California Girl

by T. Jefferson Parker

  David labored to his desk, consulted a book, and scribbled down a name and number.

  “Rest up for round two, David. You were great.”

  “Nick? You won’t find a killer in my church.”

  “How do you know?”

  David studied his younger brother. Even in his own exhaustion David was alert enough to see the change in Nick. Janelle? The pressure to find who killed her? This was Nick’s first case as lead. Scary.

  “Are you okay?” David asked.

  “Yeah, I’m perfect.”

  David had the thought that Nick and Katy weren’t right. With married men, it presented as dull anger. Married men became resentful in looking for something that had vanished. Looking for something they used to love but couldn’t find anymore. Being married with children was hard. David knew that, all right. Sometimes it seemed like everything in the world conspired to make you lose the love for what you once loved most.

  “You and Katy all right?”

  “Same old.”

  “I’ll pray for you.”

  “Thanks, brother.”

  Nick walked out and David prayed. A short one for Nick and Katy. Let them enjoy each other and find each other again in this busy…but fell asleep halfway through it. Lurched awake six minutes later to rewrite the sermon just a little for the eleven o’clock.

  14

  NICK SAT IN Assistant Sheriff Gorman Harloff’s office arranging his notes before he spoke. Monday morning. Clear and warm. Five days since the packinghouse.

  Harloff was dark-lipped, silver-haired, and humorless. Sometimes referred to as Boris Karloff but never to his face. He had Crimes Against Persons and narcotics under him. CAP included homicide. He had a pen in hand and a legal pad on the desk.

  Lobdell sat beside Nick staring down at his small, shiny shoes.

  “Shoot,” said Harloff.

  “Yes, sir,” said Nick. “Janelle Vonn died of strangulation last Tuesday the first, sometime between noon and midnight. It looks like she was killed somewhere else but decapitated in the packinghouse. This, from the amount of blood we found. Our witness, Terry Neemal, says he saw a man go into the packinghouse late the night of the first. Neemal said the man was regular-sized and had something bulky over his shoulders.”

  “Like a body?”

  “That’s possible, sir.”

  “Strong guy. She weighed what?”

  “One hundred and twelve pounds.”

  “Pretty strong,” said Lobdell, lighting a cigarette. “If he’s wearing her like a mink stole.”

  “But not a big man,” said Harloff.

  Nick waited while Harloff wrote. “Even with the tearing and trauma to her neck, Gershon found constriction marks. They’re consistent with the shape of fingers and thumbs. None of the postmortem mutilation would account for them.”

  “The sawing,” said Harloff.

  “Correct. She was raped by a type A secretor. Gershon found semen inside her, genital bruising and abrasions. But here’s a twist, sir—there was semen on her underwear also—type A non-secretor.”

  “Two guys might have killed her?” asked Harloff.

  “Maybe.”

  “This Neemal, then?” asked Harloff. “What’s his ABO?”

  “He’s type A also,” said Lobdell.

  Harloff made a note. “Between the O and the A, that would include what, about eighty-five percent of the population?”

  “Correct,” said Nick. “We’d have better odds if neither was a secretor at all.”

  “But don’t forget,” said Lobdell, “that Neemal is certifiably insane.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Harloff. “That he’s more likely or less likely to have raped a woman and chopped her head off?”

  “More, I’d say,” answered Lobdell. He blew one good ring, then a plume of Tareyton smoke toward the ceiling. “Look, he’s creeping around that night, says he saw this, says he saw that. Oh yeah? I think we should sweat him. See what comes out.”

  Harloff looked at Nick. “Any of Neemal’s fingerprints at the scene?”

  “None,” said Nick. “He says he walked into the packinghouse, saw her, turned around, and walked back out. This was the next morning.”

  Harloff wrote again. “The building wasn’t locked?”

  “Neemal said he saw the guy slide open the main door. We found a padlock in the grove. Partial print on the lock. Not Neemal’s.”

  “Who does security?”

  “Talon,” said Nick. “They only patrol the SunBlesst site Thursday through Sunday. So their last check would have been two days earlier.”

  Harloff wrote.

