Lethal Measures

by Leonard Goldberg

  Lori took a magnifying glass and carefully studied the bases of the fingers.

  “On the third finger I see a faded V, and on the fourth I believe I can make out the letter .”

  “Tell me what you think of that.”

  Lori thought for a moment, then shrugged.

  “I think I’m out of my depth.”

  “You should talk with Jake Sinclair about tattoos,” Joanna said, her mind now on the homicide detective who had been her lover off and on for ten years. He was good-looking and fun to be with, but he was also a confirmed loner and always would be. He drifted away when he felt like it and came back when he felt like it. And she had put up with it. But no more.

  Lori tried to read the expression on Joanna’s face.

  “What would Lieutenant Sinclair tell me about the tattoos?”

  Joanna brought her mind back to the hand.

  “He’d tell you that the most common tattoo seen on the hands of Hispanic males is the words love and hate, with one letter per finger. And most people won’t have themselves tattooed with something they can’t read. So it’s fair to say this man could read and speak English.”

  “But why are the tattoos so faded?” Lori asked. “Now I’m just guessing,” Joanna said.

  “But I suspect he had the tattoo put on when he was a kid. And, as so often happens, he regretted it later on and wanted the tattoo removed.”

  Lori nodded.

  “Probably with a laser.”

  “And that’s expensive to have done,” Joanna went on, “so I would guess he was successful in the ring.”

  “But if that’s true, why did he become a common laborer?”

  “Maybe he came on hard times when he left the ring. That’s the usual story with boxers.”

  Murdock nodded ever so slightly. That was the story with most boxers, even the great ones like Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson. He continued listening to the interchange, amazed at how Joanna could make so much from so little. But then again, he reminded himself, that’s what forensic pathologists do. No wonder the FBI wanted her.

  “But we still have no idea what ripped his hand off,” Lori was saying.

  “Chances are, once we learn his identity the other things will begin to fall into place,” Joanna told her.

  “So far, we’re dealing with a young Hispanic, married, former boxer who was probably successful in the ring. We approximate his weight at a hundred ten to a hundred twenty pounds. He spoke English, so he’d lived in this country for a while. He may even be native-born. His last job involved heavy manual labor.”

  “Well, that narrows it down some,” Lori said without enthusiasm.

  “That narrows it down a lot,” Joanna said.

  “And with some digging, you’re going to find out who this fellow was.”

  “How do I go about doing that?”

  “Through the boxing commission in California,” Joanna explained.

  Murdock interjected, “He’d be either a flyweight or a bantamweight.”

  “Are you sure?” Joanna asked.

  “Positive,” Murdock said.

  “Good,” Joanna said, but she made a mental note to look it up.

  “So he fought in the bantamweight or flyweight division some time during the past ten years. He had a fair number of fights, and I suspect he won more than he lost. And he had the words love and hate tattooed across his fingers.”

  Lori exhaled loudly.

  “You’re talking about a lot of work. There could be hundreds of boxers

  who fit that description. Remember, his tattoo may have been for the most part removed when he was at the height of his success.”

  “Like I said, it’s going to take some digging.”

  “If it’s okay, I’d like the chief resident to help me with this project.”

  “Good idea,” Joanna agreed.

  “But you do the questioning. You’ll have to interview someone from the boxing commission and go over the fighters one by one.”

  “If only we had some distinguishing feature to go on.”

  “You do. He recently disappeared, and nobody knows where he is.”

  “His wife will be really worried,” Lori added.

  “She may have even filed a missing persons report,” Joanna said.

  “Once you’ve narrowed your list down, we can cross-check it against the people reported as missing over the past week or two.”

  Lori scribbled a note.

  “Anything else?”

  “That’ll do for now.” Joanna glanced at her watch.

  “Let’s hustle down to radiology. If we get there before nine, they’ll do a CT scan on the hand for us.

  Maybe there’s something in the soft tissues that we missed.”

  Murdock looked up at the wall clock and cursed himself for wasting so much time.

  It was 8:55. He was late for his meeting with the chief of pathology to discuss a temporary morgue. There would be at least sixteen bodies. They would need a big room.

  Murdock cleared his throat loudly and waited for the women to turn.

  “Joanna, I’ve got to run. Please carefully consider my request. I’ll need your answer by noon, one way or the other.”

  Lori watched him leave, then said to Joanna, “What was that all about?”

  “It’s about being boxed in with no way out.”

  “By Murdock?”

  Joanna nodded.

  “He’s an expert at it.” Thursday, March 11, 1=40 p.m.

  Detective Lieutenant Jake Sinclair moved carefully amid the debris, avoiding the miniature flags that dotted the scene of the explosion. The color of the flag indicated the body part found. Red for head and neck, yellow for torso, green for arms and hands, blue for legs and feet. The largest part found so far was an intact shoulder blade.

  Jake stepped over an oven door and onto the sidewalk. Just behind him was Lieutenant Dan Hurley from the Los Angeles Police Department’s Criminal Conspiracy Division, a unit that dealt exclusively with bomb and arson cases.

  “How many people were in the house?” Jake asked.

