In the Guise of Mercy (Maggie Macgowen Mysteries)

by Wendy Hornsby

  My workroom was intended by the architect who designed the house to be a formal dining room, but the way Mike and I lived anything labeled "formal" wouldn't see much use. So, I had commandeered it. The space suited me. It was big and well-lit--the crystal chandelier was now somewhere in the garage, replaced by functional track lights--with tall French doors that opened onto the patio. We built a counter along one wall for my computers and monitors and other plug-ins. The wall opposite was floor-to-ceiling shelves and cabinets full of filmmaker detritus: cameras, cords, lights, discs, tripods, reflectors, gels, digital this and analog that, and so on. Looked like shelves in a junk store.

  I made space on the counter for Mike's files and sat down to go through them more methodically than I had before. Actually, so far, I had only carefully studied the original police summaries. One by one, I pored over the notes, reports, maps, and clippings that Mike had collected over the last decade.

  In a folder labeled EVERGREEN, I found a sheet with a series of abbreviations and numbers that I recognized as the coroner's code for John Does. For instance, "JD 99-235, 25-35, 130, 5'10-6', OD?, Evergreen 03/01," meant that in 1999 the 235th unidentified male the coroner examined was twenty-five to thirty-five years old, weighed one-hundred thirty pounds, was five-ten to six feet tall, and died of a possible or probable overdose. There were about two hundred John Does listed, each followed by "Evergreen" and a date some years after the body was discovered. I didn't know what Evergreen meant, or the dates after.

  I called Mike's former partner, Nick Pietro. After we reassured each other that we were hanging in, I asked him, "What does 'Evergreen' mean to you?"

  "Evergreen?" he repeated. "In reference to what?"

  "John Does and Evergreen."

  "Ah, sure. Evergreen is a cemetery. Could be the oldest cemetery in the city; east of downtown, Boyle Heights. A lot of the founding fathers are buried there, like the Van Nuys and Lankershim and Chapman families; headstones read like street names.

  "At the southeast corner there's a potter's field for the indigent and the unclaimed. The county holds on to unclaimed and unidentified bodies for a while. The coroner looks for relatives, but after a while if no one claims the body, it gets cremated and put into a plastic box. Every once in a while there's a little ceremony and all the unclaimed remains get buried together in a trench in potter's field. County's been doing that for over a hundred years."

  "John Does can be missing persons," I said.

  "Can be. Why?"

  "Mike kept a file of John Does, apparently buried in Evergreen."

  "Part of the Jesus Ramon files, I'm guessing."

  "Yes."

  "What you might do is call the county morgue. There's a tech works there that Mike was real tight with. Name is," he paused, apparently thinking, "Phil. Phil Rascon. He could probably tell you more about exactly what Mike was looking for than I can." He paused again. "Mike caught the Jesus case a long time before we partnered up. I never worked that one."

  "You've been a real help," I said.

  After good-byes and promises to get together soon, I pulled out the printout of Mike's contacts that I had taken from his computer. I found Phil Rascon and called his work number, hoping to catch him in.

  When I identified myself to Mr. Rascon, he became very emotional. I listened to his spill of anguish, heard about his long history with Mike. When I told him what I was looking for and why, he was quick to set up an appointment to show me information that he began compiling, at Mike's request, in January of 1999.

  Day after tomorrow, at the county morgue, one o'clock.

  I had moved Mike's computer into my workroom the week before. I booted it and copied his Word files on a thumb drive that I slipped into my laptop case, in case I needed something from it when I wasn't at home, and went back to the hard-copy files on the counter.

  The file folder labeled OBITS AND PALLBEARERS sounded intriguing. The contents were at least that. Mike had gathered information--coroner's reports, police investigation reports, newspaper clippings--relating to the off-duty deaths of three LAPD patrolmen. Relatively few LAPD officers live within the limits of the city they protect and serve, choosing instead to commute in from any one of well over a hundred outlying suburban towns in Los Angeles, Orange, and Ventura Counties. The clippings Mike collected had been gathered from newspapers all over the southern part of the state.

