"Honestly, Kenny, I'm not at all sure at this point where the proper hands are," I said with some heat. I gave each of them a long and hard look, and they all three met my eyes without flinching, but with those men that was an indication of nothing. "If I could know where the three of you are at all times, how necessary would all this security fuss be?"
"I don't get you," Nick said.
"Think about it," I said. They looked from one to the other. "And I'm beginning to think I'd be better off, safer, without a police escort."
"Now, that doesn't make sense." Kenny got to his feet and shadowed me as I walked back and forth between the table and the sink, picking up the last of the breakfast things, the butter and milk and eggs, and while I wiped the table, always dodging around Eldon and Nick, who had joined the kitchen cleanup. Kenny's plaint that I not dismiss police protection grew increasingly strident, frustrated. I stopped fussing with the cleanup, crossed my arms and faced him. He only stopped talking when his cell phone rang. With ferocity, he barked into the phone, "Noble."
As he listened his red and angry face suddenly paled. Unsteady, he reached for a chair and nearly toppled with it, obviously distressed, badly needing to sit down. Both Eldon and Nick, who had been contributing their own arguments, stopped talking and watched Kenny.
Into the phone he said, "How is that possible?"..."When?"..."How?"..."Who?" The answers he received only heightened his misery. When he closed the phone he dropped his head onto arms folded on the table and made great, heaving sighs.
I put my hand on his shoulder and knelt down so I could see his face. I was afraid he was going to pass out, or worse.
"What is it, Noble?" Nick asked, flanking Kenny on the other side.
Kenny took a breath, raising his head as he did so, and wiped his eyes.
"They got to her," he said. "Nelda was in her cell, asleep. Someone got to her."
Chapter 18
After Mike's funeral I took off the new gray dress my daughter and mother bought me for that occasion and draped it across the back of a chair in our bedroom where, along with a few books, several nearly clean shirts, some notepads and my Thomas Guide map book for Los Angeles County, it had remained. For the burial of the unidentified remains the coroner had been holding on to for the last three years, I needed a funeral-appropriate dress again.
I picked up the dress, gave it a shake, ran it through a dryer cycle, shook it again, and my funeral dress was fine to wear again. Saying a few words of gratitude for wrinkle-resistant fabrics I slipped it on, remembering to put a few tissues into the pocket. I fluffed my hair, put on makeup and the new funeral heels, and went next door to catch a ride into Burbank with Early.
As we drove down the mountain we were followed by a single Crown Vic all the way to the studio. The rest of the police stayed behind; for a second time, the house was a crime scene.
Early checked the rearview mirror. "Who was that guy, a few years ago, investigative reporter looking into the Posse Comitatus? Can't remember his name. Bunch of skinheads came after him, did their best to take him out."
"What happened?" I asked. "Did he get hurt?"
"No. The network created a shield around him, scrubbed all of his contact information out of the system so no one could reach him directly. Network put him up in a safe house until it was over. Network will set up something for you, too, if you're worried."
"I won't say I'm not worried," I said. "I've had so many people warn me off that I really wasn't all that surprised when something happened. I just didn't know what it would be or the direction it would come from. And I don't know what's coming next, except something will come."
"You should listen to your instincts, take precautions," Early said.
"I'm not ready to go underground," I said.
"I moved the light sensor down your driveway," he said. "You'll trip it as soon as you drive in."
"Thank you. I appreciate all your help, Early."
"And I put in a second sensor out back. You'll be able to see anything, including coyotes, that gets within six feet of the patio."
"Whoa." I turned to look at him, saw dark circles under his eyes. "My God. I had no idea you were doing all that."
"I added another set of light sensors at the end of the front stairs. If you ever have to go out at night, before you reach the bottom step the lights will come on."
I was nonplussed. "What next, Early?"
"I'm investigating alarm systems," he said. "I'll let you know what I find out."
"How many break-ins have there been in our neighborhood?" I asked. "Ever."
"Two."
