by Dianne Emley
“Would have made the motives of some of the players clearer,” she said.
“Sorry. Hopefully her stomach contents will hold secrets to help you.” Using a ladle, Takeda spooned the contents into a plastic tub, examining as he slowly poured. It looked like thick, lumpy soup.
“She ate within three hours of her murder. Food usually moves through the stomach within three hours. She had a substantial meal, which would take longer to process. It’s been fairly well digested by the stomach and was moving into the small intestine. I see small bits of meat, likely beef, and something green and leafy. I detect alcohol.”
“Steak, salad, and a cabernet.” Vining glowered. “Wonder if she was that well fed all along or if that was a special last meal.”
“The X-ray showed a foreign body in her stomach.”
“Meaning?” Kissick asked.
Takeda peered into the plastic tub as he moved the ladle through the stomach contents. Setting the tub down, he pulled open her stomach. He grabbed forceps.
“Jason, a small tray, please.
“Voilà.” The object Takeda dropped onto the tray made a metallic clatter when it hit the steel. He tilted the tray for the others.
Kissick couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Is that a crown off a tooth?”
“That’s what it appears to be, folks.” Takeda held it up with the forceps. “A porcelain veneer crown off a molar.” He dropped it back onto the tray. “It must have fallen off one of Officer Lynde’s teeth and she swallowed it. Jason, would you please put up the shots of Miss Lynde’s skull?”
Jason took a stack of X-rays from an envelope and shuffled through them. He pulled down films from clips on the light box, shoved in the new ones side by side and switched on the power.
“She has five fillings.” Takeda pointed them out. “No crowns. Nothing’s missing.”
He returned to the autopsy table and jammed his index finger inside Lynde’s slightly open mouth. “There are no jagged teeth, nothing suggesting a missing crown.”
“Dr. Takeda, a crown must be very individual,” Vining said.
“I’m not a forensic dentist, and I will call one in, but I would say it’s about as unique as a fingerprint. It’s cast to fit the structure of both the tooth it sits on and that of the opposing tooth. It’s something that can be individualized to the exclusion of all others.”
Kissick was incredulous. “How can you get a crown out of somebody else’s mouth?”
“A possible scenario,” Takeda began. “It came loose from the tooth of the person who owned it, who set it aside. Miss Lynde picked it up and swallowed it. It’s small enough, it’s likely it would have passed through her G.I. system. Since it’s not broken down by the stomach acids, hard to pinpoint exactly when she ingested it.”
“She was alive when she was scrubbed down,” Vining said. “He knew it would be a signal that her time was nearly up. He may have forced her to do it herself to torture her, to tell her they’ll never link your murder to me. She complied because she had a card up her sleeve.”
Vining smiled as she walked to the body. She put her hand on Lynde’s hair and spoke to her, ignoring the gore of her mutilated body. “You clever girl.”
F I F T E E N
B ACK AT HER DESK, VINING REVIEWED THE ATTENDEES OF THE THIRTY-FOURTH annual Police-Citizens Awards Luncheon. The event had not been open to the public. Formal printed invitations were sent out by Community Services.
There were over two hundred guests, but more than half were PPD officers and employees. Another dozen or so were city officials. There were three judges from the local superior court and a couple of deputy district attorneys from the Pasadena office. Nine PPD officers and employees received awards for length of service. Twenty-one officers, volunteers, and others associated with the PPD received awards for dedication to duty. A PPD officer and a sheriff’s deputy were awarded the Silver Medal of Courage for rescuing a man from a burning house. Seven citizens were honored for heroism. Many of the award recipients brought spouses, parents, and children.
A local news personality served as mistress of ceremonies. A three-piece jazz combo provided entertainment. There was a photographer. A writer from the local newspaper covered the event. PPD’s chief was there as was the deputy chief and four commanders.
The remaining attendees were generally citizens with ties to the community—local business owners, graduates of the PPD’s Citizen’s Police Academy, doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs—people from all walks of life who had an interest in supporting the police and hobnobbing with real-life heroes. The event was held at the Ritz Carlton in Pasadena, a stately space that the locals still called the Huntington Hotel.
