Burning Man

by Alan Russell

  That would be a better way of doing it, I knew, but it certainly wasn’t a deal maker.

  “And finally,” Ehrlich said, “there is the designation of Special Cases Unit. The word ‘unit’ suggests more than one individual, and that means you would need a partner in special cases. Because you already have a partner, I see no need in breaking up that team.”

  Sirius’s ears perked up, almost like he knew what the chief was saying. It was likely he was responding to his tone of voice. This was the sugar.

  “Sirius will have office privileges with me?”

  “He’ll even have his own desk if he wants one.”

  “Where do we sign up?”

  CHAPTER 3:

  A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME

  Rather than work out of the Police Administration Building, Sirius and I had set up shop at the Central Community Police Station. For almost a year Central had been our home. We were less than a mile from the PAB; close enough that its shadows could almost touch us.

  As we approached Central I took notice of the looming presence of the PAB. “If it weren’t for you, we’d be at the new headquarters,” I said. “The chief must have heard stories about your fleas.”

  The truth of the matter was that I had opted out of an office at PAB. The high-rise wasn’t a good fit for Sirius and me. I was well served by not being near all the big suits, and I hadn’t wanted to have to take a long ride in an elevator every time Sirius needed to water.

  One of the best things about my job is that I rarely have to report in to a supervisor. Central’s captain might not be of like mind. Because we aren’t directly under her command, Captain Becker probably wishes the chief had found a different home for us, even though she has never come out and said that.

  “We’ll be lucky if Captain Becker doesn’t evict us,” I said. “She’s a cat person.”

  Sirius wagged his tail and waited for me to open the door. Cat person or not, the captain was a lot more affectionate with my partner than with me. She is the only one in the station that calls me “Detective.” Everyone else has nicknames for me, all dog related. I am Hound Dog, Horn Dog, Junkyard Dog, Watchdog, Underdog, Bowser, Barker, and Fido. Dog food names and flea medicines are also popular. If the paw fits, you wear it.

  As I walked in the door, the watch commander flagged me down. Sergeant Perez has a line of service stripes on his left sleeve, what other cops call hash marks. The hash marks bespeak his years on the job; his wrinkles do the same. “Hey, Alpo,” he said, “I got one that’s right up your alley.”

  The watch commander tends to forget that I’m not officially assigned to Central. He knows I work Special Cases Unit—what he calls “Strange Cases Unit”—and that I report to “the brass,” but he likes to treat me as his extra uniform, or in his non-PC terminology, “my spare bitch.”

  “It’s another abandoned newborn,” he said, handing me the call sheet, “but this one’s no Moses.”

  Moses had been one of my first special cases. His mother had set the newborn adrift in a basket in the LA Aqueduct. Unlike baby Moses on the Nile, the LA Moses didn’t survive his journey. At the onset of the case, there had been the suspicion that the death of Moses was ritualistic in nature because of strange writing on the newborn’s clothes and his basket. As it turned out, though, Moses’s mother was mentally ill and had interpreted a one-day downpour as the start of the next great flood. She had thought she could save her son by putting him in an ark.

  “If you don’t want it, Sherlock Bones,” Perez said, “just pass the case to Juvie and let ACU take over the investigation.”

  “You can count on me and my Hound of the Baskervilles,” I said.

  Perez passed over what information he had. Throwaway babies don’t qualify as high-priority cases, because unfortunately they occur all too often. The baby had been abandoned on South Hill Street, which was nearby.

  Sirius and I did an about-face and returned to the sedan. The traffic over to Hill Street was stop and go. It was that time of day when commuters were arriving to roost in their office buildings that make up the skyscraper skyline of downtown LA. Over the last quarter of a century, the downtown area has become trendy and expensive, home to concert halls, museums, and water gardens. Expensive lofts and upscale security condominiums have sprung up everywhere. I am not sure which has undergone more cosmetic surgery in LA—its residents or its residences.

