Cold Hit ss-5

by Stephen Cannell

  My criminal profile identified the unsub as male. All of our victims were white. Because most serial murderers did not kill outside their own ethnic or racial group, I also thought he was Caucasian.

  The average age of all known serial killers is about twenty-five. Since this unsub was taking a lot of precautions, such as moving the body into a flowing river to obscure trace evidence, I thought this indicated a higher level of sophistication. For that reason, I had classified him as an organized killer. This pushed my age estimate up over thirty.

  Further, the killer was not sexually abusing the victims, so while there was rage, he was not leaving semen behind, making me wonder if these homeless men were possibly father substitutes. The killer always covered the eyes of his victims with a piece of their clothing after he killed them. I reasoned if these were acts of patricide, then maybe he did this because he didn't want these "fathers" staring at him after death.

  Still, after three murders, everything I had seemed perilously close to nothing. I didn't see how either profile was contributing very much. All I could hope was for the killer to screw up and make a mistake that would finally point us in a more promising direction.

  When we got down to the concrete levee, I saw that the uniformed sergeant in charge was an old-time street monster. At least six-feet-four and two-fifty, he was on of those gray-haired grizzlies who are becoming scarc in today's new police departments. Civil lawsuits have changed height and weight requirements and opened the job up to women and smaller men. I once had Vietnamese partner who didn't weigh a hundred pounds soaking wet including his uniform, shoes, am gun harness.

  The old street bulls complained that cornered felon are tempted to attack small officers. The argument was that they were getting into dustups just because they had hundred-pound partners who looked vulnerable Old-timers bitched constantly about the new academy graduating classes, full of "cunts and runts."

  It's my opinion that the opposite may actually be true. Women don't have to deal with testosterone overload, so instead of feeling challenged they employ reason. Small men tend to choose discourse over a fistfight. It's a useless argument because there is no reverse gear on this issue. We're never going back to the way it was.

  The big sergeant approached. He had a weightlifter's shoulders, a twenty-inch neck, and a face like a torn softball. There were seven duty stripes on the left sleeve of his uniform under a three-chevron rocker. Each hash mark represented three years in service, so I had a twenty-year veteran standing in front of me.

  "Mike Thrasher," he said, his voice sandpaper on steel.

  "I'm Shane Scully and this is Zack Farrell, Homicide Special. You set this up good, Mike. Thanks." His frown said, What'd you expect, asshole? I glanced around. "Has anybody heard from the ME or CSI?" noticing they weren't there yet.

  "Apparently, the Rolling Sixties and the Eighteenth Street Suranos got into a turf war in Southwest," Thrasher rasped. "A regular tomato festival. High body count. Last I checked, CSI was wrapping that up. Should be along any time."

  Usually, when you found an old guy like Thrasher with two decades of field experience still in the harness, it was because he loved patrol and didn't want to give up the street. He told us he had roped off a staging area for our forensic and tech vans around the corner near Barham, cordoned off the lip of the riverbank, and asked dispatch for three additional patrol teams to help contain the angry news crews. Because of the bloodbath in Southwest, the night watch was stretched thin and the backup hadn't shown yet. He'd also picked the route down to the body and flagged it. All of this while I'd been pushing Zack's potato nose back into the center of his bloated, Irish face.

  Just then, two more squad cars raced across the Barham Bridge, turned left on Forest Lawn Drive and parked, leaving their flashers on.

  Sergeant Thrasher had separated the two teenagers who found the body. The girl was perched on a rock thirty yards to my right. She was a twitchy bag bride speed-thin with pink and blonde hair and half a dozer glinting metal face ornaments. Her boyfriend was parked under a tree fifty feet from her. With his black Mohawk and milk-white skin, he looked like an extra in an Anne Rice movie. Even from where I stood I could see the white face powder. He was slouched against the tree trunk defiantly. His body language screamed, Get me outta here.

  "Run it down," I said to Thrasher, as I took out my mini-tape recorder and turned it on.