"Both mine. I think we can save ourselves a lot of expense and effort, and poor old Duke a lot of grief, if we just find our bad guy, or guys."
"Right," he said. "But until then."
I repeated, "Until then."
Guido and our video crew were ready to go and waiting for me when we arrived at the studio. I said good-bye to Early and joined the crew. We left the studio in a convoy, network Suburban full of video gear, with Paul Savoie and Craig Hendricks, working with us again, in the Suburban. Guido and I followed in his SUV, with the Crown Vic between us and the battered Civic carrying Guido's graduate interns at the rear. The lovely object of the attentions of Guido's camera lens was in the Civic's backseat.
When Guido is tense the corners of his chiseled jaw look hard as stone. I saw the rigid set to his jaw first thing but waited for him to bring up the source of his concern, though I had a very good idea what that issue was. Generally, he prefers to work things through before he speaks. Safer that way.
After a while, eyes straight ahead, he asked, "What happened this morning?"
"Someone on the inside at Metro Detention got to Nelda," I said. "She was asleep in a single-person cell, in high-power segregation. Somehow, someone got close enough to shank her, slit her throat, severed the carotid. Quick and quiet, but messy. She kicked off her blanket during the attack, but no one admits hearing anything. She'd been dead for less than an hour when routine patrol found her."
"Who did it?" he asked.
"Don't know, but there are a lot of candidates. Kenny Noble is really beating himself up because it was his idea to take Nelda to Metro instead of booking her downtown. He thought she would be safest at Metro, in federal lockup. And maybe she was. She lasted five whole hours there. Could have been less in the city lockup. Nelda made a lot of enemies."
"I thought you told your police tail to go away."
"Didn't work."
In the side-view mirror I could see the Crown Vic behind us.
He checked the tail in his rearview mirror. "They sure know how to stick."
"I told them where we're going."
We were quiet for a few minutes. I turned to him. "You haven't said anything about your day at the morgue. How did it go?"
"We had a good time. Your friend Phil was very helpful. The footage of the techs sifting through the debris flushed out of the bridge is priceless."
"Did they find any more parts that belong with the lady's skull?"
"Maybe," he said, nodding. "The techs found two toe joints, a femur, and a bloody blue-striped T-shirt with a Gap label. Don't know if they belong to the same person, but they are human remains. The point they made is, that pile of debris is the proverbial haystack. They're looking for a needle they aren't sure was ever in there."
He laughed. "Should have chosen a different metaphor; they found plenty of needles and other paraphernalia."
"Glad you had fun."
"More than you did," he said, patting the edge of my seat. "Forgot to tell you. That cop, Lewis Banks, came by the shoot looking for you."
"What did he want?"
"Didn't say. Maybe he wanted to be on camera again. Maybe he has a crush on you. He said he was in the neighborhood and thought he'd drop by."
"Dropped by where?"
"The morgue."
Our convoy left the freeway, exited at First Street and went east, away from downtown. Evergreen Cemeter
y is on First Street, as is City Hall. But the cemetery is on the other side of the river, on the other side of the Santa Ana Freeway.
When the cemetery was established in the mid-1800s, at the beginning of California's Anglo era, it lay way beyond the eastern fringes of the raw young city. Los Angeles, always inclined to sprawl, quickly grew outward to encircle the site. Now the cemetery is an artifact, a quiet green island embellished with ornate marble angels and fanciful urns and carved black monoliths surrounded by the dynamic bustle and flow of the Boyle Heights barrio.
The cemetery always represented the great cultural diversity of Los Angeles, and also represented the well-defined social boundaries of the old city. The names carved on the largest and most ornate headstones, if not the oldest--Los Angeles was a Mexican town long before the gringos came--are clustered together in the middle of the First Street side and read like the names on a local map: Lankershim, Van Nuys, Hollenbeck, Bixby, Workman, Chapman; these were the founders of modern Los Angeles.
