Midnight Baby

CHAPTER 5

I talked, Mike listened, all the way downtown to Parker Center, the Los Angeles police administration building. For Sly’s sake, I hoped that something he had told me about Pisces and about the man who had killed her would make a difference. It was too late to do anything for Pisces. But I had a feeling that finding the man who had killed her would help Sly a whole lot more than all the efforts of an entire phalanx of county-hire shrinks.

We pulled into Parker Center’s covered garage. Mike found a space to park his plain-wrap city car among maybe a hundred other similar nondescript, superannuated American-made wrecks.

“If you can get Lyle to locate the videotape that shows the Corvette, I’ll have a courier bring it down.”

“I’ll call Lyle right now,” I said.

We got out and walked away from the plain cars and between rows of black-and-white units, working toward the underground entrance to the building. Mike had long legs and I had to stretch mine to keep up.

I looked over at him. “I’m really afraid that the footage I shot with the Corvette isn’t going to help much. I panned to the right from the girl to include the hood of the car because it was bright and glossy and it boosted the sleaze quality of the scene. I’m not sure I got the driver. When I closed on him, he took off. He gave me good sound for maybe eight seconds, but probably no face.”

“Whatever you got, it’s a hell of a lot better than nothing. The thing is, if we bring the asshole in and Sly IDs him and we tell him we have him on tape, odds are better than even he’ll cop to it.”

“You have to catch him first,” I said.

“I always get my man,” Mike said, nudging me with his shoulder. He held the door for me and we walked through the back passage to the elevators. I had never been in the bowels of headquarters before. From the general scruffiness, I guessed that nothing had been refurbished since Jack Webb retired.

Next to the elevators there were two wide, jagged cracks in the plaster. With a pencil, someone had labeled the cracks “Whittier Narrows Quake” and “Sierra Madre Quake,” and dated them. When the elevator door opened I was reminded that disasters always come in threes. I stepped inside anyway.

“What are we going to do here?” I asked.

“Get some real coffee.” Mike pushed the button for the third floor.

“And after that?”

“Start working on the girl’s ID.”

Mike was forever telling me that assignment to the Major Crimes Section of the Los Angeles Police Department was the ultimate any detective could hope for: high-profile murders, serial shit, VIP details, all the good stuff. He said the detectives who worked majors were America’s creme de la creme of big-city dicks. He wouldn’t lie to me. Then again, Major Crimes was where Mike worked.

When we walked into his office that late Saturday afternoon, things were fairly quiet. A couple of detectives were cleaning up paperwork from a shooting in the Valley they had rolled on the night before, four members of a Korean family found dead in their home. A second two-man team had tickets for the evening game at Dodgers Stadium and were just hanging out until it was time to go. I don’t know why they didn’t find someplace more comfortable.

The Major Crimes Section has space within the Robbery-Homicide bull pen. The office is a long, narrow room badly in need of paint and housekeeping. There are the requisite ranks of gun-metal filing cabinets lining the walls. Two dozen or so detectives work literally shoulder to shoulder at old library tables and scarred metal desks set in two parallel rows down the length of the room. Each detective’s work territory is marked off by a plastic blotter and some essential clutter: family snapshots, potted plants, trophies, personal computer terminals, telephones, case files.

Densely packed on the floor around the city-surplus chairs, and under the tables, jutting into the narrow aisles, balancing on every flat, nonmoving surface, are cardboard file boxes crammed with case files.

I sipped my coffee and looked up at the wild African boar head mounted on the wall over Mike’s work area.

“Family member?” I asked.

“My first mother-in-law,” he said. “Number two is down in the locker room.”

“Uh huh.” His chair squeaked when I sat in it. “Now what?”

“You’re going to make a list of everything you know, or think you know, about Pisces. There are probably a couple thousand missing juveniles in the state computer system. Anything you can think of that will narrow down the list will help.”

While Mike called the county coroner and ordered a dental workup to be done on Pisces, I started writing: female Caucasian, age fourteen, five-two or -three, ninety-five pounds, eyes brown, natural hair unknown, first name may be Hillary, possibly from Southern California, right-handed, played the piano, athletic build, pierced ears, mother may have lived at the beach. Virgin.

Mike called Sacramento and talked his way through the switchboard until he got the state investigator working juvenile records who was on call for the weekend.

