The Juan Doe Murders: A Smokey Brandon Thriller Read online

  THE JUAN DOE

  MURDERS

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2000 and 2014 Noreen Ayres

  ISBN: 1941298249

  ISBN-13: 9781941298244

  Published by Brash Books, LLC

  12120 State Line, #253

  Leawood, Kansas 66209

  www.brash-books.com

  Out here,

  killing’s always in season.

  Walter McDonald, in “Black Wings

  Wheeling,” from Rafting the Brazos

  “You can’t lean on nothin’ up here,”

  Philomene told him. “You gotta go

  around like a little cat.”

  Robert Stone, from A Hall of Mirrors

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINTEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  I’d say the girl was seventeen. I’d say she had been pretty.

  Now her forehead shone with an alien bulge, the left cheekbone was a pile of pink pulp, and a bite mark arched across her left eyebrow and mirrored under the eye. Covering her pubis and right leg was a twisted sheet. Welts flowered her ribs. Where the nipple of her left breast should be was only a red smear.

  It was a Monday at the end of February, and the air was crisp and clean and the sunlight sharp enough to shatter. I’d parked in front of a murky-green house in a tree-lined, blue-collar section of Orange County fifty miles south of L.A. My silver-haired partner, Joe Sanders, lifted our evidence kits from the trunk and handed me mine. We crossed the street to the address we needed, where a sheriff’s investigator in plainclothes stood talking to a Hispanic man in a white T-shirt and dark pants whose hands were cuffed behind him. At the side of the lawn near the house a city cop in blue uniform parted bushes with his baton.

  A deputy on the porch signed us in, then pulled open the screen door with screws missing out of its curlicued guard so it flapped with the motion. The mesh itself was a fractured design of punctures and tears. Inside, the odor of death met us; not strong, but unmistakable.

  The living room was dark except for sunlight leaking under tinfoil applied to the windows with masking tape. A warren of sleeping bags and blankets covered the hardwood floor. Tipped against the wall on a fireplace mantel was a rendering of a haloed Christ with hands outstretched in benediction.

  A deputy came out of the kitchen. He looked like a wary ferret, hard-faced and wiry. Joe knew him, but I didn’t. When Joe said “Smokey Brandon” by way of introduction, the deputy’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve heard of you,” he said, as if trying to recall where.

  Joe tried to deflect: “Some of us go for the fame and glitter. Others go for the glitter and fame.”

  “Aren’t you the one…” the deputy said, “the one used to be a…” then caught himself before finishing.

  “I’m the one,” I said, matter-of-factly. “Want to show us what we have?” He gave me a second glance, then led us down a hall.

  The window shade in the first bedroom was rolled partway up, revealing a bare twin mattress on the floor. A Styrofoam ice chest was topped by a brightly colored kiddy radio, the kind you get for a cheap hamburger plus ninety-nine cents. Three ragged couch cushions formed another bed on the floor, and lumps of blankets and personal belongings lay along two other walls. “This must be the master suite,” Joe said. “Radio. Refrigerator.”

  The deputy said, “Somebody’s coming who can habla beanola. Investigator Bright’s trying to get something out of him right now.”

  “The guy on the sidewalk,” Joe said.

  “Yeah, him. He’s messin’ his pants. He was peekin’ out a car window, back seat. Thinks I don’t see him, shit for brains.”

  “Who phoned it in?” Joe asked.

  “White guy, two houses down. He come over to pay one of these tacos twenty bucks he says he owed on something. The door was open, six in the morning. Finds our scene here and gets to keep his twenty bucks one more day.” Deputy Martin led us down the hall again, stopping at a door to the right. His arms hung away from his sides as if his lats were too big, cobra stance.

  A second deputy came up behind us. High school would have been where I’d put him by looks, but he had a wedding ring on. Deputy Martin didn’t offer introductions. “Here you have it,” Martin said and stepped inside, holding his flashlight on the interior. The second deputy’s gaze roamed everywhere but straight ahead.

  Joe stepped in first and lifted a forefinger to the empty socket in the center of the ceiling. “Can we get some light here?” The younger deputy went off to scrounge a bulb.

  As the deputy passed the beam over the red contusions on the girl’s waist, arms, and exposed thigh, Joe leaned in for a closer look, his hands shoved in his suit pockets. I began a sketch of the placement of the body and the items in the room, noting an open cardboard box, a dark belt, and a ball of white nylon cord partly covered with a paper plate.

  Joe straightened, closed his eyes, and walked by me and out into the hall, a strange expression on his face. I was about to follow when Deputy Martin said, “Looky here,” and spotlighted a mouse backed into a corner alongside the cardboard box with clothes trailing out of it. “One mouse bound for heaven.” He drew his baton to move on the animal.

  “Thanks, Deputy, we’ll take it now,” I said, and held out a hand for his flashlight.

  He shrugged and gave it over with a grin. “You’re not going to be climbing a chair and shrieking for help, now are you, Smokey?”

