by Alex Gilly
A man in a blue lab coat came through the double-swing doors. He was a slim six feet and had slicked-back black hair. Intelligent, dark eyes peered out from beneath dense eyebrows.
“Jesus, what happened to your fucking face?” said the medical examiner, his hand extended.
Finn shook his hand and shrugged off the question. “What does it say about this city, has a morgue with a gift shop?” he said, nodding toward the shopwindow.
“This right here is a license to print money,” said Geisinger. “People come down, make a positive ID of a husband or boyfriend, then head home with a fucking souvenir. Now, what you need is one of these beach towels with the body-outline print, on account of all the floaters you bring in.”
Finn chuckled joylessly. “I heard you got Diego here,” he said.
Geisinger didn’t answer right away, so Finn waited out the silence by looking back at the display case. In the glass, he saw the reflection of Geisinger’s jaw muscles twitching. Geisinger’s face was ravaged looking, though from what, Finn didn’t know. As far as he knew, the M.E. didn’t smoke or drink, or at least didn’t drink the way Finn did. For all his cussing, Geisinger was a classy guy. He listened to classical music while he worked.
“It broke my heart when I saw him,” Geisinger said after a minute. “He was a good man. It’s a fucked-up thing. Please give my deepest condolences to Mona.”
Finn nodded. Then he said, “What about my floater?”
Geisinger brightened. “Oh man, your floater—he’s a big celebrity around here. There are med students coming down from Keck just to take a look at that piece of shark snack, morbid fuckers. His legs, what’s left of them, look like hamburgers. Put me off my lunch, which is saying something. But that’s not the important thing. Someone who knew what he was doing cut an incision about seven inches right here”—Geisinger tapped his side, just below his ribs—“removed one of his fucking kidneys, then sewed him up. Only, they were less careful when they sewed him up. The sutures got infected. There’s traces of puss.”
Finn stared at their reflection in the glass. “Why would anyone do that?” he said.
Geisinger shrugged. “It’s fucked up. You heard about the kid over in China, sold his for an iPad?”
“Jesus.”
Geisinger sighed. “We also found water in his lungs.”
“Back up a second. You’re saying that they killed him first, then took the kidney? They stole it?”
“I doubt it. Why stitch up a fucking dead man? No, I think he had the operation, then died, but I can’t say whether he died from post-op complications or from something else. We found traces of propofol in his blood.”
Finn’s incomprehension must have been evident, because Geisinger added, “That’s a serious anesthetic used in surgery. It’s only available in hospitals. Anesthesiologists call it ‘milk of amnesia.’”
“Is that what killed him? Propofol?”
Geisinger shook his head. “It can kill you in high doses—Michael Jackson was pumped full of it—but your guy lost so much blood, there’s no way of knowing if he had a lethal dose or not. All I can say for sure is that he was definitely dead when the fucking shark got his legs.”
Finn scratched his bruised face. “So what’s your best guess?” he said.
Geisinger shook his head emphatically. “Oh no, I’m not playing that game. Could’ve been the propofol, could’ve been all the fucking alcohol we found in his gut. Or maybe he just drowned. You guys brought us a real winner this time. I’m putting the cause of death as undetermined.” Geisinger paused. “Though, of course, most guys in his line of work don’t die naturally.”
Finn thought for a moment. “What do you mean, ‘his line of work’?”
Geisinger pointed at the side of his own neck. “You see the crucifix he had tattooed here?”
Finn shook his head.
“Caballeros de Cristo—the Knights of Christ—down in Sinaloa. You know the ones: shoot you to pieces, then give you a Christian burial?”
Finn couldn’t believe it. If Espendoza was a Caballero, then it linked him with Perez. “But he was just a kid. Plus, he was from East L.A. An American citizen. The Caballeros are a Mexican outfit.”
