“Where exactly we headed, anyhow?” asked Dorsey.
“For the hills,” said Ruddock. “Some place near Topanga. Green Leaf Canyon Drive.”
“I thought Topanga was LAPD. Ain’t it LAPD?”
“East of Topanga Canyon Boulevard is LAPD. West of Topanga Canyon Boulevard is county.”
“And our man’s west.”
Dorsey took out a stick of gum and settled into his seat for the long drive to the Santa Monica Mountains.
They missed the junction the first time and had to turn around at a gas station three miles further on. Green Leaf Canyon Drive was little more than a dirt track that dipped and twisted through a wilderness of boulders and stunted, thirsty-looking trees. It was about as remote a part of LA County as you could find, an area favored by superannuated bikers and followers of holistic medicine. Ruddock had only been up there once before, about five years back. A young couple had stumbled on the body of a naked prostitute beside a track just like this one. She’d been strangled with her own stocking. At the time everyone thought the killer must have driven a four-by-four, a jeep, or a pickup, but when they finally caught the guy, it turned out he’d dumped the body from a regular sedan, rented at the airport. So Ruddock knew you didn’t need a four-by-four, so long as you took it dead slow—despite the curses that came from Dorsey each time the chassis smacked the dirt.
The house lay at the very end of the track in a shady spot above a dried-up streambed. It was an old-style timbered house with a sloping roof made of red tiles and a wooden porch along one side. The wood had been painted pale yellow, but was badly in need of a fresh coat. Out front there was a patch of lawn that had turned to weeds and a dilapidated shed through whose open door several items of rusting machinery could be seen. The back of the house looked out over a shallow ravine, where the vegetation looked thicker and greener.
Ruddock parked the Chevy between a patrol car and a blue van that had gauntlet home security company written on the side. Further along stood a gray Lexus that Ruddock recognized as belonging to Dr. Juan Serratosa, the deputy medical examiner. That he had responded so quickly was a good start. On a busy day you could wait hours for the coroner’s office to send somebody out.
Sergeant Pat McNally was giving instructions to one of the patrolmen when Ruddock and Dorsey walked in. McNally was six foot three inches, with neat brown hair, a smooth complexion, and a comic-book hero’s jaw. He and his partner were on the desk that day, their job being to respond to calls from the patrol stations and make an initial assessment of the facts. They decided whether one of the nine other teams on the roster would be allocated to investigate. The discovery of a body was not enough in itself: suicide was not homicide, after all.
“Sorry to drag you out here, fellas,” said McNally. “But this one needs a little digging.”
Ruddock took a look around. They were standing in a dim hallway with a coatrack on one wall and an old, discolored mirror on the other. A musty smell of mothballs and sawdust hung in the air. There were doorways leading into a kitchen and a living room, and a polished wooden staircase going up to the next floor. The furniture and fittings all seemed to date from the I Love Lucy period: worn, utilitarian, a lot of beige and brown and eggshell blue. Apart from a pair of respectable-looking wooden cabinets, there wasn’t a single item Mrs. Ruddock wouldn’t have sent to the incinerator.
“Where’s the body?” asked Dorsey, slipping his shades back into the top pocket of his jacket.
“Top of the house,” said McNally. “There’s a kind of study up there. Couple of PCs, books, and such. And an overhead beam. Dr. Serratosa’s up there now with the crime lab people.”
“You got a positive ID?”
“Got his wallet. Charles Novak, as reported. Professor Novak, as a matter of fact.”
“Professor, huh?” said Dorsey. “Professor of what?”
“Not sure. Chemistry or some such, judging from the books.”
“Who found him?” Ruddock asked.
“Couple of guys from this home security company. They were ‘sposed to be fitting window locks today.”
“They cut him down?”
“Yep. ‘Fraid so. Loosened the knot too. Still, they say they didn’t touch anything else.”
“They say,” added Dorsey with a shake of the head. “Dummies.”
