by Gil Reavill
Russell’s middle finger on his right hand was indeed missing. Jokers were always giving him a hard time about it. Castration anxiety, his therapist told him. That was their problem. His disfigurement gave them a problem. What about the problem it gave Dorian?
“All quiet on the Western front, boss,” Fats said.
“Did you get it?”
“I’m going to,” Fats said. “Why don’t we let him just get rid of it?”
“Because he won’t,” Dorian said. They’d been over this. “I want to do it myself. Take it over the motherfucking ocean and drop it in the drink.”
“I can do that for you, boss,” Fats said.
“What did I just say?”
“No problem,” Fats said.
“Call me when you have it,” Dorian said, and he ended the call.
“Would you like to hear your other messages?” the disembodied voice asked as he careened back toward the master bedroom, aiming for the aircraft carrier of a bed.
“No,” Dorian snapped. “Do not disturb.”
He detoured toward his pharmaceutical kit bag. He had been waiting so long for this life that when it finally came he felt transported into a dream. The unreality of it jolted him. Hotel suites, narcotics, and sex. Doing whatever the fuck he wanted.
Louis Armstrong used to talk about the best things in life being the “three M’s,” which he defined as “music, money, and mmmmm—pussy!” Russell Dorian had a tin ear and couldn’t play a note, but in his new life he was determined, at least, to embrace the last two.
It was all due to his coming into his inheritance. And that was due to his father finally, at long last, Jesus-will-you-breathe-your-final-breath-already? kicking the bucket. In the end, immortality had eluded the great Hollywood producer Norman Dorian. And his son was able to slip out from under the fat thumb of Daddy after all.
Russell would have had his father killed if not for the sick feeling he got in his groin whenever he thought about it. “Face your fears,” his therapist told him. “You face them,” Russell responded. “That’s what I hire you for.”
When, six months back, miracle of miracles, Norman Dorian croaked, the years of fronting and faking and toeing the line paid off when the inheritance landed on Russell with a delicious, fat thud. He might rage at the amount, at all the rest of the money that should rightly have been his, lost to his father’s lame-brained charity donations. But relief trumped his disappointment. A few loose ends to be tied. Russell would take care of those. Then he’d be free.
“Boat drinks.” That’s prison slang for it, all the sad-sack convicts looking forward to the day when they were out of the stir and on the deck of a yacht, clinking glasses filled with rum-laced iced tropical juices. The boat-drink life.
None of those loser dreamers ever made it. But Russell Dorian had—made it in spades, made it in the shade.
If insight had come to Russell along with the after-tax eleven million his father had left him, if he had been rich and smart, able to see into the future, he might have been less complacent. The shadow of a hulking, knuckle-walking, protohuman form, the same creature that had been haunting him his whole life, now loomed up again in his future, visible but through a glass darkly. Through a dark glass, and through a narcotic haze of hydromorphone.
—
Dale Chavez, Remington’s administrator when she was TDY on traffic during the first days of the Lost Hills fire, put her with a fire warden named Samantha Ehrlich. Returning from Century City on the 405, she stopped at Ehrlich’s office in the Los Angeles County Emergency Command Center, located in South Valley, one of three ECCs found throughout the region.
“We’re still doing post on that,” Ehrlich said when Remington asked about Lost Hills. “Preliminary finding is human agency was not involved. We don’t have a definite cause, but there were lightning strikes in Las Virgenes and Gates Canyon the evening of incidence.”
Ehrlich talked like a scientist and looked like a veteran firefighter: crisp khaki uniform with fire campaign badges on the sleeve, a wealth of curly black hair kept under control with a simple fabric band.
“Bell Canyon—that would be north of the freeway?” Remington asked.
“Lost Hills jumped the freeway, pushed south and west by the Santa Anas,” Ehrlich said. “We had to close the 101 for an hour that night; there were windblown spot fires on either side of it, north and south.”
“I’m interested in the area around Trappe Canyon Ranch.”