“Detective Mike Flint, LAPD Major Crimes,” he said. “Who am I talking to?”

He listened and gave me a thumbs-up.

“Hell yes, Art, I remember you,” he said into the telephone. “That particular homicide convention was the end of my marriage. Your wife ever speak to you again?”

He laughed a whole lot louder than I suspected the joke from the other end merited.

“I just hope you weren’t so drunk you forgot you owe me a big one.”

More male-bonding laughter.

“You got it. Now I’m calling in the debt. You ready? Okay, I got me a female juvenile Jane Doe at the county coroner’s office. I’ve ordered the dental workup. They promised me they’d do it now and get it sent out to you ASAP. In the meantime, this is what I have.”

He read off my list, exactly as I had written it.

“I don’t know how long she was missing,” Mike added. “So give me some variety in the height and weight, age maybe a year or so either way. If you could do a computer Tab run and get me a list of all possibles, and get it to me overnight, I might consider your debt paid in full. Besides, it’s Saturday night. I know you’ve got nothing better to do.”

Mike’s smile gradually died as he listened to Art on the other end. He seemed all seriousness when he responded.

“Don’t think about it,” Mike said. “We were all over with a long time before that. Guess we just needed a kick in the pants to realize it. Good talking to you, pal. I’ll be watching for your report.”

He cradled the receiver.

“Do you know everybody?” I asked.

“Everybody who counts.”

“What do we do until Art’s report comes back?”

“Track down the ring,” he said. “Go over the field interviews from the crime scene. Make passionate love.”

“In which order?” I asked.

“Take your pick.”

I got up and started clearing a space on his table. “Let’s do that last item first. Right here. Right now.”

He laughed, but I saw the cast of doubt in his eyes. He wasn’t sure how far I would go. I liked knowing that he didn’t have me all figured out. When I began to tug at his shirttail, he grabbed my hand.

“Let’s go talk to the Bunco-Forgery guys,” he said. “That little manufacturer’s symbol stamped inside the band of the ring is probably registered in their book.”

“Whatever you say,” I said, and put his desk back in order.

We spent about an hour poring through a registry of copyrighted jewelers’ symbols, comparing each one to the sketch Mike had made of the stamp inside Pisces’ ring.

“What does the symbol look like to you?” he asked.

“Could be an R or a G,” I said. “Or maybe a Greek omega. What do you think?”

“Just keep looking. If the ring came from a large chain store or wholesaler, figuring out who made it probably isn’t going to lead us anywhere.”

My eyes got tired from using a big, scratched magnifying glass. I wasn’t very hopeful.

Mike was far more patient, meticulously looking back and forth between possibilities in the book and the sketch, and back to the ring. He made notes of a few of the more likely candidates. Finally, he handed the ring to me and pointed to a listing in the book.

“Got it,” he said. “It’s no Greek whatsis. It’s a rainbow.” The listing he showed me was for a custom jeweler down in Long Beach, Rainbows.

“Custom jeweler,” I said. “That’s a break.”

“We’ll check it out.”

“What happens when we identify her, Mike? We still won’t know who killed her.”

“Maybe not,” he said. “It’s just part of the drill, Maggie. Don’t you want to know who she is?”

“Of course I do,” I said. “But it seems to me that we’re looking for two different girls. One of them was a middle-class teenager who took music and learned how to set the table. The other was Pisces, the street urchin. Which one of them was murdered?”

“Good question.” The pager on Mike’s belt sounded, and he unclipped it from his belt. “The thing is, they’re both gone.” He put his reading glasses back on, held the pager against the light, and flashed the readout of the caller’s number. “Coroner,” he said, frowning. “Wonder what, huh?” He reached for the telephone and dialed.

“Mike Flint returning your call,” he said. He listened, gave me a look of absolute puzzlement. “Thanks for alerting me. I’ll be right there.”

Mike grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair.

“What is it?” I asked, following close on his heels.

“Someone has come to the morgue to claim the kid’s body.”

“Who?”

“Get to steppin’ and we’ll find out.”

Officially, Mike’s city car was on a salvage list. When it reached ninety-six thousand miles or so, it was supposed to be scrapped. But because there was no budget for a replacement, he had never turned it over. Most of the cars in the police lot were on the same list.

Even though on that day Mike’s heap was forty thousand miles beyond the city’s definition of junk, Mike made it move. We blasted out of the Civic Center with all eight geriatric cylinders pinging, and roared down Mission Road toward the county morgue in Lincoln Heights.

