Freezing

DAY THREE

Thursday

NINE

Scott pulled into the curb in front of the next body shop on his list. Eric double-checked the sheet he was holding and suppressed a yawn. ‘Sepulveda Body Shop.’

Scott caught his yawn. ‘I shouldn’t have skipped lunch.’

They got out of the car and walked into the gated concrete yard, which was packed with cars reflecting the light and heat of the summer afternoon, while all four bays in the building were occupied with vehicles up on raised pallets, mechanics working beneath them. Scott and Eric threaded their way past the parked cars and walked into the small office. An unattended desk whose trays were filled with files was shoe-horned into what appeared to be a closet but the room was dominated by a larger desk closer to the window-mounted air conditioner, which was spewing frigid air.

The young man behind this desk was wearing a blue shirt smeared with grease where he’d wiped his hands on it. The nametag read Javier and he was on the phone.

‘If you bring it here before eight in the morning, I can get someone to have a look at it same day. But if it’s rotors, it’s gonna take a day to get ’em in.’

When he hung up the phone, the agents opened their badges, announced themselves and asked for Javier’s surname.

‘Ruiz.’

‘What’s your position here?’ Eric asked.

‘I’m the manager.’

‘OK. Were you working Monday?’

Ruiz took on a wary look. ‘Yes?’

‘You get a van in here that needed body work to the rear doors?’

Ruiz glanced away briefly. ‘Yeah.’

Eric restrained himself from looking at his partner. ‘You note the license plate?’

‘Well, I don’t know if—’ Something out the window caught his attention and he hurriedly got up from the desk, moving to the side just as an overweight man charged through the front door. He hardly glanced at Scott and Eric as he made his way around the desk. He only looked up after he’d sat down in the chair and put his head in line with the air conditioner.

‘What do you need? Ruiz taking care of you?’ He was rolling his neck around to expose all the folds to the air.

Before they could speak or take out their badges, Ruiz was saying, ‘Mr Malbandian, these gentlemen have a government vehicle that needs looking at.’ He shot a nervous glance at Eric.

‘Well, help them, Ruiz. Help them. Out there.’ He shooed them out with his hands.

Scott caught Eric’s eye and they didn’t pull out their badges. They followed Ruiz out into the hot forecourt. Ruiz went to a narrow area between two black SUVs liberally adorned with chrome accents and halted. It was like standing in a toaster oven.

‘Look,’ he said desperately. ‘That guy’s my boss. He doesn’t know about this and he’d fire me in a second.’

‘Because of something you did with this van?’ Scott wasn’t following.

‘No, because I took some money that maybe should’ve gone to the shop.’ Ruiz looked over Scott’s shoulder.

‘Take it from the top, Javier.’ Eric encouraged.

‘OK. This guy came in with a van. Looked like he’d been rear-ended. There was a lot of damage to the lower part of the back doors and it was stopping the handles from latching right. Nothing weird about it until he said he just wanted me to spray the van and do all the work from the outside. Under no circumstances could I touch the handles. I said, don’t you want me to fix the lock, but he said that the padlock he’d put on was just fine. He had a chain through it too. He paid me six hundred dollars extra to do everything the way he said. And it wasn’t easy, let me tell you. He was real particular.’

‘Describe the van.’ Scott had pulled out his pad.

Ruiz closed his eyes before recounting. ‘Light blue Chevy, old. Maybe a pretty old Astro but it didn’t have its model on the outside. Um . . . good tires, I noticed that.’

‘And what color did you spray it?’

‘Gold.’

‘License plate?’

Ruiz looked embarrassed. ‘That was part of what he paid me to not notice. But I know it was Georgia.’

The agents exchanged a look. ‘Georgia?’ Scott asked. ‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes. But I didn’t look closely at it.’

‘You can’t remember anything else about it?’

‘No, honestly. I see a lot of plates and they don’t mean that much to me anymore. Especially from out of state because they’re a different layout to California plates.’

