Fatal Care

by Leonard Goldberg

  “Farelli strolled into the autopsy room when Simon Murdock was there,” Joanna told him. “And Murdock became upset because it’s a restricted area.”

  Jake rolled his eyes skyward. “As if Farelli had never seen a stiff, for chrissakes!”

  “That’s not the end of it,” Joanna went on. “Murdock and Farelli got into a word battle, and finally Farelli gave him an icy look and told Murdock to put a lid on it.”

  Jake smiled thinly. “I’ll bet Murdock shut up real quick.”

  “And how.”

  Most people misjudged Farelli on first glance, Jake was thinking. Farelli was short and stocky with a round face and tired eyes. Everyone thought he looked like a waiter in a neighborhood Italian restaurant. But he was really tough as a brick and took crap from no one. Anybody who crossed him did it only once. “Farelli is not a man you want to piss off.”

  “I think Simon Murdock found that out,” Joanna said.

  They reached the bottom of the ramp and stepped over a narrow trench. Then they walked around a giant earth mover. The ground was softer there, and they were sinking in deeper. Ahead was another trench, wider than the last one. Jake took Joanna’s arm and helped her across.

  They came to the corpse.

  Joanna slowly circled the body, getting an overall picture. The man was big—at least six feet tall—with broad shoulders and muscular forearms. He wore dungarees, a faded plaid shirt, and heavy-duty work shoes. His hands were callused, his fingernails cracked and dirty. He did manual labor, Joanna thought, with a fair amount of lifting. Her gaze went back to his shoes. The right one had a deep green discoloration on its toe. Quickly Joanna looked over at the corpse’s forearms. They were covered with loose dirt, but she could tell the right forearm was larger than the left. And it had a tattoo of a cross on it.

  Joanna moved to the man’s head with its lifeless blue eyes. His mouth was half-open, and something inside was glistening in the afternoon light. Joanna reached for a tongue blade and raised the upper lip. The man’s front teeth were made of a silvery metal.

  Joanna stepped back and examined the body once more. It was dusted with soil from his slide down the slope, but there was no dirt on his face. “Did someone clean his face?”

  “Yeah,” Jake answered. “We wanted to take Polaroids and show them around to see if anybody could ID him.”

  Joanna reached down with her tongue blade and scraped off loose dirt from the tattooed area on the forearm. There was no writing or names associated with the large cross. “I’m surprised the rain last night didn’t cake mud all over him.”

  “We got lucky there,” Jake said. “It only drizzled in Santa Monica last night.”

  Joanna nodded to herself. That explained why the blood and blood clots near the plywood fence hadn’t washed away. It also explained why the empty shoe box was dry and hadn’t lost its faint, disagreeable odor. What was that smell?

  Jake broke into her thoughts. “Well, what do you think?”

  “There are a few things of interest,” Joanna said, going back to the corpse’s shoes to make certain there was no green paint on the soles.

  “Ah-huh,” Jake said, taking out a ballpoint pen and notepad. He wondered why the corpse’s shoes were so interesting to Joanna.

  “To begin with, he’s not an addict. He’s not emaciated, did a fair amount of heavy labor, and has his shirtsleeves rolled up, which tells us he wasn’t trying to hide any track marks.”

  Jake glanced down at the man’s hands and the calluses and split nails. “What kind of work you figure he did?”

  Joanna shrugged. “Carpenter, plumber, handyman, construction worker. Any one of a dozen occupations.”

  “Is there any way to narrow it down?”

  “Not out here,” Joanna said, thinking about the tests that needed to be done in a forensic laboratory. For starters, analysis of the calluses might yield some material that pointed to a particular occupation. Components of fertilizer, for example, would indicate that the man was a gardener or perhaps worked in a factory that made fertilizer.

  “Can you tell if he’s from around here?” Jake asked.

  “No,” Joanna replied. “But I can tell you he wasn’t born or raised here.”

  Jake squinted an eye. “How do you know that?”

