Cold Hit ss-5

by Stephen Cannell

  "You're the head of the Detective Bureau. I've seen you go up against Tony and win. Don't hide behind him."

  "He's the one the press is gonna skin, not me. If we set up a task force, it gives the news people something to write about. It looks proactive. While we're setting it up and getting it organized, it buys a week."

  "And in the meantime, the case gets trashed."

  "Then solve the thing, Shane. You've been on it for almost two months. Solve it and take us both out of this jackpot."

  It was heating up. Our voices were rising in the cold night air, floating across the Venice canals. Our neighbors were probably rolling over in bed and muttering, "Those damn Scullys are at it again."

  "Even Cal doesn't want you to form a task force. He says it's gonna bitch up the investigation."

  "So I'm hiding behind Tony and you're hiding behind Cal."

  "I'm not hiding behind anybody, because I completely agree. We can solve it ourselves."

  "Okay. Then as long as we're on the subject of solving the case, maybe we ought to review it from an operational standpoint."

  "Operational?" I was lost. "Okay, what's wrong operationally?"

  "I'm hearing rumors that your partner is a problem." "Look, Alexa, my partner is my business."

  "You're sitting here giving me grief about setting up a task force while you're investigating the biggest case we've had in ten years with a fall-down drunk. Maybe that's why we're not getting anywhere."

  "Too many lies and loose bullshit gets passed around your floor at Parker Center," I shot back. "My partner's problems are his and mine. We'll deal with it."

  "Okay, then just look me in the eye and tell me he's not fucking up."

  She was angry. But she was also right and she was under a lot of pressure from Tony. She had recommended me for this case and after seven weeks I was nowhere. Since my position on Zack was untenable, I did what most outflanked husbands do. I got pissed off.

  "People go through tough periods," I almost shouted. "God knows I did, and Zack was the one who. ."

  "I don't want to hear about how Zack saved you back in the day! I'm talking about now. Four men are dead and if this fourth John Doe is a copycat, then the only clues we have on this damn serial murder case in seven weeks just evaporated." She threw her empty beer into the trash can next to the barbeque. "So tell me, Shane, is this guy the problem?"

  "No, dammit! He's not the problem. You're the problem! You and all the other backstabbers at Parker Center."

  I got up and stalked into the house, immediately feeling like a total ass. She wasn't the problem. Zack was. And I was, for protecting him.

  I went into the den, picked up the murder book and angrily flipped it open. Proving Alexa's point, the binder was a complete mess. Things were filed wrong. The initial victim, whom I had named Woody after finding him in the wash at the Woodman Avenue overpass, had one of John Doe Number Three's crime scene photos pasted in his section by mistake. The section on John Doe Number Three, dubbed Cole for Colfax Avenue, was also a mess. Alexa and Cal were right. Zack was just going through the motions. He didn't give a damn. In fact, he was screwing up evidence.

  I sat in the den and worked for almost two hours, reorganizing and bringing the murder book up to date. Some of it I had to do from memory because the transcriptions of our original crime scene audio tapes were missing. Fortunately, I'd held on to the cassettes. If Zack couldn't produce the transcripts, I'd have to get them redone. When I finished, I thought it was about 90 percent accurate. There was still paperwork missing that I'd have to look for in the morning.

  I closed the book and went down the hall to our bedroom. Alexa was already in bed. I took off my clothes and lay down beside her. It was dark, but I knew she was awake.

  After a long moment, she spoke softly. "I'll do the best I can to hold off the task force. And I'll leave Zack up to you unless it becomes impossible."

  What more could I ask?

  Then she rolled over and took me into her arms. "Because I know a man with good work ethics and a sense of the team is going to take care of business." Using Pete Carroll's words.

  What do you say to a woman like that?

  I guess you say, I'm sorry, I was wrong. So after a short internal struggle, that's what I did.

  I lay in the warmth of my wife's arms and thought about that. Pete Carroll said you win by depending on your teammates. But how could I depend on Zack?

  Before I fell asleep, I remembered Cindy's translation of the old Cyrillic warning.

  Don't wake up, the tattoos cautioned.

