In the Guise of Mercy (Maggie Macgowen Mysteries)

by Wendy Hornsby

  The intruder had spent some time in Mike's office going through his desk and file cabinets. Messy but methodical, and very quiet. Papers and office supplies, drawers taken out and turned upside down covered Mike's office floor. There was such a mess that I couldn't tell if anything was missing. The rest of the house was untouched.

  An opportunist, a cat burglar, the first deputies on the scene said. A sneak thief. The burglar had probably cased the house for a few nights and thought no one was home or that everyone was upstairs, asleep. They said that when the guy realized I was downstairs on the sofa, I probably scared him more than he scared me, and he took off. I doubted that part about me scaring him more, but the rest sounded reasonable.

  "Those guys, last thing they want is for anyone to see them," I was told.

  "Well, he certainly was stealthy, because the horses didn't see or hear him," I said. "If they had, they would have wakened both me and Early."

  "Probably a local kid, I'd guess a junkie, knows the neighborhood, came over the mountain from the backside, looking for anything he could sell."

  I was quietly working on Mike's files in my workroom, waiting for the S.S.B. crew to finish, when Kenny strode in.

  "You should have called me right off last night," Kenny said as greeting. It was a reprimand of the sort an underling or a child might receive for dereliction. I was offended; I had properly notified the law. Someone in the sheriff's office must have sent a courtesy message to LAPD. I looked Kenny straight in the face until he had finished his lecture with a second, "Why didn't you call me?"

  "I've had an eventful couple of weeks, Kenny," I said. "On a scale of one to suicide, I would rate this break-in as maybe a traffic infraction. You tell me who did it and what's missing and then I'll hyperventilate for you. Maybe, next time, if I haven't had six other dustups in the meantime to deal with, I'll think to call you first so you can speed over, lights and sirens, all the way from your house in Corona. After you did get the call, how long did it take you to drive over?" I looked at my watch. "Two and a half hours?"

  I took a breath and brought my tone down a notch. I knew he was only showing concern, but I was still a bit steamed about his patronizing tone. And I was very surprised by my quick eruption of anger. I still had a little wine buzz, but that wasn't an excuse.

  "Sorry," I said. "Didn't mean to snap at you."

  "Me, too." He hung his head for a moment, took a deep breath. "Anything other than Mike's computer taken?" he asked.

  I reached out and put my hand on Mike's computer, right on the counter next to me where I had moved it the previous week. "He didn't take Mike's computer. Mike didn't keep anything of value in his office. Other than the computer, that's right here, there was nothing saleable other than the TV, and he didn't take the TV."

  I didn't add that Mike had already distributed his treasured possessions and, as a courtesy to me, disposed of junk and clutter. I looked around my workroom.

  "There are plenty of toys in here he could sell, but he didn't touch anything." I shrugged and repeated what the deputy had said. "He was just a sneak thief and I probably scared him off before he got any further."

  "What if he wasn't?" Kenny wrapped his beefy arms around me and pulled me against his chest and hugged me tight. His heart was pounding, he was sweating. He was frightened for me.

  Patting my back he said, "I love you, Maggie, like an old papa. Getting the call about this put the fear in me like hearing a fire alarm go off in the night. You're way up here in the middle of nowhere. Damn, Maggie, what if--"

  "I'm not alone. Early is next door, there are five other houses nearby," I said, face smooshed against the starched front of his dress shirt. Even if I didn't like his patronizing tone, getting the hug was okay. "Don't forget, there are watch horses looking after me, though they weren't any help last night."

  I felt his breath catch. The breach of my house, a cop's house, had hit Kenny harder than I could have expected. Loyalty to Mike, genuine concern for me, whatever it was, I was touched.

  "Hey Kenny," I said, pulling away from his grasp. "I was going to call you today to talk about my conversation with Boni Erquiaga. And did you hear? I ran into Nelda Ruiz Monday night, and had a little tete-a-tete with Teresa Galba. Ah, and Eldon Washington tried to intimidate me. Overall, I've been having quite a picnic with Mike's files."

