The First Cut

by Dianne Emley

  A young man who appeared to be from the production company was engaged in a heated discussion with Kissick, Ruiz, and Folke.

  A PPD helicopter unit and three news helicopters circled the area. More patrol units rolled on scene. Officers were busy trying to maintain the integrity of the crime scene and keep the waves of reporters at bay.

  Early parked the Crown Victoria as close as she could get to the action. She and Vining got out.

  “I’ll shut down production, but someone’s going to pay for it.” The young man was wearing an Oakland A’s baseball cap backwards and a black T-shirt printed with the word “Feminist.”

  Kissick handed Early the guy’s card. Vining glanced over her shoulder at it.

  He was the location manager and he was heated when he told Kissick, “Your crime scene is down there, not up here. No one threw her off the bridge. She’d be closer. She’d be right beside it. Obviously she was rolled down the hill.”

  Kissick slid a glance at Vining and Early before asking the guy, “So you’re the crime scene expert?”

  “I worked a couple of CSI shows.”

  Folke and Ruiz laughed out loud. Kissick smirked and stared off at the commuters on the 210, known as the Foothill Freeway. Drivers traversing what locals called the new bridge slowed to look at the action on the old bridge that reached within fifty feet before the freeway veered off.

  Kissick’s pause was for effect. He wanted to make the guy wait for him to speak.

  “Pal, we’ve got a show right here. It’s called dead white female in the arroyo who’s somebody’s child, somebody’s sister or mother or wife who deserves our respect and uninterrupted attention that’s not diminished by you bozos up here making a frigging car commercial.”

  “I’m calling the mayor’s office.”

  “Call Arnold Schwarzenegger while you’re at it. You have ten minutes to clear these people out of my crime scene or I’m going to start making arrests for interfering with the duties of a police officer, and you’ll be the first.”

  The A’s fan marched off, barking to a younger man nearby, “Call the Pasadena film office and the mayor.”

  Kissick shook his head as he scribbled in his field notebook. “I worked on CSI, he says. Unbelievable.”

  Folke called over uniformed officers who were nearby. “Make sure these TV commercial people get their asses out of here ASAP. We’ve got the bridge shut down east of the crime scene. Shut it down on the west up to San Rafael.”

  He turned back to the detectives. “I probably cast a bigger net than we need, but better to be safe than sorry.”

  “Absolutely,” Early said. “What do we have?”

  “Female Caucasian. Twenty-five to thirty years old. Bruised up pretty bad. Throat slit. Coroner’s tech estimates TOD between ten o’clock and midnight.”

  Folke took in a breath as if preparing himself.

  “Whassup, T?” Kissick asked.

  Folke looked around to make sure no one was within earshot. He took a step closer and they instinctively closed the circle. When he spoke, it was nearly a whisper.

  “I didn’t broadcast this over the radio because I didn’t want it to leak out, but I think she might be Frank Lynde’s daughter.”

  “Holy shit,” Ruiz said.

  Frank Lynde was a twenty-five-year PPD veteran. He’d spent most of his career riding a motorcycle and had recently resumed pushing a patrol car. He was a solid cop with no career aspirations beyond doing his job each day and retiring after thirty years.

  Frances, nicknamed Frankie, was his only child. She had been missing for over two weeks and LAPD had been handling the case. Frankie had last been seen off-duty in uniform at a strip club near LAX. She’d left with a woman who was dressed in a suit and wearing a chauffeur’s cap. Witnesses saw them laughing as they ran to a black Lincoln Town Car limo parked in a far corner of the club’s lot. No one took note of the license plate.

  During the ordeal, Frank had kept a stiff upper lip, but friends said he was getting more worn down with each passing day. The missing person flyer that LAPD had distributed was posted on a bulletin board in the PPD’s report-writing room. Someone had tacked to it a yellow ribbon tied in a bow.

  Early broke the group’s stunned silence. “Folke, you did good to keep it under wraps. Last thing we want is Lynde coming down here and seeing his daughter laid out like that. Do the Field I.D. Techs know to keep it on the Q.T.?”

