White Sister (2006)

by Stephen - Scully 06 Cannell

  Under most circumstances, the morgue is a crowded place full of sheet-covered corpses waiting for their final desecration. Every time I'm up here, I wonder if one day my own precious remains will be parked in these over-wide corridors, waiting for this last indignity. Strange chemical smells mixed with some disinfectant pine scent wafted through the halls. I'd been up here when there were over twenty bodies parked on metal gurneys, most of them too young to be dead, each tray with its own special tale of woe and unfulfilled ambitions. Tonight, for some reason, the corridor was almost empty. Two lonely corpses under green sheets haunted the hallway. The building was unusually quiet. I saw a lighted doorway halfway down the hall and headed toward it.

  Ray Tsu was leaning over the dead Crip when I entered. He had just finished rolling a ten card, imprinting all of the man's fingerprints. He looked up as I entered.

  "You aren't supposed to be here."

  "How the hell can I not be here?"

  Ray was a good guy, even though it was always slightly annoying that he rarely spoke above a whisper.

  "You1 re gonna get your ass cooked unless you get out now," he warned.

  "1 need to know who this guy is."

  "Not from me tonight. Get it from Figueroa and Sepulveda tomorrow."

  "Ray, I won't burn you. Please, help me."

  He shook his head.

  "She's my wife. She's the only person who ever gave "

  I stopped, because there were suddenly tears in my eyes.

  "Shane, look at you," he said softly. "You're a mess. How're you gonna do anybody any good like this? Go home. Let Tommy and Rafie handle this."

  "We could put that print card through AFIS instead of NCIC," I said. AFIS was the Automatic Fingerprint Identification System, which we'd just installed downstairs. It had a much bigger and faster database than the National Crime Identification Computer. "If this gangster's prints are in the system, AFIS will spit an ID back on a ten-finger roll in less than two minutes."

  "Come on, Shane. Really. Let those guys handle it."

  "I've seen this vie before," I lied. "His name's right on the tip of my tongue, but I can't quite get it. If AFIS gives us an ID, I know I can remember what his connection to Alexa is. That's gonna be a huge help here."

  I watched as Ray processed this nonsense and rejected it with a frown. "Wait for Tommy and Rafie," he said. "It's their call."

  So I just reached over and snatched the drying card out of his delicate fingers.

  "This could end your career, Shane!" he said, as I walked out of the room with it.

  I didn't wait for him to follow. I was already sprinting toward a bank of freight-size elevators, each one large enough to carry three gurneys. I took the first one down to the basement where the electronic identification unit was housed. I exited just as the phone started ringing at reception. Had to be Ray. There was no one at this desk either. My luck was holding. For the first time since the cutbacks happened, I applauded the city's budget crisis. I jumped over the vacant counter and picked up the receiver hitting the Hold button. Then I put all of the remaining five lines on hold as well. When I left, the desk telephone was blinking like a Vegas slot.

  I found the AFIS machine in a small room at the end of a long corridor. A young bored-looking blond girl was running a stack of print cards.

  "Hi. I need this run immediately," I said, offering her the ten card.

  "ID number?"

  I pulled out my CREDS and showed her. After she wrote down the number, she took the print card from me and scanned it into the machine.

  "If it's in the system, this should only take a few minutes," she said.

  I tried to make small talk, but frankly, I couldn't think of anything to say. I was an emotional wreck. Suddenly, her eyes went down to the flashing phone on the table across from us.

  "I wonder why the lines are all on hold," she said. "There's almost nobody down here."

  "There was a phone guy out front. Maybe he's working on the system." Total B. S., but it must have worked because she nodded her head and smiled.

  Then I heard Ray coming down the hall. "Shane! Dammit, Shane! You down here?!" It was the first time I could remember hearing him shout.

  "He's with me, Mr. Tsu," the girl called out.

  Seconds later Ray Tsu planted his skinny body in the doorway, acting as if he could actually use his pipe-cleaner build to physically restrain me from leaving with his print card.

  "Shane, come on," he said. "Don't make this any worse."

