Exposure

by Alan Russell

  The big man lashed out with his oversized right boot, trying to knock Jaeger’s feet from under him, but again didn’t connect. For someone so large he was agile, but still all too predictable.

  Jaeger pulled out two stilettos, but instead of brandishing their points he extended their handles. “Your choice of weapons,” he said.

  Red shook his head. He didn’t really smile, but he showed his teeth. “Don’t need to choose,” he said. “I’ve got my own.”

  He pulled up his T-shirt. A scabbard hung from the inside of his dirty jeans. He yanked at the hasp and pulled out an enormous bowie knife.

  Red ran a mocking finger down his face. “It’s time to give you another fucking scar on that face of yours.”

  Jaeger’s scar was prominent, stretching down from his cheek almost to his mouth, a long, white line that marred his otherwise handsome features.

  “I learned from that mistake,” Jaeger said. He flipped both stilettos in the air and caught them by their handles. He pocketed one in a waistband sheath, then held the other out almost casually. He waited for the other man to make his move, his knees and shoulders slightly bent.

  It was a truly enormous man against one little more than average-sized. In comparison to the thin little stiletto, the bowie knife looked monstrous.

  The contest was hardly fair. Red, with his long reach, lunged. Jaeger slipped inside and let Red’s thrust do most of his work for him. Red looked at his own chest in disbelief. He couldn’t see any rip in his shirt, and reached down and felt where the blade had entered. There was just a little blood, yet something was very wrong. Red had once taken two bullets, but it was the shooter who ended up going to the ICU, not him.

  The fight wasn’t over, Red thought. It couldn’t be. They hadn’t really even started yet. Red took a step toward Jaeger, and then another. He staggered, then dropped to one knee. His body had never failed him. He tried to rise, almost succeeded, but then fell over.

  Jaeger used a fireman’s hold to drag Red over to his van. He opened its back doors, pulled down a hydraulic lift, then rolled Red’s body atop it. Jaeger pushed up and down, grunting like a power lifter, and Red rose. When he was level with the open van doors, Jaeger pushed him into the back. Red didn’t seem to want to roll, so Jaeger made a few adjustments not found in any chiropractor’s handbook, and then shut the doors.

  The easy part of the job was done. The goose still needed to be stuffed. Jaeger would have to be careful there. First he’d have to hollow out that enormous chest, taking out the heart, lungs, and liver, and much of the subcutaneous fat. And then he would replace the innards with Semtex.

  Plastic surgery, thought Jaeger. Plastic explosive surgery. And after all that, he’d still have to go out and kill someone else.

  But then tomorrow was another day.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  The body was found in a parking lot just outside of LA’s Elysian Park. It was situated little more than a mile away from the LA Police Academy, almost as if to taunt the future officers. The first person to see the body was a homeless man who was out collecting cans. He didn’t know if the man was dead or not, and didn’t get close enough to find out. Even in death, the very size of the man was intimidating. The homeless man knew this wasn’t someone he wanted to encounter dead or alive. He pushed hard at his shopping cart to get away as quickly as possible.

  The second person to witness the body sighted him from the safety of his car. He drove close enough to get a good look, but at the same time made sure all his doors were locked. Then he called 9-1-1 from his cell phone and said, “Either I’m looking at a tattooed beached whale or an incredibly large body.” As the Pacific Ocean was about fifteen miles from where he was calling, the dispatcher assumed he was reporting on something human.

  The first cop on the scene amplified on the caller’s remarks. After securing the scene for the homicide detectives, he contacted the coroner’s office: “Better bring an industrial-strength gurney. You’re going to be bringing in Shamu.”

  The homicide detectives spent some time examining the victim. They found not only the small wound to his heart, but two larger wounds, one a deep cut into his navel and the surrounding stomach area, and the other a “necktie” gash along the throat. The victim’s license identified him as Frank Kurtz. He was the same Frank Kurtz with half a dozen arrests ranging from assault to trafficking controlled substances. Truth be told, the detectives couldn’t care less that another scumbag had died, but they still were damn curious about the wounds on his body.

  With gloves on, Detective Ken Connelly studied the cuts. Kibitzing over his shoulder was Detective Mike Kuhlken. “Major overkill,” said Connelly. He pointed to the victim’s upper chest. “I’d bet this one was the only stab wound.” His hand pointed to the throat and then the navel. “These other cuts look almost surgical.”

  “Postmortem? Ritualistic?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they just wanted to make sure he was dead. Guy this big, you can’t take chances.”

  “Probably drug-related. Frankie’s no stranger to dealing. Maybe he was skimming from his biker buddies. I’d bet four or five were in on it.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Hell, it’d take at least that many just to get his carcass into a car.”

  “Whoa!” Connelly brought his head down next to the body.

  “What?”

  “Stitches. Someone sewed this guy back up!”

  Ross Brockman came on the scene just as Connelly made his discovery. The LA coroner’s investigator had been working his job for a dozen years, and while he’d seen corpses even larger, he had never seen a body that presented itself like this one. The victim’s wounds had been sewed up with a virtually transparent nylon thread. The stitches were tightly spaced and showed an almost surgical precision.

