The Lost Witness

by Robert Ellis

  He tried to think of the old man’s name, but couldn’t place it. Still, he remembered the day that he and his best friend were alone in the shop. The day the barber had told them that the art of a great fuck was a matter of physics. And the whole thing came down to how much meat a woman had on her bones. He liked full-bodied women, he said. The more full-bodied, the better because there was nothing good about a woman’s hip bones. And he liked doing it on the floor. He called it the secret to his success. The key to making it all work. Losing the soft mattress and doing it with a full-bodied woman on the floor.

  Cava remembered giggling. That feeling of racy uncertainty because he and his friend were still too young to really know what the word fuck meant. From the electricity in the air, the dreamy smile on the old man’s face, it seemed more than likely that anything to do with getting laid was a good thing. All the same, it was a new world still lingering on the horizon. Still too far off to touch. It would take a few years before Cava understood that the old man had been a wise man and everything he taught them that day was true.

  The thought vanished. Chased away by a sudden rush of panic.

  The blonde was staring at him. Frozen in her tracks and standing on the other side of the bed. Fixated on him with her mouth open and her blue eyes as wide as blue eyes go. Cava had seen it before. That look that she could tell the future. That things were about to get dramatic.

  Even worse, his meds had kicked in just as his luck ran out. He could feel his chemistry coming to a boil. An overwhelming bout of foreign body sensations mixed with a heavy case of those intense urges he had read about in the car—sexual urges coupled with other urges. If he went by the book it was time to call his healthcare professional immediately.

  She took a step toward the bedside table. But instead of reaching for the phone, her hand dipped down to the drawer. Cava lunged across the bed, spotting the gun as the drawer slid open. Wrapping his arms around her chest, he yanked her away from the weapon and they tumbled onto the floor. She yelped and started punching him as he rolled on top of her. Soft glancing blows weakened by fear and trembling. He could smell her skin. Her soft beautiful skin. And as he tried to quiet her legs and figure out what the hell to do, he thought about the hour he had spent searching the house while she was getting ready for work. He wished that he hadn’t seen her. Wished that he hadn’t caught the scent of her perfume from the top of the stairs. Wished that he didn’t have to do what he knew he had to do.

  She would be a casualty of war, he decided, a domino in the middle of the pack that had no more meaning or relevance other than its position and timing. Its need to fall. There would be more guilt to deal with. More medication and more sleepless nights. Another ghost on another chaise longue on that beach in Coronaville.

  He looked down at her face, everything in slow motion now. She had ripped open his shoulder bag and was tossing the money all over the room. She was saying something to him. Something he couldn’t quite hear with so much going on. Curiously, the scissor kicks had stopped and she had wrapped her thighs around his buttocks. As he tried to concentrate, tried to lock in on the Zen moment, he became aware of his erection again. It was still there. Still hard as a rock. And when he gazed into her wild eyes, he caught the fire in them and knew that she could feel his dick, too.

  She grit her teeth. Ran her fingers down his arm and dug her nails in. Took a swing at him.

  All of a sudden life was complicated again. A hodgepodge of mixed signals that he didn’t have time to figure out. The Fates had arrived and he needed to make his move. He needed to end this. If the guilt got too crazy, he could always spend the night counting hundred-dollar bills …

  24

  Lena had been late for her meeting with Art Madina. Fifteen minutes late. Not from the drive downtown, but from an unexpectedly long sleep. A big dreamless sleep so heavy and so blank that she had no idea how she finally broke back to the surface and opened her eyes.

  She had gone to bed before the power was restored and fallen asleep before she could reset the time on her clock radio and switch on the alarm.

  And it had been late. Long after Bobby Rathbone had given her the bad news and gone home. Long after two glasses of wine and another half a cigarette helped her think it all through.

  She had come to a decision last night to leave the bugs in place. Her house would remain hot-wired except for the low-tech bug in the handset. The feel-good bug that she was meant to find. After ripping it out of the phone, she killed it with a hammer on the kitchen floor. And when the electric company got around to turning the juice back on, Klinger and his sidekick would no longer be burdened with loud music. By all appearances, everything would be back to normal, and the dynamic duo could listen in and think that they were outsmarting her.

