White Sister

Chapter 4.

IT'S TOMMY SEPULVEDA," a voice crackled through the telephone.

"What's up, Tom?" I said.

Tommy Sepulveda and Raphael Figueroa were a detective team that worked with me at Homicide Special. Since Sepulveda Boulevard and Figueroa Street are two main drags in Los Angeles, it was inevitable that some wise guy in personnel would find a way to put them together. Sepulveda was Italian; Figueroa, a second-generation Mexican-American. They were good dicks and had a cubicle two over from me and Sally Quinn, my incoming partner. I remembered seeing that Sepulveda and Figueroa were next up on the roll-out board when I had left the office for the jail at ten this morning.

"Listen, Shane, you need to get up to the top of Mulholland Drive right now," Tommy said.

"I'm not back in rotation yet. I'm breaking in a new partner next week."

"We just got an APE case. You need to get up here now!" He sounded tense and all of my alarms started flashing. An APE case was sixth-floor speak for Acute Political Emergency.

"What's going on?"

"I'm calling you on a radio hook-up. My cell doesn't work up here. I don't want this out on an open channel. Just move it."

"On my way." I hung up and wondered what the hell to do with Jonathan Bodine. If I left him here alone, there wouldn't be anything left in the house when I got back. The shower had stopped running in Chooch's bathroom, so I went looking for him. He was in the kitchen foraging in my refrigerator, his hair still wet, wearing a towel wrapped around his skinny hips. He was holding a leg of lamb in his right hand, gnawing it right off the bone. In his left hand he had an open bottle of table wine.

"We gotta go."

"I'm having dinner."

"No, you're not."

I rushed into Chooch's room and grabbed the clothes I'd laid out for him, snatched his grimy boots off the floor, and hurried back into the kitchen, throwing the bundle on the dinette table.

"Put 'em on. We're leaving." My stomach was balled up in a knot. There was only one reason I could come up with why Sepulveda would call me out on an APE case. It had something to do with my missing wife.

"Let's go!" I yelled, and grabbed him. The towel came off his hips and fell to the floor. He dropped the bottle of wine and it rolled under a chair and started emptying on the floor. I threw a pair of Chooch's undies at him, still holding his skinny arm.

"Leggo a me!"

"Bodine, I can take you out of here naked in cuffs if that's the way you want it. You got six seconds or less to get dressed."

"I got rights, asshole. I got a broken wrist courtesy a your shitty driving."

I pulled out my Beretta and aimed it at him in an elaborate bluff. "How 'bout I just drop you and throw you in the canal?"

"Okay, okay. Calm down," he shrieked. Then he put down the leg of lamb and started jumping on one leg, trying to poke his left foot into the shorts. His plaster cast made it difficult to grasp the undies, but he finally made it. Then he put on the sweatshirt and shimmied into the jeans, which were two times too big because Chooch is six-five, two-thirty, and Bodine was a runt. Five-foot-nothing and a hundred and fifteen. There was room for two of him in there, but we weren't going to a fashion show, so I could care less. I handed him his boots and a belt, grabbed him by the collar of the sweatshirt and yanked him out of the kitchen.

He made a grab for the leg of lamb but missed, and the bone skidded across the floor and stopped under the table. I left it there, a few feet away from the emptying bottle of wine.

I have a Kojak light in my glove box and a siren under the hood. You can't go Code 3 in L. A. without permission from the communications division, which I wouldn't get because I wasn't on call. But I grabbed the magnetized bubble light anyway and slammed it up on the roof. I used it intermittently and growled the siren to bust through red lights at intersections. Technically a no-no, but I didn't care. I had the pedal down, passing cars on the right as I sped north on Abbot Kinney Boulevard.

"This be some more-a-that crazy nickel-slick driving," was about all that Jonathan Bodine kept saying. He had his boots on and both feet stretched out in fear, planted on the floor mats in front of him. He was gripping the door pull with white knuckles.

It took me almost ten minutes to get out of Venice to the 10 Freeway. Then after another quarter hour, I transitioned to the 405 North, growling my siren and flashing my headlights at slower moving traffic until they moved over.

I got off the 405 at Mulholland and headed east, climbing up into the Hollywood Hills past Beverly Glen. The houses were sparse up here, but the ones I passed were big. This was prime L. A. real estate. Pine trees and elms hugged the slopes on both sides of the road. The Valley lights twinkled below as my headlights sawed holes in the dark.

