And if the female partner later said she also had to pee, the training officer might drive straight back to the bush and say, “Your turn.”
In those days she almost got urinary-tract infections just from holding it in.
When she was a rookie she could take it with teeth clenched and a tight smile. She remembered one sergeant in particular, who liked to read crimes at lineup and make comments to humiliate the women. He’d read them one about a forced oral copulation where the suspect beat the crap out of his victim because she wouldn’t swallow. Then he’d turned to Anne and said, “Do you swallow, Officer?”
She’d been young and green and shocked. Her heart had started pounding. A dozen uniformed men had turned to look at her—and waited.
Finally she’d replied, “How do you think I got my creamy complexion?”
Some of the men had accepted her on the spot. But it had been a heavy price to pay. Many times since then she’d fantasized that she had said, “Swallow this.” And thrown her coffee in his face.
Clever responses like that had later cost plenty in the regrets department. During those years, whenever she’d get teamed with a real harasser, she’d had to figure out ways to discourage the asshole without getting him fired, and it hadn’t been easy.
When Anne had announced to her then husband—a patrol officer in Southern Division—that she was going to try for SWAT, he’d smiled condescendingly and said, “Sure you are.”
Then he’d realized that she was dead serious, didn’t smile at all, and said, “The fuck you are!”
But she had applied. During grueling tests she’d competed with men who’d puked their guts out on the dreaded “four-forty run,” a quarter of a mile flat-out.
“And what’s your time?” the SWAT trainer had always asked her after the run. Then, “Oh, how nice. Now gimme some pull-ups. All the way up. Dead man’s pull-ups!”
Having a baby had altered her body for a year, but SWAT training had brought it all back, hard as a lawyer’s heart—to the point that her upper body even got a bit too well developed.
She’d beaten out a lot of SWAT applicants, guys who’d refused to train and practice the four-forty and the pull-ups. She’d practiced. Her hands had looked like chopped sirloin from all the training, until at last she could pump out twenty. All the way down. All the way up. Dead man’s pull-ups.
The SWAT trainer, who she thought hadn’t liked her, had paid her his ultimate compliment when she’d pulled number twenty. He’d pointed to a dozen men lying exhausted on the ground and said, “You’re a better man than they are, Gunga Din.”
By the time Anne arrived at the call-out scene, yellow tape had been strung across the walk-in gate. There were two patrol units and a patrol sergeant, along with an evidence tech, her team sergeant, and one of her team members. A young patrolman approached her car, saw the police badge hanging from the shoulder strap on her purse, and shone his flashlight beam on a vacant parking space behind a media van.
The media often got to major crime scenes before the detectives by monitoring the police frequency with scanners. Anne hated the sight of that periscope pole and satellite dish, but she preferred cub reporters with videocams to the prima donnas who’d steal it all away at air time. She called all cub reporters of either sex “Jimmy Olson” after the Superman character.
Sal Maldonado was standing inside the tape at the bottom of the stairwell and he pointed downward as she approached. A stream of clotting blood ran from the bottom of the steps to the seam in the pool decking and out into a planter full of hydrangeas near the swimming-pool gate.
Sal nodded his head in the direction of a patrol sergeant, who was knocking on doors at the far side of the swimming pool.
He said to Anne, “Yupster sergeant. Wants to help but thinks bite marks are things on a computer. I told him to knock on doors and find us a witness. Didn’t have the heart to send him home.”
“Where’s the woman who called in?” Anne asked.
“Upstairs, right,” he said. “The boss wants you to talk to her. Take the other staircase.”
He shone his light onto the stairwell and lit up the body of Dawn Coyote. She lay halfway up the steps on her back, her little skirt hiked above her red lace panties. A coil of intestine, pink as bubble gum, lay on her thin milky thigh.
Sal moved the beam to her blue eyes, which were wide open. “Let’s get a picture of her eyeballs, Eddie,” he called to the evidence tech working gingerly on the stairwell. “The image of the killer’s in them.”