  For Lena, this was the quickest way back to her case and what really mattered. And it was easy enough to avoid Klinger’s camera by using the shower upstairs in her old bathroom.

  But none of that was really on her mind as she followed Art Madina inside the cooler and the door snapped shut behind them. None of what happened last night really mattered right now.

  Madina switched on his flashlight, checking toe tags in the darkness and rolling gurneys out of the way as he searched through the crowd of dead bodies. The dank air was just above freezing, her breath vaporizing before her eyes and thick as smoke. After ten long minutes, they found Jane Doe resting in the far corner beneath a thin sheet of translucent plastic.

  Madina handed over the flashlight and pulled the plastic away. Time, even in a temperature-controlled setting, had a way of changing things. Although Lena’s first instinct was to turn away, she held her ground and looked at the corpse.

  “If something was missing, how much would it be?” Madina asked in a low voice.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What did he do with it?”

  “We found a meat grinder in the garage.”

  Madina turned and gave her a long look. “You’re not serious.”

  “We can’t tell when it was last used,” she whispered.

  Several moments passed. Then Madina took charge of the flashlight and panned the beam over the victim’s wounds.

  “My problem with all this is that it’s such a neat job, Lena. So surgically precise. This guy went to med school.”

  The door opened, the space flooding with light. Two men were peering into the cooler. When they spotted Lena standing beside the pathologist, the man in the lab coat stepped away and the second man entered on his own. He was holding a manila envelope and seemed as uncomfortable by the setting as Lena was. She recognized him as Martin Orth from SID, but they had never been formally introduced. Orth was a division supervisor and it appeared strange to see someone so high in the food chain off-site and making what looked like a delivery.

  “Lena Gamble?” he asked.

  All three shook hands and introduced themselves. Then Orth handed the envelope to Lena, straining to keep his eyes on her and away from the victim.

  “You were right,” he said. “It’s her.”

  A moment passed—SID’s confirmation giving the depravity new life and breadth.

  “You’re absolutely sure,” she said.

  Orth nodded. “We ran side-by-sides from the blood samples taken in the alley last week, the parking lot at the Cock-a-doodle-do on Saturday, and the garage on Barton Avenue. Everything matches. It’s her. It’s Jane Doe. That’s where she was killed.”

  His voice trailed off, his gaze finally moving to the victim. Lena could see the pain in his eyes as he measured the woman’s battered face and skimmed over her wounds. A certain amount of determination lingered in his jawline as he turned back to her.

  “We’re twenty-four-seven on this, Lena. Weekends and holidays. Forget about the backlog. Anything you want, you get until this guy’s in the ground.”

  She wished the case was that simple. One man acting on his own.

  “What about the meat grinder?” she said.

>   “We found trace amounts of muscle tissue, but we don’t think it’s human. There’s enough rust to indicate that it went through a dishwasher. We’re not really sure what it is.”

  Lena traded looks with Madina, then turned back to Orth.

  “What about the rest of the garage?” she said.

  “It’s gonna take a while,” Orth said. “Everything we pulled looks like it came from the victim, not the doer. Hair, fiber, fingerprints. But there’s still hope. There’s still a long way to go.”

  “What about the trash can by the workbench? He left behind a smock. Everything he wore Wednesday night.”

  “We’re concentrating on the gloves for touch DNA. There’s a chance we might luck out and lift a print, but I wouldn’t count on it. They’re vinyl.”

  Lena understood the odds, but remained upbeat. Nathan Good would have been wearing the gloves long enough to have left a fair amount of perspiration behind. Although touch DNA, or low copy DNA, was still new, still not legislated in all fifty states, the science had evolved and could yield a positive result. But lifting a print from inside a vinyl glove would be more difficult. While it had been done before, success depended on the conditions being just right. Still, they were inching closer. And when she caught the glint in Orth’s eye, she realized that there was more.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “He left something behind,” Orth said. “It’s not as good as a fingerprint. It’s not something that we can key into a database and pull out his name and address. But it’s almost as good. That sheet of linoleum underneath the operating table?”

