Jarsdel found his gaze drifting back to the body. He tried to imagine who the man had been and how he’d come to deserve—according to someone’s peculiar logic—this particularly gruesome end.
“Gonna go look for my partner.” Jarsdel stepped outside. The fresh air felt good. So did being away from that grinning thing in the tent.
He spotted Morales on the other side of the pagoda, conferring with an FSD tech. The man was his partner but also his superior, a fifteen-year veteran with the LAPD—six of those in homicide. He was squat, dark-skinned, with a broad face and almond eyes. His coarse black hair was swept back into a stiff, unmoving helmet with what Jarsdel supposed must have been handfuls of styling gel. When he walked—which he avoided doing as much as possible—he did so stiffly, like a retired athlete who’d amassed a catalogue of injuries.
Morales saw Jarsdel approaching. “Hey, Prof.”
Jarsdel smiled without humor. “Morales.”
“You know Carl? He’s doing our sketch.”
Jarsdel shook hands with the FSD tech, who went back to drawing on a tablet with a stylus. The tablet was a recent innovation. Crime scene sketches had always been done by hand, maybe with the aid of a compass to get the scale right. But technicians with the Forensic Science Division used software like ScenePD or Crime Zone, allowing them to create crisp and accurate diagrams of even the most complex scenes in a matter of minutes. And while all officers were trained in sketching a crime scene, the FSD’s work was usually more impressive to a jury. Its members were considered impartial specialists, with no particular stake in the direction an investigation went. That made it harder for defense attorneys to cast them as bad guys out to get their clients.
Jarsdel moved closer and looked over Carl’s shoulder as he drew. “I know we’ve got lots of reference pictures, but I want as much detail on the altar as you can get.”
Morales looked dubious. “This pagoda thing? You think it’s important?”
“I think it’s the most startling aspect of the case.”
“Startling, huh? Shit, Professor. You oughta take a look at the body, you want startling.”
“I already have.”
“But this is what gets your attention.”
“The body was posed right in front of it. I doubt that was arbitrary.”
Morales grunted and studied the pagoda more closely. The head that sprouted from the golden statue’s neck featured four faces. “What do you think, Buddha? You an integral part of this investigation?”
Jarsdel glanced up from the tablet. “That’s not Buddha. He’s Phra Phrom, the Thai representation of Brahma.”
“Who cares?”
“It’s not a minor distinction. Brahma’s a Hindu god, much older than the Buddha. Different cosmology and way of worship. If leaving the body here has any significance, it lies in the killer’s understanding of who this god is.”
“So what, like, people used to sacrifice to this guy?”
Jarsdel frowned. “No, not at all. That’s what’s so strange. Brahma’s the god of creation, a force of good, of benevolence. He’s never associated with harm or destruction.”
“So maybe it’s just a coincidence the body being here, and your theory’s bullshit.”
“Possible.”
“Besides, I thought your specialty was dead white guys.”
“My bachelor’s was in political science. Had to take classes in cultural literacy.” Morales rolled his eyes, but Jarsdel pretended he didn’t notice. “It was a deeply cynical and profane thing to do, dumping the body here.”
“Not to mention killing the guy in the first place, though, right?”
Jarsdel looked around. “How are we doing on surveillance cameras?”
Morales pointed to the Thai market, which would normally be open by now. “Just one, but it’s trained at an angle on the door. Wouldn’ta captured anything near the altar. Might be able to get something off a traffic camera, but it’s a real long shot. Closest one is three blocks east, so unless the body was strapped to the roof of the car on its way over here, I don’t know what we’d be looking for.”
Carl, the FSD tech, turned his tablet so Jarsdel could get another look at it. “What do you think?” He rotated the image and zoomed in and out on various points of interest. He’d rendered the image without the privacy tent, of course, and had placed the body exactly as it lay at the foot of the altar.
Jarsdel nodded his approval. “Good. Send it to me.”
Another FSD man approached the detectives. “I think we’re done. Got a few cigarette butts, a flattened Coke can, some chewing gum. Scene’s pretty clean. The pagoda’s covered with prints, but it’s a public street. Anyone could’ve left them. I’m ready to release the scene if you are.”
Ipgreve emerged from the tent, peeling off his gloves. “We gotta get him indoors,” he said. “You almost done?”
Morales turned to Jarsdel. “Well, Prof? We good here?”
“Why are you asking me?”
“Want you to take lead for now.”
“Why?”
Morales paused, studying his partner. “Chain of command, rookie. Sounds like you got some specialized knowledge to offer on this case. Put some of that schooling to work.” Morales gave him a saccharine smile. “Look on the bright side. When we find the asshole, you can be the one to make the report to the LT. Maybe even get another chevron on your jacket.”
Jarsdel knew the inverse of the statement was equally true: that if they didn’t find the asshole, he’d be the one having to justify their investigative strategy to Lieutenant Gavin. And Gavin didn’t like him any more than Morales did.