Eric cut across Scott’s emerging exasperation. ‘What about the man, Javier? What did he look like?’

‘He was Anglo. Kinda tall. A light-colored beard. But he was wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses, so I didn’t see much more.’

‘What was his voice like?’

‘I guess you could say it was soft. I mean, it was American and all. Just . . . he didn’t speak loud. You’d do better asking Margarita about him.’

‘Margarita?’

‘Yeah, she does the filing. She’s not in today but I know she had some kind of problem with him.’

‘They spoke to each other?’

‘I don’t know. She just came walking back into the yard here and said something, like, about the guy being weird.’

Scott was at the ready. ‘Where can we find Margarita?’

‘Um, I know where she lives. Over by Birmingham High School.’ He gave Scott the address.

‘Let’s go back to the man,’ said Eric. ‘What time did he get here?’

‘He was here when I arrived to open up at six thirty.’

‘Just parked outside?’

‘Yeah, like he was waiting.’

‘Was anyone else with him?’

‘Not that I saw.’

‘And what’d he say to you?’

‘Just said hi and that he needed some work done on his van, right away, and he was going to pay cash.’ He shrugged. ‘My boss wasn’t coming in for two days, so I just decided to take on the job myself.’

‘He say anything about where he’d come from or where he was going?’

Ruiz shook his head.

‘Did he wait here while you finished the work?’

‘No, the paint had to dry. He came back the next day, late in the afternoon.’

‘But he just walked away when he dropped if off? Did he ask you for directions or anything?’

‘No, he just walked. I figured he was going to the bus stop or something.’

‘Is there anything else you can tell us about him?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘OK.’ Eric pulled a business card from his shirt pocket. ‘Here’s my card. If you remember anything more, call me right away, any time, day or night. Got it?’

‘So I’m not in trouble?’

‘No but we may need to take a formal statement later.’

Ruiz put the card in the back pocket of his pants. ‘And you’re not going to tell my boss?’

‘Nope.’ Scott shook his head.

It wasn’t until the agents were back in their vehicle, air-conditioner blowing, that Eric spoke. ‘We’re on to him, Houston. I can feel it.’

They drove directly to the address Ruiz had given them for Margarita, which was in a neighborhood of single-story ranch houses built in the 1940s and 1950s in the heart of the San Fernando Valley. The street they parked on was neat; dry lawns were cut short where only geranium and jade bushes held up against the heat. Margarita’s house didn’t have a car parked in the driveway but the swamp cooler on the roof suggested someone was home; its hum was audible to the agents as they walked up the front path.

The teenager who opened the door had a sullen expression. TV advertisements blared behind her.

‘Yes?’

They identified themselves and explained why they needed to speak to her. She didn’t invite them inside the house but was willing to describe the man who had brought the van to the garage.

‘Javier dealt with him outside. It was just that I wanted to make a personal call and the owner is real strict about that, makes me use the pay phone on the sidewalk just outside the gate. So I go to use it but the guy with the van was already there and he gave me a look that really scared me. I went away but I was pissed because it was an important call I wanted to make.’

Scott asked, ‘Did you hear him say anything?’

‘Well, when I came over, he was speaking up so I heard him. It was like he was talking to one of those computer voices, y’know? Like an operator? He said, “Arizona” real loud.’

‘Anything else?’

Margarita shook her head. ‘No. Soon as he said that was when he realized I was there.’

‘Can you describe him?’ Eric asked.

‘Just a skanky guy. White.’

‘Hair color? Eye color?’

‘He had a patchy beard that was kinda blond. I think his hair was blond but his hat hid most of it. I don’t remember what color his eyes were. Maybe brown?’

‘What was his voice like? Any accent?’

‘No. I just heard him say that one word.’

Eric pulled out his card and repeated what he’d said to Ruiz earlier about calling if she remembered anything further. When they were back in the Suburban, Scott said, ‘You might just get that gold star, Ramos.’

