Unwilling Accomplice - Barbara Seranella

by Barbara Seranella

  Munch inspected the padlock. It was a Master—impervious to picking because the casing clearances were so small, and case-hardened, so forget about cutting the shackle. She twisted the dial a few times to get a feel for how loose the inner mechanism was. She didn’t see any rust, but sometimes dirt or spiderwebs got inside and gummed things up. This lock didn’t seem old at all. ln fact, it looked brand-new. She twisted the padlock up from the hasp so that the backside faced out. The serial number was legible, which meant they could write the company and have the combination mailed to them. If they wanted to wait that long.

  She pulled down on the body of the lock, putting tension on the shackle.

  "What are you doing?" Lisa asked. .

  "What does it look like? Shut up for a minute."

  Munch closed her eyes and dialed the number wheel to the right until she felt a sticking point. She stopped, noted the number, and then turned the face again. She felt a second sticking point. This was going to be a tough one.

  "We’re going to need some paper and a pencil," she told Lisa.

  "I’ll ask the guy at the desk."

  Lisa returned a moment later. Munch recited twelve numbers, and Lisa wrote them down.

  Eliminating all the sticking point numbers ending in the same digit, and all the ones where the dial stuck between numbers, she was left with 38.

  "That should be the last number," she told Lisa. "Sound familiar?"

  "l think so."

  Munch took the paper and pencil from Lisa and did some simple calculations, which involved dividing thirty-eight by four, taking the remainder of two, and working up in increments of four. This gave her ten possibilities for the second number. There was a slightly different formula to figure out the first number. The guy who had taught her this process called it modulus operator mathematics. It was much simpler than it sounded. When she was done, she would also have ten possibilities for the first number and overall one hundred options for the correct combination. Chances were she’d hit on the winning series closer to her fiftieth attempt.

  Lisa kept walking to the end of the hallway and looking both ways. Munch smiled as she worked. Knowing that she didn’t need a lookout didn’t change that it made her feel better. Plus, it kept Lisa busy and out of her light.

  Munch worked the combinations in the order that was easiest for her to keep track of, remembering after each failed attempt to clear the tumblers with three full clockwise turns of the face dial. It was a good thing her fingertips were calloused from turning bolts, she thought, or this could get painful.

  After ten minutes, the dial shifted an almost imperceptible millimeter inward as the last tumbler fell into place. Munch pulled the lock open.

  "That was truly fucking elegant," Lisa said, swinging the door open. "You’re handy to have around."

  "Yes, ma’am. Think of me first for your next B and E."

  Lisa pulled a thin overhead chain and a bare lightbulb snapped to life. "What the fuck? Look at this mess. That motherfucker. "

  "Who?" Munch asked, surveying the wreck before them.

  Boxes were upended and emptied on the floor. A mattress leaning against the wall had been slashed and its stuffing pulled out. An armchair and a small sofa had suffered the same fate. Lisa picked up a green garbage bag and began stuffing clothes into it. Pissed off, Munch noticed, but not surprised into inaction. Munch stooped down to pick up a book lying open and spine up. "Who did this?"

  "That’s what I'd like to know. Son of a bitch." Lisa kicked at the mattress.

  "Let me see if the guy in the office has a broom we can borrow," Munch said.

  "What’s the point?" l Something silver and shiny caught Munch’s eye. It was a wad of duct tape. She bent down to examine it closer and instantly knew better than to touch it. A hank of human hair was still attached. The hair was long and black save for the last two inches, which were dyed orange. Munch grabbed Lisa's arm and pointed.

  Lisa said, "Oh, God/’ stared at it a moment, let the implications sink in, and then shouted, "Oh! God! "

  Munch studied the mess before them, looking for blood or a white, lifeless limb extending from beneath a pile. There was the scent of mildew, of unwashed clothes, a trace of cat, but not the unforgettable rotten-meat smell of decay, of death. She noticed something red, but made of cloth. It was only a piece of red bandanna.

  "When did Charlotte change her hair?" Munch asked.

