Angeles Crest

by P. J. Zander

  The two men were about to rope up Nathan’s frozen bulk and move him into position for the gurney when Turner informed them Detective Marchessa was riding the hoist down to get some photos and take notes. “So, don’t move the body.” When he was done, the Captain continued, he’d confirm coroner’s clearance to bring the body up.

  The detective nodded toward the paramedics as he slowly made his way over to the body, bracing himself along the steep incline by leaning in against the snow with his free hand.

  “Hey, Frank. How’s it going topside?”

  “Guys,” Marchessa grunted and keeping his eyes fixed on the body, pushed between the two men. Both looked at each other with raised eyebrows and stepped back to watch the detective do his thing. Less than fifteen minutes later, he simply nodded to them and rode the hoist back up.

  Once they got the go ahead from Turner, they struggled for twenty minutes to pull Nathan up slope clear of the trees where the gurney waited in the snow. With the body in place they each hung off a side to secure the gurney as it was hoisted toward the helicopter.

  SIXTY-ONE

  For several weeks following that night up Angeles Crest, the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office crafted its case against Susan Rossmoor who had become a long-term inpatient at Huntington Memorial Hospital while undergoing three surgeries to repair internal injuries to her liver, spleen and bladder and multiple fractures to hips, pelvis and left femur and tibia. She also was under twenty-four-hour guard as she had been arrested for the murders of her sons, Nathan Rossmoor and Martin Dwyer, and attempted murder of Raylene Ojibway. It hadn’t taken much to tie her fingerprints to the SIG Sauer. There also was residue on her hand and jacket from firing the gun that was revealed in paraffin tests. But, the backbone of the case was Banyan’s eye-witness statement on the shootings and Raylene’s corroboration that Rossmoor was holding the gun aiming first at Banyan then turning and firing on her in the Outback.

  When the news of the incident hit the papers, she didn’t have to worry about finding a defense attorney. One of the country’s most renowned and priciest big event lawyers, Conroy Waterhouse, showed up at the hospital to be greeted by news media who had received advance notice of his arrival from his firm.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, if you would be so kind as to give me a few moments of your time.” He was standing on the top step to the main entrance, impeccably dressed and wrinkle-free, including his face. Licensed to practice not only in his home state of Texas, but in New York, District of Columbia and California, not to mention reciprocity admission he regularly obtained to a dozen or so smaller jackpot states, he and his staff had flown into Burbank from Dallas/Fort Worth in his private Citation X and sped by two limousines to Pasadena. The thing about him, though, was he didn’t wear the Lone Star State on his sleeve. He was in his early forties, five and a half feet tall, trim with cropped white hair, and all energy. He wore no boots, no hat, and no big, brass longhorn belt buckle. In fact, the only trait that placed him in Texas was his easy drawl. In the courtroom he was fierce, unrelenting, and strictly observant of decorum and politeness.

  “I am Susan Rossmoor’s attorney and I’m here to inform all interested parties that from this point forward, all contact with the defendant will go through me.”

  As he continued, prosecutors, law enforcement and politicians around Southern California began hearing about it on the live streaming news in their offices and all had the same reaction: Shit.

  Waterhouse’s announcement, of course, was before he’d as much as spoken to her. After reading the account of the killings in the Morning News, he knew immediately that he was going to defend Susan Rossmoor by going after Frederic Russell Banyan’s instability and bizarre behavior—pushing a family to the brink, a stalker seeking revenge for what currently wasn’t even a crime, just an unsolved missing person case. And, there was the statement by Banyan himself that he had beaten Dwyer almost unconscious, possibly a fatal beating. Over the next days and weeks, Waterhouse freely scattered the seeds of this approach to any California news media, radio talk shows, and bloggers that wanted the facts as he saw them. The prosecutors knew this and were sweating it out. Strange things could happen in the courtroom even with a preponderance of evidence on your side. Both sides were using every minute in preparation as they waited for the defendant to rehab enough to handle the rigors of a murder trial.