"Slow down, motherfucker," Bodine said. It seemed like usable advice. I was close to the summit, so I took my foot off the gas.

Then I saw a police circus up ahead. Half a dozen patrol cars and a coroner's van. Sitting in the middle of yards of yellow crime-scene tape, was Alexa's black BMW. I hit the brakes and skidded to a stop, getting out of the car almost before it had stopped, running toward the twenty cops and techies who were milling around beyond the tape in front of Alexa's car.

Raphael Figueroa saw me coming and broke off, intercepting me. He was six feet tall with a weight lifter's build and a tea-brown, Indio face.

"Hold it, Scully! Slow down!" he barked.

"Where is she?"

"Not here. We haven't got a line on her yet."

I could see a black male slumped over in the front passenger seat of the car.

"Who's that?"

"The guest of honor," cop-talk for a body. "Looks like he's been dead about an hour. No lividity yet or rigor."

I tried to push past Figueroa, but his left hand was holding my arm in a strong grip. Then he put two fingers of his right hand under his tongue and let out a shrill whistle.

"Tommy, get over here," he yelled.

Tom Sepulveda broke away from the coroner's van, where he'd been talking to Ray Tsu from the ME's office. Ray was a narrow-shouldered Asian man with such a quiet manner and voice he was known by most homicide cops as Fey Ray. Sepulveda was his exact physical opposite, an Italian stallion. Short, bull-necked, aggressive. Like his partner, he was in his mid-thirties and they both knew their stuff. Tommy grabbed my other arm, then he and Figueroa led me about twenty yards away to their maroon Crown Vic, opened the back door, and pushed me inside.

"Let go of me," I said, and they released me.

"I called you because if that was my wife's car, I'd want a call, too. But you're not on this case," Sepulveda started by saying. "That's protocol, and me and Rafie are holding you to it."

"Don't quote the rule book to me. Where is she?"

"We've done a preliminary search of the surrounding areas," Figueroa answered. "It's pretty dark and it's dense foliage up here, but so far no sign of her."

"Who's the stiff?"

"Unknown," Rafie said. "No wallet but he's got gang ink all over him and expensive, chunky, diamond jewelry so he's probably some street G. Whoever capped him wasn't interested in bad-taste jewelry. There's a big ABC tattoo on his right bicep."

"Crip?" I asked. ABC usually stood for Arcadia Block Crips, a dangerous gang from the Piru Street area in Compton.

"ABC also stands for American Broadcasting Company," Tommy said. "Let's not get ahead of ourselves."

"I need to look in the car."

"No way!" they said in unison.

"I'm a material witness. I know what was in that car this morning when she left for work. You don't want me to even take a look and inventory that for you? See if any thing's missing?"

Raphael and Sepulveda looked at each other. They both suspected this was bull. But technically, I had a point.

"Okay, Scully. You can go over there with us," Sepulveda said. "But that's it. No touching, no asking questions. I don't want a bunch of grief from the rat squad about this later. We square on that?"

"It's my wife's car."

"We know, man." Rafie took a breath. "I'm sorry, but if you get into this, the Professional Standards Bureau is gonna fall on all of us."

"I get it," I said. "I'm not gonna get in your way.

They took a moment and studied me. I have a little bit of a reputation in the department as a walk-alone, and I could see they were slightly skeptical. But operationally, they had no choice, so finally they exchanged a silent nod and led me over to the car. As we ducked under the yellow tape, Ray Tsu looked up at me.

"Sorry, man," he whispered. Ray and I had worked at least twenty homicides together and had established a good on-the-job relationship. I nodded at him, then we walked over and I looked into the car.

The front seat was drenched in blood. Fear swept over me, almost blinding my vision. I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. I told myself that I was a trained homicide detective and I needed to treat this car as just another murder scene. I willed myself to look at it dispassionately. I already knew this was going to be the most important investigation of my career. Regardless of what I'd told Sepulveda and Figueroa, there was no way I was going home to wait for these guys to call and fill me in. Until Alexa was located, I was going to be all over this. I took another deep breath and began to form a careful mental picture of the crime scene.

