The White Angel Murder

7

Stanton drove to Interstate 8 and headed northwest to La Jolla. It was evening but the sun was still out and the freeways were not as packed as they would have been an hour ago.

He had read everything in the box and looked at most of the photographs forensics had taken. There was a video too, but he couldn’t watch it yet. The coroner’s report was detailed, even to a fault. Stanton knew the pathologist that had performed the autopsy; he had a daughter Tami’s age.

There was still daylight left when Stanton pulled to a stop in front of the Ocean Vista Apartments. The coroner placed her death at around one in the morning, at least four days before she was discovered by her boyfriend. Maggots had been found at the scene and they were excellent for determining time of death for a corpse as the incubation period in the egg and the hatching process were the same length of time from one specimen to the next.

It would have been better if he had come here at one in the morning and seen the apartment as he had seen it that night. But it was currently rented and he didn’t want to impose that on the tenants.

There was mention of a manager finding the body with the boyfriend, but when he knocked at the leasing office, which was just one of the apartments, a woman answered and said the previous manager had moved out. Stanton walked upstairs to 2-F and knocked on the door. A slim male in cut off shorts with a cigarette dangling from his mouth answered.

“Yeah?”

“I’m Detective Stanton with the San Diego Police Department. I think we spoke on the phone.”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, lighting the cigarette. Stanton guessed it was an attempt to cover the strong odor of marijuana pouring out of the apartment. “So you just like wanna look around, right?”

“Yeah.”

He opened the door. “All right, cool.”

Stanton had called ahead and made sure the tenants understood that the police were coming. They would be more at ease when they had the opportunity to hide anything they might not have wanted him to see.

There was a young girl on the couch, maybe eighteen. Her eyes were rimmed red and she had a piercing through her nose. She stared absently at Stanton but didn’t say anything.

“So, why you wanna look around again?”

Stanton ignored him and began to his left, behind the door. He ran his eyes along the baseboards and then up the wall. The kitchen table was glass with only two chairs. The Anarchist’s Cookbook was open on a page showing how to tie a grenade to a fence with a piece of rope so that the pin would pull when the fence opened. Stanton saw out of the corner of his eye the male glance to the girl; they had forgotten to hide the book.

The kitchen was small and the microwave was bolted above the oven. The night the police arrived, half a sandwich had been found on the coffee table with large bite marks that didn’t match the victim. He had made himself a meal before leaving.

Stanton ran his eyes past the kitchen into the living room. The carpet was tattered and cigarette burns adorned it like spots on a leopard. He noticed the sliding glass door. The frame looked worn, an off shade of gray. But the lock was new chrome.

“Did you guys replace the lock on the sliding door?”

“No,” the male said. “Why?”

“Is that the same lock as when you moved in?”

“Yup.”

“How long have you lived here?”

“Bout seven months.”

Stanton began walking down the hallway and the male followed him. They walked into the bathroom and Stanton glanced quickly at the bathtub. He then went to the bedroom. The door was open and he walked in and stood in the entryway.

There was a single bed and a nightstand, clothes strewn on the floor. One window overlooking the parking lot. He sat on the bed. The closet was full of sneakers and tank tops. A few posters of women in bikinis and Bob Marley were nailed up. There were no stains on the carpets other than cigarettes, nothing on the walls or ceiling. It now held only ghosts of what had happened.

Stanton rose. “Thanks for letting me look around.”

“No worries. Hey, why were you wanting to look around anyway?”

“Someone came through here once that I wanted to see. But they’re gone.”