by David Freed
We passed a bus stop where two elderly African-American women sat with plastic grocery bags over their heads. Impromptu foul weather gear. I asked Czarnek if he’d seen the poem Micah Echevarria had posted on YouTube about his father. Czarnek hadn’t. He said he’d check it out when he got a chance.
“Maybe it’s just me,” I said, “but who drives 400 miles on their motorcycle to shoot their father, then turns around, drives back and waxes poetic in cyberspace about how much they’ll miss not having the chance to know him better?”
“People do all kinds of crazy shit,” Czarnek said. “I had a lady once stabbed her husband twenty-two times with a steak knife—I mean, sliced and diced this guy—then rents a billboard on San Vicente with their wedding picture on it that says, ‘Beloved Marvin, the best of the best.’ ”
The detective reached into the ashtray without taking his eyes off the road and pried a fresh square of nicotine-laced gum from its plastic wrapper. I asked him where we were going.
“Coroner’s office,” he said, popping the gum in his mouth. “There’s a body I’m hoping you can help us ID.”
“Who’s the lucky stiff?”
“That Russian friend of yours you went to go see. At least we think it’s him.”
“How’d you know I was going to see Bondarenko?”
“Your ex. She told me when she called to say you’d been taken into custody. Said you’d gone to this club in West Hollywood looking for some guy named Baskin Robbins who possibly had information on Echevarria.”
“Bondarenko, you mean.”
“Close enough.”
Czarnek said he’d never heard of Bondarenko—not that he necessarily would’ve, working garden-variety homicides in the Valley. He ran the name through the LAPD’s Detective Case Tracking System as well as the California Department of Justice’s missing persons database. He found that Bondarenko showed up not only on a recently filed missing persons report, but was also the focus of long-standing interest among members of the LAPD’s Counterterrorism and Criminal Intelligence Bureau. On a hunch, Czarnek said he called the coroner’s office to see if anyone fitting Bondarenko’s description had been brought in. Among the seven unclaimed John Does in the medical examiner’s current inventory, one matched Bondarenko in approximate weight, height and age.
“There was other identifying evidence,” Czarnek said.
“What kind of other evidence?”
“That’s what I’m hoping you can tell us.”
He sprayed the windshield, smearing raindrops across the glass.
“Fucking LA,” he said.
FIFTEEN
The Winnebago was stolen out of West Covina, set ablaze, then rolled down into an arroyo less than a mile from the Rose Bowl. By the time the trucks got there, it was burning like a funeral pyre. Firefighters quickly foamed down the motor home and checked inside for possible victims. The charred corpse of a man was found, its hands missing. Marks on the wrists suggested that a power saw with a serrated, reciprocating blade had been used to remove them.
“They wanted to hide the decedent’s identity,” pathologist Doug Roth said as he led Czarnek and me into the elevator at the LA County Coroner’s Office. “No fingerprints. A total CSI. I love my work.”
Czarnek looked down at his rubber-soled oxfords and tried not to roll his eyes. Dr. Roth was in his late thirties, autopsy-ready in turquoise scrubs. His sideburns flared below his earlobes. A bushy cookie duster flourished below his lower lip. He punched the down button.
“Detective Czarnek tells me you have an interesting work history,” Roth said.
“Detective Czarnek wouldn’t know the truth if it ran over him with a semi.”
“A regular Seinfeld, this guy,” Czarnek said, chewing his gum.
The elevator doors opened. Dr. Roth led us down a hallway and into a dressing room. There were shelves stocked with scrubs, caps, gloves, and protective booties.
“You know the drill. I’ll be right back,” Roth said to Czarnek, and left.
We put on surgical smocks and fabric booties over our shoes.
“I never knew death could be so contagious,” I said.
“They don’t want you getting anything on your street clothes,” Czarnek said. “Lawyers, they’ll sue for anything. Which reminds me. If you drop a child molester and an attorney off the Empire State Building, you know which one hits first?”
“Who cares.”
“Exactly.”
Roth returned and handed us each a respirator equipped with an N-100 hepa filter. “Standard procedure, strictly precautionary,” he said. “Nothing to get freaked about.”
