Pacific Beat

Chapter 4

Ken Robbins, head of Forensic Science Services for the County of Orange, met Weir in the parking lot of the coroner’s building. Robbins was a sturdy man in his early fifties, with gray hair that grew long around his collar and the weathered tan eyes of a sailor. Weir had gotten along with him well in his days with the Sheriffs. Robbins seemed to lack ambition, and because of it he tended his duties with a scrupulous devotion rarely found in public servants. Ken Robbins was always focused. He was carrying a briefcase, which he set on his lap as he sat down beside Weir in the truck.

“I’d ask you in, but tongues would flap.”

“This is better.”

“You don’t want to view her, do you?”

View her. “No.”

“Good to see you again, Jim. You lost some weight.”

“What do you have for me, Ken?”

Robbins took out a file and set it on top of his briefcase as Jim guided the truck out of the lot and down Civic Center Drive.

“Okay. Glen Yee did the work; he’s my best man. Some of what we have is preliminary, some of it’s hard. Yee got her after the other lab work — hair and fiber, latents, blood and semen.”

Weir’s stomach sank. “Was she raped?”

“I’ll get to that. First, time of death between midnight and one A.M. Yee’s firm on that because we got her six hours later. Food in her system, blood loss, lividity, rigor mortis, the usual. She was stabbed with a sharp knife, thin, single-edged, nonserated, with a six-inch blade and no hilt. It’s called the Kentucky Homestead, made in Japan, and there’s a picture of it in the file here. Any one of thirteen wounds were fatal — they were done before the others. The first three happened when she was standing — the other twenty-four when she was down. No sign of resistance, so apparently our man got tired or scared — what have you. Twenty-seven penetrations in all. Now there wasn’t so much as a cut on either of her arms or hands, so we’d have to say she lost consciousness almost immediately, before she could defend herself. No bruising that would indicate a struggle before the knife hit her. Eight of the thirteen fatals penetrated the heart; the others hit the aorta or the pulmonary artery or both. He was forceful, Jim. Very.”

Weir rolled down his window and let the air hit his face.

“I’m sorry.”

“Keep going.”

Robbins flipped a page and folded it under. “Semen inside the vagina and minor bruising of the mons and symphysis suggest that she was raped before she died. We found some abrasion of the vaginal canal, but not a lot, so she lubricated quickly. We found semen in the uterus, as well as on the labia and underwear — trace only, there. If she’d been found on dry land, we could guess how much time elapsed between the rape and death, but the seawater could have rinsed off a great deal of fluid, so we’re kind of stuck. We think between five minutes and half an hour. At least five minutes, though — we’re sure on that. The roses don’t tell us much. We’re tracking variety and supplier for Innelman. Ten in the waistband of her skirt, one inserted with some force into the vaginal canal... after death, we assumed. The other one probably floated away, or else he saved it.”

The road went blurry in Weir’s eyes; he turned on the air conditioner full blast and directed the stream onto his face. He was now on some side street in the barrio — no idea which one, and it truly didn’t matter.

“Pull over, Jim.”

“I think I will.”

He found a shady spot under a big olive tree. The curb was littered with the purple stains of crushed fruit. He breathed deeply and unwound his fingers from the steering wheel. Robbins offered him a cigarette, which he took. They both sat back and smoked. Weir watched the plume hesitate at the window, then rush out and up.

“What I’m about to tell you now isn’t going to make you feel better, Jim. She was pregnant.”

“I know.” Weir drew the smoke, felt the rush in his head, the warmth spreading down to his feet. He also knew something that Robbins wouldn’t understand, that even he, as a man, couldn’t fully comprehend — that Ann had wanted a child more than anything in the world.

“Seven weeks along, Jim. God, this is tough to do to you.”

Jim stared out the windshield and saw nothing. He could feel his heart pounding away in his ears, and his hands had begun to tremble. “Keep going, Ken. I’d like to get this over with.”

“Want to just read the report?”

“I said keep going.”

“Okay, the perp. He’s a type-B secretor, which means—”

“I know what it means.”

“Right-handed. From the angles of penetration, Yee figures five foot ten to six feet tall, if they were both standing on level ground. The first three penetrations were done when she was upright, like I said before. Yee’s good at his angles and estimates. We took a hair off her blouse — it was worked into the fabric. Two inches long, dark-brown, wavy. Prelim is male Caucasian, thirty-five to forty- five years old. Latents didn’t get much — the seawater saw to that. We took partial prints from the upper arms and face, nothing we can send through Sacramento. We combed her for trace and found some possibilities, but running through the samples will take some time.” Robbins was silent for a long while. “It’s also going to take some time to run the semen through the DNA lab. We’ve never tried it after seawater contamination. I wouldn’t hold my breath. That’s it, Jim.”

Weir stared out the window and finished the cigarette. A little girl in a pink dress with white ruffles kicked a ball down the sidewalk. Jim watched her black shoes pick their way through the olive stains. “Play it back for me, Ken. Put the pieces together.”

Robbins drummed his fingers on the briefcase. “I see it like this. First, what do we know? That she was raped, struck twenty-seven times with a knife, that eleven roses were... arranged on her person, that she was left floating in the Back Bay. All that and no signs of a struggle except the bruising of the mons area. We know she was killed a hundred yards up the bay from where they found her — a dark night, a remote region, not the kind of place she’d just happen to go to for no reason. Reason, then? He had a gun on her, maybe the knife. She was frightened, couldn’t resist until it was too late. But she managed to stand up after the rape, because that’s what the penetration angles tell us. The first stab could have killed her, any of the three while she was still upright. After she was down, he just kept at it.”