Eric started to reply but then Scott’s cell phone rang. He picked up, listened, and said, ‘We’re on our way back now.’

He looked at Eric. ‘Tony’s got a name to go with the surgical plate Thirty-two One found.’

Eric slapped the dashboard in excitement. ‘Hot damn!’

‘She’s an Eleanor Patterson. Lance is checking her out right now to see if she was reported missing.’

‘I told you. We’re on to this guy.’

‘We’ve got to track him down yet,’ Scott cautioned as he started the car.

‘Yeah, but if we’re interpreting Margarita right, we know he’s headed to Arizona. We know the color, the make, and the potential model of the van.’

‘But no license plate and no name of the perp.’

‘I’m not letting that stop me,’ Eric asserted. ‘We need to issue a BOLO to Arizona.’

Scott glanced at him as he drove to the canyon road that would take them back to their office. ‘Let’s do Be On the Lookouts for Arizona and California. He may not have made it to AZ yet.’

‘OK,’ Eric agreed. ‘We’ll ask LAPD to put it on their BOLO boards.’ Now his cell phone rang and he answered. He muted the call as he listened and said, ‘Lance is putting through a Detective Kragen from Carlisle PD, regarding the Patterson case.’

Scott nodded and went quiet.

When the caller identified himself as a coroner from Alaska, Carol put him through to Steelie in the lab. Steelie brought the phone to the computer so she could have the digitized X-ray of Thomas Cullen’s head on her screen, then she took the call.

‘Chuck Talbot,’ the matter-of-fact voice said. ‘Anchorage ME’s Office.’

‘Dr Talbot. Good to hear from you.’

‘Chuck’s fine. Look, this whole situation with the John Doe bullet has caused a bit of a stir up here.’

Steelie couldn’t read his tone. ‘Oh?’

‘It’s probably for the best, I don’t know. But that’s not your problem. I’m calling to inform you of a positive ID for this John Doe as Thomas Cullen. We’ll be posting it on the ACB network this afternoon.’

Steelie jotted a note. ‘This is great news. Can I ask how you got the match?’

‘Dental. It turns out the teeth were where the breakdown was. Or maybe I just want to blame the odontologist.’ He chuckled. ‘We’ve been having a feud for years. But I can’t actually blame him.’ He paused. ‘Are we confidential here?’

‘Absolutely,’ Steelie replied quickly. ‘All communications between our agency and coroners are confidential.’

‘Fine. So the odont gave us the dental chart on the Doe and we submitted it to the police misper unit for them to put it on NCIC. Like most coroners, I don’t have direct access to NCIC. Been trying to get a terminal in my office for, what, seven years? Ten? Anyway, I gave the dental to Missings. Didn’t go anywhere, I’ve now discovered.’

‘Well, you definitely can’t blame the odont for that.’

‘No but I’m still tryin’. Seems that, on request, my autopsy tech sawed out John Doe’s max and mandible and couriered it to the odont for the dental report before starting the craniotomy. When I got round to doing the autopsy, I got the bullet no problem but I didn’t have the mouth and I assumed the bullet was fresh. Figured the palate would show perimortem trauma, as the rest of the body didn’t show signs of cause of death and the tissue was too decomposed for toxicology. So the main result of the post was that bullet. Case closed.’

‘You’ve obviously got the mouth back now, though?’

‘Oh, we’ve had the mouth back this whole time. It’s been sitting in the fridge. Just no one looked at it when it came back from the odontologist to see if the trauma to the palate was peri or antemortem, or healed or what. And it is healed. That is definitely old trauma, old gunshot. So, we’re all having to tighten our belts. My tech was hasty, I wasn’t thorough, the odont only reported on the dentition itself and didn’t bother to describe the palate, and our police unit didn’t do the other half of its job.’

