One Day You'll Burn

by Joseph Schneider

  Morales looked at him in astonishment. Jarsdel’s phone rang again. It was Ipgreve.

  “Your John Doe just got more interesting,” he said. “Get here soon as you can.”

  Jarsdel passed the news to Morales, who stood, checking his watch. “Lunch rush traffic by now. Be nuts gettin’ over there. Might as well grab something to eat first. Just don’t go Rain Man on me anymore.”

  Chapter 4

  Jarsdel could still taste the carne asada burrito he’d picked up at a lunch truck on Riverside. It had been delicious—perfect, even. But now, in the autopsy suite of the LA County morgue, the lingering flavor of beef and onions mingled with the smell of industrial chemicals and the deeper, creeping funk of death. The inside of his mouth tasted sour, corrupt.

  Not for the first time, Jarsdel thought how the room resembled a hotel kitchen. Giant stainless-steel sinks lined one wall, and stacks of cutting boards rested on the counters between them. Ladles and tongs drip-dried in a hanging basket, and assorted knives glinted from a magnetic rack. The similarities ended there, however. Kitchens didn’t usually feature a large rectangle on the floor demarcated with bright yellow tape reading Splash Zone, nor were there dangling garden tools—shears and limb cutters—for cracking the stubborn vault of the human chest. Two long, glass vases sat in a cubby, both full to the brim with what looked like river rock, though Jarsdel knew they were actually gallstones. On the wall near the sinks was a drain-cleaning log, and he thought the citizenry would be surprised to learn that all the runoff from autopsies went into the same system as their mouthwash and shaving scum.

  The suite’s surreality was heightened by the giant mosquito zappers humming away in the corners—a defense against surprise hatchings of fly larvae, which could lie dormant in a human corpse as long as it remained in the refrigerator. Once it warmed up, so did the maggots. On Jarsdel’s last visit, the entire department had been in the midst of a week-long siege, and the autopsy had taken place to the accompaniment of sizzles and snaps as the flies met their end.

  But today, it was quiet. The few flies that had joined the cadaver in its body bag had flung themselves into the zappers as soon as they’d been released, and the usual banter between the ME and his assistant was muted and subdued. The body before them represented a totality of misery and suffering rarely seen, even by veteran witnesses of horror like Ipgreve.

  Before Jarsdel and Morales had arrived, the medical examiner had already performed the rudiments of the external investigation—photographing, x-raying, and weighing the cadaver. He’d also made the requisite Y-shaped incision along the body’s trunk and removed the chest plate, which now rested on a separate table.

  Jarsdel and Morales slipped on masks and goggles as Ipgreve reached a gloved hand into the incision. He pulled back the skin, revealing the internal organs. Jarsdel’s face twisted in revulsion, and he noticed that even Morales looked queasy.

  What should have been a healthy, glistening pink had been cooked to a muddy reddish brown. Pockets of congealed blood—as black as chocolate syrup—sat between the organs. The intestines had ruptured in the heat, and what Jarsdel supposed was fecal matter could be seen amid the mass of ravaged tissue.

  Ipgreve dabbed a finger in a pool of blood and rubbed it against his thumb. “I’ve seen every kind of burn victim you can imagine. Nothing like this. Consistent, even heat for an hour, maybe more, in an enclosed chamber of some kind. Total body third-degree burns resulting in profound loss of blood protein and water content leading to hypovolemic cardiovascular collapse. So yes, he was literally baked to death. Weighed in at 156, but I’d bet he’d’ve been in the neighborhood of fifteen or twenty pounds heavier before he went into the oven.”

  Morales nodded. “That’ll help with missing persons. Any idea on race?”

  “Caucasian. Skin would be even darker than it is now if he were Latino or African American, and measurements of the skull and maxilla rule out an Asian background.”

  Jarsdel felt some relief; at least he could call up Ken Peyser and put a stop to the hate crime theory. “Dr. Ipgreve,” he said. “You mentioned on the phone there was something we needed to see?”

