I got out of the van, went around back, and threw open the rear doors to finish suiting up. I slipped a disposable jumpsuit-style jacket and pants over my civilian clothes, and then sat on the rear bumper. A dull summery warmth radiated from the metal. I hoped that the plastic pants wouldn’t melt in the heat.
I tucked my long black locks into a dingy gray hair net for that oh-so-attractive cafeteria lady look and then jammed the lot under a dark blue Dodgers baseball cap. Finally, I kicked off my flats and slipped into a pair of zip tack shoes that I’d nicknamed my ‘stompy gothic boots of doom’. They wouldn’t win any awards on the fashion runway, but they’d keep corpse juice out of my socks.
The shoes also gave me almost three more inches in height. I’m already pretty tall, at least for a woman, but when you’re dealing with cops, men who each think they’re as tough as Clint Eastwood and hung like Mr. Ed, every extra inch counts. Don’t ask me why. I think it’s a dominance thing. We really are still primates at heart.
I grabbed a heavy aluminum case by its textured plastic handle, heaved it up to my side, and slammed the van doors shut. I stepped over the worn side of the curb and picked my way through the mallow flowers and gravel.
Broken glass and dry twigs snapped under my feet. The cops milling about the scene looked up and watched me approach. They looked unsure as to whether I was there to help clear things up.
Or just muddy the waters a little more.
This wasn’t like a bunch of construction workers ogling a tight-bloused secretary on her way to work. Believe me, nobody looks sexy in crime scene gear. But show me a beat cop, and I’ll show you a frustrated wanna-be detective. If there’s less than three cops at a murder scene, they’ll sidle up to you to offer their pet theory on how it all happened. Three or more, and they’ll hang around, hoping to overhear something they can gossip about to their buddies back at the station.
The debris formed a gentle slope of loose material that’d have been hell to walk through in my flats—let alone high heels—but my stompy boots handled it just fine. One of the guys separated himself from the mass of the LAPD’s finest and waved as he came towards me. Hazel eyes, close-cropped hair, and a friendly face that shone through a perpetual haze of beard stubble.
I recognized Alanzo Esteban from working a couple of these joyful little scenes. One of the few detectives in Homicide who I actually liked. Judging by the bashful way he snuck glances at me when he thought I wasn’t looking, the feeling was more than mutual.
“Why, señora del acero,” he said with a smile. He wasn’t a good looking man, but his warm Latino accent sent a thrill down my spine. “So good of you to join us, Dayna.”
“Yeah, but I’m sure no lady of steel, no matter what you say,” I replied. I fought to keep a grin off my face and lost. “Fill me in. What the hell’s going on here, Alanzo?”
Esteban had worked with me enough to know that I wasn’t asking about the crime scene, at least not yet. I wanted to know why so many cops were wandering over the site, making my job harder and more miserable by the minute.
“What’s going on is that some pendejo dumped our dead guy in the middle of this demolition zone,” he said. “Construction’s due to start here on one of the mayor’s pet projects. So you have politicos falling all over themselves to jump into everyone’s soup. And when the Chief heard…”
I held up a hand. “He sent McClatchy out, didn’t he?”
He nodded. I let out a groan.
“Esteban, I’m not done with you yet!” came a harsh voice. We traded a glance that spoke volumes.
“Speak of the devil,” I said.
I followed Esteban across the tumbled surface of concrete and rebar. The sun beat down on the exposed city block and I pulled my cap brim down as far as it could go. Perspiration already stained the inside of my jumpsuit. No wonder I was always able to keep the flab off my hips and the cottage cheese off the thighs. I carried my personal one-size-fits-all sauna around with me. I licked a stray bead of sweat from my lips and came away with the gamy taste of body salt.
We came up to a barrel-chested, red faced man busy shouting orders at the officers towards the far end of the field. His salt and pepper hair was balding, his jowls were threatening to sag, and he clenched a red and black-tipped toothpick between his teeth. A snazzy gray pinstripe suit tented over his wide frame. Office wear for field work always marks you as one of two things: a rank amateur, or a politically appointed desk jockey.