A news copter had joined them, beating the air overhead and forcing those on the ground to shout to be heard. Jarsdel looked from his partner to the mass of people pressed against the barricade, then past them, to the crush of traffic struggling up Western. A street vendor was taking advantage of the captive potential customers, moving up and down the rows of cars with bags of cotton candy. Haarmann’s prisoner was bucking back and forth in the patrol car. Seeing Jarsdel looking at him, the man stopped, shouted something, and stuck out his tongue. It was a child’s gesture and felt strange and ugly coming from a grown man.
“You home, Professor?” asked Morales.
Jarsdel gave a slight nod, looking once more at the statue of Brahma, likely the only witness to the identity of the murderer. He’d sat the night in vigil, in quiet contemplation, tranquil as a frozen lake even while confronted with the astounding savagery visited upon one of his children. Jarsdel felt a sudden sense of shame on behalf of his species, who’d been given so much and repaid it all with blood and steel.
But look, he thought at the statue. I care. I’m here, and I’ll make it right. Just give us a little longer to push back the darkness.
Chapter 2
They watched as the ME slipped paper bags over the corpse’s hands, preserving any potential physical evidence, and secured them at the wrists with rubber bands. “I’ll try to raise his prints back at the lab, but don’t hold your breath. He’s pretty badly burned.”
“You’re tellin’ me,” said Morales. “Smells just like carnitas. I’ll never be able to eat that shit again, goddamn it.” He shook his head. “Just a week from my pension, and I get a case like this.”
Ipgreve looked surprised. “You’re pulling the pin? I thought you were sticking till mandatory retirement.”
“It’s a joke, man. You know, every cop movie ever.”
“Oh. I get it.”
“Can you get to him today?” Jarsdel asked, nodding at the body.
“Oh, for sure,” said the ME. “I’ll have to move some guys around, but I wanna hear what this one’s gotta say.” Ipgreve waved away a fat blowfly, which flew neatly into the John Doe’s left eye socket.
A thought occurred to Jarsdel—at this time yesterday,
whoever that was lying there had been up and walking around, alive, thinking about his lunch or his job or his girlfriend. Now he had a bluebottle dancing around in his skull.
Morales grimaced and bent to massage his leg.
“Knees again, huh?” said Ipgreve. “Pressure change with the weather, probably. Those can be a bitch. You want something for that?”
“No. Thanks.”
“Sure? Just because all my patients are dead doesn’t mean I’m not a real doctor. I can write you a scrip.”
“I’m fine.”
Several more flies joined the cadaver as it was zipped into the body bag. Coroner’s assistants began taking apart the privacy tent, and the John Doe was lifted onto a stretcher. As it was loaded into the back of a van bound for the LA morgue, the crowd gathered at the police barricade fell briefly silent.
Jarsdel checked his notes. “I want to talk to the caller, the special effects guy. Dustin Sparks.”
“It’s your show, man. Do what you think is best,” said Morales.
“You wouldn’t start there?”
“I’m following your lead, Prof.”
Jarsdel sighed. “He’s got an apartment on Winona. That’s only a couple blocks away. Be easier to walk it in this traffic.” He regretted the words as soon as they were out. “Sorry, I mean, we can—”
“You wanna walk, we can walk,” Morales said.
The two men signed out at the crime scene log and headed east, brushing off a reporter from KCAL9 who’d camped out on the Harvard side of the barricade. They walked in silence, passing a junior market, an Armenian bakery, and a florist with a going out of business sign in the window.
Finally, Jarsdel spoke up. “Look, I want to be partners on this. You want me to take lead, that’s fine, but it’s important we work together. If you have better ideas than I do, I hope you’ll share them with me.”
Morales feigned puzzlement. “You mean it’s possible I might have a better idea than you? Even without a PhD? That doesn’t seem like—how’d you put it?—a minor distinction.”
The walk was already taking its toll. Morales had developed a limp, and patches of sweat dampened his dress shirt.
“Hey,” said Jarsdel. “I was reading the new book about the Bell Gardens Butcher. I didn’t know it was your idea to use low-angle sun photography to find the burial sites. That was clever.”
“I have my moments.”
“You know, that’s one of the ways they find Roman walls. Or where they used to be, I mean. The earth is so compacted in those areas that even though the stones may be gone now, you can see the impressions they made. Take a picture in the morning and compare it to one taken at dusk, and they just pop out of the landscape.”
Morales didn’t respond. They turned on Winona and soon located the apartment building, a shabby, three-story box painted a fecal shade of tan. A metalwork sign bolted to the facade identified the complex as the Winona Chalet. There was no buzzer or directory, just a locked iron gate protecting the meager courtyard from trespassers. Jarsdel referred again to his notes, found Sparks’s number, and dialed it on his cell. The voice that answered was wary.
“Yeah, who’s this?”
“Mr. Sparks, this is Detective Jarsdel, LAPD. We’re hoping you wouldn’t mind coming downstairs and answering a few questions.”
“If you’re another reporter, I’m going to be supremely pissed off.”
“No, sir, not reporters. My partner and I are here at the gate. We’d like to talk to you if we can.”
Sparks hesitated. “Fine, whatever,” he said and hung up.
