The Trials of Nikki Hill

by Christopher Darden; Dick Lochte

  There, she waited beside a man smoking a cigar, its fumes adding to her general malaise. She was relieved when he took a car going up, but, descending alone to the second basement level, she longed for even his smokestack company.

  She emerged from the elevator to face a sign on the wall reading “Autopsy Room.” Her nostrils were assailed by a strange and powerful odor. Not a stench exactly. Something strong and...what? Malignant? She tried to find some category for it. A combination of Mr. Clean and collard greens? A mix of medicine and funk? It confused her senses and increased her apprehension. She remembered something Blackie had once told her about the way cops would soak their handkerchiefs in cologne before dropping in at the morgue. Good advice that came to mind too late.

  She paused, poked in her handbag for perfume, breath spray, anything. Coming up empty, she gritted her teeth and prepared for the next sensory assault—the visual one. She told herself that if a wimp like Ray Wise could stand the sight of a body reduced to dead meat, blood, bone, and tripe, so could she. She made a silent prayer that her sensitive stomach would not betray her, clasped her leather briefcase close to her chest, and ventured forth. The words of the late, great King Pleasure never seemed more appropriate: “So afraid of where I’m going, so in love with where I’ve been.”

  A right turn introduced her to an amazing sight: a logjam of corpses on gurneys. She shivered. The chill she was feeling had more to do with emotion than air-conditioning. Head held high, she made her way through the corpses. Although she kept her eyes straight forward, her peripheral view took in the bodies. Male. Female. Fat. Thin. Black. White. Brown. Yellow. Stabbed. Shot. Beaten and bruised. Blood draining off in troughs along the sides of the gurneys.

  She realized she was holding her breath. She paused, eyes on the ceiling, then continued on to the operating room.

  The scene before her was worse than any nightmare she could have imagined. Surgeons in powder blue casually making “Y” incisions on corpses. Faces being pulled back. The top of one head being cut off, like opening a can of tuna. Brains being scooped out for analysis. Organs being removed, bagged, weighed, and labeled.

  One of the masked men approached a body with an instrument resembling a bolt cutter. Nikki stood rooted to the floor, unable to look away as, with a crack as loud as a gunshot, he broke and lifted the breastplate of some hapless corpse.

  Onward she moved, faster now. Passing organs being weighed. Blood being measured by a ladle. A brain being set aside for dissecting.

  Nikki stopped at a table where a fleshy black woman was humming peacefully through her powder-blue mask while her latex-gloved fingers sewed up a long, gray male corpse with an instrument that looked like a thick crochet needle. “Excuse me,” Nikki said to her.

  The woman looked up from her work and nodded. “Minute,” she said. She finished a stitch, and then, instead of merely setting the needle aside, she stuck it into the dead body’s stomach as if it were a pincushion.

  She yanked down her mask and said, “Now. How can I help you, sister?”

  “The autopsy of Madeleine Gray?”

  The woman gestured with a gloved hand. “Down that hall, the first door on your left. Dragon Lady’s there, herself, so make sure you get suited up,” she added, offering Nikki a wink as she adjusted her mask and withdrew her needle.

  In the hall the prosecutor was struck by a wave of dizziess. She leaned against the wall and closed her eyes. Damn you, she cursed herself, toughen up right now!

  It seemed to help. The wooziness passed and she entered the autopsy room, already crowded with powder blue people. In spite of their surgical masks she easily identified Ray Wise, Detectives Morales and Goodman, and the coroner, a bland, emotionless Asian-American named Ann Fugitsu, who stood back a pace, observing the pathologist and his assistants as they hovered over the remains of what had once been Madeleine Gray.

  Nikki lifted a scrub suit from a hook near the door. One of the assistants got her a mask.

  Dr. Fugitsu brought them up to speed in very little time. “It is our preliminary opinion that death was due to skull fracture causing injury to the brain,” she stated without emotion. “There appears to have been a significant brutalizing of the body. Then a solid object, smooth rather than sharp, did the final job, cracking the back of the cranium.”

