by B. J. Graf
Lt. Figueroa leaned over to Scott Black, and then to Plotkin and Sonny, whispering sotto voce, before conferring with Joy. Joy looked at me then slowly shook her head.
Figueroa delivered the verdict. “Detective Piedmont, the Officer Involved Shooting team has determined four to one the shooting of Paco Ramirez was within departmental policy.” He slid my gold shield back across the desk to me.
I wanted to pump the air with my fist, but I stayed planted in my chair.
“But we have ruled three to two,” Figueroa continued, “that some of your actions prior to the gunfire were questionable. Therefore, it is our recommendation that the Chief of Police refer this case to the IAC for further disciplinary hearings, pending a five-year review of your record. You will remain on administrative duty pending mandatory psychological evaluation.”
I nodded, clenching my fists under the table.
IAC rose out of the ashes of the Internal Affairs Division, when the latter was disbanded and re-established in 2020 after a series of battles with the civilian Police Commission and federal oversight committee over allegations of racial profiling. The IAC investigates all citizen complaints against the department. Ms. Ramirez, mother of the deceased, had made one. This OIS ruling meant the chief would refer my case to the IAC with a big black mark on it. I was still a Homicide Special Detective, but any hope I had held out for immediate redeployment had evaporated like fog in a high hot wind.
Jay Espinoza thanked the OIS for their time and tapped me on the shoulder. We walked out. Once in the hall with the door closed behind us, he said, “What was that about? I told you let me do the talking.”
“Ms. Kidder and I have a little history together,” I said. “It didn’t go the way she wanted.” I told him about the hook-up and her subsequent series of calls.
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?” he sputtered. “That’s conflict of interest.”
“I was trying to tell you when the hearing started. I didn’t know she was on the panel till then. Can’t we use that?”
Jay cocked his head to the side, nodding slowly as the wheels visibly turned in his mind. “She should have recused herself and didn’t. But we can’t pre-emptivly derail the IAC hearing now. So, prepare yourself. Put a lid on those outbursts and get through your psych eval. I’ll see you at the hearing.”
I thanked him as he hurried off to another appointment.
That’s when the door opened and Joy Kidder strode into the hallway. Any impulse to mend fences died when she looked at me like she’d just won the heavyweight championship.
“Happy now?” I said. I looked forward to that IAC interview about as much as a public prostate exam, and she knew it. But while I had obstacles ahead of me, she at least was no longer one of them.
“You’re lucky I didn’t request an investigation into possible discriminatory conduct,” Joy said pressing her lips into a smile thin as a razor blade.
“Sometimes discrimination’s a good thing,” I said. “We both should’ve remembered that back in the bar where you tied one on.” I walked past her without another word. Her mouth opened and snapped shut like a baby bird expecting the worm that didn’t come.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“So?” Shin was waiting for me at his desk on the third floor, nervously cracking his knuckles as he elbowed aside the evidence bags from the Devonshire case. “How’d it go?”
I flashed him my badge. “But you’re going solo to the autopsy.” As I glanced at the bag holding the contents from the deceased’s purse, I filled him in on the O.I.S. verdict.
“Could be worse,” Shin said, clearly relieved. “They benched you. They didn’t kick you off the team.” He handed me a flash-dot. “The Devonshire girl’s phone records just came in. Have fun with the read through.”
“You’re actually enjoying this,” I said.
Shin’s grin and waving fingers were his reply as he headed out. The news feed playing on my computer was grim. More kids stricken with Alz-X, more bodies turning up on the streets since Nieto had been been released.
I turned off the newsfeed, put my feet up and started the slog backwards through three months of phone records.
An orphaned foster kid, Britney had nobody in the way of family. I was hoping to get a sense of who she was and looking for patterns or anything unusual.
A glance at the log of calls from July through the first week of October showed Britney Devonshire had made over fifteen hundred texts to a local number which the system identified as belonging to a Mercedes Delblanco. A quick search revealed Delblanco was another stripper employed by Sandy Beaches. From her photo I recognized the Latina with the blue-black hair I’d seen at the club.
