The Juan Doe Murders: A Smokey Brandon Thriller Read online

  “For women. You want to call that in?”

  “No.”

  “Bring me something on this Doe and we’ll see.”

  “Stu, you’re all heart,” I said. He believed I meant it.

  The higher I drove, the bigger the mansions became.

  Nellie Gail is a hilly subdivision in the city of Laguna Hills, a few miles south of Irvine. Homes there run worthy of a Kennedy clan. Streets are not streets but “parkways” and “avenidas”; they intersect with rounded corners. Backyards spill in long slopes and in them are classy swimming pools and rows of fruit trees and corrals draped with bougainvillea in blazing salmon, pink, and magenta. The horses wear crisp green fly-masks as they munch from grain buckets and flick their wiry tails. Goats stand stiff-legged, chickens pose on boulders, and black sheep swing their lower jaws nonchalantly over fresh alfalfa spears. Another world here than the one in downtown Santa Ana, central county; another world entirely.

  I pulled up to Gallup Circle across from a park. It was misty, no sun out today, promoting the smell of camphor from the many eucalyptus trees. Carnival trees, Ray Vega calls them. “Carnival trees,” he says: “U-clipped-us.” Three nannies, in colored sweaters over white uniforms tending children on the playset, turned their honey-gold faces to me as I got out of the car.

  Two black-and-white sheriff’s units were parked under the U-clipped-us, while a third was at the far end of a line of yellow scene tape strung across the trunks of several trees.

  I walked up to one of the deputies, a man I knew from a case a year ago that took us to long waits in court hallways and what-a-tough-job-it-is conversations. “Hi, Art. I hear we have a homicide bright and early.”

  “I’m thinking suicide,” he said, and pointed up the hill.

  “What does Homicide say?”

  “Not here yet. Stuck in traffic.” He hiked his belt laden with gear, and went on: “I checked the weapon. Little peashooter.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Okay? Okay? I don’t get any rise out of ya?”

  “Can I yell at you later?”

  “I had to clear the weapon, Smokey, you know that.”

  “Two rounds out of seven,” Art said, and pointed under his chin. “Poor dumb shit had to shoot himself twice. Time comes I’m thinking serious suicide, I’m damn sure usin’ a bigger gun.”

  “It’s not the bullet that kills ya, it’s the hole,” I said.

  “I still don’t see how a guy could cap himself twice,” another deputy said.

  “People do the damnedest things, ain’t that right, Smokey?”

  “That they do.”

  Long ago, I’d read a book on suicide by one of the Doctors Menninger of the famous clinic. Curdled my blood, you could say.

  “No casings around though,” Art said, “is what has me bothered. Maybe you can find them. Also, looks like a California collie’s been gnawin’ on his foot. Bigger ’n life, I see this ol’ dude come right down off the hill and go loping across the park.” When he pointed, the nannies, whose faces had been trained in our direction, quickly glanced away. “I almost took a shot at him.”

  “Contrary to rumors, Art, you’re a bright man.”

  “A guy with a shotgun in the closet and a three-year-old in the back yard will blast the hell out of that thing one of these days. I would, I lived here.”

  When I started for the hill, the other deputy said, “Better wait for Homicide.” I gave him a look, said nothing, then waded through a carpet of lavender Mexican poppies at the foot of the slope.

  The victim sat against the trunk of a tree, head sagged forward. One ankle was marred with purple bands. I knew at once the marks were not from a coyote. The animal would’ve gone for the bigger wound, first to lick the drainage and then to topple the body over for an easier feast.

  In the right hand lay a .25 semi-auto. Its magazine lay on top of a brown paper sack where Arty had put it, blocked from sliding down the slope by a patch of weed. A few feet back I located a flat spot on which to set my kit and camera. I drew a map, then took a number of shots, and finally pulled on latex gloves. I wanted to see the hole, the hole that kills ya.

  Ordinarily, nobody touches the body until the coroner’s people do, but there are exceptions. L.A.’s not Orange County, Orange County’s not Fresno, Chicago’s not New York, and none of it is Kermit, Texas. There’s a lot more latitude at crime scenes than people know.