Deputy Chief Bob McClatchy fell into both categories.
“Esteban, see what you can do,” McClatchy said, with a wave of one hand. “You know, tell these scene techies to hurry up. We’ve got real work to do.”
“As it happens, you can pass the message on directly,” Esteban said, indicating me with a nod. McClatchy squinted at me like Esteban had brought him a new kind of bug to look at.
“Dayna Chrissie, Office of the Medical Examiner,” I said. I put my hand out. McClatchy stared uncomprehendingly at my open palm for a moment, as if I were offering him a dead fish. Then the automatic courtesy I was counting on kicked in, and he gingerly shook my hand. “We’ve met before, in passing. Phone booth shooting in Northridge.”
“I remember,” he said. “Not you. The case. Took your people eight days to go over a crime scene the size of a shower stall. Real pain in the ass, if you’ll pardon my French.”
“I pardon and parlez French,” I said wryly. “But crime scene processing is always a pain in the ass if you do it right. You don’t just run in, scoop up a handful of DNA, and boom, you’re finished. And you’re going to make it harder for me to do my work if you keep using beat cops to comb the area for evidence.”
He scowled at me. From the pattern of wrinkles on his face, I could tell that the scowl was one of his favorite expressions. Maybe he practiced in front of a mirror every morning before he went to work.
“Fine, anything to speed this mess up.” He spoke to one of the nearby officers and sent the man off to round up the boys in blue. He shifted the red and black toothpick in his mouth and then jabbed a finger at me. “You’re going to perform your initial report with me present, got that, Chrissie?”
Esteban coughed. McClatchy stared at him.
I pointed at the Dodgers insignia on my baseball cap. “I’m not LAPD, McClatchy. I’m a non-com private contractor, like most of your Crime Scene Analysts.”
“A lot of the M.E. offices are moving that way,” Esteban added. “Gives people like Dayna here more flexibility while it saves the city money.”
“Well,” McClatchy huffed, “I still want to be there—”
“Then come along,” I said brusquely.
I turned away and started hiking towards the yellow and black scene tape markers. I heard the two men follow in my wake, but I didn’t turn to talk with either of them. My meager store of patience had run bone dry. When you come down to it, I think that’s why I got into this line of work in the first place. Compared to the living, dead people are so much more agreeable, in no small part because they don’t try to pull rank—they just smell it.
Esteban stepped quickly to keep up at my side. He said, “You got lucky. Hector Reyes got here ten minutes before you did. Before the rest of the local police division arrived.”
“Really? That is good news.” Hector was the best crime scene photographer in the department. If he got here before too many extra footprints were set down, we’d have more to work with than a smeary blur of shoe marks.
“Somebody called the body in around eleven this morning,” Esteban added, as we each slipped under the yellow tape perimeter. “No eyewitnesses to the killing, or, if the body was dumped here, any reports of suspicious people, suspicious vehicles.”
We crested a small rise where the mess of concrete blocks and rusted iron gave way to a pitted gravel surface. I didn’t see the body at first, but my eye followed a little trail of red droplets that dotted the ground. Several little trails, actually, that led back to a patch of mallow that�
�d been half-crushed by a pair of feet, clad in a pair of worn leather boots.
The stench of the body hit me then. The corpse hadn’t been lying out too long. Insects were just beginning to gather, and even in the burning heat of the Southern California summer, it smelled only of newly decomposing flesh. On the Chrissie Scale of Stinkiness (patent pending), our guy still only rated a five out of ten. But it still made Detective Esteban pause and His Highness McClatchy reel back as if someone had punched him in the gut.
I stepped up and took my first look at the body. Let my reptile brain sift through the images to pick out any curious, out of place details later. The corpse belonged to a man in his late thirties to early forties. Caucasian with sandy blonde hair. Well built. Looked like he’d been in good health and pounding the weights at Gold’s Gym.
And that’s when I saw something that really got my attention, got my pulse pumping like I’d gone down to Starbucks and mainlined a Venti espresso.
The skin on the man’s arms was covered in little white scales like a snake.
