“You’re getting chubby,” Jen said. “Nobody needs more than one chin, honey. The way it’s going, pretty soon you won’t have any neck at all.”
Eve’s shoulder muscles tightened as they always did when her mother started irritating her, which was practically every time Jen spoke. It was worse when they were together, so it was a good thing her mother lived in Ventura, a beach community forty miles north, and they rarely saw each other.
“I’m going to get back into my exercise routine again now that my cast is off.”
“Good,” Jen said. “Because your fitness is important. There aren’t any fat actresses in your age bracket who are popular enough to carry a series.”
“That’s not why I want to stay in shape.”
“How many cop shows have there been starring a fat actor who wasn’t William Conrad?” Jen said. “I’ll tell you. None. Did you know he made a pass at me when I guest-starred on Jake and the Fatman?”
You weren’t a guest star, Eve thought. You were an uncredited background extra who didn’t have a name or a line. But what Eve said was: “You’ve told me a thousand times.”
“It was like being charged by a horny hippo.”
Eve’s shoulder muscles were as tight as a crowbar. Now the stiffness was spreading to her neck. Five more minutes talking to her mother and she wouldn’t be able to turn her head tomorrow without pain. “Did you call just to tell me I look fat?”
“Of course not,” Jen said. “I wanted to remind you that your niece’s fifth birthday party is at Kenny’s house on Saturday.”
Kenny’s girlfriend, Rachel, became pregnant when they were students at Cal State, Northridge, together, so he married her, quit school, and started a pool-cleaning business. They rented a house in Encino, in the same neighborhood where Eve and her two siblings grew up.
“I know,” Eve said. “I’ll be there.”
“Get Cassidy something girlie, not another toy badge, ticket book, and gun.”
“I loved the junior police officer kit when I was her age.” Eve wrote her mom tickets for everything. Coming home late at night. Leaving dirty dishes in the sink. Making too much noise in the bedroom with her boyfriends.
“One cop in the family is plenty,” Jen said. “Get her a makeup kit, or stick-on nails, or a princess costume. Or buy her a book. Every kid loves The Cat in the Hat.”
Eve hated The Cat in the Hat. It made her anxious. The cat was way too much like her mother, a tornado that left nothing but damage in her wake. Junior Cop Eve would have put that cat in prison.
“Good night, Mom.”
“One more thing. Show a little cleavage next time you’re on TV,” Jen said. “It will draw attention away from your chins.”
Eve clicked off the phone and stared at her chicken potpie. It was like she was looking at her entire childhood in a bowl. Her appetite was gone. She tossed the potpie in the garbage and took a shower instead.
Eve woke up starving at 6:00 a.m. on Tuesday. She ate three granola bars, got dressed, and rode her bike to work. It was a straight shot down Las Virgenes over the freeway, and then a right on Agoura Road, and then up a slight grade past a shopping center, several office parks, and a fire-damaged motel that was nearly destroyed by a rogue ember from the wildfire. The swift journey to the station with the wind in her hair, and the pleasing sensation of natural balance, was an invigorating start to the day. She didn’t even break a sweat.
Daniel stepped out of the mobile lab as she was parking her bike near the back door of the station. He walked over to her.
“You ride a bike to work?” Daniel said it as if she’d arrived on a camel. In Eve’s experience, anybody in Southern California who didn’t drive a car for every journey, even if it was just to pick up the newspaper at the end of their driveway, was regarded as some kind of freak.
“It’s no big deal. I practically live across the street,” she said. “You’re here early.”
“I never left,” he said, stating the obvious. He was still in the clothes he wore yesterday and it looked to Eve like he hadn’t slept, either. “Let me show you something in the lab.”
Eve was tempted to dash inside the station first and get a coat out of her locker, but that wouldn’t look good. Instead, she followed him into the cold trailer. There were a lot more bones on the table now.
“I found this last night.” Daniel picked up a lower jawbone lined with teeth.
