The Burning Plain

by Michael Nava

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  He chugalugged coffee. “I mean it. You’ll be old and fat soon enough and no one will want you. Get it while you can.”

  “You give your daughter the same advice?”

  He smiled. “Believe me, my daughter doesn’t need my help in that department. She runs girlfriends hot and cold.”

  “Do you know what the phrase cognitive dissonance means?”

  “Seeing ain’t believing?” he ventured.

  “Basically,” I said. “That’s how I feel when I talk to you. You look like Archie Bunker, but you sure don’t sound like him. On the subject of gays, anyway.”

  “My daughter came out to me when she was seventeen, I had to choose between the things I was taught about homosexuals and what I knew about her,” he said. “I’m a practical man. It wasn’t a hard choice.”

  I thought about Ron Travis. “Not every parent feels that way about their gay kid.”

  He stuffed a bit of muffin his mouth. “Things are changing. Be patient.”

  “They’re not changing fast enough for my friends who’ve died.”

  “Close friends?”

  “The man I lived with,” I said. “He died about a year ago.”

  He nodded, as if in confirmation. “I wondered why you were alone.”

  I shrugged. “I’m alone because I’m cranky and choosy.”

  He smiled. “You know Tim down at the station? My jailer? He’s single.”

  “Are you trying to set me up?” I laughed. “Is that why you dropped by?”

  “It’s just a suggestion,” he said. “It’s not why I dropped by. I came to see you about Gaitan.”

  My mirth evaporated. “What about him?”

  “I’ve been conducting a little unofficial investigation,” Odell said, clawing a chunk from the second muffin. He popped it into his mouth. “You were right. He planted the fiber evidence in the cab.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “The fiber samples they took from Amerian’s body disappeared out of the evidence locker at the crime lab after they were analyzed.”

  “How could they match the fibers they found in the car if the fibers were gone?”

  “They did it on paper,” he replied. “They analyzed the fibers from the trunk and matched them to the earlier analysis of the fibers from the body.”

  “No one bothered to mention to me the sample had disappeared.”

  “No one knew but the lab. I also called the FBI and talked to their fiber guy about your theory of how the fibers should’ve shed if the body was wrapped in a blanket in the trunk. He said you were right.”

  “Why did you call the FBI?”

  “I wanted an objective opinion,” he said.

  “You don’t trust your crime lab?”

  He shrugged. “Someone in the lab removed the fiber sample and gave it to Gaitan.”

  “You know that for a fact?”

  “There’s no other way it could’ve been done, because the lab people are the only ones who would have had access to the sample.”

  “That’s circumstantial, at best.”

  “Gaitan has an old partner from his Antelope Valley days. Jim Roca. Roca’s brother-in-law works in the lab. Hair and Fiber. His name is Stan Bedell. He did the analysis.”

  “Gaitan and Roca still keep in touch?”

  “They and a couple of other deputies own a cabin up at Big Bear.”

  “Was Roca part of the vigilantes you were sent to Antelope Valley to break up?”

  “He was one of the ones that was transferred.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “Gaitan sees Bedell’s name on the fiber report and calls his compadre Roca,” Odell said. “Roca has a word with his brother-in-law. The sample disappears.”

  “Wouldn’t Bedell have to account for it?”

  Odell shrugged. “There’s thousands of bits of evidence in the locker. Some of it gets lost.”

  “It was several weeks between the discovery of Alex’s body and the impounding of the car. Did Gaitan hang on to the fiber sample all that time?”

  “Yeah, waiting for his opportunity to use it,” Odell said. “You see, I told you the good news first. There’s bad news, too.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The bloodstain in the trunk they matched to the Baldwin boy, that wasn’t a plant.”

  “You’re sure?”

  He nodded. “They drew blood for a tox screen,” he said. “The remaining sample’s never been tampered with.”

  “What about the paint transfer on the cab?”

  “It’s like you said, no one asked the lab how old the scratch was. The car’s out of impound. There’s no way of telling now.”

