He said, “Sorry, Doc, no entry, they’re still clearing room by room.”
Monchen stepped in front of me. “I’ll help clear.”
Reed didn’t move. “Not necessary, everyone’s got a gun out, we don’t want surprises.”
“Oh,” said Monchen. “So what should I do?”
“No one’s called it in, yet. You know the code, right?”
“Sure,” said Monchen. Far from certain. “Should I call from the van?”
Reed said, “Good idea.”
“Ashley actually shot her?”
“She did.”
“Damn,” said Monchen. “That’s heavy.”
Reed looked at the van.
“Roger,” said Monchen. Saluting, he ran off.
Reed said, “Tomorrow it’s going to hit him. Not to mention her.”
The obvious question: What about you?
The obvious thing to say: nothing.
Maybe Reed was being considerate, maybe he shifted his weight to the left unconsciously. Either way, the space he created allowed me a view of Deandra Demarest’s body.
Mercilessly lit by an overhead fixture, she lay facedown on a brown carpet stained with red. Wearing what Binchy had described earlier: a black top that could’ve come from a bikini but might’ve been a bra, and cut-off denim shorts revealing crescents of butt-cheek. Bare feet. Clean feet. Blond hair fanning. Black polish on her fingernails. Not even a chip.
When I leaned in a bit closer, Reed didn’t stop me. Details seeped in.
Red sump at the base of the skull.
Five additional blood blossoms grouped near the center of her spine.
Rookie or not, Ashley Burgoyne was a crack shot.
Everything on tape, justification for the shooting seemed obvious. Though the damage situated on the back might prove problematic if someone complained.
I heard footsteps from the rear of the house, shouts of “Police, show yourself.” Then: “Clear here.”
“Clear.”
“Clear.”
A black-and-white had pulled behind the UPS van. Tyrell Lincoln led Phil Duke away.
Reed shook his head. “I was trying to keep her alive, Doc. Even with the cutter, I could’ve handled her.”
I said, “Tough decision on Ashley’s part.”
“If she actually made a decision.”
“Reflex move?”
“Happens. She’ll have to deal.” He looked over his shoulder. “L.T. let her clear. Maybe therapy, huh?”
Burgoyne stepped from the rear of the house, looking far too young and dispirited.
Reed said, “You okay?”
“Uh-huh.” Shaky voice. “Um…totally all clear. I’m supposed to wait in the van, now.”
“Then that’s what you do.”
She looked at Reed, lower lip trembling.
“Thanks for backing me,” he said.
Fighting back tears, the girl who’d shot a woman ran to the van.
“There we go,” said a voice nearly as deep as Phil Duke’s. Marlin Moroni came forward, holstering his Glock. “I’m keeping watch, here. Milo says you should meet out back, he thinks he found something, didn’t say what.”
Reed said, “Maybe a big ruby.”
“A ruby? Like a gem?”
“Yup.”
“Really,” said Moroni. “Any chance of buried treasure, also? Commission for a dedicated public servant?”
“If only,” said Reed.
“It’s always if only,” said Moroni. “That’s called real life.”
—
Reed and I headed down the driveway. A few steps took us to a tiny backyard. Exterior lighting fixtures shaped like tulips on stalks were in place but not in use. The sole illumination was the narrow, bouncing beam of Milo’s flashlight.
He said, “Can’t figure out how to turn the fixtures on,” and ran the beam across a fusebox on the wall, then over to a meager square of lawn. As perfect as the grass in front and backed by precisely cut beds overflowing with flowers.
Behind all that, reached by a brief brick pathway, was a greenhouse that spanned the entire rear of the property. Impressive wood-and-glass structure, a good eight feet tall, with a pointed finial adorning a shingle roof. More ornate than the house, far too large for the space.
Dim light and not much sound made for sensory deprivation. But a third sense was on full alert.
The reason Milo had called us back was clear.
The smell you never forget.
Moe Reed’s hand shot to his nose. “Oh.”
