by Sean Lynch
“What was she wearing?” I tested her. I remembered the photograph adorning Reyna’s shrine.
“She was wearing a pink gown with a crown on her head, you bastard,” she said, beginning to cry. “She was beautiful. My beautiful little girl.”
“And you didn’t see her after the Quinceaneras?”
“I told you. Last time I saw her was at the Yucatan.”
“You know she was out on the Track?”
Carmela’s face snapped up to mine. “No. Not until I was told that’s where she died.” She hung her head again. Tears fell.
This conversation was getting me nowhere. I was beginning to wonder why I’d come in the first place. Ten minutes with Carmela Hernandez and her pal Ernesto and it was crystal clear to me why Reyna Sandoval had been awarded custody of Marisol and Belicia.
I set one of my business cards on a small table. “You think of something helpful, you call me.” Carmela nodded. Ernesto groaned again. I started to leave.
“Hey Mister,” Carmela called out before I reached the door. I turned back around.
“You really going after the Cuca who killed Marisol?”
“I am.”
“When you find him, I hope you kill him.”
Chapter 11
By the time I got home it was raining again; a real soaker. I like the rain, particularly in the evening, and especially when I don’t have to be out working in it. I remember a lot of nights from my days as a cop, shivering in the rain at one crime scene or another. Nights like those you don’t miss, but never forget.
I put some water on the stove for tea and tuned the stereo system to play my Enya collection at random. I have everything Enya’s ever put out, so I had a few hours of auditory serenity on tap. Next I got out my laptop and fired it up. By the time the screen began to glow the water was nearly done. I poured myself some green tea, put on my moccasins and my Firefly hooded sweatshirt, the one with the image of Jayne Cobb on it, and sat down to commence reading. Viva la Browncoats.
I inserted the flash drive Matt Nguyen had given me into the laptop. A few seconds later I was looking at a series of scanned document files; the official record of the death of Marisol Hernandez.
The first file I opened was the beat patrol officer’s initial incident report. It was cursory, as I expected, and essentially documented what time Patrol Officer J. McLaren got the call, when he arrived, and what he found when he got there. His involvement after that was limited to posting up crime scene tape and requesting a supervisor and a detective from Major Crimes Section 1. There was a crime scene log attached to the report which chronicled the parade of police personnel who subsequently entered the scene during the course of the next several hours. These people included a patrol supervisor, several evidence technicians, the Coroner’s deputies, a Vice/Child Exploitation Unit sergeant named Quintana, which would be expected given the location and apparent nature of the homicide, and Major Crimes Section 1 Sergeant Matt Nguyen.
The next file I opened contained a large number of scanned photographs. It’s been said that a picture can say a thousand words; if it’s a crime scene photo, make it a million. Crime scene photography, when done by a professional trained in the craft and with the best digital technology available, can make or break a case. Modern jurors, influenced by the advent of television programs like CSI and its spin-offs, have been known to decide a case on the crime scene imagery alone.
In my time as a cop I’ve viewed too many crime scene photographs to count. While I always prefer to examine a crime scene personally, in addition to the photos, a camera can offer perspective and insight not readily apparent during an initial scene survey. Since I didn’t have the luxury of visiting the scene of Marisol Hernandez’s death on the night it occurred, I was hoping that by studying the crime scene photographs taken by Oakland PD during the course of their homicide investigation I might learn something of use in my own.
There were dozens of photographs in the file. I scrolled through them one by one. The first pictures were taken of the scene as a whole, from a distance, and showed 42nd Avenue and International Boulevard in all its seedy glory.
There were no surprises. It was nighttime. The street and sidewalk were wet. There were a few gawkers, but not as many as you’d expect at a murder scene; a sure indicator of a crime-ridden neighborhood.
In low-crime residential or business districts, street murders are rare. As a result, the denizens inhabiting safer places come out to look when they notice the flashing vehicle lights of paramedics and cops. In Oakland, where street murders aren’t rare, most of the inhabitants stay hidden away and do their watching from windows; too many of them are under the influence or have active arrest warrants. Also, the majority of them don’t want to get observed by their neighbors talking to a cop or being interviewed by a reporter. Being perceived as a snitch isn’t particularly healthy in Oak-Town.
In looking at the panoramic scene photographs, it occurred to me that the pimps and hookers at 42nd and International Boulevard must have been pretty pissed off that Marisol bought the farm in the middle of their marketplace on a weekend night. Her murder effectively shut down the pussy trade in a three-block radius for several hours. All those cops milling about must have sent the Johns running and scattered the B-girls like cockroaches at the scent of insecticide.
The next pictures were of Marisol’s body, and there were a lot of them. As expected, they all showed the same thing from different angles. Whoever took the photographs knew what they were doing.
Marisol was lying supine along the edge of the sidewalk at an approximately forty-five-degree angle from the street. She looked starkly out-of-place on the filthy concrete of International Boulevard. Her brown legs were too clean under a short, tight, Lycra skirt. There were no abrasions on her knees or elbows. Lying as she was, with her legs askance, the skirt was short enough to show her underpants. Her right leg draped over the curb. She was wearing a skin-hugging pink T-shirt, also unsoiled and unwrinkled, with a glitter heart adorning it. The outline of a bra was visible under the shirt.