  He smiled. "Mike always said you're a pistol."

  "He meant that in the nicest way, right?"

  "He meant, he wasn't always sure he could keep up."

  I laughed; that's exactly what Mike would have said if he had been standing where Kenny was, with this funny look on his face that can only be described as terror.

  Chapter 8

  You captured it," Lana said after the final image faded to black. When I arrived at her house in Brentwood with the promo disc that Thursday morning, she was still in her baggy pajamas, spending her day working from home until it was time to catch her flight to New York. "The programming boys will buy it."

  "No changes?" I asked.

  "Not now."

  "You can carry that disc with you for backup," I said. "But the news division will transmit it to New York this afternoon when they have the satellite up for the East Coast evening news feed. The tape desk in New York will copy it for you and get it set up in the conference room for your meeting tomorrow."

  "I'm impressed by your access to the news shop." Lana walked me to her front door and followed me down the front steps, her too-big felt slippers slapping on the bricks. "Rare generosity from News. How'd you pull it off?"

  "It's who you know," I said.

  At the car we exchanged perfunctory kisses and hugs.

  "Maggie, it's not too late to change your mind about this project, you know. I love it. The programming boys will give their blessing. But my concern is for you. You've been through a lot lately, darling. You ready for whatever this investigation throws at you?"

  "Me? Bulletproof."

  "Bullshit."

  "Absolutely." I opened my car door. "I'm more afraid of Pete and his gang in New York."

  "That bunch of neckties doesn't scare me," she said.

  "Bullshit," I said.

  It wasn't yet noon when I left Lana's.

  • • •

  While Mike and I have a sort of quasi-romantic history attached to the Los Angeles County Morgue, it is not one of my favorite places to visit. First time I went, Mike took me there to identify a body. That's how we met, at least that's the short version.

  There was a shooting, very high-profile, lots of media attention and hype. Through all the fuss, Mike kept his focus on the victim and what happened to her, and paid not one whit of attention to anything except the investigation and the needs of the victim's family. I never once saw Mike Flint preen for television cameras or kiss the midnight blue butts of his superiors.

  My first impression of Mike was that he was the very epitome of a hard-headed reactionary cop. As I came to know him, his kindness to me, to the parents who had lost their child, his genuine concern for people, made me feel ashamed that I had judged him so quickly, expected him to fit my ill-informed stereotype of cops. The tough-guy veneer he presented upon meeting was an occupational necessity for Mike, but it was a veneer only.

  On the drive across town to the coroner's offices in Boyle Heights, I kept reminding myself of all that kindness.

  I was walking across the parking lot of the morgue corner of the campus of L.A. County General Hospital, maybe ten yards from the body-intake bay, when I got the first whiff of the place. That first day I went there, with Mike, as we walked up to the coroner's back entrance, Mike told me to take a deep breath first thing when we got inside, to get used to the smell quickly.

  There is nothing on earth quite like the smell of human decay. All the Mentholatum and Vicks in the world smeared around the nostrils won't cover up that smell. It seeps into the lungs and settles there, to be breathed back up for hours after. It lies damp and heavy on your clothes, leave
s a residue on your skin and a film on your shoes, stays in your hair the way cigarette smoke from a rancid bar used to. After a while the coroner's staff seems inured. But they must carry that smell home with them to their families, must be identified by that scent to the people who embrace them.

  I entered through the receiving bay doors and identified myself to the clerk on duty. He placed a call to Phil Rascon, the coroner's technician I had spoken with Tuesday afternoon.

  Rascon had told me that his office was upstairs next to the evidence storage rooms. Part of his job was keeping track of rape kits and tissue samples and boxes of physical evidence for pending homicide cases filed there. I was dreading the long walk down the central hall between the autopsy suites and the cadaver cooler to reach the elevator up. The big cooler was designed to hold three hundred cadavers, max, but the morgue has, from time to time, an overflow of maybe a hundred more. During the work day they get stacked, naked, along the sides of the hall to await a turn on the autopsy trays. Walking down that long hall is like a descent into the depths of Purgatory, a sampler of the worst behavior of the human species: gunshots, knife wounds, drugs, neglect.