Flipping past the phone log to the transcription detail, I started in on the cache of texts. The fifteen hundred back and forths between the girls confirmed Mercedes Delblanco as Britney Devonshire’s BFF from work. I slogged through texts debating the merits of various make-up tips, including passionate discussion of favorite lip and nail color complete with emojis and multiple exclamation points: The deceased favored a shade called Apricot Dream. I remembered her chipped, bitten, nails from the crime scene.
Neither woman was a fan of their boss Sandy Rose. Complaints were frequent. There was a spike in the number of texts at the end of August. The uptick in volume apparently centered on Sandy’s decision to cut Mercedes’ hours and move her to the afternoon shift at the beginning of September. Britney had stayed on prime time in the evenings. Sandy had merited a few choice epithets, but there was no mention of drug tests, random or otherwise.
There was, however, girltalk about clients: shared advice on who was a good tipper and who failed to observe the look don’t touch rules of the establishment. But none of the clients seemed to be anything but minor nuisances.
Barring the litany of complaints Mercedes had about her ex-husband Raul, the usual chatter about boyfriends was surprisingly thin on the ground for a woman as attractive as Britney Devonshire. Mercedes dated, but her friend was either less forthcoming, or had less to report. Until a few weeks before her death when a few references to somebody Ms. Devonshire had met recently popped up, including one elated text complete with emoticon: he said yes Merc!!!
Timecode showed Britney had fired off that text the same week Sandy Rose had canned the now dead stripper – just a week prior to her death.
Britany Devonshire’s last text to Mercedes, sent only a couple hours before her estimated time of death, read: Bye-bye to the 818. Movin on up.
I switched back to the main log listing phone calls. Scanning timecode of incoming calls, I found one number that matched the timeframe for both texts. Moreover, Britney Devonshire had made three additional outgoing calls to that same number earlier in the month. The system showed the number she’d called only a couple hours before her death belonged to a Dr. Gabriel Lee.
Another quick search told me Dr. Lee was a sixty-three-year old microbiologist employed by Genesys, a biomed research facility in Sun Valley. He was married with one teenaged son. I sat back in my chair and stared at the data. Why had the stripper contacted a microbiologist old enough to be her grandfather once, let alone five times in three weeks? Was he a client/john from the club, a friend or something else, something more?
Her glove phone camera roll turned up mostly selfies and badly-framed shots of her cat. But there were a couple pics of a woman in a purple bikini I recognized as Mercedes Delblanco. In the picture Mercedes squinted at the camera as she stood on Zuma beach near the lifeguard station nearest the parking lot. I scrolled through the rest of the photos, but there was no Dr. Lee. No men at all in fact, which once again pointed to a black hole in the boyfriend department.
I put down the log and picked up the evidence bag of some of the deceased’s effects. Her purse held the California driver’s license I’d already seen but no wallet. Like most people she’d apparently charged all her purchases to her barcode. A small pink bag of make-up held some lipstick, mascara and a half-empty bo
ttle of the apricot nail polish she favored. The only other item in the bag was a little pocket Bible.
Britney Devonshire’s apartment had held an e-reader stuffed with gossip rags and travel magazines, but no books or religious paraphenalia. The title page told me the Bible had belonged to her long-dead mother. I started to flip through the pages and something fell out.
A grimy print-out, it looked like a fuzzy identity barcode – when I turned it on its side.
“A blood spot?” I said the words aloud.
Blood spots, the colloquial term for genetic partial prelims, were a standard part of my job. The down and dirty genetic analysis of a single drop of blood revealed enough about the donor to make for an economical identifier that was nonetheless accurate to over ninety-eight per cent. Thirty years ago blood spots had been confined to the criminal population where blood or saliva was harvested upon arrest. Once big data companies saw the potential, however, the pool of registered individuals had expanded. The fastest growing market had been neo-natal.
Many prospective parents wanted to know the medical forecast for their progeny, and fetal partial prelims were tailored to indicate undesireable genetic traits, both existing and potential.