Just like Matt said, she was wearing backless heels that somehow managed to stay on when she’d fallen. Which meant, also as Matt suggested, Marisol dropped where she was shot. Her pumps were black, and the camera angle allowed me to see the sole of her right shoe dangling over the curb. The underside of the heel was unscuffed. Her toenails were unpainted.
From the neck up, Marisol wasn’t so clean. A tiny entrance wound was evident in her upper chest, on the left side, under her collarbone. It was above the scoop-neck of her shirt, and there were scorch marks along the upper hem where the fabric met the skin. There were also a couple of faint but still-visible horizontal abrasions on her bare chest above her breastbone.
Another slightly larger entrance wound was visible, in her neck, along the left side of her larynx. This one had even more black residue, and the skin surrounding the wound was shredded and seared.
A third entrance wound was at the crown of Marisol’s head. This one was quite distinct, and had all the signs of being a contact shot; where the muzzle of a pistol was pressed against the skull. The skin around the wound was charred and cratered significantly, flaying open a large flap of her forehead right at the hairline and revealing a chunk of white cranial bone. This wound, like the other two, was along the left side of Marisol’s head above the left eye.
Most people’s perception of gunshot wounds comes from Hollywood, where fountains of blood emanate from explosions on the victim’s bodies, leaving circular, cookie-cutter holes. This is done by special effects technicians whose intent is to give the audience a graphic indication of when and where the character is shot.
In reality, entrance wounds can sometimes be difficult to locate until an autopsy is performed. The human body is essentially a meat bag draped over a bone superstructure and filled with fluid. When a bullet enters the body, which is under hydraulic pressure, the skin often closes over the wound, sealing the hole without blood escaping
the entrance point. This is more likely if there is an exit wound, as fluid under pressure will gravitate towards the larger of two outlets. This effect is especially common with lower-velocity projectiles, like handgun bullets, versus the higher-speed projectiles fired from rifle-class firearms. It’s not unheard of to see a .45 caliber bullet enter the body leaving only a small dimple in its wake for an entrance wound. Exit wounds are another story.
Exit wounds are typically much larger than entrance wounds, but not always. And they don’t always produce a massive stream of blood. Sometimes the bleeding occurs almost exclusively internally, and a person can have a through-and-through gunshot wound and produce little or no external bleeding. This was not the case in Marisol Hernandez’s shooting.
Both of Marisol’s sightless eyes were open. Her left eye was black from internal cranial hemorrhage; her right had the pupil blown wide. Under her head and neck was a large puddle of dark blood, already coagulating by the time the photographer captured the image. Her body had acted as a dam, forcing the flow of crimson fluid to follow the outline of her body on the left side and into the gutter of International Boulevard.
Marisol’s hair was worn down, and other than the congealed disarray on the left side of her head, looked like it had been cleaned and combed before she was shot. Her left arm lay across her hip. The fingers on her left hand were dirt-free and none of her unbroken nails were painted. She wore no rings. Her right hand told a different story.
Marisol’s right hand lay palm down at a ninety-degree angle and away from her body. In that position the hand was almost perfectly posed, and the crime scene technician obviously concurred with my assessment since he took a lot of pictures. Like her left hand, Marisol’s right was clean and had unpainted nails. That’s where the similarity ended.
Marisol’s right forefinger was bent at an angle so sharp it could only be broken. I wouldn’t bet that there wasn’t bone protruding from the underside, but I couldn’t see, since her palm was facing down. There was a jagged, crescent-shaped laceration on the knuckle of her forefinger, down to the bone. The inside of her thumb was badly abraded and the thumbnail was split. The web of her hand had a dime-sized scallop of skin missing, and a similar but smaller wound was evident on the middle joint of her middle finger. There wasn’t much blood surrounding the hand wounds, which told me Marisol died quickly after she’d sustained them.
I didn’t see a purse or bag in any of the pictures. I didn’t see a phone.
What I did see, memorialized in those grim photographs, was a pretty, fifteen-year-old, high-school sophomore lying lifeless on an Oakland street corner on a cold January night.
I finished rifling through the rest of the photographs. As the Coroner’s deputies began to move the body, per standard operating procedure, the crime scene technician documented the movement with more photography. Sure enough, when Marisol was turned over, exit wounds, roughly corresponding to the entrance wounds on her opposite side, were discernible. I couldn’t determine how many exit wounds because her entire back was drenched in blood. Particles of brain matter and bone chips matted her hair, which covered what had to be a gaping exit wound.
Also, as I surmised, on the underside of her right hand where the forefinger met the palm, was a well-defined protrusion. Had her heart still been beating for a few more minutes, the protrusion would have been darker and much more swollen.
There were a lot more pictures to go through, from a dozen different angles and distances. In some of them I saw Matt. He looked cold, and like he’d just woken up. In one of them he was talking to a barrel-chested Hispanic cop about our age with sergeant’s stripes on his blue nylon OPD raid jacket. Vice/Child Exploitation Unit Sergeant Quintana, according to the crime scene log.