  The medical examiner moved around to the cadaver’s right and gently lifted its hand. Metal rods were clamped to the fingers, making them splay out as if in greeting. “We had to attach the straighteners very carefully. Pull too hard and the fingers’ll pop right off like drumsticks. As I suspected, we weren’t able to get any prints, but…”

  He slowly turned the hand palm up. There was a snapping sound somewhere in the shoulder, and the skin split open, but everyone’s attention was on the hand.

  Stuck to the cadaver’s open palm was a small red disc. Jarsdel didn’t recognize it at first, then made out the familiar image of an eagle, wings spread wide. A quarter, painted red.

  “I don’t get it,” said Morales.

  “Someone went through the trouble of gluing this to the guy’s hand,” said Ipgreve. “Did a pretty thorough job of it too. If I tried taking it off, the rest of his palm would come with it. Have to get some solvent so we can get the coin off to the lab.”

  “Does it tell us anything?” asked Jarsdel.

  “Only that whoever did it glued it on before he was cooked.”

  “Yeah,” said Morales. “And we also know they wanted us to find it. No chance the coin could get lost if it’s superglued on. Prof, any ideas what it means?”

  Jarsdel shot Morales an irritated look, but he’d bent to get a better look at the coin. “No.”

  “Never lived in an apartment, huh?” said Morales with a smile.

  “I’m over at Park La Brea.”

  Morales snorted. “That ain’t a real apartment.”

  “What’s your point, Morales?”

  “On-site managers get free laundry. Landlords give ’em these red coins so they don’t get mixed up with the profit.”

  “Hadn’t thought of that,” said Ipgreve. “When I was a kid in Jersey, some people painted quarters red in protest when they raised the toll from fifteen cents to twenty-five. Paint’s too fresh, though, and your explanation makes more sense.”

  Jarsdel wondered how either theory made any sense but decided not to say anything. His gaze strayed to a standing autopsy scale that’d probably been in use for decades. Someone had affixed several statistics to the dial’s wide face. Largest Liver 1600 grams, read one. Spleen Queen 1560 grams, read another. Jarsdel’s favorite came with a date, 1-2-09, and read King of Hearts 1260 grams. It seemed in LA, there was always a last-minute chance at celebrity.

  * * *

  Ipgreve followed them as they left the autopsy suite. The three men peeled off their masks and gloves and dropped their goggles on a tray to be sterilized. They stood by a squat, waist-high air filter—dubbed R2-D2 by the staff—one of several in the building whose job it was to combat the smell of decomposition. The result was a kind of stalemate. The air wasn’t foul exactly, but it wasn’t pleasant either.

  Ipgreve raised his voice over the lusty whoosh of R2-D2. “So like I said, we’ll get the coin off to the lab, see if we can learn anything about the paint or the glue. We’ll check to see if the killer put a nice thumbprint right in the middle of the coin when he glued it on, but you know as well as I do that’s unlikely.”

  “And you’re sure we can’t get the vic’s fingerprints?” said Morales.

  The ME grunted. “You’re welcome to give it a try if you want. I don’t know—there’s maybe one thing I can do. If it works, I’ll give you a call. In the meantime, I’ll try getting a DNA sample that’s not complete mush. Maybe we got lucky and the center of his heart didn’t get up to more than about 110.”

  “So just to clarify,” said Jarsdel, referencing his notes, “we should be checking Missing Persons for a white male, approximately five foot eight and somewhere between 171 and 176 pounds.”

  “I can’t g
et you an exact number on the weight because we don’t know how long he was in the oven. Height’s even tougher, considering what the heat did to his muscles. But yeah, I’d say five foot eight is safest.”

  Jarsdel put away his notebook. “Doesn’t exactly stand out in a crowd, does he? Three fillings, and the X-rays say he had a broken right arm somewhere in his past. But no tattoos, no major surgery or obvious infirmities. Then again, he could’ve been completely blind, and we wouldn’t know.”

  “You find any likely candidates, send me the dentals. Until then…” Ipgreve shrugged.

  “It’s his first time taking lead,” said Morales. “He wants answers, and he wants them now.”