  Then the AFIS machine started buzzing and a printout shot into the catch tray. We had a match. Ray made a move toward the tray, but I beat him to it and grabbed the printout along with the ten card and folded them both in half. I knew, of course, that he would just run it again, but he'd have to reprint the body first. That would buy me at least a ten-minute head start.

  "I'm reporting this, Shane."

  "I know." I turned and ran out the door, taking the stairs two at a time, exploding back into the rear lobby. The security guard had returned from the toilet, or wherever he'd been when I first arrived, but they aren't there to stop you from leaving, only from getting in.

  "Have a good night," the guard called, as I speed-walked past him out the door and into the parking lot. I pushed the button to open the parking gate from the inside, then sprinted out of the lot and across the street to my car. I jumped in and powered away.

  I still hadn't looked at the printout. My heart was slamming inside my chest. My hands were shaking as I gripped the wheel tightly with sweating palms. When I was ten blocks away and felt safe, I pulled over, turned on the dome light, and unfolded the AFIS printout.

  The DMV photo I was looking at was of a clean-cut man with short hair. But despite the different haircut, I recognized him as the dead guy from Alexa's car. He was handsome in a rakish way. A slightly skewed smile said he knew he was hot. His driver's license identified him as David Morris Slade, six-one, one hundred ninety-five pounds. He lived at 420 Cypress Street, Compton. Following that, the AFIS printout had added other pertinent information, and that was the surprise.

  There was a police identification number, with a notation. David M. Slade was a member of the LAPD Academy class of 1982. He was currently a sergeant assigned to a special gang intel unit. I folded the paper and looked at the empty street in front of me while I tried to process all this. Of course, it was the missing piece.

  The reason he was in Alexa's car.

  Chapter 7.

  COMPTON is BORDERED on the south by Long Beach and on the north by Watts. The city has a bloody gang history.

  In the late sixties a new form of Jamaican music caught hold in New York, then quickly spread to Compton. Rap music was fueled by rock cocaine and violent street gangs. In the late eighties, N. W. A cut their first incendiary rap album, titled Straight Outta Compton, which featured the hit single "F Tha Police." With that album, gangsta rap was born. While Crips and Bloods competed for drug turf around Piru Street in Compton, rap impresarios with serious gang affiliations were recording street artists and making millions. But there were downsides. The average lifespan of a Compton drug dealer was twenty-five years and gang violence at hip-hop awards shows had become common.

  Rappers like Easy-E, Dr. Dre, and DJ Quik were just kids growing up in Compton in the eighties. Snoop Dogg was a few miles away in Long Beach. Rap and crack made stars and millionaires out of some and corpses out of others. In recent years the black gangs in Compton were in a struggle to control their turf, losing street corners one by one to the new, violent Hispanic gangs like the Ninos Surenos and Mara Salvatruchas.

  As I made my way down toward the Long Beach Freeway, I tried to fit David Slade into the equation. Slade had that big ABC on his arm, and I knew you didn't put Crip ink on yourself unless you were in the gang. There was only one way I could reconcile a cop with that tattoo. After the Watts Riots, the LAPD was having trouble recruiting minorities. In a desperate attempt to get more "color" on the job, some nitwit in ad
ministration had suggested we drop the juvenile felony restriction, opening the department up to people who had committed serious crimes as long as they'd done them under the age of eighteen. The result of this change allowed ex-gang-bangers of all ethnic backgrounds onto the police force. Cops like Raphael Perez had joined up, later becoming involved in the Rampart scandal and disgracing the department. Was David Slade just another example of this failed policy? Once you were jumped into a set, you rarely got out. If he'd joined the LAPD in the early 1980s, it explained why he still lived in Compton.

  Most black cops felt disenfranchised by the hood, and were called out for being on the job. The majority of them moved, preferring places like Stevenson Ranch or the Marina. I wondered if Slade stayed in Compton because he was still Crippin' working both sides of the street. I needed to access his I. A. file and his current caseload. His gang drapes told me he was probably working undercover. All this left me back where I started: What was he doing shot to death in Alexa's car?

