The Juan Doe Murders: A Smokey Brandon Thriller

by Noreen Ayres

Will said, “This one in Laguna Hills? Witnesses?”

  “Aa-a, them rich people never get outta their limousines,” Boyd said. “That’s up in Nellie Gail. You been there?”

  Will was new to the county. He ignored the question and asked me, “What do we have for prints on these?”

  “Nothing for a couple of days. They’re not even rolled off these two first victims, just the Turtle Rock.”

  He shifted in his chair. So far he wasn’t impressed. “Okay, a weapon was recovered on the second one, right?”

  I answered, “There’s no blood or tissue on it but it definitely has been fired. I can tell you this: If it was the victim’s, he didn’t fire it the day he died. There’s no gunshot residue on his hands. No prints on the magazine, none on the remaining rounds. Plus, no casings. I took a slug out of the tree behind him—”

  “Firearms put it as a thirty-eight,” Boyd said.

  “It’s awfully hard to tell from a deformed blob of lead without a barrel to connect it to,” I said. “There’s not that much difference between a .357 non-mag, a 9 millimeter, or a .38 Special—as I’m sure you know.”

  Boyd shrugged and said, “Talk to Firearms, then. It’s what they told me. Turtle Rock’s a bigger problem, looks like.”

  Will raised his eyes to me. “You didn’t find a slug, a casing, a weapon on this Turtle Rock.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “How hard did you look?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “How thorough a search did you do?” I wondered what kind of Adam Henry this guy was going to be, A-H for a certain hidden part of the anatomy. He had been the investigating officer there, gone by the time Joe and I arrived. He waggled his pen. “You use a metal detector? You need to use a standard ten-inch searchcoil capable of detecting a slug tunneled to several feet.”

  “Wal, out here in the sticks, we don’t have nuttin’ near like that so new-fangled and all,” I said. We did, but I wasn’t going to go into details, not with this guy.

  Bright put his pen down and raked his eyebrow with a finger. I expected the worst. But he said, “I’ve had a tough two weeks. Shouldn’t take it out on you. I apologize.”

  I gave that brief thought, then said, “Welcome to Orange County Crimebusters.”

  Boyd winked at me, and we went back to the chart. He said, “These could be gang pops, but I tend to think it’s personal. Up close on all three, the doer was having a conversation. No graffiti around. None of these are Santa Ana, after all.”

  Will dragged the end of his pen down to Doe Three, yesterday’s victim. “What’s this with the condoms?”

  I said, “Found in a coffee bag, under a bush.”

  Boyd said, “Maybe they’re one-fifth a rubber glove.”

  I took a hard candy out of my jacket pocket and picked red lint from it. “Can we go back to Doe Two, Nellie Gail, the grocery store coupons we found in the wallet.”

  “Juan Two?” Boyd said. He sang the melody of an old tune, “Juan-Two-Three, look at Mr. D.,” in a surprisingly pleasant voice.

  “Okay, what about the coupons?” Boyd said, finding his notation on a small notepad.

  “I was wondering if you wanted to take them back to the store along with the sketch of the victim, see if any of the checkers might remember him.”

  “A thought,” Boyd said.

  Will said, “I’m surprised you didn’t do that already.”

  Boyd’s forehead reddened.

  It went on like that, Will like a nettle under the skin, Boyd impatient in his own way to get this meeting over with. We ended it with no better feel for the cases, but at least we made a pass at communication that our respective management could note as progress.

  In the hallway, Boyd said to me, “I’ll have that guy for lunch.”

  “You’re taking him to lunch?”

  “Hah!” he said. “Fucking Adam-Henry.”

  “That’s what I called him.”

  “To his face?” Boyd asked, ready to offer respect.

  “Not yet,” I said. I was nearly out the front door when I heard him call my name.

  He hustled over, his jacket back on. “Your boss called. Doe One and Two, guests of honor.”

  “Now? They’re doing the autopsies now?”

  “Hey, I’m just the messenger. Want a ride over?”

  “I’ve got my car, thanks.”

  He looked at me a second longer. “Sure?”

  I remembered Joe’s warning about Boyd’s wandering ways.

  “See you there,” I said, and moved along.

