White sister

Chapter 6

Fifteen minutes later I was parked across from the Medical Examiner's Facility on North Mission Road in a spot with a good view of the lighted parking lot. The coroner's van would be arriving in the next half hour with Ray Tsu and the dead Crip G aboard.

I knew I had to call Chooch. I didn't want him to hear about this on the news in the morning, but I dreaded making the call. Reluctantly, I pulled out my cell phone and dialed the number for USC summer football housing. The team was staying at an apartment complex near Howard Jones Field to facilitate training table, curfews, and six A. M. wake-ups. After ten rings, an assistant coach finally answered and after I told him who I was, said he'd go and get Chooch out of bed.

Ten minutes later, Chooch came on the line.

"Yeah?"

It's me, Chooch. I've got bad news."

He sounded sleepy, but that brought him out of it fast. "What bad news?"

"Your mom is missing. They found her car up on Mulholland an hour ago. There was a dead gang-banger in the front seat. She's not there. Nobody knows what happened to her."

"What?" he shouted.

"I know… look, there could be a lot of explanations. Unfortunately, some of them are bad. I don't have anything else, but I'm working on it. I'll let you know as soon as I come up with something."

"I'm coming home."

"No, you're not!"

"Dad, if Alexa "

I cut him off. "Listen to me, son. I'm not supposed to work on this because she's my wife and I'm emotionally involved, but screw that, because nobody will work it harder than me. And there're some problems I need to address. An issue with her gun."

"Dad, I'm not staying here."

"You're not coming home, either."

"Why not?"

"Right now, I've got a chance to run free for a short time, but that won't last long. I might get a jump on this if I kick ass right now, but when the two homicide cops who got the squeal catch up with me, I'm gonna be in a world of hurt. I can't put you in the equation. I don't have time."

"She's my mom!"

"I know. But son, what are you gonna be able to do, really?"

"I'll… we'll talk it over. I'll… I don't know. I can't just stay here and hit a blocking sled."

"Tell the coaches. I'm sure they'll let you take some time off. But you've gotta stay where you are. Let me do this my way."

There was a long pause. I could hear him breathing.

"Dad, what do you mean there're issues with her gun?"

"It might be the murder weapon."

"And they think Mom shot this banger dude?"

"They're cops. They'll follow the evidence wherever it leads. But whatever you hear on TV, remember who your mom is. I'm not letting this get sideways. Wherever she is, I'll find her."

"What if… what if…"

"She's not dead, son. She can't be. I won't allow it."

After that, we didn't know what to say to each other.

"I'll call you in the morning," I said.

"Okay."

"Love you," I said. There was silence. "Say it back, Chooch. I need to hear it."

"I love you, too, Dad." He sounded devastated.

I hung up the phone and looked out the window again at the North Mission Road building. It was a new, plain-looking structure that housed the morgue and all of our forensic science units. Like most municipal buildings, budget considerations had deprived it of any architectural extras. It was a shoebox with windows.

I'd worked enough homicides to know pretty much how the next hour would play out. Ray Tsu would bring the corpse here, and do the preliminary death photos, prints, and dental work. Sepulveda and Figueroa would finish up at the crime scene, impound the car, and then head back to stand over the body while Ray, or the chief ME did the autopsy. Because Alexa was missing, it was an APE case and ticking PR bomb. For that reason, there wouldn't be the standard two-week wait for an autopsy, which had been a growing problem for homicide cops in L. A. They would do the cut tonight. That meant if I moved fast, I might have half an hour to forty minutes alone to work on Ray Tsu before Tommy and Rafie arrived. I had to make that forty minutes count, and find out who did this dead Crip was. Then I had to work that angle fast. It was the best thread in the case.

I sat in the front seat of the Acura, running the other permutations. I couldn't come up with a theory that accommodated what appeared to have happened. If you took Alexa out of the equation, it was easier to understand. A dead banger in cuffs, executed up on Mulholland, could fit a lot of scenarios. He could have been kidnapped, driven up to that lonely spot, popped, and left there for somebody to find in the morning. Handcuffs were easy to get. I'd seen dozens of hits that more or less went down like that.

It was adding Alexa to the picture that skewed everything. What series of events, what missing facts, made Alexa's involvement and subsequent disappearance add up? I couldn't think of anything.

Half an hour later, the coroner's van swept into the lot. I waited while Ray Tsu and the driver pulled the gurney out of the back. They popped the wheels down and rolled the dead Crip inside. On their way, they hit a button to close the electric parking lot gate.

I jumped out of the Acura, locked it with a chirp, and sprinted across the street, making it through the gates just as they were closing. I rang the bell at the back door of the building, held up my badge for the security camera, and was buzzed in.

Nobody was sitting behind the downstairs admitting desk. The midnight-to-six shift had been pared in half during the last round of budget cuts. Usually there were two guards back here a lucky breach of security because I had no business to conduct. There was a camera in the entry hall taping the room, so I crossed to the security desk and signed in for the benefit of the guard up on three, writing Samik Mampuna on the entry log. Then I took the elevator to the fourth floor where autopsies and body preps were done.