The guy in the passenger seat was a middle-aged African-American. His wrists were cuffed behind him and he'd been shot behind the left ear, execution style. The bullet's trajectory looked to be downward and the exit wound had taken out half his right cheek. He was slumped forward with his forehead resting on the dash, still dripping blood and cerebral spinal fluid all over Alexa's right floor mat. He had long, black hair, which was straightened in a Marcel. The impact of the bullet had knocked the Marcel loose and strands of the shiny, straightened do now hung over his ears. He was muscular, dressed in a sleeveless leather vest and pants with gang tats all over his arms. The big ABC tattoo decorated his large left bicep. He also had BTK on his arm Born to Kill. There was blow back and blood spatter everywhere, except for where the driver had been sitting. If the driver was the shooter, and the bullet was fired from the driver's seat, it seemed to me that the trajectory was slightly wrong. Alexa is five-eight and for the bullet to have a downward trajectory, the doer had to either be taller or standing outside, shooting across her. The passenger side window had not been broken by the exiting bullet, so the slug was probably buried in the lower door panel. Alexa's backseat held several old case boxes and a green sweater. All of it had been there this morning. The backseat seemed untouched.

"Looks like someone was sitting here when the shot was fired," Figueroa said, pointing to the clean spot where the driver would have been.

I didn't respond.

"See anything we can use?" Sepulveda asked, looking hard at me.

"We were doing that retraining day at the jail this morning," I said. "She was in jeans, tennies, and a gray, unmarked sweatshirt." "Better put that on the air," Rafie said, and Sepulveda crossed to their car to make the broadcast.

"All that stuff in the backseat was there, but her briefcase is missing. And her purse."

"Okay," Rafie said. "Describe those."

"Purse was canvas and black. One of those designer deals with pockets all over it. Briefcase was brown alligator. Small. Wafer-sized."

Rafie said, "You know the vie?"

"No."

"Never seen him?"

"Nope."

"If those turn out to be her cuffs, we're gonna have us a situation here."

"She didn't drive up here and pop this guy," I said hotly.

"Let's move back. Give the C. S. guys some room to work," Rafie said. He led me away from the BMW and back to their Crown Vic where Sepulveda was just hanging up the mike.

"Anything else?" Rafie asked.

"I left her at Parker Center around six. She said she was going to go visit the chief in the hospital before his surgery tomorrow. I was over at USC Medical on an unrelated matter but she never showed up. Her secretary said she was maybe going to try and fit in an appointment."

"You know with who?" Tommy asked.

"No. But you could ask Ellen in her office. Maybe she does."

"Okay, what next?" Tommy said.

"I went home. She wasn't there. Then you guys called."

"Who's the rat-bag sitting in your car?" Rafie was looking over at my Acura.

Bodine was still in the front seat. He had his head back, his dreads hanging over the headrest, eyes closed, zoning out. I'd stupidly left the keys in the car. Probably the only thing that was keeping Long Gone John from clouting my ride was he would have had to do it in front of ten cops.

"That's Jonathan Bodine. He's a homeless guy. He has nothing to do with this."

"Okay, Shane. That's it, then. If you think of anything else, write it down and leave it on my desk." "Right."

"And if you try and work this, me and Tommy will break your back." "Right."

"I'm serious, man. Mess with this and we're all headed for the zoo."

"Gimme a little credit here. I'm not going near it."

They exchanged looks, nodded, and then both moved slowly away from the car, treading on that questionable promise like thin October ice.

Once they had stopped looking back at me, I got into my car and pulled away.

"What we doin' now?" Bodine asked. I ignored him and drove past the commotion and found a spot around the bend where I pulled the car off the road and down into some trees. Then I killed the lights and turned off the engine.

"We on some kinda dumb-ass camping trip here? What's this about, douche bag?" Bodine complained.

"Shut up and stay in the car."

I got out, taking the keys, grabbed my black mag-light from behind the seat and began to walk down the hill through dense foliage, making my way back toward the crime scene, using the underbrush for cover. I didn't know what the hell I was doing, or what I was hoping to find. I guess my plan was to look in the bushes below the site where the car was parked, hoping I wouldn't find my dead wife down there. My stomach was full of acid and I was fighting back waves of nausea.

I kept the light on, but as I got nearer to the cops at the crime scene above, I took out my handkerchief and wrapped it over the lens, cutting the light down by two-thirds. Then I swung the dull beam right and left looking in the underbrush, praying I wouldn't find her. I don't know how long I walked around. Ten minutes, maybe thirty. I could hear cops talking above me on the road.

Then, I shined my light to the right, and something glinted. I moved over and found myself looking down at a small, nickel-plated, 9mm foreign automatic.

There was little doubt in my mind that it was the murder weapon. I also recognized the pistol. It was Alexa's purse gun. Her 9mm Spanish Astra.