Vigilante

CHAPTER 10

When I got back to the Police Administration Building, I Googled the Boca Raton Rape Clinic and sure enough, there were half a dozen pictures of Nix Nash hosting last night’s fund-raiser in South Florida.

Not to be overly thorough, but I wanted to make absolutely sure he wasn’t a suspect, so I checked the airlines and found that Nash had been on a flight that left Fort Lauderdale Airport at 5:00 A.M., landing at LAX at 7:43 this morning. I talked to a terminal manager who remembered Nash coming off the flight and being stopped for autographs. That meant either he’d been at Lita’s house to take her to breakfast as he’d said or he’d been tipped to her death by someone inside our department. I suspected it was probably the latter and was determined to root out the spy and close that leak.

The rest of the day was spent researching Lita Mendez. Of course, I’d heard a lot about her and knew something of the trouble she’d caused for the department, but for the last few years, because I’d been investigating high-profile homicides, her crusade against the Hollenbeck Station and the Internal Affairs Group had mostly escaped my scrutiny.

As I surfed old stories about her on the Net, I was surprised by how much there was. When she died Lita was just thirty-three years old. One story revealed that she had become enamored of the court system at the age of six when she watched her mother get a restraining order against Lita’s father, who had been violently assaulting them both. Her dad, an Evergreen gangster, ended his short earthly journey a year later, going tits up in an alley off First Street. Lita had been keeping herself busy since adulthood by making life impossible for the cops in and around Hollenbeck.

Among her numerous activities, she’d crashed various LAPD undercover operations, taking photos of the undercovers, posting their pictures on the Internet, putting their lives in danger, and burning these cops for this kind of work forever. Most of her civilian complaints were not for police brutality but for lesser charges like rude behavior or harassment.

She had also made her share of enemies on the street. A committed Evergreen associate, she had little use for the more than forty-five competing Hispanic sets and often turned her legal skills against enemy shot callers.

An article about her titled “Talking Truth with Lita Power,” by an L.A. Times writer named Trent Phillips, told how she was attempting to intimidate and drive rude, harassing police officers out of her neighborhood with complaints and lawsuits. Most cops thought her real motive was to compromise police activity and wrest control of Evergreen turf away from Patrol, turning the blocks back to the gangs.

She printed police corruption T-shirts with the pictures of officers she’d accused of crimes and then passed them out in community centers. It didn’t matter that most of her complaints found those cops innocent. She hung sheet banners from freeway overpasses decrying Hollenbeck police officers, identifying her favorite targets by name.

On our part, the department had charged her with two dozen misdemeanors and a few low-weight felonies, everything from driving without a license to the more serious offense of assaulting a neighbor with a gardening tool. There were eight to ten counts of verbal assaults against various cops. None of this legal vitriol had gone anywhere in court.

Last year Stephanie Madrid, a captain in charge of the Advocates Section at Internal Affairs, had used police union funds to finance a restraining order against Lita, which would require her to stay more than fifty yards away from the Hollenbeck Station. That suit had prevailed.

There was a raging legal debate being fostered within the L.A. Times blog community over whether Lita Mendez was a community activist exercising her First Amendment rights or a criminal menace, who was hurting her community and the quality of civilian life in Boyle Heights. By-and-large, the bloggers were throwing in with Lita, accusing the police of just about everything but double-parking.

However, even Lita’s detractors admitted that she had a sophisticated understanding of how to use the court system and the complicated Federal Consent Decrees that, until recently, had governed the LAPD. She had often stated in the L.A. Times articles that her dream was to one day complete her GED and go to law school.

She might have made an excellent attorney, because with no formal legal training and a closet of conservative business suits for court, Lita Mendez had managed to keep Internal Affairs and our city prosecutors embroiled in an endless legal debate. Just last week Captain Stephanie Madrid had filed a criminal lawsuit against Lita, charging her with intentionally making a false police report.

In the gang-corrupted streets, she was heralded by Evergreens as a hero. They claimed she had the courage to stand up to City Hall. Her attorney, who mostly worked her cases pro bono, claimed Lita had never been convicted of a felony, even though she did have a sealed stolen-car beef dating back to when she was a juvenile.

When I was finished, I had compiled a long list of people who hated her guts. A lot of them were cops.