Chapter 2
I knelt a couple meters away from the body, set down the aluminum case I’d been lugging along, and cracked it open. I hurriedly slipped on a pair of shoe covers over my stompy gothic boots of doom, a surgical mask over my face, and finished the outfit off with a pair of latex gloves. I chewed my lip in thought for a moment, and then looked up at Esteban.
“You up to taking some body pics for me?”
“As long as I don’t have to get too close, I’m okay with it,” Esteban said, with an expressive shrug.
I dug out a second mask for him, another pair of gloves, and then pulled out my trusty old Pentax out of one of the case’s padded compartments. Esteban had to hold out both hands as I gave it to him. The Pentax had all the grace, subtlety, and weight of a black plastic brick. But nothing beat a digital single-lens reflex camera for minute detail.
I grabbed a set of forceps, took a couple steps forward, and knelt by the body. I waved my hand through the holding pattern of flies that circled above the corpse and began my observations. The smell of decaying flesh hung heavy in the air, like a wet curtain.
“Alanzo,” I said, “snap me a set of photos starting at the feet up. Individual body parts, left-to-right. Close up shots on any wound pattern or blood spatter.”
Esteban began clicking away with the camera. I looked over the man’s brown leather boots. Nice ones, too, by the look of it—hand stitching that would’ve done justice to the kind of Italian loafers you’d find for sale on Rodeo Drive. The footwear had seen heavy use, judging by the wear on the soles. His dun-colored trousers were made of some kind of rough cloth, and a light blue sleeveless top that looked like—well, to be honest, it looked like what my hippie niece would’ve called a ‘peasant shirt’. A very simple kind of tunic.
Something strange about his clothing made me frown. Suddenly my brain did one of its weird little clicks and it snapped into focus: the clothes really were simple. Too simple. The boot straps were adorned with a heavy iron buckle. So was his black leather belt. But his trousers were perfectly smooth, both on the sides, and in the crotch. No zipper teeth, no Levi’s button-fly. Instead, John Doe had a kind of rough leather lacing holding his split together.
My mind raced. When was the last time anyone made clothes without zippers and buttons? Hell, when was the last time anyone made a pair of everyday-wear men’s pants without pockets?
I kept quiet a moment longer as I looked at the strange wounds on the body. Deep, jagged cuts or slashes of some kind marked the corpse in a couple of spots. One on the left-hand palm, a second on the forearm. Another on the side of the head, where an ear dangled by a strip of pasty flesh. The worst of the slashing injuries yawed open in a fleshy red mouth that cleaved open the right-hand shoulder and exposed a compound fracture of the collarbone.
I spotted a fleck of black against the white edge of bone. I snatched it out with a nimble flick of the forceps.
“What’s that?” McClatchy demanded. His voice was muffled. Sounded like he’d pressed his nose into a pocket handkerchief. I heard the man fumbling in his pocket for something but I didn’t waste the time to look up.
“Chip of metal,” I said, as I turned the object over to get a better look. It was the size and shape of a pinky nail. “Whoever sliced open our John Doe here like a side of beef may have left us a clue.”
“Part of a blade?”
“Maybe. These slashes sure as hell didn’t come from a twelve-gauge.” I caught Alanzo’s eye and nodded towards my case. “Pull me a specimen bag out of there, would you?”
Esteban got one and brought it back, holding the edges open with his gloved fingers. I dropped the sample in and went back to work. The shoulder wound was definitely the nastiest of the cuts.
But that probably hadn’t killed the man.
No, what probably did the dirty deed was the fist-sized hole in the center of the chest. Actually, it wasn’t so much a hole as a fleshy, bloody crater. Whatever this guy’d been hit with, it had blown right through his shirt and smashed the sternum into bone powder. Blood pooled in a sticky, half-clotted mass in the cavity. Using the forceps, I pulled the tattered, burned-looking edge of the shirt away to see the edge of the wound.
The remaining skin on his chest also looked like it was made of tiny white scales. I shook my head again in amazement.
Who is this guy? Is he related to Persephone?
