Cold Hit

Chapter 9

It poured down rain during the night. I heard it hitting the roof of our house around 3 A. M. banging loudly in the downspouts. By morning the storm had passed and L. A. was reborn and washed clean. The air had a brisk crispness, all too rare in this city of fumes.

As I drove from Venice across town to the Glass House, I decided to take a detour and stop by the city forensic facility on Ramirez Street. The crime lab is a very busy place, and even though I was working a red ball that should be afforded top priority, sometimes people make strange choices. One of my jobs as primary investigator was to make sure my Fingertip murder got the proper attention. Sometimes, by just showing up with a box of Krispy Kremes, you can work wonders.

I stopped at a mini-market just before getting on the I-10 freeway and bought two dozen, then drove up the ramp and joined a long line of angry freeway commuters who were bumper-to-bumpering their way to work. My lane mates were holding their steering wheels in death grips, their faces scowling masks of anger. The frustration all of us accumulated on the 10 would be dutifully passed along to our coworkers, who would take it out on their subordinates. This domino effect of bad traffic karma would kill working environments all over town until noon.

I inched along past Wilshire Boulevard, and tried to stifle my frustration by running through a list of more pressing problems. Alexa, Cal, and Tony didn't want Forrest to be a copycat because that body gave everyone hope. The department could slip into waitand-see mode and pray Zack and I would turn something. But since I was pretty sure Forrest was not part of the Fingertip case, it was just a head feint for the press. Eventually, we'd have to own up to that fact, and when we did, we'd undoubtedly get a task force, including a contingent from the FBI. The feebs like to bill themselves as experts in serial crime. After all, they have an Academy Award-winning movie starring Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster to prove it.

All of this made me hate the driver of the blue Corvette in front of me. These assholes in my lane didn't know who they were dealing with. I was pissed off and I was packing.

At 9:40 I finally made it to Ramirez Street and parked in the underground garage at the municipal crime lab. I took the elevator to the third floor and asked the girl on the desk if either Cindy Clark or Mike Menninger were in. A minute later Cindy came out. She was a sweet-faced, slightly round girl with the thick Texas accent I remembered. She smiled and looked down at the box of donuts I held out to her, selecting one carefully.

"Y'all really know how to tempt a girl."

"If that's all it takes, then I've been wasting a lot of money on jewelry and concert tickets," I joked.

"What can I do for you, Detective?"

"I was wondering if we're getting anywhere on my contact lens."

"I was just fixin' t'check with Brandon on that. Come on.

I followed her down a narrow corridor lined with tiny rooms that were the approximate size of walk-in closets. Each one contained a computer, a desk, and a geek. We entered a slightly larger room at the end of the hall dominated by a very skinny, young, black guy with a receding hairline. He wore no jewelry, not even a watch, but he had on a T-shirt that said "Crime Unit" with an arrow pointing down to his shorts. We're really going to have to do something about the quality of humor in law enforcement. Cindy made the introduction.

"Brandon Washington, Detective Shane Scully. Shane has HM fifty-eight oh-five."

"Grab a seat," Brandon said. "Lemme check my e-mails on that lens." When he smiled I saw that his two front teeth were box-outlined in gold. Not my favorite look, but hey, guys do what they think will get them laid in this town. He turned on his computer, and brought up his e-mail.

"I've got a shitload of correspondence here. Hang on a second. Let me shoot through them." As he started scrolling, he brought me up to date. "I examined that contact when it first came in yesterday. It's a rigid gas-permeable lens."

"Is that normal?" I asked.

"Gas perms with this kind of correction are pretty expensive and are used for special eye problems. I checked it under a microscope for a manufacturer's edge mark, but it wasn't made by any of the labs here in the U. S., so I sent it out to an eye clinic we use that buys from manufacturers in Europe to see if they can trace the country of origin. Ahhh, here we go." He leaned forward and read the screen. "Okay, the guy I sent it to says that he can tell from the way the lens was made, that it is from Europe, but they don't know where yet. It could take him a while to run it down because he says there are any number of countries with labs that might be able to do this kind of lens."

"Why don't you start with Russia?" I said.

He leaned back from his computer, looked at me and frowned. "Why Russia?"

"Hunch. Cops get hunches, it's how we solve cases." "Okay, I'll start with Russia."

"You also might try all of the countries in the old Soviet Union," I suggested. "Georgia. The Ukraine."

"Okay." He picked up a sheet of paper from his out basket and handed to me. "I scanned your lens last night," he said. "That's the condition it was correcting."

I studied the sheet. Bell graphs and squiggly line drawings with a column of numbers.

"That prescription corrects an eye disease called Keratoconus, or KC. It only occurs in a fraction of one percent of the world population, so it's extremely rare. It usually occurs when a person's in their mid-twenties and can progress for ten to twenty years. The name refers to a condition in which the cornea grows into a cone shape and bulges forward. To correct KC, you need one of these rigid gas-permeable lenses."

"This is good," I said. "Anything else?"

"Historically, degeneration of an eye with KC slows around age forty or fifty. According to this prescription, the dead man in the wash was significantly sight-impaired and probably past middle age. Without his contacts, it would have been impossible for him to even drive."

"How expensive are these to get made?"

"My eye expert says hundreds of dollars. They have to be fitted several times to make them wearable."

I sat for a minute holding the printout, thinking not many bums are walking around with expensive contact lenses. "Since this is a rare eye condition, if we can find the lab in Europe that made the lens, we've got a damn good chance of finding out who he is."

"Yep," Brandon said. "'Bout the way the donut crumbles." Then he took another Krispy Kreme.