  Chapter 9

  It poured down rain during the night. I heard it hitting the roof of our house around 3 A. M. banging loudly in the downspouts. By morning the storm had passed and L. A. was reborn and washed clean. The air had a brisk crispness, all too rare in this city of fumes.

  As I drove from Venice across town to the Glass House, I decided to take a detour and stop by the city forensic facility on Ramirez Street. The crime lab is a very busy place, and even though I was working a red ball that should be afforded top priority, sometimes people make strange choices. One of my jobs as primary investigator was to make sure my Fingertip murder got the proper attention. Sometimes, by just showing up with a box of Krispy Kremes, you can work wonders.

  I stopped at a mini-market just before getting on the I-10 freeway and bought two dozen, then drove up the ramp and joined a long line of angry freeway commuters who were bumper-to-bumpering their way to work. My lane mates were holding their steering wheels in death grips, their faces scowling masks of anger. The frustration all of us accumulated on the 10 would be dutifully passed along to our coworkers, who would take it out on their subordinates. This domino effect of bad traffic karma would kill working environments all over town until noon.

  I inched along past Wilshire Boulevard, and tried to stifle my frustration by running through a list of more pressing problems. Alexa, Cal, and Tony didn't want Forrest to be a copycat because that body gave everyone hope. The department could slip into waitand-see mode and pray Zack and I would turn something. But since I was pretty sure Forrest was not part of the Fingertip case, it was just a head feint for the press. Eventually, we'd have to own up to that fact, and when we did, we'd undoubtedly get a task force, including a contingent from the FBI. The feebs like to bill themselves as experts in serial crime. After all, they have an Academy Award-winning movie starring Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster to prove it.

  All of this made me hate the driver of the blue Corvette in front of me. These assholes in my lane didn't know who they were dealing with. I was pissed off and I was packing.

  At 9:40 I finally made it to Ramirez Street and parked in the underground garage at the municipal crime lab. I took the elevator to the third floor and asked the girl on the desk if either Cindy Clark or Mike Menninger were in. A minute later Cindy came out. She was a sweet-faced, slightly round girl with the thick Texas accent I remembered. She smiled and looked down at the box of donuts I held out to her, selecting one carefully.

  "Y'all really know how to tempt a girl."

  "If that's all it takes, then I've been wasting a lot of money on jewelry and concert tickets," I joked.

  "What can I do for you, Detective?"

  "I was wondering if we're getting anywhere on my contact lens."

  "I was just fixin' t'check with Brandon on that. Come on.

  I followed her down a narrow corridor lined with tiny rooms that were the approximate size of walk-in closets. Each one contained a computer, a desk, and a geek. We entered a slightly larger room at the end of the hall dominated by a very skinny, young, black guy with a receding hairline. He wore no jewelry, not even a watch, but he had on a T-shirt that said "Crime Unit" with an arrow pointing down to his shorts. We're really going to have to do something about the quality of humor in law enforcement. Cindy made the introduction.

  "Brandon Washington, Detective Shane Scully. Shane has HM fifty-eight oh-five."

  "Grab
a seat," Brandon said. "Lemme check my e-mails on that lens." When he smiled I saw that his two front teeth were box-outlined in gold. Not my favorite look, but hey, guys do what they think will get them laid in this town. He turned on his computer, and brought up his e-mail.

  "I've got a shitload of correspondence here. Hang on a second. Let me shoot through them." As he started scrolling, he brought me up to date. "I examined that contact when it first came in yesterday. It's a rigid gas-permeable lens."

  "Is that normal?" I asked.

  "Gas perms with this kind of correction are pretty expensive and are used for special eye problems. I checked it under a microscope for a manufacturer's edge mark, but it wasn't made by any of the labs here in the U. S., so I sent it out to an eye clinic we use that buys from manufacturers in Europe to see if they can trace the country of origin. Ahhh, here we go." He leaned forward and read the screen. "Okay, the guy I sent it to says that he can tell from the way the lens was made, that it is from Europe, but they don't know where yet. It could take him a while to run it down because he says there are any number of countries with labs that might be able to do this kind of lens."