  “It’s impossible to tell.” Hurley was a tall, lanky man with sharp features and a crew cut. His left hand was missing two fingers and the tip of a third.

  “We got nothing but bits and pieces. My guess is there had to be three in there, maybe more.”

  Jake scanned the devastation, now watching a medical examiner sifting through the rubble.

  “What kind of explosive caused this?”

  “Our preliminary studies indicate it was C-four.”

  “Any idea how much?”

  Hurley scratched at his ear.

  “A lot. These guys were major players.”

  “It looks like a damn war zone.”

  “Yeah,” Hurley said flatly, his mind flashing back to Vietnam, where his job had been to disarm land mines and unexploded shells. He had done it for over a year without so much as a scratch. He had been lucky. But his luck had run out eight years ago when a pipe bomb in downtown Los Angeles went off prematurely, taking two of his fingers

  with it. A careless mistake, he told himself for the thousandth time. Involuntarily, Hurley put his maimed hand into his coat pocket.

  Jake asked, “Do we know who lived here?”

  “Nope,” Hurley said.

  “According to neighbors, it was recently rented out.”

  “Who owned the house?”

  “The guy next door. He was killed in the explosion too. And so were his wife and baby daughter.”

  Jake sighed wearily.

  “This isn’t going to be easy, is it?”

  The men watched a plump medical examiner methodically push rubble aside. He extracted a heavy high-top work shoe. A human foot was still in it. The medical examiner put the shoe down and planted a blue flag.

  Hurley unwrapped a stick of gum and placed it in his mouth, chewing slowly.

  “The FBI guy told me they’re bringing a hotshot named Blalock to do the forensics.”<
br />
  “Joanna Blalock?” Jake asked.

  Hurley made a guttural sound under his breath.

  “A woman, huh?”

  “Have you got a problem with that?”

  “Not really,” Hurley said. But he did.

  “Is she any good?”

  “Damn good,” Jake said at once.

  “Do you remember that case a couple of years back of the faceless corpse with no fingertips? Well, she’s the person who reconstructed the face and gave us his ID.”

  “But she had a whole body to work with. Now she’ll have only bits and pieces, and that’s a different ball game.”

  Jake smiled thinly.

  “You’ll be making a mistake if you underestimate her.”

  “Uh-huh,” Hurley said, unimpressed. He didn’t have much confidence in women when it came to law enforcement. And it wasn’t a matter of male chauvinism. Hurley had two daughters whom he loved more than heaven and earth, and he hoped that someday they would become doctors or lawyers or whatever they wanted. But that didn’t change his conviction that when it came to criminal investigation, women simply could not perform as well as men.

  The detectives moved aside as two federal agents hurried by them. The agents were wearing blue jackets with the yellow letters atf inscribed on the backs.

  “How many agencies are investigating this damn explosion?” Jake asked.

  “Too many,” Hurley told him. “For starters, there’s the FBI, the aTF., and LAPD’s Homicide and Criminal Conspiracy Units. And there’s sure to be others we haven’t heard about yet. Remember, this is a high-profile case.

  Everybody is going to try to get into the act.”

  “Christ.” Jake groaned.

  “We’re going to be tripping over one another.”

  “At first,” Hurley agreed.

  “But once it’s clear there is no easy solution and the trail runs cold, most of the units will start losing interest and begin distancing themselves from the investigation. They don’t like to be associated with failure.”

  “And that’ll leave you and me to do all the legwork,” Jake said, thinking aloud.

  “And to take all the heat if we don’t catch the bastards behind this.”

  The men turned their attention to a medical examiner who was holding up another shoe. They could see a jagged bone sticking out of its top.

  “I think we’ve got a match!” he called out.

  “Two shoes, one left and one right, don’t necessarily make a match,” Hurley said quietly.

  “They could have come from different people.”

  “How do you know it’s a match?” Jake called back to the examiner.

  “Because the feet are wearing the very same type of sock,” Girish Gupta answered. He was a pudgy, middle-aged man, born in New Delhi and trained in London, now a senior medical examiner for the county of Los Angeles.

  “I’ll show you in a moment, after I finish up this area.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Hurley saw a strikingly attractive woman ducking under the crime scene tape. A goddamn nosy reporter, he thought.

  “Hey, you! Get the hell back behind that tape!”

  The woman ignored the order and walked over to them.

  “Hi, Jake,” Joanna said without smiling.

  “It’s been a while.”

  “I’ve been busy,” Jake said, stung by her coolness.

  “Real busy.”

  “Haven’t we all?”

  “I guess.” Jake turned to Hurley.

  “Lieutenant Dan Hurley, meet Dr. Joanna Blalock.”

  “Jesus,” Hurley hissed softly.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Blalock. I thought you were a reporter.”

  “No problem,” Joanna said, keeping her voice even to hide her

  irritation. His response was typical of many males. Women should be nurses and teachers and secretaries, but not forensic pathologists. It was something she’d had to put up with all of her professional life. She should have been used to it by now, but she wasn’t.

  Joanna glanced quickly around the area, appalled by the devastation. It looked like a tornado had touched down in the middle of the block. Houses were flattened, with only a few walls here and there still standing. Rubble covered everything. Just off the sidewalk was a Raggedy Ann doll, tattered and bloodstained.

