Cold Hit

Chapter 4

I dropped Zack at the main entrance of Parker Center and watched as my partner trudged up to the large glass double doors, dragging anchor. Zack was in charge of keeping the murder book, so he was heading to Homicide Special to update the case file. While I attended the autopsy, it was his job to start a new file for John Doe Number Four, copy in the names and addresses of our two teenage respondents, Xerox the diagrams I made of the position of the body in the river, then paste them all into the book. Once we got the photographs of the eyelid tattoos, we'd copy them and send the originals to Symbols and Hieroglyphics for analysis. We'd paste in the crime scene photos after we got them, and tomorrow the coroner's report and autopsy photos would be added along with all the other details of the investigation. Little bits and pieces, some of it seemingly worthless, all of it carefully logged, dated, and placed in the murder book along with a detailed time line, until finally we hit some mystical investigatory critical mass and someone yelled, I know who did it! That was the theory, anyway.

The problem with John Doe murders is until you have the victim's ID, it's almost impossible to solve them. Without a name, you can't even make up a preliminary suspect list or question any witnesses. If we'd known who the first three victims were, maybe we could have begun to define the unsub's kill zone and set up a patrol dragnet. As it was, the case was going nowhere.

In an attempt to identify one of my John Does, I had the coroner retouch their faces and had a sketch artist do charcoal portraits. I ran them in the local papers and on TV under a heading DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN? Nada. Of course, most of the people who might have known them lived in doorways or cardboard boxes and didn't watch much TV or read the newspapers.

Now, for the first time in seven weeks, I was feeling hopeful. Forrest might deliver some useful clues. He still had the bullet inside him. The tool marks lab in ballistics would magnify it and graph the striations. Since every gun leaves its own specific rifling marks, maybe we could match the bullet to one used in another crime. He also had those unusual tattoos on his eyelids, which might tie him to some club or gang. Then there was the contact lens. If I could work that backwards, find the lab that made it, and use their records to locate the eye doctor who wrote the prescription, I might find out who the victim was.

These possibilities were spinning my spirits into a more optimistic orbit as I pulled into the stark, ten-story County Medical Examiner's building on North Mission Road. It was 7:45 A. M. when I got off the elevator on the seventh floor where autopsies were performed and walked past the losers from last night's gang war. This group of departed karmas was lying on metal gurneys; a collection of shrunken memories.

I checked the scheduling board and saw that Forrest had already picked up a city homicide number. He was now HM 58–05, which stood for Homicide-Male. The twenty-eighth murder in the city of L. A. for the year 2005. It was only the tenth of January, so not even counting the traffic jam of gang-bangers parked in the hallway, '05 was getting off to an energetic start.

As Ray indicated, Dr. Rico Comancho was doing the autopsy. Rico was raised in a blighted neighborhood in Southwest called Pico Rivera. But he'd been blessed with a high IQ and received a full academic scholarship to UCLA. He went on to med school, and a year after graduation, joined the ME's office, where he made a rapid ascent, eventually reaching the lofty position of Chief Medical Examiner. An exciting success story if your thing is sawing up dead people.

Dr. Comancho rarely did autopsies anymore, unless a press conference was scheduled to follow.

The cut was taking place in Room Four, the big operating theater, which had a twenty-seat balcony for those who enjoyed sipping machine coffee while watching corpse carving. L. A.'s Theater of the Absurd.

I don't generally get along with city administrators, and Rico from Pico was a well-known municipal assassin, but I couldn't help myself, I sort of liked him. He was devilishly handsome, with his full share of Latin charm. His teeth were as square and white as a line of bathroom the and when he wasn't smocked, he wore expensive suits on a lean, athletic body. An oversized gold watch always rode his slender wrist like a tailor's pincushion. He also had a sunny disposition, which was an asset not often seen among those who perform the last act of desecration.

The autopsy was already in progress when I walked through the door. The center of Forrest's chest was cut from breast bone to crotch and clamped open. Dr. Comancho, in goggles, gloves, and smock, was leaning over the body peering inside like a man inspecting diamonds in a Tiffany jewel case.

"Pull that light down, Ray. Let's give Shane a look at the goods."

Ray Tsu reached up and lowered a large operating theater lamp over the body. The rib cage was already clipped and lifted. The stomach had been removed. Rico pointed at Forrest's internal organs.

"Kidneys are good. Nice and pink. Most of these homeless guys' kidneys look like old army boots."

I grabbed a chair and placed it where I wouldn't get splattered by the bone saw when Comancho got around to widening the Y-cut.