  "Why don't you start with Russia?" I said.

  He leaned back from his computer, looked at me and frowned. "Why Russia?"

  "Hunch. Cops get hunches, it's how we solve cases." "Okay, I'll start with Russia."

  "You also might try all of the countries in the old Soviet Union," I suggested. "Georgia. The Ukraine."

  "Okay." He picked up a sheet of paper from his out basket and handed to me. "I scanned your lens last night," he said. "That's the condition it was correcting."

  I studied the sheet. Bell graphs and squiggly line drawings with a column of numbers.

  "That prescription corrects an eye disease called Keratoconus, or KC. It only occurs in a fraction of one percent of the world population, so it's extremely rare. It usually occurs when a person's in their mid-twenties and can progress for ten to twenty years. The name refers to a condition in which the cornea grows into a cone shape and bulges forward. To correct KC, you need one of these rigid gas-permeable lenses."

  "This is good," I said. "Anything else?"

  "Historically, degeneration of an eye with KC slows around age forty or fifty. According to this prescription, the dead man in the wash was significantly sight-impaired and probably past middle age. Without his contacts, it would have been impossible for him to even drive."

  "How expensive are these to get made?"

  "My eye expert says hundreds of dollars. They have to be fitted several times to make them wearable."

  I sat for a minute holding the printout, thinking not many bums are walking around with expensive contact lenses. "Since this is a rare eye condition, if we can find the lab in Europe that made the lens, we've got a damn good chance of finding out who he is."

  "Yep," Brandon said. "'Bout the way the donut crumbles." Then he took another Krispy Kreme.

  Chapter 10

  You have the transcripts from the cassettes we made at the first three murder scenes?" I asked Zack. "They aren't in the murder book."

  He was wearing yesterday's clothes and was slumped in his wooden swivel chair across from me in our cubicle, scowling down at the reorganized murder book, thumbing through the pages. He must have gone to a doctor because his nose was now encased in a metal splint and heavily bandaged. He seemed sober, but then it was only 10 A. M.

  "I put them in there. In the flap leaf," he said, pointing at the binder. "Somebody musta removed 'em." Since I was the only other person with access to the book, the implication was that I had done it, forgetting for the moment, that he'd left the damn thing unattended in the Xerox room. But so what? I stand accused. Our troubled partnership wallowed on.

  Then a look of momentary clarity spread across his discolored face and he snapped his fingers, tilted forward, and started rummaging around in his bottom desk drawer. After a minute, he sat up with an apologetic grin and handed me some Xeroxed pages.

  Accused and exonerated. Swift justice.

  "I threw 'em in there," he explained. "Was gonna put 'em in the book later. . forgot." He shrugged as if to say, hey, I'm only human.

  I took the blue LAPD murder book out of his hand and started to tape the Xeroxed transcripts for Woody, Van, and Cole onto a fresh page in each of their sections.

  "You really wants take this dumb-ass, new theory of yours to Calloway?" Zack said, leaning back and looking down his nose, studying me across a pound of medical adhesive.

  Since Cal had demanded a theory that tied all the unaligned facts together on Forrest's murder, I'd been trying to find one. I'd come up with a promising idea this morning. The more I'd thought about it, the more I liked it. I bounced my copycat theory off Zack as soon as I got in to see how it played. It had been met with stony silence. Now I ran down my new idea. After I finished, Zack glowered at me.

  "The skipper's gonna say two things," he complained. "He's gonna call this a hunch and tell us that Homicide Special dicks operate on evidence, not hunches. Then he's gonna say, you ain't got nothin' but bullshit here. Which of course, is exactly what it is."

  "He'll listen to reason."

  "If you're five and a half feet tall and shave your head every morning, you don't need reason." He leaned forward in the wood swivel. It squeaked loudly. "So, after he hears your dumb-ass idea, he's gonna call us morons and broom us both off the fucking case. No way he's gonna let us separate out John Doe-Four 'cause it's not a copycat, and that's the only murder in this chain a hits that we got a halfway decent shot at. Besides, he's also getting his nuts roasted over a slow fire every other Tuesday morning in the COMSTAT meeting." He was referring to the chief's bi-monthly meeting with all the division commanders to review computer crime statistics.

