The place gave Hank the willies, but he’d learned to keep his repulsion off his face. How could a man supervise the homicide division if he got queasy around dead bodies? They didn’t bother him at crime scenes, no matter how gory. That is, unless the victim was a child. Children were the worst, even if the scene was only a traffic accident, not a murder. A child was like a spotless canvas. None of them deserved to die.
It was something about the tiled floors at the morgue, the chemicals, the grinders and slicers. Hank decided that after a person got killed, he or she went through a second butchering on a frigid autopsy table. He wouldn’t want his organs to end up as hamburger in one of Charley’s grinders.
“Okay,” the pathologist said, covering up a partially dissected young male on the table, pocketing his cell phone and keys, and stuffing some papers into a black leather satchel.
Hank stared at what looked like a small roast sitting on top of the scales. “What’s that?”
“A heart,” the pathologist said, rushing over to take care of it. “Thanks for reminding me. I started working on one of your shooting victims from the gang case. Everything needs to go back in the refrigerator until I get back.” He started to package up the heart himself but then hit the intercom and gave instructions to an assistant to finish the job.
Leading the detective out of the room and heading back the way they had come, he said, “I told you we had a problem with your case yesterday.” Their heels tapped on the floor as they walked. “It’s even worse than I thought. I spent an hour teleconferencing the case with Martha last night. She called me at midnight, and she was still at her lab. I was so tired, I passed out as soon as I got home. Martha’s a machine. She can work for days without sleeping.”
“You’re just bursting with good news,” Hank said, pulling out a toothpick and placing it between his teeth. “Lay it on me.”
“I don’t know how the hell we’re going to identify this woman. We can’t profile her by nuclear DNA typing like we normally do. The remains were in the Alessandro Lagoon for an unspecified period of time. Depending on rainfall and other factors, they were more than likely submerged, then exposed to high temperatures and humidity from the miserable summer we had.”
They stepped into the sunshine, and Hank slipped on his dark glasses. When they reached his unmarked black Crown Victoria in the parking lot, he hit the alarm button and unlocked the doors. “Didn’t you find some maggots in the grave? I thought you could tell something from what those nasty little suckers had eaten.”
“Unfortunately not,” Charley told him, climbing into the passenger seat and strapping on his seat belt. “The tissue the insects were consuming turned out to be cat gut. There was a partially decomposed cat a few feet away.”
“Partially decomposed? Why wasn’t the cat reduced to bones like the victim?”
“A rodent probably burrowed in with it. Then it later floated to the surface. Obviously, I haven’t had time to go over every detail. We have nothing more than the woman’s height and a speculation as to her general weight. There’s no sign of degeneration in her knees, so let’s say five four, weight between one twenty to one forty. Martha agrees that she’s probably in her thirties or early forties. Let’s hope she can come up with something more definitive.”
Hank turned the key, and the big engine engaged. “The last time we brought in an anthropologist, we didn’t hear back from the guy for over a year. He charged us a fortune to reconstruct the dead guy’s face with clay. In my opinion, it didn’t even look like a person, more like a doll or something, and an ugly one at that. That was five years ago, and we still haven’t identified the victim.” He pulled out of the parking lot and headed toward the 101 freeway. “Did Ferguson see anything that would give us the cause of death?”
“I already told you there was no blunt force trauma,” Charley told him. “Martha didn’t find any knife scrapings on the bones, which lowers the chances that the victim was stabbed. Her jaw was gaping, but there’s no way to know if her mouth was open at the time of death or if it just collapsed that way during decomposition. It could have also happened when the killer moved her. I’d say strangulation or suffocation, but the killer could have held her head underwater out there until she drowned, along with dozens of other scenarios. Without tissue, for all we know, she could have starved to death, or the killer may have buried her alive.”
“Now that’s a pleasant thought,” Hank said, directing a harsh glance toward the pathologist. All this fancy equipment and brain power, and they knew nothing more than the day before.