“It’s natural enough,” said Ruddock. “How do they know if the guy’s dead or not? Anyhow, you got to talk to them, Sam. I’ll do the scene.”
“Sure thing.”
“Through there,” said McNally, pointing into the living room. “Their names are Arthurson and Roby.”
Ruddock and McNally began climbing the stairs, which were covered by a worn gray carpet. On a small ledge halfway up stood a blue vase with a bunch of dried flowers inside. They looked as though they’d been picked around 1955.
“So this Novak guy was worried about security, huh?” said Ruddock, pulling on a pair of surgical rubber gloves so as not to disturb any prints. “Any sign of forced entry so far?”
“Not that I can see. And no sign of theft either. Front door wasn’t locked, though. Anyone could have walked in. I’ve asked the deputies to check if he reported anything recently. Maybe something in particular made him want all these locks.”
“He lived here alone?”
“Looks that way.”
They were up on the landing now. Rays of sunlight from a window caught dust floating through the air. They passed a bathroom on one side, a bedroom on the other. Ruddock saw a dark red Chinese dressing gown slung over an unmade bed, a clutter of black-and-white photographs on a painted mantelpiece, a pair of brown slippers, one on its side.
“These security people, did they talk to Novak yesterday?”
“Not much. They said they knew what they had to do and just got on with it. Maybe Dorsey can get something out of them. It’s one more flight, I’m afraid.”
They went up another ten steps, steeper ones this time, uncarpeted and smelling faintly of wood preservative. McNally’s heavy footsteps sent shock waves through the whole structure.
“Juan?”
The door swung open and Juan Serratosa appeared, dressed in disposable paper overalls that were too big for him. Serratosa was a small, lean man with a dark complexion and a brilliant smile, which he used a lot for a guy whose business was the aftermath of unlawful killing. The fact that he was wearing protective clothing confirmed what McNally had said: that the circumstances of this particular death were far from clear. It meant they were probably going to have to check the crime scene for everything from skin flakes to carpet fibers—the so-called trace evidence. In the room behind him the crime lab team was hard at work, photographing the scene and dusting for prints.
“Hi there,” Serratosa said. “I thought you were on vacation any day now.”
“Starting Monday, I hope,” said Ruddock. “Provided I can get this one cleared up nice and quick.”
Serratosa wrinkled his nose as if he didn’t think that was going to happen but didn’t want to say so.
“So let’s take a look.”
Serratosa led them into the middle of the room, a spacious attic that had clearly been converted during the last few years. Lit from a single skylight, it had a stripped pine floor and shelves along one wall, many of which were only half full. On three long tables office equipment was arranged, including two personal computers, a laser printer, and a small photocopier. On one of the screens computer-generated tropical fish swam back and forth above a computer-generated seabed. Leo Nash, the lab photographer, looked up from his camera and acknowledged Ruddock with a nod.
The body lay sprawled out on a patterned rug, the head twisted to one side, a length of nylon rope still loose around the neck. Male, about sixty, tall, about two hundred and twenty pounds, gray hair, balding. Ruddock stepped closer, taking in the dark purple marks below the ears, the gray-blue skin of the face, then the open mouth, the bulging, motionless eyes, the eyelashes. The eyelashes were brown, ex
cept above the roots where, he noticed, there was no color at all. The flashbulb went off again, the dead man’s expression suddenly vivid. To Ruddock it seemed to register not horror or suffering but something more like disgust or self-reproach, as if Professor Novak’s last realization was that he had missed some very important appointment.
“Best keep off the rug, guys,” said Serratosa. “It should’ve trapped any stray fibers. The rest of the floor doesn’t look so promising.”
Ruddock looked up at the overhead beam: about two feet of rope hung down from a knot, the end of it frayed from the hasty cut the workmen had made. On the ground a couple of feet away a plain wooden kitchen chair lay on its side. He wondered why Serratosa and McNally were so reluctant to treat this as a likely suicide. Homicides by hanging were extremely rare. In fact, in all his years at the bureau he could not remember even one.