  To my relief, Rascon came downstairs to meet me and, instead of going up to his office through the Valley of Death, took me to the administration building next door. We settled into a small conference room that was intended for families who come to view the remains of their loved ones. I wondered why we were meeting there instead of in his office, but I was grateful for both the privacy and for being spared another exposure to the halls next door.

  Rascon placed a file folder on the table that took up the center of the small room. With a courtly bow, he pulled out a chair for me and took one opposite.

  "I was glad to hear from you, Miss MacGowen," he said as he sat down. "We're all pretty shocked around here about Mike Flint's passing. Damn shame."

  "Yes," I said. "A damn shame."

  He was intense, a serious man by nature. But he seemed inordinately worried, I thought. Or maybe wary was the word.

  Rascon opened the folder he'd brought with him and took out a copy of a Thomas Guide map page showing downtown Los Angeles. On the map someone had inscribed a circle around the eastern part of downtown in red pen.

  "Mike gave this to me some years ago," he said. "He asked me to identify all the John Does we brought in from this defined area from 1999 to the present, or could have been transported from that area."

  "To the present?" I asked.

  "Sometimes we bring in remains that we can't really get date-specific about," he said. "Just last week a city crew power-washing the underside of the First Street Bridge dislodged a skull. Mike wanted to hear about that sort of remains."

  "Just a skull?" I asked.

  "Lot of the time, we don't even get that much," he said. "Maintenance crews wash down all sorts of debris the homeless people and the dopers take up into the bridge supports with them. Most of it's bedding and clothing and trash and drug paraphernalia, but last week, there was that top of a skull.

  "People, they find any kind of crack or nook that's big enough to crawl into, they climb in to shoot up or to look for shelter. Sometimes they die in there, and no one finds them. Not ever."

  "Were there more bones from the same person, more than the skull?" I asked. "Other remains?"

  "Not so far. Can't be sure exactly where on the bridge the skull fell out of, it was just washed down and swept into a pile with everything else. Now the Scientific Bureau technicians have to go through all the junk that came down that day and try to associate anything they can with the skull, try to determine cause and time of death, and identity. Takes time. Takes man-hours."

  "That's the sort of discovery Mike would have been interested in?" I asked.

  He nodded as he opened the folder and sorted through the papers and notes he had collected. I noticed that the folder tab said only MIKE. He selected several color photographs and arranged them facing me; bones, hair, teeth, random body parts.

  "We don't always get a whole, pretty corpse we can take a portrait of and fingerprint. If the remains aren't found real quick by people, the animals find them and do their thing. You know, dinner."

  Rascon pulled up another set of pictures. Some were mostly unidentifiable masses of gray with the occasional recognizable human feature.

  "You can't imagine what happens to a cadaver that gets washed down the Los Angeles River in a rainstorm with all the debris that comes down the Arroyo, the rocks and trees and things out of the mountains and backyards, all kinds of city trash. Everything ends up pulverized, like in a blender. Some remains we fish out of the water, some, usually just parts, get deposited when the water recedes again, or they get washed out to sea and end hung up in Long Beach on the oil drilling islands or against the breakwater in the harbor."

  "Mike wanted to know about all of them?" I asked.

  "Not all," Rascon said. "He gave me pretty specific parameters. He was looking for someone who died in January of 1999, or could have died then, male adolescent, Hispanic, small. I wouldn't send him an old lady died a week ago, or anyone positively ID'd by prints or DNA match."

  "Is DNA analysis routine?"

  "Too expensive. Backlog's too big," he said, shaking his head. "Not unless there is evidence of a crime or some indication that the remains are associated with a missing person case or an ongoing police investigation and the D.A. or some P.D. requests it. Sometimes a family will make a good argument for further identification, and it gets done. Just depends. Anyway, some of the stuff we get is so degraded there's no retrievable DNA. But everything gets a file number, a record of where it was found and what it is. We take a tissue sample if we can, and photos."

