by Robert Ellis
“No,” Matt said. “I don’t think it can.”
Gainer may have been slightly irritated, but it didn’t last long, and with great care, he slipped the girl’s jeans off her hips and slid them down her thighs to her ankles. Matt made room for the photographer, then gave Cabrera a quick look.
The girl’s legs were bruised—her thighs, her calves, and shinbone. It had only been a hunch, but Matt needed to know. Like the bruises on her arms, some of the contusions could have occurred during the struggle, but most looked as if they’d come before that—within the last ten days.
The photographer moved in with his strobe light pulsating again. Matt took a step closer, adding it all up. Most of the girl’s wounds were a part of her life, her history—a monster she may have known.
But just as disturbing was the amount of semen on her upper thighs. It crossed Matt’s mind that maybe the killer had spent more time with the girl than he had first imagined. Maybe that’s why the killer didn’t have time to cover the shallow grave with pine needles. Maybe that’s why the grave site appeared rushed. The killer had seen the grove of pine trees, dragged the girl inside the canopy for privacy, and had his way with her. Not once or twice, but until he was done with her . . .
FIVE
Matt switched off his flashlight and returned it to Speeks, then dug his cell phone out of his pocket and backed away from the table. Sweeping through his contact list, he found Howard Benson’s number. Benson headed the Missing Persons Unit. Anyone involved in narcotics spent a lot of time working with Missing Persons, and he and Benson knew each other well enough to have exchanged cell numbers a few years ago. Benson picked up on the first ring.
“I’ve got something,” Matt said quietly. “You busy?”
“Let me get to my desk,” he said. “You got a body?”
Matt sized up the victim. “A girl,” he said. “A teenager. Sixteen or seventeen.”
“Maybe younger,” Cabrera whispered.
Matt noticed his partner standing beside him. He tilted the phone so that both he and Cabrera could listen without turning on the speakerphone.
Matt’s eyes flicked back to the girl. “You get that, Benson? Maybe younger. She’s Hispanic. About five nine, and on the thin side.”
Benson cleared his throat. “This is LA, Matt. I’ve got hundreds of missing girls around that age. Where are you? Give me a location. Maybe that would help.”
“Elysian Park.”
“The picnic area up top?”
“What about it?”
“You’re on Channel Five right now. The news choppers, Matt. They’re circling the tent.”
“Yeah, they are.”
“Give me a second,” Benson said. “No, I might have it. Sophia Ramirez. She’s from the neighborhood. Fifteen years old. She went missing on her birthday three days ago.”
Matt met Cabrera’s eyes as it settled in. The murder victim was a kid. Her watch stopped three days ago on January 8.
“You got a picture you could message us?” Matt said.
“It’s on its way.”
Matt felt his phone vibrate, pulled it away from his ear, and clicked open the message. As the picture rendered on the screen, he held the phone out so both he and Cabrera could compare the image with the dead girl laid out on the picnic table. It wasn’t easy. On the one hand they had a corpse that seemed remarkably preserved. On the other, a young teen who had been severely beaten and bruised.
“It’s a match,” Matt said finally, then, glancing at his partner. “A match, right, Denny?”
Cabrera nodded. “Yeah,” he whispered. “It’s a match.”
Matt lifted the phone back to his ear. “We got her,” he said to Benson. “Sophia Ramirez.”
“If that’s her, she lived right down the hill on Casanova Street.”
Matt pulled a notebook and pen out of his jacket. As Benson gave him the house number, he wrote it down beside the girl’s name and date of birth. When the UV lights shut down and the work lights came back up, he took a quick shot of Sophia Ramirez’s battered face. Then he raised the phone back to his ear, trying to listen through the sound of the rotors churning in the sky above. He could hear Benson at his desk—papers rustling in the background, a keyboard that stopped clicking.
“What is it, Benson?” Matt said.
“Just want to give you and your partner a heads-up. Something’s going on with this kid.”
“Like what?”