“What’s your concern?” Ehrlich asked. “Wait a minute, are you on the Odalon Sanctuary thing?”
Remington nodded.
“I can let you see exactly what happened with that,” Ehrlich said. She motioned Remington around to her side of the desk and called up a computer wildfire-simulation graphic on her screen.
“This is Lost Hills,” she said. The graphic showed a red blob laid across a topographic map of the area. “See, there’s the 101 Freeway cutting through. This is eighteen hundred hours on the evening it started.”
“What are those little white arrows?” Remington asked. They covered the map, pulsing, changing direction.
“Wind vectors,” Ehrlich said. “They’re what’s pushing the fire.”
Remington watched as the red blob grew and three other blobs appeared, each one marked with an ID number and a time code. “This one, this is the one.” Ehrlich jabbed her finger at the screen as one of the four original blobs swelled and spread south of the freeway. “That’s the one that became Lost Hills.”
The other three blobs slowly shrank, but the one Ehrlich had indicated kept enlarging.
“So the winds carried coals and ash aloft and ignited other fires?” Remington asked.
“That’s correct,” the fire warden said. “We had our hands full, and we just got to this one too late. You don’t always know where to put your manpower. The canyons up there are vicious.”
Don’t I know it, Remington thought.
“So it climbed along the ridgeline here,” Ehrlich said, narrating the developments on her computer screen. “Took out a collection of homes there, see?”
Like some hungry, rampaging protozoa, the blob ate up a half-dozen bright white squares on the computer-sim landscape that represented buildings. “Four homes and a couple of businesses, actually,” Ehrlich said.
Lost Hills was giving birth to spot fires on both its flanks. Remington got her bearings on the map and found Trappe Ranch.
“That’s the Odalon Sanctuary?” she asked, pointing with her finger. “The fire is a whole couple of canyons away.”
“Midnight,” Ehrlich said, indicating the time code. “But look what happens.”
As the time code advanced to 0200—2 A.M.—another blob suddenly flared to the immediate north of the sanctuary. Remington watched, fascinated. She was seeing what Cindy Iracane had described on the ground. The smaller spot fire enlarged, encompassed the whole area, and then merged with the larger fire at 0445.
“So how did that smaller fire start?” she asked.
“Probably windblown ash, flaming debris, something like that,” Ehrlich said. “You know, we looked at this, analyzed wind vectors, but so far it hasn’t made much sense to anyone. Look at the winds at that point in time. It doesn’t really fit.”
Remington couldn’t see what Ehrlich was talking about, but took her word for it.
“We haven’t gotten up there yet to do a thorough analysis. I understand you had some fatalities. The staff euthanized the animals to prevent them from dying in the fire?”
“Well, we haven’t done a thorough analysis, either,” Remington said. “It’s pretty clear they were shot before the fire came down on the yard.”
“Horrible,” Ehrlich said. “There’s something truly heartbreaking about caged creatures caught without any way out.”
“The sanctuary folks tried to get a cattle truck in there to transport them, but they were too late.”
“They were lucky they didn’t experience any human fata
lities. This was one fast-moving fire.”
Remington thanked the warden for providing her with a much clearer picture of what happened in the canyons that night.
“When we finish this simulation, I could send you the file,” Ehrlich said. “Because of budget cuts, we have to say that it’s proprietary. So if you use it in court or anything, get our written permission first, okay?”
As Remington headed to the door, she said, “I ran into one of your burn bosses up there near the sanctuary the next morning.”
“There was still a lot of work to be done for days afterward,” Ehrlich said. “Who was it?”
“I didn’t catch his name,” Remington said. “He was on a hotshot team from Arizona.”
“New Mexico,” Ehrlich corrected her. “We had one team in from New Mexico, two from Nevada, plus crews from all over California. None from Arizona. They have a couple of their own big fires to fight down there. It’s been a bad season all around.”
“I must have misremembered,” Remington said, even though she didn’t think she had.