Jarsdel and Morales waited only about a minute, but the strained silence made it seem longer. Morales had wrapped his stubby fingers around one of the gate’s rods, taking some of the pressure off his legs, and was staring fixedly at the building’s double glass doors. Jarsdel considered whether it might be time to request a transfer to a different partner, then dismissed the idea. Few other things would be more harmful to his career, especially considering a mere eleven months had passed since he’d been promoted to the Detective Bureau. If he complained he couldn’t get along with Morales, he’d be branded a whiner, and no one would want to work with him.
The man who emerged from the building didn’t look at all the way Jarsdel imagined he would. According to the 911 operator, Dustin Sparks had been out for a jog when he’d come across the body, but this man was sallow and heavyset, wearing a faded Iron Maiden T-shirt, black cargo shorts, and unlaced combat boots. A greasy comb-over of dyed-black hair was doing its best to cover his bald crown.
“I need to see some ID,” Sparks said as he approached.
Jarsdel and Morales held out their badges. Sparks scrutinized them. “Not sure I’m buying it. How do I know what those things are supposed to look like?”
Morales drew his jacket aside, letting Sparks see his .45 Kimber Classic. That seemed to convince him.
“I take it you’ve been having problems with the press,” said Jarsdel.
“Uh, yeah, that’s one way to put it. I don’t know how you guys run your investigations or whatever, but now I’ve got reporters calling me every five seconds.”
“I’m very sorry about that. High-profile cases like this tend to spring leaks. That’s why it’s so important for us to get to you before anyone else does and to advise you not to discuss what you saw with the media.”
“Free country, though, right? ’Specially if they’re paying.”
“That’s up to you, yes. But there may be aspects about what you witnessed that could help us catch the perpetrator. If we can withhold that information from the public, we’d have something we could use to identify a suspect.”
“You keep calling me a witness,” said Sparks, dragging his fingers through his hair. “But it’s not like I actually saw anything happen. I probably wasn’t even the first person to see the body—just unlucky enough to be the one to call it in to you guys.”
“Mr. Sparks, would you mind if we continued this conversation in your apartment?”
“Why? We’re fine here.”
Jarsdel glanced at Morales, who looked amused, and turned back to Sparks. “It’s kind of an awkward way to conduct an interview—you on one side of the gate, us on the other.”
“I told you, there’s nothing to interview about. I saw the body, I called you guys.”
Jarsdel produced his notepad. “You mentioned to the 911 operator that you work as a special effects technician and that’s how you were able to determine the body wasn’t just some sort of Halloween dummy, is that right?”
“Yeah.”
Jarsdel made a note. “And you were out taking a jog?”
“Yeah. So?”
Jarsdel made another note, this time deliberately writing for longer than the answer seemed to deserve. “About what time did you leave your apartment this morning?”
Sparks shifted from foot to foot. “Uh, I don’t know. I don’t usually check the clock before I go out to exercise.”
“So you exercise regularly?”
“Sometimes.”
“How many days a week you go jogging?”
“I don’t know. Three or four.”
“Always around the same time?”
“Usually just after I wake up.”
“Good, so what time do you wake up?”
“I don’t know. Different times, depending on the day.”
Jarsdel watched him closely. The man’s affect was flat; he stared straight ahead at the detectives, unblinking, and didn’t use his hands or arms while he spoke. His answers, too, had no life in them, no animation in the eyes as the memories were recalled.
“On days you don’t exercise, what time do you wake up?”
“I have no idea. Eight. Probably eight.”
“But the 911 call came in at just after six, so today, you’d have h
ad to leave pretty early, correct?”
Sparks shrugged, and Jarsdel made more notes.
“Describe your route.”
“My route?”
“Your jogging route.”
“My jogging route,” Sparks repeated, as if the words were strange and new.
“In other words, did you come upon the body along the first or second half of your route?”
“On my way back.”
“In your call, you mentioned a coyote. Was it already there, or—”
“No, it showed up right then, right as I was standing there.”
“And about how long had you been out before you saw the body?”
“I don’t know. Ten, fifteen minutes.”
Jarsdel paused, fixing Sparks with a look of weary skepticism. He had no reason to single out that particular answer for scrutiny; his aim was to give the man a long, uncomfortable gap he’d be compelled to fill with more words. Words were bindings, sure as a set of irons, but ones provided by the subjects themselves. Jarsdel sometimes even imagined them springing from the speakers’ mouths and wrapping around their bodies. The point was to get as many words said as possible. Truth or lies didn’t matter—just get them said and get the story locked down. The more words, the tighter and more numerous the bonds.
Sparks was uneasy. “What? I mean I’m not totally sure about the time. It was early.”
“Did you approach the body from the east or west?”
“I’m not good with those kinds of things.”
“Did you see the body while going toward Thailand Plaza from the direction of Winona or coming the other way, from Western Avenue?”
“Oh. From Western.”
“From the north or south side of the street?”
“I just told you, I’m not—”
“Did you see the body from across the street, then go over to take a closer look, or were you already on the same side of the street the body was on?”
One Day You'll Burn Page 2