  "These two found the body. They're heavy blasters. confirmed all their vitals. Addresses and licenses check out. Both are seventeen. Casper, over there has an extensive juvie yellow sheet. Drugs, mostly. He went down behind two dealing beefs in oh-two and did half a year at County Rancho. Name is Scott Dutton. The girl is Sandy Rodello-two Ls. No record. They say they were down here looking for her raincoat that blew out of the back of his pickup, but since the Barham overpass is the space paste capital of Burbank, I think it's beyond obvious, they were under that bridge slamming veins.

  "Sandy's the reason they called it in. She can hardly wait to get up there and do some TV interviews."

  "Ain't no business like show business," Zack contributed, slurring his words. Mike Thrasher looked over and sharply reevaluated him.

  "Anything else?" I said.

  "Putting the drugs and the bullshit about the raincoat aside, their story kinda checks. I made sure none of our guys touched the victim, and these two claimed they didn't either. Except when they found him his jacket was pulled up over his eyes, same as the other three vics. They pulled it down to see if he was alive. They claim, other than that, they didn't touch the body. But the corpse is still damp so somebody musta dragged him out of the water."

  "Not necessarily. The river's been dropping fast the last two days. It could have receded almost a foot in the last six hours, and with this marine layer, the vic could still be wet, depending on when he got dumped."

  I spent a few minutes with Sandy Rodello and Scott Dutton. Drug Klingons, both in the Diamond Lane to an overdose. Sandy was in charge, Scott amped to overload. Along with the vampire face powder, he also had some kind of black, Gene-Simmons-eye-makeup-thing happening.

  "You think we'll get to be on the news?" Sandy suddenly blurted after they had confirmed the facts Mike gave me.

  "Greta Van Susteren at the very least," Zack quipped. "You might wanta think about hiring a media consultant." Then without warning, my partner pulled the Kleenex twists out of his nose, spit some bloody phlegm into the bushes, and then wandered away without telling me where he was going.

  Truth was, I would just as soon work alone. I was getting weary of Zack's sarcastic lack of interest.

  "A media consultant?" Sandy Rodello said, earnestly searching my face for a put-on. "No shit?"

  "Let's push on," I said. "Do your parents know where you are?"

  "Of course," Sandy said defiantly. "They're cool." "It's okay with them you're both down here doing drugs under that bridge at two-thirty in the morning?" "Who says we're doing drugs?" Scott challenged angrily.

  "Twenty years of hookin' up tweeksters, pal. I got a nose for it."

  "Well, your nose must be as broken as your partner's," Sandy said, and Scott giggled.

  "You two need to go home," I said. "I'm sending somebody from our juvie drug enforcement team over to talk to your parents tomorrow."

  "Big fucking deal," Scott glowered and looked at Sandy for approval.

  "We're done. Get going." I waved one of the Blues over. "Show Ms. Rodello and Mr. Dutton to their chariot. And make sure my prime witnesses don't talk to the press. I see you guys doing interviews, and I'll be forced to swing by your houses tomorrow and start taking urine samples. Let's do each other a favor and just keep everything on the DL."

  "That's so fucking lame," Sandy whined. But I could see I had her worried.

  After we got them out of there, Zack reappeared and we half-slid, half-duckwalked down the forty-five-degree concrete slope of the culvert until we arrived at the river. Then we worked our way back forty yards past the two cops
and one paramedic to the body.

  Chapter 3

  The victim was lying on his back at the water's edge, his light cloth jacket pulled high under his armpits, but no longer covering his face as Thrasher indicated. The victim's eyes were wide open and rolled back into his head. He'd been shot in the right temple, but there was no exit wound. The bullet was still lodged inside his head.

  On the previous murders the head shots had all been through and through. Since we didn't know where any of the killings had originally taken place, we'd never recovered a bullet before. Retrieving this slug might be the first break we'd had since Zack and I caught this case seven weeks ago. After we pulled on our latex gloves, I shined my light over the body, working down from the head, pausing to study his ten fingers. Each one was neatly cut off at the first knuckle.

  "He's in the club," Zack said softly.