  “But it’s possible that Gaitan planted the fibers and scraped the car against the fence at the same time.”

  “Yeah, it’s possible,” he said. He tore off a piece of the croissant. “Of course, there’s that eyewitness who claims she saw Travis coming out of the alley where Amerian was dumped.”

  “A witness procured by Gaitan,” I reminded him. “I never interviewed her. It seemed pointless after Travis died. Did I tell you he said he wasn’t using the cab the weekend Alex was murdered?”

  Odell was unimpressed. “What else was he going to say?”

  “His alibi was that he used the cab after his car broke down. I saw a receipt that shows he didn’t take his car into the shop until the Wednesday after Alex was killed.”

  Odell said, “All that means is that Gaitan planted the evidence in the wrong car, not that Travis didn’t kill Amerian.”

  “If he did, it’s inconsistent with the other two killings,” I said. “Serial killers don’t change their methods.”

  “The man’s car broke down. He needed another vehicle to pick up his victims,” Odell said. “I’m sorry, Henry, but just because Gaitan planted evidence doesn’t make Travis innocent. Gaitan didn’t make the case up, he made it stronger.”

  “What are you going to do about him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “If Travis had lived and you had given me this information, he would’ve walked.”

  “Yeah,” Odell said. “Maybe.”

  “Would you have told me?”

  “If he confessed to you he was the killer, would you have told me?”

  “It’s not the same thing. A defendant has his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination. You have a duty to turn over exonerating evidence.”

  “It didn’t exonerate him,” he said. He eyed my untouched pastry. “You going to eat that?”

  I pushed the plate across the table. “You would’ve let the man go to prison on falsified evidence?”

  “The man was guilty,” Odell said, munching the danish.

  A couple of nights later, I was watching the local news when, on the screen, behind the anchorwoman’s bland, robotic face, came a fuzzy picture, clearly from a driver’s license, of a dark-haired girl. I hit the volume button.

  “… the remains of twenty-four-year-old Katherine Morse were found in a shallow grave in a remote section of Griffith Park this afternoon by two hikers. The woman’s family in Fresno had not heard from her for several months, after she told them she was moving from the Bay Area, where she had lived, to Los Angeles. Police had declined to list the woman as missing, because she had been out of touch with her family before. Today, however, the mystery of her whereabouts was tragically solved. Now, on a happier note …”

  Katherine Morse. Katie. Alex Amerian’s roommate.

  I gave it a day before I decided the coincidence that both Alex and Katie had been murdered was worth looking into, if for no other reason than to assure myself it was a coincidence. Since her body had been found in Griffith Park, her murder was under the jurisdiction of LAPD, but I figured Odell could obtain a copy of the police report.

  “Odell,” he barked into the phone, when I reached him at the West Hollywood station.

  “It’s Rios,” I said. “
I have a favor to ask you.”

  “A favor?” he said. “Do I owe you?”

  “Morally.”

  He laughed. “Shoot.”

  “A couple of hikers in Griffith Park found the remains of a young girl on Friday,” I said. “Her name was Katie Morse. She was Alex Amerian’s roommate. She disappeared the day after he was murdered.”

  “Yeah, I heard about that.”

  “Interesting coincidence,” I observed.

  “I remember the girl was heavy into drugs. That’s a dangerous lifestyle.”

  “Did anyone actually follow up and try to find her at the time Alex was killed?”

  “I couldn’t tell you offhand,” he replied.

  “I’d like to look at the police report.”

  Silence. “Maybe I would, too,” he said.

  “Can you get it?”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  I heard from him the next morning.

  “It’s pretty straightforward,” he said. “Cause of death was blunt force trauma. The medical examiner says her skull was smashed. She was buried in a shallow grave. No signs of rape, but there wasn’t much left after the animals got to her.”

  “When was she killed?”

  “Sometime in the last three months,” he said.

  “Nothing more specific?”

  “The last time anyone heard from her was her brother in Fresno. She sent him a birthday card around the middle of June.”

