The Viking Funeral

Chapter 12

THE NEXT MORNING Shane went to Mark Shephard's autopsy. The ME performing the examination was Dr. Clyde Miller, a notorious civil-service character. He wore tie-dyed T-shirts under his white medical smock and sang old Beatles tunes while he cut up corpses.

"It's been a hard day's night, and I been working like a dog," he warbled at ten A. M. to the accompanying screams of a bone saw in the autopsy room. The procedure was taking place in operating theater three of L. A.'s huge medical examiner's facilities. The next-in-line corpses were on rolling gurneys in the narrow basement corridor, all waiting under ironed green sheets, with red name tags wired festively to their bloodless toes. They were bumper to bumper under the fluorescent tubes, surrounded by the throat-clogging cologne of the newly departed-formaldehyde mixed with preserving chemicals. It was a sad little parking lot of last night's traffic and gun mistakes.

Commander Mark Shephard was the only self-inflicted gunshot death that morning. The physical inspection of the body was just getting under way as Shane arrived.

"Hey, Sarge, welcome. Another opening, another show," Miller caroled, switching momentarily to Cole Porter as Shane entered the room. "Was this poor guy a friend?"

"No, I found the body."

"Hard way to go," Miller grunted, and switched back to the Beatles, altering a lyric here and there as he continued his physical inspection of the lower extremities. "Hey, Jude, don't make it bad / Take a sad song and make it better / Just don't hide the reason you're gone, and this Doc will find the answer, answer, answer, answer." He broke into the "na, na, nas" as he went over Commander Shephard's legs and feet, inch by inch, looking for any exterior abnormalities before making his Y-cut at the sternum, then emptying and weighing the Good Shepherd's heart, liver, and kidneys.

Shane was standing at the head of the table when Dr. Miller suddenly stopped singing and turned to his medical assistant, a black woman Shane had never met, who was functioning as his "diener" during the autopsy. "Whoa, Nellie. Whatta we got here," he said, raising an eyebrow.

Both Shane and the tall African American woman moved to the foot of the table to see what he had found. There, on Commander Mark Shephard's left ankle, on the inside just above his medial mallealous bone, was a small, two-inch, hand-drawn tattoo of a Viking head in profile. A horned helmet dominated the artwork.

Shane looked at the tattoo, then took a small camera out of his pocket that he always brought to autopsies to photograph anything of note for his case folder. He carefully shot the tattoo from different angles.

Two things about the tattoo bothered Shane: First, most police officers would rather cut off one of their fingers than get a tattoo anywhere on their body. They viewed tattoos as a mark of the criminal underclass. Cops who already had one prior to joining the force usually invested in laser surgery to remove it.

Common folklore on the streets was that if you were a criminal, always look to see if your cohorts in crime were tattooed-or "sleeved," as the cons called it-because any guy without a tattoo was immediately suspected of being the Law.

The "no tattoo" rule among cops was relatively inviolate, so it bothered Shane that Mark Shephard had this Viking on the inside of his right ankle. But there was something else about the tattoo that bothered Shane even more.

About three years before, the L. A. County Sheriff's Department had discovered a band of rogue officers. This group called themselves "the Vikings," and they all had Viking tattoos on their ankles. They were suspected of forcing confessions, usually by administering a little chin music in some dark place. The Vikings were eventually broken up, but this tattoo looked exactly like the ones worn by that bunch of officers. It was in the same place on the body, low on the right ankle, where it could be covered by a sock.

When this rogue group of deputies was first discovered, Sheriff Sherman Block tried to stage an inspection. He wanted to examine every sheriff's deputy's right ankle in search of Viking tattoos. But the Sheriffs Department Law Enforcement Union filed a lawsuit, claiming that such an inspection without probable cause violated the officers" civil rights. It became a big deal, and eventually the sheriffs union prevailed. The physical search never took place, but ten deputies were eventually terminated from the original core group.

Mark Shephard had the same tattoo, or at least one a lot like it. Shane wondered if the culture of the Vikings had somehow migrated from the Sheriffs Department to the LAPD. He made a mental note to try to get someone to pull Shephard's file to see if he had ever been loaned out to the sheriffs or had ever been part of one of the cross-pollination task forces. There had been several over the years, and a few were still operating: The Cobra Unit in the Valley was one; L. A. Impact was another. Even some of the big serial-killer task forces qualified. On the Hillside Strangler Unit, the Sheriff's Department and LAPD worked closely together because the murders occurred in both the city and county.

One other strange thing turned up as a result of the autopsy, and also caught Shane by surprise. But it didn't happen while Doc Miller was sawing up Commander Shephard and singing selections from the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. It arrived an hour later, when the preliminary blood work came back from the lab. Shane was stunned to learn that the Good Shepherd had been stoned when he parked the Remington Light in the central lobe of his cranial cavity. He had high traces of marijuana in his bloodstream.

"Shit," Shane said as he stood outside the ME's office in the hazy mid-morning sunshine, trying to decide what to do with this new piece of information. How would he tell Alexa, or should he even tell her at all? Since it would eventually find its way into the press, maybe it would be better to let the Los Angeles Times deliver the bombshell. Shane didn't need to be the one to further distress Alexa with negative facts about her old boyfriend.

He decided to take some time and think about it. He went across the street and had a Heineken in a tavern called the Canoe Factory. The place was a hangout for medical examiners and their staff after long days of opening corpses and turning them into what they referred to as "body canoes."

As he sipped his late-morning brew, he realized he had no choice but to tell Alexa, even if telling her would drive them further apart. She was acting head of DSG, and it was her responsibility. She had to know about the tattoo, about Shane's suspicions. Furthermore, he was determined to find out if his old best friend, Jody Dean, was out there committing multiple homicides on his former commanding officers.

At eleven Shane left the bar and just barely made his rescheduled psychiatric appointment, only five blocks away.

He sat in the reclining chair while the psychiatrist asked him how his last four days had gone.

"Very well," Shane lied. "Exceedingly well, in fact."

"Uh-huh… I see. Go on," the fat doctor said.