  "Yep." I didn't want to move the body before CSI and the crime photographer got here, but I kneeled down and reached under the corpse, being careful not to shift his position. I felt his back pocket for a wallet, but already knew I wouldn't find one. Unless we turned up a witness who knew him, he was going to go into the books as Fingertip John Doe Number Four.

  I snapped on my recorder and spoke. "Jan ten, oh-five. Fourteen A. M. Shane Scully and Zack Farrell.

  Victim is in the L. A. River, one block east of Barham and appears to be a homeless man in his mid-to-late fifties, no current address or ID available. All ten fingers have been amputated at the distal phalanx in exactly the same fashion as the three previous corpses. Cause of death appears to be a gunshot wound to the right temporal region of the head, but there is no exit wound. Respondents who found the body said his jacket was covering his face, same as the other three John Does." I shut off the tape and motioned toward the dead man's chest. "Let's see if he's got the thing under there."

  Zack knelt down across the body from me and we unbuttoned the victim's damp shirt and pulled it open. Carved on his chest was the same design we'd found on the other three victims. A crude figure eight opened at the top, inside an oval, with two parallel lines running horizontally and one vertically.

  In homicide there is a simple formula. How plus Why equals Who. The modus operandi of an organized kill is part of the how. It tells us how the unsub did the murder. But MOs are dynamic, meaning they can be learned and are subject to change. They are basically methodology and evolve as a killer gets better at his crime and attempts to avoid detection or capture. But this symbol on the chest was not MO, not part of the how. It was what is known as a signature element and was part of the why. Signatures have psychological reasons. In this case, I thought the unsub was labeling his victims and the symbol was part of the ritual and rage of the crime. If we could decode it, we'd gain insight into the why of these murders. So far the cryptologists at Symbols and Hieroglyphics downtown had not been able to identify it. We quickly rebuttoned the shirt, covering the mutilation.

  Zack and I had kept this signature away from the press. On high-profile media crimes, there was never any shortage of mentally deranged people who step up to take credit for murders they didn't commit, wasting hours of police time. Zack called them "Droolin' Just Foolin's." By holding back this symbol, we were able to easily screen them out.

  Zack informed me that he had to go tap a kidney and went back up to the road in search of a tree to water.

  While we waited for the ME and crime scene techs to arrive, I took a second careful visual inventory of the body. This victim had bad teeth. Dental matching was a good way to identify John Does except when it came to homeless people who obviously didn't spend much time at the dentist.

  I knew from all the books I'd been reading that the homeless were low-risk targets and high-risk victims. A fancy way of saying they were vulnerable and easy to attack and kill. I shined my light over the body, trying to see past the carnage into the killer's psyche. John Douglas, one of the fathers of criminal profiling at the FBI Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, once said that you can't understand the artist without appreciating his art. So I studied the mutilated corpse trying to step into the killer's mind-set.

  Then I noticed something on the victim's eyelids. I knelt further down and shined my light onto his face. His eyes were half open so I slowly reached out and closed them. Four strange symbols were tattooed on each lid.

  The coroner's wagon pulled in just as the sun was beginning to lighten the sky. A slight man made his way down the flagged trail toward me. As he neared, I recognized Ray Tsu, a mild-mannered, extremely quiet, Asian ME known widely in the department as Fey Ray. He was so hollow-chested and skinny, his upper body resembled a sport coat draped on a hanger. Straight black hair was parted in the middle and pushed behind both his ears.

  "Who's the guest of honor, Shane?" Ray whispered in his distinct, undernourished way as he knelt beside me.

  "No wallet. Unless you can find me something that puts the hat on, he's John Doe Number Four." We both looked at the clipped fingers. I pointed out the symbols tattooed on the victim's eyelids.

  "How the hell do you tattoo an eyelid without puncturing the eye?" I asked, thumbing the lids back to their original position.

  Ray shook his head. "Beats me." He opened the shirt and studied the chest mutilation. "Sure wish we knew what this was." His gentle voice was almost lost in the sharp wind.

  "I need this guy to go to the head of the line, Ray."