  "Not much to go on, is it?" I asked.

  "We do our best to identify remains and inform family members, but our resources are limited, like I said. And sometimes when we contact families they just don't have the money for a funeral, or they don't care enough to retrieve the remains for burial."

  With a slow, sad shake of his head, he said, "Working here, you meet all kinds."

  "I'm sure you do," I said. "What do you do with the remains that don't get claimed?"

  "Everyone who hasn't been reclaimed after three years gets transported over to the crematorium here behind the county hospital and comes back to us in a plastic box, and we keep them a while longer. A few times a year all the unclaimed remains go over to Evergreen Cemetery. The county holds a nice service, and then they all go into a mass grave in potter's field over in a far corner, down by First Street."

  "If you found, say, the skull of Jesus Ramon," I said, "could you identify it?"

  "We'd have a pretty good shot at it," Rascon said, shuffling through his folder. He found two pages and put them in front of me. "We have his dental records and his mother's DNA profile. If we found enough to get a sample, we could say with some certainty we had found Jesus."

  "That skull you found last week?"

  He shook his head. "African American woman over fifty. Skull formation, tooth wear; not Jesus."

  "Have you found any good candidates?"

  "None conclusive." He cocked his head, looked at me. "I'm still hopeful. But another thing, there are people who die and no one ever discovers them. Finding that skull in the bridge was pretty much an accident."

  "When did you start keeping this file for Mike?" I asked.

  "Long time ago. When that kid went missing and people started climbing up Mike's back."

  "This is ten years of John Does who might fit?" I asked, touching the file.

  He nodded. "Yes, it is."

  "That long ago, Mike believed that Jesus Ramon was dead?"

  "He thought it was a possibility, yes, ma'am."

  "Did you go to the grand jury with this file when they convened?"

  "Not with the file, no. But I talked to the D.A. about John Does. They told me to forget it. Junk, they said."

  "The district attorney said that?"

  Phil nodded. "One of t
he assistant D.A.s, yeah. Someone named Tiffany didn't think a coroner's tech had anything to add to what they already knew, or thought they knew. I grew up in the neighborhoods of this city, Miss MacGowen. I know that attitude. I'm not the person they wanted to hear from, and I wasn't going to argue with her."

  "Your information was dismissed," I said.

  "I was dismissed, yeah." He shrugged. "I asked Mike what he wanted me to do and he said to forget it. Unless I had a positive ID, speaking out might just come back and bite me. My office doesn't know about this file, and he thought we should keep it that way because there was a second part to this that could be tricky. If the right person wanted me to stop collecting data, I'd have to stop."

  "Now that Mike is gone," I said, "will you keep looking?"

  "As long as I'm working here I'll keep looking for Jesus," he said, eyes misty. "I worked with Mike Flint for twenty years, ever since I hired on. He always treated me with respect, like I was a pro, which is more than I can say for some of his colleagues. Mike was a good man. Because of my respect for him, I went the extra mile for him. He did the same for me."

  "Mike had so many good friends," I said. "Thank you, Phil."

  "Friends do things for friends," he said with a shy shrug.

  "You said there was a second part to all this."

  He folded his hands over the folder the way doctors do when they have bad lab results to read to you. "Actually, you could say that Jesus was the second part. At the time the boy went missing, we were already looking into the murder of a big-time drug dealer."

  "Rogelio Higgins?" I asked. I knew the name from Mike's files.

  He nodded. "Mike was really smart, you know? He saw how little things fit into a big picture damn quick. LA County is a big place, bigger than some states are. And it's fragmented into about a hundred and twenty incorporated cities, most of them pretty small. Some of them contract with the county sheriff for police, but a lot of them have their own little departments. Those small departments don't always share information very well, and they don't always pay very good attention to bulletins that come in from other departments. They get territorial, you know? And sloppy."