  “His teeth.” Joanna leaned over and pried up the corpse’s top lip with a tongue blade. “Using metal to replace teeth is kind of archaic, but it’s how dentistry is practiced in Russia and in some parts of Eastern Europe. That’s where this fellow is from.”

  Jake nodded. “That fits with his tattoo.”

  Joanna’s gaze went to the tattoo. It was a large, dark blue cross with orange borders. “You think that tattoo is Russian?”

  “I think the cross is Russian Orthodox, and that’s a religion practiced mainly in Russia and the countries around it.” Jake pointed at the ornate details of the cross with his pen. “See the fancy whirls and swirls, particularly at the ends of the cross?”

  “Pretty fair artwork,” Joanna commented.

  Jake tilted his hand back and forth. “So-so. The color is uneven and the symmetry is not all that good.”

  Joanna smiled over at him. Jake was an expert on tattoos. He loved them. They were the perfect identification mark. Perpetrators never bothered to hide them, and victims always remembered them.

  “So,” Jake concluded, straightening back up, “we’ve got a Russian or Eastern European immigrant who does heavy labor. He walks down this street—for what, only God knows—and gets his head blown off.”

  “He came down this street to kick a hole in the fence, Jake.”

  “What!”

  “Look at the toes of his shoes, particularly the one on the right.”

  Jake saw the green discoloration on the toe of the right shoe. On closer inspection he detected small green splinters stuck between the sole and the upper part of the toe.

  “And he’s right-handed,” Joanna continued. “That’s why we see green paint only on the toe of the right shoe. That’s the foot he would use to kick through the green plywood fence.”

  “Jesus,” Jake muttered, more puzzled than ever. “Why the hell did he want to kick a hole in the fence?”

  “To get inside,” Joanna said simply.

  Jake shook his head. “That doesn’t work. Why kick in a fence and make all that noise? That’s only going to attract people. All he had to do was walk down another forty yards and he could hop over a gate.”

  Joanna nodded in agreement. The victim could easily have climbed over the gate. The chain link in the gate would have given him an excellent toehold.

  Jake looked up the dirt ramp to the street, picturing in his mind the apartment units across from the gate. “The streetlight,” he said to himself.

  “What about it?” Joanna asked.

  “There’s a streetlight in front of the apartments across from the gate,” Jake explained. “He didn’t want to jump over the gate because the area was lighted and he thought somebody might see him. That’s why he kicked a hole in the fence.”

  “But why’d he do it?”

  “Like you said, to get in.”

  “For what?”

  Jake shrugged his shoulders. “That, I don’t know.”

  They turned as Girish Gupta, a senior medical examiner for the County of Los Angeles, came over. He was holding a medium-size bottle in his hands. “Dr. Blalock! What a pleasure to see you again.”

  “It’s nice to see you as well,” Joanna said, liking the man and his genial yet formal manners. “Lieutenant Sinclair tells me we have some nasty business here.”

  “Indeed, indeed,” Gupta said in a clipped British accent. He was a short pudgy man who was born in New Delhi but raised and trained in London. “We have dead fetuses strewn about everywhere.”

  “How many so far?”

  “This is number eight.” Gupta held up a capped, fluid-filled bottle. A small human fetus was floating inside it. “This has to be the work of a crazy person. Who
else would preserve fetuses in bottles, then bury them in the ground?”

  Joanna’s brow went up. “Are all the fetuses in bottles?”

  “Every one so far,” Gupta replied. “And all are perfectly preserved. Here, see for yourself.”

  Joanna took the bottle and held it up to the light. In it was a small human fetus with well-formed arms and legs. The mouth, nose, and eyes were easily discernible. It was at the three- to four-month stage of development. Joanna tilted the bottle and the fetus floated around, facing her. Its chest and abdomen had been cut open. “Are all of them cut like this?”

  “Every one of them,” Gupta answered. “It looks as if somebody has been performing abortions, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess.”

  Joanna continued to examine the floating fetus, wondering why the incisions were so straight and the arms and legs untouched. That usually didn’t happen when the abortion was done by a D and C. She handed the bottle back. “You’ve got a tough case on your hands.”