Matt waved Cabrera back and tilted the phone toward him again.
“Something’s wrong with her disappearance,” Benson said. “It didn’t happen the way it should’ve happened.”
“We’re listening,” Matt said. “Tell us what you’ve got.”
“She wasn’t reported missing by her parents. That’s more than unusual. As a matter of fact, in a missing persons case that’s been reported, as long as I’ve been here, that’s not the way it happens. Not when a child’s been involved. Usually it’s the parents who make the call.”
“Who are they?’ Cabrera asked.
“Angel and Lucia Ramirez. They never reported her missing.”
Matt wrote down their names, thinking about Sophia’s black eyes and all those bruises on her arms and legs. “If her parents didn’t make the call,” he said in a harder voice, “who reported her missing?”
“The principal at her high school.”
“When?” Matt asked.
“Two days after she went missing. Yesterday.”
It hung there for a moment. A fifteen-year-old girl was murdered on her birthday and no one had said anything. No one had even been looking for her.
Matt glanced over at his partner and could see it in his eyes.
The idea of it was stunning. A human disgrace. The young girl had been abandoned even in death. Matt knew all about being abandoned by a parent because it was part of his past, too. Part of the darkness that still haunted him.
The monsters were waking up in his head.
He tried to shake them off and pull himself together. He thanked Benson for his help, thinking that he sounded like a machine, then walked over for another long look at Sophia’s corpse. He watched as Gainer gently pulled her jeans up over her hips, then lowered her into a body bag like a father taking his dead girl home.
Gainer gave him a look.
Matt could feel the storm beginning to rotate through his gut. The bands of thunder and lightning coursing through his body. The monsters in his head were awake now, rising from a deep and disturbing sleep.
Trouble ahead.
He grabbed Cabrera by the arm and walked him out of the tent where they could speak without being heard.
“I’m doing the next-of-kin notification,” he said. “And you’re staying here to oversee the crime scene.”
Cabrera eyed him carefully. “I think that sounds like a bad idea.”
Matt shook his head. “We can’t do both,” he said. “Not now. Not fast.”
“But those bruises, Matt. We don’t have a clue who these people are. You could be walking into something.”
“You’re right, Denny. Her killer could be homegrown. There’s a chance he could be someone she knew. That’s why I think we can’t wait on this. We need to do it now.”
Matt measured his partner’s face. Despite the protests, he knew Cabrera agreed. He turned and saw Gainer loading the corpse into the truck, the two first responders, Alvin Marcs and Bill Guy, standing by ready to help.
“I’ll take them with me,” Matt said.
“Who?”
“Those guys. Maybe we’ll get lucky, Denny. Maybe it ends right now.”
SIX
It had become a gray January day. Dreary, and even more strange for Los Angeles, uncomfortably humid with thunderclouds moving in over the city. Matt glanced at his watch and realized that it was almost four. Dusk had already set in, and he hadn’t eaten anything since the middle of last night. His coffee mug ran dry nine hours ago.
He was riding in the back s
eat of Marcs and Guy’s cruiser. As he gazed out the window, his first thought was that the people living on Casanova Street were a stone’s throw from one of the most affluent cities in the world, yet they were impoverished.
He tried not to think about it. Tried not to feel it. Had his uncle, Dr. George Baylor, been sitting beside him right now, the demented man would have used this rundown neighborhood as some sort of bent justification for the people he’d murdered. And for a variety of reasons, some easy and others not, Matt had a vague understanding of his uncle’s logic, his torment, but didn’t want to let it prey on him right now.
The Ramirezes’ home was halfway up the block on the left, a side entrance to the park directly across the street. Marcs pulled in front of the house, switched off the headlights, and turned around in his seat. He seemed a little tense.
“How do you want to handle this?” he asked.