This blood spot wasn’t from the crime lab or the outside lab the LAPD used for its genetic contract work. That meant it hadn’t been harvested from Britney Devonshire’s prior arrest for soliciting. That also meant it likely was neo-natal.
I texted Shin to call me straightaway.
CHAPTER NINE
Shin’s pixilated face floated in the L-shaped space of my Nokia Handy. He was walking out the door from the downtown morgue on his way to the detective sedan. They had just finished the cut.
“Missing me already?” Shin sat down behind the wheel and cranked the AC.
“What did the M.E. find on Britney Devonshire?” I said.
“No real surprises. Probable cause of death - accidental overdose. But she had Blue Lotus in her blood as well as Green Ice.”
“Ice and Spice.” Blue Lotus was a synthetic marijuana often smoked by fans of Green Ice. “Was she pregnant?”
Shin raised his chin. The smile vanished as he shook his head. “No. Why?”
I held up the blood spot I’d found tucked in her pocket-Bible. Then I told Shin about the texts to her friend and the calls to microbiologist Dr. Lee. “So if she wasn’t pregnant…”
“Maybe it’s from an earlier pregnancy,” Shin said. “The M.E. said Devonshire never delivered a kid. That doesn’t mean she never miscarried or aborted. Maybe she held onto the blood spot and used it to pressure the reluctant boyfriend.”
“Dr. Lee’s not her boyfriend.” I told Shin about the noticeable lack of texts and pictures from Britney Devonshire’s phone. “More likely she feigned pregnancy to shake down a married client with a lot to lose.”
Shin listened intently. “That’s a bold play, Eddie. Risky with a guy who knows his science.”
“Yeah.” The kind of desperate ploy a systems kid who’d run out of options might try. “Any sign of sexual assault?”
“None, Eddie.” Shin ran his hands over his face. He looked tired. Shin knew the stats as well as anyone. If a woman is killed, nine times out of ten her husband or boyfriend pulled the trigger.
“No sign of foul play at all? You sure?”
He nodded. “I think you’re making too much of those texts.”
“Hmm.” There was no way the department would spend the cash for DNA tests unless Britney Devonshire’s death was ruled a homicide.
“Eddie,” Shin said, cracking his knuckles. “I see where you’re going with this. Just between us, I agree the OD might not have been so accidental.”
I waited.
“She’d just lost her job. She had money problems. Most likely - this girl accidentally on purpose took a one-way trip with the Green Angel. But homicide - you’re too far out over your skiis.”
“You check her accounts?”
“Of course.” Shin looked a little put out by my question. “She made good money but spent more. Tracked down that derma ad too. Britney made peanuts on it. The cookie jar was bare. No cash deposits or record of money transfers from this Dr. Lee. If she tried to pressure him and that went south too? No surprise she wanted out, is it?”
“You’re gonna write it up as suicide?” I said.
Shin shook his head. “We can’t prove it wasn’t accidental, so I don’t see a reason to contradict the coroner. No next of kin is listed, but somebody might turn up. Why make it worse if they do, you know?”
I nodded, reminded again of why I liked Shin so much.
A lopsided grin spread across Shin’s affable face. “Eddie, it’s this desk-duty. You’re like a Terminator-terrier chewing the ball to bits. Get cleared for active duty. We need you.”
I thought about the newscast I’d seen, the higher body count since Nieto’s release. Maybe Shin was right. Maybe I was just guilt-tripping myself over landing us in all the shit with the OIS.
Britney Devonshire’s death was a non-starter for the department. The overdose of a stripper wasn’t exactly a high priority in a city with three hundred odd homicides – courtesy of the Zeta war. But the fact this system kid had suddenly put a spike in the wrong arm so soon after that happy-talk text to Mercedes ate at me. Especially given the timing of phone calls to Dr. Lee and that blood spot.
“I’ll send you her final autopsy report soon as I have it,” Shin said.
“Do me a solid,” I said, “and don’t close out the file yet. Nothing adds up on this. That’s interesting, don’t you think?”