Geisinger shrugged. “Maybe they’re franchising. Maybe it’s NAFTA. Maybe they don’t recognize the border. Hey, I’m just the medical examiner, what the fuck do I know? What I’m telling you is anyone who gets that tattoo on his neck and isn’t a fucking Caballero and they find out, they’re going to separate his neck from his head, right? So either Espendoza was a Knight of Christ or else he was so stupid he died of it.”
Finn absorbed this, then asked, “Do you know when he died, or how long he’d been in the water?”
“You pulled him out Wednesday morning, the twenty-first. I would say he’d been in the water four or five days by then, maybe even longer. He had a lot of gas in him, more than most of them, probably because of the wound. As for whether he was already dead when he went in…” Here, Geisinger shrugged.
Finn calculated. Four or five days meant that he would’ve gone in Friday or Saturday of the week before last. He made a mental note to see if he could find out where the Pacific Belle had been on the sixteenth or seventeenth.
Then, in a concerned tone, Geisinger said, “There’s been talk about you, Finn.”
“What kind of talk?”
“Ugly fucking stuff. This morning, these two guys from CBP Internal Affairs came in. They said they were investigating Perez. But their attitude was all wrong.”
“Wrong how?” asked Finn.
“They asked to see Diego’s autopsy, not just Perez’s. They made remarks about how Diego was wearing his sidearm but hadn’t taken it out of his holster. They talked about how it was likely he knew and trusted his killer. Wanted me to say so, too. They wanted to know if the slug was from a Heckler & Koch P2000, the ones you guys are issued with. Then they started speculating on whether you’d had a beef with him. Right there in the cold room, in front of my team. In front of the fucking body, for Chrissakes.”
Finn stared at his reflection in the gift-shop window. “What’d you tell them?”
“I said I was just the fucking medical examiner and they should go ask the ballistics guys. Fucking amateurs. They won’t get anything from them anyway. I pulled out a slug, it was a total mess. It was lodged in his heart. He was shot in the fucking back, so the bullet bounced off his spine and got all messed up. Doesn’t look like anything. They’ll never identify the weapon, not unless they find a casing.”
Benitez hadn’t mentioned finding any casings at the San Pedro dock.
“You find anything that could tell you where he was shot? I mean geographically?” Finn asked.
Geisinger shook his head. “All I found in his stomach was beer and nuts. I thought the cops had the crime scene down at the fishermen’s dock in San Pedro?”
“They do,” said Finn. “I’m just … I’m just looking to see if they missed something.”
“The water washed away most anything that might’ve been helpful on the outside,” said Geisinger. “I’m guessing that’s why the fucker who killed him put him in there. He must’ve hit the water reasonably hard, too. The impact knocked everything off him. He ruptured his spleen against the steering wheel, though he was already dead by then. There was tattooing around the entrance wound in his head, telling me they shot him at close range, but not enough to tell me with what, or where.”
Finn rubbed his chin, then said, “I need to see him, Eugene. And the floater, too.”
Geisinger gave him a long look. “Okay, let’s go,” he said, but not in a way that indicated he thought it was a good idea.
Finn followed the medical examiner through the swinging doors and down a pale green corridor to the cold room. He zipped up his jacket.
* * *
In the anteroom, Finn put on a lightweight gown over his clothes and slipped on a pair of latex gloves. Then Geisinger offered him some VapoRub. Finn scooped some out a
nd rubbed it below his nostrils, clearing them instantly. The M.E., he noticed, didn’t bother with either the gown or the VapoRub. Like a fishmonger, he’d gotten used to the smell of his trade.
Inside the examination room, orchestral music was playing from a couple of wall-mounted speakers. Espendoza was laid out uncovered on a metal autopsy table. Sea bugs had gotten into him, accelerating autolysis; Finn could tell by the blue color of Espendoza’s face. He averted his eyes from the stumps and stared at that face. Despite its dead-man color, it seemed more natural to him now, or at least how Finn imagined Espendoza might’ve looked when he was alive. His youth was apparent now; he looked barely old enough to have a driver’s license, just the faintest hint of hair on his lip. Finn had hoped that seeing Espendoza’s body would help him work out what had happened to him, would reveal some connection that he had been blind to. He kept staring, waiting for it to come to him. He took in the gaudy tattoo of the Virgin on Espendoza’s chest; he looked at the small cross in blue ink on his neck that Geisinger had mentioned.
