Billy Straight

4

In eight months, Petra had worked twenty-one other homicides, some fairly sloppy. But nothing like this. Not even the Hernandez wedding.

This woman looked shredded. Washed in blood. Dipped in it, like fruit in chocolate. The front of her dress was a mass of gore, glossy gray tubes of entrail popping out from slashes in the fabric. Silky fabric, not great in terms of latents. The blood would be a good cover, too- try lifting anything from skin. Maybe the jewelry, if the killer had touched it.

She and Stu arrived in darkness, encountering grim faces, radio static, a blinking symphony of red lights. They took reports from the rangers who'd found the body, waited for sunrise to have a careful look at the victim.

The blood had dried red-brown, streaking the skin and the surrounding asphalt, running down the parking lot in rivulets, some of the spatters still tacky.

Petra stood by the corpse, sketching the surrounding terrain and the body, tabulating the wounds she could see. At least seventeen cuts, and that was only the front.

Bending and getting as close as she could without messing anything up, she examined torn flesh; the lower lip almost completely severed, the left eye reduced to ruby pulp. All the damage on the left side.

If you could see your squeamish kid now, Dad.

Twenty-one previous bodies notwithstanding, viewing this one in sunlight jolted her with nausea. Then something worse hit her: the pain of sympathy.

Poor thing. Poor, poor thing, what led you to this?

Outwardly, she maintained. No one watching would have seen anything but trim efficiency. She'd been told she looked efficient. An accusation thrown at her by Nick, implying competence wasn't sexy. Along with all the other garbage he'd dumped on her. Why hadn't she realized what was going on?

She liked being thought of as businesslike. Had found a business she liked.

A month ago she'd gone to a Melrose salon, ordered the reluctant stylist to lop off six inches of black hair, and ended up with a short ebony minimal-care wedge cut.

Stu had noticed right away. “Very becoming.”

She thought it framed her lean, pale face pretty well.

Her clothes were picked for nothing but practicality now. Good pantsuits bought on sale at Loehmann's and Robinsons-May that she took home and tailored herself so that they fit her long frame perfectly. Mostly black, like today. A couple of navys, one chocolate-brown, one charcoal.

She wore MAC lipstick, deep red with a brown tint, a little eye shadow, and mascara. No foundation; her skin was white and smooth as notepaper. No jewelry. Nothing a suspect could yank.

The victim wore foundation.

Petra could see it clearly where the crimson hadn't settled. Traces of blush, powder, mascara, applied a little heavier than Petra 's, to the eye that remained intact.

The damaged eye was a sightless black-cherry hole, the eyeball collapsed to folded cellophane, some of the jellylike humor leaking out and specking the nose.

Nice nose, where it hadn't been slashed.

The right eye was wide, blue, filmed over. That dull dead look. You couldn't fake it- there was nothing like it.

Flight of the soul? Leaving behind what? A casing, no more alive than a snake's molt?

She continued studying the corpse with an artist's precision, noticed a small but deep cut on the left cheek that she'd missed. Eighteen. She couldn't flip the body till the crime-scene photographer was finished and the coroner gave the okay. The definitive wound count would be the pathologist's, once he had the corpse stretched out on his steel table.

She added the cheek wound to her drawing. Might as well be careful- the coroner's office was a zoo; doctors made mistakes.

Stu was over with the coroner- an older man named Leavitt- both of them serious but relaxed. None of that tasteless joke stuff you saw on cop movies. The real detectives she'd met were mostly regular guys, relatively bright, patient, tenacious, very little in common with cinema sleuths.

She tried to look past the blood, get a sense of the person beneath the carnage.

The woman appeared young, and Petra was pretty sure she'd been good-looking. Even savaged like that, dumped in the parking lot like refuse, you could see the fineness of her features. Not tall, but her legs were long and shapely, exposed to mid-thigh, her waist narrow in the short black silk dress. Big bust- maybe silicone. Nowadays when Petra saw a slender woman with a healthy chest, she assumed surgery.

No sign of any bizarre leakage in the torso, though with all that blood, who knew. What would happen to silicone breasts when slashed? What did silicone look like, anyway? Eight months in Homicide, the issue had never come up.

Panty hose ripped, but it looked like asphalt wear. No obvious sign of sexual assault or posing, no visible semen around the ruined mouth or the legs.