  The rub in this was that the upcoming trial was all wrong. The prosecutors, the media, all were preparing for the huge show that would put the spotlight on the lives and deaths in this most respected family. In the end, the matriarch could be sent away for life up to Chowchilla’s maximum security for murdering her two sons. But without finding out what happened to Jolene Ojibway, all the hoopla would be a hollow victory. There would be no satisfaction, no justice. There would be no healing for Raylene. At least, that was the way Banyan saw it. For himself, he’d never be able to shake the albatross chained around his neck.

  SIXTY-TWO

  Random ice patches got Parker’s attention as he drove his family out of the mountains. Below in La Canada Flintridge, the mid-March sun wrapped the city in a 75 degree blanket. Not so up there. Any relative heat from the morning had all but died off and a few clouds were forming to the west. He didn’t like driving the minivan under any conditions, and on that road on that day, his lowland freeway experience was useless. The daily commuter Saab in his South Pasadena garage at least would have given him a better feel for the asphalt. The two kids were beginning to fade after the long drive up and lunch, and his wife was thumbing through the January-February Western Interiors. They had no idea of the knot tightening in his gut.

  Coming into the sun again after rounding another of the endless shadowed curves, someone at a turnout about two hundred yards down and to the left was waving his arms frantically back and forth over his head, like windshield wipers making Xs and Vs. Behind him, a bright blue compact car, brilliant in the sunlight, was parked at a funny angle, front end pointing up hill and passenger side raised up onto the crescent-shaped snow berm bordering the turnout. Parker instinctively hit the brakes.

  First came the slight easing of traction as the rear of the van broke loose from the melting ice topped with a thin layer of glistening water, and began a slow sickening slide across the oncoming lane. It felt as if he was driving on ball bearings. He heard his startled wife gasp as she grabbed for the armrest and dashboard. Turn in the direction of the skid flashed in his brain, and he did so with what could have been a little hope. His next thought was thank God there’s no opposing traffic. The front-wheel-drive van responded by accentuating its spin to the left, pivoting around the front end so that now, he was staring up the road they had been driving down only seconds before, and out of the corner of his eye, Parker saw that the sunlit blue car was a Nissan and caught a glimpse of what he now realized was a tall, young woman with short blond hair, her hands covering her face below her wide-open eyes which showed the scream he couldn’t hear.

  “Shit” was all he could get out. Natural forces took over and whatever the manufacturer’s designers had built into the van for stability was no longer a factor. It rolled over onto the driver’s side. The kids woke up yelling, “Daddy.” His wife screamed, “Alan. Alan.” As the left side of the van slammed onto the road, airbags deployed but not soon enough to prevent his head from smacking the window, and he felt a tremendous explosion in his right shoulder. Dazed but maintaining his vice-like grip on the steering wheel, the torque of the crash tore shoulder cartilage and yanked the humerus from the socket, severing the biceps tendon. Searing pain hit him, then dizziness and nausea. He struggled to turn his head to the right to see his wife, suspended above him by her seatbelt. Terrified, breathing rapidly, groaning against the pressing belt, but otherwise she looked okay. Kids were strapped in so they would be okay, too. “Turnout . . . snow bank will stop us. . . .” he mumbled.

  The minivan slowed as the rear end hit the berm, went up and out over nothingne
ss, and came to rest on the snow-covered guardrail, like a teeter-totter. But, it wasn’t centered on the berm. The rear end tipped the balance and pulled the van over the cliff. His last sight was a torn and weathered piece of yellow police crime scene tape sticking up from the top of a guardrail post poking out from the snow. The first bounce off the steep rock and scree slope popped most of the seat belt anchors and set up a 700 foot cart-wheeling plunge to the bottom, during which Alan Parker, his wife of 11 years, son, age 8 and daughter, age 5, were scrambled like eggs.

  #

  The young woman couldn’t get her cell to work, but finally had luck when she flagged down a road crew which got a 911 connection which was why the Air-5 Rescue helicopter was at that moment hovering over the wreck.

