Carcass Trade Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Tom

  alongside in the dream

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Grateful thanks is offered to the following for their help during the long haul:

  Members of the Fictionaires, with special thanks to Barbara DeMarco

  Orange County Sheriff-Coroner’s Department

  Cherry Van Stee, Deputy Coroner

  Maureen Albrecht, Deputy Coroner

  Larry Ragle, Director of Forensic Services, Retired

  Larry Harris, Lieutenant, Search and Rescue Reserve Unit

  Michael Lynn, Sergeant, Coroner Support Reserve Unit

  Richard Olson, Lieutenant, Public Information Officer

  Gary Bale, Investigator

  Long Beach Police Department

  Larry Chowen, Police Officer, Patrol

  Bob Mahakian, Police Officer, Administration

  Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department

  Larry Mitchell, Crime Scene Investigation, Scientific Services Bureau

  Barry Fisher, Director, Scientific Services Bureau

  Newport Beach Police Department

  Patrick O’Sullivan, Detective Sergeant

  California Highway Patrol

  Bruce Lian and Greg Moorehead, State Traffic Officers

  Federal Bureau of Investigation

  Randy Aden, Special Agent

  U.S. Customs Service

  Michael Fleming, Public Affairs Officer

  Other experts of talent and grace

  Shirlie Banta, Greg Block, Cecelia Fannon, Dr. Kathleen Ryan, Al Tank, Sandy Tourigny, Harold Trask, David Vincent, and Ryan Watje

  Wise and Sharp-Eyed Editors

  Bob Shuman and Liza Dawson, and copyeditor Kathy Antrim

  Wise and Charming Agents of the William Morris Agency, East and West

  Michael Carlisle and Amy Schiffman

  My families, both of them

  And again, in memory of Gary Brazelton

  EPIGRAPH

  There must be wisdom with great Death;

  The dead shall look me thro’ and thro’.

  –Alfred Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam”

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Also by Noreen Ayres

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  Up on the hill CC Rider ambled along with his red tail curled over his back and his nose down, sniffing. He stopped just over the burned car wreck that lay on a ledge in the canyon below him and gazed toward us on the roadside just getting out of our cars.

  We were in a cut of Chino Hills called Carbon Canyon, a part of northeastern Orange County where, at the start of the century, an oil probe hit a gusher along the Whittier fault line and released centuries of compressed single-cell diatoms that flooded the area with oil boomtowns. Now these same canyons shelter restive yuppies and biker barons taking the narrow curves that snake from the coastal valley to the desert plain by way of Cleveland National Forest.

  CC Rider moved downhill on the roadside nearer to where there might be some evidence of a car going over the side, but not so close that anyone could throw a net over him and haul him off to some county dog motel.

  “Keep that dog away,” I called to the deputy standing near his cruiser. A red county fire truck was parked ahead on the shoulder, with only one fire fighter in the cab that I could see.

  “We been trying,” he said. He removed his pistol from the holster and mock-shot him, and CC on the hill watched and then rose and walked over a little way, tucked his rear under, and defecated near a clump of creosote bush. Then he gave two finishing kicks, sending a weak plume of rain-softened leaf bits into the air. I first came across CC Rider a year or so ago, when I’d been called out on a cocaine-related homicide near a patch of defunct oil rigs crouched and ready for calisthenics in the weeds. While we worked, the dog ran around the steel structures and watched to see if we were doing it right, the investigation, and the park ranger told us then that the dog belonged to no one, but the bikers at Los Lobos named him CC for Carbon Canyon and fed him scraps and got him drunk every once in a while.

  The morning sun had broken through the mist and the air carried an unsettling smell of char as I stood by the trunk of my car waiting for my passenger, Doug Forster, to hear the last of “Devil with the Blue Dress” on the oldie station and bring me my keys so I could get my evidence kit out. Doug and I are civilian employees of the sheriff-coroner’s department, in the forensic services section, commonly called the crime lab. He shoots most of our photos since the man who used to be on this shift got canned for using crime-scene shots in an art exhibit in Laguna Beach.

  While I waited for Doug, I tried to figure how a two-ton missile landed sideways on a table ledge with its wheels to the canyon wall, assuming it flew off the road going up an incline on a right-bending curve.

  I heard Doug’s voice behind me say, “I know a recipe for roadkill.” He nodded toward a ribbon of brown ants I’d disrupted coursing toward a flattened snake the color of straw near my rear tire, but at first I thought he meant what lay in the burned wreck, humor being one of the ways cops and their cousins cope. Wearing a white turtleneck and jeans, Doug looked like a college student. His dark hair shone and his skin was baby smooth with no beard shadow. Once I heard our front-office clerk say she thought Doug was real buff, meaning cool and hunky. My own taste runs to the old and ragged, Joe Sanders style. I expected Joe to be pulling up in a moment. I’d put a call in for him.

