Vertical Coffin

Chapter 25

When I got back to Hidden Ranch Road there were two parked sheriff's academy vans and at least two dozen academy cadets up by the burned-out house, dressed in grubbies and yellow fire slickers, leaning on shovels. They seemed glad to be working on an actual case, instead of running laps and doing pull-ups at the Academy. They were eagerly looking at the large dig site, anxious to begin.

I spotted a slightly plump female criminalist with wire-rimmed glasses and red, curly, Orphan Annie-styled hair. She looked to be in her mid-thirties and was wearing a crime tech windbreaker, sweatpants, and a white T-shirt that said: Get Off My Fucking Crime Scene. Had to be Robyn DeYoung.

Jo hadn't arrived yet, so I walked up to Robyn, who was standing a few feet past where the front porch had once been, just about on the exact spot where Emo Rojas had bled to death. She was holding an open set of builder's plans and was issuing instructions, dividing the cadets into four teams and assigning them to separate quadrants of the dig site. When she finished, she turned to me.

"Don't tell me. You're Scully," she said.

"Guilty," I replied. "DeYoung?"

She nodded. Aside from the curly red hair, she also had freckles across the bridge of her nose and was attempting a disapproving scowl. But she possessed an instant likability, an infectious demeanor. She was mad at me for sending her back out here in all this damp ash and rubble, but for her anger wasn't a durable emotion, and it was already burning off like predawn mist.

"Sorry to put you through this again," I said, trying to soften her up.

"If you wanna grab a shovel, I have a fire slicker in my trunk that might fit you."

"Gee-me with a shovel. Now there's a heady concept."

"Didn't think so," she said. "Okay. Always good to have another supervisor." She opened the plans and studied them.

"Building department?" I asked.

"Yep. Pulled 'em this morning. No architect on these homes. Builder contracted. They all run between three and five hundred K. They seem nice, but when you look close they're just two-story, hollow-wall deals. Probably why it flashed over so fast."

"Right," I said. "The hot gas grenades and all that ammo in the garage probably didn't hurt either."

She let it pass, then asked, "What am I looking for again?"

"Rottweiler."

"Okay, have a seat and get started on your ice cream. If he's here, we'll dig him up."

I returned to the car, then opened the manila envelope containing Smiley's LAPD academy records and started to read.

The person who did the psychological profile was Doctor Hammond Emerson IV. I always love it when people put Roman numerals after their names, like inbred New England dilettante French royalty. Doctor Emerson had conducted three interviews with Smiley in 1999. He found the subject to be evasive and secretive. He felt that Smiley clearly had parental issues, particularly with his mother, which the doctor surmised could have stemmed from child abuse. Emerson noted in his summary that Vincent exhibited some gender confusion and a sense of hostility toward women that most probably also stemmed from the deep-seated problems with his mother, Edna Smiley-currently deceased.

Doctor Emerson concluded that Vincent Smiley demonstrated sado-sexual tendencies combined with latent rage. Emerson also surmised that these problems would create great stress when interrelating with females, both in the department as well as in society.

The LAPD academy employed a point system for applicants. Out of a possible one hundred points Smiley had scored forty, well below the seventy required to be considered for admission. Not even a close miss.

I closed the file, tapping it with my thumb. Was the AK-47 a deadly penis substitute? Was Smiley trying to make up for his sexual confusion by going postal and shooting up his neighborhood?

Just then Jo Brickhouse pulled to the curb in a sheriff's black-and-white. We both got out of our cars and met halfway. I handed her the file. "What's this?" she said. She still seemed angry, but maybe it was me, and I was just projecting.

"Smiley's LAPD academy app. He applied to us before Arcadia. Probably took a shot at your department, too. You might see if they turned him down and if they have a psych profile on him."

She took the file, opened it, and skimmed it while I watched the cadets moving ash and charred lumber off the site.

"Gay?" she said raising an eyebrow.

"Hey, come on, take it easy. That doesn't necessarily make him a bad person."

There was a moment while two conflicting emotions, anger and amusement, fought for control of her strong face. Finally, the dazzling smile won out. "You're not gonna stop busting my balls, are you Scully?"

"When you stop busting mine, I'll stop busting yours."

She considered that for a second, then waved it off.

"Okay, look-the sheriff's department doesn't spike an application on the grounds of homosexuality alone. You guys don't either."

"Not now, but what was it like in the mid-or late nineties?" I asked.

"Not sure." She tapped the folder on her thumb, exactly the same way I had. "Most likely, Doctor Emerson dinged him for all this other stuff. The sado-sexual rage, the mother problem- add that to the gender confusion, and who wants an asshole like that on the job?"

"Right. But I don't think gender confusion is necessarily homosexuality."

She thought about that and nodded, so I went on.

"And there's nothing in there about depression or suicidal tendencies either."

"It's just a quick psychological scan. This doc could've missed a lotta stuff." "Still…"

Just then we heard yelling up at the site. I walked across the grass again with Jo Brickhouse at my side. The Academy cadets had found a charred lump of meat about the size of a large dog. They had scraped the ash away from the mound and were all standing around, looking happily at the object like puppies who had found a ball.

I kneeled down. The smell of cooked, decaying flesh made my throat constrict. Then I saw something glistening in the ash near the corpse. Using the tip of my pen, I pulled it away from the burnt carcass. A round piece of metal.

"Dog tag," Robyn DeYoung said. "You can touch it if you want. No prints survived the heat of this fire."