Milo’s nose was unprotected as he washed the panes of the greenhouse with his torch, highlighting smudges of condensation on the inner surface of the glass, dirt speckles, the contours of vegetative things pressing against panes like curious children.
Further scanning revealed flowers grayed by night. A pulpy-looking blossom so intensely orange, the color forced its way through nocturnal retinal cells.
Meanwhile, the reek grew, invading my sinus passages, climbing into my head, overtaking my brain. Then my gut.
The vile stink, something beyond rotten. Cooking and boiling over.
I suppressed a gag.
Moe Reed, habitually stoic, looked as if he was ready to hurl.
Milo turned to us. “Far as I can see the damn thing’s shut tight and it’s still getting through.”
Reed stepped back, managed speech. “Pretty rank, L.T.”
“You’re a master of understatement, Moses. Okay, I’m seeing two choices. The easy way is call the crypt and leave all the fun to the C.I.’s. Or, on the off chance there’s someone in there who needs saving, we go take a look ourselves.”
“Ricki Sylvester,” said Reed. “Saving a lawyer.”
Milo laughed. “Don’t tell anyone, Moses.”
Reed dredged up a smile and stepped back farther.
Milo whipped out a handkerchief, folded it double into a wad that he pressed against his nose.
Cotton seemed flimsy protection; he usually carries mentholated ointment for coating his nasal passages.
All the planning, you can’t think of everything.
He said, “Let’s try not to breathe,” and walked toward the greenhouse.
I bunched my jacket and pressed my lapel to my nose, decided that was awkward and worthless and pinched my nostrils shut with my fingers.
When I stepped forward, Moe Reed said, “You really want to, Doc?”
But he didn’t stop me and a few seconds later, I heard the sound of his footsteps, trailing.
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I was right behind Milo when he flung the greenhouse door open. Letting loose humid heat and putrescence that would’ve repelled Satan.
“Oh, God, the things I do for God and country,” he said as he stepped in.
—
The floor was brick, a central walkway between rows of wooden tables.
The reek seemed to have acquired solidity, jellying the air as it poisoned.
A whole lot of visual beauty made matters worse, though I couldn’t tell you why.
Pots on the tables, glossy and patterned intricately, housed palms, ferns, bromeliads, and other pineapple-like things. Plants with fleshy leaves, spoon-like leaves, spiky leaves, others filamentous and delicate as corn silk.
I spotted one of those red, heart-shaped things they sell in Hawaiian souvenir shops. The orange flowers I’d seen through the window belonged to a squat, spreading thing with hairy, leathery leaves.
A plant that resembled a bird’s head.
A vine that reached for the ceiling, sucker-like appendages gripping glass, an herbaceous octopus.
Something that resembled nothing I could classify.
Everything healthy, lush, thriving.
As we trudged slowly, a squirt of fragrance hit my nose. Sweet, exotic, tropical, facing up to the stink but dying quickly.
Another burst: gingery. That, too, lost out to the ambient toxicity.
Milo stopped, retched, coughe
d. Bent a bit, straightened, resumed the slog.
I found myself teetering. Reached out for the support of a wooden table, thought better of it and forced myself to keep going.
No one behind me. I half turned, saw Reed’s fleeing form. I sympathized but found perverse pleasure in that. Good to know something could get to him.
Milo took another couple of steps. His flashlight found something and he stopped, pointed, covered his entire face with the handkerchief then dropped it just enough to undrape his eyes.
At the far wall of the greenhouse, several large yellow bags were neatly stacked.
The potting mix Binchy had seen Phil Duke bring home from the garden supply house.
To the left of the bags was a massive heap of loose dirt. Five feet high, shaped like a first-grader’s clumsily drawn mountain.
Oddly messy for this precise herbarium.
The flashlight searched, floundered.
Found something.
Sprouting from the top of the pile. Melon-shaped.
Large melon.
We got closer. The stink beat us mercilessly.
