Vertical Coffin

Chapter 23

There were four police cars and three media vans parked in front of the neat, one-story ranch-style house in a Leave It to Beaver neighborhood in Van Nuys. Nobody had bothered to tape off a staging area yet. The street was wide open, and as I got out of my car another news van rolled in and three crew types hit the street and started unpacking video equipment.

The crime scene was alive with spectators. I saw a lot of strained looks and hidden agendas. If Jo Brickhouse hadn't been screwing up her end so badly I would have enjoyed watching her trying to handle this angry mess, but there were already half a dozen people on the porch standing over the body. I saw two TV news teams and a print photographer walking around inside the house shooting tape with their sun-guns on. Like the Morning News with Ken and Barbie needed to be in there handling evidence and getting shots of the widow crying in the den.

Adding to the emotion and hyperbole were Rick Manos, the SEB Gray team scout, and his long gun, Gary Nightingale, who was sitting on the corner of the porch crying, holding his dead sibling's hand. To her credit, Jo Brickhouse was trying to move all the extra people out, but this thing had already lifted off. Brady Cagel and his band of feds hadn't put in an appearance yet. Interesting, I thought. Why not?

I pulled Jo Brickhouse aside. "You're missing a sure bet here. You should be selling tickets."

"What am I supposed to do, physically throw these assholes off the porch?"

"Exactly. You're a woman, not a pussy, remember?" While she was turning a few more shades of red, I stepped up and took Rick Manos by the arm.

"Get your people off this porch," I ordered.

"This isn't your case, it's ours." He snatched his arm back.

"I'm through with that shit," I replied. "You're SWAT, I'm homicide. You don't know how to work a murder. Look at the mess you've already got here. Besides, this is inside L. A. city limits, and Sergeant Brickhouse from your department is on it, so get your people out of here."

"We told you this was gonna happen, but you wouldn't listen!" Rick said hotly.

I didn't like the way he was facing me, too ready, too close to the edge. He killed people for a living and wasn't used to getting pushed around. I decided the best way to handle him was to put him to work.

"You wanta do something worthwhile, get those damn newsies out of the house. Who let them in?"

Manos looked at me, trying to decide if he was going to answer. Finally he shrugged. "I don't know. Barbara Nightingale probably. They were here when we arrived." But he still didn't move-not sure he wanted to take an order from me, even a good one.

"If you want me to solve Michael's murder, get all the civilians out of there. We gotta bolt this puppy down. Come on, help me out. You know this is fucked."

He nodded and started inside.

"Hey Rick," I said, and he stopped. "Take Gary with you. Give him something to do other than leak DNA all over his brother's body."

Rick looked down at the SEB long gun, who had tears streaming down his face. Then he went over and gently took hold of Gary's arm.

"Let's go Gar, okay? We gotta help clear out this house," he said. "Then you should go sit with Barbara."

The two of them went into the house and I heard voices raised in anger, but the blow-dries inside weren't a match for Manos and Nightingale.

Just then two more of our black-and-whites and a fourth TV news van rolled in. Jo Brickhouse was heading toward me, shaking her head in frustration. I stopped her.

"Get a patrol car blocking each end of the street and move all those news vans and press cars at least a block away. Tape off a staging area out front."

She took off and I grabbed one of our uniforms. His name-plate identified him as S. Berg. "You wanta help me, Officer Berg?" He nodded. "Get a notebook and start an incident log and crime-scene attendance sheet. Nobody gets past you without signing in. Start with me. I'm Scully, three forty-five a. M."

He pulled out a spiral pad, wrote my name down, and I signed it.

"Get everybody who was inside, including civilians. Depending on how this goes, we may need to contact all of them later for elimination prints."

It took us almost ten minutes to clear the house. It really pisses me off when news crews arrive at a crime scene ahead of us, but the midnight stringers and late shift newsrooms ride the police frequencies. Because they have mobile units all over town, they can often get to the meat ahead of us.