  Jarsdel braced himself for a chuckle from Ipgreve, but the ME didn’t even smile. “I don’t blame him,” he said, nodding his head in the direction of the autopsy suite. “That’s probably the cruelest thing I’ve ever seen one human being do to another. I’ll sleep better myself when you catch him.”

  Chapter 5

  Cities are unnatural things, Jarsdel thought.

  The traffic on Third Street was punishing, the kind of soul-rending slog Angelenos learn to endure as a simple fact of life. In traffic like this, Jarsdel couldn’t help thinking of Çatalhöyük, one of the first fledgling efforts of humankind to live in a city. It had been a mess—dwellings piled one upon the other, not a single road or sidewalk. In order to get anywhere, you had to walk on your neighbors’ roofs. To Jarsdel, it was absolute proof that cities weren’t in our DNA but were rather an artificial construct we had to condition ourselves to accept.

  The thought didn’t bring him much comfort as he crept toward Highland Avenue, where he saw the light was out. At the best of times, the intersection of Third and Highland was a battle of wills. With the light out and the drivers left to fend for themselves, it was miraculous no one had been killed. Jarsdel waited his turn and finally crossed, noting it had taken him thirty minutes to go as many yards.

  By the time he pulled into Park La Brea, the sun hung low and heavy in the sky, casting long shadows across the grounds. Despite Morales’s assertion otherwise, Park La Brea was indeed an apartment complex—a massive, 160-acre enclosed lot of newer high-rise towers surrounded by clusters of ’40s-era townhouses. It was in one of these, on Maryland Drive, that Jarsdel lived. The walls were plastered-over cinder block, practically earthquake-proof. The Park La Brea townhouses had even shrugged off the Northridge quake of ’94, which had caused tens of billions in damage across the city. The trade-off was that the rooms were stifling in the summer and freezing in the winter. You could turn on the air or heating, of course, but the systems were so old and loud that you risked missing a phone call or sleeping right through your alarm.

  There was no reserved parking, but Jarsdel got lucky and snagged a spot only a few doors down from his own. The heat hugged him tightly as soon as he stepped from the car, but it was a relief to be on his feet again after the drive from the coroner’s.

  The loneliness didn’t fully descend until he was inside his apartment. He’d done everything he could to guard against it, had thought that by surrounding himself with the things that pleased him, he’d be happy. Framed vintage travel posters of Dubrovnik and Rio shared the walls with a prized plein air painting of Big Sur and an advertisement for Caesar’s Soldiers, a History Channel special he’d been featured on as an expert. His overflowing bookshelves groaned under an equally unusual assortment. The Irish Pub Cookbook and Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives were crammed on either side of a rare, six-volume edition of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Curio cabinets and built-in nooks celebrated every corner of Jarsdel’s restless mind—high school fencing trophies, an ancient phallus pendant, a deck of cards from Revolutionary France where the usual court cards had been replaced by Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. A leaded shillelagh war club. A chunk of three-thousand-year-old amphora. A mummified cat from the Valley of the Kings. It was Jarsdel’s sanctuary, carefully engineered so that no matter where he looked, he’d see some reflection of himself.

  And none of it helped. He should have known it wouldn’t. He’d read the Stoics, all of whom agreed solace couldn’t be found in mere objects. Jarsdel had hoped that maybe, just on that one point, they’d been wrong. Instead, he found himself caught in the perverse cycle of the addict: the more he grew to depend on his sanctuary, the less it fulfilled him. And yet the thought of cleaning the place out terrified him. It would be easier to saw off a limb.

  The silence in his apartment was dense and unsettling, somehow made worse by the day’s feverish, sickly heat. Jarsdel turned on the AC to take care of the heat and put on a Sonny Chillingworth album to fend off the silence. But when the air kicked on, he could barely make out the sweet melody of Chillingworth’s slack-key guitar and so opted for music instead of comfort.

  He turned off the police GPS alert on his phone, poured himself a glass of wine, and stepped onto the small, screened-in patio. It was a degree or two cooler outside, enough for him to think. He opened his laptop and sat down, shedding his gun and handcuffs as he did so. A moment later, Jarsdel was staring at the morning’s crime scene photos again, hoping that something new would jump out at him now that he knew about the red quarter. Nothing did, and he soon decided he’d looked at that ruined body enough for one day. He snapped the computer closed and took a long swallow of wine.