  As we drew near to the crime scene, Sirius started nervously pacing the backseat. Police dogs and fire dogs never really retire. “Relax,” I told him. “You know how tech people get cranky about dogs shedding at crime scenes. But I’ll make sure you have a seat on the fifty-yard line, all right?”

  Sirius stopped his pacing. I flashed my badge to a uniform standing near the curb, pointed to where I wanted to park, and he lifted up some crime scene tape for me to get by. The forensic field unit was already at the scene, and Sirius and I watched a photographer leaning over a railing, clicking away. I opened all the windows halfway, and Sirius stuck his nose out the window and took a few sniffs. My guess was with those sniffs Sirius probably knew more about what had occurred than anyone working the scene for hours. Sometimes I don’t envy his sense of smell.

  When the sergeant gave me the call information, he hadn’t mentioned that the baby had been abandoned at the foot of Angels Flight. I wondered if the baby had been dumped there on purpose, or if the station’s name had inspired someone to leave her there. Angels Flight has long been touted as the shortest railway in the world. The cable railway connects Third and Fourth Streets. It was built at the turn of the twentieth century, serving the well-to-do in their large Victorian houses. Even when the neighborhood went south and flophouses replaced the Victorians, the railway managed to endure for more than half a century. Downtown redevelopment had brought back Angels Flight a half block from its original location, but a fatal accident in 2001 had shut it down for six years. The railway was finally running again, but it wouldn’t be running today.

  I offered greetings and nods but didn’t engage those at work. Before doing anything else, I always take a long, last look at the dead. I bent over like a catcher, getting close to the ground, and tried to filter out my emotions and personal feelings; I was supposed to be the dispassionate cop. This time that didn’t work.

  At least, I thought, the baby hadn’t been left in a Dumpster. She had been put in a cardboard box and placed behind a railing at the bottom of the stairway that connected the two streets. Pigeons flocked the area looking for their morning handouts, but the usual habitués that used the concrete embankment as a bench weren’t being allowed in to feed the scavengers.

  Looking up, I saw the face of what many called the new downtown. Imposing glass edifices filled the skyline, leaving the old downtown in its shadows. Angels Flight was supposed to be the bridge to those two worlds. Maybe there was no bridge to those two worlds.

  It appeared some thought had been given as to where to abandon the baby. The cardboard box had been left in a protected spot above street level. During the day there was a steady stream of pedestrians that passed by the spot. Whoever had abandoned the baby had wanted it to be found. I continued to hunch down, thinking my cop thoughts. The area was fairly well lit at night, but it would have been easy to stay in the shadows and anonymously drop off a baby. It was unlikely that anyone would have trekked down the stairway from above; I had walked the steps a few times and knew the incline was both steep and long. No, someone would have pulled up to the curb and quickly dropped off the baby and box behind the railing.

  I stared up at the empty tracks of Angels Flight. When it was in operation, one railway car went up while the other came down. The cars were named after famous biblical mountains, the one Sinai and the other Olivet. In Catholic school I had been told that Mount Sinai was where God spoke to Moses and where he waited to receive the Ten Commandments. Mount Olivet’s history was no less storied—it was where Jesus retreated on the night he was betrayed, and where he said his farewell
to the Apostles. I tilted my head back and scanned Bunker Hill. As far as I knew, no miracles had ever happened there.

  Rising, I drew nearer to the cardboard box. Because of the incline, the box was tilted at an angle. I looked inside, and if I hadn’t known better I would have thought some girl had abandoned her doll. The body was impossibly small. She was facedown in the box and draped in a blanket. Her face was planted deep into a small pillow.

  The baby had olive-colored skin, but I couldn’t really determine her race. The skin pigment of newborns often changes dramatically over the course of a few days. There were no visible signs of any trauma, but the blanket swaddled most of the body.