  Lisa only looked at her dumbly.

  "When did she dye the ends orange? In the picture taken at school, her hair was streaked light."

  "Saturday. She changed it just before we met you at the park."

  Munch looked at the hair lying on the floor and the duct tape with its ominous implications. Rico couldn’t ignore this.

  She rushed back to the front desk and told Catfish there was an emergency and that they needed to use his phone.

  "Employees only," he said. "Pay phone is on the corner."

  "We need to get the police here now," Munch said.

  "Why?"

  "My kid is missing." Lisa said, "and we just found some of her hair in the storage unit. Besides that, someone’s been going through my shit."

  "Are they there now?" he asked.

  "No," Munch said, wondering what it would take to raise this guy’s adrenaline. She should have just come out yelling fire.

  "This phone is for business only." Catfish said, working a snooty tone of voice into his delivery "No exceptions."

  "I’m telling you—" Munch started to say but the guy cut her off.

  "You don’t tell me anything, woman." He said woman as if it were some kind of insult, unplugged the phone, and dropped it into his desk drawer.

  Munch left Lisa to tell the guy how many kinds of an asshole he was and called Rico from the pay phone outside. The storage facility was less than a mile from the Pacific Station. As luck would have it, Rico was at his desk.

  She and Lisa were pacing ruts in the ground around Lou’s truck when Rico arrived fifteen minutes later. He gave them a short wave. Munch answered by pointing toward the open door where Catfish sat.

  Rico pulled into the NO PARKING zone in front of the office.

  Munch joined him as he got out of his car. Rico brushed her cheek with his finger and asked, "What’s up?"

  It took a second for her to get past the distraction of his touch. "You need to see for yourself."

  "The guy behind the desk in there wouldn’t let us call from his phone," Lisa said.

  Rico looked toward the office. Munch imagined his eyes narrowing behind his sunglasses.

  "Yeah," Lisa said, warming to her sense of being disrespected now that a champion had arrived, "he said, 'Woman, you’re not telling me what to do.'" She put the same emphasis on the words Catfish had.

  Rico straightened to his full height of six feet. "What did he call you?" he asked Munch, reading accurately what Catfish’s tone had implied.

  "’Woman,'" Munch repeated, feeling a smile starting to curl her lips despite her anger. "But that’s not what’s important."

  Rico took the steps two at a time. The women hustled to catch up.

  "You!" Rico shouted as he pointed at Catfish.

  The chair slipped out from beneath Catfish. Munch caught a vision of dirty toes clutching in midair.

  "What is your major malfunction?" Rico pressed, towering over the guy and not giving him room to untangle himself from the chair. "These ladies needed your help, and you just sit on your fat ass? And put some shoes on. You’re disgusting."

  Happy as Munch was to see Catfish get his due, she wanted Rico to see what she and Lisa had found in the storage room. She pulled on Rico’s arm and then let it go. She didn’t want to distract either of them from what was really important here.

  Rico followed the women to the storage area and hunkered with a flashlight to inspect the evidence.

  "Don’t go back in there," he said.

  "l know," Munch said. This wasn’t her first crime scene.

&nb
sp; "There’s something wrong here."

  "You think?"

  "I mean this isn’t simple robbery or vandalism."

  "Don't forget abduction," Munch added.

  "No, I’m not. Obviously that is the priority here. I’m just saying"—he waved his hand behind him—"destruction like this. This says rage."

  Rico returned to his car and got on his radio. Munch watched him work. He glanced over at her as if sensing her scrutiny and winked. Did he think that was all it was going to take? she wondered. Hardly. She shook her head, and when she looked

  again, he was watching the street.

  "What happens now?" Lisa asked.

  "Let’s go find out," Munch said.

  Rico emerged from his car. His expression was earnest as he addressed Lisa. "I’ve got a crew of technicians coming. They’ll dust the unit for prints and gather trace evidence. I’ll need you both to come back to the station and make statements."

  "Now we’re getting somewhere," Lisa said, and headed back for the truck.

