Dead and Not So Buried

by James L. Conway

  She leaned forward and kissed him. Her tongue darted into his mouth, did a quick, tantalizing tango with his tongue, then slipped out again. “You got a car?”

  “In the lot out back.”

  “Let me guess, Porsche?”

  “Guilty.”

  She put her hand on his crotch and squeezed gently. She felt him stiffen through his jeans. “Stick shift?” she whispered.

  “Yes,” he answered thickly.

  “Vroom. Vroom...”

  They walked out of the club hand in hand. The Lady in Red leaned against him, her hip touching his hip, her thigh brushing against his thigh. He could smell flowers in her hair and Chanel on her skin. “I live nearby,” Colin said. “A couple of miles up on Crescent.”

  “Perfect,” she purred as he opened the door for her. She got in, sighed happily, her fingers relishing the hand-stitched leather. As Colin got in she wrapped her arms around him and kissed him again. Nothing playful this time; the kiss was pure lust. Her hand was back in his lap, rubbing his cock. His right hand went to her breasts, rubbing them through her dress. Real tits, he thought, thrilled. She even has real tits!

  She moaned, took his left hand, put it under her dress, on her panties. He rubbed her mound, his finger searching, finding her clitoris. That brought a grateful groan and her right hand went to work on his belt, unfastening it. Colin lifted up and she slipped down his jeans.

  Jesus Christ, Colin thought. This babe is unbelievable. She wants to do it right here, in this tiny fucking car. He pulled away from her voracious kiss. “Unless you work for Cirque du Soleil,” he said, “we should wait ‘til we get to my house.”

  “Don’t want to wait,” she said, her hand freeing his erect penis from his boxer shorts. “I want you now.” She bent down, taking him in her mouth.

  Okay, Colin thought. I can live with that. Now it was his turn to groan with pleasure as he laid his head back on the headrest and closed his eyes.

  That’s why he didn’t see the last twenty seconds of his life.

  He didn’t see her hand slip into her purse and pull out the Colt Vest Pocket .25 automatic. He did feel the gun as she placed the muzzle under his balls, but he thought it was her finger and she was just kinky. He didn’t see her pull the trigger.

  POP. POP. POP.

  The first bullet ripped through the sigmoid colon, shredded the small intestine, tore through the stomach and left lobe of the liver, finally severing the esophagus. Bullet two veered a little left, taking out the bladder, the ascending colon and the right lobe of the liver before imbedding itself in the spinal cord. Bullet three soared through the small intestine, took out the gallbladder, pulverized more liver, punched a hole in the diaphragm and did a victory dance in the right ventricle of the heart.

  The lady in red leaned back in her seat, watching the little jerks and spasms his body made even though he was already dead. There was much more blood than she expected, and she was surprised to see he still had his hard-on, though it suddenly started to shrink, like a balloon losing air.

  She put the Colt back in her purse, took out a pair of surgical gloves, put them on, and then pulled out a scalpel. She had work to do...

  ONE

  The phone woke Ryan, never a good sign. He opened one eye and looked out the window. Dark. Middle of the night dark. Shit.

  He picked up the phone. “Hello.”

  “Duty calls, Ryan.” He recognized the voice, his boss, Lieutenant Hanrahan. “Got a very dead body in a very bloody car on the always exciting Sunset Strip.”

  Ryan glanced at the clock, three-thirty. Fuck, he thought. Not because of the dead body, he was a homicide cop and it was hard to do his job without the occasional body or two. The fuck was for the hour. He liked his sleep.

  Hanrahan coughed, a phlegm-filled hack from someone who gave up smoking twenty years too late. “Parking lot on the corner of Sunset and Martel. Oh, and call Syd, will you?”

  Syd was Ryan’s partner. “No problem,” he said and hung up.

  The sheets rustled then as a head popped out from under the pillow. Red hair cascaded past green eyes and a million adorable freckles. Syd. “That the bat signal?”

  “Shining bright in the evening sky.”

