Bleeding Out

by Baxter Clare

  Frank ignored the insult, producing a business card.

  “If you happen to see something unusual call this number.”

  She deftly tucked the card into his shirt pocket and turned away, catching something churlish about “dykes and the LAPD.” It was far from the first or last time. Cop-bashing was popular recreation in the ‘hood. Being female and not acting the part only exacerbated the censure, but Frank had learned even as a recruit not to hear it. Or at least not care about it.

  By noon she was ready to leave the rec area and check out employees who’d been off for the last two days or on leave. Frank gravely thanked the rec area manager for her cooperation and apologized for taking her away from her work for two days.

  The woman laughed and tossed the hair off her freckled face. “Are you kidding? It was a relief to get out of that office! I just wish it could have been for a more pleasant reason.”

  Driving out of the rec area Johnnie observed, “Nice dame.”

  “Dame?” Noah glanced in the rearview mirror. Johnnie’s arms were stretched against the back seat and an unlit cigarette dangled from his mouth.

  “What are you, Humphrey Bogart?”

  “Did either of you get hits on the pictures?”

  Johnnie pulled a list from his pocket.

  “Yeah, we got a couple.”

  Frank compared his list to hers. One of the pictures showed up on both their lists.

  “Daniel Nathan Sproul,” she said. “Let’s check him out.”

  Turned out that Daniel Nathan Sproul had three priors, two drug-related, one for lewd behavior. The computer spit out an address for him and at six o’clock that evening Frank and Noah were on his doorstep. He lived in an apartment in Baldwin Hills and he came to their knock sleepily, as if they’d woken him.

  Frank held her badge up to him, asking if he was Daniel Nathan Sproul.

  “What if I am?”

  “If you are we have some questions for you.”

  “This isn’t a good time,” he answered dreamily. “Why don’t you come back later?” He slumped against the doorframe, his eyes on the detectives but looking through them.

  “What are you on?” Noah asked politely.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean what are you trippin’ on?”

  He smiled. “Ain’t trippin’.”

  “Internal possession’s a felony, Sproul. But to be honest, we’re not narcs. We’re homicide cops. I don’t care if you’re shootin’. I just want to ask you some questions.”

  Sproul smiled, as if a long lost buddy was waving at him from behind the homicide cops.

  “Do you know what today is?” Frank asked.

  “First day of the rest of my life?” Sproul guessed.

  “The date,” Frank said patiently. “What is today’s date?”

  Sproul giggled. “I don’t know. You’re cops. You should know stuff like that.”

  Noah reached behind for his cuffs.

  “Take him in?”

  “May as well put him in the cooler and see what we can get out of him in the morning.”

  Noah hooked him despite a feeble protest, checking out the track marks on his arms. They drove him downtown, right through the bright lights and glamour that people called L.A.

  Sproul didn’t look very good when he came out of the chilled holding cell almost a day later. He was only twenty-two but could have easily passed for being in his late thirties. His skin was tinted yellow and he needed a shave. The muscles in his arms held no tone. He was nearly as tall as Noah, though, and broader. Even in bad shape a young girl shouldn’t be trouble for him.

  In the tiny interview room Noah asked Sproul basic questions—name, age, occupation, education—that required simple, innocuous answers. The detectives already knew the information, but it gave them a chance to establish their suspect’s verbal and physical style when he was relatively relaxed and calm. As they questioned him, any changes in this style could be indicators that he had tensed or was nervous about something.

  “So how long you been chippin?” Noah asked.

  “I don’t know,” he responded tiredly, “two, three years.”

  “Kinda dangerous isn’t it?”

  The young man shrugged.

  “What’s it to you?”

  Noah shrugged back.

  “What do you know about this girl?” he asked, slapping a color picture of Melissa Agoura under Sproul’s nose.

  Sproul peered closer, then squirmed back against his chair.

  “Who the fuck is she?” he asked, glancing up at the detectives.

  “Melissa Agoura. Recognize her?”

  Sproul eyed the ugly picture again.

  “Uh-uh. What happened to her?”