  “Déjà vu all over again, huh, B.G? What is it about this place, anyway? We were up here on that last recovery, what, eight, nine weeks ago?”

  “Yup. Mid-January, I’m thinking, Zak,” answered Sheriff’s Deputy Greer.

  “Papers said they’re getting close to beginning that trial on the mother shooting her two sons,” Deputy Horne said as they worked their way over to the demolished vehicle. “Man, that van smacked the trees almost where we found the guy. This isn’t going to be pretty.”

  “Nope.”

  The minivan was lying on its passenger side. Pulling himself up into the left entrance of the van where the sliding door had been shorn off, Horne braced himself against the seats and scanned the interior without saying a word. Greer joined him.

  “You get four?”

  “Yeah,” Horne responded. “Looks like two adults, male and female, two kids.” Greer’s question was expected. In this type of wreck, bodies were smashed, torn apart and compressed into each other. “All dead. . . .” His voice trailed off. A rescue by these Emergency Service Detail life-savers, even if only one of the lives in this crash, would have been a high. They’d known the chances were slim, but then, the sudden low, the familiar emptiness, consumed them. “I’ll call it in.”

  Before he spoke, Sergeant Avila was in his headset. “Horne, these crosswinds are getting dicey. What do you have down there?”

  “Chief, could be a family. Adult male, adult female, two children. No survivors.”

  “All right. Get me a vehicle description and plate number.” Greer was already jumping down and moving to the rear of the vehicle. “We only have a few hours of daylight left. I’m going to bring you guys up so the pilots can get us home. MSAR’s ETA is twenty minutes. Captain Turner is directing them in from the ridge below you to the south and they’ll carry the bodies out. It’ll take a little longer, but it’s safer than hovering in this tight-ass gorge.”

  “Zak, we need to stay with them,” Greer called from the rear of the van. Horne knew he was right.

  “Chief, we’re staying here until the rescue team arrives. We’ll walk out with them.”

  Avila didn’t like leaving any Air-5 crew behind, but he understood. “Stay in comms with the Captain up top. And don’t wander. Out.”

  #

  A half hour later, volunteer Jason Fleming of the Montrose Search and Rescue Team, called up to the crash site. “Air 5, MSAR. Hey, Zak, we’re about one hundred meters down slope from you, should clear this stand of burned spruce in a few. Over.”

  “Roger.” The clinking of the gear began penetrating what remained of the forest as the unseen team made its way toward him and Greer. Staying with the bodies had been the right thing to do, but the wreck site was a heavy load. The paramedics hadn’t said much to each other since the chopper had left almost thirty minutes earlier. They traversed the slope to a familiar outcrop to wait for the team. Horne spat into the snow and raised himself onto the flat rock to tighten a boot strap. As he reached down for the Velcro, he noticed what looked like a piece of paper sticking out of the snow next to the rock. He pulled on it, but it didn’t budge. Down on one knee, he brushed the snow with his gloves and saw light blue material, like a cotton tee-shirt. He cleared more snow and saw that the material went around the side of the rocks. Heart pumping, he slowly reached behind the base of the outcrop with both hands, removing the deeper snow and there was no mistake. He knew it was a femur.

  “Jesus. B.G., take a look.”

  Greer, seeing that Horne was uncovering human legs, began clearing snow in the opposite direction, parallel to the rocks. In a moment his partner joined him and together they gently worked up to the head. The remains, protected in the frozen shadows, were more than a skeleton, less than a body. What looked like a worn translucent cloth stretched over the skull, tears and rips in the once-living fabric curled up and rigid at the edges, accenting the yellowish veil of dead skin with the brown of old blood. Black hair hung in clumps, a single blue barrette with a colorful little butterfly, broken but still clinging to a few strands. The eyes had been reclaimed by nature. Tarnished yet standing out on a chain around the neck just above the ragged blue camisole was a small gold charm of a skier.

  They both sat back on their knees.

  “Oh, dear God. B.G., you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  “Yeah, got to be.”

  “The one they’ve been looking for for months. It’s that poor girl.”