They made it to the 405, one of the most heavily traveled freeways in the country, and headed south toward Los Angeles. Early afternoon, and already the traffic was bumper to bumper.
Charley said, “Now that we’re on the subject, are you still dieting?”
“I watch what I eat.” Hank proudly sucked in his stomach, then pounded it with his fist. “That’s solid muscle, my friend. I run two miles every other day, do a hundred sit-ups every morning, and lift weights for an hour. I feel like I’m twenty again. The only problem is my belly feels like a tin drum with a dime rolling around inside. Right now, it wouldn’t be satisfied if I fed it an entire cow.”
“Ah,” Charley said, “that’s why you’re so anxious lately. Don’t lose too much weight. It isn’t healthy. You might be trying to push your body below its set weight. If that’s the case, you’ll be battling this forever.”
“It’s more like a war than a battle,” Hank said. “If I let myself, I could pack on ten pounds in a week. Forget about me. You had to find something worthwhile about our Jane Doe.”
“CSI recovered a few hairs, but they’re missing follicles and roots. One of the reasons we think she was buried somewhere else, then moved, was there wasn’t any sign of clothing.”
The detective was tempted to turn on his lights and siren to navigate around the traffic. Insisting on accompanying Charley may have been a poor decision. But now that he was a lieutenant, he had other officers to do the grunt work. And he had a vested interest in this homicide. Most murderers he didn’t know. Carl Holden was the scum of the earth. The man didn’t suffer from a mental illness, nor was he retarded. Although Carolyn said his mother may have abused him, causing him to develop a hatred for women, who gave a damn? Every killer out there claimed a history of abuse. Hank’s mother used to lash him with a belt, and he hadn’t turned into a murderer. That psychological stuff was nothing but bullshit. Tracy Anderson had been a beautiful young woman with an adorable four-year-old boy. If the child hadn’t been at Tracy’s mother’s house on the day Holden murdered her, he would more than likely have been killed as well.
Sammy Anderson would be twelve by now. He recalled Carolyn telling him about having seen the boy with his father at the Olive Garden. How would the poor kid feel when he learned that the man who had murdered his mother had been released from prison because of an incompetent scientist?
“Any news on the Abernathy homicide?” he asked Charley. Even though Oxnard had its own police department, it was still part of Ventura County, and their crimes were processed at the same labs.
“I’m not handling it,” Charley told him. “From what I understand, dozens of people wanted him dead.”
“Dozens is an understatement. It looked like an execution to me. They tried to get a match on the partial print and came up with nothing. The shooter had grease or something on his hands, so the print was distorted. The kill shot was perfectly placed. And unlike most people, he didn’t pump the guy full of bullets to make certain he was dead. He only fired one time. My guess is that the murderer served time in the military. If not, someone might have hired a professional assassin.”
“Where are you going, Hank?” Charley asked, looking out the window. “We were supposed to exit on Wilshire. You drove right past it.”
Hank took the next exit and used the side streets to make his way back over to the right street. “Were the hairs the CSI guys found human?”
<
br /> “Yes. They had to sift through a ton of cat hair to find them. The hairs are only a few centimeters long, and we don’t know if they’re from the killer or the victim. That’s the only break we’ve caught so far.”
Big break, Hank thought facetiously. “What’s next?”
“Mitochondrial DNA typing is all that’s left. Belinda Connors will have to get approval from the top.” Connors had replaced Robert Abernathy as the new chief of forensics. “We use an outside lab, and it’s extremely costly. Mary Stevens called me this morning. She said our victim might be a woman who disappeared from San Diego about a year ago. The height and weight match, and the woman was thirty-six years old. I can’t be certain about time of death. That’s another thing we might learn if we run mtDNA on the remains. We can compare the findings to a body whose time of death is known. A year could be on the money, and then again, we might be looking at five or ten years. If she’d been buried in a cooler, dryer place, the bones would have been able to tell us more.”