  “You tell us,” Noah said.

  “Fuck if I know.”

  Then they could see it dawning on him.

  “You think I did this?”

  “Did you?”

  “Fuck no! I’m a junkie, not a murderer,” he said sincerely.

  “There’s no law says you can’t be both.”

  “Well I’m not.”

  “Why don’t you tell us about the 288 you got pulled on?”

  “The what?”

  “The little incident when you were arrested for accosting women on the street?”

  “Aw, shit, that wasn’t anything,” Sproul said dismissively. “I was messed up. Just being stupid with my friends.”

  “Doesn’t seem like you got a lot of respect for the ladies.”

  “I got plenty, I was just fooling around. Didn’t mean nothin’ by it.”

  “Maybe you didn’t mean nothin’ when you started batting her around—”

  “—I never touched her! I don’t even know who she is. I never seen her before now.”

  Noah changed tack.

  “You know where the Kenneth Hahn Recreation Area is?”

  Sproul was puzzled by the switch but answered affirmatively.

  “You ever been there?”

  “Yeah. Lots of times.”

  “What do you go there for?”

  Sproul hesitated, obviously reluctant to answer. The detectives pushed and he copped to meeting his dealer there.

  “Did you ever see her there?”

  Noah slid a family photo of Agoura across the scarred table. Sproul looked at it carefully.

  “No. She the one who got beat up?”

  “What do you do when you’re in the park waiting to score?”

  “I don’t know. Just hang out.”

  “You ever talk to anybody?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not like I’m hanging around a lotta people when I’m trying to make a deal go down, you know?”

  “Think. Who have you ever talked to?”

  “I don’t know.”

  They could see him thinking.

  “Maybe I’ve said hi to the guy picking up trash. Or the girl at the entrance.”

  “What girl?”

  “The one in the booth as you come in.”

  “You ever said hello to any other girls?”

  “I can’t remember. I don’t think so, at least none I remember.”

  Noah asked Sproul where he was on October 19th and Sproul laughed.

  “Like I know just off the top of my head.”

  “It was a Sunday. What do you normally do on Sundays?”

  “That’s the weekend. I don’t know what I was doing. I coulda been doin’ anything.”

  “Like what? What do you like to do when you’re not working or chipping?”

  Frank watched silently as Sproul groped for answers. Noah asked about other dates, then changed subjects and quizzed Sproul about his social life. Sproul was answering easily, willingly. He was leaning over the table, facing Noah with his hands open, holding his gaze easily. Frank didn’t get any indication that Sproul was their man, but she let Noah play out the interview.

  An hour later he stood and motioned Frank to follow him outside.

  “I don’t think
this kid knows shit,” he said.

  “I don’t either. Let’s lose him.”

  They went back into the box.

  “Mr. Sproul, do you have any vacation plans?”

  “No.”

  “So if we came to find you at home in a day or two, or at work, you’d be there?”

  “Well, yeah. I mean if I wasn’t out, or…”

  “Or what?” Frank asked.

  “Or in jail.”

  “Why would you be in jail?”

  “Felony possession,” he reminded her patiently.

  “We’re going to let you go, Mr. Sproul. Don’t leave town. Here’s our number. If you have to leave you’d better call us first or you’re going to be in a world of hurt.”

  Sproul couldn’t believe he was being let go.

  “What’s the catch?”

  “No catch. Let’s just say you owe us one.”

  Sproul clearly wasn’t happy about owing the LAPD a favor, but he was eager to get home.

  “So I’m free to go?”

  Frank nodded dispassionately. She was hungry and tired, and it seemed like all the cases lately were diggers, but knowing that the interviewee was always watching the interviewer, Frank betrayed no emotion. She opened the door, and Daniel Sproul scuttled out to find his next fix.

  His worst fears erupted into life when his father put the car in park and quietly told him, “Get up to your room.” With a certainty that made his sphincter spasm, he recognized the flat expression reflected in the rearview mirror. Not only had the boy’s terror come to life, it had grown and taken wing and was flopping about in the evening’s growing shadows.