Eve knew that if the dead woman had been reported missing, her dental X-rays were likely to be in the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, a database containing DNA, dental charts, skeletal X-rays, and other distinguishable details about lost or unidentified people provided by families, law enforcement agencies, and other concerned parties. It was an important discovery.
“The teeth could tell us who the dead woman is or corroborate the ID we’ll get off the radial head implant,” Eve said. It was always good to have more than one piece of evidence to support the victim’s ID when dealing with nothing but bones. She still hoped they’d find some jewelry or keys belonging to the victim that might have survived the inferno.
“Delighted to be of service,” he said. “In the meantime, the incompletely erupted wisdom teeth indicate I was right about her age.”
“Erupted?”
“The third set of molars haven’t fully emerged. That happens when you’re about twenty-five, assuming you don’t have the teeth removed because they are impacted or there’s no room for them in your mouth.”
“I see you found some other bones. Do any of them give you a clue about how she died?” She could tell from the expression on Daniel’s face that they did.
“It would just be a guess,” he said.
“So guess,” she said.
“That’s not my job.”
“You’re afraid Nan will kill you if you speculate.”
“That’s one reason,” Daniel said. “The other is that there are still a few more bones I’d like to find. But I need a shower and a nap first.”
“Are you alert enough to drive home?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “You have showers and cots here, don’t you?”
Eve walked him into the station, showed him the men’s locker room, then led him to a small, windowless room with two cots inside. It was essentially a repurposed supply closet.
“Welcome to the Four Seasons Lost Hills.”
The cots were mostly used by deputies who lived far from Calabasas and ended up working an unexpected swing shift, or by deputies on morning watch who had to testify in court the following day. It didn’t make sense in either case for the deputies to drive all the way home only to come right back again for their next shift. A sign above the door read PLOWDEN MANOR.
Daniel gestured to the sign. “What’s that mean?”
“The story I heard is that Plowden was a deputy going through his third divorce with big debts and no money. He lost his apartment and his car was repossessed. So he lived here for a few months.”
“Anybody living here now?”
“Not that I know of,” she said, but the air was stale and smelled like dirty socks. She had no idea when or if the sheets were cleaned. “Are you sure you don’t want to call an Uber?”
“Absolutely. This is a presidential suite compared to some of the places I’ve had to stay on the job.”
Eve was intrigued and wanted to know more about those jobs, but he was clearly exhausted and she had work to do. It would have to wait until another time.
“Sweet dreams,” she said and headed for the squad room.
Duncan was at his desk when she came in. He was drinking a cup of coffee and eating a Ding Dong that he’d bought from the vending machine.
“You’re in early,” she said.
“I got a text from Nan. I hate texts.”
“You hate anything that’s written on a screen. What did she want?”
“She says they found some implants belonging to our Jane Doe and traced them to an orthop
edic surgeon in West Hills. His office was able to ID the patient,” Duncan said. “Her name is Sabrina Morton, age twenty-four, and she lived in a guesthouse on Latigo Canyon Road.”
That was the road that ran along the ridge above Sherwood Mintner’s home in Hueso Canyon. “How long ago was the surgery?”
“Six years,” Duncan said.
That was probably how long her body had been in the ravine, Eve thought, considering that Daniel was sure she’d died within a few weeks of getting out of her cast. All the facts were fitting together smoothly. “Did you run her name through the system?”
“I was waiting for you,” Duncan said. “Because I know how worried you are about missing any excitement.”
“You mean because you hate using the computer,” she said.
“That too,” he said.
Eve went to her desk, logged in to her computer, and entered Sabrina’s name into CLETS, the California Law Enforcement Telecommunications System, a title that was coined in 1970 and that hadn’t changed with evolution in the underpinning technology. CLETS combined several databases, including the FBI’s National Crime Information Center and Department of Motor Vehicles records from multiple states. Sabrina’s California DMV photo came up, along with her vital stats and most recent addresses. Sabrina was white, as Daniel said she’d be, with long brown hair and a doe-eyed innocence that was reflected by her lack of a criminal record or outstanding warrants.