  “Cool.” Syd bounced naked from bed and bounded into the bathroom. She looked too young and innocent to be a cop, but Syd’s combination of enthusiasm, street smarts and second- degree black belt more than made up for nature’s disguise. “We’re going to have to stop by my place for a minute so I can change. I can’t very well show up at the crime scene in yesterday’s Donna Karen... unless you’re ready to go public with our relationship.”

  Syd and Ryan had been partners for eight weeks and sleeping together for four. They were in that wonderful pheromone-induced infatuation phase where they could barely keep their hands off each other.

  It had been lust at first sight for Ryan. Whatever lizard brain criteria had been hardwired into Ryan for a sexual companion, this perky, freckled-face redhead was it. He literally got a hard-on the first time he shook her hand. Oh, shit, he thought. She’s going to be trouble. He did everything he could to be business-like and professional around her. But they spent twelve to fifteen hours a day together; sitting across from each other in the Hollywood Division Homicide bullpen, sitting next to each other in their city issued Crown Vic, working the files together, conducting interviews, eating, brainstorming, and all the time, Ryan fantasized about her.

  It must have been the same for Syd, Ryan realized, when late that fateful night four weeks later, they found themselves alone in the bullpen. Ryan went into the file room to return a murder book, and when he turned around he was nose to nose with Syd.

  “I can’t stand this,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “The game we’re playing. Pretending to be totally professional when all we want to do is rip each other’s clothes off and fuck like coked-up porn stars.”

  Don’t do this, he thought. Be professional. You don’t sleep with your partner.

  “I should warn you,” she said, her lips now brushing his. “I’m prone to multiple orgasms and I love anal sex.”

  Game. Set. Match. Ryan kissed her. They practically swallowed each other. They were naked in seconds and as Ryan entered Syd for the first time, he thought that doing something this wrong shouldn’t feel so unbelievably good.

  Back in Ryan’s apartment, Ryan said, “Department policy states that partners aren’t allowed to fondle each other’s genitals.”

  Syd stuck her head out the bathroom doorway, toothpaste foaming at her mouth. “I remember doing a lot of things to you last night, but by no modern definition would any of them qualify as fondle.” True, Ryan thought. Sex with Syd was frantic, almost desperate. Always fantastic.

  “I’ve got a good feeling about this one,” she said ducking back into the bathroom. “This’ll be the one that makes us famous.”

  That was Syd’s one blind spot. Ambition. It had carried her in record time from street cop to Vice and now to Homicide. But she didn’t want to just be a good cop; she wanted to be a famous cop. And that kind of ambition could be dangerous.

  Ryan’s right hand worked the stick as he steered all original 271 horses of his red ’65 Mustang through the hairpin curves etched into the mountainside of Coldwater Canyon. They’d stopped at Syd’s studio apartment and she’d changed clothes; now back on the road, Ryan relished the pre-dawn drive. The top was down, and though the temperature was only in the upper forties, typical for early May, the heater was blasting, modulating the chill enough so they could still savor the sweet, invigorating morning.

  “Does it get any better than this?” Syd asked, her red hair whipping around her head. “A pre-dawn expedition into the belly of the beast, a fresh crime scene bursting with clues, a sprawling city hiding a cold-blooded murderer, intent on escape, but doomed because the world’s best homicide detectives are on his ass.”

  Ryan smiled. “World’s best homicide detectives?�
�

  “Hey, we’re undefeated. In eight weeks we’ve investigated four murders and solved them all.”

  True, Ryan thought, but they’d been lucky. Two of the killings had been a murder/suicide – a bitter ex-husband finalizing the divorce with a .9mm bullet to his wife’s chest before blowing out the back of his skull. Another was a gas station robbery/murder, caught on a security camera – the tape was aired on the local news and the doer was ID’d by a heartbroken mother turning in her drug-addled son. Number four was a bit more challenging, a UCLA co-ed found dead, raped and strangled in the bathroom of her apartment. They spent four hours at the crime scene, working with SID collecting evidence, talking to her roommates, the neighbors. When they first arrived, Syd noticed a guy sitting in a battered blue pick-up, parked a half block north of the apartment. She pointed him out to Ryan. The guy in the pick-up stuck around for about twenty minutes, then left. Two hours later Ryan

  noticed him parked a block south of the apartment. Killers

  often return to the scene of the crime, so maybe. Ryan didn’t dare risk approaching on foot – the suspect would see him coming and boogie. So he radioed for backup. The cops sealed off the street and then two black and whites swooped in trapping him. The suspect gave up without a fight. He was a convicted sex offender, released just two weeks earlier, working the neighborhood as a handyman. He’d arrived to do some work for the landlord, met the co-ed who excused herself to take a shower and well, the son of bitch couldn’t help himself.