  "I hope so," Munch said. She didn’t think she would feel overly encouraged if she were to find a lock of Asia’s hair in a strip of duct tape. She turned to Rico, out of Lisa’s earshot.

  "This isn’t all bad, right? A dead girl would not be brought into a locked room only to be removed again?"

  "I wish I could tell you that was true," he said. "Who knows, Munch? Who knows?"

  Chapter 7

  What can you tell me about the dead boy, Steven Koon?" Munch asked. She was sitting across from Rico at his desk. She’d spent the last twenty minutes answering his questions, and

  now she had a few of her own.

  "He had a history of truancy, running away and one count of public drunkenness."

  "Was he on the run when he was killed?" Munch tried to act casual as she studied the framed pictures on Rico’s desk.

  Rico followed her gaze, which had come to rest on a framed photograph of his daughter on a beach. Looked like Baja. "No. He’d been back home for almost a month. He was in school, and according to his parents and teachers he seemed happy and was responding well."

  "You spoke to the parents?"

  "Yes." Rico’s hand rested next to his daughter’s picture, a finger absently stroking the frame.

  "That must have been rough. How are they doing?"

  He shrugged. "About what you’d expect. I had a grief counselor with me. The mother vacillated between hysterics and asking us if we wanted coffee. I'm told that’s pretty normal

  given the situation."

  "How about the dad?"

  "Man, he cried like a baby"

  Munch nodded. "Sounds brutal." It hurt her heart just to think about it. "The paper said the boy had been questioned about a burglary?"

  "He pawned a stolen VCR in Santa Monica about a month ago. The owner of the pawnshop checked the serial numbers against his hot sheet and called it into the Santa Monica PD when he found a match. The station was only a few blocks away and they picked the boy up at the Greyhound depot."

  "What did he say?"

  "The usual bullshit. He was pawning it for a friend. He wouldn’t give up the friend, but the detectives were working on him. His parents hired a lawyer and any interviews had to go through the attorney. Steve probably would have cooperated if the DA had been willing to deal."

  "Was the VCR part of the loot taken by the ring we were talking about?"

  He paused before answering, then seemed to come to a conclusion to his inner debate.

  "Yes."

  Had he decided she was trustworthy? she wondered. Pretty fucking funny, considering. So funny she wanted to slam his face into his desk. She wondered if the VCR Steve Koon had tried to pawn had been a Betamax or a VHS. She had given Garret Dimond a VCR for Christmas last year—he had wanted a Betamax. Garret was the man she was breaking up with when she met Rico. She had also given Garret a flugelhorn for his twenty-eighth birthday. It was a beautiful brass instrument and had come nestled in a blue velvet case. It had cost seven hundred dollars, a price she hadn’t haggled over. Why was it that she always gave the most expensive gifts she could afford to the men she couldn’t really love? She also had a bad habit of giving what she couldn’t afford to the men who didn’t/wouldn’t/couldn’t give her back what she needed most.

  She looked at Rico again, shifting her mind to a puzzle that was solvable. "So you’ve got a burglary ring hitting the homes of vacationing owners and the phone lines are always cut. The thieves wouldn’t do that without reason. Mace St. John told me once that MO was learned behavior, something bad guys perfected and refined as they did their deeds."

  "That’s still true." Rico said. "They don’t want to get caught."

  "Sounds like they already knew nobody was home. So why cut the phone lines?"

  "lt’s not that uncommon."

  Munch nodded as she continued to think out loud. "We have a system at the garage that automatically phones the alarm company if the perimeter is breached. What l’m thinking is that this thief, or one of these thieves, got busted sometime by one of those silent alarms. Can we check who’s been caught like that?"

  "We can try but it will take time. I have a bulletin out to other cop shops nationwide. If there have been similar burglaries and the detectives are paying attention, they’ll contact us. The problem is most burglaries are investigated initially only by patrol officers. They may call for crime scene techs or request detectives to respond, but to have detectives in on the investigation from the get-go, the situation has to be extraordinary "

  "Like how?"