I rolled down my window and took in all the fresh air I could, wishing I could save it up somehow. This would be my second trip to the morgue with Mike. What I remembered most vividly was the smell. Once you have been there, you never forget the smell.

Mike bounced through the potholes in the asphalt drive of the massive County – USC Medical Center campus and jerked to a stop in a no-parking zone right beside the front steps of the morgue. He bounded out of the car, his jacket flying out, his holstered automatic bouncing on his hip. I was right beside him.

To my great relief, we were headed for the front door. Last time I had gone in through the back way, through guest reception. That had been surreal, a charnel house. The front was mauve marble and mahogany office doors. The only stiff was a bureaucrat snoring at his desk.

Inside one of the offices that opened off the lobby, I could see a man and a woman sitting together. He was grim-faced and pale, she wept softly against his chest. They were in their early forties, I guessed. Except for their grief, there was nothing remarkable about them, a couple in ordinary Saturday clothes: jeans, sneakers, windbreakers. The woman was thin and blond, probably pretty under better circumstances. The man had a fair-sized sports-fan gut; a big man who worked with his hands.

They looked like nice, careful people. Not the sort who might mislay a daughter.

“Mike?” A small Oriental woman came out of the office where the couple sat. She wore business attire, a lightweight wool suit and low-heeled shoes. Clipped to her lapel was a coroner’s investigator badge.

As we walked to meet her, Mike whispered in my ear. “Act like a cop. You’re probably not supposed to be here.”

“How does a cop act?” I asked.

“You know.” He grinned. “Pushy, like you own the place. Just let me do the talking.”

He offered his hand to the investigator.

“Sharon Yamasaki,” he said, “this is MacGowen.”

She smiled at me and reached for my hand. Her eyes lit up, as if a light bulb had come on inside. “You’re Maggie MacGowen.”

“Guilty,” I said, and nudged Mike with my toe.

“I’m very pleased to meet you,” she said. “I saw you interviewed on PBS last week. Program about reporting from a war zone. It was very interesting.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” I said.

“Is Mike helping you with research for a project?”

“In a way,” I said, and smiled at him.

“When you two are finished?” Mike tugged on my arm.

I pulled away from him and moved closer to Sharon Yamasaki. “Who are those people?”

She glanced at the couple inside. “Mr. and Mrs. Metrano. They say that someone called and told them that our young Jane Doe is their missing daughter.”

“Did you call them?”

“No.”

“Have they viewed the body?” Mike asked.

“Yes. On video.”

“They ID her?”

Yamasaki held up her hands. “People sometimes see what they want to see. Why don’t you talk to them. I promise you, it’s a puzzler.”

We walked into the office, and Yamasaki did introductions all around. “George and Leslie Metrano, Detective Flint, Maggie MacGowen.”

I rolled their names over in my mental Rolodex a couple of times. Nothing came up right away, but I knew the card was there.

Then I looked at them both closely, rudely I guess, trying to match their features to Pisces. I saw no obvious likeness, but they seemed to be within the range of possibility.

“How long has your daughter been missing?” Mike asked them.

“Ten years, five months, twelve days,” Leslie Metrano said, her voice breaking.

“Ten years is a long time,” Mike said. “Kids change pretty fast when they’re growing up. What makes you think this girl is your daughter?”

“A mother knows.”

“Possibly.” Mike looked very uncomfortable. “But we’ll need something more concrete before we can release the body to you. Do you have dental records?”

“She was only four years old when she was taken from us,” George Metrano said. “She had never been to the dentist.”

Mike nodded. “We can draw samples from you and run a DNA match. The results from that are damned near hundred-percent. Problem is, results will take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months. Is there anything you can offer in the meantime, fingerprints we might match with Jane Doe?”

“She has a name,” Leslie cried out. “Amy Elizabeth Metrano.”

“Jesus Christ.” Mike sat down on the closest chair and stared at them. “Amy Elizabeth Metrano.”

I remembered the little blond with big brown eyes. There had been-posters with her pretty round face everywhere for over a year. As I recalled the story, little Amy had disappeared during a family picnic in the mountains around Lake Arrowhead. I couldn’t remember all of the details. She had been playing hide and seek in the woods with older siblings and various other children. She hid and they never found her again.