Vining blinked at the long list of names. There would be hotel employees to check out as well. This was going to take lots of hours and would likely lead nowhere. Such was much of the work they did—following dead ends. And it had been her idea. She had to follow through.
She started making marks beside names to check out. She skipped employees of the PPD, city officials, and others whom she knew. She excluded the women. Even though Frankie appeared to be partying with Lolita, Vining sensed a man pulling the strings. Frankie went for attractive, dangerous men, like Moore, enjoying the threat of a lit fuse burning closer. Lolita in the picture at the strip club was part of his game, not Frankie’s.
She heard Caspers on the phone in the adjoining cubicle, trying to make sense out of the leads, questioning the people who had called in, pressing for specifics, probing their motives. He was doing his best with a job as thankless as hers.
She pared the list down to forty-seven men. Each would have to be run through the criminal databases that would report warrants, wants, felony arrests, and certain misdemeanors. She didn’t have birth dates, but it was likely safe to exclude anyone without a local address. NCIC would bring up phonetic matches with the names entered. This was an advantage as there was no telling if the names on her list were accurate or complete. The names also needed to be run through the DMV.
She wasn’t in a position to be a diva, but someone else could do this job. She wanted to get to the bottom of what went on between Moore and Frankie. He was hiding something. If it was important enough for him to hide it, it was worth her time trying to uncover it.
She thought of a way to shortcut the luncheon angle. She called the manager at the Pasadena Ritz Carlton who told her they kept security tapes for a month before copying over them. He would check. It was possible somebody screwed up and didn’t properly rotate the tapes. He’d also obtain a list of employees who worked the luncheon.
She said she’d be right down. She took her purse from her desk drawer and picked up her list of forty-seven luncheon guests to investigate. From the war room, she took a copy of Frankie’s missing person poster and the artist drawing of Lolita as seen at the strip club. She went to Sergeant Early’s office and rapped on the doorjamb.
Early waved her inside.
Seated at his desk, Sergeant Cho muttered, “How are ya, Vining? First one here this morning. Last one out. Sorry now you didn’t stick with me?”
“Cho, stop harassing my investigators,” Early said.
Sergeant Taylor piped up from his desk. “His mother didn’t breast-feed him. Ruined him for life.”
“Leave my mother outta this.”
Early called Vining over. “I got a call from a woman over on San Rafael. Her house overlooks the bridge. Says she’s got something on her security camera the night Frankie’s body was dumped.”
“Okay, I’ll go there before I head to the Huntington Hotel. Kissick fill you in about the luncheon?”
“Yeah.” Early did not sound enthusiastic. “Hope the reward brings in better information. We could use it.”
Vining could see the strain taking its toll on her. Frankie’s body had been found thirty-six hours ago. The clock was quickly ticking toward the forty-eight-hour mark. If they had no solid persons of interest by then, cases went cold fast.
/> “Take Caspers and go over there.”
“Caspers? Sarge, all due respect, but I think I can handle talking to some trophy wife in San Rafael and the Huntington Hotel’s manager on my own. Caspers is busy following up leads. If I may suggest, it’s a better use of manpower.”
Cho was amused by her backpedaling.
“Okay. Fine.” Early took a two-way radio from a charger and handed it to Vining. “We were giving you a car today.”
“I’ll get it tomorrow. I’ll take my own car.”
“We’ll do it right now.”
“Really. It’s fine. I’ll get it tomorrow.”
“You just want to get the hell out of here.”
“I haven’t been outside all day. I’m getting cabin fever.”
“Go. Don’t forget to let us know where you are.”
“Sure. Sarge, by the way, is there someone who can run the names of these luncheon guests?”
“But of course. Sergeant Cho, you have anyone I can use?”
“Unfunny, Early.”
On her way out, Vining swung by her desk and picked up the notebook labeled with her name.
It was midafternoon and hot. The sky was blue-white, blanched by the heat. It was still good to see it.