I finished the photographs and opened the next electronic file on the flash drive. This file contained the preliminary autopsy report prepared by the Alameda County Coroner’s Office. The full and complete autopsy report on the death of Marisol Hernandez wouldn’t be available to Sergeant Matt Nguyen for at least several more weeks, when the results of laboratory and toxicology tests came in.
The preliminary autopsy report could provide a general idea of the cause of death, and was typically completed as soon as possible and made available to investigators. But most good investigators would keep an open mind until the final report was finished and signed off by the Coroner’s Bureau pathologist.
There was good reason; if an autopsy was performed on a person struck by a train, it is not necessarily considered a fact that the train was the cause of death. Maybe the victim was poisoned and the body dumped on the tracks? This wouldn’t be known until the toxicology results came back weeks later.
It was the Coroner’s job to determine the cause of death; what technically killed the victim. It was the police investigator’s job to determine the manner of death; how they died. There were only four categories for manner of death; homicide, suicide, accidental, or natural. All unattended deaths are supposed to be presumed homicides until the investigation is concluded, but some are easier to call than others.
The Coroner could determine forensically if a person was poisoned, for example, but it was up to the cops to figure out if the poisoning was an accident, a suicide, or at the hands of another; a homicide. Marisol Hernandez’s death was a no-brainer. Unless somebody could convincingly demonstrate that she shot herself multiple times, she was murdered.
I’d attended dozens of autopsies during my tenure as a homicide detective, and knew most of the pathologists and Coroner’s deputies assigned there. I recognized the name at the bottom of the report as one of the more senior pathologists. When I cross-checked the dates on the preliminary autopsy report against the initial incident report, I noticed that Marisol’s autopsy was performed four days after her death, and the report completed two days after that. For Oakland, that wasn’t bad.
I digested what facts the report divulged. Marisol Hernandez’s body was 155 centimeters long and weighed 41.2 kilograms. The contents of her stomach included partially-digested remnants of macaroni salad, graham crackers, and fruit juice; a school lunch. One of her lungs was in perfect condition and color; she was clearly not a smoker. Her left lung, however, was torn away from the main bronchus and filled with blood.
In addition to the three gunshot wounds, and the damage to her right hand, there was one other sign of trauma to her body. This damage was not visible externally, and became apparent only after the pathologist cut into the torso and limbs. There was muscle tearing in the anterior portion of her right deltoid, and in the latissimus dorsi muscle under her armpit.
There were no needle marks. I knew the Alameda Coroner’s staff was thorough; if Marisol had any hypodermic injection sites anywhere on her body, such as under the tongue or between the toes, the pathologist would have found them.
Marisol’s lips were clean and undamaged. They were not cracked, chafed, abraded, or blistered. The inside of her mouth showed no sign of abrasions or lesions. The pathologist noted he took oral swabs for potential testing.
Marisol’s vaginal and anal canals were immaculate. Per protocol, combings of her pubic hair and swabs of her vagina and anus were taken, but the report indicated there were no signs of any, much less recent, sexual activity. Her hymen was intact. Her underpants were unsoiled and appeared to have been recently laundered.
Under the ultraviolet light Marisol’s outer clothing and body showed no indication of ejaculatory fluid residue. The report noted all her clothing had been collected and tagged as evidence. Scrapings of her fingernails were taken as well but the pathologist noted no telltale residue on visual inspection.
The pathologist determined Marisol had indeed been shot three times. As I’d noted from the crime scene photographs, one bullet struck her in the upper torso, one in the throat/neck area, and one at crown of her head near the hairline; all three entrance wounds were located on the left hemisphere of her body.
The two bullets entering Marisol’s neck and he
ad exited on approximately the opposite side of her body from the entrance wounds and were consequently not recovered. Those two projectiles could have ended up anywhere, and a search for them in the vicinity of 42nd Avenue and International Boulevard would be folly. The bullet which tore through her skull followed an oblique angle from the front-left portion of her forehead where it entered, to the base of her neck where it exited. This bullet cut a channel through her frontal, temporal, and occipital lobes and was denoted by the pathologist as an, “…instantaneously, non-survivable, wound creating an injury inconsistent with life.” You had to love the lingo; legally sound and antiseptic at the same time.
The bullet which entered Marisol’s upper left torso struck the collarbone, deflected downwards, and tunneled vertically until it collided with the point where the main bronchus intersects the lung. This wound was also listed by the pathologist as non-survivable.
Unlike the other two bullets which entered Marisol’s body, this one remained within her. It was recovered in the lung. The projectile was listed as an, “… alloy-jacketed, hollow-point, bullet weighing 11.24 grams.” That weight would make it close enough, after deformation, to be an approximately 180 grain .40 caliber bullet. Hopefully there was enough left of the slug for a NIBIN search.
All of the evidence items recovered from Marisol excluding her corpse, such as the bullet, clothing, and tissue swabs, were turned over to the custody of the police investigator assigned to the case. In this instance, Oakland Police Sergeant Matt Nguyen signed for the items. It would be at his discretion whether to have further forensic testing completed by the Alameda County Crime Laboratory.