  “I told them.”

  “Is Lynde on today?” Kissick asked.

  “He just got off Morning Watch,” Folke said. “Hopefully he’s asleep.”

  Ruiz looked up at the news helicopters churning the sky. “My money’s on somebody calling him after seeing this on T.V.”

  “Don’t you socialize with Frank?” Kissick asked Ruiz.

  “Yeah. He’s in our monthly poker game.”

  “Folke, tell your team that if anyone comes around who’s not supposed to be here, even if they’re one of us, to let you know and not to let them in,” Early said. “Poor bastard’s going to find out sooner than later, but we can try to do it with dignity.”

  Folke took his cell phone from a pocket in his equipment belt, avoiding broadcasting through dispatch and risking the information being picked up by someone with a police scanner. He pressed a speed-dial number.

  They walked to the end of the bridge. The scene there was frenzied as people and vehicles made their departure, clashing with uniformed officers who were attempting to control and expedite the process.

  In the midst of the chaos, a pall had fallen over the group of detectives.

  Vining decided to remain in the background. She wasn’t sure she was even part of the team. If she was, she’d been demoted to junior member. Best to be seen and not heard, even though she knew a lot about the disappearance of Frankie Lynde, much more than any of the detectives there.

  “Adult women missing for over two weeks don’t usually show up alive,” Kissick said. “Everyone knows that. But this…”

  “Wonder if it was a vengeance move against Frank Lynde,” Folke said.

  “LAPD detective by the name of Schuyler is handling the M.P. case.” Ruiz mopped perspiration from his forehead with a handkerchief. It was just after nine o’clock on an early June morning, but it was already hot. “Frank told me that he and Schuyler went through the arrests he’s made over the past ten years, all the guys he’s sent to jail, looking for someone with a motive. No one jumped out. Nothing that made any sense.”

  “She have a boyfriend?” Early asked.

  “Frank said she never talked to him about her social life,” Ruiz said. “Frankie had a reputation for partying a little too much. Pressing the envelope. Her best friend said she’d dated an LAPD lieutenant for a while. Schuyler told Frank he’d tracked down a dozen guys that Frankie’d been involved with to a greater or lesser degree. Said Frank flipped out. Said he didn’t know anything and didn’t want to know anything about that.”

  Kissick took off his jacket and tossed it over his shoulder. “Any of these guys suspects?”

  “We’ll find out.”

  Folke was walking ahead of them. “Why dump her body in Pasadena? If Frank’s not the connection, what is?”

  “Random?” Ruiz suggested.

  “Vining, what do you think?”

  Kissick was walking in front of her. She was thinking how nice his shoulders looked in his light blue dress shirt, a good color for him, when he drew her into the conversation.

  “I doubt it’s random.”

  She sensed Ruiz bristling when she challenged his view. “The bridge is a Pasadena icon. What better way to taint it? If we can figure out why Pasadena, we’ll find him.”

  “Taint the Pasadena icon.” Ruiz shot a glance at her over his shoulder. “Right. The asshole probably lives in Eagle Rock and drives across to go to work in Pasadena. Middle of the night, there’s no traffic here. You can see headlights in the distance, to give you warning. Houses on the ridge are too far away. C
an’t see that spot from the freeway. Not a bad place to dump a body. Still, Angeles Crest would have been more remote. Roll the body into a canyon from up there, chances are it would never be found.”

  “Doesn’t that prove Vining’s point, Ruiz?” Sergeant Early said. “That scenario you outlined is not random.”

  Vining was pulling up the rear, so no one caught her small smile. Early’s stock with her had always been favorable. Today it skyrocketed. It would be a Pyrrhic victory as Ruiz would certainly make Vining pay.

  “I’m thinking out loud,” Ruiz protested. “So, yes. Why the body was dumped here probably does not follow the precise definition of random. But I wouldn’t go so far as to say he’s making a statement, ‘Screw Pasadena.’ You know what I’m saying? All due respect.”

  “Point well taken,” Early said.