Vining again headed for the bridge, crossed it, and turned left on San Rafael Avenue. It was a neighborhood of large, architecturally significant homes at the end of long drives sequestered behind security gates. The hilly streets meandered. The landscaping was lush. It was a neighborhood where it looked as if nothing bad could happen. Vining knew there was some truth to that. Other than the occasional car or home burglary, goings-on here rarely attracted the attention of the police. Family dramas, however, were played out even in the best homes.
Vining wasn’t thrilled about interacting with the San Rafael wife. Her prejudice was firmly in place. She saw the neighborhood as twisted traditional. Soon, the men would be home from the office for cocktails with their wives, who would lament about having too few hours in the day.
The twist, in Vining’s view, was that these women never did anything resembling real work. They spent their days exercising at the gym, shopping, gossiping, planning vacations at high-end resorts, and consuming the services of exotic personal care professionals: aestheticians, herbalists, acupuncturists, and Pilates instructors. They arrived home to say good-bye to the nannies who watched their kids and housekeepers who kept their homes shipshape. It was a perversion of women’s lib. These women were free to self-indulge.
She knew about their lives. She eavesdropped on them at Starbucks, the town square of the new millennium, while they stood in line with yoga mats slung over their shoulders, splurging on shared crumble cake and chatting about the events of their lives with the gravity of a U.N. Security Council meeting.
Sure, she had a well-developed attitude. She blamed her ex-husband Wes’s wife of seven years for it. It had taken Kaitlyn just over twenty-four months to evolve from stylist at Supercuts, where she’d started her affair with still-married Wes, to über–soccer mom. Kaitlyn’s upbringing had been as blue-collar as Vining’s, but she now affected that snobbery unique to those whose lives had transcended from hardscrabble to highbrow by the power vested in a wedding ring.
Vining had struggled most of her life to get by. The exception was the two years after Emily was born. Then Wes’s business was finally doing well and Vining had experienced what it was like not to go to an outside job every day. Not to struggle to make ends meet. Not to fret about how she should have paid the telephone bill instead of having dinner out. She had been taken care of and it had been nice.
Vining refused to put her daughter through the childhood she had endured. She and her younger sister, Stephanie, had never known their fathers, who had both left when they were toddlers. All their mother would say about her first two husbands was that they were bums and it was good that they weren’t in their lives. After school, the two girls would hang out at their grandmother’s home beauty salon while their mother was at work or on a date. Patsy married twice more. By the time husband number four, Mr. Brightly, had come around, Vining was married herself to her high school sweetheart, right after graduation. It was her ticket out of Dodge. A year later, she was pregnant and never happier.
She and Wes decided she would quit her job in the billing office of a dermatology group and stay home with Emily. Vining worked part-time managing Wes’s property development business. Through Wes’s hard work, he had become an in-demand general contractor and was initiating his own projects. He’d done well on the fixer-uppers he’d turned around and was building houses on spec. They’d just bought their first house, an early-sixties tract home suspended from a cliff on cantilevers, in the then-unfashionable L.A. neighborhood of Mt. Washington. Wes was rehabbing it himself on weekends. Vining considered getting her real estate license and capitalizing on the rebound of the California real estate market. They were living the American dream.
Vining loved those first years after Emily was born. She was finally in control of her life. She had a family and a good man who loved her. Wes was so easygoing. They never fought. Their lives were free of the relentless tension and energetic arguments that characterized her mother’s marriages. Life was great for the first time in Vining’s memory, until the day shortly after Emily turned two. Wes had come home and said he didn’t want to be married anymore. He piled clothes into his pickup truck and left.
Vining found a job as a civilian jailer at the PPD. Emily stayed with her mother or grandmother while Vining eked out a living. Wes paid child support, but Vining still struggled to make ends meet. She applied for a better-paying job as a police officer and surprised herself by making it through the Academy. Five years after Wes walked out on Vining, they finally divorced and he married Kaitlyn, eight years his junior. They bought a five-thousand-square-foot house in a spanking new development thirty miles away in the quiet and safe city of Calabasas, snuggled among the rugged hills east of Malibu. There, Kaitlyn was a stay-at-home mom with her two boys: Kyle, five; and Kelsey, three.