Hank wasn’t impressed with Mary’s assumption that the missing woman in San Diego was their murder victim. Mary was smart all right, and a damn hard worker, but she had a tendency to jump to conclusions. “Most of the females aren’t even missing. They know where they are. They just don’t want anyone else to know. Half the time they’re running from an abusive spouse or boyfriend. We can’t find anyone these days. You know what I think?”
“No,” the pathologist said, pressing his glasses farther up on his nose, “but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
Hank thought about how many people were killed every day, and his mind summoned up images of his own body on one of Charley’s autopsy tables. “Promise me something, okay? If some asshole shoots me, don’t grind me up or put me through one of your slicers.”
Charley laughed. “I’ll use the Stryker saw instead.”
“You’re a prick, you know,” Hank told him, his body twitching with tension. “I don’t know how you can do what you do. I don’t have the stomach for it. Anyway, what was I saying?”
“Something about why you can’t find anyone.” Charley saw a street sign just then that prompted him to call out, “Turn here.”
Hank careened around the corner, picking up where he’d left off. “It’s the Internet. It’s taught everyone to lie. Even old ladies have dozens of AKAs. They’re in chat rooms, trying to pick up men, or using their kid’s credit cards to buy stuff they don’t need. Sex Starved Wanda or Lizzy Big Boobs can turn out to be ninety years old. Can you believe this crap?”
“So, you’ve finally learned to use the Internet?”
“Just because I know how to use it doesn’t mean I like it. Jesus, Charley, a monkey could use the Internet.” The detective spat his toothpick out the window. “We busted one guy who’d gone to court and legally changed his name to the one he used on his e-mail. Cyberspace, my ass. It’s a hotbed of criminal activity.”
“Thanks for reminding me,” Charley said, opening his briefcase and pulling out his Blackberry. “I need to check my e-mail.”
“Put that away,” Hank barked. “Check your e-mail later, damn it. How long is this other test going to take?”
“Don’t you ever use your onboard computer?”
“I use it now and then. Just answer my question.”
“Okay, mtDNA typing can take two analysts almost a month per case. That’s why it’s expensive. And there’s also a risk of consuming the sample. Then if they come up with a different result, they don’t have anything left to test. This was probably what caused Abernathy to do the things he did. He consumed samples, making it impossible to verify his conclusions. And in his case, it wasn’t that he didn’t have an adequate sample. He failed to collect the necessary material, and he handled it incorrectly in the lab.” The pathologist rubbed his palms on his thighs. “Back to your Jane Doe. The thing is, even after we get the results, we still might not know who she is, unless she happens to come up in the FBI’s DNA database, which is probably a long shot since she’s female. Check and see what the San Diego PD collected as evidence from the missing woman’s residence. Get me some decent samples, and maybe we’ll eventually arrive at some answers. If nothing else, it’ll give me a stronger reason to push the county into footing the bill for mtDNA analysis.”
“I’ll get Mary on it right away,” Hank said, parking in front of a three-story brown brick building and getting out. The street was lined with mature trees, and it was far enough away from Wilshire that the traffic noise was minimal. “Does Ferguson own the building? How much does this broad make?”
“Her company owns it,” Charley said, somewhat enviously. “She makes more than we do, that’s for certain. They called her in to identify victims from nine-eleven. She started out at the CILHI, the US Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii, working on the remains of Vietnam vets. Her father went MIA in ’Nam. His body has never been located.”
Hank fell silent as they walked down a sidewalk leading to the front of the building, his original assessment of the redheaded anthropologist changing. Like Mary Stevens, Dr. Martha Ferguson must have decided to enter her profession due to the tragedy surrounding her father’s death, something a man had to respect.
After they spoke to a receptionist, they took a seat in the waiting room. The sofas were worn, and the surfaces of the tables bore circles where people had placed leaking cups of sodas or coffee. The anthropologist might own the building, Hank thought, but she didn’t appear to have a desire to impress anyone. He slouched in his seat, his stomach growling from hunger. He’d learned to accept the hunger pains, knowing they meant he wasn’t overeating as he’d done in the past.