  Judging by physicochemical changes of the body and bodily fluids and the residual reactivity of muscles to electrical and chemical stimuli, she explained, they had narrowed the window of death to approximately three hours. “Between eight and eleven P.M. The body was, of course, in rigor when it was first examined in the alley.”

  The deceased had been legally inebriated. “Blood showed an alcohol content of point-one-four. There was some drug residue. Cocaine or some other coca derivative. We will send the usual sample to the forensic toxicologist. The vagina showed some irritation, and vaginal fluids were present but no semen was found.”

  “Meaning what?” Wise asked. “That she hadn’t been schtupped?”

  Dr. Fugitsu’s normally unreadable face showed a flash of annoyance. “She apparently had been sexually stimulated prior to her murder. The stimulation did not go as far as orgasm. If she was with a man, he must have used a contraceptive, and one that left no traces of latex or lubricant.”

  Dr. Fugitsu noted that no foreign hair, pubic or otherwise, had been found on the body. “No flakes of skin, either,” she said. “However, the fingernails on the victim’s right hand yielded a small amount of blood and tissue. A slightly larger amount was recovered from under the left thumbnail.”

  Goodman asked about rug fibers.

  “Numerous coarse fibers dyed mainly red and yellow were found on the skin and in the hair,” the doctor said. “In addition, many other particles were clinging to the body, probably the result of the corpse’s residence in the garbage bin.”

  While the coroner listed the various Dumpster contents found clinging to the corpse, Nikki’s attention shifted to the doctor’s assistants, who were busily photographing body samples and collecting fluids. Madeleine Gray’s liver was thrown on a scale, then deposited into a plastic bag. Other organs were weighed and put in a larger bag that was closed and placed between the corpse’s legs. The corpse was then cocooned in a material not unlike Saran Wrap. Finally, a rope was tied around the late Madeleine Gray’s arms and shoulders. Why, Nikki couldn’t imagine.

  At the end of the ordeal the detectives put away their notebooks, and Wise, who’d filled several pages of a legal pad with his small, precise printing, clipped his pen to the pad. Nikki was startled to realize that her own pad was blank. She’d forgotten to take notes. She quickly zipped up her briefcase and hoped Wise hadn’t noticed.

  His interest was elsewhere. “When will we have the final results of your tests, doctor?” he asked.

  “Two weeks,” the coroner replied. “The DNA? You’re

  talking more than a month.”

  “What about blood type?”

  “I could have something on that for you today,” she said. Wise told her that would be lovely. Then he turned to Nikki. “Meeting in Joe’s office in half an hour,” he said. “Don’t be late.”

  TWELVE

  Nikki was impressed by Joe Walden’s apparent calm. He had less than an hour to decide if he should formally accuse Jamal Deschamps of murder or set him free. Still, he was leaning back in his chair, chilling out while Wise relayed the results of the autopsy. When the head deputy finished, Walden sighed and focused on his spotless desktop. Except for the fingers of his right hand doing a little dance on the arm of his chair, he might have been a man with nothing of consequence on his mind.

  Nikki, on the other hand, felt restless and uneasy, as if she were several cups of coffee over her limit. The morgue experience had left its mark on her, its peculiar, funky smell still clogging her nostrils. Then, the article about her in the morning L.A. Times, which was waiting on her desk when she arrived, added its own jolt of anxiety. Not only had it carried the err
oneous information that she was the deputy “overseeing” the Gray investigation, it referenced the infamous Weenie Defense Murder Trial, noting that “Hill refuses to discuss either the trial or why she chose to spend the next few years out of the fast lane, serving in the Compton courts.”

  Just as vexing, the article mentioned her father, William Hill, citing his long and distinguished career as a member of the LAPD. Nikki had carefully stonewalled questions about her personal life and, much to the dismay of Press Relations Deputy Meg Fisher, had cut the interview short when the reporter had grown too insistent in probing into her upbringing. She had also turned down requests for interviews long or short from, according to Meg, twenty-six legitimate news outlets. Of course, to Meg, the Globe was a legitimate news outlet.