  EIGHT

  The room smelled strongly of meat. On the table near the door lay a large man discolored to a grayish-purple around the shoulders, sporting an erection coincident with his size.

  A male coroner’s assistant stood holding a twisted paper towel high in the air. With a lighter, he ignited the lower end. The paper caught, sending a ring of char creeping above the yellow flame as it climbed the torch. He held it over the corpse and plunged a knife downward into the dead man. Released gases flared like a barbecue coming on.

  On the next gurney was an old woman waiting her turn, a “medical misadventure,” then another male. He looked to be of Hispanic descent. The two at the end I recognized.

  As I walked to meet Boyd standing at the back, assistants wearing plastic goggles and blue paper gowns, white booties, and pink masks were sectioning organs or weighing them in hanging scales, the women with their hair folded into clear plastic satchels.

  Boyd was into a full yawn as I approached, perhaps from boredom, or perhaps from the discomfort most of us feel when in this room. He nodded toward the nearest gurney where a tech had her hands deep in the ditch of human organs. “X-rays show the bullet’s still inside,” he said. “Big guy on the end was found in a motel bathtub, meth smoker. Next guy drowned off Aliso Beach. Why is it Mexicans can’t swim? They got an ocean same as us.”

  One of the techs gave Boyd a look, her dark eyes unreadable above her mask.

  “Maybe we better look at that ankle,” Boyd told Dr. Margolis, the pathologist working our case.

  Dr. Margolis answered abruptly, “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  Boyd turned to me and said quietly, “I sure as hell won’t.”

  The tech with the dark eyes went to the end of the table and lifted the head of the Nellie Gail Doe to slide a wooden block underneath. The block had a V-shaped cutout at the top so the head could rest without moving on its wooden pillow. Taking a comb, she parted the newly washed hair in a horizontal line mid-skull for the knife’s path. In a moment she would slice through the scalp and peel the face forward in a procedure called reflecting, folding the face onto itself in a bizarre, otherworldly mask. Then the electric saw would whine through the sinuses for access to the brain. It was a procedure I never got used to.

  “See you in a minute,” I said, and walked away.

  I approached the first table, where the pathologist was dipping a white plastic lid into the body cavity, then poured the collected blood into a small vial. She set the vial aside and came forward, her rubber gloves bright with fluid.

  “Yours?” Dr. Schaeffer asked.

  “The two on the end. How’ve you been, Doctor?” People who work at the morgue are a staunch lot. Some I wouldn’t walk across the street with, but others I’d invite to my own funeral. This one I liked: Dr. Schaeffer-White, recently gone to just Schaeffer. She had two little girls and an ex-husband who’d grown tired of her workload and her evening studies at law school. He told her he’d seen her through med school, he wasn’t going to do the same thing for law. She was living in a condo in Tustin Ranch about ten miles away, sharing custody in an informal way, but mostly still responsible for the kids with the help of a nanny from Guatemala. Her ex was engaged to a woman who designed bikinis.

  She rubbed her forehead with a humped wrist and answered, “Not bad. What’s new with you?” She turned to a tech and said, “Excise the track marks on that left arm, will y
ou?” She stepped closer to me, her back to the table. “That one’s a student at the osteopathic college. Very good. Very cute.” I looked over Lenore’s shoulder to see him take a scalpel and remove a plane of tissue from the corpse’s mid-forearm. “What do you think?”

  “I’m happy you see it that way,” I said.

  A crimp came and went in her brow, as if I either had poor taste or my mild remark could make her reconsider.

  The whine of the saw had ceased behind me but the smell of bone dust was still in the air, and I wasn’t quite ready to go back. As Lenore’s cute student laid the strip of flesh on a tray, I asked, “Going to the wedding Saturday?” There was to be a merger of two coroner’s technicians.

  “Can’t,” she said, shaking her head hopelessly. “I have to study. Say, if you’re going back to the lab, would you mind delivering a blood sample?”

  “Sure, no problem.”

  The tech behind her placed the appendix he’d just removed in the sink and wrote “APP-yes” on the whiteboard against the wall. “I take the bar in July,” Lenore said. “Ask me something, anything. I can tell you how to sue Santa Claus’s sister.”