Matt gazed out the window, still thinking it over as he eyed the small stucco house and weighed the risks. The rooms were lit up, the light over the front door switched on as if Sophia’s parents were expecting someone. Matt looked up in the dark sky, noting a small satellite dish mounted on the terra-cotta tiled roof. To the left of the house, a short driveway led down the hill to a pickup truck and a modest two-car garage that looked as if it needed a fresh coat of paint.
The front door swung open.
“Oh shit,” Marcs whispered from behind the wheel. “Company.”
Matt turned and saw a man with a mustache and dark brown eyes standing on the other side of a storm door staring at them. He guessed that the man was Sophia’s father, Angel, and from the porch light raking his heavily lined face, that he was more than upset. The man seemed fixated on the cruiser and didn’t make a move to step outside and ask why they were here. Instead, he just stood there—still as a statue—brooding and trying to pierce the darkened glass of the cruiser with those eyes of his.
Matt turned back to Marcs and Guy, then pulled out his pistol.
“Here’s the way I want to do it,” he said as he inspected his .45, checked the mag, then returned the pistol to its holster on his belt. “This may not be what it could be. You guys understand? Don’t let your imaginations get in the way of what you’re seeing right now. I’m going in alone to talk to these people and let them know that we found their daughter’s body. If I need help, I’ll shoot you a sign.”
Guy gave him a wild look from the passenger seat. “What kind of sign?”
Matt filled his lungs with air as he opened the door and climbed out of the cruiser. “I’ve got no clue,” he said under his breath. “You’ll know it when you see it.”
He closed the door and started toward the house knowing that the advice he’d just given Marcs and Guy was more for himself than anyone else. As he stepped onto the narrow front porch, the feeling was so strange, so odd—the man just standing there glaring at him. From a distance he appeared short and stocky and strong as a bull. He was wearing a pair of overalls and combed his coarse black hair straight back. When Matt finally reached the door, he got a closer look. The lines on the man’s face seemed like they might be more about exhaustion than age because he was obviously still in his thirties. But even more important, he didn’t appear to be armed. Matt’s eyes ran up and down the man’s body, and he didn’t see any sign that he might be carrying a piece.
“Are you Angel Ramirez?” Matt said in a firm voice.
Moments passed before the man nodded.
“May I come in?”
Ramirez had an attitude going but eventually acknowledged Matt’s presence and stepped aside. Pulling the storm door open for himself, Matt glanced back at Marcs and Guy in the cruiser, then entered the house. He was feeling uneasy, trying to push the images of the bruises on the young girl’s face and body out of his mind. He was concerned that even this early in the case, the evidence could be spinning them in a direction they might not be able to overcome.
He kept reminding himself that a monster killed the girl. A monster beat her up and put her in the ground.
He looked up. Angel Ramirez was standing close, maybe too close, and still staring at him with those hollow dark eyes.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” Ramirez said in a gruff voice. “We’ve been waiting since we heard the helicopters this morning and turned on the TV.”
Matt took a step back, noting the shotgun over the fireplace and guessing that it was far too new and lethal to be a family heirloom. He knew the make and model well, a Remington 870 Wingmaster, and had to assume that it was loaded. When he turned, he realized that the room was lit entirely by candlelight and the TV, which appeared to have been muted. Framed pictures of Sophia were everywhere.
And then he noticed Sophia’s mother, Lucia. Her eyes were on him as she sat on the couch quietly weeping into a handkerchief. Like her husband, she was well groomed. She wore an apron over what appeared to be a fitted red blouse, and black slacks. But what struck Matt most about her person was her warm face and gentle demeanor—her dark eyes that seemed to work like a pair of open windows, revealing how damaged she was inside.
“You’ve come to arrest us,” Ramirez said.
Matt turned and gave him a hard look. “Why don’t you have a seat on the couch with your wife.”
The man grit his teeth in anger. “Why don’t you just get this over with and take us away?”
“Sit down on the couch, Mr. Ramirez.”