  As an investigator, he was supposed to examine the decedent, but only superficially. The in-depth work would have to wait for the laboratory. Brockman documented the scene with photos and sketches, did a fruitless walk around in search of witnesses, then scratched his head alongside of the homicide detectives.

  “Lab boys are going to like this one,” Brockman said.

  “Glad somebody will,” said Kuhlken.

  “You done with the body?” Brockman asked.

  With an exaggerated magnanimous gesture, Connelly said, “He’s all yours.”

  Brockman signaled the body detail, a moment the man and woman team had been dreading.

  Adnan Fayed shook his head. “I got a bad back,” he said. His dark Semitic face was already winced in pain.

  “I don’t,” Emerita Suarez said. She was oversized herself, but nowhere near the biker’s league. “But I got a feeling that’s about to change.”

  They collapsed the gurney. Compressed, it folded down to no more than eight inches off the ground, but the distance still seemed daunting.

  The homicide detectives came over to offer advice, if not assistance. Kuhlken said, “You guys gotta do the clean and jerk, you know, like those weight lifters.”

  The woman offered a less than respectful look at the dead. “No, we gonna have to jerk the jerk.”

  “Leverage,” said the other detective. “That’s the key.”

  “In this case,” said Brockman, “the key is having a bulldozer.”

  “Mohammed went to the mountain,” Fayed said. It was hard to tell by his words if he was offering a prayer, or a curse, or signifying his own approach to the mountain.

  “I’ll help,” said Brockman.

  Dead weight isn’t merely an expression. The three of them worked on that dead weight, putting their all into moving Kurtz. He was as stubborn dead as he had been alive. Working as a unit, they managed to roll him forward. For a moment the corpse threatened a Sisyphean ending, almost dropping off the gurney, but with shaky arms they were able to steady their load.


  Detectives Kuhlken and Connelly offered polite applause.

  Jaeger knew when the body was rolling. Inside its flesh he had planted a transmitter/receiver. The timing, as he had hoped, looked perfect.

  The second—and more important—body had already been collected. That’s where his attention had been directed. Now there would be a confluence of the dead.

  The Los Angeles County Department of Medical Examiner-Coroner, what everyone called the LA coroner’s office, was a busy place. Every half hour of every day the investigators handled a new case, and on any given day twenty autopsies took place in the North Mission Road building. With over ten million people living in LA County, and two hundred people dying daily within its borders, the numbers weren’t altogether surprising.

  From the first, Jaeger had faced the stumbling block of the coroner’s office. The pathologists and medical technicians were very good at their jobs. Given a chance, it was likely they would have questions about the other victim. They couldn’t have that. It was upon that death, Monroe had told him, that everything else was being built.

  Getting into the coroner’s office would have been problematic, if not impossible. The guards could have been bypassed, but not the video cameras. And all attention would have focused on that one victim. The evidence needed to disappear, but he couldn’t snatch the body. That would be too obvious, and raise too much attention.

  That was the last thing they wanted.

  Jaeger had given considerable thought to the problem, looking for a back door. Invariably, there was a back door. And then it became obvious: the living weren’t welcome at the LA coroner’s office, but the dead were.

  All Jaeger needed was the right Trojan horse.

  Jaeger had done a detailed study of the 55,000-square-foot four-story building. He learned its routines and how incoming bodies were handled. The dead were taken to a staging room, the coroner’s Forensic Science Center, where they were fingerprinted and weighed. After personal effects were inventoried, the police signed off on the belongings. Then photographers took pictures of the body, both clothed and unclothed. After that the decedent was stored in a huge walk-in refrigerator, one of three so-called cold storage rooms, along with the rest of the dead.

  It was possible they would want to process his Trojan horse more quickly than most bodies. His biker might not have to wait the day or two that most homicides did. They would probably earmark his autopsy—or toe mark it—for Room B, the so-called VIP room. But in the meantime they would still take him to one of the cold storage rooms.

  Jaeger was counting on protocol. It would be unlikely for them to fluoroscope the victim until just before the autopsy was to take place.

  He drove toward the coroner’s office. Jaeger was in no hurry. It would take about two hours for the body to be processed. After that it would be housed above the subbasement on the Security and Service floor. There was no vantage point into that floor, but there were some good inconspicuous spots that afforded him a view of the off-white coroner’s building. If at any point it appeared that the beehive was agitated, that his Trojan horse had been discovered, he would abort the mission and walk away.

  Blackwell had been adamant about that. He always was. Anonymity was the first rule. The second rule was compartmentalizing all tasks. Jaeger knew what he had to do, even if he didn’t always know how it fit in Blackwell’s scheme.

  It hadn’t been easy stuffing the biker full of Semtex. First he’d had to do some draining and clearing out of the body, and that was only the beginning. After filling the biker’s stomach cavity with plastic explosive, he’d carefully wired the Semtex to the detonator.