  “We’ll be losing you,” I said.

  “I’ll still be available for disaster work and maybe fill in for vacations. We’ll be able to get together.” But I knew no matter how sincerely Lenore meant it she also didn’t mean it, because she was entering law precisely so she could leave this work behind.

  I went back to my cases. Dr. Margolis was in front of Doe Two, dictating to a tech who leaned on the counter, writing. “Deep muscle hemorrhage to the throat interior. Minor damage to the trachea consistent with strangulation, not sufficient to cause death.” He said to Boyd and me: “We’ll have a look at the contusions on this one tomorrow. By then they’ll appear more clearly.” Then he gave instructions to the techs to insert cornea caps containing small prongs so the eyes will stay closed. The other tech readied the waxed twine for sewing shut the mouth. The doctor handed me a plastic container with the deformed slug in it. I gave it over to Boyd and he looked at it without comment and handed it back. He took off his smock, a concession to protective clothing I didn’t make, and wadded it up as we went to exit, coming too near the steel door of the cooler where bodies were kept so that it slid open as if by a bidding hand. The odor of preservation chemicals rolled out. “I have to get samples to take back to the lab,” I said.

  “Later, then,” Boyd said, by way of goodbye.

  Glancing at Lenore, still busy with the meth death, I stepped inside the cooler. Full house. Bodies lay on gurneys wedged under long shelves horizontal to the wall, with more on the shelves. On a shorter shelf were the tiny forms of two unclaimed babies wrapped in cold plastic instead of soft layettes. Next to them, fetuses hunched nut-like in formaldehyde solution within glass gallon jugs.

  I found the vials of blood for Dr. Schaeffer in two labeled paper sacks sealed with green tape, then went to a supply room to get similar packaging to hold my bullet in its case. When I came out Dr. Schaeffer was near the gurney weigh-station doffing her protective clothing. When she slipped off the hair hood, her ash-blonde hair, close in color to my own, swung around a square jaw. Diamonds in a setting that spelled “Lenore” winked from a gold chain around her neck. Her soft pink dress made her look like any preschooler’s mom, not someone who was only a moment ago up to her elbows in blood. At the end of the hall, holding the inner door for me, she said, “Three months, Smokey. Can I last?”

  “Sure you can.” I signed out at the desk. She didn’t.

  “If I don’t ace the bar exam on the first try, I don’t know what I’ll do.” She held the door to the parking lot for me too. “This July. I just have to show the sonofabitch.”

  “That would be your husband.”

  “You met him once, didn’t you?”

  “He seemed nice enough to me,” I said, aware that people don’t want you to verify their own bad opinion of an ex. It reflects badly on their choices.

  We were by the line of cars parked in front of the building. I stopped at mine. The sky was a pale gray slate. A chilly mist blew in our faces. “Should’ve brought my sweater,” Lenore said, rubbing her arms as she looked back toward the morgue. She was still on the sidewalk when I unlocked my car door.

  I said, “Why don’t you go take your buddy in there to the movies,” I said. “Or the tennis courts. Something.”

  “Not yet,” she said, and gave a quick smile and turned away.

  As I pulled out, a white bus with a sheriff’s star on the front stopped at the gate to the Intake Center. Inside were inmates arriving from outlying detention facilities or returning from a work crew, many with Hispanic features under shocks of dark hair. Some might be from this same area of modest frame houses. As children they may have walked these same sidewalks to school. How many would wind up like the two young Hispanics I just left, covered with white plastic and lined up like piano keys in a morgue refrigeration room, feet exposed and a toe wearing a red-bordered WARNING tag attached by thin wire to forbid unauthorized disposition. Even in death, captive.

  For my Juan Does presently being showered down for the final time outside the back doors of the morgue, the strenuous swim was over. They would not go on to wash cars, bus tables, work fields, pound nails, cut lawns, and join in a massive labor force without which the texture of Southern California life would not be the same.

  Some of the men on the bus were gazing my way; others stared straight ahead. In a moment I would be in motion, driving away, free, making the most minor of choices they could not, while next to me sat the sacks holding human blood and the small, quick, cruel agent of another human’s destruction.