“Can you give us any help on time of death?” he asked.
“Well, we’ve got almost complete rigor mortis,” said Serratosa, brushing his nose against his forearm. “Given the size of this guy that would suggest that he’s been dead at least twelve hours. But it could be a lot longer than that.”
“How much longer?” said Ruddock.
“Well, it’s pretty hot up here, so I’d expect rigidity to start disappearing maybe twenty-four to thirty-six hours after death. But that’s only a rough guess.”
“So the likelihood is he died some time last night.”
“And he’s wearing a sweater,” said McNally, “which tallies.”
“And we don’t have a note or anything, Pat?”
McNally shook his head.
“Nothing anywhere obvious. ‘Course he may have mailed one to somebody. Has been known.”
Ruddock pointed to the computer that was on.
“You checked that too?”
“What, the fish?” said McNally.
“That’s a screen saver. Conies on automatically after a few minutes. Stops you wearing out the tube.”
He walked over to the computer and gently pressed one of the keys with his gloved finger. The computerized fish instantly vanished to be replaced with a word-processor screen. In the top left-hand corner of a document were written the words: TIME TO END IT. CHARLES NOVAK.
Ruddock smiled. “There’s your note.”
McNally came over and looked into the screen.
“Well, what do you know,” he muttered.
“Maybe his hand was shaking too much to write,” Ruddock suggested. “I mean on paper. Or maybe he just didn’t have anything handy to write with.”
“Better get that keyboard checked out for prints,” said McNally, “and the mouse too.”
Ruddock frowned and put his hands on his hips. Maybe his partner was right about McNally. Maybe he was a little too suspicious.
“Sure, we’ll check it,” said Ruddock. “But, I think this puts a slightly different angle on this whole thing, don’t you? I mean, Juan, when was the last time you had a case of homicide by hanging?”
“I haven’t,” said Serratosa. “Not in five years and two thousand autopsies.”
“Right. So the odds must be—”
“But I’m not sure this is a homicide by hanging,” Serratosa added. “The way I read it, what we have here is most likely ligature strangulation.”
“Strangulation, as in homicide?”
“Only kind there is.”
Ruddock looked at McNally. So that was it.
“Okay. Why?”
Serratosa squatted down beside the body and sighed. For him a corpse was like an ancient artifact, something to be interpreted, understood. It was a messenger from the past; only it spoke in a language that only the expert could understand. It didn’t matter what state it was in or whom it had once belonged to. All that was part of the game. Ruddock suddenly felt he understood how Serratosa was able to smile as much as he did.
“There’s no one thing,” Serratosa said. “Just a lot of little things. For one, the slip knot here. With all the suicidal hangings I’ve seen, the knot’s found at the side of the neck: left-hand side for right-handed people and vice versa. If you’re tying a knot yourself, it’s a lot easier to reach at the side.” He demonstrated, grasping an imaginary rope over his left shoulder. “But this knot’s at the back of the neck, like a regular judicial hanging. I’ve never seen that before.”
“Maybe Novak just liked things neat,” said Ruddock.
“Are you kidding?” said McNally. “Just wait till you see the kitchen.”
“And then there’s the bruising pattern,” Serratosa went on. “Here, take a look. You got enough now, Leo?”
The photographer nodded and stepped back from the corpse, making way for Ruddock.
“If everything’s just the way it looks—if the guy got up on the chair, tied the rope, and jumped off—you wouldn’t expect to see such extensive bruising. It would all be over too quickly.” Serratosa reached down with a gloved hand and gently loosened the nylon cord further. “See here? Around the sternomastoids? And we’ve got more bruising here, on the strap muscles around the larynx, and there’s a kind of rash—maybe a rope burn—on this side.”
Ruddock knelt down for a closer look. There were deep horizontal bruises following the line of the rope.
“But if he’s dancing around, enough to kick the chair over, wouldn’t he get marks like this?”