13
“CHOMPANZEE!” read the LA Daily News tabloid headline the next morning, with twin subheads: “ROGUE CHIMP KILLS FORMER KEEPER” and “‘BIT OFF FACE’ SEZ POLICE.”
Remington read the News story as she was parked in the lot of the medical examiner’s office in East L.A. The article was light on facts and heavy on gore. But clearly someone on the newspaper staff had a source within the sheriff’s department.
A chimp attack was always good for a ratings bump. When Travis, the former show ape that had spent his early life appearing in ads and on TV programs, went berserk at a private residence in Connecticut, the media relished the gory details. The victim dramatically unveiled her new, surgically reconstructed self on Oprah. Viewership spiked.
The violence that went the other way—what humans did to apes—enjoyed a much lower media profile. Warehoused at the local morgue were thirteen victims of that particular brand of aggression, members of one primate species that had been shot and killed by an unknown member of another.
Remington tossed the News aside and headed into the coroner’s.
“I’ve never done one of these before,” admitted Kenny Bedford, a pathologist on the coroner’s staff. Remington had joined Bedford in one of the green-tiled, windowless morgue labs. The body of an adult male chimpanzee lay partially opened up on the stainless-steel autopsy table.
“I think this one was called Booth,” Remington said. “Or maybe it’s Mister Jeepers.”
“Really? Mister Jeepers?” Bedford said. “I used to watch him on Saturday-morning TV.”
He launched into a parody of Hamlet. “Alas, poor Mister Jeepers! I knew him, Remington: a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.”
Working in a morgue encouraged a tendency toward both irreverence and the philosophical. “Where be your gibes now?” the pathologist asked, directly addressing the dead ape. Then he requested that Remington help him heft the corpus onto a scale.
“He’s a big one,” Bedford remarked, reading the digital display. “Seventy kilos.” Remington never got the conversion automatically; she still had to think about it. A little more than a hundred and fifty pounds.
“Where are the others?” she asked.
“They’re still in the truck, got ’em sheeted and stacked,” Bedford said. “Listen, not everyone likes them being in the lab here. They say we should have placed them at a vet’s somewhere.”
“They hate dogs,” Remington said.
Bedford glanced over at her. “They’re dead, Detective.”
“Right,” Remington said, looking down at the ape, which they had shifted back onto the examining table. “That is a big affirmative, sir.”
“They’re almost identical,” Bedford said. “To us, I mean, anatomywise.” He lifted up a limp foot. “Except for some anatomical quirks like this,” indicating the fingerlike big toe. He let the foot flop back onto the table. “Their brains are a third the size of ours, weighing in at around a pound, while ours are about three.”
“Size matters, I guess,” Remington said. “So we can say that a chimp is a third as smart as we are.”
“Well, you can’t really make the comparison,” Bedford said. “The sperm whale, say, has an eighteen-pound brain, and as far as we can tell it doesn’t have six times the intelligence of humans.”
“Although…” Remington said, trailing off.
“Right,” Bedford said, giving a laugh. “They might be thinking deep thoughts, down there in the ocean, and just prefer not to share them with us.”
As Bedford chatted away, he worked inside the chest cavity with a blade, making a ripping sound like that of a fish being gutted. He then set the knife aside and dug his latex-gloved hands into the opening, lifting out the compact package of the viscera: lung, heart, liver, stomach, kidneys. The organs hung together, and the pathologist placed them upright on the table between the ape’s legs, like a small valise.
Bedford reached for the goosenecked hose that was attached to the head of the anatomy table. Using the table’s knee controls to control the flow of water, he flushed out the chest cavity.
“I’ve already taken a preliminary look at all of them,” he said. “Funny thing, I don’t think we’re going to recover much for ballistics.”
“What do you mean? Why not?”
“Very heavy loads. The projectiles tore right through them. I can tell you definitively the rounds did not come from that rifle that was put in as evidence.”