The southwestern corner, isolated across a small stream with a bridge, was reserved for black residents until after World War II, when the stream was breached and African American graves spilled into the general cemetery population at the same time that African American families began to spill out of the Adams Avenue neighborhood and into the suburbs south of Slauson Avenue, and beyond.
North of the old black section, beginning in the 1890s and continuing to this day, are the Japanese. The Japanese section is now the most active and has the largest number of recent memorials; Little Tokyo is a half mile west. There is a Jewish section, a place for war dead from every war since the Spanish-American War, another for children and victims of the flu pandemic of 1918.
The middle was once generally Anglo, with German and French enclaves, while some headstones on the east side have Hispanic surnames; the old Catholic cemetery is further south, in East LA. This eastern section is where the second largest number of new graves is to be found. Too many of the headstones here have laser-engraved portraits of very young faces, most of them male, teenagers with nicknames like Sleepy Jefe, Outlaw, Notorius, Little Dog carved between their Christian names and their fathers' family names. Jesus Ramon's older brother is here, and if he had been found, Jesus would lie next to him.
In the far southeastern corner, behind a chain-link fence, the nameless, friendless and the impoverished are interred anonymously in potter's field. The markers here are flat stones carved with numbers only. Beyond them, and outside the cemetery walls altogether, land was set aside in the nineteenth century for Chinese burials. Somehow the Chinese graveyard became forgotten or was disregarded and got paved over by the extension of First Street as the city grew outward. Recently, during construction on a new section of the Gold Line, the downtown-to-Pasadena light rail route, over one hundred of those old graves were discovered under the road bed, halting construction, heaping shame on the city's segregated past. Makes one wonder who else was paved over and forgotten as the city expanded.
Guido and I, and his students and my tail, parked in the small public lot and walked across this map of urban social history to join Savoie and Hendricks at the trench dug for the interment of the county coroner's current accumulation of unclaimed cremated remains.
The trench had roughly the dimensions of a standard grave, but shallower. There were flowers, a minister and a priest, representatives from the Board of Supervisors and the mayor's office, a few good-hearted citizens who make it a point to attend these rituals regularly, and a bugler. Julia Ramon had brought her sister Mayra in recognition of the possibility that Jesus, if any part of him had ever been found, was interred in a similar plot with a number, no name.
Phil Rascon from the coroner's office was there, possibly, I thought, because he was feeling proprietary about our being there. My good friend Rich Longshore was beside him, both dressed for the occasion in dark suits. I walked over to them.
"Maggie," Phil greeted me. "Want you to meet Sergeant Richard Longshore from the County Sheriff's Homicide Bureau."
"The Bulldogs," I said, extending my hand. "Never let one get away. Good to see you Rich. A nice surprise."
He reeled me in for a hug. "How's my girl?"
"Doing fine," I said, face against his broad shoulder.
"I watch the news, Maggie," Rich said, patting my back. "I'm concerned."
"So am I." I pulled away so I could look him in the face. "Can we talk later?"
"I'll be right here, keeping an eye out. Let me know when you're ready."
I turned to Rascon. "How do you know my friend Rich?"
"Sergeant Longshore and I go back a long way," Phil said. "When he was the sheriff's big canyon diver he used to bring me a lot of business. But now they have him working cold cases I don't see so much of him."
"Canyon diver?" I bit at the opening, though I knew the story. Savoie had his camera trained over my shoulder, Hendricks held a mic. The conversation became an interview, potentially for the video.
"In my long-ago youth I was an Army Ranger, in Vietnam," Rich said, standing straight, abs pulled in. "So after the sheriff sent me from SWAT up to Homicide Bureau, seemed like every time remains were found down the side of a ravine, I got sent out to put on my rappelling gear. I liked the opportunity to get out of a suit now and then, but I got a bit senior to be rappelling down canyons in the San Bernardinos. That's rugged terrain."
"One of his cases is getting buried today," Phil said. "Remains of a lady he found down Placeritos Canyon a few years back."
"You never identified her?" I asked, though I'd heard the story before. Maybe this would be the fall season opener of my series.