  “The middle of June covers a lot of ground,” I said.

  “Amerian was killed the first weekend,” he reminded me. “That’s the beginning of June, no matter how you slice it.”

  “But you don’t have a specific date.”

  “You must be real good on cross,” he said. “No specific date.”

  “Didn’t it worry her family that they hadn’t heard from her in two months?”

  “The father told LAPD Katie was a drug addict who left home when she was seventeen,” he said. “Reading between the lines I’d say they didn’t care if they heard from her or not. The brother tried to file a missing person’s report with LAPD in July, but after they got the full story from the parents, they declined to accept it.”

  “What kind of substances did she abuse?”

  “Ecstasy, Special K, plus stuff I’m sure there’s no name for yet.”

  “Those are party drugs,” I said. “She wasn’t an addict, she was just a club kid.”

  “If you say so,” he replied, the disapproval in his voice reminding me he was a cop.

  “Do you think her disappearance is related to Alex’s murder?”

  “We don’t even know when she disappeared,” he said. “All we know is that she wasn’t there the morning after.”

  “The place had been tossed,” I said.

  “Or maybe they were bad housekeepers,” he replied. “Look, if she sent her brother a birthday card in the middle of June, she was still alive.”

  “Anyone bother to ask him if the card had a return address?”

  “I’m sure LAPD is working on it.”

  “What’s the brother’s name?” I asked, reaching for a pen.

  “Come on, Henry,” he said gruffly. “You know I’m not giving you that information.”

  “It’s relevant to Travis’s case.”

  “Travis is dead,” he replied. “You don’t have a client, you don’t have an interest.”

  “Will you at least tell LAPD about a possible connection?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ll pass that along.”

  Odell was right, of course. I had no evidence Katie had disappeared the Friday Alex was murdered. She could simply have not come home that night. At the time, Richie claimed she was dealing drugs, and if that was true, fearing the cops, she might not have returned to the apartment at all once she heard Alex had been killed. But certain images of that morning disturbed me when I remembered them: the phone, pulled from the jack and left lying in the hall; the cardboard boxes in her room full with rumpled clothes; the missing computer; the screen that had been removed from one of the windows in the back of the house. Something had happened there that night. As I mentally walked myself through the apartment, I remembered taking a receipt of some kind from her desk, a pay stub. I found it in my wallet, tucked away with the two unused movie tickets to Letters. Until I held the tickets between my fingers, what I remembered about Alex Amerian was inextricable from the grotesque manner of his death. But now he came back to me, in vivid physical detail, and I relived again the shy hopefulness I’d felt when he agreed to go out with me, the surge of desire when he walked through the door of the restaurant. I remembered how we’d slipped into each other’s nakedness and how Josh had seemed to inhabit him, and I remembered the ugly scene afterward, his blood dripping from the doorknob. My memories of Alex unfolded like a movie, from our first meeting to the jagged final images, the black-and-white photos of his mutilated body. The discovery of Katie’s body was like an unexplained coda. I felt, without being able to say why, something crucial was missing.

  I called the temp agency named on the pay stub. A brisk woman answered the phone with a clipped, “Temporarily Yours. This is Judy. How can I help you?” When I explained that I was calling about Katie Morse, she said, “Well, it’s about time.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I called you last week, as soon as I saw the news.” She paused. “You are the police, aren’t you?”

  I couldn’t remember whether impersonating an officer was a misdemeanor or a felony, so, leaving myself wiggle room, I said, “I’m working with Sergeant Lucas Odell at the West Hollywood sheriff’s station. Can you answer a couple of questions?”

  “If you make it quick. I do have a business to run.”

  “When did Katie last work for you?”

  “That’s why I called you,” she said, with exasperation. “On the news they said no one knew when she disappeared. I checked her time sheets. We placed her with a law firm in Century City on a nine-week job in mid-April. She worked through May and the first week of June, then she didn’t show up and I couldn’t get ahold of her. The firm was very upset.”