“No?”
“A projectile from a .270 couldn’t do what was done here. Bullets from the rifle you recovered at the sanctuary would have been like thin needles. This damage was done with something more like a fist.”
“You turn up any slugs?”
Bedford shook his head. “Not so far. You want lead or copper on this, you’re going to have to go out and comb the ground.”
“The scene is decayed,” Remington said.
“The fire teams had their way with it, didn’t they? Well, no smoke in the lungs, it looks like. I did a swab test, so the fire had to be post.”
Bedford lifted up the chimp’s head, displaying a neck wound. “Might as well have been a howitzer shell. Check the spine.”
The shattered bone showed up against a pulpy mass.
“Military?” Remington asked.
“Could be,” Bedford said. “But have you been to a gun show lately? Everything’s available to the public, including the kind of heavyweight magnum ammo that did this. Some of these high-velocity rounds, you know, they can go straight through an engine block.”
“Or a Kevlar vest,” Remington said.
Bedford lowered the head gently back down onto a stainless-steel neck rest. He had steadied the corpus with a longitudinal prop made of dense gray rubber. Anatomy tables, Remington knew, had to be enlarged in recent years, along with school desks and seating on subways and buses, in order to accommodate the increasing girth of the American public.
Dr. Edward Gladney, the L.A. County coroner, pushed into the lab through the double doors of the cold room. Remington introduced herself.
“I’ve heard about you, young lady,” Gladney said.
“Good things?” Remington said.
“Well, the world is a backstabbing kind of place. Have you ever noticed that?”
“I was actually first on the scene for a backstabbing once, up in North Hollywood,” Remington said, and Dr. Gladney chuckled.
“We’d like to get these animals out of here as soon as we can,” he told her. “We’re worried about cross-contamination. Can you release them?”
“Are you short on space?” Remington asked.
“They’re stinking up the place,” Bedford put in. “The refrigerator truck smells like a campfire.”
Dr. Gladney frowned. “The Santa Anas are going to be coming in strong in the next few weeks, and that means more business for us.”
The winds. Every fall the Santa Ana
winds swept out of the desert to the east. They led to respiratory deaths among the elderly, yes, but also to shootings, knifings, and random violence—all of which spiked along with the hellish, relentless wind. The parched desert air blew down from the mountains and John Q. Public suddenly found himself dodging stray bullets.
“Can’t you just warehouse them in the truck, Doc?” Remington asked. “I don’t know where we are with this. I have to speak with animal services, the fire teams, the owners of the sanctuary.”
“So you’re playing a game of let’s pretend,” Gladney said. “You want them treated as homicides.”
Remington shrugged. “Thirteen dead. That’s not nothing. Plus the caretaker.”
“I heard about that,” Gladney said. “We didn’t do the postmortem here—they had it up at Valley Presbyterian.”
“The lab guy up there told me the body had totally bled out, all six quarts,” Bedford said. “Beat up like it’d been in a blender. No open casket on that one, if you please.”
All three of them stared down at the dead chimp, whose death grimace displayed teeth able to rip the face off a man.
“Well, the freezer has some space,” Gladney said reluctantly. “The problem is I don’t know where they’re going from here. It’s not like a mortuary will take them.”
“You can leave them in the fridge truck, if that’s okay,” Remington said. “I’m thinking they need to be retained for days, not weeks.”
“You want a full autopsy on all dozen?” Bedford asked.
“No real need, I guess. Just, you know, anything odd, plus ballistics the best you can.”
To Dr. Gladney, Remington said, “We’ll have them out by the middle of next week, or next weekend at the latest.”
“My predecessor, Johnson Falks, used to call the bodies that came in here his ‘guests.’ Fish and visitors stink after three days, and in this case it’s literally true.”
Bedford said, “That’s a line from Ben Franklin, did you know that?”
Remington jerked her thumb toward the double doors in the back of the lab. “Mind if I go out this way, visit the rest of them?”