"Not yet," Rich said. "Maybe I never will."
Phil nodded in agreement. "It's the sad truth."
"This one got to you," I said.
"They all do," Rich said, and again Phil nodded. "Young woman dead, someone must be looking for her. A lost hiker found her in a ravine about four years ago and I went down to retrieve her. I took Phil everything I found, an arm bone tangled in the sleeve of an expensive silk robe. Visited a lot of lingerie shops before I found where it came from, a Rodeo Drive boutique, sold the Cacique label; someone spent a lot of money to make her look pretty."
He looked at me as if to ask, Enough?
I kept him talking, moving toward the question I actually wanted him to answer on camera. "That's all you found, an arm and a fragment of silk?"
"I also had some hair, the femur, and the top of a skull. Phil helped determine her sex, her age, her background and how long she had been dead: she was twenty-five to thirty-five, probably of Japanese heritage, and she had been exposed to the elements for about two years before a hiker slipped off a trail and literally fell into her while sliding down the ravine. Phil can't tell me how she died, but I have a pretty good idea she didn't die while hiking because who goes hiking in an eleven-hundred-dollar silk robe?"
"You're working backwards on that case," I said. "What about someone who has gone missing and no one can find the remains after ten years?"
"You're talking about Jesus Ramon," Rich said. "We all looked for that kid. To this day, every time I get something that could even remotely belong in that pocket I take it straight to Phil."
"You and Mike Flint were good friends," I said.
"Sure. Too much is made of competition between county and city departments. Mike and I worked more than a few cases together. He was maybe the best detective I ever worked with. He had that sixth sense that old cops develop."
"Do you have it, that sixth sense?" I asked.
He grinned, dipped his head, looked up at me with his turquoise eyes. "I seem to."
"Among the possibilities you took to Phil, none of them fit Jesus?"
"On the contrary. There are at least a dozen John Does that could fit Jesus. But there isn't enough left of any one of them, or salvageable DNA, to prove that it is or it isn't Jesus."
"I was told there were rumors that Jesus might have been dumped i
nto the Los Angeles River during a rainstorm or was dumped into a canyon."
"Who said that?"
"Woman named Nelda Ruiz."
Rich thought that over for a moment.
"I'll be seeing Nelda tonight," Phil said. "Only she won't be answering any more questions."
Good place to end the conversation. The coroner's van had arrived and the minister and the priest moved into position at the head of the trench. Savoie and Hendricks went off to video the removal of the remains from the coroner's van.
"What are you doing after the service?" I asked Rich.
"I'd planned to go straight back to the office, but I'm at your disposal."
"Thanks." I kissed his cheek, and walked over to stand with Julia and Mayra.
Mayra reached for my hand and pulled me down closer to her. She whispered, "They killed her."
"Yes," I said. "I'm so sorry."
"Live by the sword," Julia said. I straightened up and put my free hand around her shoulders. We stood in that three-part clutch and watched as the doors of the coroner's van opened and the boxes were carried out.
Savoie's camera followed the procession of the remains from the van to their placement in the trench, lined up like a stack of plastic bricks on the black earth. During the service Savoie focused on the various people assembled, glanced at Guido occasionally for instructions, turned to capture the perfect view of the downtown skyline that the cemetery offered. Hendricks was in position behind him with a synchronized sound recorder, capturing the service. The two men were long-time pros, unobtrusive and at the same time everywhere.
I was impressed by the gravity of the service, by the sincerity of the people who came. Phil Rascon said a few words about how difficult it was to finally consign someone to anonymous interment when there might be family searching. Rich talked about the young woman in the silk robe. Julia asked for a prayer for her son, Jesus, because he might already be in one of the numbered graves around us.
It was one of the saddest funerals I had ever attended. I caught Savoie videoing me as I blew my nose into a sodden tissue. I made a mental note to have that piece removed. It would not belong in the finished project and I didn't want publicity to flaunt it if it turned up.
In the Guise of Mercy (Maggie Macgowen Mysteries) Page 23