“I promise I won’t sue,” I said.
Czarnek tossed his gum in a receptacle for toxic waste. We pulled on our surgical gloves, masked up and followed Roth to a windowless stainless-steel door marked, “Security Floor, Authorized Personnel Only.” Scotch-taped to the wall beside the door was a sheet of green construction paper announcing the coroner’s office’s upcoming annual holiday potluck: A-through-I, bring meat; J-through-R, a side dish; S-through-Z, soft drinks or dessert. The announcement was adorned with stickers of Christmas trees and Stars of David. Roth tapped an entry code on a computerized keypad. The electronic lock clicked. Roth held the door for us.
“Welcome to the show,” he said.
The dead are not conveniently stored in stainless-steel pull-out drawers at the LA County Coroner’s Office, as they are in Hollywood’s version of reality. There are too many cadavers for such cushy accommodations. Most bodies don’t even rate body bags. A decent quality bag can cost upwards of sixty bucks apiece these days. In the cash-strapped City of Angels, corpses are instead packaged like 7-Eleven burritos in opaque plastic sheeting—Saran wrap, only beefier—then stacked floor-to-ceiling in an oversized walk-in cooler. When room runs out in the cooler, the human burritos are stacked in the corridors.
Business was brisk that day at the coroner’s office. The newly departed lay all around. One body in particular caught my eye. It was on a gurney. Brown. Slender. Young. It was shirtless and wearing oversized chinos, the kind favored by Latino gangbangers. Its hair was buzzed short, close enough that I could read the letters “VNE” tattooed on the scalp in Old English script. There was a symmetrical bullet wound the size of a dime in the back of the skull. There was another hole the size of a fist where the nose used to be. The left eye dangled from its socket by the optic nerve like a handset on an old wall phone. A coroner’s technician in scrubs and a mask was fingerprinting the dead boy. The boy’s hand was still supple. No rigor. Not yet autopsied.
“Hey, Doc,” the tech said to Roth as we strode past, rolling the tip of the boy’s left thumb on an electronic, handheld scanning device, “why don’t blind people skydive?”
“Because it scares the crap out of the dog.”
“You heard it already, huh?”
We walked past three autopsy rooms where postmortem examinations were in full swing—pathologists sawing skulls and weighing internal organs on hanging scales like so many tomatoes at the grocery store. In one room, a doctor was stitching up the gaping, Y-shaped incision he’d made in the chest of a young girl, tugging on the catgut with both fists as though he were lacing up a hiking boot. The cadaver flopped limply on the stainless-steel table like a rag doll.
“This way, gentlemen,” Dr. Roth said.
He led us into what looked to be a converted meeting room. The conference table and chairs were pushed to one side, replaced by a flat metal table on wheels. On the table was the charred body of a man laying on its back. Its hands were missing.
“He was shot, then torched postmortem,” Roth said. “They obviously burned him and sawed off his hands to make it harder to ID him.”
The bullet had left a perfectly neat hole just above the dead man’s left ear. The pathologist had removed the skull cap to retrieve the fatal round and examine the victim’s brain. The man’s head had been sawed in half, like an orange.
“Single GSW to the
left temporal lobe, .40-cal, copper jacket,” Czarnek said. “The round matched the ones we pulled out of your friend, Arlo Echevarria.”
“The plot thickens,” I said.
Czarnek unwrapped a fresh square of gum. “You recognize this guy?”
“His own mother wouldn’t recognize him,” I said.
A patch of blackened skin had been scraped clean from the body’s right shoulder during the pathologist’s examination, revealing a tattoo—a miniature martini glass bearing what looked to be the initials, “WS.”
“The missing persons report his wife filed indicated he had a ‘WS’ tattooed on his left shoulder,” Czarnek said. “I checked corporate DBA’s. Baskin Robbins owned a lounge called the Wet Spot. The tattoo’s on his right shoulder, so, obviously, Mrs. Baskin Robbins got that part wrong, but, I mean, what are the odds?”
“It just goes to show,” I said, “how well do we truly know the people we’re married to?”