  I had a dozen questions and no answers. I was also running out of time. I was pretty sure by now Ray Tsu had alerted Sepulveda and Figueroa to my commando raid on North Mission Road, and fed them the info from the print card. Those two cops would be on their way to Compton to head me off. Coming from Mulholland gave them a geographical advantage, but I had a big time jump. I was probably still a few minutes ahead. I was navigating with the Acura's GPS and stayed on main streets, which at this time of night were faster. I was busting lights, dangerously.

  I got into Compton a little past midnight and turned onto Cypress Avenue. It was an old, residential street lined with run-down bungalows and duplexes. Chain-link fences fronted lawns where the grass was mostly brown. The paint on everything seemed faded and chipped.

  As I sped along, I was surprised to see a young boy about five or six riding a tricycle on the sidewalk. It was past midnight. Where the hell were his parents? Fifteen years from now, would I be chasing this kid down these same streets and end up in some desperate shoot-out because when he was five, nobody cared enough about him to tuck him in at night?

  Slade's residence was a tan Spanish bungalow with brown shutters and wrought-iron security bars across the front windows. It was one of the rare houses on the street that had been freshly painted. I parked about twenty yards away, behind an old gray Chevy Caprice, and left my door ajar in case I needed to make a quick exit. Then I sprinted back to Slade's house. I didn't bother with the front door, because I didn't have a search warrant and a white guy jimmying a front door might not go unnoticed in this neighborhood. I had already decided to break in from the rear where I would be less visible. I went directly around back and looked in the porch window. Then I tried the back screen door. Everything was locked. I pulled out my gun and crept silently along the side of the house looking for a good window to break. I found one in the middle where the security bars were loose. I pulled one away, bending the old screws until the bar came off in my hand. Then I reached through the remaining two bars and broke the glass with my gun, found the latch, and slid the window open.

  I stood quietly for a minute, listening for trouble: an alarm or a drooling Rottweiler. The house remained quiet. A strange truth is a lot of police officers don't install electronic security because they think that no street burglar would be stupid or brave enough to try and rip them off. I jumped up and shinnied through the window, squeezing between the two remaining security bars, and dropped inside.

  I landed in a guest bedroom. Cardboard boxes full of junk were all over the floor. I didn't bother with them, but instead moved out into the hall. The smart thing to do was to clear the house first, to make sure there wasn't some armed homie crashing on the front couch. I knew I didn't have much time, but even so, I decided to do a quick shake to be safe. It wouldn't do Alexa much good for me to get shot as an intruder.

  The house was so small that it only took a few minutes. There were three bedrooms; one had been converted into an office for Slade. The front area consisted of a dining room, living room, kitchen, and guest bath. The whole place wasn't 1,200 square feet. The furniture was old. Nothing matched. It was the kind of look you end up with after a relationship fails and you divide everything up. Before Alexa, I'd had half a dozen apartments furnished exactly like this.

  Most shakes start in the bedroom because that's where people tend to hide their secrets. The master was a third larger than the two guest bedrooms. The walls were painted blue. LAPD blue or Crip blue? I wondered. The space was dominated by an unmade king-sized bed. A large Spanish dresser sat opposite it against the wall. There was a closet full of Fila running suits, known in law enforcement as 211 suits because for some reason hold-up specialists from the hood seemed to favor them.

  I went quickly through the hanging clothes, checking pockets for notes, cards, or other personal debris. Nothing. I then turned to three cardboard boxes stacked on the floor and found that each one was packed with old clothes. At the back of the closet, my eye fell on a large, rectangular, black case about three feet long by one foot high. I pulled it out, broke the lock with a metal hanger, and pried the lid open. Lying on the bottom in black cut Styrofoam was a fully automatic Beretta AR-70 with two thirty-round clips. I looked down at the illegal firearm and wondered what David Slade used it for. I closed the box and pushed it back into the recesses of the closet.