Next she typed Sabrina’s name into the in-house database to see if she’d ever had contact with the sheriff’s department, anything from calling to complaining about a noisy neighbor to being interviewed as a witness to a crime. The first item that came up in the search results was a missing person report.
“Got something,” Eve said, getting Duncan’s attention. “Six years ago, Sabrina was reported missing by her parents, Albert and Claire Morton of Woodland Hills.”
Another fact snapped into place with the others.
Eve went on, summarizing the report for Duncan as she browsed through it. “Sabrina worked at the winery in Hueso Canyon but had the day off. Her roommate says Sabrina was there when she left for work at eight a.m., but when she came back that night, Sabrina was gone. Which was odd, because Sabrina’s car was still in the driveway and her purse, keys, and cell phone were on her dresser.”
“That explains why all we found were her bones,” Duncan said.
“But not why we haven’t found any jewelry.”
“Maybe she didn’t wear any,” Duncan said. “You don’t.”
“Only at work—otherwise I have a few necklaces that I like to wear. Seems to me we ought to turn up an earring or something.” Eve went back to summarizing the report. “The roommate assumed Sabrina went out for a walk. When Sabrina didn’t come back that night, the roommate became concerned and called her parents. They called us.”
There were some related reports in the case file from the detective who interviewed her neighbors and the deputies who searched the area for Sabrina. The investigation had lurched on for a few more weeks without getting anywhere and there hadn’t been any new notations in the file in six years.
Eve closed the file and returned to the search results. There was another case involving Sabrina, opened just two weeks before her disappearance.
Early on a Saturday morning in Malibu, Sabrina staggered into a gas station on Pacific Coast Highway wearing only bikini bottoms and a T-shirt, and asked the clerk if she could use the restroom. The clerk gave her the key. When she came out a few minutes later, she told the clerk to call the police.
Tell them, she said, that I’ve been raped.
CHAPTER FIVE
Duncan stayed in his chair and used his feet to wheel himself over to Eve’s cubicle. “Who was the detective assigned to the case?”
Eve checked the screen. “Ted Nakamura. The same detective who handled her missing persons case. Did you know him?”
Duncan nodded. “He’s Assistant Sheriff Nakamura now. Teddy was even more ambitious than you are.”
“I’m not ambitious.”
“If that were true, you wouldn’t be sitting in his old chair.”
Eve went back to reading through the file and giving Duncan the broad strokes as she went along.
Sabrina told Nakamura that she was partying on the beach with three male surfers she’d met on Friday night. They had a few drinks, she got dizzy, blacked out, and the next thing she knew, she woke up on the sand at dawn. The guys were gone, her bikini bottoms were off, and she hurt deep inside. She suspected that she’d had intercourse but couldn’t remember a thing.
Sabrina put on her bottoms, went up to the gas station, and asked to use the restroom, and she bled when she peed. Now she was certain that she’d been raped. So she told the clerk to call the police.
The deputies took her to West Hills Hospital, where her bathing suit and T-shirt were bagged as evidence and a nurse swabbed her for pubic hairs and sperm. Blood and urine samples were also taken. All the evidence was placed in a rape kit and sent to the crime lab in Monterey Park. She was interviewed by Detective Ted Nakamura at the ER. She repeatedly refused any counseling and was given a ride home.
“Her blood and urine tests didn’t reveal any traces of a roofie,” Eve said.
“No surprise there,” Duncan said. “It would have passed out of her with her first piss.”
“But they did find traces of cocaine and marijuana.”
“That’s bad. It raises the possibility that she was so blitzed that she might’ve consented to the sex and forgot about it,” he said. “A defense attorney would tear her apart.”
It was a shit case, Eve thought. No doubt about that.