  “Pasadena icon. That’s going out on a limb, in my view.”

  Ruiz, give it a rest, Vining thought.

  “We’ve already agreed, best to cast a wide net.” Early seemed determined to have the last word. “Whatever reason he dumped the body in Pasadena, one thing’s for double damn sure. If she is Frank Lynde’s daughter, even if she was last seen in L.A. and she was LAPD, this is our homicide investigation.”

  F O U R

  T HEY REACHED THE WESTERN EDGE OF THE BRIDGE AND STOOD BESIDE the steel railing off the end that inhibited wayward cars from plunging over.

  The view was a favorite of local artists. To the south, a near-wild expanse of trees and brush stretched into the distance. To the north were Brookside Park and the Rose Bowl. Along the canyon’s base, a few inches of water still flowed through the cement channel that constrained the Arroyo Seco watershed. A stately Moorish building that had been the Vista del Arroyo Hotel in the 1920s dominated the canyon’s eastern ridge. The former hotel was now home to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. It had served as a military hospital during World War II. The big homes flanking it were now used as offices. New town homes were under construction nearby.

  Kissick expressed what Vining was thinking. “The opposite ridge is over a quarter of a mile away. It’s unlikely anyone was around in the middle of the night.”

  Vining turned to look in the other direction at the mansions on the western side that overlooked the arroyo, tucked among dense trees and chaparral. Gated, gigantic places along San Rafael Avenue meandered along the ridge line. The closest was several hundred yards from the bridge.

  She said, “Those homes are too far away for anyone to have seen anything without binoculars.”

  Still standing were the burnt-out, skeletal ruins of the brick gothic-style mansion that had been used as Wayne Manor in a Batman movie. It had been undergoing extensive renovations that were nearly complete when it burned to the ground in a spectacular blaze battled by firefighters from Pasadena and four neighboring cities.

  A spark of light glimmered from a large Mediterranean manse near it. Vining asked Kissick for his binoculars. The flash of light must have been a reflection of the morning sun off the windows. The mansions were most likely bustling with the activities of their rich owners and their overscheduled children, not to mention the extensive household staffs required to keep them going. She wondered why the grand homes always seemed empty. She imagined what it would be like to walk through one, opulent, cavernous, and still. She felt her lungs compress as if a hobgoblin had sucked the air from her.

  She quickly returned the binoculars.

  “Not hopeful that knocking on doors will turn up much,” Early said.

  A few yards past the end of the bridge was the spot where the body had been rolled downhill. Beyond the railing was a flat area of patchy wild wheat and grass, dried golden and sun-hardened dirt before the ridge dropped steeply. The body was not visible from where they were standing in the street.

  Field I.D. tech Tara Khorsandi was looking over the ground with a crime scene tech from the county. The PPD had a small forensics department that gathered and processed evidence, took photographs, and analyzed fingerprints. Anything beyond that was handled by the county crime lab.

  “What’s doin’, Tara?” Folke asked.

  Bent over with her hands on her thighs, she shook her head without looking up. “The ground is like cement. A car was driven up here, over the curb between that break in the railing. The weeds are packed down, but no tire marks.” She straightened, rubbing her lower back and pointing. “Not finding much. A few blood drops here. Likely the victim’s. We’re about to go down and see what we can get off the body.”

  “Okay if we have a look?” Early asked.

  “Sure.” The tech placed a plastic marker imprinted with a number near the blood.

  Ruiz drew their attention to a tall, halogen streetlamp several feet away on the other side of the street. “That should have concerned him.”

  Almost at once, the group looked back at the bridge. It was lined with original lampposts with large, frosted-glass globes. The lampposts had been restored as part of the bridge’s renovation and seismic retrofitting in the 1990s. It was closed for years after being severely damaged in the 1987 Whittier Narrows quake.

  “Those lights on the bridge aren’t bright at night,” Early said. “Still, between them and the streetlight here, he didn’t pick a dark spot to do his business.”

  She stepped over the railing, picked her way to the edge, and looked over. The sheet-draped body was about fifty feet down on the hillside.