Capt. Stephanie Madrid was well known to everyone in the department. She was a hard-ass who ran the Advocates Section at IA. Advocates were police officers who had the job of prosecuting accused officers. In essence, they were advocates for the department. Defense reps were the officers picked by the accused to defend them. A defense rep could be any officer on the LAPD as long as they were below the rank of captain. The chief advocate had supervisory responsibilities over both the advocates and defense reps. It was a big, important job and Captain Madrid ran a large machine that brought police officers charged with malfeasance before administrative Board of Rights hearings. Hundreds of cops had found themselves facing boards because of Lita’s mostly frivolous complaints.

When I finished, I rubbed my eyes, which were fatigued from hours on the Internet. It was a depressing compilation of facts and angry people. I had a long list of G-sters and cops to look into, including a prickly IA captain. Stephanie Madrid was often referred to as the “Queen of the Dark,” so I certainly wasn’t looking forward to conducting a suspect interview with her.

One thought was buzzing around me like the angry green blowflies in Lita’s kitchen: this certainly was the perfect case for V-TV.

At five o’clock Hitch called to say he was just leaving the ME’s office. I suggested we meet for a beer in a bar called the Copper Buckle across the street from the Police Administration Building. A lot of cops came in there for drinks after work, and it was usually packed.

We found a booth in the back and sat across from each other over foaming mugs. I gave Hitch a copy of my background information on Lita and he slid my copy of the ME’s report over. Instead of reading the paperwork, we filled each other in verbally and would go through the paperwork later. After I gave him Lita’s background info, he started recapping the coroner’s report.

“The two bullet wounds to the head were made by nine-millimeter copper-jacketed Federals. They were one-hundred-twenty-nine-grain Hydra-Shok hollow points and were fired postmortem,” he began.

“If she was already dead, it sounds like the doer had some personal issues with the vic,” I said, thinking of my long list of angry cops.

“Lita was beaten to death first,” Hitch went on. “Head trauma, body trauma, and massive brain hemorrhage on the right side of the cerebellum, which Ray says was the immediate cause of death.”

“How about DNA?” I asked.

“Nothing on her body. Her nails had soap under them. Maybe she brushed her nails. Maybe the killer did. No soap where we found her, so it didn’t happen while she was lying on her kitchen floor. The body was clean. No foreign hair or skin traces, no vaginal DNA. It was so clean, in fact, the coroner thinks the corpse could have been hand vacuumed, which means the unsub knew what he was doing.”

Again, I thought, cop.

We drank our beers while I turned pages on the ME report. When I finished scanning the analysis, I looked up at him.

“We got nothing here to hold Carla or Julio Sanchez.”

“I still think there’s an outside chance they could be good for it,” Hitch replied.

“Except we don’t have enough to charge them. Even if CSI matches their prints to prints inside the house it may not matter, because Carla used to live there. How about time of death?” I asked.

“Still working on it. Her stomach content analysis came back just before I left, so it’s not on that top sheet. I clipped it to the back page. Lita had a mostly digested meal of beef enchiladas and Mexican beans. Ray thinks when she died it was maybe four hours old. If she ate at eight, which is just a guess, then she might have been killed around midnight. That fits with the lights still being on and the absence of rigor mortis.”

“Enchiladas? So much for the Bolognese sauce.”

“Once every ten years or so, I’m wrong,” he said, smiling ruefully. “That TOD estimate is also supported by lividity and maggot gestation. Ray will try and dial it in a little closer tomorrow by figuring in the ambient room temperature and adjusting for the temperature’s effect on larva development.”

“Carla said she was there at eleven and Julio confirms it. If you believe them, it puts Carla outside the window on this preliminary time of death,” I said.

We ordered two more beers. After they arrived I said, “Just for the hell of it, I checked on Nix Nash’s whereabouts, not that I think he did it, but I would have loved to get a way to stir him up a little.”

“Tell me.”

“He was in South Florida for some fund-raiser when she died.”

“I still don’t think we should cut the Sanchezes loose,” Hitch said.

“They’re on a seventy-two-hour hold. We could hang on to them for another day.”

“I think that’s what we should do. Their bags are already packed and if we guess wrong and they really are the doers, it’s hasta la vista on those two. On a murder one, we’ll never extradite them from Mexico.”

I nodded my agreement. It had been a long, depressing day. Neither of us wanted this damn case.

So we packed up the paperwork, finished our beers, and went home.