The Prostitutes Ball

Chapter 25.

The week after Christmas is when all LAPD department heads have to prepare the year's budget review. They have to work up an annual cost-of-operation estimate for the coming twelve months and tender it to the chief, who then assembles the overall department budget and submits it to the mayor's office the first week of January.

Alexa is always completely buried by this fiscal process so I knew she would most likely be working until well past midnight.

I was thinking about what I would do for dinner as I faced six angry CSIs up on Skyline Drive, trying not to communicate my own displeasure about being forced to be here.

It didn't seem to be working because after I told them what Dahlia Wilkes wanted, they were glaring at me like I'd just delivered the wrong pizza.

"Is she kidding? We went through this place very carefully/' Lyn Wei, the lead CSI, said. She was a twenty-nine-year-old Asian woman with a round face that wasn't helped by her severe helmet-shaped hairstyle.

"I don't think she was kidding," I told them. "Look, it never hurts to be thorough. I know you guys started with an inward spiral search pattern when you first got up here, then yesterday did a grid and graph, so why don't we try a parallel search today?"

Lyn Wei wrinkled her nose. "Did you and Hitchens do something to piss her off?"

"Miss Wilkes is a fine prosecutor," I said. "She tends to be a little obsessive on evidentiary and procedural stuff but let's bear in mind the terrific results she gets."

While they went to work, I sat on a pool chaise and looked at the big, empty house.

I thought about a distraught Thomas Vulcuna coming home all those years ago with that old prop Luger in his briefcase. Maybe coming out here half drunk to test-fire it, his hands shaking as he held a pillow on the barrel so he wouldn't alert his family inside. Then getting into an argument with his daughter, Vicki, killing her and his wife with a ball-peen hammer. Ugh.

A lot about that didn't track.

If he had the Luger, why use a hammer? I guess if it wasn't in the same room with him when he snapped and started swinging, you could find a way to get there. But still, I was suspicious of it.

Then after committing those ghastly murders he goes upstairs to the master bedroom where he opens The Divine Comedy to an underlined passage about death before he shoots himself.

I didn't like the Divine Comedy suicide note at all. I've been working homicide and suicide cases for a long time. Never seen that one before. People who write suicide notes are usually communicating important last thoughts to someone. Its something you do in your own words, not with a passage out of a book.

I also wondered if Thomas Vulcuna had removed his shoes before shooting himself. I'd noticed that on a large majority of suicides I'd worked, the victim had removed his or her shoes before doing the deed. It happened something like seventy percent of the time.

Td asked a psychologist about it once and was told that the act of removing ones shoes prior to death was a ritual. This doc told me when we remove our shoes and socks before bed at night it symbolizes an ending. A suicide victim is involved with a final gesture the end of life. By performing this task, the vie was subconsciously acknowledging the end of one state and the beginning of the next. At least that's what the shrink said.

I don't know how much of that I believed, but I certainly believed the overwhelming statistic I'd observed. It made me want to examine the autopsy and crime-scene photos of the Vulcuna murder to see if his shoes were on or off.

Of course, the fact that the '81 murder-suicide was closed almost thirty years ago was going to be a problem. But I'd find a way to deal with it.

I dialed Alexa to check on her schedule. She told me what I'd already suspected.

"I'm not going to make it home 'til very late," she said. "I'm collecting budget estimates from my division commanders right now and I'd like to get a preliminary worksheet done by the end of the night."

"Okay. I'm gonna pick something up," I said. "See you when you get home."

"If I get home," she sighed.

I stayed true to my promise to Hitch and didn't tell her about what we'd found out from Beverly Bartinelli, but I felt guilty as hell about it.

After I hung up with Alexa I called the Records Division and talked to an old sergeant named Leroy Porter.

I'm looking for an eighties case file," I told him. "It was a murder-suicide that occurred in December of eighty-one."

"Vulcuna?" he said without hesitation.

"How'd you know?"

"Guy came in here and checked it out an hour ago. Two boxes. They were in the old evidence warehouse. That case was before we went on computers and it was stored in the hard copy room."

"Was Detective Hitchens the one who took it?"

"He'd be the one," Sergeant Porter said.

Damn, I thought as I hung up. Hitch had swung by on his way to IA. He beat me again.

My partner had a reason to be AWOL from our crime scene. He had his shooting review board. I, on the other hand, was stuck here. I didn't trust Dahlia Wilkes not to unexpectedly drop by to make sure we were following her instructions to the letter. She was gunning for us and certainly wasn't above that. I asked Lyn Wei when her team was scheduled to go into overtime.

"Six P. M.," she said.

It was four in the afternoon, so that meant I had to cool out up here for two more hours while Hitch was doing god knows what with the Vulcuna evidence boxes.

At quarter to six, I let the team of CSIs off fifteen minutes early. The crime scene had now been shrunk to just the property. The press had moved on to sit on another fence waiting to tear the flesh off L. A.'s next juicy disaster.

We all walked down the drive and got into cars parked by the sagging wood gate. I drove down Skyline and took a left on Mulholland on my way to Sumner Hitchens's house.