  “Something’s interesting, though,” said Lobdell. “One of the Talon guards told us the older padlocks get hard to open. Rain and sun and they corrode. Won’t take the key. Said you can line up the Schlage to look locked when it really isn’t. You just get the links up inside the shackle and it looks locked. Then, you’re making the rounds you just pull down and twist it open, pull it off, and you’re done. Don’t have to wrestle with a difficult lock and key. He wasn’t the SunBlesst guard. Maybe just a blowhard, but that could have been what happened.”

  Harloff considered. “But none of the SunBlesst guards said the lock and key were bad?”

  “Nope,” said Lobdell. “Not that they would.”

  Harloff wrote, frowned. Wrote some more. “Go on.”

  “She was approximately eight weeks pregnant,” said Nick. “The zygote was apparently healthy at the time of her death.”

  “Wish it could talk,” said Lobdell.

  “I do, too,” said Nick. “No drugs in her system. We believe she was an LSD user but there’s no test for that. Blood alcohol was point-zero-eight, so she was drinking moderately. Except for the decapitation, she wasn’t mutilated or tortured.”

  “Pretty big exception,” said Lobdell.

  “She defended herself. We got flesh and blood scrapings from under a thumbnail and three fingernails on her right hand. Type O. I had three fingers and a thumb amputated and frozen along with the scrapings.”

  Nick saw the rise of Harloff’s eyebrow but the assistant sheriff said nothing.

  “She’d eaten Mexican food approximately four hours before she died,” said Nick. “Gershon found it in her large intestine. I corroborated this with some take-out containers and a receipt in a wastebasket in her kitchen. Apparently she ate at home that night, with two men—‘Red’ and ‘Ho.’ Obviously they’re key, but I haven’t come up with them. Yet.”

  “She have a date book?” asked Harloff.

  “Yes, sir. It had the Red and Ho date, and lots more. And I found plenty of phone numbers and notes and scribbles in her house. Several pages torn from pay phone books, with names and numbers circled. Matchbooks. Business cards. She knew a lot of people. She had a wide range of friends and acquaintances.”

  “Boyfriends?”

  “At least one,” said Nick. “A singer. Says he was up in Los Angeles that night. The names and numbers he gave me checked out. I’ll talk to him again.”

  Harloff nodded. “I guess a fallen beauty queen might have as many boyfriends as she wanted.”

  “We found some of her clothes thrown off toward one corner of the packinghouse,” Nick said. “A black miniskirt and boots. No blood on them. No physiological fluids at all. So, he—or they—must have taken off those clothes before they used the saw.”

  “What about that saw?” asked Harloff.

  “A folding pruning saw with a ten-inch blade—‘Trim-Quick.’ It’s made by Garden Forge. Wooden handle, sells for around four dollars. It appears to be either new or very lightly used. The blade was ripped off where the bolt goes into the wood and we haven’t come up with it. Yet. Maybe he took it with him. No prints on the handle but lots of blood. All samples we took off it were type B—Janelle’s type. We’re checking Tustin area nurseries and hardware stores that might carry them.”

  “How long would it take?”

  “What, sir?”
r />   “To saw off her head.”

  “Gershon said that depended on how hard he worked at it. Strong man, going fast, two or three minutes.”

  Harloff made a note of this, too. “Seems slow to me. Neemal see a car that night?”

  “A large light-colored four-door,” said Nick. “He didn’t see it real well. He said maybe a Cadillac or a Lincoln or one of the big Chryslers. Late model.”

  “His arm really have that much hair on it? The paper made him look like an ape.”

  “There’s a patch of it that thick, sir. A dermatologist in Santa Ana told me it’s a type of birthmark. Rare. You see them on dark-skinned people. Neemal’s mom was Haitian.”

  “Find any of those hairs on Janelle?”

  “No.”

  “Wouldn’t the papers love that?” Lobdell asked. “Your brother could write Wolfman stories for weeks. Then a book and a movie.”

  “My brother’s story was good,” said Nick. “He played down the Wolfman stuff.”

  Lobdell shrugged. “I had a birthmark like that, I might go crazy, too.”

  “Neemal tried to kill his brother when he was just a child?” asked Harloff.