I picked it up and rubbed it with my thumb, clearing the ash. "Eichmann," I said, reading the name. "Guy named his dog Eichmann."

"Hitler was probably already taken," Jo said from behind me.

"I wonder if he really was some kinda white supremacist?"

"Goes with the survivalist training Tad Palmer mentioned," Jo answered.

I handed the tag to Robyn and stood. "Okay, that probably answers the question of what happened to the Rottweiler. Can you get us a DNA scan to match the breed, just to be sure?"

Robyn nodded. She gave an order and two cadets ran to the crime van, returning with a plastic sheet and a rubber coroner's bag. Then they loaded the charred remains onto the sheet and Robyn wrapped him up like a burrito. She instructed them on how she wanted the remains loaded into the coroner's bag, then two cadets carried him down and left him in the back of her black-and-white Suburban.

Jo and I walked back and leaned against the hood of my car, watching while the cadets again started digging where the plans indicated the basement staircase would be.

"What are we really doing out here?" Jo asked.

"Loose ends," I said.

"Look, Scully, you were right. I never worked in homicide, but in IAD I've put down a pile of officer-involved shootings. So far, this doesn't stack up as a bad shooting. Smiley brought this on himself. Death by cop. I don't see how checking this guy's background adds anything to Emo Rojas's death, or Billy Greenridge's and Michael Nightingale's."

"I'm not sure it does either," I admitted, annoyed again, but trying to stay frosty.

"Not to state the obvious here," she continued, "but you and I are at ground zero in a jurisdictional hurricane. I'm starting to get a lot of cold shoulders from my fellow deputies. They don't like it that we're investigating this. We've got heavy metal blowing around over our heads and you're out here looking for a dead dog and a bomb shelter."

"I gotta get it off my mind."

"What? Get what off your mind?" Frustration again.

"What Smiley was really doing."

"Committing suicide."

"Not according to Doctor Emerson."

"Fuck Doctor Emerson. He's just a guy in a tweed coat who never dealt face-to-face with a gun-toting psychopath. For him it's all theory and book work."

"Smiley was in Kevlar," I said for the umpteenth time, speaking slowly so somebody might finally get it. "He was building a bomb shelter. That doesn't sound like a guy contemplating suicide."

"So what?" She snapped. "Look Shane, my ass is on the line too. I'm having daily meetings with the undersheriff. My boss wants results, and all you're doing is moving backwards."

I shook my head. This was exactly what I'd been afraid of. Some silk from sheriff's IAD, who'd never worked a murder, telling me what to do.

"Is this just you wandering around on the outer edge of the crime scene again?" Jo interrupted. "Because if it is, I think we need to seriously refocus."

"There's not much we can do until we get those shell striations matched. Let's just see this through."

We both went to defense postures, leaning back and crossing our arms. She was definitely not in agreement, her face impassive but angry. The sleeves of her gray cloth jacket bulged at the biceps.

Again, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd seen her before. Where was it? I wondered.

"We found it," one of the academy trainees yelled. Jo and I pushed away from the hood of my car and trudged up the lawn again toward the crowd of young cadets.

They had uncovered a staircase that led into what looked like a basement. There was ash and rubble all the way down to a lower level door. One of the female cadets was at the bottom of the stairwell, still digging with a shovel, throwing the last spadeful of sodden debris up. It landed all around the spot where we were standing. Then she scrambled up, her face smudged with soot, but she was grinning. This was a high-profile investigation, and she was thrilled. This was why she had signed on- exactly what the recruiting poster promised.

Join the tradition. Become an L. A. County sheriff. Wear the star. Shovel shit.

We looked down the staircase. It was a mess. The ash at the bottom still soggy from the fire hoses.

"I'll take you up on that slicker now," I said to Robyn.

She smiled and instructed a cadet to run to her car and get two. He returned a minute later carrying yellow panchos with lasd stenciled on the back. I handed one to Jo, put the other over my head. Once we were rigged, we started down the steps. The door at the bottom of the stairs had burned right off its hinge. I picked it up and set it aside, then we went into the underground room.

The flashover heat from the fire had been so intense it scorched everything down there. The basement contained a laundry room, a tool area, and a few metal closets. The clothes had burned off the wire hangers. The plastic on the Black amp;c Decker power tools had melted.

But there was no bomb shelter.

We all stood and looked at the scorched remains in the concrete block basement.

Jo said "What now?"

"I don't know," I replied. "The neighbors claimed he was pulling dirt out of here. He told them he was digging a bomb shelter in the basement. So where is it?"

"Smiley was a lying head case," Jo answered.

"But his neighbors weren't lying. Where'd the dirt come from, if it wasn't from a bomb shelter?"

Again we fell silent. Then Robyn DeYoung said, "You through with us? Can I send these 'cruits back to the barn?"

"Yeah, I guess. Thanks, guys."

They all waved, then started to pack up their gear. But something wasn't right. Just before they headed back to the academy vans, I stopped them.

"Wait. Hold on a second. Help me pull this stuff away from the walls first."

Several cadets came down and helped move the tool bench. It was heavy, almost two hundred pounds, and took three of us to slide it to the corner of the room. Next we moved a metal closet. Nothing. Last, the washer and dryer. When we pulled them away from the wall, I saw where the dirt had come from.

Vincent Smiley had dug a hole in the wall under the drainage line hidden behind the washer. It was a foot up from the floor and measured about three feet in diameter. Just large enough for a man to crawl through.