  "Like a 'hot prowl' scenario where risk is increased to the victim because they were home when the burglar hit, or the loss is huge, or involves dangerous items being taken, such as guns"

  "Or a kid is found dead in a stolen car."

  He nodded. "Yep, that would definitely be a red flag."

  "What about psychics?" she asked, thinking of the strands of Charlotte’s hair stuck in the duct tape.

  "What about them?"

  "You ever use them?"

  He snorted. "If a psychic ever leads me to a body, l’m arresting the psychic."

  Munch laughed, then sobered quickly. Who was saying anything about a body? She was looking for a live kid.

  "I have a name for you. Some guy called Mouseman. The lady who runs that shelter in Hollywood told me about him. He recruits kids to rob houses. I don’t know anything more than that."

  Rico wrote the information in his notebook. "What we’re doing now is looking for the link that ties these victims. We’ve put together an extensive questionnaire and the victims are downstairs now in the roll-call room filling them out."

  The "we" he spoke of, Munch realized, were his fellow cops. Lisa emerged from the bathroom. Rico gestured toward her with his head. "I want to talk to the mom alone for a minute.

  Do you mind?"

  9

  "I’ll wait downstairs." Munch took the stairs to the street level.

  Several uniformed cops sat behind a counter. Vending machines sold snack food and drinks. Munch bought a soda and noticed a stream of a dozen affluent-looking white people, mostly women, heading to the roll-call room in the basement, accepting forms from a cop she didn’t recognize.

  "You got one for me?" she asked the cop.

  He handed Munch one of the forms. It was the questionnaire Rico had mentioned. These had to be the people who had been ripped off. She'd told Rico she would wait downstairs. But she didn’t say how far, Munch thought as she merged into the flow of burglary victims heading for the basement.

  Everyone took seats at the tables where the patrol cops got their morning briefings. The room looked like a community room where an AA meeting might be held. Chairs set in rows, a raised dais with lectern, a forty-cup coffee urn and all the fixings, plastic dispensers of "literature," a blackboard. Only instead of placards of the twelve steps, the bulletin boards held mug shots of men labeled "Known Predators." She was sure the literature had a much different th
eme, too.

  Munch scanned the crowd, looking for a familiar face. They were all familiar: upper-class West Side folk, but none that she recognized. The two men who’d arrived with their wives had left the women to fill out the forms and were studying the photographs of bad guys. Munch sat with the women and read through the questions.

  The people were being asked to list who insured them, where they shopped, who cleaned their house, which gardening service they used, and where the women got their hair done. How about Who does their babysitting? she thought. That should be one of the questions. She saw a smudge on her T-shirt and wondered why she always managed to collect stains at breast level. Wearing white, she’d been asking for it. She also wondered if Rico had noticed.

  Ten minutes passed before pens were laid down and the women started meeting each other’s eyes and exchanging smiles. Munch connected with a woman in the front row and figured she was as good a place as any to begin. "What a cute top. Where’d you get it?"

  The woman smiled broadly "At Connie’s in the Village Mart."

  "In Brentwood?" the woman sitting behind her wearing Nancy Reagan red asked.

  "Yes."

  "Have you eaten at that deli lately?" the woman to their left with a European accent wanted to know.

  Then they were off and Munch sat back and observed. It was a little like watching roundtable Ping-Pong, only it was verbal and anyone was free to hit a serve or return at any time in any direction. This was something Munch really dug about women in groups—how, even among strangers, they exchanged tips and health advice.

  "I wouldn’t trust their potato salad if I were you," Nancy Reagan red said.

  "The produce is fresh and organic," a young, earnest woman in glasses responded.

  "My daughter won’t touch anything green," a plump, volunteer-for-everything sort of matron offered with a smile.

  "Do you all have kids at home?" Munch asked. Only four of the women said yes.

  "They need a new streetlight at that intersection." This from a woman in a business suit.

  "My sister-in-law works the ER at UCLA and says the Wilshire on-ramp is the worst." Volunteer lady.

  "Tell me about it. Between the construction and detours we almost missed our plane last week." Business suit.