  “Oh, Lord!” Joanna said, moving the doll with her toe.

  Hurley asked, “Have you worked bomb cases before?”

  “Some,” Joanna said.

  Which meant damn little, Hurley thought unhappily.

  “Let me fill you in.”

  He told her about the explosion that had occurred at 10:40 the night before. In detail he described the type and makeup of the explosive used, and the most recent injury and body count. Twenty bodies had now been recovered. None of the nearby neighbors had survived. There was a possible witness, however—a man walking his dog a block away at the time the bomb detonated.

  “What has the witness told you?” Joanna asked.

  “Nothing so far,” Hurley said.

  “He’s got a bad concussion and he’s still shocky.

  Also both of his eardrums are ruptured and he can’t hear a damn thing. Maybe he saw something, maybe he didn’t.”

  Joanna pointed to the pile of rubble in front of her. The only things standing were brick steps and a small cement porch. Metal pipes coming out of the ground were severely bent.

  “Is this the house where the explosion occurred?”

  “Right.”

  “Where was the explosion center?”

  “The kitchen, we think,” Hurley said and gestured to the left of the steps. The explosion center was where the bomb was actually detonated. It was determined by two characteristics: it was where the maximum damage had occurred and where the highest concentration of explosive was found. The bomb squad had detected the greatest concentration of C-4 on various kitchen appliances.

  Joanna pictured in her mind what an explosion would do to a kitchen. In most kitchens the refrigerator and sink were opposite each other.

  “I assume the sink went one way and the refrigerator another.” Hurley nodded.

  “The sink was blown forty yards south, the refrigerator twenty yards north. We located a piece of the stove a block east of here. We figured the explosion had to have occurred between the three objects.”

  “Please have the medical examiners carefully check each of the appliances.”

  Hurley thought for a moment.

  “Why?”

  “Because some body parts may have been blown directly into those heavy appliances.”

  “Good point,” Hurley conceded and took out a pen and notepad.

  Joanna noticed the missing fingers on Hurley’s hand and looked away.

  “Do you believe this was a work accident?”

  Jake smiled wryly.

  “Work accident” sounded like such a benign term, but it referred to terrorists being blown up by one of their own bombs that detonated prematurely.

  “I think a work accident is our most likely scenario for a number of reasons,” Hurley said.

  “First, I can’t think of any motive for blowing up a neighborhood with C-four. Can you?”

  Joanna shrugged.

  “It could be a way to induce terror in the general population.

  People become frightened as hell when homes are being blown up.”

  “Nice try,” Hurley said, “but no. Terrorists prefer crowded places, like planes and buses and buildings. They like to kill as many as possible. Had they put this much C-four in a shopping mall on a Saturday afternoon, they could have killed hundreds. And maimed God knows how many more.”

  “Maybe it was the work of some nut,” Joanna guessed.

  Hurley shook his head.

  “Nuts don’t work in groups. And nuts don’t use C-four.

  That’s the mark of a terrorist.” He shook his head again.

  “Naw. This wasn’t done by a nut. A small group of terrori
sts in the kitchen were playing with C-four and it went boom.”

  “I’d feel more comfortable with your theory if we could find a nude body or two,” Joanna said.

  Jake asked, “What would a nude body tell us?”

  “When terrorists construct bombs they frequently do it in the nude,” Hurley explained.

  “Sometimes clothing produces enough static electricity to set off a bomb.” He pointed with his thumb to the miniature flags, now waving in a soft breeze.

  “But all we’ve got is bits and pieces here. No intact bodies.” “But there’ll be parts of torsos,” Joanna countered.

  “And they can be examined for particles of clothing, or buttons, or zippers.”

  “And if you find those particles, so what?” Hurley asked.

  “They won’t tell you much.”

  “Sure they will,” Joanna said.

  “They’ll tell me that at the moment of explosion there wasn’t a group of nude terrorists sitting around a kitchen table constructing a bomb.”

  Hurley shrugged.

  “Sometimes bombers don’t strip.”

  “But most engineers working with C-four do.”

  Hurley nodded, thinking that Joanna Blalock seemed to know her way around the bomb scene. She used the words that bomb experts used terms like “work accident” and “explosion center.” And she understood the significance of finding a nude body at a blast site. And she knew the word “engineer” referred to the terrorist who constructed the bomb. But that information was superficial. It could be obtained from newspapers or magazines or television documentaries. Hell, it was even on the Internet. Joanna Blalock talked a good game, he thought to himself.

  But he still wasn’t sure of her.

  “Hello, Dr. Blalock!” Girish Gupta called out as he walked over. He was wearing high black boots over his pants and thick rubber gloves up to his elbows.

  “It’s been entirely too long since I saw you last.”

  “I agree,” Joanna said, returning his smile.

  “I’m delighted to be working with you again.”

  “It’s my pleasure.” Gupta held up two heavy work shoes with feet still in them.

  “This is gruesome business, very gruesome business. But I think we are making progress. We may have a matched pair here. They have the exact same socks, you see.”

  Jake leaned forward and studied the backs of the shoes.