‘Well,’ Steelie said, wanting to ameliorate the impact of this sorry but not unusual laundry list. ‘Even without you ageing the bullet correctly, NCIC would have made this ID if only your postmortem dental info had been uploaded into the system. So I don’t think you have too much to beat yourself up about.’

‘You think getting cause of death wrong is nothing to beat myself up about? Huh.’

‘I meant, this was situational; it’s not like you need to go back to med school. But speaking of COD, do you have anything there?’

‘Now that the bullet’s ruled out? No. I mean, there wasn’t much left of this guy for me to work with. No marks on the bones. It’ll probably go down as undetermined, for both cause and manner.’

‘And contact with the Cullen family?’

‘I’m going to be calling them myself. I’ve got someone at a funeral home up here that can handle shipping the body back across state lines.’

Steelie looked down at the notes she’d been making. ‘Well, Chuck, I guess I don’t have any more questions.’

He cleared his throat. ‘I’ve been asked to reassure you that we are making some procedural changes up here so we’d prefer if you didn’t go public with how this ID came about.’

Steelie’s cheeks burned. ‘We don’t do that. We’re just trying to facilitate identifications, and quietly.’

‘Sure. But you never know what you might set off.’

‘What do you mean?’ Steelie asked warily.

‘Ever picture what it would look like if every parent of a missing person found out that thirteen-thousand-odd coroners and MEs, between them, have tens of thousands of Jane and John Does sittin’ on ice in this country? Just do the math. You’ve got a hundred thousand missing persons, at least. They’ve got one parent each, maybe two, and a couple of siblings. That makes for a heck of a march on Washington.’

Steelie had indeed pictured this but she wasn’t prepared to admit it in this context. ‘And that’s a heck of an imagination you’ve got there, Chuck. But we’re not a lobby group. We’re not allowed—’

‘But,’ the coroner cut her off. ‘What I’m also saying, Ms Lander, is that I’m not sure that would be a bad thing.’

He signed off and Steelie was left looking at the phone in her hand, wondering how many other coroners shared Dr Talbot’s take on that kind of pressure from families. If she were still in graduate school, she’d do a survey. Maybe she could get someone else to do a survey. She walked to the front of the building, summoning Jayne from her office as she went.

Steelie stood at Carol’s counter, knowing that their receptionist already had an idea of what she was about to say, since she’d put Chuck Talbot’s call through and she could read Steelie’s smile. But Jayne had no idea. She raised her eyebrows at Steelie, who announced, ‘Thomas Cullen has been positively identified in Anchorage.’

Jayne just stood still, returning Steelie’s grin, so it was Carol who started clapping first. A slow clap that skipped two beats in between, then gradually sped up to one beat in between. Jayne joined in, then Steelie, until they were clapping as fast as they could, like a team psyching itself up after a mid-season win.

Two men from A-1 Electrics delivered the generator to Agency 32/1 just after 4 p.m. As it turned out, they didn’t need to spend much time inside the building, as the generator was installed just behind the building, in its own security cage. Just before 5 p.m., Jayne heard Carol announce that Scott was holding on Line 1 for her. She located her copy of the examination report on the freeway body parts, expecting him to ask why there wasn’t more to it. Leaving aside the surgical plate in the right arm, they’d only been able to conclude:

– Minimum Number of Individuals: 2. One female, one sex indeterminate

– Left arm: Female, 40 years ± 15, possible Caucasian, healed fractures, possible antemortem defense wounds

– Right arm: Female, 40 years ± 15, possible Caucasian, mid-shaft surgical plate conjoining proximal and distal humerus

– Leg: Sex indeterminate, 20 years ± 5, possible Caucasian

– Torso: Sex indeterminate, 18 years+, possible Caucasian

It hadn’t looked like much because there was a limit to what a purely external examination could deliver. But then there was that surgical plate in the upper arm.

Scott sounded buoyant. ‘I’ve got good news.’

Jayne sat up straighter in her chair. ‘Let me have it.’