  There were three accidents. I read through each set of information carefully, looking for the connective thread, other than the fact that three officers died.

  Chronologically, Rod Pearson was the first. On the job for less than four years, the father of three, worked Devonshire Division in the North Valley, fell off a sixteen-foot ladder at home while stringing Christmas lights in late 1998.

  The second officer, Art Collings, on the job eight years, divorced, father of a daughter, worked Hollenbeck east of downtown, died in the early moments of January 1, 1999 of that peculiarity called a New Year's Eve lobotomy. Apparently, a holiday reveler randomly shot his handgun into the air, and when the bullet fell back toward Earth it cleaved the skull of Officer Art Collings while he stood in his backyard perhaps a mile away. A fluke.

  The third and last officer, Tom Medina, on the job twenty years, married father of five, worked out of Harbor Division. Medina's was the most recent incident. In March of 2003, Medina stopped at a 7-Eleven store on his way home from his mid-watch shift. It was almost four A.M.; he was dressed in civvies. As he approached the store's front door he spotted a man, dressed in black and brandishing a firearm, who was apparently intent on robbing the store. Officer Medina drew his service revolver, identified himself as a police officer, told the man to drop his weapon, and was shot dead. His community established a scholarship fund for his children. The would-be robber got away.

  There were grainy funeral photos in each bundle of clippings, tiny faces, difficult to differentiate. The file was labeled OBITS AND PALLBEARERS for a reason. I put the clippings into my scanner and enlarged the photos, fooled with Photoshop to fill the gaps between the pixels, and managed to create images with recognizable, and sometimes familiar, faces: Boni Erquiaga was a pallbearer for Rod Pearson, Tom Medina helped carry Art Collings, and Harry Young and Lewis Banks did like service for Tom Medina.

  I printed the enhanced photos and put them into the file, and made a note to call Harry.

  The next file I picked up, labeled DESERTS, was thicker, and was almost entirely clippings. After drug kingpin Rogelio Higgins was killed in December of 1998, there was a string of robberies, fires, and killings across the three contiguous counties that all get lumped together as "Elay": Orange, Los Angeles, and Ventura. All of these events involved the homes, warehouses, vehicles, and carcasses of known or suspected drug dealers. And, none of them occurred within the jurisdiction of the LAPD or the LA County Sheriff, and none garnered much interest beyond a very narrow compass.

  The LA Times gave three paragraphs near the back of the Metro section to a fire in a Torrance house caused by an explosion set off by a batch of crystal meth the tenants were cooking up on the family stove. Two children who lived in the house were taken into protective custody. The small-circulation South Bay Pilot gave the incident more in-depth reportage and ran two editorials about the noble efforts of the local police department to prevent the scourge of drugs and drug dealers from gaining a toehold among the stucco canyons of suburbia.

  It was suggested in a few editorials or reports that there was a gang turf war underway, or several gang turf wars because the crimes occurred across a broad geography, which was seen as evidence of many local problems rather than a single shared problem.

  There were some arrests, the usual suspects taken in, some convictions among dealers and drug manufacturers, but no concrete association among the crimes in various places was made or apparently even considered. Downtown gangbangers were sometimes credited with beginning a suburban infiltration, evidence that a town needed to crack down on--choose any--curfew violato
rs, gang attire, non-English speakers, overcrowding in rental units, single motherhood, and graffiti.

  I got the impression that each event was downplayed by the locals and generally credited to outsiders. Better to keep an isolated violent event quiet than to risk ruining property values. Maybe the local police and their communities thought that the dealers who were beaten or killed, whose homes were torched and meth labs blown up, got their just deserts, ergo Mike's label, perhaps. I wondered how many drug dealer robberies went unreported either to the police or to the community.

  Mike also clipped reports of four police officer-involved shootings in various Los Angeles suburbs during the same time period, some fatal, all found to be justified, and all of them, again, receiving bare mention by the Times. Local, smaller-circulation newspapers like the Long Beach Shore community's Grunion Gazette and the Santa Monica Daily Breeze showed more interest when the incidents happened in their well-mown backyards, but even then the coverage was tucked among reports about high school sports, immediate district political issues, school events, holiday parades, and ads for homes for sale.

