“I’m surprised that the ME is doing a post so soon. It’s been less than twenty-four hours. Things must be slow in the body shop,” John said.
“Dr. Kelly said this one won’t take long because there’s not much left to examine,” Paula reported.
“Then why the rush?”
“She said something was different with Cardozo.”
“What’s that?” John asked.
“Cardozo was alive when he was gutted.”
SEVEN
Plain walls, tall columns, and expansive windows belied the gruesome tasks carried out within the building on the corner of Forty-Ninth and Broadway. It seemed more suited to scruffy-bearded software designers until the plain-lettered sign came into view—Sacramento County Coroner. John pulled into the parking lot at the rear morgue entrance. He avoided the front public lobby where families waited to claim the remains of their loved ones. Good news never came to those who gathered there, and John felt the lobby held a suffocating cloud of misery from years of accumulated sorrow.
Dual glass doors parted for the detectives as they walked in from the covered bay, past the coroner’s white nondescript minivans, used to harvest the dead for examination. A pair of attendants rolled a white-sheeted gurney from an industrial scale toward a wall-mounted X-ray machine. Movement and control of the remains that passed through this building required the skill of an air traffic controller. Dr. Sandra Kelly was equal to the task. During her tenure as coroner, budget cuts hit the operation along with the loss of half of the forensic pathologist positions and the elimination of the chief forensic pathologist. Only two forensic pathologists remained, and they were on call twenty-four-seven to handle the load. Each performed more than six hundred autopsies a year, more than twice the national average. Criminal defense lawyers pounced on the slightest hint of a miscalculation or procedural error due to the workload. So far, Dr. Kelly aptly doused the embers of doubt when called as an expert witness. The look on her face changed when she noticed John and Paula cut through the six open bays of the autopsy suite. These three recent murders tested the coroner’s office resources and her own reputation. This was personal.
Dr. Kelly grabbed a file as the two detectives entered.
“Come with me,” Dr. Kelly said. No polite conversation, no banter. The doctor led them to the homicide suite, one of two enclosed autopsy spaces.
A sheet draped a lump in the center of the stainless-steel table. Too small for a corpse; the remnants of Cardozo’s body hid under the cover. The size of the bundle betrayed the violence inflicted on the former gangbanger.
One wall in the suite displayed a dozen photos of the Mercer and Johnson autopsies. The wounds were identical, grisly bookends of one another. A single, long gash ran from victims’ throats down the length of their torsos.
“Let’s start here,” Dr. Kelly said. “Mercer and Johnson exhibited a common single wound track running from the sternoclavicular joint, where the collarbone and sternum connect down to the pubic arch. Deep, straight, and precise.”
Dr. Kelly pulled back the sheeting and exposed Cardozo’s carcass. “You see anything different here than what we found with Mercer and Johnson?”
John stepped forward to the steel table where the torso sat like an empty shell, void of its life-sustaining contents. The lump of flesh and bone was sickly white under the autopsy room lighting, more grotesque than it had been in the moonlight. The chest cavity had sunk in on itself because the ribs no longer connected to the sternum. Each rib bore evidence of a sharp cut severing the rib cage from the breastbone. The victim’s skin was drawn and puckered like the leather of an old baseball glove. This, too, was evident in the prior two victims.
“Looks the same to me,” John said.
“And you call yourself a detective,” Dr. Kelly said behind a smirk.
The coroner pressed her gloved hand down on the incision, at the point where the incision began. The severed rib, cartilage, and muscle tissue, while cleanly cut, bore reddish, mottled stains. “Along with the histamine levels in the tissue, this indicates that the incision was perimortem.”
“This is how you knew he was alive when the killer went to work on him?” Paula said.
“Exactly. Help me turn him,” the doctor directed.
John took a purple latex-free glove from a box on the counter and pulled it over his right hand. Along with Dr. Kelly, he turned the torso onto its side.
John saw the bruise before Dr. Kelly pointed it out. “That looks like a ligature mark. I couldn’t see that through the mud last night,” he said.
“The bruises tell us this victim was restrained before death. There is a narrow gouge in the skin from whatever was used to bind him. I’ve swabbed it for trace, but I’m not hopeful it will reveal anything.”
“Narrow, like rope or a length of wire?” John said.
“I’d be inclined to say wire. It was wrapped tightly around the victim’s torso, and it didn’t leave any abrasions that I’d expect to see from a rope or drapery cord.”
“Mercer and Johnson didn’t have any evidence of restraint,” Paula said, looking at the crime photos.
“Why did Cardozo need the restraint that the others didn’t?” John said.
“The simple answer is he was alive. Couple that with the near lack of lividity, and that means most of the blood was drained before it had the opportunity to pool. See here, there are a few speckles of pooling; not what you would normally expect,” Dr. Kelly said as she touched pinpoint purple specks on Cardozo’s back.
Together, John and the doctor lowered the torso back down. John snapped his glove off and tossed it into a red biohazard container near the exam table.
He walked to the wall that displayed the Mercer and Johnson autopsy photos. “What are you saying?”