  The back of the victim’s jacket collar was a tarry red. Ants ran a two-lane course on the tree behind, business as usual. I took hold of the victim’s hair and lifted the head to check for the onset of rigor. It gave, with only slight resistance. Blood that had pooled in the mouth drooled out.

  Entry, as Art had said, was under the chin, with sooting at one edge of the hole, indicating a near-contact wound. The size of the hole looked bigger to me than that from a .25, but I wasn’t a pathologist and maybe two rounds would do that. On the other hand, it didn’t seem likely a person could put two in a single channel, no matter that I’d read about and seen some strange things. Art thought there were two rounds because it was a seven-round magazine and two were missing, but maybe he didn’t have it loaded to capacity, or maybe he fired a trial round as he worked up courage. No brass around to prove it, though it could have rolled downhill.

  I lowered the head and examined the exit wound. It also seemed larger to me than what a .25-caliber might inflict, but again, I was not a coroner’s assistant, I was an evidence junkie.

  Bending over to look at the gun, I didn’t see anything that might be blowback on it, bits of blood and tissue, though micro-scoped at the lab, it might show. Once again I raised the head to look at a face that might not have made it out of the teens. In his eyebrows and on his cheeks were flecks of dirt, as if he’d rested or been thrown upon the ground. Beard growth was uneven. The eyes were half-open and had lost their sheen.

  I whispered, “Who did this to you, fella?”

  I released his head forward. That the head gave at all could mean he’d met his death within the last four hours, since rigor both begins and ends first in the small muscles of the head and extremities. Several things can affect rigor: activity before death, ambient temperature, drug use. In rare cases, rigor never asserts itself, as in some very obese or very small people. By eighteen hours rigor is in retreat; the body becomes flaccid again. I didn’t think the victim had been up here, in this wealthy neighborhood, undiscovered that long.

  When I applied pressure on the bluish-red coloring on the side of his palm, there was a blanching. The color signified a condition called postmortem lividity, or livor mortis, which occurs when gravity pools the blood in the capillaries to the lowest body portions. I removed a glove and touched the skin: cool as a mannequin. Body temp, or algor mortis, would be taken at the morgue and matched with time charts to aid in what must remain, without a witness to the crime, only an estimate for time of death.

  I glanced downhill and saw the feet of several civilians through the veil of tree limbs, and hands connected to leashes with dogs on the other end. Somewhere the raucous sound of leaf blowers began. Then I saw the coroner’s van and a beige car pull up. Boyd Russell had made it.

  I was taking swabs from the stain on the tree when he came up. Long of face, high of forehead, with gray bags beneath his eyes, Boyd was wearing a tan suit and a shirt that already looked rumpled. He looked like a million middle-aged men in any profession, one who probably paid his taxes on the last eligible day, went to church for the sake of the kids, and watched ball games on TV and re-runs of Hunter.

  I reported what I’d done so far. He asked if anyone had checked the higher part of the hill above us, where two massive, cream-colored water tanks surrounded by a chain-link fence hunkered behind a hedge. “Not that I know of,” I said.

  “Go take a look around, will you? Let me get the lay of this here and I’ll join you in a minute.”

  I looped my camera cord around my neck, gathered several small brown evidence sacks
from my kit, and walked at an angle up the slope, plowing through a spill of gold gazanias, their long-fingered petals folded skyward as if praying for sun.

  As I walked the fence around the water tank, I saw a cigarette butt, a piece of cellophane, a beer can—kids out smoking and drinking in the bushes, maybe. Not exactly what you’d call evidence, but I set position markers, shot some frames, and bagged the items anyway, numbering the sacks and applying labels over the folds, and writing down identifying info in my notes as well. Some forensics jocks say it’s possible to take too many notes, that they can get you in trouble, trip you up in court, but I haven’t found it that way. Later Boyd would ring doorbells to ask neighbors if they saw anything; if they had teenage kids who might’ve seen anything; if they had teenage kids who may have sneaked off to suck a few brews on the sly and leave their litter on the landscape, and if so, these items could be eliminated as part of the case.