  “Stay tuned,” I said. I tapped the cardboard box with the flashlight. The mouse leapt straight upward, darted along the baseboard, halted at the doorway, then sprinted through. I looked out after him and saw Joe leaning against the wall in apparent thought.

  The younger deputy came with the bulb, Deputy Martin screwed it in, then left, saying if I needed his help to roust more rodents just holler. He squeezed by the videographer, Bob Hammerly, arriving to shoot both still shots and video, as I went to join Joe. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “You look funny.”

  “That’s kind of you.”

  “What do you say we get out of here? The heater’s on in the living room, that’s why it’s so hot,” I said. Out of here meant only the front yard, because Joe wouldn’t leave a scene early even if all of California was doing the tectonic-plate rumba.

  We stood under an avocado tree laden with shiny boat-shaped leaves. A dead one slipped free of its mooring and glanced off Joe’s shoulder.

  “She was in there a lot of hours with people sleeping in the other rooms,” he said. “Where are they?” His skin normally has a flus
h to it, heightened by hair the color of dimes, but he looked pale and I mentioned it. He said, “Ulcer, what you want to bet?”

  I answered, “I think it’s leprosy. Probably that.”

  “Sweetheart, I am circling the drain.”

  A bird cut in front of us, grabbed broken twigs from under a hedge, and zipped back to the eaves of the house. We walked to the edge of the lawn and looked down the street, deputies nodding or waving to Joe. After two decades at the lab, Joe seemed to know everybody, new employee or not.

  On a block-wall fence bordering the next house sat two boys old enough to be in school. Their solemn eyes watched us and followed the low-flying birds tracing patterns from shrub to eave. One boy picked up a piece of broken capstone that lay atop the wall and gave it an underhanded pitch, hitting the tail feathers of a bird in flight. The bird let loose of a strand of nest stash but managed to lift off anyway. Then the boys scrambled out of sight on the other side.

  As we walked back toward the house, Joe said, “Know what the worst is?”

  “Sunday, and no ball game?”

  He shook his head and almost smiled.

  “Cookies, no milk?”

  As if in any moment he’d spot the killer in the deep-green junipers that brushed at window-level around the house, Joe stared ahead and said, “The worst is,” he said, “you can’t unknow what you know. You can’t un-see a picture.”

  Back inside, we set to work swabbing blood spatter, dusting for prints, and boxing up those items better examined at the lab. All the while, Joe was quiet, not joking as he often did.

  Soon another lab tech named King Davis arrived in the ID van, with the coroner’s van just behind. A small man, bald except for a robust ring of gray hair around the dome, King was as quiet as he was determined to get the job done and move on to the next. If he just worked fast enough, we kidded him, one of these days he’d close the gap between his arrival and the crime’s commission so that he could claim eyewitness to a murder. We left as King was wrapping the mattress the girl had lain upon in plastic, to take it, whole, to the lab.

  At the car I glanced at Joe as he came up on the passenger side and saw him put his hand to his stomach and wrinkle his face in a way that had nothing to do with sun.

  By Tuesday noon the girl from the shoebox house in Santa Ana had been identified as an illegal named Nita Estevez. “Nita” for Juanita. The runt hiding in the car was one of the people who slept in the house, paying a hundred a month to do so. He worked graveyard shift at a mailing company. That morning when he came home from his job everyone had already scattered and the girl was in the condition we found her. A nice girl, too, he said. Made him sick to think about it.

  Investigator Will Bright gained a thumbnail history of Nita Estevez. Six months ago she paid a cousin a thousand dollars to sweep her along a hazardous route from a little border town in Mexico to opportunity in the U.S. La Grullita was the name of the town; translation, Little Crane—just below Yuma. She was ushered in to work in a Garden Grove garment factory, making tank-tops for women and swim trunks for men at a wage that should but doesn’t shame the sweatshop owners.

  It took a few days for the news to reach the girl’s mother through a series of calls from the morgue to the Border Patrol, Mexican police, and friends of friends. Now Mrs. Estevez had come to claim her daughter’s body, using most of the money her daughter had sent home which she had been saving for the only child of hers who would get to go to high school, this year, because of Nita. I was at the morgue for a meeting about a different case when Mrs. Estevez was shown the photo that would serve as official ID for her deceased daughter.

  From my vantage point, in an office across the hall, I watched her take the photo in her hand, suck in a long breath and turn a peculiar greenish color. She dropped the picture, rose from her chair, and walked stiffly to the side door, batting aside a young male companion’s hands extended in solace. I excused myself from the meeting and went after her, but she was moving fast and rounded the corner to the front of the building before I got to her. Her companion jogged up to me, and the two of us watched helplessly as she cried “Asesinos!” then plopped down hard on the sidewalk, leaned to one side, and vomited into the flower bed.