Big hair. Honey-blond, good dye job, a few dark roots starting to show, but nice, expertly done. The dress was a jacquard with hand stitching, and the way it was pulled up and bunched around the shoulders, Petra could read the label. Armani Exchange.

The shiny things Petra hoped would yield prints were a diamond tennis bracelet on the left wrist with nice-size cut stones, a sapphire-and-diamond cocktail ring, a gold Lady Rolex, small diamond studs in the ears.

No wedding band.

No purse, either, so forget instant identification on this one. How'd she end up here? Out on a date? Big hair, minidress- a callgirl lured onto the streets by an extra bonus?

The purse gone, but the jewelry hadn't been taken. The watch alone had to be three grand. So not a mugging. Unless the mugger was an even-stupider-than-usual street fool who'd taken the purse and panicked.

No, that made no sense. All these wounds didn't spell panic or robbery. This piece of dirt had taken his time.

Snatching the purse to fake robbery, not thinking about the jewelry?

She pictured someone ripping away out of rage. Deep wounds, no defense cuts, but defense cuts were rarer than most people thought, and a decent-size man wouldn't have had much trouble subduing a woman this slender.

Still, it might indicate someone she knew.

The wound overkill sure did.

Had the blond woman been caught off guard?

Petra 's brain flooded with fast-motion images. She quelled them. It was too soon to theorize.

God, it looked ferocious. A predator's attack. The massive frontal disemboweling wound was her guess for the fatal one, but most of the punishment had been concentrated on the face.

Gutting the woman, then trying to wipe away her beauty? Such intense hatred; an explosion of hatred.

Something personal. The more Petra thought about it, the more that made sense. What kind of relationship had led to this? Husband? Boyfriend? Some reasonable facsimile of a lover?

A beast let loose.

Petra unclenched her hands, jammed them into the pockets of her pantsuit. DKNY, Saks overstock, lightweight crêpe, true black. Comfortable, so she'd worn it to the Freshwater stakeout.

The blond woman's dress had just a touch of blue in it. Blue-black rinsed in rusty water.

Two women in black; the mourning had begun.

Stu continued to confer with Leavitt, and Petra stayed by the corpse, a self-appointed guardian.

Protecting a molt?

As a little girl in Arizona, on summer digs with her father and her brother Dick, she'd found plenty of shedded skins, the lacy donations of snakes and lizards, collected them, tried to braid them, fashion lanyards. They'd turned to dust in her hands, and she'd started to think of reptiles as fragile, too, and somehow less frightening.

But they continued to poison her dreams for years. As did scorpions, wildcats, owls, horned toads, flying beetles, black widows, the seemingly endless stream of creatures that came in off the interstate.

Poor Dad, sentenced to hour-long nightly routines- stories and dumb jokes and obsessive-compulsive checking rituals, all so his youngest child would sleep and allow him some single-parent quiet time.

When he finally got some solitude, what did he do with it?

Knowing Dad, any spare time was spent grading papers or working on the textbook that never got finished. A tall glass of Chivas for fortification. She knew he kept a bottle in his nightstand and that it was emptied often, though she never saw him really drunk.

Professor Kenneth Connor, physical anthropologist of medium repute, now fossilized by Alzheimer's, dead prematurely, twenty months ago. She remembered the day; had been chasing a stolen Mercedes all the way down to Mexico when the station patched through the hospital call. Cerebral accident. Fancy name for stroke. The neurologist suggesting Dad's brain had been weakened by placque.

Dad had specialized in invertebrate genetics but collected shells, skins, skulls, shards, and other bits of organic antiquity, their tiny, highway-bordering house outside of Phoenix crammed with detritus and relics, smelling like a neglected museum. A kind man, a caring father. Petra 's mother had died birthing her, but never once had Dad showed any resentment, though she was certain he must have felt something. She'd certainly punished herself, turning into a wild, angry teenager, setting up confrontations till Dad had been forced to send her to boarding school and she could luxuriate as a victim.

His will specified cremation, and she and her brothers had complied, tossing his ashes over a mesa in the dead of night.

Each one of them waiting for the other to say something.

Finally, Bruce broke the silence. “It's over, he's at peace. Let's get the fuck out of here.”