  The gate to the first water tank was padlocked. I moved on to the second one, which also had a gate but was free of a lock. Inside the lower walkway I found the ladder that allowed access to the top. I left the sealed bags on the ground and draped my jacket over the wire fence. Then, with a jump, I caught a rung and climbed. When the ladder became raised handholds on the curved dome, I stood and walked to the center. In the foggy distance a pack of low hills floated like whales in a white ocean.

  The raw call of a crow ripped overhead; leaves rustled. I saw his hard eyes and the shine of his jointed feet as the branch swelled up and down with his weight. Then he lifted off, to perch over the second water tank. Only then did I spy the brown tent of a wallet standing against the last handhold on the second tank’s dome. Not far from it, draped over an air valve, lay what looked like a silver chain and medallion.

  “Damn,” I muttered. Maybe I was going to have something to make old Stu happy after all.

  “It could be nothing,” I told Boyd Russell when I got down. “But there’s a lock on the gate and the cage at the bottom of the ladder.”

  “We’ll fix that,” he said. We both went to his car. He got a bolt cutter out of the trunk, and when I saw a wire coat hanger in the dark recess by the wheel well, I asked for that too.

  Boyd cut the locks. I climbed the tank with my camera, sacks, and the straightened coat hanger to retrieve the wallet and medallion. Down again, I put on fresh gloves and opened the wallet. Inside were grocery store coupons of the sort the checker hands you with your receipt, and another poorly counterfeited green card. It wouldn’t have fooled a drunk man in a dark alley. The photo did seem to be of the victim but it was clearly glued on and I knew the Alien Number was about four digits short. The name on the card was Hector Bonifacio Rios. Another Hector. The birthdate made him twenty-four.

  A folded snapshot in the back pocket showed people at a party. Three Hispanic men and women with bright smiles on their faces. One of the women stood behind the far end of the couch with her arm around a man and her face pressed into his sweater. I recognized him as the dead man on the hill. Smiling. Handsome. Young. Alive. I wanted to will him back, as if you could run life’s film in reverse.

  After the coroner’s investigator took tape-lifts of the debris on the victim’s face and applied them to 3×5 cards, she had her two attendants pack up the body and remove it. I snapped a few more shots and searched the ground beneath. With an army knife I poked around in the tree bark until I felt a solid stoppage, and dug out a slug, a single slug. I stashed it in a small black film canister after showing it to Boyd.

  “Looks to be maybe a thirty-eight,” he said.

  “That’s about how I’d call it,” I said.

  Boyd said. “Get the ballistics. I bet it won’t match the gun over there. Just doesn’t look small enough.”

  I stayed a while longer, checking the area again and even asking the deputies to lift their shoes to see if any brass had lodged in the ridges of their soles. But the simple fact is you can’t count on much for evidence in outdoor scenes. You can go after spent shell casings, dropped weapons, blood stains, witnesses, and victim ID. You can take fingerprints off trees, but unlikely. You can take them off toilet paper in a toilet, the insides of gloves, the sticky side of tape, off concrete sidewalks, even the victim’s skin, though none of these is without its own set of difficulties.

  Find something, Stu had said. Okay. I did. Two dead Hispanics in the space of two days, both with gunshot wounds to the head, both in outdoor scenes. Fake ID’s with the given name “Hector.”

  But if that added up to anything, it was as elusive as a shadow sped across the moon.

  FOUR

  I stopped at Del Taco for an early lunch and sat in my car and threw bits of tortilla from a burrito to a Brewer’s blackbird and three wrens.

  Music crackled from an outside speaker, Gloria Estefan singing “It’s Too Late.” The DJ came on and said we were in for a perfect seventy-two degrees. I wondered how Joe was spending his rare vacation day, hoped he was poolside with a drink, a book, and soft music, or barefoot on the beach, watching pretty girls go by.

  When I got to the lab, a colleague named Jerry was leaving out the back door, grumbling about AFIS, the automated fingerprint system, being down. I could still log in the evidence from the Nellie Gail scene, prepare fingerprint cards, and examine the tape lifts holding the leaf debris. I passed by Joe’s office on the way to my desk and there he was, sitting there big as life.

  “Liar,” I said from his doorway.