  “Was she a flake?”

  “No, not at all,” the woman said. “That’s why I was worried, but when she didn’t return my phone messages, I pulled her card from my Rolodex. I mean, let’s face it, they don’t call this temp work for nothing. People come and go. But I was surprised that Katie just disappeared.”

  “Could you fax me her time sheet?”

  “Of course.”

  “Did she fill out any kind of application with you?”

  “Yes, our standard agreement.”

  “Could you fax me that, too?”

  “Give me your fax number and I’ll do it right now, before I get any busier.”

  I gave her the number. “Did you know anything about her personal situation?”

  “Honestly? No. She’d only been with us a couple of months and I really only saw her on Fridays when she picked up her paycheck. She was a nice girl, very pretty. I was sorry to hear about her.”

  “Can I call you back if I have any other questions?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Just ask for Judy. Who are you?”

  “Detective Gaitan,” I said. “G-A-I-T-A-N.”

  Five minutes later, I was looking over Katie Morse’s employment application. The most interesting thing on it was under the heading PERSON TO BE NOTIFIED IN CASE OF EMERGENCY, where she had scribbled, “Rod Morse.” Under RELATIONSHIP TO APPLICANT, she’d written “brother,” but instead of an address or phone number, all she had provided was an e-mail address. That night I went on-line and sent a message to RMorse@Osiris.net:

  Dear Rod, I’m an attorney in Los Angeles who knew your sister and her roommate, Alex Amerian. I would be interested in talking to you about her disappearance and death because Alex was killed around the same time and I’m wondering if there was a connection. Please e-mail or call me at 213-555-4592. Sincerely, Henry Rios.


  I checked my e-mail every day for the next week, but there was no response from Rod Morse, nor did he call me. I didn’t think I could get away with another call to the temp agency, so I was reduced to checking the paper to see if the police had uncovered any new information about Katie, but she wasn’t mentioned again. Her disappearance was complete.

  “henry, are you there?” The voice on my answering machine was whispery and hoarse, as if the air had been squeezed from it, but still recognizable.

  I picked up the phone. “Richie?”

  He sneezed. “There’s a special place in hell for queens who screen their calls.”

  “Are you all right? When did you get back?”

  “Summer cold,” he grumbled. “Just now.”

  “Where were you?”

  “Here and there,” he said, vaguely. “I got your message about Duke. Thanks, Henry. My lawyer is composing a groveling letter of apology.” He coughed. “I’m all by myself. Come and see me.”

  “I was sorry to hear about you and Joel.”

  “All good things come to an end,” he croaked. “Come for tea? Four-ish?”

  Javier—Richie’s houseman—let me in. He was a man of indeterminate age, somewhere between thirty and sixty, whom Richie had helped escape from El Salvador where, as a homosexual, he had been reviled by both sides in that country’s endless civil war. There had been some trouble with INS, which refused to grant refugee status to immigrants who had been persecuted because of their homosexuality on the grounds that they were mere criminals. I represented him pro bono at the INS hearing, where he described how government soldiers had stuck bamboo splints into his urethra. When he was given his green card, he kissed my hand. I had never felt so humbled.

  “Hello, Javier.”

  He smiled formally. “Señor Henry.”

  “Richie invited me to tea.”

  “He’s in the living room.”

  I found Richie in the sky-blue living room, seated before the tiled fireplace, where a fire was burning, though it was ninety outside. The room was refrigerated. I thought of Duke Asuras and wondered whether fires in the summer was simply the latest trend among the rich; no quarter to nature given there. Richie was dressed like a character from a novel by Somerset Maugham set on the Riviera in a thick blue-and-white striped terry-cloth robe with a lavender silk scarf elaborately wound around his neck. He wore monogrammed espadrilles. At his elbow a lacquered table held a tea service, including plates of crustless sandwiches and fruit tarts. He was smoking and wheezing. I eased into the chair opposite him. His skin was yellowish and he looked fevered and ill.