The White Angel Murder

25

Stanton got home late and saw that Suzie was asleep, her window open as she lay in bed snoring. He usually never thought about it but right now he could’ve used some company.

His apartment seemed cold somehow and he felt as if he were forced to be there. He looked at the bare walls and thought that tomorrow he would pick up some art. Things that would lighten the place up. He had always admired Tamara de Lempicka and found her works uplifting. He would find prints online and have them framed nicely for the walls.

He wasn’t hungry but went to the fridge anyway and stood there looking at the empty shelves. There was a box of Diet Coke on the counter and he lifted it and felt its lightness and knew it was empty. His headache had returned and sometimes caffeine and Advil together helped. But he was too tired to run to the store. He knew he hadn’t done any real physical exertion and wondered what it was that had exhausted him.

Stanton took eight hundred milligrams of ibuprofen and went to bed. He lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling. The moonlight was coming through his window and it lit up the room with a soft, blue light. He began counting the swirls in the paint in his ceiling, tracing the pattern with his eyes and making out familiar shapes. Slowly, he began to drift off.

It was 2:12 am when Stanton’s cell phone woke him up. He didn’t realize what it was until he remembered that he had thrown his phone on the nightstand without turning it off. He fumbled with it, sleep still in his eyes, and answered without looking at the number.

“Hello?”

“Jon, it’s Mike. I, ah, got something.”

“Where are you?”

“Home. Some uniforms just woke me. I’ve sent down a patrol to pick you up.”

“Why? What’s going on?”

There was silence on the other line for awhile before Harlow said, “It’s Detective Hernandez, Jon. He’s been killed.”

*****

The scene was chaos. There were at least ten patrol cars with their red and blues twirling in the night. Yellow police tape wrapped twenty feet from the apartment complex and held back a large crowd. A few had brought chairs and drinks. A news van was parked near the curb on the outside of the tape, a tall blond in high-heels having make-up applied as the camera crew set up.

Stanton parked a basketball court’s length away to avoid the cameras and the crowd. He walked slowly and when he neared, he saw that on the sidewalk in front of the Boca Del Ray stood Chief Harlow with George Young. As soon as Young saw Stanton, he darted for him. Harlow yelled something and two uniforms grabbed him and Stanton could make out one of them shouting, “He’s not worth it.” Young was taken to a cruiser and leaned against it as several officers came to him, trying to calm him down. Stanton went under the police tape and to Harlow.

“Sorry to call you out like this,” Harlow said, “but I figured you’d want to be here.”

“What happened?”

“Gangland happened, Jon. We think they got wind and popped him.”

“I’d like to go inside.”

“Go ahead. I gave Chin the case.”

Stanton walked past the officers standing on the porch. They gave him cold stares; long penetrating looks before they turned away and pretended they hadn’t seen him. He made his way down the hall and could see the flashes from the forensics unit cameras. The apartment was packed with police officers. Anytime an officer was killed everyone on the force wanted to be there. It was a sense of “that could’a been me.” It was also part of the job and every officer tried their best to prepare for it, but Stanton had yet to meet one that was ready to die for a paycheck.

He saw Chin Ho in the kitchen typing something in a tablet and he turned away and looked to the corner of the living room. Francisco’s corpse lay lengthwise, his arm under his head, blood pooled around him from the gaping wound in his skull. Written in blood on the wall next to him was the word PIG.

Stanton carefully brushed past the uniforms and stood next to the body as forensics investigators finished their photos and vacuuming and called the medical examiner’s office to send body lifters to haul it away.

Stanton waited patiently for forensics to finish. Though not police officers, since the airing of CSI they carried a sense of self-importance and condescension with them. They weren’t even allowed to carry firearms but applications to the police academy had declined in recent years and applications to forensics schools had skyrocketed. One forensic investigator had attempted to interview a witness and he was promptly fired and lost his state licensure. But because of a television show people now looked to them to solve crimes.

Stanton bent down and looked at the hole in Francisco’s head. It was large and there were gunpowder burns on the skin over his face, meaning he had been shot at close range. No defensive wounds anywhere, no sign of struggle.

“Did you know him?”

Stanton turned to see Chin standing there, staring at the body as one would stare at something that puzzled but didn’t interest.

“You could say that.”

“I don’t know why the chief gave this to me. I think it’s really pissing off some of the locals.”

“It’s just yours tonight. Mike knows everyone’s emotional and when they’re emotional they make mistakes. They’ll calm down by tomorrow and that’s when he’ll call you into his office and tell you he’s under pressure to keep it local.”

“Huh. Smart move I guess. So what’dya think?”

“Not typical gangland. These guys are crazy but I don’t know if they’re crazy enough to kill a cop and make a big deal about it. They know a lot of theirs would be next. Then again, I haven’t worked Gang Unit since the early nineties. I hear they’re a lot less scared of police now.”

“They would want to send a message though. You send us undercovers and this is what happens. But check this out.” Stanton followed him down the hall to the bathroom. Chin turned the lights off and grabbed a portable black-light from one of the forensics investigators. He switched on the light and turned the bathroom light off. Splashes of blood lit up like glow in the dark stickers. It was over the toilet, the wall, the bathtub and the floor. “Shot in here but there’s only droplets on the hallway carpet.”

“More than one?”

“That’d be my guess. Probably three. Two to hold him and one to pull the trigger while his head was down in the bathtub. Then they carried him to the living room and let him bleed out.”

“Why not leave him here?”

“No idea. But they tried cleaning the blood with bleach.”

“Everyone knows that doesn’t work.”

“Well these guys think it does.”

“Where’s the entry?”

“No damage we can find. These guys were invited in.”

Stanton shook his head. “I was careful.”

“Not careful enough.” He saw his face and added, “That’s not what I meant.”

“It’s all right.”

Stanton left the bathroom and watched as the body was placed in a black bag and zipped up. The lifters from the ME’s office were quiet when they carried it away. They were the low men on the totem pole. Typically they were either young and looking to apply to forensics school or to become pathologists, or they were old and they had grown comfortable with the silence of the dead. Live customers were much more difficult to deal with.

The officers stood still and didn’t speak out of respect until the body was out of the apartment.

Stanton walked outside. The air was warm but there was no breeze and the warmth sat on you and made the skin feel sticky. Harlow had left. This was his rebuke. Rather than tell him about it tomorrow he had him come down to show him what he had done.

But the scene didn’t make sense. They had attempted to clean up blood in the bathroom but wanted to leave a message on the living room wall. There was a disconnect between what happened in the bathroom and what happened in the living room. Something had not gone right.

Stanton saw out of the corner of his eye Young speaking with another officer. Young said something and the officer looked to Stanton and nodded.