Persephone belonged to my college roommate, back around the time that I’d lucked into a scholarship at the University of Chicago. Funny, now that I thought about it. I couldn’t recall the name of my roommate, who I usually called ‘the bitch who keeps mooching my vanilla-bean and coffee ice cream’. But I did remember Persephone, her albino king snake. Pretty creature. And like this guy, the snake’s scales were a perfect mesh of little ivory crescent moons.
I was still struggling to figure out whether this guy was some freak of nature when I took another look at his face. His features were strong, generically masculine. The eyes stared out into nothingness like glassy brown marbles. But then I saw something that short-circuited the idea of calling up the FBI to see if they really did have someone to cover the ‘X’ files.
The ‘scales’ stopped at the base of the man’s neck. They weren’t the mark of some snake-human hybrid. It was a pattern that had been etched into the skin from some kind of pressure. Of course, that did jack squat for me, given that all it did was replace one mystery with another.
I leaned in closer to the body to get a better look. The itty-bitty hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as my nose caught the ghost of a scent. Something layered underneath the rotting-meat miasma of the corpse itself. I fought the nausea, rode it out like a wave on a choppy sea. I closed my eyes and inhaled, seeking that elusive scent, and found it.
Sulfur. Mixed with charcoal. Once I found it, the smell seemed to leap down my nasal passages, dig into my tongue, and dance around on it like a lit match. I moved my head back and forth, continuing to trust my senses. The sulfur-charcoal smell was strongest from the chest wound. And then, I smelled something else underneath the charred-sulfur smell. Dry, like fine gin, delicate like lace.
It vanished in a heady rush of menthol that wiped out my sense of smell and buried it under a tidal wave of Vick’s VapoRub.
I came within a hair’s breadth of a snarl and looked up. That’s what McClatchy had been digging for—a tube of menthol to protect his delicate sinuses. Judging from how he kept wiping the snotlike gel under his nostrils, it wasn’t helping him much. All it really did was throw an effing monkey wrench—and a dozen extra monkey tools, as far as I was concerned—into my analysis.
My eyes snapped back to the red and black toothpick in McClatchy’s teeth. My brain did another one of its weird little flips. I saw that McClatchy’s toothpick was done up to look like a miniature lacquered chopstick from Chang’s Mandarin Five-Star. McClatchy liked Chinese food. I turned back to the corpse and began to speak, tr
ying my best to sound casual.
“This your first time close to a corpse, McClatchy?” I asked.
“Unless you count the ones in the morgue,” he replied. I nodded to myself. That meant he’d only been exposed to the chilled, scent-reduced versions of dead humans.
“It’s something that takes time to get used to. I still run into things I never expect to see,” I continued. “For example, this one guy we found in the desert near Bakersfield. His intestines had dried up and shrank, like those crispy noodles some Asian places put out on the table for you to munch on.”
“Um,” McClatchy said. His face had taken on a distinctly greenish cast.
“Then there was this one time I came across a fresh corpse, a gang-banger who’d been gut-shot. So his stomach’s been ruptured, and the yellow of the stomach acid and the red of the blood all ended up mixed together. Just like the yin and yang symbol they do at some restaurants, you know, when they put the yellow hot mustard and the red sweet n’ sour sauce in a dish and make that little swirl for dipping your chicken egg rolls?”
McClatchy didn’t respond. He dry-heaved, held his index finger to his lips, and abruptly walked off. Esteban shook his head.
“Remind me never to piss you off, Dayna.”
“You just have to know how to get rid of extra people at a crime scene,” I said. “Back in Chicago, the winters made it easy. If there’s snow on the ground, you just hand someone a shovel and ask them to get ready to do some shoveling. You turn around and they’re gone, because now they realize that they might actually have to do some work.”
Esteban let out a snort.
I still couldn’t get the damned menthol smell out of my nasal passages, though. It hangs around, binds itself to the soft tissues of the sinus like eucalyptus-scented superglue, and the only cure is time.
“I’m almost done,” I said, as I probed the meaty pink pit of the chest wound with the forceps. “Might be good to call up the trace techs and then get our John Doe bagged up.”
I Married the Third Horseman (Paranormal Romance and Divorce) Page 14