“This is a joke, right?” Malcolm said. “Because I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“If you’re innocent, help us,” I said. “Where were you on January twenty-first from midnight until eight that morning?”
“Where were you?” he shot back. “You think I remember where I was three months ago? I can tell you this. I wasn’t helping Junie out of a jam with a dead john. You guys really crack me up.” Malcolm sneered. “Don’t you know that Junie’s playing you?”
“Is that right?” I said.
“Yeah! She’s romantic, you know? Like a girl in the ‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter’ commercial. Junie wants to believe that she did Michael Campion before he croaked -”
I heard the tap on the glass I’d been waiting for.
Malcolm was saying to Conklin, “I don’t care what she told you. I didn’t cut anyone. I never dumped any freaking body parts anywhere. Junie just likes the attention, man. You should know by now when a whore is lying to you. Charge me, dude, or I’m outta here.”
I opened the door, took the papers from Yuki’s hand. We exchanged grins before I closed the door and said, “Mr. Malcolm, you’re under arrest for tampering with evidence and interfering with a police investigation.”
I fanned the search warrants out on the table. “By this time tomorrow, dude, you won’t have a secret in the world.”
Chapter 10
WHILE RICKY MALCOLM SLEPT in a holding cell on the tenth floor at 850 Bryant, I opened the door to his second-floor, one-bedroom apartment over the Shanghai China restaurant on Mission. Then Conklin, McNeil, Chi, and I stepped inside. A faint stink of decomposing flesh hit me as soon as I crossed the threshold.
“Smell that?” I said to Cappy McNeil. Cappy had been on the force for twenty-five years and had seen more than his share of dead.
He nodded. “Think he left one of those bags of body parts behind?”
“Or maybe he just kept a souvenir. A finger. Or an ear.”
McNeil and his partner, the lean and resourceful Paul Chi, headed for the kitchen while Conklin and I took the bedroom.
There was a pull-shade in the one window. I gave it a yank and it rolled up with a bang, throwing Ricky Malcolm’s boudoir into a dim morning light. The room was a study in filth. The sheets were bunched to one side of the stained mattress, and cigarette butts floated inside a coffee mug on the nightstand. Dinner plates balanced on the dresser and the television set, forks congealed in the remains of whatever Malcolm had eaten in the last week or two.
I opened the drawer in the nightstand, found a couple of joints, assorted pharmaceuticals, a strip of Rough Riders. McNeil came into the room, looked around, said, “I like what he’s done with the place.”
“Find anything?”
“No. And unless Ricky dismembered Campion with a four-inch paring knife, the blade’s not in the kitchen. By the way, the smell is stronger in here.”
Conklin opened the closet, searched pockets and shoes, then went to the dresser. He tossed out T-shirts and porn magazines, but I was the one who found the dead mouse under a steel-toed work boot behind the door.
“Whoaaa. I think I found it.”
“Nice door prize,” McNeil cracked.
Four hours went by, and after turning over every stinking thing in Malcolm’s apartment, Conklin sighed his disappointment.
“There’s no weapon here.”
“Okay, then,” I said. “I guess we’re done.”
We stepped out into the street as the flatbed truck pulled up to the curb. CSIs hooked up Malcolm’s ’97 Ford pickup, and we stood by as the truck rattled noisily up the hill on the way to the crime lab. McNeil and Chi took off in their squad car, and Conklin and I got into ours.
Conklin said, “I’ll bet you a hundred bucks, or dinner – your choice, Lindsay -”
I laughed at his girl-magnet smile.
“I’ll bet you Michael Campion’s DNA is somewhere inside the bed of that truck.”
“I don’t want to bet,” I said. “I want you to be right.”
Chapter 11
JUNIE MOON’S PAINTED LADY looked tired and dull that afternoon as the sky darkened and a fine rain swept the city. Conklin lifted up the crime scene tape that was strung across Junie’s front door and I ducked under it, signed the log, and entered the same room where Conklin and I had interviewed the fetching young prostitute late the night before.