  Doug nudged the snake tail with his foot and said, “We could whip up a peanut sauce, thread him on a stick and roast him: snake satay.” He put his finger and thumb together like a delicate waiter, then looked across the road into the canyon at the charred car.

  “Are you trying out for the Laff Stop, or what?”

  “Think I’m good enough?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Damn,” he said, and brushed his hands across his jeans as if grass were sticking to them.

  We crossed the road some distance from where the cruiser and the fire truck were parked and went partway down the slope and stood, getting the feel of the scene. Except for the black mar against the cliff, the surrounding area was not touched by flame or fury. We had been warned that this one was ugly: The car, with whoever was in it, was entirely burned. Though the paint on the license plate had boiled away, the numbers, which were raised, could be read, and when the deputy ran the plate he learned the 1974 Cadillac was owned by a woman from Beverly Hills, and stolen. That qualified it as a crime scene on a slow morning, even if it did look like a simple accident. The call had come in around six in the morning to the San Bernardino sheriffs from a motorist who’d seen a smoking car over the side on Highway 142. The civilian, doing his Good Samaritan best, had shagged dow
n the hill with his heavy-duty flashlight and tried to get a look inside, but the ledge and the slippery debris prevented more than a verification that it was indeed a beached vehicle, so he plowed back up the hill and phoned from the market in Sleepy Hollow just over the county line where he’d had his morning cup of coffee not ten minutes before.

  I said to Doug, “How much damage do you think the fire crew and the civilian did?”

  Before he could answer, a deputy shouted and waved his tablet at us. We trudged back up to the shoulder.

  While Doug was signing in, I suggested we do the area sketches and wide shots before going down to examine the wreck, and he said, “I hate a woman boss.”

  “Not as much as she despises you. Now boogie on up the road and get me some tire impressions, Private.”

  The deputy smiled and stepped away so he could motion to a couple of slow cars to keep on moving. I’m not really Doug’s boss. I just happened to be the lead on this investigation. I’ve got five years’ seniority on Doug, both at the lab and in life, and at twenty-eight his urges to compete are in full flower. Or maybe he was just trying to impress the deputy.

  I signed in, Brandon, initial: S.

  Samantha’s my given name, but most people know me as Smokey, so the letter works either way. In my younger, stupider, and in some ways happier days, I was Smokey Montiel, a dancer, an entertainer, you might say, in Vegas. A stripper. When I first sought a job in law enforcement, they ran a routine background check because, among other things, they don’t want embarrassment to come to an agency from a person’s previous employment. But if my former foolish job interested anyone particularly, I never heard about it, though I admit I downgraded the job to “dancer,” and right after that got to list a few years’ stint behind a grocery store cash register while I went to college. Way back then I stopped wearing makeup, cut my hair and wore it straight and stayed out of the sun so it wouldn’t be so blonde, and took to wearing clothes that if not hid then didn’t announce my figure, and in no time I was a cop working jail duty up north. And then one day I wasn’t, but dealing with the aftermath of minds much weirder than mine, and feeling my chip was at least on the stack for justice.

  “Let’s go have a look,” Doug said, following me down the slope.

  I put my kit down, took out my pad, and set an N on top of the grid paper for the north marker. At the bottom, I wrote my name, the date, and the words “Tape-measured—not to scale.”

  “Come on, let’s see what’s up,” he persisted.

  “Doug, do you know you sound like a whiny little kid?”

  “I am a whiny little kid. That makes me smarter than you, see, ’cause I get what I want.”

  “Go take your pictures.”

  “Okay, I’m going down.”

  “No.” I made a swift motion to the roadside.

  He said, “See? That’s what I hate about women. Changing their minds all the time.”

  “I meant the road shots.” The reason I wasn’t in a hurry to approach the wreck was that a man who’d been around the lab a long time before me told me from the start: Go slow and you might get lucky. Go fast and the expressions on the faces of the victim’s family when the court case fails because of something you botched will stay with you for years.

  Enunciating slowly and in a near whisper, I said to Doug, “Find us some skid marks, will you, before every looky-loo in the county messes them up.” He followed my gaze to the road shoulder where a car and a bicyclist were stopped as if the deputies’ orders shouldn’t pertain to them. Only when one of the officers began walking toward them did they ease away.

  Doug pointed a finger at me and said, “You lack a serious level of prurient interest, you know that?” then hunched away, turning back for a quick grin. It’s not that he has no respect for the dead. It’s just that each of us handles this kind of work in a different way. I require a long lead-in.

  I noted an approximate distance from roadside to rubble at about sixty feet. My rendition of a jumbo sedan with its wheels to the cliff face looked like a Crackerjack box with loop handles, but a sketch doesn’t have to be a piece of art. Above me, while I sketched, I heard the whir of Doug’s autowinder. I glanced up and saw CC Rider observing this new occurrence from a higher perch on the incline. Let’s put our thoughts together, CC. What do you think? I pondered how the driver missed the curve and tunneled into a bowl of darkness to connect with the unforgiving clay-and-sandstone backstop. Maybe he was fleeing, in his stolen car, from someone. Maybe he’d been blinded by opposing headlights, or his tires had skied on a skin of water from the night’s hard dose of rain. Perhaps he was a night-shift worker who took a final snooze in the car he borrowed from a friend, waking for a last few precious seconds as his body shifted in the capsizing car.