  I swore under my breath, unable to hide my anger at the senseless death. In 2001, California passed the Safely Surrendered Baby Law, which allows a mother to anonymously surrender her newborn within three days of birth at any emergency hospital and most fire stations. The law was designed to prevent unsafe newborn abandonment. Nowadays, mothers no longer need fear arrest or prosecution for giving up their babies. Mothers that have somehow managed to keep their pregnancy secret for nine months can keep their secret forever and not be punished. It is a good and needed law, but another expectant mother had apparently not heard about it.

  The uniformed officer posted just beyond the crime scene tape took my obvious anger as an invitation to comment. “You ask me, people should have to get a license to have children.”

  My grunt of acknowledgment was interpreted as encouragement to speak further. “I got a newborn of my own,” he said. “As soon as I saw the kid, I knew the mother was felony stupid and didn’t know jack about babies.”

  The officer knew a lot more about newborns than I did and my eyes dropped south to his tag. “What told you that, Officer Alvarez?” I asked.

  “The damn box wasn’t level, and the baby was just left facedown in it,” he said. “That’s an invitation for disaster. My wife would kill me if I put our newborn to sleep on her stomach. And the pediatrician must have told us a dozen times that you never wrap a newborn in a blanket, and you especially don’t put a pillow in the crib.”

  His comments made me look harder at the angle of the box, and at what was left inside it. You don’t usually think of a pillow and blanket as being instruments of death.

  “The mother must have been worried about the baby getting cold,” I said.

  Alvarez did his imitation of Dr. Spock: “That’s what sleepers are for.” Then he added with cop disdain, “Of course the mother’s probably a wasted teenage tweaker who didn’t even know she was pregnant.”

  He knew his newborns but not his profiling. From working the last dumped baby, I’d learned that women who abandon their newborns don’t fall into any neat category: they can be any race, creed, or color. College students are as likely to offend as high school dropouts.

  “You were the first on the scene?” I asked.

  Alvarez nodded. “After determining the baby was dead, I cleared the area and made sure nothing was disturbed.”

  “You want to name her?” I asked.

  The officer rubbed his hands on his thighs, leaning one way and then the other, clearly uncomfortable with my question. “It doesn’t seem right, naming the dead.”

  “No, it doesn’t, but the baby’s going to need a name before she’s buried.”

  “I’ll pass, if you don’t mind.”

  “No problem,” I said and then thanked the officer before returning my attention to the baby in the box.

  My adoptive parents were churchgoers with an abiding faith in God. One of my father’s favorite quotations was from the Sermon on the Mount, and he would often repeat Christ’s words to me: “Not a sparrow falls to the ground without His care.” I looked at the fallen sparrow; by naming the baby I would provide her with an identity. The memory of my last trip to a unique and troubling graveyard made me remember roses.

  Rose, I decided, and my victim had a name.

  I checked with the crime scene unit, making sure it was okay for me to do a close-up study of Rose. The blue blanket surrounding her was a polyester blend. A woman’s white cotton T-shirt, size medium, swam over the baby. As I lifted the shirt, I was surprised to see that Rose was wearing knit pink bootees. Rose wasn’t wearing a diaper, and her pink-streaked body made it appear as if she had been hurriedly washed before being clothed and deposited in the box.

  There was some food residue on the blanket, crumbs of some sort. Forensics was probably already on it, but I’d double-check to make sure they bagged it. I removed the pillow, rested Rose on it and then made sure there was nothing else in the box.

  The coroner’s office would decide how Rose had died, but I was betting they would rule her death as an accidental homicide. Dumped babies aren’t usually clothed or blanketed, and this was the first time I’d ever heard of an abandoned baby wearing pink bootees. My gaze lingered on her tiny feet. Someone should have been playing with the little toes and spouting nonsensical words about a piggy going to market.

  “The mother hedged her bet.”

  I turned around and saw Della Tomkins, a veteran of the Forensic Field Unit. We had met at several crime scenes. On those other occasions, Della had been bright and cheery, but this time she couldn’t even force a smile.