  Ray Wise, perched beside her on an uncomfortable gray leather chair that was a twin of hers, cleared his throat suddenly. The noise seemed to shake Walden from his reverie. “I’m surprised more of the killer’s flesh wasn’t recovered,” the D.A. said. “Judging by all the scratches on Deschamps’s back, I was expecting there to be enough skin under the victim’s fingernails to make a small boy.”

  “Deschamps says it was the other broad who tore him up,” Wise said. “So maybe he wasn’t lying about that. Anyway, there was enough for Fugitsu to work with. She said she’ll have a blood type for us today.”

  Walden consulted his watch. “Any particular time today?”

  Wise shook his head.

  “Take us through the crime, Ray.”

  Wise plucked a yellow legal pad from a briefcase beside his chair. He flipped a few note-filled pages and began. “Sometime between seven and ten P.M. Deschamps and the deceased were at her place, probably playing some sort of sex game. There were booze and drugs, according to Fugitsu. But no semen was found in the body. So maybe Maddie tells the guy no and this pisses him off. The party gets rough. He belts her around, just like he’s belted other women in the past. She doesn’t like it, gives him some of it back and that pisses him off even more. He picks up something handy and uses it to crack her skull.”

  Wise’s scenario was raising a number of questions in Nikki’s mind, but she knew better than to interrupt him. Instead, she made notes and kept quiet.

  “So there’s Deschamps with a dead woman on his hands. In the woman’s house. Still, he doesn’t panic. It’s dark outside. The house is secluded. He wraps Gray’s naked tokus in a rug and drags it out to his car. He wants to dump the body ASAP, but he’s afraid to take the chance of somebody seeing him. It’s unfamiliar territory to him. So he drives down to an area he knows, South Central, where, even if he’s seen, there’s less chance anybody’s going to report it.

  “After he unloads the body, he feels wired, excited. He goes to a bar, picks up a bimbo,” Wise consulted his notes, “one Dorothea Downs. They screw until around two A.M. when her roommate shows up and Deschamps takes a walk. “That’s when he remembers the ring on the dead woman’s finger. A bauble like that’s worth a few bucks. So he goes back to the alley. And gets nabbed.”

  Walden nodded, then turned to Nikki. “Comments?”

  Her mind started to compose a diplomatic response, but Wise hated her guts anyway. So, the hell with diplomacy. “What makes you think the murder took place at her house, Ray?” she asked. “The police still aren’t sure where it happened.”

  “Depends on who you talk to, sweetie,” he replied. “The house is where they found the likely weapon. You know, the hunk of metal sculpture with blood on it. There’s a missing rug Deschamps must’ve used to wrap up the body for delivery. And, there’s the broken lock on the vic’s office cabinet.

  That might be considered a little clue, too, that the murder took place on the premises.”

  “What do you suppose happened to the clothes she was wearing?” she asked.

  “Relevance?” Wise inquired.

  “If she and Deschamps were engaged in sex play that turned deadly and if she wound up naked in an alley, wouldn’t her clothes be in a pile near the murder scene?”

  Walden gave her a smile of confidence and turned to Wise. The prosecutor shrugged his bony shoulders. “Maybe Des-champs folded them up and put ’em on a shelf.”

  “The clothes she was last seen wearing are missing. Shoes, too.”

  “So Deschamps dumped ’em in another alley.”

  “Why?” Nikki asked. “If he killed the woman in her own home, why not just leave the clothes there?”

  Walden’s head deputy looked at him pleadingly. “Can’t we stop with this bullshit? In seventeen years on this job, I’ve yet to try one case where everything made perfect sense. As anybody with any experience knows, murderers don’t behave rationally. So he took her clothes. Why? I don’t give a shit. Maybe some of his blood got on them. Maybe he likes going in drag. They’re missing. If they turn up, fine. If they don’t, too bad.”

  Walden asked, “Anything else, Nikki?”

  “Ray, you say he dragged the body to his car. What car? According to Deschamps, and the DMV, he has no car.”