Melon with eyeholes…wet, sloughing rind.
So much bloat and rot that a first glance told you nothing.
A second glance refined the perception.
What had once been a human head. The mouth degraded to a black O, the eyeholes tiny caverns leading to nothing.
Milo retched. “I’m losing it.” He ran past me and out.
What possessed me to stick around for a few more seconds, I’ll never know.
Something was wrong with this Gehenna. Then it came to me: the silence. No flies. No maggots destined to be flies.
All at once, the silence was gone, replaced by a clanging in my head, metallic, insistent.
I took one last look at the head and walked out. Slowly, deliberately.
In control. Nothing was going to rush me.
When I got out, Milo was at the top of the driveway, sucking air.
I did the same. Thinking about Gerard Waters’s body, kept in a warm, moist place before being dumped in the Palisades.
Milo recovered enough to talk, but his voice was weak. “C.I.’s and techs on their way. I warned them. Go hazmat.”
“Considerate,” I said.
“See something like this, you aim for any virtue you can snag.”
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Phil Duke got stashed temporarily in the West L.A. holding jail, Tyrell Lincoln completing the paperwork and going home with Milo’s blessing. Marlin Moroni stood guard at the house, saying, “I don’t mind, got the next four days off, gonna drive to Laguna Seca for two-wheel day, run my Indian around the track.”
Moe Reed drove the brown van back to the station, both rookies the passengers. Ashley Burgoyne would be answering questions, soon. We all would.
The crime scene army would take a while to arrive, busy with three other murders, one in Lancaster, two in South Central.
Milo and I gave Duke’s house another go-round, searching for the ruby with no luck.
“Like you said, Ricki’s got a safe. For all we know, she’s the big winner, took it and split.”
I said, “You see her as the mastermind?”
“I don’t know what I see, other than that…thing in the mulch has to be Bakstrom. Meaning everyone else is dead and she might not be.”
We went outside where he smoked a cigar and I let my thoughts settle.
I said, “I’m still seeing Deandra as the boss. The ruby was important to her. She might’ve kept it close.”
“Meaning?”
Moroni had shut the front door. I pointed at it.
“What?” said Milo.
“On her person.”
He puffed hard. Walked to Moroni who stepped away and let him open the door. Staring inside, he returned, got on the phone to the night desk at the crypt. “Pedro? Milo. What’s your investigator’s ETA? Can you see if they can snap it up a bit…I know, but what’re you talking about, coupla gang thingies, mine’s way more interesting…we’ve all been doing it a long time, Pedro. It can still happen, something you never saw before, trust me.”
Twenty minutes later, the white, blue-striped crypt van rolled up with two drivers, ready to do the usual sit-by until the C.I.’s okayed transport. A few minutes later, a larger van, the mobile crime lab.
Last to arrive was a blue sedan bearing two investigators, one I knew as Gloria, a former nurse, one I learned was Tish, a former respiratory therapist.
Both wore knit tops, jeans, and sneakers. Gloria said, “Where’s the decomp situation?”
Milo said, “Out back, a greenhouse. First do the one in the house, she’s clean.”
He told them what he needed.
Tish said, “Pedro said it could be interesting. I might start thinking he’s credible.”
They approached the body the way experienced C.I.’s do. Gloving up and taking time to observe, then recording the scene orally and visually, Tish using her cellphone to snap pictures, capturing every wound, Gloria speaking into a mini-recorder.
She counted the shell casings from Burgoyne’s service gun, said, “That’ll be fun for the techies.”
Back to the wounds. “Not much mystery about cause.”
Down to the shorts. “Not much by way of clothing and I don’t see any bulges in the pockets but let’s give it a go.”
She patted the garments as Tish continued to film.
Nothing in the four pockets of the short-shorts, same for the cups of the top, which turned out to be a bra from Trashy Lingerie.
“Nope, sorry,” said Tish. “Any reason we shouldn’t tell the guys to transport?”