“Sure,” said Eddie. “Why didn’t I think of that?”
“The motive wasn’t robbery,” Sal Maldonado told Anne, playing his beam over the crotch of Dawn’s panties. “When I first saw that bulge I thought she was a transvestite. Until I saw the face of Alexander Hamilton peeking out at me from inside her panty leg.”
“The girl was a hooker, all right,” Anne Zorn said.
The most pathetic thing about the murder scene was the victim’s toenails. She’d lost one shoe and the red enamel on her toenails was chipped and cracked. Anne knew that she’d remember the girl’s toenails long after she forgot the rest of it.
“So fill me in on what we know,” she said.
—
Blaze had been alone for nearly an hour since the first cop had arrived on the scene and taken the preliminary report. A detective sergeant had appeared next and introduced himself, but he said he’d be sending another detective to talk to her. Since then she’d had three cups of coffee even though a cup and a half with her morning cereal was her daily limit. Well, she wouldn’t be sleeping, anyway, not even after they took Dawn away. Not even after the cops were all gone.
She put a cardigan on over the sweatshirt, but she was still cold. It was after 3:00 A.M. when she heard a soft knock at the door.
Blaze opened it and was surprised to see a tall woman in a tailored jacket and skirt and low-heeled pumps. She was carrying a clipboard, and a badge was attached to the shoulder strap of her purse. She was rather attractive in a no-nonsense way, and Blaze could see at once that she was very fit for someone who was fortysomething.
The woman said, “Ms. Singleton? I’m Detective Anne Zorn. I have a few questions.”
“Come in,” Blaze said. “Sit there on the sofa. Can I get you some coffee?”
“If it’s already made,” Anne said. “Black, please.”
“It is,” Blaze said, going into the kitchenette while Anne did what all cops do. She looked around the room.
It was tidy, cheaply decorated but with some taste. There was a California impressionist lithograph hanging over the sofa. The furniture was a mixed bag of contemporary with one antique: a little hall tree so scaled down that it looked feminine. A nice, tidy little apartment.
When Blaze returned with the coffee, she said, “I can’t tell you much.”
“I know,” Anne said, “I’ve already chatted with the patrol officer who responded to your call.”
“Have they determined who the girl is yet?”
“She had no purse,” Anne said. “Do you have any idea?”
“None at all,” Blaze said.
“You saw her then? The body?”
“Well, no, but the second police officer said she was a young blond woman. We don’t have any young blond women living on this floor.”
“Do you have any young blond friends?”
“No.”
“Acquaintances?”
“No.”
“There’re six units on this floor, on this side of the building. Ever seen a young blond woman visiting any of them?”
“No.” Blaze said. “How’s the coffee?”
“Fine,” Anne said. “It’ll keep me awake. If you snooze you lose in my business.”
“I can imagine,” Blaze said.
“The officer told me you thought you heard a bird cry?”
“A gull,” Blaze said.
“And that was the only sound? No loud scream? No voices at all?”
&nb
sp; “That was all,” Blaze said. “How about the neighbors? Did anybody else hear anything?”
“Two aren’t home. The others were dead asleep. Sound asleep, I guess I should say.”
“Does that mean he killed her instantly? Or did he gag her mouth or something?”
“He?”
“It must’ve been a man. She was stabbed, wasn’t she?”
“Oh, yes,” Anne said. “She certainly was. Can I just get a little information, Ms. Singleton? You didn’t give the other officer a business address or a business phone.”
“No,” Blaze said. “I’m between jobs right now.”
“What kind of work do you do?” Anne asked, sipping the coffee.
“Want some more?” Blaze asked.
“No, thanks. What do you do when you’re working?”
“I’ve done lots of things. I’ve been a cocktail waitress. I’ve done general office work.”
“Where was your last job?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t want my former boss to be bothered by all this.”
“Bothered by all what?”
Blaze hesitated and said, “Well, he’s an older man and he might be alarmed if the police called him.”
“Why would we call him?”