“The evidence points to the fact that they were dead before the incisions occurred,” Dr. Kelly said. “This new one was alive. We don’t know if Cardozo was conscious or not.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Paula added. “You mean he may have been awake when this happened to him?”
“It’s possible, and the use of the restraint tells me that it was highly probable.”
“Cause of death?” John asked.
“I have tissue samples in the lab for a tox screen. He didn’t leave us liver tissue, ocular fluid, blood, or brain matter to work with. Just an empty shell. Right now, Cardozo is like Mercer and Johnson—homicide with the exact cause of death undetermined.”
“This guy covers his tracks. But the killer had to know that Cardozo’s tattoos would give us a quick identification. We needed a DNA hit to identify Mercer and Johnson. Cardozo was different,” John said.
“What if the profiler was right about the whole spilling his guts thing, the idea that he was a snitch? Was the killer trying to find out if he was an informant? It might explain why Cardozo was awake when he was gutted,” Paula said.
“That’s an angle we can explore,” John said. “We can go back and check against known informants. Just because the West Block Norteños claim Cardozo wasn’t in trouble with the gang doesn’t mean they didn’t do a little housecleaning.”
Dr. Kelly pulled the sheeting back over Cardozo’s remains. “Sorry I couldn’t be of more help here. There’s simply nothing left to autopsy. Everything is gone. It’s like it was already done for us.”
John turned, took a step toward the door, then stopped and returned to the photo display. His finger traced the incisions on the Mercer photo and then touched the Johnson photo. He tapped the latter. “What’s he doing with the body parts he keeps?”
“I don’t know. The precision with which he dissected, removed limbs and all the internal matter is disturbing. This is someone who knows exactly what he wants with the body and goes about it very efficiently.”
“Medical training?” John asked.
“You want to look at every doctor, mortician, and veterinarian in the Central Valley?” Paula asked her partner.
“It’s a pool to start
with,” he said.
“It’s a frickin’ ocean until we know what he’s doing with the body parts. There is absolutely no chatter on the street about finding body parts. Is he getting rid of them? He could be making stew like that New York cop for all we know,” she countered.
“A disgruntled sous chef, an off-the-rails satanic cult, or a killer getting rid of gang informants, Cardozo is our connection to the ‘why.’ This killer is skilled and kept his victim alive while he slowly killed him. What did he want from Cardozo?” John said.
“More than his insides?” Paula asked.
“Something made Cardozo special. We find out what that was and we’re finally in our killer’s head.”
EIGHT
On the walk to the car, Paula asked, “You really think the killer has medical training? I don’t need another reason to hate going to my gynecologist.”
“You heard Dr. Kelly. Every cut was made with exact precision.”
“Or lots of practice,” she said.
Both detectives got in the car and buckled up. John started the engine and backed from the parking lot. “Remember back in high school biology? Dissecting frogs?”
“Not my favorite day. That smell. Every time I attend an autopsy, that formaldehyde odor reminds me my class was right after lunch. We had pizza that day, and I threw up all over my frog. I was so embarrassed. I never understood why they made us do that nasty stuff.”
“That’s kinda what I’m getting at, minus the pizza. The killer treats his victims like lab specimens. Every cut is exact, the bodies are opened up—he knows what he wants; he’s not bumbling around looking for something, exploring,” John said.
“Cold, direct, and all business. We can run a check on doctors who lost their licenses and complaints filed against hospitals or insurance companies,” Paula suggested.
“It’s a start, and I can’t wait for the doctors to start throwing up the ‘patient confidentiality’ flag as soon as we start digging.”
John pulled the unmarked sedan into the police department parking lot and nosed it into an empty slot near the door. Too late in the day for a call to Jimmy Franck, the snitch, as he’d be deep in a dime bag by now. If Jimmy had anything, someone would have called it in. Inside, shift-change briefings started for the evening units before they hit their assigned patrols. John and Paula entered the hallway and passed the briefing room when a graveled voice called out.
“Hey, Penley, you got a minute?”
John backtracked a few steps to the briefing room door and saw Sergeant E. B. Collins leaning on the podium at the front of the briefing room. The thirty-year veteran ran the briefing for the evening shift, where he issued the latest “BOLOs,” or be-on-the-lookout notices, officer-safety bulletins, and crime-mapping updates. The latter involved geographic information systems, what Sergeant Collins referred to as “video game voodoo magic.” Collins preferred the time-tested approach of word-of-mouth information dissemination.
Seated at a half dozen tables were the patrol partners that made up the evening shift. The group was a mix of younger officers paired with veteran training officers and those who chose the evening shift to steer away from brass-heavy day-shift politics.
John looked over at Paula and said, “I’ve got this if you want to take a run at getting the medical licensing information on vigilante doctors.”
“I’ll get it started with the state medical boards,” Paula said. She continued down the hall toward the detective bureau offices.
John ducked inside the briefing room. “Sergeant,” he said.
“Detective Penley, would you care to give us an update on the body fished out of the river last night?”
Collins retained the same formal approach in public that John experienced when Collins was his training officer years earlier. Although when together in a patrol unit, Collins had softened and even shed a tear when John’s daughter, Kari, was born. He said it was allergies.
John approached the front of the room near the podium, and before he started, one of the older officers called out, “Was it that dirtbag, Cardozo?”