Under most circumstances, the morgue is a crowded place full of sheet-covered corpses waiting for their final desecration. Every time I'm up here, I wonder if one day my own precious remains will be parked in these over-wide corridors, waiting for this last indignity. Strange chemical smells mixed with some disinfectant pine scent wafted through the halls. I'd been up here when there were over twenty bodies parked on metal gurneys, most of them too young to be dead, each tray with its own special tale of woe and unfulfilled ambitions. Tonight, for some reason, the corridor was almost empty. Two lonely corpses under green sheets haunted the hallway. The building was unusually quiet. I saw a lighted doorway halfway down the hall and headed toward it.

Ray Tsu was leaning over the dead Crip when I entered. He had just finished rolling a ten card, imprinting all of the man's fingerprints. He looked up as I entered.

"You aren't supposed to be here."

"How the hell can I not be here?"

Ray was a good guy, even though it was always slightly annoying that he rarely spoke above a whisper.

"You1 re gonna get your ass cooked unless you get out now," he warned.

"1 need to know who this guy is."

"Not from me tonight. Get it from Figueroa and Sepulveda tomorrow."

"Ray, I won't burn you. Please, help me."

He shook his head.

"She's my wife. She's the only person who ever gave "

I stopped, because there were suddenly tears in my eyes.

"Shane, look at you," he said softly. "You're a mess. How're you gonna do anybody any good like this? Go home. Let Tommy and Rafie handle this."

"We could put that print card through AFIS instead of NCIC," I said. AFIS was the Automatic Fingerprint Identification System, which we'd just installed downstairs. It had a much bigger and faster database than the National Crime Identification Computer. "If this gangster's prints are in the system, AFIS will spit an ID back on a ten-finger roll in less than two minutes."

"Come on, Shane. Really. Let those guys handle it."

"I've seen this vie before," I lied. "His name's right on the tip of my tongue, but I can't quite get it. If AFIS gives us an ID, I know I can remember what his connection to Alexa is. That's gonna be a huge help here."

I watched as Ray processed this nonsense and rejected it with a frown. "Wait for Tommy and Rafie," he said. "It's their call."

So I just reached over and snatched the drying card out of his delicate fingers.

"This could end your career, Shane!" he said, as I walked out of the room with it.

I didn't wait for him to follow. I was already sprinting toward a bank of freight-size elevators, each one large enough to carry three gurneys. I took the first one down to the basement where the electronic identification unit was housed. I exited just as the phone started ringing at reception. Had to be Ray. There was no one at this desk either. My luck was holding. For the first time since the cutbacks happened, I applauded the city's budget crisis. I jumped over the vacant counter and picked up the receiver hitting the Hold button. Then I put all of the remaining five lines on hold as well. When I left, the desk telephone was blinking like a Vegas slot.

I found the AFIS machine in a small room at the end of a long corridor. A young bored-looking blond girl was running a stack of print cards.

"Hi. I need this run immediately," I said, offering her the ten card.

"ID number?"

I pulled out my CREDS and showed her. After she wrote down the number, she took the print card from me and scanned it into the machine.

"If it's in the system, this should only take a few minutes," she said.

I tried to make small talk, but frankly, I couldn't think of anything to say. I was an emotional wreck. Suddenly, her eyes went down to the flashing phone on the table across from us.

"I wonder why the lines are all on hold," she said. "There's almost nobody down here."

"There was a phone guy out front. Maybe he's working on the system." Total B. S., but it must have worked because she nodded her head and smiled.

Then I heard Ray coming down the hall. "Shane! Dammit, Shane! You down here?!" It was the first time I could remember hearing him shout.

"He's with me, Mr. Tsu," the girl called out.

Seconds later Ray Tsu planted his skinny body in the doorway, acting as if he could actually use his pipe-cleaner build to physically restrain me from leaving with his print card.

"Shane, come on," he said. "Don't make this any worse."

Then the AFIS machine started buzzing and a printout shot into the catch tray. We had a match. Ray made a move toward the tray, but I beat him to it and grabbed the printout along with the ten card and folded them both in half. I knew, of course, that he would just run it again, but he'd have to reprint the body first. That would buy me at least a ten-minute head start.

"I'm reporting this, Shane."

"I know." I turned and ran out the door, taking the stairs two at a time, exploding back into the rear lobby. The security guard had returned from the toilet, or wherever he'd been when I first arrived, but they aren't there to stop you from leaving, only from getting in.

"Have a good night," the guard called, as I speed-walked past him out the door and into the parking lot. I pushed the button to open the parking gate from the inside, then sprinted out of the lot and across the street to my car. I jumped in and powered away.

I still hadn't looked at the printout. My heart was slamming inside my chest. My hands were shaking as I gripped the wheel tightly with sweating palms. When I was ten blocks away and felt safe, I pulled over, turned on the dome light, and unfolded the AFIS printout.

The DMV photo I was looking at was of a clean-cut man with short hair. But despite the different haircut, I recognized him as the dead guy from Alexa's car. He was handsome in a rakish way. A slightly skewed smile said he knew he was hot. His driver's license identified him as David Morris Slade, six-one, one hundred ninety-five pounds. He lived at 42 °Cypress Street, Compton. Following that, the AFIS printout had added other pertinent information, and that was the surprise.

There was a police identification number, with a notation. David M. Slade was a member of the LAPD Academy class of 1982. He was currently a sergeant assigned to a special gang intel unit. I folded the paper and looked at the empty street in front of me while I tried to process all this. Of course, it was the missing piece.

The reason he was in Alexa's car.