Nothing.
He turned his attention to the other table. A body lay under the cover.
“That him?” he said.
Geisinger nodded. Finn walked over and stood next to it.
Geisinger just looked at Finn. After a minute, he said, “You sure?”
Finn nodded.
Geisinger rolled back the sheet. Diego’s face was without color, or at least without one Finn could describe. His eyes were closed. A ragged, red-black wound the size of a dime marked the place where the round had entered on the right side of Diego’s forehead. Finn breathed slowly and deliberately. He stood as still as possible and listened carefully, as though he were expecting Diego to say something, tell him who had killed him, where to find that person, what to do. But he didn’t hear anything but the hum of the refrigerators.
He felt a hand on his elbow.
“Time to go, Finn,” said Geisinger.
Finn nodded. They left the cold room and headed down the corridor.
“I thought I had something here,” said Finn.
“Bodies play tricks on people,” the medical examiner said. “Sometimes it’s better just to let them be.”
Finn thought that was funny, coming from him.
He walked out of the building and unzipped his jacket. He liked Geisinger, but he was glad to be outside. He stood at the top of the steps for a moment, letting the rays warm his skin, hoping they would seep the chill out of him. But the image of Diego’s colorless face, the ragged wound ripped in his forehead, was burned into his mind’s eye. The urge for a drink came on strong.
“Fuck,” he said.
The receptionist was standing next to a potted plant on the other side of the steps, smoking a cigarette, one arm across her waist, her hand supporting her elbow. She glanced in Finn’s direction.
“You grieving, hon?” she said.
He nodded.
“Uh-huh. Who’d you lose?” she said.
Everybody, thought Finn. “A friend.”
She nodded matter-of-factly. “What happened, he get shot?”
“Three times.”
“Yeah, that’ll do it. You some kind of cop?” she said, looking at his uniform.
“Customs and Border Protection,” he said.
“Uh-huh. I heard of that. You want my advice?”
He shrugged. “Sure,” he said.
“Right now you need to be with the people you love and who love you. You’re not bringing your friend back, standing there with all those bad ideas I can see in your eyes. Let the Lord be the judge. You got a wife or girlfriend?”
“A wife,” he said, his voice cracking a little.
She crushed her cigarette into the side of the pot.
“Go spend time with her. That’s the best place you can be right now,” she said before heading back inside. Finn dialed Mona’s cell. The call went straight to voice mail. He left a message, telling her what he’d learned from the coroner. He asked her to check with La Abuelita whether the Caballeros had moved north.
After hanging up, Finn stood there for a moment, listening to the cars passing on the nearby Golden State Freeway, the sound like waves breaking on a shore.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Finn slept for a couple of hours, then arrived back at the dock just as the sun was setting. He pulled up near the water, far enough from the Pacific Belle not to draw attention to himself. He got out the pair of binoculars he kept in the Tacoma for when he was doing surveillance on boat ramps, and trained them on the seiner. As he had expected, there was nobody aboard. He put away the binoculars, sat back, and waited for the sun to set. The smell and sight of the fishing boats was so familiar to him. Finn took a swig of Jim Beam and thought about his father.
When Finn was ten years old, his father had lost his right leg below the knee and four fingers on his right hand to a drum-winch cable on a purse seiner. After the accident, he couldn’t fish anymore, and he had taken up drinking full-time, mostly at Bonito’s. This was in the old days, before Cutts had taken over. Then he had started a second career piloting boatloads of Mexican pot up the coast. He’d known the waters, and he’d known how the coast guard and CBP patrolled them. He’d been a good smuggler, but he’d been a drunk, which meant he’d gotten careless, which meant he’d gotten caught.
“Takes a fierce storm, son,” he’d said to Finn in the car driving back from the penitentiary when he came out on parole after a four-year stint, “for a man to realize the world don’t care if he lives or dies.”