She scanned through more reports. “The rape kit was sent to the lab, but it was never processed.”
That was no surprise to either of them. It was common knowledge that the backlog of untested rape kits at the crime lab numbered in the thousands and went back a decade. There wasn’t enough money or the manpower to process them all. The situation was even worse in some other states.
“The investigation went nowhere,” she said.
“Because she disappeared,” Duncan said. “No victim, no case. We could be dealing with a suicide.”
“The thought occurred to me, too.”
“I’ll give Teddy a call, ask him if he remembers anything about the investigations that might not be in his reports. I’ll also see what else I can learn about Sabrina through public records and LexisNexis.”
“In other words,” Eve said, “you want me to go break the news to Sabrina’s parents that she’s dead.”
“I’ve done that enough for one lifetime,” Duncan said and wheeled himself back to his cubicle.
Eve called Claire Morton, introduced herself, and told her that she had some news about her daughter, but that she preferred to deliver it in person. Claire told her to come right over and that she’d call her husband at his office in Tarzana to meet them at the house.
On her way out, Eve passed by the sleep room. The door was ajar. She peeked inside. Daniel was asleep on a cot, in a UCLA T-shirt and shorts, his wet hair leaving a damp spot on the pillow. Eve wondered what drove him so hard. Was it scientific curiosity or was it the same need to put things in order, erase uncertainty, and get justice for the dead that drove her?
The Mortons lived in a rambling ranch-style house in a Woodland Hills cul-de-sac east of Valmar Road, their back fence an inch from the Calabasas border. Eve arrived at the same moment that Albert Morton pulled into the driveway in his Cadillac. He wore a suit and an expression so stony on his jowly face that he could have been a sculpture. Eve introduced herself and got a nod in response.
Albert led Eve into the house, where Claire waited in the living room, sitting up straight on a floral-patterned couch in her floral-patterned dress, her delicate, pale hands in her lap. The room smelled of lilacs, but the only flowers Eve could see were illustrations on fabric. Perhaps she was only imagining the scent.
�
�Have you found her body?” Albert asked as he sat beside his wife on the couch. Eve guessed they were both in their early sixties.
“Albert—” Claire began.
“It’s obvious, Claire. You don’t need to be a shrink to read this woman’s body language.”
Eve sat down in an armchair that faced them. “I’m afraid your husband is right.”
“Where did you find her?” Albert asked.
“Hueso Canyon,” she said. “The fire cleared away the brush, exposing her remains.”
“That’s practically outside her front door,” Albert said. “And you didn’t find her until now? That’s unacceptable.”
“What were the circumstances of her death?” Claire asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
“I don’t know yet,” Eve said. “But I promise you I won’t rest until we know everything.”
Albert bolted to his feet, startling Eve, and towered over her. “Now you care, after she’s dead, when you didn’t do a Goddamn thing to help her when she asked you for it.”
“Albert,” Claire said softly. “Detective Ronin didn’t ignore Sabrina, the other detective did.”
He turned to his wife. “What makes you think she’s going to be any different?”
“Because she’s a woman, not much older than Sabrina was when she was raped.”
Albert sat back down on the couch and Claire placed a hand on his knee. Eve waited a moment before she spoke. She could only imagine the depth of this couple’s pain or how they’d managed to deal with it over the years. It disturbed Eve, though, that Claire believed that a young female detective would be more motivated than a man to investigate the sexual assault of a woman. Was there any merit to that belief? Eve wondered how Claire would feel if it had been an older female detective who’d failed to find Sabrina’s attackers . . . or if Claire’s assumption about the impact of the gender and age of the detective on the investigation would change if Eve failed, too.
“What can you tell me about the sexual assault?” She knew the details from Nakamura’s report, but she wanted to hear what Sabrina’s parents said. There could be details Sabrina shared with them that she didn’t mention to Nakamura.
Bone Canyon Page 5