I said, “Is it okay to take off the shorts, right here?”
Everyone looked at me.
I reiterated the logic I’d given Milo.
He said, “Oh.”
Tish said, “You think it could be up her? Yick.”
“Just a thought.”
Gloria said, “Protocol is to disrobe them back at the crypt.” A beat. “Why not, better than something falling out and we don’t see it.”
Tish said, “Hey, we’re all grown-ups.”
—
Down came the shorts, sliding fluidly after an initial tug.
No panties.
A thin gold chain belted the widest part of Deandra Demarest’s lovely, flaring hips. Tugged down at the center by a bit of weight.
A red stone the size of a large cocktail olive dangled at the precise center of a vertical strip of dyed-blond pubic hair. Partially concealed by the hair but the harsh overhead light zeroed in on the ruby and set off sparkles.
“Whoa,” said Tish. “We’d have seen that back at the crypt, we’d figure fake, one of those stripper deals, we’d probably stash it in some locker.”
She looked at me. “You’re a smart man. Or you understand women.” Crooked smile. “Both possibilities scare me.”
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The ruby was photo’d, logged, placed in an evidence envelope, and handed over to the crime scene techs. After a call to Noreen Sharp from Milo, delineating precisely.
She said, “Over to us, huh?”
“Safest route.”
“Only route, Milo. I’m driving over there now, find the right place for it.”
It didn’t take long for Deandra Demarest’s body to be bagged, gurneyed, and wheeled to the blue-striped van.
The C.I.’s left.
One of the techs said, “Now what?”
Milo said, “The dirty work. Sorry.”
“We do plenty of hazmat.”
“I asked for two extra masks.”
“Got them, too.”
“God bless you.”
“We hear that all the time,” said the tech.
“You do?”
“Not.”
He and his partner laughed.
Whatever helped.
—
The airtight greenhouse had prevented the entrance of
flies and the compression of the soil heap had partially preserved the body. But you can’t stop nature, and bacteria and tiny mites migrating from the plants did their thing, albeit at a far slower pace than blowfly maggots.
Decomp had spread downward, concentrating on the exposed head, leaving the legs below the knees and the feet pristine. The arms and hands were somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, with all ten fingers still able to serve up decent prints.
ID was verified, along with the route the male victim had taken to eternity.
Two bullets had entered the occiput of Henry Bakstrom’s brain. Later that day, a ballistics match was obtained at the crime lab: The same weapon had killed Gerard Waters. Never to be located.
Milo came by the house and filled me in. “Dirty end for a dirty guy.”
I said, “How long was Bakstrom in there?”
“Best guess, a week or so.”
“He was also expendable from the beginning.”
He nodded. “DeeDee and Phil’s mulch pile. Not that Duke’s admitting anything. Lawyered up after I asked him a few questions. I did learn his relationship to her. Distant cousins, third or fourth, he wasn’t really sure. He barely knew her when she showed up and told him a story.”
I said, “Before or after seducing him?”
“Who knows? Not that going mute is gonna help him, stick a body in your greenhouse and let it molder, even an L.A. jury will get it. The other news is no news on Ricki Sylvester. Not at home or in her office, so she’s either another stashed corpse or flown the coop.”
I said, “That about sums it up.”
But we were wrong.
—
Shortly after ten P.M. a call came into the West L.A. station. Milo was off-service but the desk sergeant was smart enough to remember and phone him.
He reached me at home and we arrived at the Aventura simultaneously. Chain-link fencing blocked the drive but a car-wide gate hung with a condemnation sign had swung open.
The hotel had its own odor: an arid, musty aura of desertion. Like a sauna gone bad.
One vehicle in the lot, a Saturn bearing the signage of a private security firm. Two black-and-whites parked near the mouth of the loggia leading to The Green. The windows of The Can were black, the landscaping spots as inoperative as those in Phil Duke’s backyard. But the lobby was brightly lit and exposed by glass walls.
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