“You asked where I last worked. So I thought…I thought…”
“Yeah?”
“Well, I thought you might have to…verify what I tell you about myself.”
“No, I was just making conversation until I could think of another relevant question.” Anne Zorn stared into Blaze Duvall’s anxious green eyes.
“My last job was in L.A.,” Blaze said quickly. “A little plastics business called…Brunswick Enterprises. I only worked there for eight months. I don’t like L.A.”
“Don’t blame you,” Anne said, scribbling in her notebook. “Part of our San Diego heritage. L.A. haters, one and all.”
“It’s possible,” Blaze said, “that the murdered girl took the wrong stairs. The other staircase is just on the other side of the pool. People’re always taking the wrong stairs to get to the second floor.”
“We had considered that,” Anne said. “It may be what happened. I wonder if it might help us for you to actually look at the girl to be sure you don’t know her?”
“No!” Blaze said. “No. I couldn’t do that. I don’t know any young blond woman. I don’t want to look at someone who’s been stabbed. No. I’m sorry.”
“Okay,” Anne said. “I guess that’s all for now, but I may have to phone you. Is this number good day or night?”
“Yes, it is,” Blaze said. “I’ll be looking for a job during the day, but I call my machine for messages.”
“Right,” Anne said, standing up.
Blaze said, “I’d like to be informed if you catch the person. If that’s permitted, I’d like to be informed.”
“You will be,” Anne said. “You may be called to testify when we catch the person.”
“But I didn’t see anything,” Blaze said.
“We’re troubled by one detail,” Anne said when Blaze opened the door.
“What’s that?”
“Near the bottom of the steps we found a blue terry-cloth bathrobe.”
“Do you think the girl might’ve been carrying it? The murdered girl?”
“Unlikely,” Anne said. “It was found thirty feet from her body.”
“The pool,” Blaze said. “The pool’s very close by, as you can see.”
“Yes?”
“One of the tenants probably dropped it coming from the pool. Somebody’s always dropping something.”
“Even bathrobes?”
“They drop everything,” Blaze said. “Trust me.”
“But this bathrobe had bloodstains on the hem,” Anne Zorn said.
The detective was staring at her again, with unblinking brown eyes, the irises flecked with yellow. Unnerving, like cat’s eyes. Blaze was afraid of this woman’s unblinking eyes. “Blood?” Blaze said. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s a pretty fresh stain,” Anne said. “I’ll bet it’s the victim’s blood.”
“I don’t understand,” Blaze said.
“Neither do we,” Anne Zorn said to Blaze Duvall. “Yet.”
CHAPTER 9
On Easter Sunday they were out there on the water: every sailing-stupid and Jet Ski doofus. Every ski-boat beavis and fishing dweeb. Anyone who wasn’t indulging in safer pursuits on Mission Bay’s surprisingly extensive twenty-seven miles of coastline. Of course there were plenty of dirtbags, too, with bulgemobiles full of crystal meth, ready for a relaxing Sunday doing the same things on a boat they did on dry land—tweaking or fighting.
The cops figured on seventy or eighty accidents a year in Mission Bay as boaters ricocheted off one another. One or two of those would be fatal.
Leeds was into his campaign mode again, but this time he wasn’t dumping on Washington Democrats. He was bitching about the San Diego mayor and the police department’s ongoing salary disputes with the city council.
“How’d you like to be the chump who has to chauffeur Her Honor around?” Leeds wanted to know.
Fortney, who was driving the patrol boat that day, said nothing.
“ ‘Driving Miss Lazy,’ I call it,” Leeds said.
Fortney didn’t reply.
Then Leeds berated her for crash-dieting at election time, calling her “the expandable mayor.”
Fortney said, “Shut up a minute, we just got a call.” He picked up the mike and said, “One eighty-three king, ten-four.”
“I didn’t hear it,” Leeds said.
“How could you?” Fortney said, heading the patrol boat toward the jetty.