  Years ago when I first became a cop in Oakland, I studied criminal justice textbooks, read department case histories, and listened to the brief or embellished tales from cops, the lies and truths from punks, the stories from emergency teams, and the anguished cries of victims’ relatives. As a consequence, I grew alert to the way ordinary people talk to one another in violent phrasings, to the unthinking vocabulary of mayhem we all use: killer this, hammer that, tear his throat out. Placid scenes in others’ eyes—a park, a trail, the beach at dusk—signified danger zones to me. Self-murder, war murder, murder in all the degrees. Through its study, I soon saw that in no way can man’s imagination exceed his capacity for killing. Every contemplated method for exacting agony has at some time or another been proficiently, even proudly, performed.

  Murder, big and small. This was my obsession.

  After a while a certain peace settled in, as if by owning murder’s gravity I could face all other things down.

  I was young then, mid-twenties. Ten years have passed, and I am no longer obsessed. Then there was Nita. In my off hours I grieved for a girl who came looking for work who found death instead, who would never walk on perfect sand and smirk at seagulls, nor lift a child to feel a peach on a tree. Never would she move to the magic of music, enjoy the inexpressible touch of a lover, or thrill to challenges within her own mind, and I wanted someone to be held accountable; someone. For the violated girl in the Santa Ana hovel, I would do my part to render justice.

  Yet I knew the primary burden of solving this case was not mine. I’m not a sheriff’s investigator. I’m a forensics specialist in a buck-strapped, shorthanded county crime lab where, after a county bankruptcy, layoffs continue, retirements are urged, and the concept of hiring seems archaic. This crime was not even as bad, one might say, as the surpassing brutality of those against children or the elderly, if one can put a scale to the gravity of murder.

  But Joe was right—you can’t un-see a picture.

  I wanted the killer of the young woman I silently re-named Little Crane because at times the vessel of disgust just spills over. Without justice for Nita Estevez, she would be three times abandoned: first to poverty, then to death, last to memory.

  I wanted her killer because, under the merciless green tint of fluorescent lights as she lay in the cool chamber of the dead, we had come to learn she had been alive when she was beaten, throttled, raped, and had her nipple bitten off.

  TWO

  A week later we had no more meaningful evidence than the day we walked out of the murder scene.

  I had worked that case and several others all week and had gone four days before that without a day off. I thought I had Sunday finally, and planned to meet my pal, Ray Vega, in San Juan Capistrano for the Swallow’s Day Parade. Then Stu Hollings, my supervisor, called at six a.m. and asked me to cover a scene in an area of the city of Irvine named Technology Park where computer geeks toil. “Remember,” he said, “victims don’t get a day off.” I could argue the point but didn’t.

  Irvine is a vast, flat, master-planned and virtually aseptic city so dirt-free you could drop a sandwich, pick it up, and eat it without a thought. A breeze could blow between buildings of the business park where the body was found and not lift a single leaf. It was not a place you might imagine a man to be sitting against a white wall with a bullet drilled through his head.

  I found the slug bored into the stucco behind him, and stood by while the coroner’s investigator taped bags over the victim’s hands so fingernail scrapings could be taken at the morgue. The scene was shut down in under three hours with precious little to show for it. But the man did have ID; plenty of it. He was supposed to be twenty-one years old. With the damage of death, it was hard to hazard a guess. On his employee badge and driver�
�s license he was Hector Victor Flores. The name on an old Border Crosser card forbidding work in the U.S. was Hector Ramon Gonzales. And the name on a fake Resident Alien card, known as a “green card” although it is actually pink, was Hector Joaquin René Martinez. I examined that one carefully because I knew something was not quite right about it, then realized it bore a full-face photo instead of the required one showing an ear.

  As I took my small collection of evidence to Property at the lab, I was thinking that the young man should be just now stirring in a bedroom on this day of rest, or reading a Spanish version of the Sunday paper to find a new used car, or chomping on a cold tortilla stuffed with leftovers while he figured out which movie or air show to attend. Where he shouldn’t be, was lying on a steel gurney at the morgue.

  “Having a good T-I-M-E?”

  The giant bird bobbed toward me and Ray Vega, gold beak flapping. We stood beneath a huge sycamore tree along the parade route. The celebration was to mark the day the tiny gunmetal-blue birds known as barn swallows return from their winter retreat. They would build mud cups beneath town eaves and mission arches while issuing soft vit-vits, slip-lips, and long musical twitters. But this big-footed, ugly, slightly frightening, man-sized swallow stirred edgy giggles as he advanced on spectators. He whirled, drew his six-shooter, and plugged a cow-dude sneaking up on him smack dead in the street. The crowd shrieked, laughed, then applauded.

  I looked down the line of parade watchers. Most were Anglos but many bore the dark hair and tawny skin of Hispanic/Indian mix like Ray, by my side, and the victim who only hours ago leaned against a building in what now seemed another world.

  “Damn it,” Ray said, “I want to see some swallows floculating.”

  I said, “Your mouth, son.”

  “No, really. They swoop, they dive, they get it on.”

  “Me, I’m mad I missed the Hairiest Man Contest,” I said. At that, Ray milked his chin, feeling for a beard. “Forget it, sweetie,” I said, “they had two months’ head start.”