"If I find anything edible, how would you like it done? I'm told my liver flambe is exquisite."

"That's good kitch, Rico, very humorous."

"Guest of honor ain't gonna be needing any of this stuff no more. Might as well get your order in, amigo." "You find my bullet yet?"

"Fished it out with needle forceps about twenty minutes ago. It's in pretty good shape. Small caliber. I sent it over to ballistics. They'll weigh it and let us know." "Anything else?"

"Some deep-tissue trauma to the left side in the lateral pectoral region and a totally ruptured spleen."

"That sounds like a left hook to the ribs."

"The guest of honor could've caught a couple a sledgehammer lefts before he winged on outta here. But for all this bruising to occur, the trauma had to be premortem, or at the very least anti-mortem."

"You saying he was beaten to death and then shot?" He nodded. "Without the heart pumping blood, you don't get bruises. Also, in my opinion, this guy would've eventually bled to death from internal injuries without the head shot. An alternate theory is he could have been shot and thrown down into the wash with his heart still beating and maybe got the three smashed ribs and the deep-tissue trauma when he hit the concrete levee. Then once he hit, he croaked."

"Threw him down? Somebody threw him? How much does he weigh?"

"In kilograms or pounds?"

"In candy kisses, asshole."

"'Bout two-twenty."

"So the unsub picks up two-hundred-plus pounds of dead weight and shot-puts this guy thirty or forty feet over the ledge into the river. You kidding me?"

"Not entirely impossible," Rico said. "You been down to Gold's Gym lately?" Then he looked up from the body. "Ray says there's no trace evidence, so how else would the killer get him down there without leaving drag marks or footprints?"

I had to admit it was a pretty good question. "Our unsub would have to be Godzilla," I said softly.

"Godzilla, Rodan. . pick your favorite Japanese lizard. But hey, it's just a theory. Medical forensics isn't an exact science, especially when it's bein' done by some border-jumping cholo."

The mask covered his mouth, but I was getting some crinkling around the eyes, the residue of a grin.

"Anything else you want me to fish outta this guy, Shane?"

"I want you to get the contact lens from his right eye traced."

"Already sent it out."

"And I'd like a standard stomach content analysis." "This guy eats out of trash cans. Don't put me through that."

I started to frown, when he waved a hand at me.

"Come on, lighten up, Homes. Stomach's already out." He pointed to a plastic container with a grayish-brown organ in it. "You think I wouldn't do a standard content analysis? This is Autopsy Central, dude. We serve the dead here. Speaking of which, sure you don't want something to go?"

Some jobs get black as coffin air.

I moved my metal chair further back as Rico took the Striker electric bone saw off a peg and extended the cut. The blade screamed as he opened Forrest the rest of the way up, widening the Y from sternum to crotch. He scooped out the organs, making one more body canoe, then weighed the heart, liver, and kidneys on a hanging scale, read their weights in milligrams into a mic hanging over the table, and dumped them all back into the body cavity like scrapings from a Christmas goose. Ray closed Forrest up with crude stitches reminiscent of the laces on a football. They ended with a standard toxicology panel and complete blood scan. Rico asked Ray to finish and do the stomach content analysis as the phone rang.

The ME stripped off his mask, goggles, and surgical gloves, then crossed the room to answer it.

"Yeah, he's right here." Rico turned the phone over to me and worked his eyebrows. "Some chavala named Darlene Hamilton from ballistics, wants your honkey ass. Cha-cha-cha."

"This is Detective Scully," I said.

"Are you the primary on HM fifty-eight-oh-five?" She had a high nasally voice.

"Yeah, only his name is Forrest now."

"Did we get an identification already?"

"No, but I can't deal with the numbers so he's Forrest 'til I can ID him. I was going to call him Barney after Barham Boulevard, but Barney's a comedy name, so it's Forrest."

She was silent for a minute. "Is this Rico? Is this a put-on?"

"It's Detective Scully. Tell me what you've got."

After a pause she said, "We just weighed the bullet Doctor Comancho sent over. It's a strange, off-sized caliber. Rare, actually."

"What is it?"

"A five point four-five millimeter, which makes it a little smaller than your standard twenty-two."

"That's from some kind of foreign automatic, right?"

"The most common gun still using that caliber is a PSM automatic. They were originally issued to KGB officers and Russian Secret Police during the Cold War and were very popular for execution-type slayings behind the Iron Curtain in the mid-eighties."

I hung up and pondered this strange new fact while I waited for Fey Ray to finish the stomach analysis. When he finally gave me the results, the case got even more confusing.