  As long as the incidents involved police cleaning out drug dealers or dealers killing each other, no one seemed overly concerned.

  In my head, I had been keeping a timeline of events. I set aside the files and began to write down the sequence, beginning with the shooting of Rogelio Higgins in December of 1998 and ending with the trial and incarceration of Nelda Ruiz and Boni Erquiaga some years later. I still did not understand how one event related to another, but there was clearly an escalation of events around the time that Jesus disappeared, and there was a cast of recurring players.

  After two hours I had a stack of to-do notes, a fierce headache, and only the faintest glimmering of an idea why Mike was interested in the apparently random deaths of those three policemen, and a series of suburban drug-related incidents. I had a whole new set of questions that needed to be asked, and a new understanding that asking the right question of the wrong person could be very dangerous.

  Mike warned me, Watch six. It was good advice.

  About an hour before I expected Guido, I took a long, cool shower--the day had turned out to be very warm--dressed in clean jeans, sandals, and a favorite shirt. Downstairs again, I uncorked the bottle of very good pinot noir that Mike had opened on his last day, poured some into a broad-bowled, long-stemmed glass, and carried it out onto the front deck.

  The heat of the day had begun to soften. Brisk afternoon breezes swept through the canyons. Dos vientos, the locals call the afternoon breezes, two winds, cool moist ocean air blowing in from both Malibu to the south and Ventura to the west.

  Breathing in fresh mountain air tinged by the sea, I leaned my elbows against the deck rail and looked out across the canyon before me. A red-tailed hawk soared on thermals, spiraling higher and higher until it was a dark speck in the blue. Then, suddenly, it dove straight toward the earth as if it were shot from the sky. When I saw it again, dinner hung from its talons, maybe one of the abundant cottontails or ground squirrels that were local garden pests.

  I was marveling at this rugged mountain wilderness into which we had managed to interject ourselves, when I heard footsteps coming up my wooden front stairs. I looked over the rail, saw that it was Early.

  "Hey, neighbor," he said. "Saw you were back. How you doing?"

  "Hanging in," I said.

  "All fixed." He held out the remote garage-door opener he had taken home to fix the week before. "The clicker's fine. Looks like the real problem was a critter nested inside the motor in the garage. I replaced the motor. Works fine, now. I left you a message...."

  "Thanks, Early," I said, accepting the opener from him. "Sorry I didn't get back to you."

  "Didn't expect you to." He leaned his elbows on the rail beside me and looked out over the canyon.

  "Thanks for helping out last week. Couldn't have handled all those people without you."

  "You'd do the same for me," he said.

  "The horses are still squirrely," I said.

  "Horses are notional. They'll settle down." He didn't take his eyes from the canyon.

  I'd worked with Early a couple of times, borrowing him from the news division when I needed his expertise. He's one of those people who is indispensable to a big institution: versatile, resourceful, knows the back doors, a go-to guy when you don't know who else to ask, or when you need to learn how to do just about anything related to television production.

  Early was a somewhat laconic Midwesterner, closer to Mike's age than mine, with a slow, dry sense of humor. Early rarely seemed to be in a hurry, generally paused to think before he spoke. In the zippity-do-da, rigid timeline-driven environment we worked in, he sometimes seemed to function in slow motion when everyone around him was in fast-forward. Might drive the hyper sorts a bit crazy to be around him, except that what he had to say was generally worth waiting for, and when he did something it never had to be undone or redone. And polite to the point I would call him courtly. Add bowed legs and an extravagant handlebar mustache, he could easily be cast as a cowpoke in any western movie.

  He's a good co-worker, and an easy neighbor.

  "Can I get you a glass of wine?" I asked. "Maybe a beer?"

  "Wouldn't mind a glass of wine at all," he said. He followed me into the kitchen. "Guido told me he's coming over to work on your project proposal later. I wondered if your digital editor was still giving you problems. Want me to take a look at it?"

  "I'd appreciate it," I said, handing him a glass of wine. He picked up the bottle, looked at the label, and whistled in appreciation.