The scene played through Jim’s head with obscene clarity.

“What do you think?”

“Go on.”

“So, he pulled the gun, or showed the knife early, forced her into his car. Or maybe he was smoother than that. There’s a thousand ways to get a woman into an auto. I worked a case last year where a guy used his own baby daughter to lure a woman in — said he couldn’t figure out why the kid was crying. He raped her in the backseat. We matched seat belt material with what we took from under her fingernails. Anyway, Ann let herself be taken out to the bay, maybe even let herself be... presented with a bouquet of roses. He’s a sicko and she knows it by now. She plays along, trying not to make him furious.”

“There’s no evidence at all of a gun.”

“He raped her and she didn’t so much as get a fingernail into him. He threatened her with a gun, maybe the knife. Maybe with just his words, but he threatened her with something to which rape was a preferable alternative. She had her clothes on when they found her. They weren’t torn, they weren’t even radically disarranged. The skirt was short enough he could have just pulled it up. Her underpants were on. What’s that tell us? That he let her put them back on after he was finished. That was part of the deal: You lie back, let me do my thing, and you walk. Considering the knife — or the gun — Ann weighed the offer and took it. No resistance, even though the genital bruising indicates some pretty rough treatment. She took it, on the belief she’d be okay. She got up, put herself back together, and he killed her. Now sure, he could have put her clothes back on after he killed her, but why bother?”

Jim’s hands trembled. He laced his fingers together to stop it. He looked down to see them locked contritely in place, but still twitching.

“Account for the five minutes between the rape and the time she died.”

“It was at least five minutes. And remember, she was still lying down. Okay, try this: She thought he’d left. She lay there, heard him leave, thought she heard him leave. She was stunned, starting to go into shock. She lay there a long time — or what seemed like a long time to her — then she put her clothes back on. She stood up, she started to walk, but he wasn’t gone. He was waiting, and he got her before she could make a move.”

Weir watched the scene again in vivid detail. His hands were clenched now, and his ears rung with a wavering intensity, as if a siren was approaching fast. When he blinked his eyes to banish the vision, the barrio street asserted itself before him with strident, mocking clarity. He started up the truck again and pulled back onto the street.

“Who’s working this for Brian?”

“Dwight Innelman and Roger Deak.”

“Dwight’s good.”

Weir navigated back to the coroner’s building in silence. They got caught behind a transit district bus with a picture of Brian Dennison’s face on the back. The exhaust had left the interim chief tainted with black. Ken Robbins slipped his papers into a folder and set the folder on the seat beside Weir. “I probably don’t have to say this, but I will anyway. Twenty-seven wounds. Our man was in a rage. But he was cool enough to bring along a dozen purple roses.”

Weir considered the empty flower vase on Ann’s desk at the day-care center. “Maybe she was carrying them when he took her. Maybe he didn’t bring them at all.”

“It’s possible.”

“Maybe he sent them to her earlier.”

“Wouldn’t that be nice. I imagine the Newport Beach Police thought of the same thing. The local florists could tell you if he was that stupid.”

Robbins got out of the truck and shut the door. “Let me know what else I can do. I’ll have Yee’s finals ready for you by this time tomorrow. I’m sorry. How’d it go in Mexico?”

“Better than this.”

Weir stopped at a bar three blocks away, downed two shots of scotch and a water back. From a telephone over by the shuffleboard table, he called Raymond’s house and got no answer. He tried the Eight Peso Cantina on Balboa and found Raymond’s mother, Irena. Irena and Ray’s father, Ernesto, had owned the Eight Peso — a neighborhood cantina that offered good food and cheap drinks — for forty years. She told him between sobs that Ray had gone to the hospital. “He just fainted. It’s all too much for him,” she kept repeating. Ernesto — Nesto, to family and friends — had gone to stay with him, but Irena was keeping the bar open for business.

“Here’s your mother, Jim. Vaya con Dios.”

Virginia’s voice was firm but faint.

Jim told her he needed her help and she said nothing. Virginia’s complicity was understood.

“Go home, sit down at the kitchen table, get out the phone book. Call every florist in Newport Beach and find out who either sold a dozen purple roses to Ann, or had them delivered to Ann’s Kids. If you strike out, try Laguna, Corona del Mar, Costa Mesa. Try every number in the book. Don’t stop until you know.”

“He sent her those roses? The ones on her desk at work?”

“It’s an outside shot. This is our secret, Mom. Just ours for now, understand?”

“The police should have thought of this.”

“They have. I just want you to get the answers before they do.”

Virginia said she’d be starting her calls as soon as she got home.

Jim told her to remember what he had said early that morning, that they would get through this, that there would be an end to the way it felt. He hadn’t known then whether he believed it, and he didn’t know now.

For a moment, there was nothing but silence between them, a silence that bred in Jim terrible visions of the days to come.

“I love you, Mom.”

“I love you, too, Jim. And anyone who thinks I’ll quit working for Slow Growth because of this has got another goddamned thing coming.” Virginia hung up, her sense of multiple missions declared to Jim by the loud crack of the phone hitting its cradle.

Weir called Hoag Hospital. A nurse told him that Lt. Cruz was apparently exhausted and had not been eating. He was sedated now and sleeping soundly.