“I can’t say for sure. It’s just not something I’ve seen before. And just look at the whole area above where the ligature was: you’ve got generalized anoxia, petechial hemorrhages. Just look at the conjunctivae. This is what happens when you get pressure on the veins and the trachea before the carotid arteries. It all says he took a little while to die. My bet is that when we do the autopsy, we’ll find fractures in the thyroid cartilage. That’s a classic sign of homicidal strangulation.”
It could take two or three days, maybe more, for the results of an autopsy to come through. In the meantime, they would have to pull the place apart looking for a lead. So far, it didn’t look promising.
“If this was a murder, Pat, then it looks awful clean. It would have to be at least two guys, possibly professionals. That means they ain’t gonna have left any traces.”
McNally shrugged. Vacations were never very high up on his list of priorities.
“Looks like you could be in for a long day,” he said, checking his watch.
The body was removed half an hour later. Then the real work began: the measuring, the noting, the labeling, the cataloging, the plowing through papers and correspondence. Ruddock didn’t know what he was looking for, so he had to cast the net wide. His best hope was to come across something that indicated illegal dealings of some kind, because if Serratosa was right, Novak’s killers had to be professionals. And retired professors of biochemistry did not tend to get mixed up with such people in the normal run of things. But all the papers pointed to was a lonely old guy who liked to keep his biochemical hand in—read scientific journals, occasionally correspond with academics and PhD students on various campuses. He lived on a company pension, had been married and divorced twenty years back, had no kids. He didn’t keep anything valuable at the house, yet he was apparently worried about breakins—getting a little paranoid probably, the way old people often did. In short, he was the sort of guy who might just get depressed enough one night to put a rope around his neck and jump. He was the kind of guy who might type TIME TO END IT on his PC and end it.
The sun was well below the hilltops when Ruddock returned to the room at the top of the house. A white taped outline now marked the place and position in which Novak’s body had been found. On the computer screen the tropical fish had returned. From the darkness they stared warily at the world beyond, as if they had witnessed a little of its suffering and violence and were afraid.
Ruddock went over to the table and tried to save Novak’s message. The computer informed him that the document had no name and would have to be given one. He chose the word Evidence. When the file
was closed, he began to search the word processor for other documents, hoping to find something more helpful than the old papers he had been sifting through all day. But there were few letters, and certainly nothing suspicious. He stood up straight and stretched. His back was beginning to act up again. It happened most evenings nowadays, especially when things weren’t going the way he wanted them to: a tightness, like an iron fist closing around his spine. He needed a change, a rest. Above all, he needed a vacation.
“Duane? You up there?”
It was Dorsey. Ruddock could hear him coming up the stairs. He would want to know what their next move was, who they should talk to next. In the normal course of events, it would be the neighbors, to ask if they’d seen anything suspicious. But out here there were no neighbors. And whom did that leave? Ruddock didn’t have a clue.
He was about to shut down the system when he saw a little folder icon he hadn’t noticed before, tucked away in one corner of the screen. It called itself Diary. He opened it with a few clicks of the mouse and started scrolling through the pages.
The door swung open and Dorsey walked in.
“So what’s the next move, Duane? We’re all but finished here, I reckon.”
Ruddock smiled.
“Well, it seems our professor had an appointment for tomorrow night at nine o’clock,” he said, writing the name and details down in his notebook. “With one Dr. Marcus Ford.”
“No kidding?” said Dorsey. “That son of a bitch? You know I read about him in the paper.”
2
Ford came to with a bitter taste in his mouth, his back aching from where he had been slumped unconscious in the hard plastic chair. Helen Wray was there, leaning forward, holding Sunny’s hand, saying something he couldn’t make out.
For the past few days she had been coming in during visiting hours to keep him company. And it bothered him. He found he didn’t want her to see his anguish. Sexual intimacy was one thing, but to share a family crisis with someone you hardly knew—it felt wrong. And there was a personal reckoning going on too. Something he would have preferred to go through alone.
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