  "Mike opened it," I said.

  He nodded, raised his glass to tap mine. "To Mike."

  "To Mike."

  I led him into my workroom.

  "I was thinking," Early said, "that the problem with your editor might be in the hardware and not with the software."

  "Another squirrel in the motor?" I asked.

  "About like that." He found a grounded screwdriver he liked from the bucket on the counter, sat down in front of the computer that held the editing program, and set to work with a happy gleam in his eye.

  I was happy to have some congenial company while I did work of my own. I put away Mike's files in the cupboard and started writing thank-you notes to the people who had sent flowers or food or performed any number of other kindnesses over the last week and a half. The list was huge. Time would have to be set aside every day until everyone on the list had been contacted.

  "Hardware problem, as I thought," Early said. "Faulty core processor."

  He went over to the cupboard and found a CPU that wasn't attached to anything.

  "Mind if I cannibalize this?" he asked.

  I said, "Go ahead."

  "I'll bring home a replacement part tomorrow."

  Twenty minutes later the transplant was complete, and successful. The editor was working.

  "I'm beholden," I said.

  He bowed, grinning.

  "Interesting name, Early," I said, sticking postage stamps onto the day's finished notes; it was dark outside.

  "Earl Edward," he said. "My dad was Earl Thomas. Folks called us Earl E. and Earl T."

  "Family nicknames." I chuckled. "My real name is Margot, but my older sister and brother always called me Maggot. I was happy when that morphed into Maggie."

  Outside there was a terrific racket of horses whinnying and neighing. Duke, Mike's big gelding, was as good as a sentry dog. When anyone approached, he set off the other two horses before they knew why. Duke liked to stand in the front corner of the corral, right where the headlights of cars coming around the last hairpin curve of the road would hit him square in the eyes. Long ago, I learned to snap off my lights before rounding that turn to spare Duke's sensibilities and to maintain peace in the neighborhood.

  "Guido's here," I said, glancing at my watch. It suddenly occurred to me that I was really very hungry. "He's supposed to be bringing food. You'll join us."

&
nbsp; It wasn't a question and he didn't bother with a demurrer.

  Guido came in laden with buckets of barbecued tri-tip, ribs and chicken, and various side dishes from the Wood Ranch Grill down by the freeway. Enough food for the rest of the week.

  During the evening the promo film got polished. I thought that it played very well, had an interesting look, good color and texture, crisp narrative with some attitude, some pathos, even hints of menace. I had no hesitation about handing it over to Lana for her review.

  When we were finished, I was very tired, but I didn't want the evening to end. We'd had fun. Just easy, relaxed fun among friends, colleagues. I gathered together the remnants of our meal, excused myself, went into the kitchen and wept.

  • • •

  After Guido and Early left, I didn't bother to go upstairs and climb into bed. I locked the door behind them, curled up on the living room sofa under an afghan, and went right to sleep.

  Mike was a terrible sleeper. Often, when I worked late, I would sleep on the sofa so that I wouldn't wake him by coming upstairs and fumbling around. He'd never get back to sleep if I did, and then we'd both be up half the night. So, from time to time I slept on the sofa.

  Sometime during the night I rose far enough out of a heavy, wine-assisted sleep to hear Mike moving around, a normal enough household sound. I felt Mike standing over me, checking on me, which he did sometimes when he wakened and I wasn't in bed. I was very sleepy, so I just snuggled down into the cushions and waited to fall back into the depths of sound sleep. A cool evening breeze, full of the scent of flowers, wafted across the room. Very pleasant.

  I sat bolt upright, suddenly fully awake, and peered into a room full of dark and shadows: If anyone was walking around the house that night, it certainly wasn't Mike Flint.

  Chapter 7

  Kenny Noble showed up at my house early the next morning. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Scientific Services Bureau team had already been there for a couple of hours, dusting for prints and looking for anything the intruder might have left behind. I had called Early immediately after talking to the 911 dispatcher and he had come over on the run. He was in the kitchen making coffee when the first deputy sheriffs arrived from the Malibu substation, lights and sirens, fifteen minutes later.