  “I was hoping you might help us,” Gupta said with an ingratiating smile.

  “I wish I could,” Joanna told him. “But my work at Memorial is really stacked up.”

  Jake stepped in. “We could really use your assistance here, Joanna,” he urged. “I can guarantee you that this is going to be a high-profile case. The story about a cemetery of dead babies is already out, and the press will play it for all it’s worth. You’d be doing us a big favor to take this one over.”

  “But it’s Dr. Gupta’s case,” Joanna protested. “And he—”

  “No, no!” Gupta interrupted quickly. “We are so far behind at the county morgue that this case would sit on the shelf for weeks. And I don’t think we want that, do we?”

  “No,” Joanna had to agree. The Los Angeles medical examiner’s office received over two hundred cases a day. They were always backed up, usually for weeks, sometimes longer. But her own workload at Memorial was also heavily backed up and getting worse. And there were still Oliver Rhodes and the drowning victim to do.

  “All right,” Joanna said reluctantly. “I’ll take the case.”

  “Excellent!” Gupta breathed a sigh of relief. Fetal pathology and embryology were not his strong points. “Of course, I would like to assist you.”

  “We’ll arrange the autopsy schedule so you can be there,” Joanna said. “I’ll have my secretary call yours to set up the times.”

  “Excellent,” Gupta said again, and turned to leave. He stepped in a small hole and tripped. As he tried to regain his balance, the bottle slipped from his hands. It hit a piece of wood on the ground and then bounced up and hit the wood once more. Gupta retrieved the bottle and held it up to the light. “There’s a crack at the bottom, and it’s leaking.”

  Joanna detected a strong, disagreeable aroma. She waved at the air to disperse the sharp odor. “Is that formaldehyde?”

  “Yes,” Gupta replied. “And that explains why the fetuses are so well preserved.”

  “The shoe box,” Joanna muttered under her breath.

  “What?” Gupta asked, ears pricked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Well, then, let me transfer this fetus to another container,” Gupta said, and walked away, this time watching his step.

  Jake moved in closer to Joanna. “What about the shoe box?”

  “I think that faint smell we detected in it was formaldehyde or something closely related to it.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’d bet on it.”

  “Jesus,” Jake grumbled, pacing around the corpse with his hands clasped together behind his back. “This case gets stranger by the minute. Now we’ve got a Russian immigrant carrying around a dead baby in a shoe box, and he kicks down a fence so he can dispose of the baby and plant it with the others. And while he’s doing all this, he ends up with two bullets in his melon. Now, how in the hell do you figure all this out?”

  “Well, for starters, this wasn’t a matter of simple disposal,” Joanna said thoughtfully. “The fetus in that bottle was about four inches long. If you just wanted to dispose of it, you could have just flushed it down the john.”

  “Or put it in the garbage disposal,” Jake added.

  “Right,” Joanna said, sickened briefly by the thought. “And if they were only interested in disposal, they wouldn’t have put the fetuses in formaldehyde.”

  “So they wanted the damn things preserved.”

  “That would be my guess.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t have the faintest idea.”

  Jake shook his head, even more confused now. “So our guy wanted to bury preserved babies and, at the same time, make sure they were never found.”

  Joanna looked at Jake quizzically. “How do you know he meant for the babies to never be found?”

  Jake pointed across the excavation site to two large cement trucks. “The digging part of this project is over. Today they were supposed to finish leveling off the ground and start laying down cement.”

  Joanna thought for a moment and then slowly nodded. “And while those earth movers were leveling the ground, they probably unearthed the bottles with the babies. Is that what you’re thinking?”

  Jake nodded back. “That’s how I put it together. The guy who buried those babies figured they’d be under a foot of cement by now.”

  “But why go to the trouble of preserving babies, only to hide them in a place where they can never be found?”

  Jake shrugged. “Who the hell knows?”

  “This case gets crazier with each new clue.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  The overcast sky suddenly darkened, and large raindrops began to fall.