This time we had a search warrant.
The sound of hammers slamming into ceramic tile led us to the bathroom on the second floor, where CSIs were tearing up the floors and walls in order to get to the bathtub plumbing. Charlie Clapper, head of our CSU, was standing in the hallway outside the bathroom door. He was wearing one of his two dozen nearly identical herringbone jackets, his salt-and-pepper hair was neatly combed, and his lined face was somber.
“Curb your expectations, Lindsay. There’s enough splooge in this whorehouse to tie up the lab for a year.”
“We just need one hair,” I said. “One drop of Michael Campion’s blood.”
“And I’d like to see Venice before it sinks into the sea. And as long as we’re wishing on stars here, I’m still pining for a Rolls Silver Cloud.”
There was a leaden sound as the CSI working behind and under the tub dismantled the trap. As the tech bagged the plumbing, Conklin and I went back to Junie’s bedroom.
It wasn’t the pigpen Ricky Malcolm slept in, but Junie wasn’t a tidy homemaker either. There were dust balls under the furniture, the mirrored walls were smudged, and the dense gray carpet had the oily look of a floor mat in a single dad’s minivan.
A CSI asked if we were ready, then closed the curtains and shut off the overhead light. She waved the wand end of the Omnichrome 1000 in a side-to-side pattern across the bedspread, carpet, and walls, each pass of her wand showing up pale blue splotches indicating semen stains everywhere. She shot me a look and said, “If the johns saw this, they’d never take off their clothes in this girl’s house, guaranteed.”
Conklin and I walked downstairs toward the sound of the vacuum cleaner, watched the CSIs work, Conklin shouting to me over the vacuum’s motor, “Three months after the fact, what do we expect? A sign saying, ‘Michael Campion died here’?”
That’s when we heard the clank of metal against the vacuum cleaner nozzle. The CSI turned off the motor, stooped, pulled a steak knife from under the skirt of a velvet-covered sofa – just where Conklin and I had been sitting last night.
The investigator held out the steak knife with his gloved hand so that I could see the rust-colored stain on the sharp, serrated blade.
Chapter 12
I WAS STILL SAVORING the discovery of the knife when my cell phone rang. It was Chief Anthony Tracchio, and his voice was unusually loud.
“What is it, Tony?”
“I need the two of you in my office, pronto.”
After a short volley of useless quibble, he hung up.
Fifteen minutes later, Conklin and I walked into Tracchio’s wood-paneled corner suite and saw two well-known people seated in the leather armchairs. Former governor Connor Hume Campion’s face looked swollen with rage, and his much younger wife, Valentina, appeared heavily sedated.
The front page of the Sunday Chronicle was on Tracchio’s desk. I could read the headline upside down and from ten feet away: SUSPECT QUESTIONED IN CAMPION DISAPPEARANCE.
Cindy hadn’t waited for my quote, damn it.
What the hell had she written?
Tracchio patted his Vitalis comb-over and introduced us to the parents of the missing boy as Conklin and I dragged chairs up to his massive desk. Connor Campion acknowledged us with a hard stare. “I had to read this in the newspaper?” he said to me. “That my son died in a whorehouse?”
I flushed, then said, “If we’d had anything solid, Mr. Campion, we would have made sure you knew first. But all we have is an anonymous tip that your son visited a prostitute. We get crank tips constantly. It could have m
eant nothing.”
“Could have meant? So what’s in this paper is true?”
“I haven’t read that article, Mr. Campion, but I can give you an update.”
Tracchio lit up a cigar as I filled the former governor in on our last eighteen hours: the interviews, our futile searches for evidence, and that we had Junie Moon in custody based on her uncorroborated admission that Michael had died in her arms. When I stopped talking, Campion shot out of his seat, and I realized that while we had assumed Michael was dead, the Campions hadn’t given up hope. My sketchy report had given the Campions more of a reality check than they’d expected.
It wasn’t what they wanted to hear.
Campion turned his red-faced glare on Tracchio, a man who’d become chief of police by way of an undistinguished career in administration.