  Jaeger got off the interstate and drove along North Mission. With time to kill, he stopped at a McDonald’s and had a leisurely lunch before continuing on to the coroner’s office. He found a space on the street near enough to see the building, but far enough away from any potential surveillance cameras. The transmitter/receiver was working perfectly. It told him what he needed to know: the biker’s body was inside the building.

  So was the other body.

  Fifteen more minutes, Jaeger decided. He drove a dozen blocks, passing by Juvenile Hall and Lincoln Park, before reversing direction. Fourteen minutes later he parked on the street again and appeared to be consulting a map. The coroner’s office, what some referred to as the “Monument of Death,” was as quiet as could be expected. Jaeger couldn’t discern any unusual activity. To someone who didn’t know any better, the coroner’s office could have passed for a small hospital.

  Jaeger got back on the road again. He was two blocks away when he activated the signal. His windows were down, and in the distance he heard a rumbling. From where he was, it sounded like thunder. Clear skies belied that possibility.

  The building wouldn’t be totaled, but the cold storage rooms would now be history. All the bodies housed within would be vaporized. The pieces of human remains would be microscopic. The wreckage would rival that of a crashed airliner.

  Their victim was the new Humpty Dumpty. Even if they somehow identified him, they wouldn’t be able to put him back together, or at least not in such a way as to jeopardize Blackwell’s plan. The history of his death would forever remain a mystery.

  There was only one thing more to do: Jaeger needed to make a call claiming responsibility for the bombing. More misdirection.

  In the distance, sirens started wailing. Several dogs joined in the chorus, their howls loud and lachrymose. It was, thought Jaeger, a chorus for the dead—the now very, very dead.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  “Is this Graham Wells? The photographer?”

  He was used to being called worse. “Speaking.”

  “This is Tina Wiggins. You probably don’t remember me, but we talked a few months ago at the Paramount reception.”

  Graham had no idea who she was, but pretended he did. While making friendly patter, he typed Tina’s name into his phone to see if she was in his contacts. Bingo. She was there. Collecting names was his business, and Graham’s database was extensive. Stars and power brokers were few, but their underlings were many, and everywhere. They were the eyes and ears Graham counted upon.

  Tina was one of Lanie Byrne’s assistants. In Hollywood parlance, the title of “assistant” could mean anything from secretary, to maid, to au pair, to personal trainer, to sex slave. The title that really mattered was Lanie Byrne. She was gold, at the top of the “A” list. Lanie was more than the actress du jour. She was that rarity, a commercial and artistic success. Her star had risen to the point where she was a one-namer—Lanie—and even that was being abbreviated. Now many were calling her “Miss L.” They could have pronounced it “missile” the way her career was rocketing.

  Graham hoped Tina was still working for Lanie. Current contacts were best, though he was more than willing to settle for a “someone done me wrong” song.

  “The last time we talked,” Graham said, “you were working for Lanie.”

  Her answer was soft, tentative: “I still am.”

  Graham needed to get Tina talking without scaring her. He had to warm her cold feet.

  “I hear she can be difficult.”

  A laugh. “No comment.”

  “I hope when she gets her next Oscar she remembers you in her acceptance speech.”

  “Fat chance.”

  The resentment was there on the tip of Tina’s tongue. It just needed a little push to come spilling out.

  “Well, at least you get the big bucks.”

  “I wish.”

  Most stars have their employees sign nondisclosure contracts. This means their employees aren’t supposed to say word one about their employer during, or after, their term of employment. Graham had yet to see the contract that kept an employee from talking.

  “In fact, that’s sort of what I was calling you about,” Tina said. “The last
time we talked you gave me your card.”

  Some people chase ambulances for a living. Graham chased stars. He didn’t think there was much difference between the two trades, though ambulance chasers would probably take umbrage at the comparison. Graham passed out a lot of cards.

  “And,” continued Tina, “you said that I could make some extra income by providing you with certain information.”

  “Cash sent to the address of your choice.”

  “What kind of money are we talking about?”

  “It all depends on the payoff. I need to get something I can sell, preferably an exclusive. If it’s good, your finder’s fee can be quite substantial. You’re like a film agent. You get your ten percent.”

  “Ten percent of how much?”

  “I know photographers who have gotten more than a million dollars for a single picture.”

  And he had photographed people who had won the lottery. Sometimes the one in a million shot happened, but it was the rare picture or pictures that commanded more than five figures, let alone six or seven. That wasn’t something Graham wanted to emphasize.

  “See,” he explained, “I submit my work to my film agency, and they peddle the product worldwide. Money comes from the initial sale. And then there’s always reprints. Some shots have legs. They bring in money for years to come, and sometimes that lets me play Santa Claus for a long time.”

  “But you only pay me if something pans out?”

  “That’s right.”

  She thought about it. Graham didn’t want her to think very long. He sensed that Tina had something good. There was a pearl awaiting just a little shell prying.

  “Anything you tell me gets locked in the vault,” Graham said. “I never reveal a confidential source.”

  “I live out at the Grove,” Tina said. “That’s what we call Lanie’s estate in Malibu.”

  She stopped talking again.

  “Nice digs,” Graham said. “I’ve seen pictures of the place. It looks more like Xanadu than the Grove.”