  Instinctively they took off their helmets and said nothing for some thirty seconds, taking in what remained of a beautiful life interrupted by evil.

  Slowly, Horne refocused and spoke into his mic. “CV, Air 5.”

  “Go ahead, Horne,” Turner answered.

  “Captain, we found another one.” He paused to slow his heart rate down. “Real deteriorated. Greer and me think it could be the missing girl.”

  SIXTY-THREE

  The discovery of Jolene Ojibway’s remains began a frenzied effort by the D.A. to add what was no longer a missing person, but a kidnapping-homicide, to the charges against Susan Rossmoor prior to trial. They pulled together several key pieces of evidence that gave them the indictment they needed. First, Susan Rossmoor’s Mercedes was in fact in a body shop for front end repairs the day after Jolene went missing. With that information, the sheriff’s investigators searched the car and in the back seat found hair samples that matched those on Jolene’s remains. Last, they had Banyan’s testimony that after she shot both her sons, she told Banyan that Martin had killed Jolene’s killer, Tony Mattingly, within days of the abduction. Circumstantially, the D.A. tagged all three dead men, Martin, Nathan and Mattingly as the ones responsible for kidnapping and killing Jolene. Again circumstantially, Mother told the eldest that he must protect her, the business and the family from possible public disclosure of the indiscretion witnessed by Jolene, as he had protected her over twenty years earlier. Most likely, Martin persuaded Mattingly to participate, possibly by threatening him. The three had used Susan Rossmoor’s car because it was a familiar sight in the neighborhood when she drove to and from the rental property. The prosecutors didn’t need to place her in the car to get the indictment for conspiracy to commit murder. They would attempt to present the whole web of incest to expose the despicable, vicious lengths to which Susan Rossmoor went to control her world.

  Most importantly, though, was the finality the discovery brought to Raylene. While at times she couldn’t help but hold on to a fragile ray of hope, she had never fooled herself into believing Jo would be found safe. She had steeled herself for that time—the day, the hour, the second—when she would be told the awful truth if and when it came.

  #

  Ray and Banyan had made the forty-minute freeway drive to the County Coroner’s Department in L.A. to view the remains. That was not in the Coroner’s protocol but a call to Captain Quintana who leaned on several associates up the line had greased the necessary skids to make the exception. So, on an overcast, blustery morning five days after the remains were uncovered, they found themselves parking off of North Mission Road at the imposing Boyle Heights building. A massive red brick and concrete structure that rose to a third story gabled roof with an intricate concrete cap, it wasn’t geared towa
rd welcoming visitors, at least the live ones. About twenty very wide concrete steps lead to the entrance door. He’d been here a couple times and that first sight was still disconcerting. Banyan had jokingly referred to it as the Haunted Mansion after his initial visit. Whatever humor he found in it was abetted by the gift shop, AKA, Skeletons in the Closet, a room near the main entrance quite possibly the only one of its kind in the world, and probably rightly so. With thematic tee-shirts, ball caps and beach towels, it was on the raw side of couth.

  They were led into a cold sterile room, the air of which smelled of formalin and chemical cleaners. Under fluorescent lighting, he felt weak in the knees as he watched Raylene bend over what was left of Jo on a stainless steel table, lay her arm across the sheet, touch the few strands of discolored hair with her other hand and gently kiss her daughter’s frontal bone above the empty eye sockets. With a hand on Ray’s shoulder, he placed his other hand on the sheet beneath which were Jo’s ankle bones, and shook his head. He had shut himself off from the dark corner long ago so that he could do his work, in fact live his life, with a cool head. The losses and agonizing memories were deep down. His mother, his father, Ray. Perhaps Vietnam. He had held the wide range of emotions each evoked to a burn inside, controlled vengeance that he could switch on for those particularly deserving. When Susan Rossmoor had told him Jolene was dead at the turnout that cold January morning, he’d almost given in. But, touching this once lovely girl’s remains right then brought them all back. He began to weep, for her, for Ray, for his mother . . . for his life.