“You crazy hakujin,” Shin said, shaking his head. “I’m raising three kids and juggling a full caseload. I don’t have time for interesting. I hardly have time to eat. You feel me?”
“Meet me at the dojo,” I said. “We can grab a bite after. I’m buying.”
CHAPTER TEN
Every Monday night after work Shin and I played kendo, Japanese fencing. The dojo was on Corinth Ave., a block south of Sawtelle in little Osaka. When I got there, it was magic hour. The dying light of the sun poured through the windows lining the long wall of the Japanese Community Center.
Slipping off my shoes, I bowed before entering.
Kendo is Japanese for ‘the way of the sword.’ There were no colored belts or changes in uniform to signify rank. Everyone wore the same midnight blue gi, the long sleeved padded karate shirt, and hakama, floor length Japanese culottes. Protective armor, or bogu, shields the head, torso and hands from the full contact blows delivered by the opponent’s bamboo sword. It made us all look like Darth Vader in blue.
As I knelt and strapped on my own bogu, Shin warmed up – doing suriashi across the expanse of the bamboo floor. He seemed to glide across the blond wood like a Noh dancer.
We bowed to each other then began kiri-kaeshi, the traditional choreographed opening drill. Kiri-kaeshi, or cross-cutting, is both a warm up, and at higher skill levels, a chance to practice timing, footwork, breathing and the recognition and creation of the right moment to strike.
Like a seasoned cop reading a threat on the street, an experienced player quickly sizes up the level of his opponent, adjusting to the level of the novice. An adept has practiced moves so many times his brain synapses fire faster than a novice’s. His body acts on its own. I’ve played against a couple of masters. It’s like moving in slow motion against an opponent in fast forward.
Shin and I started to spar. Shin remained nearly motionless, holding his sword steady. Then he lowered it a couple centimeters and slowly raised it again. It was a feint, an attempt to force me into a rushed attack. Edging in warily with my feet, I felt for that moment when the energy of the opponent shifts and the action goes down.
Shin was an advanced player, but not yet a master. Born in Osaka, he’d started playing in school but dropped kendo when he’d left Japan, and the banking career his parents had mapped out for him, behind. Shin had moved to the U.S. and become a cop only to take up kendo
again when he landed in the Koreatown station where he’d served before Homicide Special. Even with the gap, my partner still had twenty years of kendo experience on me.
It was Shin who’d gotten me started on the martial art three years ago when we first became partners. He played classic kendo, no tricky feints or fast barrages of multiple strikes. Just one shot - one kill. It’s an elegant style and the hardest to master, but Shin was patient and willing to suffer losses until he was good enough to win the way he wanted. I had to rely on speed, height and tricky set ups planned in advance.
I set up a rhythm, then broke that rhythm, trying to force Shin off his center to score. In far better physical condition than Shin, I played that to my advantage, dancing around him, wearing him down. Keeping him on the defensive till he was breathing hard, I feinted left for a kote wrist lopping strike, but landed a blow to the head instead. That match went to me.
“Doh!” Shin won the next match with a clean strike to the gut when I went for a wrist-head combination and left my core open. If the swords had been real, my guts would be spilling out over the floor like spaghetti.
Now tied, we both felt intensity build on the third match. This time I left off the dancing around and kept my eyes focused on Shin’s whole body. I started to cheat the distance, right foot stealing ground under the hakama. He felt the feint as a move and went for my head. I beat him. He bowed, conceding.
“Most men your size aren’t that fast, Eight Pack,” Shin teased as we cleaned up after practice.
“You almost had me.”
“Almost is still dead. But you rely too much on height and speed, Eddie. It’s a young man’s game. Let the sword move on its own.”
I laughed. “I use what I have. You’ve got the edge in technique.”
“You over-think things too,” Shin said. His slow grin lit his face then dimmed. “Like the Devonshire case.” Shin folded his hakama into its neat origami-like square for storage. We put our bogu and shinai back in their bags.