  So, Ryan and Syd were four for four. Not bad for a Homicide department with just a thirty-four percent clearance rate. But with two out of every three murderers going free in the city of Los Angeles, Ryan knew it was just a matter of time before the odds caught up to them.

  “You got any gum?” Syd asked.

  “Check the glove box.”

  Syd popped it open, started rummaging around. “I hope you also have hand sanitizer in here because this is disgusting.” She pulled out a grease-stained Taco Bell wrapper, a balled up Wienerschnitzel bag, a crushed Starbucks coffee cup, a half-eaten chocolate glazed Krispy Kreme, and a wadded up McDonalds napkin.”

  “In there,” Ryan said. “The gum’s in the napkin.”

  Syd peeled the napkin open. “It’s already been chewed. You’re offering me used gum?”

  “Think of it as a symbol of our intimacy.” Ryan laughed. Got you, he thought.

  Syd looked at him, at the smug smile, and then she peeled the gum off the napkin, popped it in her mouth and began to chew.

  “Yuck,” Ryan said. “That’s disgusting.”

  “I’ve had your tongue, ear, fingers, toes, balls and cock in my mouth. This is nothing.”

  That was the thing about Syd; Ryan never knew what she was going to do next.

  She stuffed the detritus back in the glove box, and then noticed something. She pulled out a wrinkled lottery ticket. “I didn’t know you played the lottery.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then what’s this?”

  “A lottery ticket,” Ryan said, confused. Then a memory flooded back. One he wasn’t very proud of. One he didn’t want to tell Syd. “Oh, yeah, I remember,” Ryan said, and then lied. “The jackpot was like forty million dollars or something so I took a flier.”

  She checked the date. “It’s almost six months old. You ever check to see if it won?”

  “No. I forgot all about it.” That part was true.

  Syd read the numbers, “14 19 20 23 36, and a mega of 18. Any significance to the numbers?”

  Ryan didn’t know, and then remembered, “No, it was a quick pick.”

  “Well, today may be your lucky day.” She flipped the glove box closed. “A murder and a shot at unimaginable wealth; like I said, it doesn’t get any better than this.”

  TWO

  The Havoc parking lot had been taken over by the LAPD; yellow police tape and portable floodlights surrounded the Porsche, uniformed officers kept a few gawkers behind hastily erected LAPD plastic barricades. Two SID technicians worked the inside of the car. The Scientific Investigative Division was the LAPD’s version of CSI. They dusted the car for prints, collected fibers, and bagged anything that might be considered evidence. Ryan and Syd joined Lieutenant Hanrahan and Liz Kettle, one of the L.A. County Coroners, outside the open driver’s side door.

  Syd looked at the victim. “Ok, that’s gross.” The victim lay slumped against the back of the driver’s seat. His eyes were open and so was his mouth. Sticking out of his mouth, like a cheap cigar, was a penis.

  “His junk, I presume,” Ryan said, glancing down. The victim’s pants were at his knees, blood soaked the exposed thighs and pubic hair and the ragged end of a once proud penis.

  “Is that what killed him?” Syd asked.

  “No,” Ryan said. “Not enough blood. Isn’t that right, Liz?”

  Liz was Ryan’s favorite coroner. She had the body of a linebacker and the mouth of a marine. In her early fifties, thrice divorced, Liz was on the handsome side of attractive. She wore her salt and pepper hair pulled back and the only make-up she wore was a touch of eyeliner to frame her piercing blue eyes. Liz had no patience for laziness or stupidity and her sharp tongue scared the shit out of almost everyone. Everyone but Ryan. But Ryan knew Liz better than most other cops – she was his stepmother. Well, one of them, anyway. Ryan’s mother died when he was just two years old and his dad married four more times. Liz had been wife

  number three. She lasted six years, six of the most important

  years for Ryan, age eight through fourteen. So Ryan was used to the bluster; in fact, he cherished it. She’d been his favorite stepmom.