  "We gotta tell him anyway," I persisted. "Because regardless of what you think, I believe I'm right."

  Then, as if he had been waiting outside, listening for his cue, Captain Calloway stuck his shaved head inside our cubicle.

  "You guys asked for a meeting?"

  "Yeah."

  "Let's do it."

  He turned and walked across the squad room toward his office.

  "You tell him," Zack said as I stood. "I ain't up to being screamed at by Mighty Mouse this morning." "Fine," I said. "Just hold my back."

  "Only reason I still come in is so I can hold your back and watch you work." Sarcasm.

  On our way out, we collided in the doorway. I caught a gamey whiff of him.

  "Since you've given up showering, how 'bout investing in some cologne?" I muttered.

  "This is cologne. Eau de Werewolf. I send to Transylvania for this shit."

  "Go ahead and joke it off. You got half the Glass House circling you. Maybe if you didn't come in smelling like Big Foot, it would help."

  "Lemme get back to you on that," he snarled. We walked into Cal's office.

  "What's up?" Cal said. He removed his jacket, exposing huge arms in a short-sleeved shirt. His bi's and tri's bulged the white cotton.

  "Cap, did you read the update I e-mailed you this morning?"

  "On the hard gas lens? Looks promising."

  "I think when we find out where it was made, it's gonna come back as being from a lab in one of the old Soviet Union countries."

  "Are we having hunches again?" Cal said, half-smiling.

  Zack shot me a dangerous look.

  "Hunches based on shrewd observations," I corrected.

  "Such as?"

  "The tattoos in the vic's eyelids turn out to be Russian Cyrillic symbols. They translate: 'Don't wake up.' "

  "How do you get tattoos done on your eyelids?" Cal asked. "Don't they have to press the needle down too hard?"

  "I called a tattoo artist, Big Payaso, at the Electric Dragon in Venice. He told me this kind of eyelid art is mostly done in prison. They slide a spoon under the lid to make a work table." Both Cal and Zack winced. "Also, the bullet came from a Russian automatic so I think the vic is
maybe a Russian immigrant and the lens is gonna trace back to somewhere in the Soviet Union."

  "Okay, so John Doe-Four is a homeless Russian who did time. That's why you wanted to see me?"

  "As I told you yesterday, I think this last hit is a copycat. I think I may also have the thread that ties it together."

  Cal got up and closed the door. Then he turned back and motioned for me to continue.

  "I think this last guy might have done time in a Russian prison and John Doe Number Four might be an ROC hit."

  "Russian Organized Crime?" Cal said, raising an eyebrow. His expression told me I better make this good.

  "The Odessa mob is aggressive and proactive. They've been trying to infiltrate the department for at least fifteen years, ever since Little Japanese came over here from the Ukraine in the late eighties."

  Chapter 11

  Little Japanese was a violent Russian gangster named Vyatcheslav Ivankov who got his street handle because he was short and had squinty eyes. He brought several members of the Odessa Mafia with him. They had started small, but now there were more than five thousand members listed in our gang book, with large concentrations of Armenian Odessa mobsters in Glendale, Burbank, and Hollywood. I didn't have to remind Cal that we found Forrest right on the Burbank city line.

  "The Odessa mob has tried to infiltrate the LAPD two or three times before," I said. "Maybe they put a mole in the ME's office and somehow found out about the symbol carved on the victim's chest. With that piece of info, they could duplicate these killings and use the Fingertip case to hide a high-profile mob execution."

  Cal looked over at Zack. "How 'bout you? Whatta you think?"

  "I completely disagree. I think John Doe-Four is part of the Fingertip case," Zack said, not looking at me. "Besides, if we isolate the case out on weak shit like this, we got a lotta explaining to do. There's more at stake here for all of us, than just who's killing a few bums."

  He was obviously talking about our careers. So, despite his promise to the contrary, Zack had left me hanging. Maybe I should call that the last straw.