Dad, the tissue collector, reduced to gray particles. Maybe one day, millions of years in the future, some archaeologist would find a Kenneth Connor molecule and hypothesize about what life had been like back in the twentieth century.

Now here was this lump of dead flesh, right next to her, fresh and pathetic.

Petra guessed the woman's age at twenty-five to thirty. The tight jawline said not too much older; no tuck scars behind the ears that she could see.

Good cheekbones, judging by the right side. The entire left side was crimson mush. Probably a right-handed killer, the head rolling to the right as he cut her.

Except for Freshwater, her twenty-one previous cases were the typical stuff: bar shootings, one-jab knifings, beatings. Stupid men killing other stupid men.

The ugliest had been the Hernandez wedding, a Saturday affair in a VFW hall near the border of Rampart Division, the groom killing the bride's father at the reception, using a brand-new pearloid-handled cake knife to slit the older man from sternum to groin, just filleting him as his new eighteen-year-old wife and a hundred other people watched in horror.

Some honeymoon.

Petra and Stu found the groom hiding out in Baldwin Park, served the warrant, brought him in. A nineteen-year-old gardener's assistant, the knife hidden in a fertilizer sack in the back of his boss's truck, the idiot.

Look, Dad, I solved it, no heebie-jeebies.

She imagined her father's surprised smile at the trajectory of his shuddering, phobic baby.

Efficient.

She swallowed morning air. Sweet; you could smell the pines. Suddenly, she was tired of waiting around, itching to do something, learn something.

Finally Stu walked away from Dr. Leavitt and passed behind the tape into the outer region of the parking lot, where the police and coroner vehicles had grouped. Being his usual methodical self, telling the techs what to do, what not to do, what to take back for analysis. The coroner drove away, and the morgue attendants stayed behind, listening to rap music in their van, the bass thumping.

Everyone waiting for the photographer and K-9 units to arrive so the body could be taken away and the dogs could check out the wooded area above the parking lot.

Stu talked to a uniform, barely moving his lips, profile noble, framed by sunlight.

Chief Bishop. If he didn't get a big movie role first.

Two weeks into their partnership, he'd taken out his wallet to pay for lunch at Musso and Frank and she'd seen the SAG card, next to a frequent-flyer Visa.

“You're an actor?”

His Celtic skin reddened and he closed the wallet. “Purely by accident. They came to the station a few years ago, filming a Murder Street on the Boulevard, wanting real cops as extras. They bugged me till I finally agreed.”

Petra couldn't resist. “So when do your hands and feet go in the cement?”

Stu's swimming-pool-aqua eyes softened. “It's an unbelievably stupid business, Petra. Incredibly self-centered. Do you know how they refer to themselves? The industry. As if they're manufacturing steel.” He shook his head.

“What kind of roles have you had?”

“Minor walk-ons. It doesn't even cut into my routine. A lot of the filming goes on at night, and if I'm still in town, leaving later makes the freeway ride shorter. So I don't really lose any time.”

He grinned. It was protest-too-much time and they both knew it.

Petra smiled back wickedly. “Got an agent?”

Stu turned scarlet.

“You do?”

“If you're going to work, you need one, Petra. They're sharks, it's worth the ten percent to have someone else deal with it.”

“Ever get any speaking parts?” Petra was genuinely interested, but also fighting back laughter.

“If you call ‘Freeze, scumbag, or I'll shoot' speaking.”

Petra finished her coffee, and Stu worked on his mineral water.

She said, “So when do you write your screenplay?”

“Come on, give me a break,” he said, opening the wallet again and taking out cash.

But the next week he took a part as an extra out in Pacoima. Everyone in L.A., even a straight guy like Stu, wanted to be something else.

Except her. She'd come to California, after a year of state college in Tucson, to attend the Pacific Art Institute, got a fine arts degree with a specialty in painting, and entered the workplace with a husband sharing her bed. Nick had a great job designing cars at the new GM future lab. She earned chump change illustrating newspaper ads, sold a few of her paintings out of a co-op gallery in Santa Monica for the price of supplies. One day it hit her: This was it; things were unlikely to change in any big way. But at least she had Nick.

Then her body failed her, Nick showed his real soul, or lack of, leaving her baffled, broken, alone. A week after he walked out, someone broke into her apartment and stole the few valuable things she owned, including her easel and her brushes.