  “Oh, there’s plenty of blood, but not enough to indicate he bled out. Something stopped his heart, which stopped the blood flow. Move your fat ass, Hanrahan,” she snapped. “You’re blocking the light.”

  Hanrahan shifted to his right as Liz plucked the penis out of the victim’s mouth then held it up to the light.

  “How humiliating,” Hanrahan mumbled.

  “Sort of puts everything into perspective if you ask me,” Liz said. “All the murder and mayhem created because you Neanderthals are always trying to prove who has the bigger dick. Well, here it is, fellas, in all its flaccid glory. Four and a half inches of shriveled meat…” Liz’s voice trailed off as she noticed something. “Huh, look at that, there are no hesitation cuts before the actual amputation.”

  “So the killer had medical training?” Ryan ventured.

  “Or was used to handling knives,” Liz said.

  “Or has done it before,” Syd said.

  “Grizzly thought but possible,” Hanrahan said, unwrapping a grape Tootsie Roll Pop. He’d taken to sucking the Pops when he quit smoking his beloved Marlboros. He turned to Ryan, “Be sure and run the specifics through VICAP.” The FBI’s Violent Crime Apprehension Program was an online database used by the county’s law enforcement agency to collect and compare violent crimes.

  “The bartender said the victim met a woman inside the club, they flirted for a few minutes then left. About twenty minutes later a couple noticed the body when they got to their car.”

  Ryan asked, “Could the bartender tell if they knew each other?”

  Hanrahan shook his head. “She sat down next to him and he started talking. Could have been a prearranged date, could have been an old friend, could have been two strangers in the night.”

  “The woman’s the doer?” Syd asked.

  “Or she was working with someone who was waiting out here,” Hanrahan said.

  “Robbery?” Syd asked.

  Tony Ramirez, the lead SID tech, held up an evidence bag. Ramirez was one of the department’s best. A chess champion as a kid, Ramirez was brilliant if a bit anal compulsive, which actually came in handy in his line of work. Forensics was all about the details.

  Inside the evidence bag was a wallet. “Found it in his front left pocket,” Tony said. “It’s got three hundred eleven dollars in cash but here’
s where it gets interesting; there are credit cards in all the slots except one.”

  “She left his money but took a credit card?” Syd asked.

  “Which cards did he carry?” Ryan asked.

  Tony checked his inventory. “Master Card, Visa, Nordstrom and Barney’s.”

  “No American Express?” Ryan asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Then that’s what she took,” Ryan said. “Everybody who drives a Porsche carries American Express; they are all about status.”

  Syd made a note. “I’ll contact American Express. If she uses it, we can trace her.”

  “I don’t think she took the card to use it,” Tony said. “This wasn’t about money. Besides the cash in his wallet, there is a nine-hundred-dollar Patik Phillip watch on his wrist and a gold signet on the pinkie of his left hand.”

  Syd was confused. “Then why take the credit card?”

  “Souvenir?” Liz asked.

  “Maybe he just left it somewhere the last time he used it,” Hanrahan said.

  “We’ll check,” Ryan said.

  “His name was Colin Wood,” Ramirez said. “Registration in the glove box confirms it’s his car.” He ripped a page out of his notebook, held it out. “I wrote down his address for you.”

  “Thanks,” Syd said then turned to Ryan. “It should be easier to find a premeditated murderer than a random robbery.”

  “Right,” Ryan said. “Though it is a little troubling the killer didn’t even try to pretend it was a robbery. It would have been so easy to take the wallet and watch. It’s like the killer wants us to know it was murder…”

  “I think the dick in the mouth is message enough,” Liz said. “Sounds very personal to me.”

  “Old girlfriend?” Syd asked.

  “Sounds like a great place to start,” Hanrahan said.

  “What about a cell phone,” Ryan asked. “Did you find a cell phone?”

  Tony held up another evidence bag. “iPhone. I’ve already dusted it, so if you want to check it, it’s yours.”