  Whatever the cause, I wanted Joe Sanders to get there soon. After twenty-three years of service, he’s an expert in arson, explosives, drugs, blood, trace evidence, toolmarks, or whatever, and the rest of us dummies call on him when we get in a bind. He used to be the supervisor of CSI, Crime Scene Investigation, but that was three years and a heart attack ago, and now he assists the lab director and is available for teaching classes at the academy. On the way to the scene I learned he was finishing up a seven o’clock class at the training academy, so I left a message for him to drop by if he could.

  I was getting out my steel tape measure when Doug came back and stood braced above me on the slope. He said all the fire crew had done was check for embers; otherwise, they had not disturbed the scene.

  “Did you get some skids?”

  “Nope. A diet Pepsi can. Good shot of that.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “I bagged it. Want it for evidence?” He withdrew a brown paper sack from his camera bag, a pleased look on his face. “My lunch sack.”

  “Why not?” I took it and put it next to my kit.

  “If nothing’s on it, give it back. I’ll recycle for the five cents.”

  “Things are tough all over, Doug.”

  “Do you know now long it’s been since I had a raise?”

  “Yeah, I know. You’re so poor you’re eating jam sandwiches: two pieces of bread jammed together.”

  “I am poor,” he said. “My roof leaks so bad my whole bed’s a wet spot.”

  Joe’s gray sedan pulled up and parked ahead of my car and behind the deputies’ cruiser and the fire pumper. He got out, crossed the road, and stood with his legs apart and his hands in his suit pockets, then came down the hill toward Doug and me sideways, experienced with fallen eucalyptus spears that act like a million minisleds on slopes. With the steady look that sufficed for hello, he said, “Did you call for aerial?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s just a stolen car.”

  “With a body. There could be another one somewhere, or an injured person. You goofed.”

  My hackles were up, him talking to me like that. He may be an expert, but he’s forgotten that these aren’t the good old days when Orange County was rolling in citrus money and aw-shucksing itself in the presence of certain gol-dumed Republican actors, one of whom went and got a whole airport named after him. John Wayne is still one of Joe’s favorites. Over the holidays, he watched seven of his movies.

  But I didn’t say anything because I figured he was giving me a small dig for a reason. We’d been a passionate pair for a while until I asked for a reprieve, not because dating someone you work with is a bad idea to my mind, despite the popular notion. What better petri dish than a work environment to learn someone’s values, temperament, and reputation? But I admit to a restlessness I sometimes have to defend, and a memory of a husband lost to sudden death. His memory slips through me like a shadow in a stream, there, not there, solid, broken, like life itself, and a certain wariness takes over. You’re either ready for commitment or you’re not, and I’ll take the blame.

  “Who all’s been down?” Joe asked. He glanced back up to the road where the one fire fighter, a small
man with little hair, sat on the backstep of the truck, pulling on a stick of red licorice with his teeth. Now I noticed a female fire fighter at the side writing in a report book.

  “We haven’t yet,” Doug said. “Everyone else has.”

  “I haven’t seen Homicide yet,” I said. “If it’s just a stolen, maybe nobody’s coming out. Maybe Dispatch didn’t—”

  Joe looked at the car a moment, then said, “Somebody arsoned it. These canyons are used all the time for body dumps.”

  Doug asked, “What if the car just flew off the road and burst into flames?”

  Joe shook his head. “Cars hardly ever explode. Except Corvettes. All that glue and resin. No, somebody wanted to hide something. I’ve got the sniffer in the trunk. I was using it in class.” He was referring to a device called a catalytic combustion detector, a CCD, used to see if anyone dumped gasoline, kerosene, or lighter fluid before the blaze erupted. “Get all the shots you can up the road, okay?” he said to Doug.

  Doug started uphill immediately, and Joe waited a moment, then asked, his face softened, “How are you, kid?”

  “Semi-lonesome,” I answered, and buffeted him with a shoulder as I passed by.

  “I’m free tonight,” he said, catching up.

  “Let me think about it.”

  He nodded once, and after a time we both stopped and just stood there, looking ahead at the wreck behind the twisted yellow cordon tape swinging in the breeze.

  Up on the road, Doug was talking to a detective named Les. The less I see of him the better I like it.

  Joe said, “Your buddy’s here.”

  “I see that.”

  Les was in a brown suit and an orange tie, a favorite combination he claimed went with his faded red hair. He and Doug moved off to the deputies’ car.

  Joe looked me over, and I couldn’t tell if he was remembering something else he should have brought or he was about to give me another lesson. “You look pretty today,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “You do.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Why are you always so touchy on that?”

  “On the job I’m neuter.”