“The body was identified as Daniel Cardozo,” John confirmed.
“Any relation to Luis ‘Puppet’ Cardozo?” an officer asked.
“Brother,” John said.
The officer high-fived another longtime officer.
“That’s enough, Stark,” Sergeant Collins chided.
“Cardozo and the West Block Norteños were pains in the ass every time they crossed the river. What’s the deal with celebrating there being one less? They breed like cockroaches anyway,” Stark said.
“Detective, is it true that Cardozo was dismembered and gutted, like the others?” one of the younger officers asked.
“He was, although we haven’t released that publicly,” John said.
“The dude had that coming,” Stark responded.
John stiffened. “Nobody deserves what happened to Cardozo. The family doesn’t even have a complete body to bury. Our killer has taken three victims, and the only connection we have is that they were all associated with street gangs. We don’t know why Mercer, Johnson, and Cardozo were chosen. Cardozo’s body was not hidden like the prior two; he called us after he dumped the body this time.”
“How do you know this ain’t the start of a gang war, picking off thugs one at a time?” Stark said.
“We all would have heard something on the street if this was another gang turf problem,” John said.
The rookie officer asked, “What does he do with them? I mean the arms, legs, heads—what does he do with them?”
“Who cares. It ain’t like Cardozo’s gonna need them anymore. Tell you what, Rook, if you pull over a car with a half dozen feet in the trunk, then you know you cracked the case,” Stark said to snickers from the group.
“All right, that’s enough,” Sergeant Collins said, cutting off the response to Stark’s comment. “Detective, what do you need us to look for?”
“We feel that Cardozo could be the key. We are holding back the medical examiner’s specific findings, but I can tell you the killer treated Cardozo differently from the prior two. Listen to the chatter on the street and see if you can pick up anything that tells us what Cardozo was up to in the last few days. Everything so far supports the claim that he had cut ties with the West Block Norteños, so if you hear anything to the contrary, shoot it to Detective Newberry or me,” John said.
“Screw Newberry,” an officer in the back called out.
“Somebody better find this guy’s footlocker before Stark’s foot fetish takes over and he keeps them for himself,” an officer commented from the back row.
“That’s enough. You heard the detective—you hear anything pertaining to Cardozo or these murders, get back to him. Anything else, Detective?” Sergeant Collins asked, signaling that he needed to get on with his shift briefing.
“That’s it. Thanks, Sarge.”
John turned and left the room, the rookie officer’s question nagging at him. What did the killer do with all the body parts? Nothing had turned up. Not so much as a single arm, leg, or shred of muscle fiber. By the time he arrived at his desk, a concept had crystallized.
He’s a collector.
NINE
“What do you mean he’s a collector?” Paula said from behind her desk.
“He’s deliberate in every aspect of his work. I’d say almost obsessive in his absolute precision, right?” John said. He peeled a square of nicotine gum and tossed it in his mouth.
“Okay, I’m with you so far.”
“Everything he does is reasoned and planned.”
“There’s nothing reasonable about any of this,” Paula said, gesturing to the crime-scene photos on the wall behind her desk.
“Arms, legs, and heads removed, and not a one turned up anywhere. What did he do with them?”
“We’ve said that he dismembered the bodies to stop us from identifying them. Now you think he has a trophy room?” she asked.
�
�We know the killer dismembered them. What if it had nothing to do with hiding their identity? What if he kept what he wanted? Still with me?”
“Yeah.”
“Think about this like any other supply-chain business. He brings in his supplies and needs a place to work. He does something with them, and then what? He’d have to stash his product until he gets rid of it. Think of it like a meth lab—product in and product out.”
Paula examined the crime-scene photos again. “That still brings us back to how he selects his victims.” She ticked off points on her fingers. “Were all three victims gang informants? If they were, then who stands to benefit with them off the board?”
“The FBI profiler mentioned the symbolic injury the killer is acting out. What is it that Johnson, Mercer, and Cardozo did that put them on the killer’s radar?”
“They were all gang members in the lower rungs of society, preying on the vulnerable. If our killer ran in those circles, how is he able to pull this off without having the full weight of the Crips, Skinheads, and West Block Norteños come down on him? We’ve heard no talk of revenge or retaliation, a very un-gang-like response to losing a member. Now we can add to the list that we don’t know where he keeps his body-parts stash.”
From behind John and Paula, Lieutenant Barnes chimed in, “That is not very comforting, Detectives. What, exactly, do we know?”
Paula’s face reddened. She stood and pointed toward the three photos of the body dump sites. The gruesome similarity of the bodies was unmistakable, each one deprived of limbs, heads, and entrails. “Each of these victims turned up where they would be discovered, sooner or later. Cardozo was dumped on the riverbank, Mercer on the bike trail, and Johnson in Miller Park. All public places and all within the city limits, but none of them lived in the city. Cardozo lived in West Sacramento, Mercer in Rancho Cordova, and Johnson was from Grass Valley.” Paula looked at her partner and saw his nod to continue.
She pulled a file from beneath her keyboard and said, “The victims were gang members, but not in the city . . .”
At What Cost Page 4