  I felt a surge of futility, as I often do when coming away from an autopsy. No one escapes. Does any demise matter over any other? It’s easy to reach a place where it seems nothing about a victim’s life has any more meaning than its violent end, as though that person were merely born to be murdered.

  I drove, thinking about Lenore Schaeffer struggling toward her Great Escape and wondered if there were such a path for me. I thought of my colleagues sinking under the weight of a workload that seems with passing weeks to only gain the momentum of a landslide. Then there was Joe and the toll this work had taken on his marriage and maybe his son. I wondered what this work might be doing to me unseen, like a destructive cell bent on proliferation.

  NINE

  Farmer flushed an egret. It sailed through the dank air like a slow-moving white paper airplane. Then the setter came trotting back, grinning as only dogs can do, and with muddy feet clear up to mid-leg. Farmer belonged to my neighbor, Mary Langston. She was a dear old lady who suffered from a connective tissue disorder called fibromyalgia. Now and then I offered a dog-walk. Something about an animal makes you remember it’s good to be alive.

  When I brought him back it was dark. I hosed him off good by the side of the building where a light shone over the faucet. At the top of the stairs by Mrs. Langston’s door was a wicker chest for his towels. I dried him off before I rang the bell. Mary asked me to stay. Jeopardy! was playing on the TV behind her. I promised another time.

  At my condo I fixed something to eat, bringing my guinea pig’s cage into the dining room so he could watch; I was his TV. His name was Motorboat, from the long, burring noise he made when I touched him. Honey-blond all over, his consistent coloring causes the type to be known as a “self.” Farmer found him. He’s a blond puff with a round nose and rump, no tail. I had to drive to a vet to ask what it was. Now his home is a brown wire cage in the laundry room. He eats continually and pees constantly, but I am its mama now and it may be the only child-thing I’ll ever have.

  While I took care of the dishes I kept thinking I should have stayed longer at work to prepare the Turtle Rock prints. A news program on the television highlighted an actor’s group calling for more representation in film.

  I was late to work the next morning. By my desk I smelled a spicy aftershave: Stu had be
en there. I went to the coffee room and hauled a full cup back to my desk and drank it while shuffling through the self-generating paper in my IN bin. Parthenogenesis, it’s called: the ability to reproduce without a fertilized egg. Handle a piece of paper once, time managers say. But I put most of the stuff back in my bin, got out my Turtle Rock cards, dropped my empty foam cup in the wastebasket, and headed for Joe’s office.

  He was just pulling a ceramic cup out of his drawer and a bottle of water. A packet of antacid discs lay on his desk. He slipped the seltzer disks in his cup, watching it foam. “David is failing school. Wants to quit entirely.” I pulled out the guest chair and sat. “We had dinner last night in Laguna. Nice sunset, a little jazz combo playing. Then this.”

  “Get thee to a counselor, Counselor. Think that would work?” He gave a not-very-convincing nod. “I’ve got all these Doe prints to run,” I said. “Unless I can talk you into it.”

  “Nice try,” he said, and followed me to the doorway.

  Two hours later we were still sitting at the CAL-ID computer monitor. It was slow with its searches that day. The green letters on black were blurring under my gaze. I stood to reach another copy of a fingerprint card when the last one came up nil. “Let’s try this one,” I said, and loaded a print onto the scanner, the one from the cigarette pack at Turtle Rock. Up came the white box labeled SEARCH PRINT IMAGE and the black maze of a fingerprint rendered from my earlier tracing. Next to it, another white square reading CANDIDATE IMAGE filled in with an image that had lain deep within the state’s electronic storehouse.

  Joe said, “Check it out,” and pointed to the SCORE column, which reflects how many ridges, loops, whorls, arches, tents, radials, pockets, ulnars, doubles, and “accidentals” on the “unknown” fingerprint match up with the print the state has on file. The top score possible is 9999. Our cigarette pack delivered 8525. Subject’s name, Froylan Marcos Cordillo, age twenty-two. Jacked a year ago for unlawful possession of a vehicle.

  We put the card in for the prints rolled at the morgue. It came up Froylan Marcos Cordillo, but I could have made it easily just by eyeballing. Last known address, 34567 Marconi, Irvine. “Marconi,” I said. “That’s familiar.”