  “You lifted a shoe print.”

  Orth grinned with pride. “About three-thirty this morning,” he said. “It was invisible, but we found it. It’s amazing what florescent powder and a black light can do. I called and they said that you were here, so I came down. The placement on the linoleum couldn’t be reached once the plywood was clamped to the saw horses. I figure he left the print when he was setting up and didn’t have his booties on.”

  “You got the entire print or just a piece?”

  “Take a look. A copy’s in that envelope. We lifted the whole thing, but it gets better. He was wearing Bruno Maglis just like O.J.: a size ten Magdy boot. It’s a lace-up dress shoe with a rubber sole. List price: four hundred eight-four dollars and ninety-five cents.”

  She pulled the photograph out of the envelope and gazed at the shoe print. Everything crystal clear.

  “He has money,” she said.

  “He’s got more than that. Look. He’s got a small Phillips head screw embedded in his right heel. Maybe he stepped on it in the garage. Maybe not. Either way, you get the deal.”

  She found the screw in the photograph. “The shoe puts him away forever.”

  “Like I said, Lena, it’s not a fingerprint. But in court—”

  “It’ll work just as well.”

  Her cell phone started vibrating. When she checked the screen, she knew that she had to take the call. It was Klinger, dialing in from Chief Logan’s office.

  “He wants to see you,” Klinger said. “I told him that you’d be here in fifteen minutes. That was ten minutes ago, so you’ll be late.”

  The chief’s adjutant didn’t give her a chance to respond. Before she could say anything, he hung up on her again.

  25

  District Attorney Jimmy J. Higgins hustled out of the chief’s office and rolled down the hall toward the elevator. As he passed Lena, he kept his eyes fixed on some invisible object ten feet ahead, scratched the back of his overly groomed silver hair, and muttered the word bitch under his breath.

  Lena didn’t stop or turn or even question whether or not she’d actually heard it. She kept walking until she reached the door at the end of the hall.

  Klinger looked up as she entered. He was seated at his desk, installing software in a new laptop computer. The carton and packing materials were on the floor. Checking his watch, he smiled and pointed at Chief Logan’s office.

  “You’re late,” he said.

  Lena ignored him and tapped on the door. Bracing herself for the main event, she took a deep breath and walked in.

  “Close the door behind you,” the chief said.

  She followed the chief’s instructions. When she turned, she noticed Lieutenant Barrera leaning against the windowsill and caught the imperceptible shake of his head. He was here, and he was her ally. But he was also trying to warn her. Keep cool. Trouble ahead.

  Chief Logan cleared his throat. “Did you see the DA on his way out?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Did he say anything to you?”

  “He called me a bitch.”

  A beat went by She had been matter-of-fact in her delivery Then the chief shrugged from behind his oversized desk.

  “The man’s pissed,” he said. “A lot of people are. Welcome to the real world, Gamble. Now take a seat.”

  He was studying her, measuring her with those dark eyes of his. As she moved toward the chair, she noticed an M21 sniper rifle mounted behind glass and hanging on the near wall beside his medals from the Vietnam War. Several black-and-white photographs were on display as well, one that included the chief sitting beside a .50 caliber Browning machine gun in the jungle. She remembered reading something about the chief’s war record in The Times after his interview with the police commission. He had been one of the first to use a .50 caliber weapon in a sniping role, and had recorded the second farthest confirmed kill during the war. She couldn’t remember the distance, but thought that it was over two thousand meters.

  “Why do you think the DA’s pissed, Gamble?”

  She turned back to the chief, considering his question. She wanted to say that Jimmy J. Higgins was pissed off because he had become a pig, but didn’t. She wanted to say that the district attorney had let the high-profile job go to his head. That he would do or say anything for a political campaign contribution or a decent headline. That he loved having a limo and a driver and hanging out with celebrities. That he campaigned on ending the dangerous practice of keeping score on wins and losses like so many other cities had, but never followed up on his promise to see justice through no matter how it turned out.