There was a lifeguard boat already there as well as several looky-loos. And within a very short time body snatchers from the coroner’s office showed up.
Another floater. The water was warm enough for the bacteria to have cooked fast, and after several days methane gas had brought it bobbing to the surface, bobbing lazily against the rocks. Water cops claimed that floaters somehow smelled even worse than stinkers on dry land.
Fortney inched the boat as close as he could. Leeds looked down and said, “Crabs and lobsters had their Easter brunch early.”
Fortney was relieved that the body snatchers already had the assistance of lifeguards, who were lowering a basket down the rocks to the water. They wouldn’t be needing the cops to help scoop it in.
Fortney recognized one of the body snatchers, a thick, red-faced guy with a heavy unshaven jaw who looked like a coronary candidate.
This one specialized in brain teasers, and he yelled to Fortney, “We can tell he’s a male from his clothes. But can you guess what race he is?”
Fortney and Leeds studied the faceless, gristle-stripped mass of bleached-white rotting tissue, and Leeds said, “No way. No way anybody can tell.”
The body snatcher said, “Throw a can of Colt 45 in the water. If he grabs for it, he’s a brother!”
The body snatcher giggled and snuffled and hacked up a loogie, while Fortney fired up the boat and drove away, wanting to be well clear if the floater should explode.
“That’s the same snatcher,” Leeds said. “The guy who one time last summer got this floater with his head all stove in. And the snatcher had the guy’s brains in a plastic bag with a twist tie. And he shows it to me and shakes it around and says, ‘Think it’ll make him dizzy?’ ”
“Guys like him,” Fortney said, “don’t collect stamps, coins, or figurines. They collect suicide notes so they can relive fond memories when they look back in their scrapbooks.”
As the cops motored past the bustling oneAustralia compound, they saw a lot of pleasure boats bobbing at a respectful distance.
“Worshipers at the altar of the America’s Cup,” Leeds noted.
“Boating bozos,” Fortney said.
Then, as they motored past the Dana boat ramp, the two cops were so astounded that they sucked half the air from Mission Bay. There was a man walking
on water!
“Holy Christ!” Leeds cried out, scaring a gull into flight, which added a Holy Ghost symbol to the incredible vision.
Fortney, who figured it out more quickly, said, “It is Easter Sunday, you know. He’s allowed.”
Actually, the guy appeared to be walking on water. In reality, he was walking on the roof of a forty-foot executive motor home that was completely submerged.
It wasn’t the Second Coming. They heard the guy screaming at a woman on shore, “You fucking bitch! I told you to put it in gear!”
“Lots of divorces at boat ramps,” Fortney observed. “Speaking of which, I wonder when we’ll get to see my future former wife again.”
“Who’s that?” Leeds asked, shaky from the near-religious experience.
“The redheaded cuppie,” Fortney said. “The one they call Blaze. I’m marrying her, but I just know she’ll eventually divorce me. They all do.”
—
Letch Boggs figured it was a solicitor calling him at 8:00 A.M. on Easter Sunday. In San Diego solicitors were as relentless and unstoppable as illegal border crossings, and even people with unlisted numbers got hassled.
He was delighted when the telephone voice said, “Boggs? It’s Anne Zorn. You knew me as Anne Sullivan. Or maybe it was Anne Bartlett. Remember?”
“Annie!” Letch said. “Do I remember? I’m the guy that always called you Legs!”
“Yeah,” Anne said. “I haven’t forgotten you either.”
“You still got ’em?” Letch wanted to know, wide awake now.
“What?”
“Gorgeous, buff, volleyball player’s legs?”
“Haven’t changed, have you?”
“So what’s up? You need somebody to color Easter eggs? I’m your man. You divorced again?”
“Yeah, but that’s not why I called.”
“You wanna come back and work Vice with old Letch? Okay, I’ll put in a word for—”
“Letch, gimme a break,” Anne said. “I’ve been working all night. I pulled a call-out homicide and I’m too tired for patty-cake. I got a few questions.”
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