Kaitlyn had not been shy about expressing her opinion that Vining’s career was a negative influence on Emily. Five years ago, when Vining shot and killed a man while on duty, Wes began a fight for full custody of Emily. Emily was nine then and pitched a fit that had no effect on her father. Vining met with Wes privately.
“If you care as much about Emily as you say you do, you wouldn’t have abandoned her in the first place. I know Kaitlyn is putting you up to this. Understand one thing. Don’t even think about taking my daughter. I will make your life a living hell. And you know I know how to do it.”
Wes dropped the issue. As for Emily, she never forgave Kaitlyn. She extracted revenge by jerking Kaitlyn’s chain. Vining had to swear to Wes that she didn’t put their daughter up to it. On a girly shopping trip, Emily regaled Kaitlyn with tales about mother-daughter time at the gun range putting the family arsenal through a workout. Emily’s gun tale had a happy consequence for Vining. Kaitlyn stopped allowing Wes to bring their children into Vining’s home, in spite of Vining’s assurances that she secured her weapons at all times.
Vining was glad she didn’t have to put up with her ex’s spawn, although it seemed appropriate for Emily to have a relationship with her half-siblings. Still, at this stage of her life, Emily couldn’t care less about her half brothers and Vining knew she couldn’t force-feed relationships to her daughter.
Kaitlyn wasn’t the only reason Vining had developed an aversion to that type of woman. During her police career, Vining learned that the moneyed of the city, regardless of age, and especially the women, were often as ruthless as gangbangers in laying on attitude.
Pasadena had attracted the wealthy for generations. At the turn of the century, titans of industry built winter homes there and eventually relocated permanently, the balmy climate overwhelming all objections. Lesser neighborhoods sprouted like moons around the vast estates.
Many PPD officers who had arrested
or written a traffic citation to one of the city’s affluent had heard, “I pay your salary. You work for me. I know your boss. I’ll have your job.” When Vining was a rookie, the tales of class distinction surprised her. It seemed something old-world and un-American. Before she’d personally experienced it, she’d thought of herself first and foremost as a cop, a member of the thin line that divides civilization from anarchy. Until she’d busted a judge’s son, she’d never thought of herself as a civil servant, a mere city employee.
She’d watched the teenager, wearing his private school uniform, give money to a guy outside a motel on the east side of town that was a known drug trade site. Minutes later, someone threw an eight ball of crack down to the kid from a second-story window. When Vining collared the boy, he went off on her. Something inside her snapped and she yanked and shoved him more than necessary while he threatened lawsuits and demanded to know if she knew who his father was.
“Yeah, he’s the father of a criminal,” she’d shot back.
Vining had to admit she’d developed attitudes of her own during her years on the Job. She was embarrassed to lay claim to some of them. She’d always wondered if she hadn’t mouthed off to that man she’d shot, whether things might have turned out differently. She resisted being a jaded cop, but feared she was on a one-way street and powerless to turn around. The Job got under one’s skin that way, like a slow-moving virus. T. B. Mann had hastened the journey.
She found the address on San Rafael Avenue. It wasn’t far from Frankie Lynde’s dump site. None of the investigators considered there might be a suspect among the affluent residents. Perhaps that reflected prejudice as well, but the police would say it was a judgment call. Outsiders called it profiling. In the grand scheme of things, it was unfair but practical.
The sun had dropped behind the hills along the arroyo’s west side, casting everything in a violet haze. Drivers traveling westbound on the 210 freeway, which ran north of the bridge and swooped around the foothills, had a tremendous view of the sunset and the silhouette of downtown L.A. At dusk or in the early-morning hours, if the smog wasn’t heavy, the way the light hit downtown L.A. miniaturized the buildings, putting Vining in mind of storybook cities in the books she’d read to Em, like the view Peter Pan and Wendy had when they’d soared above London. Or some of the old Fantasyland rides in Disneyland.