  But the truth was that she knew why Higgins had called her a bitch the moment it slipped out of his sloppy mouth. The DA was taking heat from both the press and his political rivals for backing down on a young TV actor who crashed his Land Rover and killed his teenage friend sitting in the passenger seat. The actor’s blood alcohol level was four times over the legal limit. An ample supply of cocaine had been found in his system as well. Detectives working the case wanted to charge the actor with gross vehicular manslaughter, which carried a prison sentence of ten years. Instead, the kid went to rehab. This was the second incident in as many months where a celebrity had been responsible for the death of an innocent person while driving drunk. The second time in two months that Jimmy J. Higgins had looked the other way because he had so many celebrity friends.

  She could have said a lot of things. But when the chief repeated the question and asked her why Higgins was so pissed off, she said, “Because Dean Tremell made a contribution to his campaign and this is strike three.”

  The chief’s compact body tightened up. She had struck a nerve and could see his wheels turning. Her answer had been the obvious one. Dean Tremell was using his political muscle in an attempt to protect his rotten son. And the DA was in a jam.

  “When does Stan Rhodes get back?” the chief asked finally.

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Did either one of you bother to find out exactly who Dean Tremell is?”

  “His son’s name came up on Saturday afternoon,” she said. “Yesterday the crime scene was located. Today that’s been confirmed.”

  “I understand that you’ve been busy. But that’s no excuse for fucking up.”

  Lena glanced at Barrera standing by the window. Then the chief leaned over his desk.

  “Stop looking at your sup
ervisor, Detective. He can’t help you now.”

  She turned back, the chief glaring at her. “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s better,” he said. “You fucked up. You didn’t do your homework, so now I have to do it for you. Anders Dahl Pharmaceuticals employs thousands of people in this city. There are more full-time employees working at Anders Dahl than any two movie studios combined. The company is an important part of our city’s economy. You’re right, Dean Tremell is one of the district attorney’s biggest contributors. If you had bothered to check, you would have learned that he’s also made contributions to every member of the city council. It’s business, Gamble. And he’s a player. A mover and a shaker. Do you understand what I’m saying? The man counts.”

  She didn’t respond. She tried to let the words sink in, but couldn’t. Even the concept felt dirty.

  “You got a problem, Gamble?”

  “I thought everybody counted,” she said.

  “Stop feeding me your bullshit. The man deserves your respect. I deserve your respect.”

  The chief finally took his eyes off her and leaned back in his chair. She could see where the conversation was headed. It was in her best interest to keep quiet—in her best interest to take the blows and walk out in one piece. And she probably would have followed her own advice if her eyes hadn’t come to rest on the chief’s telephone. The intercom light was on. Klinger was listening. The high-octane pervert who installed the camera in her bathroom and just bought a new laptop computer was listening to her take the chief’s verbal beating.

  “This isn’t about Dean Tremell,” she said. “This is about his son. He was the last person seen with the victim before she was murdered.”

  “You haven’t been listening,” the chief said. “You’re not hearing me.”

  “Justin Tremell lied about being there. He’s more than a person of interest.”

  “What are you trying to do? Fuck me up so that I can be like you? I don’t want to be like you, Gamble. You should have checked with me before you barged in on them Saturday. And you should have had more than the word of a part-time prostitute working at a whorehouse off the one-oh-five fucking freeway. This isn’t a drunk-driver case. This is a homicide investigation. What if you got it wrong? What if your asshole friend over at The Times printed your fuck-up in his newspaper? You could have ruined Justin Tremell’s life. And the story would have followed him around forever. Zero plus zero equals zero, Gamble. And this is the Los Angeles Police Department. We work with evidence here. Not hopes and dreams. Empirical evidence. Quantifiable evidence. You don’t walk in on people like this half-cocked and try to wing it. You’re not ready for prime time. You’re a fucking disgrace.”