“Any luck tracking down Holden?” Charley asked.
“Not yet,” Hank said, cracking his knuckles.
“Did you see the paper this morning? Your murderer already has a name. Since Holden was cleared in the Tracy Anderson case, they’re leading up to classifying him as a serial killer.” He opened his briefcase and removed the Ventura Star, handing it to the detective.
Hank sat up in his seat, glancing at the headline on the front page: SWEEPER STRIKES AGAIN. “Goddamn reporters,” he said, scanning the article. “All I said was the killer hadn’t left us much in the way of evidence. Sadistic bastard is probably eating this up. I never said he meticulously cleans up after himself, or any of this other shit they printed.”
“He does, though.” Charley told him, closing his briefcase. “Why do you think Abernathy perjured himself in Holden’s trial? What he found under Anderson’s fingernails might not have been enough to test properly. Holden must have spent hours going over that body. And dumping the garbage in the grave was brilliant. Consider yourself lucky that this man spent eight years behind bars. He could have killed a dozen women in that length of time.”
Martha Ferguson burst through the doors, and both men stood. She was wearing a white lab coat, its top buttons undone, and her ample breasts looked as if they were about to pop out. Her red hair was tousled, her green eyes blazing, and her freckled Irish skin was beet red from the days they’d spent at the lagoon in the sun. “Hello, Charley,” she said, pumping his hand. Then she stared at Hank. “What do you think you’re doing here?”
“Nice to see you, too,” Hank answered. “I’m trying to solve a homicide. That’s my job, in case you’ve forgotten.”
“I sent my progress reports to Detective Stevens last night,” she advised. “Maybe by the end of the day we’ll have more. Right now, Dr. Young and I need to get to work.”
“I’m sorry, Martha,” Charley said, his face flushed. “Hank and I came in the same car. I don’t have a way to get home. I can only stay a few hours, anyway. He’s a good man. He’ll stay out of your way.”
“Humph,” she said, her eyes drifting up and down Hank’s body. “Well, it looks like I don’t have a choice. This way, gentlemen.”
She gestured toward the door she’d come out of, and waited for the two men to enter. When Hank stepp
ed into the hallway, he felt something and whipped his head around. The anthropologist winked at him and smiled. Hank didn’t know if he should be mad or flattered. The esteemed Dr. Martha Ferguson had just pinched his ass.
CHAPTER 14
Tuesday, September 19—9:45 A.M.
Kathleen Dupont Masters sat in her blue Mercedes SL500, waiting for her husband’s private jet to land at the Monterey Peninsula Airport. Standing five ten, she had shoulder-length curly blond hair and blue eyes. She’d always been self-conscious about her height and therefore had a tendency to roll her shoulders forward in order to appear smaller. Her most distinguishing feature was her manner of speaking. She was incredibly articulate, each word perfectly formed, delivered with a slow and measured tempo. People sometimes thought she was a newscaster or radio commentator.
Kathleen’s husband, Dean, had made a million-dollar commitment to Jet USA. She would have never spent that kind of money when airline fares were so cheap. But to his credit, with only a phone call he had access to a fleet of jets to take him anywhere he needed to go. He used the plane primarily to fly from one golf tournament to another, chasing his childhood dream to become a PGA pro. He’d failed to make it through qualifying school the previous year. Right now, he played on the smaller, less lucrative tours. She knew he wouldn’t be satisfied until he made it to the big time.
Even though her husband was independently wealthy, their spacious home had been a part of her divorce settlement, and she took care of most of the ancillary expenses. When two people knew they had more money than they could spend in a lifetime, it didn’t matter who wrote the checks.
Today was Kathleen’s forty-third birthday. Because her job selling real estate necessitated that she entertain clients, she’d recently picked up a few pounds, most of it around her waist. Her weight was still below average for her height and age, but her husband thought she looked best when her ribs showed and her stomach was concave. She attempted to camouflage the extra inches by wearing loose-fitting jackets over short skirts that showed off her long legs.
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