  At the front door he cast his mother a soundless plea. She deftly fielded her son’s glance and shot back one of her own. It too was sickeningly familiar, silently reproaching. You’ve disappointed your father and now we’ll both have to pay.

  The boy used the banister to drag himself upstairs. The terror flapped all around him. He heard his mother ask with a practiced tone carefully blended of equal parts concern and empathy, “When would you like dinner, dear?”

  In a gritty voice, his father answered, “When I’m through with the boy.”

  Perched heavily on the boy’s thin shoulders, the terror settled into its nest.

  5

  On October 19th, when Melissa Agoura failed to meet her friends at Kenneth Hahn, they called her house to find out where she was. By 9:00 p.m., three hours after dark, Mrs. Agoura called the police. LAPD was swamped with missing person complaints. A perfunctory investigation was conducted two days later, but the disappearance of a sixteen-year-old girl in L.A. didn’t generate much investigative work.

  Two weeks into the case, Noah and Frank interviewed and reinterviewed people in and around the vicinity of the park. Joggers, picnickers, old men and kids fishing in the small ponds— none recognized Agoura or recalled anything odd around the time she disappeared.

  Heading back to the station late one afternoon, Noah sighed, “You know what gets me more than anything?”

  Frank felt the question was rhetorical and just glanced at her partner.

  “Not the stupidity, not the senselessness, not the blood or gray matter, I mean that’s just biology and death, they’re inevitable. What gets me is the goddamned apathy. How many people have we shown her picture to?”

  Frank shrugged.

  “And how many have cared?”

  “This is L.A., No. People see dead faces every day.”

  “I don’t care if it’s Buchenwald! This is their neighborhood, one of their own. She died in their own backyard and no one gives a shit. No one wants to get involved.”

  With half an ear Frank listened to Noah’s tirade. Of all the cops she’d worked with, and after fourteen years on the force, Noah was still the most passionate. Peace officers, especially in a huge metropolis, had to develop some kind of emotional armor against the daily traumas they dealt with. Noah’s armor was forged of dark humor and constant complaints that belied an unyielding optimism. Tirades were his way of blowing off steam. After seeing the worst people could do to each other, he still believed in and expected the best. He’d explained once that it was the only way he could continue to do his job and raise three kids. He had to keep believing, but it was an effort in the face of what he dealt with every day. When it got too much, he blew.

  On the other hand, Frank was always prepared for the worst. Noah was frustrated they weren’t getting anywhere on the case; Frank accepted it easily and just kept chipping away. They’d talked to three of Agoura’s girlfriends again, the ones she was really tight with. One of the girls had been a little hinky, and when Frank pressed her she’d burst into tears. Seems she had a wicked crush on the boyfriend and had been trying to lure him from Melissa. But that was all she was guilty of. The girls basically reiterated what the family and boyfriend said.

  They interviewed casual acquaintances, classmates, an ex-boyfriend. Same story. Agoura hadn’t been in any trouble, she had her steady friends, steady boyfriend. They engaged in the usual teenage mischief and highjinks—nothing serious enough to get her killed. Agoura was a square peg who’d somehow ended up in a round hole. Most murders were not accidental, but Agoura’s victimology was all wrong. She apparently had no connection to anyone from the area or that school. She wasn’t dealing or using, she wasn’t hooking, she wasn’t a banger. As far as Frank and Noah could tell, she had no reason to be in the ‘hood.

  Back at the station, Noah dropped all his paperwork on his desk and headed home. Frank lingered in her office, scanning Crocetti’s terse protocol again. Time of death was roughly 7:00 p.m. the night before she was found. The rape test located three light brown nonvictim pubic hairs. He confirmed there was no evidence of oral or vaginal rape, only anal. The multiple contusions and hematomas were seemingly made by a large, rounded instrument. Crocetti wouldn’t commit to a specific weapon. The nature of her wounds was consistent with the time frame of her absence. Her right shoulder had been dislocated before she was killed. There was no evidence of postmortem injury.