She sank into a two-month depression, then finally dragged herself out of bed one November night and drove around the city, limp, deadened, defenseless, thinking she should eat. Her skin looked terrible and her hair was starting to fall out, but she wasn't really hungry; the thought of food made her sick. Finding herself on Wilshire, she turned around, headed for home, spied an LAPD recruitment billboard near Crescent Heights, and amazed herself by copying down the 800 number.

It took her another two weeks to call. The police commission said the department had to actively recruit women. She got a nice warm welcome.

Entering the academy on whim, thinking it a stupid, incomprehensible mistake, she'd surprised herself by liking it, then loving it. Even the physical-fitness challenges, learning to use her flexibility rather than brute strength getting over the Wall. Avoiding the turtle squad and learning she had good reflexes, a natural talent for using leverage to floor hand-to-hand opponents.

Even the uniform.

Not the wimpy powder-blue top and navy pants of the cadet, the real one, all navy, all business.

She, who'd bucked so many boarding school fascists over issues of rank conformity, ended up attached to her uniform.

Lots of the guys in her academy class were buffed jocks and they had their blues tapered to second-skin tautness, emphasizing biceps, deltoids, latissimi.

Boys' version of a push-up bra.

One night, impulsively, she'd customized her own uniform, using the old chipped Singer sewing machine she'd brought with her from Tucson, one of the few things the burglars had left behind.

She was five-seven, 132 pounds, with slim legs, boyish hips, big square shoulders, a butt she thought too flat, and a small but natural bust that she'd finally come to appreciate. Growing up with a father and four brothers, she'd found it valuable to learn how to sew.

She worked mostly with the shirt, because it bagged around her waist, and with those hips she needed some shape. The result had flattered her figure without flaunting it.

After graduation, she was even happier, though she didn't invite anyone to the ceremony, still nervous about what Dad and her brothers would think.

A month into her probationary year, she told them, and they were all surprised, but no one put her down. By then, she was in the groove.

Everything about police work felt right. Keeping fit, cruising, roll call, shooting on the range. Even the paperwork, because one thing boarding school had taught her was good study habits and proper English, and that put her ahead of most of the buff-jocks with their pencil-chewing agony over syntax and punctuation.

Within eighteen months, she made Detective-I.

Earning the right to guard a molt.

A new car joined the others in the parking lot. Subcompact with a department emblem on the door. A woman police photographer came out lugging a professional Polaroid camera. Young, around the victim's age, in sloppy clothes and long, too-black hair. Four pierces in one ear, two in the other, just holes, no earrings. Plain face, sunken cheeks, a spot of acne on each. Combative Generation-X eyes.

As she approached the body, Petra constructed a hypothetical identity for her: like Petra, an artistic type gone practical. At night she probably put on black duds, smoked dope, and drank stingers at Sunset Strip clubs, hanging out with failed rock musicians who took her for granted.

She opened her camera, looked down, and said, “My God, I know who this is!”

Petra said, “Who?” as she waved Stu over.

“I don't know her name, but I know who she is. Cart Ramsey's wife. Or maybe it's ex-wife by now. I saw her on TV around a year ago. He hit her. It was one of those tabloid shows, showbiz exposé. She made Ramsey out to be a real asshole.”

“You're sure this is her?”

“Hundred percent,” said the woman, peeved. Her photo badge ID'd her as Susan Rose, Photog.-I. “This is her, believe me. They said she was a beauty queen and Ramsey met her at a pageant- God, look at her, what a sick fuck!” The hand holding the camera tightened and the black box swayed.

Stu came over, and Petra repeated what Susan Rose had said.

“You're sure,” he said.

“Jesus. Yeah, very.” Susan began to shoot pictures rapidly, thrusting the camera forward as if it were a weapon. “On the show she had a black eye and bruises. Fucking bastard!”

“Who?” said Petra.

“Ramsey. He's probably the one who did this, right?”

“Cart Ramsey,” Stu said without inflection, and Petra found herself wondering if Stu had ever worked on Ramsey's show. What was it called? The Adjustor, some private-eye hero who solved the problems of the downtrodden.

Wouldn't that be cute?

Susan Rose removed a cartridge and dropped it into her case. Petra told her, “Thanks, we'll get verification. Meanwhile, do your thing.”

“It's her, believe me,” said Susan Rose, irritably. “Can I turn her over? I already got all of the front.”