I had a murder once, right after I joined South Bureau Homicide, where I arrived at the crime scene and couldn't find the body. There were twenty people in the murdered guy's apartment: neighbors, friends, TV, and print news. I'm looking all over the place, and I can't find the vie. Finally I asked the person who called it in where the body was. "In the bedroom," this guy tells me. So I go back in there and I still can't find it. I start thinking I don't believe this! Somebody stole the damned corpse.

Then I hear a news photographer in the bathroom firing off stills with a motorized camera. So I go in there and ask him, "You seen the dead guy anywhere around?" And now I'm feeling like a complete yahoo.

"Yeah," this asshole tells me. "I finished taking pictures in there and the body was kinda grossing me out, so I rolled him under the bed."

Amazing.

Finally I had the crime scene locked down and Officer Berg taking names at the door. Nobody could find Lou Ruta. He wasn't answering his pager, but Beverly King called in and reported that she was five minutes out, so I waited for her before I started.

When she arrived Jo kept the other cops off the porch, while Beverly and I took Mrs. Nightingale into a spare bedroom. After we calmed her down we took her preliminary statement. She told us that Michael had been on call last night, so she had taken the kids out to a movie. When she got home she came in the front door, didn't see her husband, and figured he was still at work. She went to bed, but woke up at two. Michael was still not home, so she called the squad and found out that he had gone EOW three hours earlier. She started to worry and began looking around, and finally found him head-shot on the back porch. She managed to get the kids to a neighbor, then called it in.

Basically, she knew nothing. Heard and saw nothing.

It's SOP in all homicides to regard the spouse as a prime suspect until the facts prove otherwise. But the truth was, Barbara Nightingale looked and sounded legit to me. Still, I couldn't let my suspicion that this was done by a bunch of angry commandos at SRT color my thinking. I had to keep all options open; collect information and evidence with no preconceived bias.

Alexa was right. This was going to be huge-a media frenzy. I had only Jo and Beverly to assist me, and neither had much homicide experience. I could use more help.

When I walked back into the living room I asked Beverly King, "So, where's Ruta? Think he's ever gonna show?" Even though he was a jerk, at least he was an experienced one.

Beverly shrugged, probably relieved that her partner was MIA, but came to his defense anyway. "Maybe his pager batteries are dead." Which is sort of the adult equivalent of the dog ate my homework.

Sergeant Brickhouse was starting to direct the forensic techs onto the porch, so I went outside to stop her.

"Let's just hold off on all that for a minute. I don't want anybody to touch anything for a while."

"Why?" she argued. "We need to get on this. Bag and tag the vie, get a liver temperature to establish time of death, search for trace evidence."

"Just calm down for a minute, okay?"

"I don't work for you, Scully," she said angrily. "You don't outrank me either."

I pulled her off the porch, holding her muscled arm. She was hard to move-big and strong. I led her out of earshot of Beverly King and the CSI techs. We stood in the backyard, ten or twelve yards away.

"Let the fuck go of me," she said. "I don't…"

"Work for me, I know. But how 'bout working with me?" She glowered, but I charged ahead. "How much time did you spend in homicide before you went to IAD?"

"That's not the point. I'm here at the direct request of Sheriff Messenger, Enrique Salazar, and the county supervisors. My department has a lot at stake now. This dead officer was ours. I'm your jurisdiction on this shooting," she said hotly.

"This isn't the time or place to have it out, but I'm damned tired of fighting with you for control of the wheel. We need some guidelines."

"Here's a guideline! Stop trying to tell me what to do."

"I've done over a hundred homicides. I have a way I do it. Why don't you take advantage of that, instead of resenting it?"

She looked at me, anger still flaring. "Okay. This should be fascinating. So why don't we start with the body, since the body is the reason we're all here?"

"The body isn't going to get up and leave, so there's no need to rush."