There had been a lot of speculation about what had happened to her, from kidnapping to consumption by the local wildlife. Other than a pink sweater hanging on a bush, she had vanished without a trace.

“I have pictures,” Mrs. Metrano said. She laid out the familiar poster snapshot, and then a series of computer-generated sketches that projected what Amy might have looked like at various ages, had she lived. I picked up two of the sketches, one labeled age twelve, the second age sixteen. The artist had assumed that she remained healthy and well-fed, and round-faced. Pisces’ features had been gaunt.

I put the sketches down and looked over at Mike.

“What do you think?” he said.

“She was a pretty little girl.” I shrugged.

He nodded. “When we get your videotape down, we’ll get a forensic anthropologist to make a bone-structure comparison.”

“What videotape?” Mr. Metrano asked.

“I filmed part of my conversation with the girl who called herself Pisces. I’m sure you’ll have a chance to see it. Just remember, she was lying to me. She was a little scam artist, but she wasn’t a hooker.”

Mrs. Metrano began to weep, “My baby, my baby.”

I thought poor Mike would have to leave the room. I have watched Mike follow an autopsy from Y cut to final suturing without flinching – unphased even when the skull popped open like a champagne cork. But this weeping woman was another matter.

Mr. Metrano held his wife against him and patted her back rather hard.

“Mr. Metrano,” I said, “if this girl is your daughter, where do you think she’s been for the last ten years?”

He had turned a sickly pale. “Right at the beginning, we got a report from this private investigator that Amy Elizabeth had been sold into a sort of white slavery ring. He told us they were always looking for little blond-haired girls. We went up to Montana where this ranch was supposed to be, where they took these girls. But we never found it. I took out a second mortgage on the house, and we kept on looking until the money ran out.”

“You believed in this PI?” I asked.

“Well, he kept at it after the police and sheriffs said there was no hope. No one else was giving me anything. And he showed me pictures. Awful pictures of grown men and little girls.”

“Was Amy Elizabeth in the pictures?” I asked.

“I couldn’t tell. A father sees his princess doing what they had those babies doing, you think he could make himself recognize her?”

“Did you see the pictures, Mrs. Metrano?”

“I wouldn’t let her,” George jumped in. “No mother should see that.”

“This girl, Pisces, was never used that way,” I said. Metrano took a deep, shuddery breath. Color began to return to his face.

“I ask again,” I said. “If this is Amy, where has she been?” Mike cleared his throat, and I looked over at him.

“Sorry,” I said. “Was I messing in your territory?”

“You’re doing just fine,” he said. “Nice of you to bring me along.”

“Now what?” I asked.

Mrs. Metrano sat upright. “We want to take our baby home. She’s never even had a memorial service.”

“I’m sorry,” Sharon Yamasaki said. “I can’t release her until we have investigated further. You understand our need for caution.”

“We’ve waited so long,” the mother sighed.

“You have to understand,” Mr. Metrano said, tears in his eyes as well. “We accepted a long time ago that our Amy might be dead. But until we know for sure, we can’t move on. If my wife feels in her heart that we have found Amy, then I believe her.”

“We haven’t eliminated any possibilities, sir,” Mike said. “But I caution you not to get your hopes up too high.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Metrano,” Yamasaki said gently, “why don’t you go on home now. I’ll call you personally if anything comes up.”

Mr. Metrano lifted his wife’s chin and tenderly kissed her. “She’s right, Leslie. The kids are waiting for us.”

She nodded and rose with him. They started for the door. “One more thing,” Mike said. The Metranos stopped and turned to face him.

“Who called you?” Mike asked.

“Someone from the coroner’s,” Mr. Metrano said.

“I’m certain you are mistaken,” Yamasaki said. “Our office called no one.”

“That’s what he said,” Metrano insisted. “A man called about three o’clock and said he was from the county coroner’s office. He said we should come and identify our daughter. We used to get a call like that every week or so in the beginning. But it’s been a long time.”

Mike made a note in his case book. “He actually said, ‘Come and identify your daughter’?”

“Yes. That was different, come to think of it. They used to drive over with a snapshot and say, ‘Do you know her?’ or ‘Can you identify her?’ Now and then they would have us drive all the way up here, just to make sure. They’re real careful about what they say.”

“You drove up here from where?” Mike asked.

“Where we live. Down in Long Beach.”