  The forensic tests had finally come back, and Frank studied them one more time. The fragments of wood that Crocetti had plucked from the ripped tissues was elderberry, Sambucus glauca. Frank’s knowledge of botany didn’t extend beyond long-stemmed roses, and she’d asked the lab tech if elderberry was common in the area.

  “Commoner than crabs in a whorehouse,” he’d responded. “It grows wild all over the place.”

  There were isolated fibers found on Agoura: red nylon combed from her hair; white nylon and an additional red one pulled out of several lacerations. Cotton fibers corresponded to the last outfit she was seen in. Four blue nylon fibers appeared to be from vehicle carpeting, and a handful of green/gold carpet fibers were also found on the body. The adhesive from her wrists turned out to be a common 3M brand of packing tape. Nail scrapings revealed nothing, and her tox test was clean. It wasn’t much to go on.

  Frank sighed, closing the binder. She didn’t need it open anyway; she had already memorized the sparse information within. She shut her eyes for a moment and indulged her fatigue. She should be home sitting on her Soloflex, not here. But it was quiet in the squad room after hours, and Frank loved the silence. She’d never admit it, but there was no place in the world she felt as safe. She doodled on a yellow legal pad and her thoughts rode in the wake of the pen.

  Another puzzle was that Agoura had evidently been held against her will and tortured for three days. Death on Frank’s turf was usually sudden—drive-bys, stabbings, ODs. Kidnappings and torture weren’t unheard of, but they were usually highly personalized. That Agoura’s face was basically unmarked and her sexual organs were free of mutilation suggested that Agoura might have been a stranger to the perp. The anal assault seemed to be the focus of his anger. That was a curiously gender-neutral area of assault, adding to the impersonality of the attack. It also suggested that he may have done time.

  On one side of the paper Frank wrote Average or
Above Average Intelligence. Whoever had done this to Agoura certainly was reasonably smart. Not only had he abducted her with no witnesses, but he’d managed to keep her and batter her for three days without anyone seeming to know about it. Then he’d dumped the body on a city sidewalk and still hadn’t been seen.

  Frank leaned out of her chair and pulled a dusty notebook off the shelf on the wall. A few years ago she’d participated in a criminal profiling fellowship with the FBI. Part of the work included analyzing the behavior patterns and personalities of serial criminals.

  Frank scrutinized her Quantico notes and, just for kicks, started profiling Agoura’s perp. Hunched over her desk well into the night, her doodling evolved into an intricate list.

  Friday evening at the Alibi was packed. Nancy Kreiger had given up clearing the empties from squad nine-three’s table. Except for Jill, who’d gone home exhausted, and Bobby, who was on call and nursing a Coke, the squad was pounding back Buds and Murphy’s Irish stouts. The talk had gone from shop to football. Nookey was collecting money for the weekend games.

  Taquito, Ike, and Briggs were in a heated discussion about why the Raiders sucked wind. Bobby nodded quietly, backing Johnnie, and over the din of happy-hour voices and clanking glass, Frank was explaining to the rest of the squad why the Chiefs should walk away with the AFC title.

  Because she was his boss, Gough had to treat Frank with some respect at work, but off the clock he refused to take her seriously, especially about football. Now he was jabbing a finger at her, saying there was no way the Chiefs could sustain their momentum against the Broncos. They waged battle through another pitcher of stout and in the end settled on a fifty dollar bet. Frank conservatively took the Chiefs by two, and to put his money where his mouth was, Boy-red opted for Denver with a ten-point spread. Nookey held the money. No one came to the Alibi on Friday without cash in their pockets.

  “I hope Jeannie doesn’t find out about this,” Nookey gloomily warned his partner.

  “She’ll find out when I take her out to dinner on La Freek’s Ben Franklin.”

  Frank’s smile was thin and enigmatic. Noah winked at her and said near her ear, “You’re Mona Lisa gone over to the other camp.”

  Her smile widened a bit. She and Noah had been friends for a long time. In the early years he’d had a gentle crush on her, part of the allure being the impossibility of attaining her. The affection that had remained between them was built on mutual trust and admiration.