  “Yes, sir. Set him on fire. The record is sealed but Neemal’s old juvenile investigator works Burg-Theft here.”

  “But the brother lived?”

  “Third-degree burns over forty percent of his body. He died of cancer at twenty-five.”

  Harloff wrote again. “We’ve charged Neemal with the small stuff, so we can keep him?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Nick. “Vagrancy and trespassing. We could bump it to destruction of property and indecent exposure because he was crapping in the orange grove. Judge Miller came in high, as we asked. And Neemal has no money for a bond, anyway. So he’s not going anywhere.”

  “Should we work up a case for murder?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Nick. “But I’ll want to interview him some more. He’s valuable as a witness. And if we cut him loose we might never see him again.”

  Lobdell lit another smoke. “Speaking of cuts, you left out the Wolfman’s hands, Nicky.”

  “Neemal has small cuts and abrasions,” said Nick.

  “Consistent with defense wounds,” said Lobdell. “According to the examiner.”

  “But apparently a few days old,” said Nick.

  “Look,” said Lobdell. “In my opinion, if you have a dead beauty queen and an attempted murderer who finds her, doesn’t tell anybody, then says some regular-sized Hercules lugged her into a packinghouse, and you got his semen on her and his hands are scratched up—guess what? You charge him. They’ll just toss him back in the loony bin anyway.”

  Harloff flipped a yellow page, wrote something, and underlined it twice. “Nick?”

  “I’m not ready to charge him.”

  “His first case as lead,” said Lobdell. “He’s being careful. Everything by the book.”

  Nick nodded, staring at Lobdell. He knew Harloff saw it but he didn’t care.

  “What are your conclusions so far, Nick?”

  “The key is the dinner. Who are Red and Ho? They might have been the last people to see her alive. They might even be our A and O secretors. The wine and water glasses in Janelle’s cottage were covered with prints. All we could get were smudges and overlaps. Bad luck. Just a mess.”

  Harloff nodded. Nick knew that Harloff had worked Crimes Against Persons for most of his career. So Harloff understood that too many prints was almost as bad as none at all.

  “The doorknobs gave us nothing but Janelle,” said Nick. He felt like he was making excuses. He wanted Harloff to know he was going to get this guy if it was the last thing he did.

  “But we’ve got good descriptions, sir. The Pepito’s hostess said Janelle came in with two men to pick up the order. Said they were both squares. Shirts and ties. Early thirties, both white. One was six foot one or so. Brown hair cut fairly short. Mustache. Good-looking but not overly so. Second was five-nine, short blond hair. Clean-shaven. The hostess is about Janelle’s age. I asked her if there was anything threatening about the men. Anything odd or off or maybe dangerous. Nervous, agitated. She said no. Two ‘full-on squares’ is what she said. One even wore a flag pin. Neither spoke to her. They took the food and talked to each other while Janelle paid for it. Maybe Red and Ho are unrelated to this. But I think whoever did this knew her. She’d been around the block enough to know what can happen. She wouldn’t take off with just anybody. I know it’s only speculation, but I think this guy hated her. Really hated her. The mutilation took time and it wasn’t necessary. She knew him. The NCIC wasn’t much help. They’ve got eight unsolved homicides with postmortem decapitations in eight different states but some go back ten years. Most recent is Illinois—sixty-four and it was an elderly woman. Nothing reported in California. Nothing with a saw.”

  “What about the associations?” asked Harloff.

  Nick had already talked to the California Identifying Officers Association to see if any similar crimes had occurred in other California jurisdictions. A Humboldt County decapitation murder had been closed out earlier in the year when the son confessed to killing and mutilating his mother for “mental cruelty.”

  The California Homicide Officers Association had nothing but put him in touch with a half dozen other associations throughout the American West—Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Oregon, and Washington State. Nick had spent so much time on the phone over the three days his ear had swollen and his neck hurt. He’d come up with three current unsolved murders of young women with postmortem beheadings. It surprised him that they weren’t reported to NCIC. But none of the mutilation killings had happened closer than four hundred miles away.

  “Red and Ho,” said Harloff. “Like ‘Better Dead Than Red’? Or like Ho Chi Minh?”