  “We found a pair of blue bootees on the steps,” Della said. “Mom must not have known the sex of the baby she was going to be abandoning.”

  I had heard that Della and her life partner, Abby, had been going to fertility clinics for the past year in the hopes of Abby’s conceiving. They were doing all that they could to have a baby.

  “Find anything else?” I asked.

  “A few steps away from the box we found some crumpled cellophane wrapping with the remains of some partially eaten bread. We think the crumbs in the box match the bread. At first I thought it was banana bread, but judging from its aroma I’m now leaning toward pumpkin bread.”

  Halloween had come and gone a few months back. I thought of pumpkin bread as a seasonal offering, but maybe it was a popular item in the trendy bakeries or bistros that I never patronized.

  Della stood next to me and the two of us contemplated the newborn. “I’m identifying her as Rose in the book,” I said, referring to the casebook.

  “I thought Lisbet named the newborns.”

  “She encourages the detectives to come up with a name. It’s her way of getting us emotionally involved.”

  “Does it work?”

  I didn’t say, but Della already knew the answer. It’s easy to depersonalize a baby Jane Doe, but not as easy to forget a forsaken newborn that you’ve given a name.

  “Has anyone called the Saint?” I asked.

  I offered up Lisbet Keane’s nickname for what it was, a term of respect. An outsider had earned the begrudging high opinion of the coroner’s office and the LAPD.

  “I just finished talking with her,” Della said. “She’ll pick up Rose after the coroner releases her.”

  Before Lisbet had come on the scene, newborns had been cremated and placed in a mass grave in East LA. A decade earlier, Lisbet had seen a news spot on an abandoned newborn and felt called upon to attend to the baby’s burial. While she was negotiating for a plot, two other dead newborns turned up. Though only a college student at the time, Lisbet had decided she would somehow find the money to bury all three. In the years since she had gathered up every abandoned newborn and seen to their burials. Lisbet’s caring didn’t stop with the dead—she had been the driving force behind establishing California’s Safely Surrendered Baby Law. In only a few years, most of the country had followed California’s example, and as a result nationwide there are now fewer throwaway newborns.

  “I’ll call her later,” I said.

  Even saints need to make a living. Lisbet was a freelance graphic artist, a job that allowed flexibility for her unusual calling. As far as I was concerned, she was too young and too attractive to be a saint.

  I looked at Rose and said in a voice kinder than my own,
“Don’t worry, your adopted mom will soon be picking you up.”

  “Amen,” Della said.

  My eyes turned to the rail of Angels Flight spanning the heights. The railway didn’t operate in the evening, but I hoped that sometime during the night it had made a special ascent.

  CHAPTER 4:

  THE CRY IN THE WILDERNESS

  From inside the rectory office, I heard a familiar and comforting voice announce loudly enough for me to hear, “Well, we can’t keep one of LA’s finest waiting, can we?”

  Father Patrick Garrity, known by everyone as Father Pat, was the pastor at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament on Sunset Boulevard. When people think of the Sunset Strip, they don’t usually envision a church, but for more than a century the church has been a part of a neighborhood better known for its sinners than its saints.

  “Get in here, Michael,” Father Pat shouted. “I’d like to embarrass you in front of a few people.”

  I have never visited Father Pat without him telling the story of our first meeting to at least one person. As I entered the rectory, he stood up from his chair and opened his arms to the prodigal son. His hair was completely gray now, but the blue eyes behind his thick glasses were still young. There had been a time when I was sure Father Pat was ten feet tall. The physical reality was that he was half of that and resembled in build a well-fed friar. As he squeezed me tight, my holster pressed hard into him; for a moment his face wrinkled in distaste at his recognition of the weapon, but then he patted my shoulder and his smile returned.

  He turned and made eye contact with a young Hispanic man wearing vestments who I guessed was the latest fresh-faced pastoral intern. “This is the Michael Gideon,” he said. “You might have heard me mention his name a time or two.”