‘We’ve got an ID on the arm. Or I should say, arms plural, though that’ll have to be confirmed by DNA later.’

‘Was it the plate?’

‘Yes. That was a great find.’

‘It was just sitting there waiting for us! The hard part was not reflecting back the flesh to expose the humerus right there and then.’

‘You kind of scare me when you talk like that, Jayne.’

‘Sorry. So is she one of your missing women from Georgia?’

‘Unconnected. She’s a Mrs Patterson from Carlisle, Oregon.’

‘Carlisle?’

‘Outside Portland.’

‘Was she in NCIC?’

‘That’s the interesting part. She was but not listed as suspicious missing. And get this: she went missing two months ago. Eric’s been trying to get details from Oregon. We’ll be sending the arms to the coroner up there after we’ve got the results on whether the left arm goes with the right.’

Jayne looked at the report in front of her. ‘And maybe you can run DNA on the torso? That’s the other BP that could have been hers.’

‘We’re all over that.’

‘I take it you won’t be running DNA from the younger person’s leg through CODIS, given that we couldn’t even tell you what sex it was?’ She was referring to the FBI Laboratory’s Combined DNA Index System.

‘Even if the Bureau would let me, it won’t be worth it – not enough information. And the leg’s not one of your cases?’

‘Not enough information.’

‘Tell me about it.’

She recalled Scott’s desire to get around the backlog at the coroner’s office when he’d asked 32/1 to do the preliminary investigation. ‘So you’re OK with the leg and maybe the torso going to the LA coroner’s office after all?’

‘ID’ing Patterson makes up for a lot.’

‘Yeah.’ Jayne smiled. She had said almost those exact words to Gene when he was looking at the 32/1 filing cabinets. Gene had been negative but here was Scott, sharing her positive perspective. This was why she liked the man. ‘How’s the search for the van going, if you can say?’

‘Actually, we’ve got a lead on that and . . . I’ve . . . gotta run.’

Jayne knew Carol had left while she was on the phone, so she went in search of Steelie and found her in the kitchen, washing up cups. She told Steelie about the identification of Patterson.

‘Mrs? Sounds like he thinks she was married,’ Steelie commented. ‘I’ll bet it was her husband who gave her all those fractures.’

‘Or maybe she divorced him and married a new guy.’

Steelie looked at her. ‘You live in a dream world.’

‘You live in a lawyer’s world,’ Jayne retorted lightly.

‘Oh, that reminds me. Did you remember the raffle ticket books?’

‘Damn. I completely forgot.’

‘It’s OK. I did too, until someone from Legal Aid called to remind me that I’d volunteered.’

‘You need them today?’

‘Yeah. The raffle’s tomorrow morning so I have to go straight there—but I don’t have to stay. Can I swing by your place tonight and get them?’

‘Yeah, I’ll be in.’

‘I’ll call when I’m nearby. Should be around eleven.’

‘That late?’

Steelie turned to go. ‘I have that thing with those people. Don’t ask.’

The pinky-white flower heads waved high above the gaura plants as Jayne carefully lifted them out of her truck. Next were the two geums: absolutely shameless doubles in a clear red, swooning in front of anyone who came near, and sure to meet with Marie’s approval. Jayne nestled them in the two terracotta pots she’d bought to replace the ones by her door. She was still debating about whether the damage had been inflicted by possums or raccoons; either had the strength to tip over cacti pots. She made her way up the stairs to her apartment, reached the landing and then stopped.

Three metal washtubs filled with blooming white daisy bushes were arrayed next to her front door. The tubs were different yet complementary sizes, their shine artfully worn off in places. Jayne thought the arrangement was gorgeous, like something from a magazine, and it made her doorway look hip and inviting. She stood back, admiring first them and then her mother, who had to be responsible for this transformation. She’d have to remember to call her after she’d potted the other ridiculous flowers she’d bought, which could now live on the deck. She went inside.