After his parents split, Nick lived with his mother, but he had a key to his father’s fleabag apartment in Harbor City and stayed there sometimes. One day not long after his sixteenth birthday, he’d walked in to find his father with a black-red hole under his chin, and bits of his skull splattered over the top of the tan leather recliner. His fake leg lay on the ground next to the recliner. To this day, what remained most vivid in Finn’s memory was the gun in his father’s good hand and the finger of honey-colored liquid in the bottle of Maker’s Mark on the floor beside the recliner. He remembered wanting to drink it and to go where his father had gone.
He took a swig of his memory medicine. These were images he’d spent a lifetime trying to forget. He knew he had to keep going, keep doing what he had to do, keep moving toward the faint light ahead, no matter what. He told himself, Forget about the past. What he had to do now was find Diego’s killer, get sober, and get Mona back. He looked at the bottle in his hand. Somehow, the first objective seemed more attainable than the second. He thought about what Diego had said out on patrol that morning, how he’d been shook up by the dead-eyed way Finn had killed Perez. And Mona, always telling him how he wasn’t in a war zone, always wanting him to go talk to someone, like he needed to be guided back into the fold of the human race.
He took another swig. The truth was, he hadn’t felt anything when he’d killed Perez except the rush of adrenaline. The feelings had come later, when he was back onshore. He’d started having unnerving dreams.
While he thought about all this, the last of the day faded from the sky. Finn looked out through the windshield at the almost full moon over the water in the bay, and at all the lights of the container terminal beyond.
He tried to imagine Diego’s last moments on this earth. Had he been looking at this same moonlight reflection on the water? What thoughts had been his last? Had he pictured Ronald and Nancy bolting across the park?
Finn grabbed his Maglite from the glove compartment and a blue CBP shell jacket from the backseat, the words CBP FEDERAL AGENT printed in large gold letters on the back. Then he stepped out of the cab and went to the back of the truck. He unlocked the steel toolbox in the load tray and pulled out his personal weapon, a Glock 17. From a separate drawer he pulled out a clip, which he slid into his weapon. A cool breeze was blowing in from the sea. Finn zipped up the shell jacket, stuffed the Glock into the deep pocket, and walked down the quay to the boat.
No one
was around. Feeling more sober than he deserved to, Finn walked up the gangway and onto the steel deck of the Pacific Belle. His father had first shown him his way around a fishing boat, so he knew that the small skiff tied fast to the starboard rail was used to draw the net around schooling fish. He walked under the boom with the power block at the end of it, used to hoist the net. The boom was leaning at a thirty-degree angle off the mast and was only slightly shorter than it was. There was the cable drum, and there, the cover to the fish hold. There was everything Finn expected to see on a fishing boat, except for one crucial thing: there was no net. He glanced at the dock, where fishermen sometimes laid out their nets to repair, but there was nothing next to the Belle.
Finn climbed up to the wheelhouse and found the door locked. The door to the below-deck cabin, however, wasn’t. Finn shone his flashlight over a diner-style table and bench seats, the vinyl covering of which was patched with gaffer tape in a color that didn’t match. There was an ashtray on the table with butts in it. He opened a cupboard and found canned and boxed food. In the galley area there were a couple of burners mounted on gimbals, a fire blanket above them, and a fire extinguisher clipped into the corner. Finn opened a locker and found a box full of thick rubber gloves, the kind fishermen use to handle catch, as well as rubber aprons and neoprene-lined rubber boots. Someone had shoved an old rod and reel into a corner of the locker.
He went through to the next cabin forward, which was close and airless and hardly bigger than the dual cab of his truck. Four uncomfortable-looking bunks were crammed into it, each with a stained, thin mattress and a dirty-looking pillow without a case. There were only two small portholes and both were clamped shut. Finn started to feel nauseous—a little bourbon-flavored vomit found its way back up into his mouth; he quickly made his way out into the fresh air.