“I want my son’s body returned to us if every dump in the state has to be picked through by hand.”
“Consider it done,” Tracchio said.
Campion turned to me, and I saw his anger collapse. Tears filled his eyes. I touched his arm and said, “We’re on this, sir. Full-time. We won’t sleep until we find Michael.”
Chapter 13
JUNIE MOON SLIPPED into the interview room at the women’s jail wearing an orange jumpsuit and new worry lines in her youthful face.
She was followed by her attorney, Melody Chado, a public defender who would make a reputation for herself with this case, no matter how the jury decided. Chado wore black – tunic, pants, jet-black beads – and was all business. She settled her client in a chair, opened her black leather briefcase, and looked at her watch several times as we waited. There were only four chairs in the small room, so when my good friend Assistant District Attorney Yuki Castellano entered a moment later, there was standing room only.
Yuki put down her briefcase and leaned against the wall.
Ms. Chado appeared to be just out of law school. She was probably only a couple of years older than her client, who looked so vulnerable I felt a little sorry for her – and that pissed me off.
“I’ve advised my client not to make any statements,” Ms. Chado said, setting her young face with a hard-ass expression that I found hard to take seriously. “This is your meeting, Ms. Castellano.”
“I’ve talked with the DA,” Yuki said. “We’re charging your client with murder two.”
“What happened to ‘illegal disposal of a body’?” Chado asked.
“That’s just not good enough,” Yuki snapped. “Your client was the last person to see Michael Campion alive. Ms. Moon never called medical emergency or the police – and why not? Because she didn’t care about Campion’s life or death. She only cared about herself.”
“You’ll never get an indictment for murder,” Chado said. “There’s enough reasonable doubt in your theory to fill the ocean.”
“Listen to me, Junie,” Yuki said. “Help us locate Michael’s remains. If it can be determined in autopsy that his heart attack would have killed him no matter what you did, we’ll drop the murder charge and pretty much get out of your life.”
“No deal,” Chado interjected. “What if she helps you find his body and it is so decomposed that his heart is just rotted meat? Then you’ll have a demonstrable connection to my client and she’ll be screwed.”
I reevaluated Melody Chado as she fought with Yuki. Chado had either had a great education, grown up in a family of lawyers – or both. Junie fell back in her chair, turned a shocked face toward her breathless attorney. I guessed that Chado’s description had blown off whatever romance was left of Junie’s memory of Michael Campion.
“I want to hear about the knife, Junie,” Rich said, steering the interview to our only piece of evidence.
“The knife?” Junie asked.
“We found a knife under your sofa. Looks like bloodstains on the blade. It’ll take a few days to get the DNA results, but if you help us, Ms. Castellano will take that as another sign of your cooperation.”
“Don’t answer,” said Melody Chado. “We’re done.”
Junie was looking at Rich, and she was talking over her attorney. “I thought the knife went into one of the garbage bags,” she said to my partner. “So I don’t know what knife you found. But listen, I remember the name of the town.”
“Junie, that’s enough. That’s all!”
“I think it was Johnson,” Junie said to Rich. “I saw a sign when we got off the highway.”
“ Jackson?” I asked. “Was it Jackson?”
“Yes. That’s right.”
“You’re sure about that? I thought you said you drove up the coast.”
“I’m pretty sure. It was late, I got confused. I wasn’t trying to remember,” she told me, her eyes downcast. “I was trying to forget.”
Chapter 14
THE TOWN OF JACKSON was known for its cowboy cookouts and craft fairs. It also had a sizable dump. It was just after noon, and the smell of rot was rising as the sun cooked the refuse. Gulls and buzzards circled the trash dunes that filled our view out to the foothills.
Sheriff Oren Braun pointed out the square acre of landfill he’d had cordoned off – the approximate section where waste had been unloaded at the end of January.
“Soon as I got the call from the governor I had my boys on it,” Braun told me and Conklin. “ ‘Pull out the stops,’ that’s what he said.”