  “That’s not quite true,” Wise said. “He doesn’t own a car, but he’s been using one. A Buick Regal, two decades old, registered to George Penn, Deschamps’s uncle. It was found this morning near the bar where Deschamps picked up the Downs woman. Lab’s going over it now.”

  Nikki mentally chided herself for not keeping on top of every aspect of the investigation. She should have known

  about the car. Well, she still had one more card to play. “About the busted file cabinet in Maddie Gray’s office,” she said. “According to Detective Goodman it’s filled with blackmail material.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Wise said. “Let’s not go off on some wild tangent. Jamal busted open a locked drawer because he thought there was money inside. He found only Maddie’s files, which he left in place.”

  “The killer ignored a box full of jewelry in her bedroom,” Nikki said. “Ignored an expensive wristwatch resting on the side of her bath. Ignored a small cash box containing several hundred dollars for office expenses that was on her desk. And he pried open a metal cabinet in the hope there was money inside? Doesn’t it seem more logical that the killer was looking for something specific—a folder full of information that Maddie Gray was using to blackmail him?”

  “Ray?” Walden asked. He had an amused smile on his face that Nikki found irritating. He was enjoying the Hill-Wise battle a little too much for her taste.

  “This is all unnecessary speculation,” Wise said. “We don’t know who ripped open the cabinet drawer or why. It may not have even been the killer. As for Madeleine Gray being a blackmailer, she made her money from gossip. That’s what she did every night on TV, spill the beans on a bunch of celebrities. Naturally, she had a cabinet full of nasty secrets. Where’s the blackmail?”

  “I was with Detectives Goodman and Morales when they opened her bank boxes filled with cash,” Nikki said. “Two hundred thousand dollars. What does that tell you?”

  “It sure as hell doesn’t tell me we’ve got the wrong man,” Wise said. “Not when our boy was apprehended in the alley just ten feet from his victim with her frigging ring in his pants pocket.”

  “Why would he risk going back to the body to take her ring, after leaving all the other jewelry and money at her house?” Nikki asked.

  “Because he’s an asshole,” Wise almost shouted. “Read my lips: Murderers usually don’t make sense. It’s also possible he didn’t see the other stuff.”

  Nikki was formulating a reply when the phone rang.

  Walden scooped it up, listened for a beat, and then crooned a reply that was not quite audible from across the desk. Obviously puzzled, he replaced the receiver. “Dr. Fugitsu’s office,” he said. “The blood type from under Gray’s thumbnail is O-positive, same as Deschamps’s.”

  “All right!” Wise exclaimed.

  “The other samples, however, from the fingernails, are AB.”

  “So she scratched somebody else that morning, or
the day before. Maybe somebody she bumped into. We still have Deschamps’s type under her thumbnail.”

  “You’re just gonna ignore the other tissue?” Nikki asked.

  “Why not? It has no bearing on our case. We’ve got a type O-pos that does.”

  “It’s the most common type,” Nikki said. “The presence of the AB is a problem and we’ll need something more conclusive on the O. In four weeks, we’ll have the irrefutable DNA results.”

  “Sure,” Wise said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “We can let Deschamps go home now. He’ll just hang around his apartment for several weeks, waiting for us to make sure he killed the Gray woman. Then all we’ll have to do is send somebody out to pick him up. Maybe Nikki can go.”

  She ignored him and concentrated on Walden. “If Madeleine Gray was a blackmailer, Durant is probably not our killer,” she said.

  “Durant?” Walden asked.

  “I’m sorry. Deschamps,” she corrected herself. Wise was staring at her, frowning. She turned back to Walden, determined to move past the gaff. “Couldn’t we at least contact some of the people in those files and find out if she’s been bleeding them?”

  Walden considered it for a few beats, then said, “We’d wind up terrorizing and/or infuriating several extremely important and influential people.”

  “And,” Wise added, “Deschamps’s attorney would be very happy to point out to a jury that we were so uncertain of his guilt we initiated a whole new area of investigation.”

  “I am forced to agree,” Walden said. “Deschamps is all yours, Ray. Murder one. Special circumstances. Start the arraignment process.” His eyes shifted to Nikki. “Thanks for your input.”