The tattoo was confirmation enough as far as I was concerned that the otherwise unrecognizable crispy critter I was standing over was Bondarenko. Poor Gennady. I always kind of liked the guy, even if he was an old school Commie. Always good for a free drink and the occasional tidbit of actionable intelligence. Looking down at what was left of him, I couldn’t say I was surprised by the terrible violence that had marked his end of days. His arena had been one of sketchy characters, a landscape of ever-shifting loyalties bought and sold. The crowd he’d catered to and curried favor with embodied the very definition of dangerously unpredictable. Sometimes, when you run with the bulls, you get gored.
“If you already knew it was Bondarenko,” I said, “why’d you bring me here to ID him?”
“Show him,” Czarnek said to the pathologist.
Roth picked up the surgically removed chest plate like the lid from a garbage can and set it aside. Bits of blackened skin flaked off like burnt bread crumbs.
“I was dissecting the soft tissue adherent to the posterior plate,” Roth said, “when I first noticed it.” He flipped the breastplate over and set it on the table beside the body. Rib bones branched outward from the exposed sternum like the truncated legs of a scorpion. “At first, I thought it was some sort of new pacemaker or insulin pump, but it’s different from any medical device I’ve ever seen. Plus, its placement is substantially lower than normal implantation sites. That’s it, right there.” He pointed. “Very unusual. Never seen anything like it before.”
I leaned in for a better look: a metallic object the approximate size and shape of a matchbox, with a two-inch-long wire lead protruding from it, was affixed between the lower ribs, held in place by titanium surgical screws.
Czarnek said, “What the hell is that?”
“It’s a remotely triggered explosive device.”
“A bomb?”
“Give that man a cookie.”
“Jesus.” Dr. Roth backed away fearfully from the autopsy table. So did Czarnek.
“Not to worry,” I said, “it’s most likely inert.”
“You sure about that?” Czarnek said warily.
“It’s got a thermal safety to prevent accidental detonation. If the core temperature of the host body drops below a certain point—say, upon death, for example—the weapon automatically disarms itself. Plus, the battery’s probably already dead if it’s been in for any length of time.”
I’d seen an identical device in postmortem photos of another man, a well-known contract killer. NSA had intercepted communications indicating that a certain North African despot intended to assassinate a professor at American University in Cairo whose writings, the dictator felt, blasphemed the teachings of Mohammed, peace be upon Him. Arrangements were made through a network of cutouts working for German intelligence to have the killer check into a luxurious boutique hotel on the banks of the river Nile the night before the hit. There, he was told, two runners-up from the Miss World pageant would be waiting in bed for him—an allexpenses-paid pre-assassination assignation, courtesy of the appreciative dictator. Alpha’s orders were to take the would-be assassin alive so our interrogators could identify and roll up his handlers. The plan didn’t quite work out that way. He smelled a trap in the hotel parking lot and went for his gun. Echevarria shot him dead. The body was stashed in a rental car and flown to Dover Air Force Base, where the bomb was discovered during autopsy, removed and analyzed extensively.
We learned later that the Russians had implanted such weapons in perhaps as many as a dozen intelligence assets without their knowledge during appendectomies, hernia repairs and other routine surgical procedures requiring general anesthesia. The theory was that these assets could then be maneuvered within lethal range of targeted foreign enemies while arousing little suspicion because they appeared otherwise unarmed. Packed with highly explosive G2ZT, a nitrogen-based tetrazole refined in the laboratories of a Stuttgart-based chemical weapons conglomerate Deiter-Becker-Deutsche, the explosive could then be detonated by radio signal from as far away as a half-mile. The bomb itself was said to have a killing radius of ten meters.
“Suicide bombers who don’t know they’re suicide bombers,” Czarnek marveled. “What will they think of next?”
“Back in the day, nobody in their right mind wanted the job,” I said. “Now, they grow on trees. Amazing what seventy-two virgins’ll buy.”
Morning overcast had given way to wispy cirrostratus and anemic sunshine by the time we left the coroner’s office. An afternoon storm was moving in. Maybe this one would bring real rain.