We were looking for eight black plastic garbage bags in a sea of black plastic garbage bags. A hundred yards uphill, a dozen members of the sheriff’s department were picking very slowly through the three thousand tons of refuse piled twenty feet high, and the dump foreman was assisting the dog handler, who followed behind his two cadaver dogs as they trotted over the site.
I was trying to maintain some optimism, but that was tough to do in this grim landscape. I mumbled to Rich, “After three months out here, all that’ll be left of Michael’s corpse will be ligaments and bones.”
And then, as if I’d telepathically cued them, the dogs alerted.
Conklin and I joined the sheriff in stepping cautiously toward the frenzied, singing hounds.
“There’s something in this bag,” their handler said.
The hounds had located a plastic shopping bag, the thin supermarket kind. I stooped down, saw that the plastic had been ripped, that the contents were wrapped in newspaper. I parted the newspaper wrapper. Saw the decomposing remains of a newborn child. The baby’s skin was loose and greenish, the soft tissues eaten by rats, so that it was no longer possible to tell if it was a boy or a girl. The date on the newspaper was only a week old.
Someone hadn’t wanted this child. Had it been smothered? Was it stillborn? At this stage of decomposition, the ME might never know. Rich was crossing himself and saying a few words over the baby’s remains when my Nextel rang.
I walked downhill as I answered the call, glad to turn my eyes from the terrible sight of that dead child.
“Tell me something good, Yuki,” I begged her. “Please.”
“Sorry, Lindsay. Junie Moon has recanted her confession.”
“No. Come on! Michael didn’t die in her arms?” My roiling innards sank. Right now, all we had was Junie’s confession.
How could she take that back?
“Yeah. Now she says that she had nothing to do with Michael Campion’s death and disappearance. She’s saying that her confession was coerced.”
“Coerced? By whom?” I asked, still not getting it.
“By you and Conklin. The mean ol’ cops made her confess to something that never, ever happened.”
Chapter 15
SUSIE’S CAFÉ IS KIND OF a cross between Cheers and a tiki hut bar on a beach in St. Lucia. The food is spicy, the steel drums are live, the margaritas are world-class, and not only do the waitresses know our names, they know enough to leave us alone when we’re into something – as Cindy and I were now.
We were in our booth in the back room, and I was glaring at Cindy over my beer.
“You understand?
Talking to you off the record is ‘leaking.’ Just saying to you that I was working a new lead on the Campion case could jam me up!”
“I swear, Lindsay, I didn’t use what you said. I didn’t need a quote from you because I got the story from upstairs.”
“How is that possible?”
“Management has a source and I did an interview and I am not telling you with whom,” she said, setting down her beer mug hard on the table. “But the point is, you can hold your head up, Linds, because you told me nothing. Okay? That’s the truth.”
I’m several years older than Cindy, and we’ve had a big sister, little sister thing since she crashed my crime scene a few years back and then helped me close the case.
It’s hard to be friends with reporters when you’re a cop. Their rationalized “public’s need to know” gives bad guys the heads-up and messes up jury pools.
You can’t truly trust reporters.
On the other hand, I love Cindy, and I trusted her 99 percent of the time. She sat across from me in her snow-white silk sweater, blond curls bouncing like mattress springs, her two overlapping front teeth making her pretty features look even prettier. She looked totally innocent of my accusation, and she was holding her ground.
“Okay,” I said through clenched teeth.
“Okay and I’m sorry?”
“Okay. I’m sorry.”
“Good. You’re forgiven. So, can you tell me what’s happening on this case?”
“You’re a funny girl, Cindy,” I said, laughing and waving my hand so that Yuki and Claire could see us from the doorway.
Claire was so far along in her pregnancy she couldn’t fit in the booth anymore. I got up, moved a chair to the head of the table for Claire, as Yuki slipped in beside Cindy. Lorraine took our orders, and as soon as she’d left us, Yuki said to Cindy, “Whatever I say, even if it’s in the public domain, it’s off the record.”
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