"You don't even want SID to get started? That's nuts."

"While you and the sheriffs were on the porch holding Michael's hand, half the city desks in town were wandering around inside, screwing up the evidence. We can't change that now, but I want to take a minute and work out an operational theory. The crime scene might have been altered. I wanta think this out for a minute."

"The porch is the crime scene," she fired back, then added defensively, "I kept it as clear as I could."

Then the second L. A. myth made an unscheduled appearance. "Where the hell were you? I called you at three a. M. It doesn't take forty minutes to get here from Venice."

I took a deep breath to control my anger.

"We don't know what the crime scene is. Since I don't see a bullet hole in the back door or porch, we don't know where this happened. He could have been shot inside and dragged out here. The biggest mistake that is usually made in a homicide investigation is prescribing too small an initial crime scene area. If I could rope off the entire block, I'd do it. Now let's just back off for a minute and try to work up a shooting theory."

She was looking at me, her chest, rising and falling. Hyperventilating. Pissed.

"Look," I said, "this is bad form standing out here arguing. We'll have this out later. For now, let's do it my way."

She turned and walked off, leaving me standing there.

The truth was, I always stretched the edge of the crime scene to the farthest point out, and walked that area first, marking anything that looked out of place. After I had the immediate scene under control and the body was secure, experience had taught me that it's extremely hard to keep people from prowling the edges of the site. Neighbors, and even other cops, patrol the border, and if it's a large area it's easy for some well-intentioned schlub to pick something up or leave a footprint. We could find some cop's bootprint, plaster it, then start running off in the completely wrong direction of looking for a killer wearing size-ten combat boots.

Once I spent two weeks working a hair follicle our CSI techs found at a murder scene. The lab reported that the hair had undergone an amber tint dye job. It also had traces of an expensive French shampoo and a special French conditioner. A good potential lead. I put it out on the news that we were looking for an upscale killer with tinted amber hair who uses an expensive, French shampoo and conditioner.

A week later, I'm looking in Alexa's bathroom cabinet and I see all those same products in there. It turned out that the hair had fallen off my own coat and belonged to my wife. It's very hard to protect a crime scene, so I always start at the far edges first, and work in toward the body.

I walked the perimeter carefully, examining the ground, looking down, shining my police flashlight. The sun would be up in a few hours, but I couldn't wait, because I had seen the anger and pain in Gary Nightingale, the deadly resolve and violence in Rick Manos. I had also promised Alexa I wouldn't let this investigation drift.

The projectile had entered Michael's head from the front, the same as Billy Greenridge. The slug caught him square in the forehead, right between the running lights. He had fallen where he was shot and since the bullet had not hit the house or the door behind him, that meant it probably came from the side. To miss the house completely, the shooter had to have been firing from either the far right or the far left portion of the back yard.

I started walking around out there, searching for the shooting location. About forty yards away, behind an old lemon tree, I saw footprints. Boots. Big ones; size thirteen at least. The lowest limb of the tree had a fork about five feet up from the ground. A perfect place to cradle a rifle barrel. I called the crime techs over and showed them the footprints and the tree limb. They started photographing and getting ready to plaster the impressions.

I kept looking around on the ground on the right side of the tree. About forty feet away, lying under a small hedge, I spotted the casing.

I called Jo Brickhouse over and pointed it out to her. Beverly King followed. It was an ArmaLite.223, the kind of ordnance common to AR-15 assault rifles.

It didn't escape my notice that the long guns SRT had been using up at Hidden Ranch were AR-15s. The.223s were very fast rounds, with a muzzle velocity of over three thousand feet per second. The projectile is designed to tumble and break into smaller pieces on impact. After we photographed it, I leaned down and retrieved the brass, again using my pen tip. I held it up and we all stared at it.

The casing was a deadly calling card, and all three of us were thinking the same thing. Finally, Beverly King put our thoughts into words: "This seems way too easy."