  It was seven o’clock. Outside the complex and only a few blocks away was the Farmers Market and adjacent outdoor mall, the Grove. Jarsdel ate at the market almost daily, and not just because he was a dreadful cook. He went there because every night, even on a Thursday like today, the place would be thronged with tourists. Crowded.

  Safe.

  At home, there was too much space for his mind to spin out, to ruminate on all he’d left behind when he joined the force. Few people can so easily pick out the single most critical decision of their lives. Jarsdel could, and his abandoned career—and the alternate life it represented—seemed to exist somewhere beside him at all times, like an apparition.

  In that other life, he wasn’t living alone at Park La Brea. In that other life, his dads still spoke of him with pride in their voices, still had him and his fiancée over for dinner on Fridays, dinners that would conclude with him and Baba—a professor of ancient history—cracking a few beers and guffawing their way through Walker, Texas Ranger reruns. Meanwhile, his other father—simply Dad—would hole up in the study with Maureen, both of them able to chat for hours about their shared discipline, English literature.

  What a team the four of them made. Enough IQ points in one room to start their own space program, Dad had joked.

  Jarsdel finished his wine and went back inside, locked his weapon in a fingerprint-access floor safe, and set off for the Farmers Market. The department preferred that he be armed even when he was off duty, but he didn’t like the way the gun felt against his body when he wasn’t on the job. It separated him, made him something other, and he had a hard enough time feeling like he belonged as it was. The kind of camaraderie he craved in the Farmers Market crowd was impersonal, but it was still camaraderie.

  He crossed Third Street with two dozen French teenagers who’d just been let off their tour bus and followed them into the main marketplace, where they scattered for the shops and stalls.

  Jarsdel began to relax as he headed for the food stands, making up his mind as he went that he was in the mood for beef bulgogi, and LA Korea made his favorite in the city. The staff there knew him well enough that as soon as they spotted him in line, they began heaping up a plate with seasoned bean sprouts and cucumber salad. By the time his entree was ready, Jarsdel had bought a pint of Chimay from 326 Beer & Wine. He managed to grab a small table just as it was being vacated and ate and drank amid the soothing din of a hundred conversations.

  There were others like him too—sad, single regulars he saw night after night. The h
eavy, thirtysomething woman with the tips of her blond hair dyed a snow-cone purple who always ordered clam chowder in a sourdough bread bowl. The pinch-faced man with the goatee and the tam-o’-shanter who ate while reading the newspaper and who’d every now and then shake his head and blurt out “Unbelievable” or “Jesus,” as if he wanted someone to ask him what was going on. And the pretty young writer, sadly a decade too young for Jarsdel, who’d stake out a table early in the evening and hammer away on her laptop, never ordering any food, oblivious to the angry glances she’d earn from diners desperate for a seat.

  Jarsdel loved his compatriots; together, they made a kind of club—Team Loneliness, perhaps—and in their own silent way, they gave each other strength. They might be lonely, but at least it was a group effort.

  The seasoned Korean steak went perfectly with the strong, heady ale. He drank it quickly, then ordered another. By the time he’d finished his meal, Jarsdel was cresting the wave of a gentle buzz. He looked again at the writer. She’d brought out a book and was holding it in one hand, glancing back and forth between the open page and her computer screen. When she set it down, Jarsdel could see it was a copy of Common Errors in English Usage. At least she was serious about her work, he thought.

  Maybe she only looked young.

  Maybe he could talk to her.

  But it seemed that would break an unspoken code. Membership in Team Loneliness was supposed to be anonymous.

  But why? Why did it have to be?

  He considered, then stood and approached her table.

  “Audentes fortuna iuvat.”

  The woman raised her eyes to his. Her hair had been dyed a dark, pomegranate red, lips painted to match. She wore a maroon tank with spaghetti straps, and Jarsdel could see a dusting of freckles across her shoulders, under her face powder too. A light silk scarf was tied around her neck, giving her a Parisian look.