Czarnek said he wanted to interview Bondarenko’s widow and wanted me to go with him.
“She knows you,” the detective said. “She might be more willing to talk with you there.”
I didn’t relish the idea of having to be there when he informed her that her husband was dead, and told him as much. Czarnek offered to buy me lunch in exchange. The best Italian food in Los Angeles, he said. Who was I to say no?
We took surface streets skirting the Golden State Freeway up to the working class enclave of Lincoln Heights on the eastern fringes of Chinatown, a five-minute drive. To the north, the undulating peaks of the San Gabriels wore a fresh dusting of white. The snow line ran in precise parallel to the dun-colored elevations below, as if some giant artist had drawn it with a straight edge across the south face of the mountains. Czarnek wheeled across opposing traffic lanes and into a small lot next to an Italian deli made of cinder blocks. Two unmarked detective cars and four LAPD black and whites were already parked there.
An Italian lady who looked to be about as old as Mrs. Schmulowitz sat on a stool behind the cash register. She smiled at Czarnek as we walked by like she knew him. The tables were covered with red and white checkered plastic cloths and occupied by cops hunched over sausage sandwiches and plates heaped high with steaming pasta primavera, all talking and laughing. A few glanced at us as we walked in, nodding politely to Czarnek, then sizing me up as if to say, “Who’s the perp?”
We waited inside the door for a spot to open up.
“Popular place,” I said.
“We get a discount, half off,” Czarnek said. “Used to be, a cop couldn’t pay for a meal in this town, but those days are long gone.”
Two bellied detectives vacated a table in the rear near the kitchen and ambled past, toward the cash register. The one who wasn’t paying the check rolled a toothpick out of a dispenser on the counter.
“Where’s that crazy partner of yours?” he said to Czarnek.
“Mental health day.”
“How’re things up in Valley Bureau?”
“Can’t complain,” Czarnek said.
“Beats working for a living.”
“Does most days.”
“Keep your powder dry, Keith,” the detective said as he pushed open the door.
“You do the same, Manny,” Czarnek said.
The old lady behind the cash register handed us each a plastic laminated menu and gestured toward the open table. There was a plastic potted geraniu
m on it and a candle in an old Chianti bottle, its sides caked with dried candle wax like frozen, multicolored waterfalls. We waited until the busboy finished wiping down the tablecloth, then sat.
Czarnek spat his gum in a paper napkin. The waitress waddled over with two green plastic water glasses and a red plastic basket lined with a green paper and piled with warm garlic bread. I ordered the eggplant. Czarnek went with chicken piccata and a side of fried mozzarella sticks.
“Those things’ll kill you,” I said of his choice in appetizers.
“Hey, I quit cigarettes. You gotta croak of something.” He got out a pen and a thin reporter’s notebook. “I need to know what you know about this Russian connection to Echevarria,” he said.
I told him what I knew of Bondarenko’s ties to the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, of Carlisle’s plans in Kazakhstan with Tarasov, the Russian oilman, and Tarasov’s own purported ties to Russian intelligence. I told him about Janice Echevarria’s husband, Harry Ramos, and the possible interest Ramos shared with Tarasov and Carlisle in the Kashagan oil field. I described the nonchalant way in which Carlisle had reacted when I told him I knew that Echevarria had been to Kazakhstan a week before his death, and Carlisle’s flip-flop, how he’d first paid me to brief the LAPD on Echevarria’s true work history, then demanded I stop asking questions.
Czarnek looked up from his notepad.
“How much did he pay you?”
“Twenty-five large.”
The detective sat back in his chair like I’d just informed him the Tooth Fairy wasn’t real. “Jesus,” he said, “if that were to ever make it into open court . . .”
I ate some garlic bread and licked the olive oil off my fingers.
“Why do you think Carlisle wants you to back off ?” Czarnek said.
“Theory one: He’s afraid my digging around might blow his chances of scoring big in Kazakhstan. Theory two: He’s somehow involved with Tarasov in Echevarria’s murder.”
“What about Baskin Robbins’ murder?”