  “I’ve gotten nothing political from this so far,” said Nick.

  “Laguna’s full of radicals,” said Lobdell. “All kinds of political types. Marxists, Bolsheviks, anarchists, demonstrators, flag burners, atheists, God haters, peaceniks, hippies, yippies. Dopers and flower children. Fairies all over the place. That Leary nut from Harvard is still there with his LSD religion. You drive down Coast Highway on a hot night you can smell the marijuana in the air. The canyon there is full of dealers selling anything you can imagine. They call Woodland Street Dodge City because the law can’t get in. Or so the hippies think.”

  “I know,” said Harloff. “I oversee narcotics.”

  “I know you know,” said Lobdell. “I’m just saying if Vonn was living in that mix down in Laguna, she could have had just about anybody over for Mexican takeout.”

  “The two squares sound more like Mormons to me,” said Harloff. Then a rare smile. Dark lips, white teeth. “Or insurance salesmen or FBI.”

  Lobdell didn’t answer.

  “Interesting you should say that,” said Nick. “One of my sources said a white male searched Janelle’s cottage Thursday night. I tracked the car plates back to the FBI resident agency in Santa Ana.”

  Harloff raised his eyebrows and tapped his pen on his desk. “FBI? I know one of the agents there. I’ll make a call and see what that was all about.”

  “Appreciate it, sir.”

  “Odd, though,” said Harloff, “that they didn’t contact us.”

  In the silence Nick cleared his throat. Looked directly at Harloff. Time to play another one of Andy’s tips. Thank God for little brothers who were also newspaper reporters.

  “Sir,” Nick said. “There’s something else you can do to help us.”

  “Shoot.”

  “I heard that Janelle Vonn had been on the narcotics informant payroll for four years,” said Nick. “If that’s true, someone there knows her a lot better than we do, just coming in now. We need to talk.”

  Harloff nodded curtly. “Who told you that?”

  “I’m not free to say.”

  “Talk to del Gado.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Harloff studi
ed him for a long time. Nick held his gaze for a beat, then looked away.

  A few minutes later Frank del Gado, the narcotics captain, unhappily told Nick and Lobdell that he’d look into it.

  When they got outside the building Nick stopped and looked at his partner. “Hey, Lucky.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fuck me again in front of my boss and you can find another partner. I don’t care how it looks or who gets written up, I’m not working with a guy who won’t stand by me.”

  Lobdell eyed Nick. Almost smiled but didn’t. Nodded instead. “Good.”

  15

  THEY WENT TO a late lunch at the new place, Lorenzo’s, up in the Anaheim hills. Nick had found the Lorenzo’s matchbook in Janelle Vonn’s shoe box. And the Lorenzo’s phone number written in three different places in the pile of papers by her phone.

  He showed a five-by-seven black-and-white photograph of Janelle Vonn to the hostess. The hostess had long hair and a startlingly brief skirt. About Janelle’s age. In Nick’s opinion they shouldn’t let girls dress that way, but he liked it when they did. Katherine would never be allowed to dress like that. The hostess had never seen Janelle.

  The dining room was almost empty. A few people drinking in the bar. The steaks were pricey so Nick got the Ortega burger with a big wet chili on it. Lobdell went with the lunch special New York cut.

  The waitress had seen Janelle Vonn here at Lorenzo’s about a week ago, she said.

  And one time before that, maybe a month earlier. Both times large parties, thrown by the Lorenzo’s owners.

  “That’s really a bummer what happened to her,” she said. “She was younger than me.”

  “What day of the week was she in?” asked Lobdell.

  “Friday or Saturday. Super busy.”

  “Are any of the owners in today?” asked Nick.

  “Not today. They never tell us when they’re coming. They just arrive. But let me get the manager.”

  “We’ll just knock on his door, say hello. Okay?” asked Nick.

  “That’s cool.”

  The office was small, bright, and neat. Radio playing “Soul Kitchen.” Smell of aftershave. Raquel Welch poster from One Million Years B.C. on the bathroom door. Fur bikini on a body like that, thought Nick. Unbelievable.