  Normally, in L. A., there's almost a two-week wait on autopsies due to the huge influx of violent murder. But our Fingertip case was drawing so much media attention we had acquired the treasured, DO NOT PASS GO autopsy card.

  Tsu looked at his watch. "I'll squeeze him in first up," he said. "Doctor Comancho will want to do the Y-cut, but I oughta be able to get everything done here and have him back to the canoe factory by eight." The ME's facility was dubbed the canoe factory because during an autopsy, the examiners hollowed out corpses, removing organs and turning their customers into what they darkly referred to as body canoes.

  "Thanks Ray, I owe ya."

  Just before I stood to go, I shined my light one more time over my new client. I wanted to remember him this way. Shot, mutilated, then dumped in the river like human trash.

  I named him Forrest, for Forest Lawn Drive.

  Homicide cops see way too much death, so lately, to fight a case of overriding cynicism, I've been naming my John Does, who are generally referred to as "its" and thought of as "things" with no gender or humanity. By giving them names, it helped me remember that they were once alive, walking around with treasured hopes and dark fears just like all the rest of us. Life is God's most precious gift, and nobody, no matter where they are on the social spectrum, should end up like this.

  I looked at Forrest, taking on emotional fuel as the beam from my light played across his face. Then something caught my attention. I moved closer and leaned down. The top of his right eyelid refracted light slightly differently than the left.

  "Hey, Ray. Come take a look at this."

  The ME moved over and while I shined my light, he looked down into Forrest's eyes, then took forceps out of a leather case and carefully lifted the lid.

  "What's that look like?" I asked.

  "Contact lens pushed up in the eye socket. Right one only," he said, leaning closer, studying it.

  "So where's the other lens, I wonder?"

  "I'll have CSI look around down here, see if they can find it," he answered. "Probably washed out when he was underwater."

  The crime scene van was just pulling in as I got back up to the road and spotted Zack talking to some cops over by our car. As I started toward him he laughed loudly at one of his own jokes. Some of the cops near him shifted awkwardly and frowned. The crime scene is the temple of every investigation. Zack was drunk, defiling our temple.

  I was starting across the street when I felt a hand on my arm. I turned and found Mike Thrasher staring at me.

  "Your partner's loaded," he said flatly.

 
"He may have had a few," I defended. "We were off duty when we caught this squeal."

  "This is your murder. There's no excuse. You're senior man and you need to take action, Scully. He's been stumbling around up here pissing on the bushes in front of the press, breathing whiskey on everybody. If you're not going to take care of it, I'll be forced to file a one-eighty-one. With all the bad shit this department has been through since Rodney King, 0. J., and Rampart, none of us need this."

  Of course, he was right. But I felt my heart pounding in anger, my cheeks turning red with frustration.

  "It's not your problem, Sarge. You don't know what he's been going through. He's in a messy divorce. He just lost his moonlighting job at the Galleria. He's having big problems. Why don't you just be a good guy and stay outta his business?" Thrasher glared at me, so I said, "And if you file that one-eighty-one, I'll have to look you up and do something about it."

  After a moment, he turned and walked away.

  I'd won. But I'd also lost because I'd been forced to watch all the respect drain out of his cool gray eyes.

  Chapter 4

  I dropped Zack at the main entrance of Parker Center and watched as my partner trudged up to the large glass double doors, dragging anchor. Zack was in charge of keeping the murder book, so he was heading to Homicide Special to update the case file. While I attended the autopsy, it was his job to start a new file for John Doe Number Four, copy in the names and addresses of our two teenage respondents, Xerox the diagrams I made of the position of the body in the river, then paste them all into the book. Once we got the photographs of the eyelid tattoos, we'd copy them and send the originals to Symbols and Hieroglyphics for analysis. We'd paste in the crime scene photos after we got them, and tomorrow the coroner's report and autopsy photos would be added along with all the other details of the investigation. Little bits and pieces, some of it seemingly worthless, all of it carefully logged, dated, and placed in the murder book along with a detailed time line, until finally we hit some mystical investigatory critical mass and someone yelled, I know who did it! That was the theory, anyway.