  Next, I searched the dresser. In with his socks, Slade had some thong underwear, some condoms, and in the bottom drawer, half a dozen hand-laundered, five-hundred-dollar silk shirts. It seemed extravagant for a guy on a sergeant's salary. There were half a dozen pictures in silver frames on top of the dresser. In all of them, Slade was dressed in silk or satin, wearing tasteless, chunky, diamond-encrusted jewelry. His straightened Marcelled hair glistened. In several shots, he had his arm around some very hot-looking ladies. Some were white, some African-American. In one picture he was with a prominent, up-and-coming rapper whose name I couldn't remember, but had seen on TV. Both were grinning and throwing Crip gang signs.

  Then, I heard two car doors slam out front. I flipped off the bedroom light and sprinted back to the guest room just as I heard knocking on the front door.

  "This is the police. Open up!" I heard Rafie yell. Then the door was being pounded on again and Sepulveda shouted, "Shane, if you're in there, open up or we'll break it down!"

  I was halfway out the window when I heard the front door smash open. I landed on the grass, did a shoulder roll and came up running. I was just passing the garage when I noticed a brand-new, white Cadillac Escalade parked inside. Most cops drive midline Japanese iron. Not that a cop can't get financing on a ninety-thousand-dollar sled, but it seemed a little out of place sitting in Slade's ghetto garage. He had really pimped out the ride with twenty-inch, custom chrome wheels, known in the hood as blades or dubs. The car was talking to me. Something, some instinct, told me I had to check it out. I veered into the garage and tried to open the driver's side door. Locked. I could see the alarm light flashing. No alarm in the house, but a dude always wires his snap. Go figure.

  I glanced over my shoulder at the back porch and saw lights going on inside. I heard Rafie and Tommy calling my name. It wouldn't be long before they'd be out here. I started frantically looking around for a hide-a-key under the bumpers. I found it in the right front wheel well, stashed high up behind the headlight a small metal box attached by a magnet. I pulled it off, opened it, and slipped the key out. There was a small alarm remote on the key, so I chirped it and opened the door.

  The car was loaded with expensive extras: leopard seats, color TV in the back, fifty-channel satellite dish on the roof. It had the latest GPS and telephone, and a sound system with enough muscle to blow all the fur off a pimp's collar. I opened the glove compartment and pulled out the registration. In the dim light from the open glove box, I could just read the DMV info. The car was owned by somebody named Stacy Maluga. The name sounded vaguely familiar. The address was 223 Oceanridge Drive, Malibu, California.

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sp; Then I heard the back porch door open and I got out of the car.

  "Hey, Tommy, there's an Escalade out here. He might be in the garage," Figueroa yelled.

  I was trapped. No way to get past him. I rolled up the registration slip and held it in my right hand like a baton. Then I edged toward the open garage door and looked out. Rafie was standing about twenty yards away on the porch, looking in my direction. He hadn't spotted me yet.

  Here goes nothing, I thought, and sprinted out of the garage past where he was standing, and down the drive.

  "Hey! Who is that?" Rafie yelled, startled. "Come back here, Shane!"

  I heard footsteps behind me. I was pretty sure I could outrun him. He spent way too much time in the gym, and guys with lifter's thighs are usually slow as hell.

  I rounded the corner at the end of the drive and pumped like crazy, heading for the Acura.

  "Come back! Dammit, Shane! Stop!"

  I made it to the car, jumped in and put it in gear. I could see Rafie clearly now, about five yards away, closing fast.

  "Scully! You son of a bitch! Come back here!"

  I floored it and shot away, speeding off the mean streets of Compton on my way to the mansions of Malibu.

  Chapter 8.

  BELOW ME, ON the left side of the road, the Pacific coast stretched in a lazy horseshoe defined by the lighted curve of the Malibu Shoreline. Off to the northeast was Pepperdine University. I was driving along twisting Oceanridge Drive, looking for 223. Finally, I pulled up and parked in front of a huge, multimillion-dollar mansion that sat by itself on a point that overlooked Malibu far below. A gold M adorned the center of an ornate design on the double-hinged, wrought-iron gates.