  “What can I say? I love my job.” A few years before I met him he’d had a heart attack. He could easily take light duty if he wanted, but he didn’t and this was an example.

  I sat in the chair in front of his desk and said, “Can’t you even give yourself one day? One single day?”

  “When David’s classes are over we’re going rafting on the Kern River. Then you’ll be complaining, ‘Where’s Joe?’ ”

  I dug out a small pack of M&Ms and fished a finger in. “Want some?” Joe shook his head and made a slight face. “That tequila will getcha every time,” I said.

  “It’s not a hangover.”

  “Sorry to tell you, but it’s called a hangover.”

  “We still on for tonight?” he asked. “How’s six?”

  “Fine.”

  “Heard you had one out at Nellie Gail this morning.”

  “Correct. We have ID, but it seems hokey.”

  “GSW?” Joe asked.

  “Here,” I said and touched the point under my chin where the victim sustained the gunshot wound. “Two rounds. No casings. He had a twenty-five caliber in his hand, but I took a slug out of a tree behind him that looks bigger, but it’s hard to know for sure until Firearms sees it.”

  “Ear witnesses?”

  “None so far.” On his desk I saw a familiar case file. “Something new on your Dana Point case?”

  “Not really.”

  Six weeks ago Joe attended a scene where a woman’s body was discovered on a high ocean bluff after her small dog returned to their neighbor’s house dragging its leash. The husband, when he was told, was too nonchalant, playing a radio strapped to his belt the whole time of the interview. He answered questions without rancor and seemed to cooperate, but Joe thought the guy was guilty as hell and every once in a while hauled out the case file.

  He stood and rounded the desk and said, “Come out to the car with me. I have a present for you.” He stopped when I didn’t trail him. “Why the face? I just felt like giving you a present.”

  “You know they make me feel…”

  “Funny,” he said.

  “Gifts are like pants before the advent of suspenders,” I said. “They’re too hard to keep up.”

  “How long have you been planning to use that one?”

  “Long time,” I said.

  In the parking lot, a bird hurtled onto a low limb of a jacaranda tree whose purple buds were partially open. Joe said, “Name that bird.”

  “That’s an LBJ.” He waited for me elaborate. “Litt
le Brown Job,” I said.

  “For that,” Joe said, “you don’t get your present till tonight,” and pocketed his keys. Then, looking beyond me, he said, “What happened to your car? That’s your ride over there, isn’t it?”

  We went over to my car, backed into the slot. My heart sank. All along the passenger side was a deep scratch. Joe bent down to inspect it. “That’s not from somebody parking too close. Where you been hanging out?”

  “Nowhere. Well, with you and bad company like Ray Vega.”

  “There you have it,” he said, teasing.

  Back inside, I had two phone messages waiting. I was on the second return call when my boss dropped by and stood in the doorway. I wasn’t able to get off the phone right away. He left. When I got off that call, I phoned the morgue to find out the autopsy schedule for the Does so I’d have something to tell Stu. They were backed up. It probably wouldn’t be till Thursday.

  The rest of the afternoon I worked on the Nellie Gail and never saw Stu and never saw Joe again before I left. When I went to my car and got reminded of its damage, I wasn’t even mad anymore, just resigned.

  The crowd at The Quiet Woman was noisy from a birthday party, the honoree screaming her surprise at every turn. Joe and I hid in a booth, wishing the establishment’s name applied. The wooden sign near the front door was a painted depiction of a woman in Dutch dress, minus a head; hence, the quiet woman. Legend has it she incurred the fatal wrath of her relatives by talking too much.

  Over the racket, Joe mentioned again that something seemed to be bothering his son.

  I sipped my wine and asked benignly, “Girl trouble?”

  “Don’t think so. And as far as I know, he’s doing okay in school. So says Jennifer. She usually gets something out of him.”

  Behind us the birthday girl was opening a pink package, crying, “Amy-y-y, you shouldn’t.”

  Joe said, “It’s like he can’t finish a thought, a sentence. His knees bounce. We’ll be sitting somewhere, his knee takes on a life of its own. He’ll put his own hand on it. Then the other one starts.”