Matt watched the man cross the room and take a seat beside his wife. Ramirez’s admission of guilt was more than unusual. It came way too quick to be right and true. These people were obviously in shock and grieving. His eyes dropped to Ramirez’s hands. He didn’t see a single bruise, cut, or even a scratch. He could have been wearing gloves and it wouldn’t have made a difference. There was no way that he could have beaten his daughter to death and walked away with unblemished hands. Something was going on here. Something he couldn’t see yet.
Matt sat down in a chair across from the couch, making sure he had a view of the front door.
“How many children do you have?” he said.
Lucia Ramirez raised her head and gazed Matt’s way. “Only Sophia,” she said. “Just our Sophia.”
She lowered her eyes again. Matt reached inside his pocket for his cell phone and found the photograph he’d taken of the victim’s battered face.
“I need to show you something,” he said as gently as he could. “It’s not gonna be easy to look at. It’s gonna be tough. Maybe the toughest thing you’ll ever be asked to do in your life. That doesn’t change the fact that I have to ask you to do it.”
They were staring at him, their eyes big and glassy. Ramirez moved closer to his wife and wrapped his arm around her shoulder as if he could somehow protect her from the moment. His meaty hands were trembling.
“Are you ready?” Matt asked.
They nodded tentatively, unable to speak. They knew what was about to happen. They already knew what they were going to see.
Matt turned his cell phone around and pushed it across the coffee table. Both Ramirez and Lucia leaned closer, their eyes drifting toward the phone, then locking in on the picture of their dead little girl.
“Is this your daughter?” Matt asked. “Is this Sophia?”
They didn’t need to answer. They didn’t need to say or do anything. Moments passed. Tears and agony—he could see the dread in their eyes. A certain kind of dark confirmation that their lives had just been ruined. Forever ruined. And in an instant, Matt knew with absolute certainty that they had never abused their child and had nothing to do with her death. They were in mourning but had admitted to committing a crime. From the fear they were still showing on their faces, Matt thought he knew what it was now.
He switched off the phone and slipped it into his pocket. Then he picked up a framed photograph of their daughter from a side table and placed it before them on the coffee table. His hope was that it might help shorten the memory of what they’d just seen. Both Ramirez and Luc
ia gazed at the new picture, wiping their eyes and cheeks and trying to pull themselves together.
“Your daughter went missing three days ago,” Matt said in a quieter voice. “Why didn’t you call it in? Why didn’t you report it?”
They kept their eyes on the photograph without speaking, the fear on their faces all the more telling.
Matt gave Ramirez a look. “When did you come to this country?” he said. “That’s the crime you were talking about, right? That’s why you didn’t call Missing Persons. You were afraid someone might show up and take you and your wife away.”
They looked up from the photograph of their daughter, the fear in their eyes reaching a fever pitch. Matt guessed that their journey began a long time ago, maybe when they themselves had been children, because both spoke English without the hint of another first language.
Matt leaned over the table, measuring them. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. We’ll never talk about it again. But you’ve got to understand something. I’m gonna need your help to solve this case. Your daughter’s case. I can’t do it without you.”
They nodded like they wanted to help but remained silent.
“Okay,” Matt said. “I understand why you’re afraid, but we’ve got a deal, right?”
He met their eyes and waited for them to say something, but they never did. He glanced at the door, then back.
“Tell me why your daughter had so many bruises on her body—her arms and legs. Who was abusing her?”
Ramirez shot him a look like he didn’t understand. “Abusing her?”
“Was it a neighbor? A relative? Someone bullying her at school?”
Lucia met Matt’s gaze and appeared just as confused as her husband. “Sophia was very popular,” she said. “She was a straight-A student. Everybody loved her.”
“What about a boyfriend?”
Ramirez shook his head. “He lives down the street, but he would never hurt her. He wouldn’t do this to Sophia.”
Matt pulled out his notebook and pen. “What’s his name and address?”
“Trey Washington, but he’s a good boy. Those bruises on her arms and legs are Sophia’s fault. She does that to herself.”