  Joanna signaled over to Gupta and made a vertical zipping-up motion. She wanted the corpse placed in a body bag. Gupta shouted instructions to an assistant.

  “Come on,” Jake said, taking Joanna’s arm. “Let’s get out of here before this place turns into a pool of mud.”

  They hurried to the ramp, glancing over at the junior medical examiner, who had found another buried fetus. He planted a red flag in the ground to mark the spot.

  “That makes nine fetuses and one adult I have to examine,” Joanna said, exhaling wearily. “And that’s going to take some time.”

  Jake watched the medical examiner hold the newly found bottle up to the light. Nine babies so far, he thought, and probably more to come. “When you’re doing those autopsies, I want you to keep asking yourself one question. It’s the big question. And the answer may well hold the key to everything.”

  Joanna’s eyes narrowed. “What’s the question?”

  Jake gazed out at the miniature red flags fluttering in the breeze. “Where did all these babies come from?”

  5

  Sara Ann Moore was reading Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar when the phone rang. She continued to concentrate on her favorite passage and read it once again.

  There is a tide in the affairs of men

  Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

  Omitted, all the voyage of their life

  Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

  Damn right, Sara thought. You either seize the moment, or you end up being a big nothing all your life. And there were no second chances.

  The phone rang a fifth time before the answering machine clicked on.

  “Sam, let’s meet for drinks around five,” a man said, and then made a sniffing sound. He hung up without identifying himself.

  But Sara knew the voice. It belonged to the man who arranged the hits and collected the fees and handed her the money—minus his 20 percent commission. The message “Let’s meet for drinks” meant he had a job for her. And the sniffing sound he made told her that everything was all right. He wasn’t being forced to make the call. She wasn’t being set up.

  She played the message back, making certain the sniff was there. Assassins had enemies, too. It paid to be careful.

  Sara walked over to the sliding glass doors of
the tenth-floor condominium, which she rented for two thousand dollars a month from a Hollywood producer who spent most of his time in Europe. Outside, the sky was cloudy and gray, a light rain falling. She glanced around the living room and wondered if the writer had an umbrella hidden away someplace. She grimaced at the tasteless furniture, hating every piece of it. The furniture had a heavy Mediterranean style, the sofa and chairs covered with a deep red velvet material. The furnishings looked like they belonged in a bordello.

  Sara decided just to wear her Stanford warm-up outfit. The jacket had a hood attached and that would be good enough to keep the light rain off her. She erased the phone message; then she left the apartment and took an empty elevator to the first floor. The lobby was well appointed with a marble floor and oil paintings on the walls.

  The uniformed doorman tipped his hat. “Good day, Miss Moore. How’s the computer business?”

  “Not bad,” Sara lied easily. She had told him she worked as a computer programmer out of her apartment. In fact, she used the computer only to buy and sell stocks and to keep track of her portfolio. Sara had made a bundle investing in Internet and high-tech companies. Recently she had sold those stocks and placed the money in blue-chip corporations, like IBM, GE, Ford, and Du Pont. Her portfolio was now worth over half a million.

  Artie, the doorman, was saying something to Sara as he opened the door. She hadn’t been listening.

  “Sorry,” Sara said. “What was that?”

  “I said the weather is getting real bad,” Artie repeated. “Watch your step out there.”

  “Oh, I will,” Sara assured him, and walked out into a very light rain.

  She couldn’t understand the people who lived in Los Angeles. All it took was a little rain, and they scampered for cover. And the television news programs, with their stupid anchors, went on storm alert. For a drizzle.

  Sara sighed, wishing she were back in New York, where she owned her own apartment and had all her things. New York was so electric and exciting, with everything on the move twenty-four hours a day. Sara missed that. But she had to be in Los Angeles because most of her work was now here. She had to know the city and the lay of the land. Often she had to follow her targets for days and sometimes weeks, learning what they did and where and when they did it. And most important, what were the target’s habits and vices and foibles? Only after she had all this information and thought about it at length could she decide how to kill the person. Although she occasionally did straightforward hits, most of her work involved her specialty—making death look accidental.