  “That’s steep.”

  Vining came up beside her and had a look.

  The songs of birds in the trees were barely audible above the roar of the freeway and helicopters. Bees buzzed around the last of the wild mustard blooms. The air was filled with the pungent, almost dusty aroma of eucalyptus trees. A thatch of wild grass sent up long, fuzzy, lavender-hued spears.

  The body had made a trail in the dried brush as it rolled down.

  “We don’t all need to go down there,” Early said. “Mess up the scene.”

  “I had that hip replaced,” Ruiz said.

  “I’ll go,” Vining said.

  Kissick looked at her. “No. I’ll go. I can head off at an angle and hang on to those bushes if I have to.”

  “I’m going, too.” Vining took off her jacket and handed it to Folke.

  “You don’t need to,” Kissick told her.

  “Go ahead.” She waved him on.

  He headed over the edge and she followed. His stiff-soled shoes lost traction on the loose dirt and pebbles and he slipped, shouting “Whoa!” He skidded to a stop on the slope, pitching himself backward and grabbing a handful of slick, dried wild wheat that pulled free, dangling a dirt clod. He slid another foot before again stopping.

  Vining nearly collided with him, falling onto her butt and scraping her palms.

  Kissick recoiled when he caught sight of a snake lying on the ground in a loose pile. It was gold with brown stripes and nearly as big around as a fire hose.

  It wasn’t moving.

  “I hate snakes,” he said.

  Vining tossed a stone and hit it. “Dead.”

  “You think?”

  “All the noise we made coming down, it would have slithered into the brush.”

  “You had to use that word. Slither.”

  “Carry on, Daniel Boone.”

  Detouring away from the snake, Kissick crossed and switched back until he reached the body. He squatted beside it and waited for Vining before grabbing the sheet. He raised it.

  The dead woman was tall and well-built. She was on her side, her face turned toward the bridge. Her head was lower than her feet, her legs splayed, her right arm tossed over her head. Locks of long, blond, blood-matted hair were twisted around her neck. Bruises mottled her face and torso. Her tumble down the hill had pulled open the deep knife wound to her throat. Weeds and dirt adhered to the dried blood and her hair. A crumpled In-N-Out Burger drink cup lay near her head.

  While her body told a different story, her face seemed peaceful. Mayb
e at the end, she was glad it was over.

  “Prick bastard.” Kissick dropped the sheet. He partially stood, grabbing on to the branches of a nearby tree. “Head’s almost cut off and he beat the crap out of her.”

  “Is it Lynde’s daughter?” Ruiz asked.

  The others peered down over the edge at them.

  Kissick shook his head, his mouth drawn open in anguish. “Might be Frankie. Can’t tell for sure.” He rubbed his free hand over his face, mixing dirt with perspiration. “She’s a mess.”

  Vining crept closer and picked up the sheet. She leaned in.

  The dead woman’s parted lips were blue-gray. Her eyes were clouded.

  Her eyes sparked with life.

  Vining started, nearly losing her balance on the hill. She blinked hard, not believing what she had seen.

  The eyes shifted to her.

  Vining began to feel that familiar and unwelcome tightness in her chest. The hobgoblin.

  Oh no. Not here. Please. Not now.

  Kissick and the others were talking across the expanse.

  Vining drew in a wheezing breath.

  The woman’s chapped lips moved. She whispered, “I am you.”

  Vining dropped to her knees, clutching a thatch of weeds to keep from sliding. She struggled to breathe. She felt like ice, yet she was perspiring. She still held the sheet, unable to tear her eyes from the corpse.

  The dead woman then whispered, “I am not you.”

  “Nan, you okay?” Early shouted down to her.

  Adam, boy, Charles, David, Edward…

  Vining murmured the phonetic alphabet, the device she’d adopted to focus on something else.

  “’M okay.”

  Still holding on to the weeds, she sat hard on the ground, dropping the sheet and covering the battered face.

  Frank, George, Henry, Ida, Ida…Come on…John, King, Lincoln, Mary…