Unwilling Accomplice - Barbara Seranella

by Barbara Seranella

Michael Koon picked up a cardboard box by the door.

  "I’ll walk you out."

  He lifted the tailgate of the Rover and set the box next to several other cartons filled with Nintendo games, boy’s clothes, and several brands of expensive tennis shoes: New Balance, Nike, and L.A. Gear high-tops. He followed her gaze.

  "I thought it would be easier if I got these out of the house."

  Munch wondered why the Koons felt they needed to explain their every action.

  "You look familiar," she said. "Have we met?"

  "I’ve done some work on television, some commercials, a little modeling."

  "That must be it." She pointed to the boxes. "I know a shelter in Hollywood that would love to get this stuff."

  "I've already promised it to the Boys and Girls Club on Lincoln."

  "That’s good, too."

  "Can I get your number?" he asked.

  "Your wife has it."

  He nodded, but didn’t look particularly happy. "I’d like to be kept informed. If you find out anything . . ."

  "I can’t make you any promises."

  He slammed the tailgate. "In the future, I would appreciate you speaking to me first."

  As he spoke, he put his hand on her shoulder. She didn’t think he was hitting on her. It was more as if he felt he were doing her a favor touching her. She stared at his hand until he removed it.

  She did her best to think charitable thoughts of him as she drove away. He had lost a son. Grief had many faces. Of course, so did guilt.

  Chapter 12

  Munch was heading for her rendezvous in Hollywood when Rico called. He asked how it had gone with Cheryl Koon and she filled him in.

  "I got some results from the DOJ." he said.

  "And?"

  "They analyzed residue on the duct tape. There was definitely saliva on the sticky side."

  "So she was gagged."

  "They also found saline traces on the outside surface."

  "Tears?"

  "That would be one interpretation. I was more interested in what it didn’t show."

  The light ahead changed to yellow. Munch decided not to try to make it. She was going faster than she realized and had to brake hard. The Thomas Guide map on the seat beside her slid to the floor. "What do you mean?"

  "Charlotte is not diabetic"

  Lisa had lied. Not a huge shock. "But the insulin?"

  "The mother’s. She came clean when she went into custody An hour ago she confessed that the insulin was hers."

  Munch couldn’t blame her. Lisa had just done what she could to bring heat to the investigation. Munch would lie in a heartbeat if Asia was in trouble.

  "There’s more." Rico sounded tired, even sad. "The hair in the tape also had some odd characteristics."

  "Besides the color?"

  "The follicles showed signs of trauma, the outer root sheaths were wrinkled."

  "Meaning what?" she asked, but already suspecting.

  "I asked that, too. The tech said it was an indication that the hair was constantly yanked."

  "Like loose threads curl when you pull them," Munch said.

  "Are you saying she was abused?" She tried to inject a wide-eyed guileless quality to her voice. Rico had no doubt heard the tone before of a guilty person doing her best to sound innocent.

  "We found a secret panel in Charlotte’s closet," he said.

  "What was in there?"

  "In where?"

  "Behind the panel." He hadn’t said there was a compartment behind the panel, but wasn’t that a logical assumption, er, uh, Your Honor, sir?

  "Is there anything you want to tell me?" he asked.

  Munch knew a setup when she heard it. "Wait a minute. The light changed."

  "Before you go any further, you should know we pulled fingerprints from the picture frames and I put in my own call to the departments psychiatric consult. I believe you know him. Dr. Miller. He’s married to St. John’s ex-wife." Lights were changing all over. Go. Caution. Stop. It was time to choose. "All right.I searched her room and found her stash. If I thought it was important—"

  "You should have told me. The Feds don’t believe we’re looking at a kidnapping now. They think Charlotte got scared and pulled a rabbit."

  "Even so—"

  Rico didn’t let her finish. "Withholding or providing false, misleading information in a criminal investigation is a chargeable offense."

  "How much trouble is Lisa in?"

  "Lisa? She never told us her kid was diabetic. In fact, there is no record that she ever reported her missing."

  "No, she left that to me. Un-fucking-believable." Munch made a turn. She hoped it wasn’t a wrong one. The big car swung wide through the intersection. Highball glasses tinkled together in the back bar. She caught a whiff of bourbon from one of the crystal decanters.

  Rico sighed. "I need you to come in and talk."

  Cops always wanted you to come to them. It was all about home court advantage and taking the subject being interviewed away from her comfort zone, not to mention the shorter distance to custody, if it came to that.

  "I can't now." Somebody honked. She realized she had cut the other driver off and waved an apology.

  "Make the time, before this gets any uglier."

  There he went, going all cop on her again. She made a left and pulled to the curb under power lines. The connection filled with static. "I’m losing you." She switched the power off.

  "You’re lost."

  Parking was tight in Hollywood and Munch had to circle the block several times before finding a slot that would accommodate the limo.

  Painter Dave was not on the sidewalk. After ten minutes, Munch walked around back to the alley where she’d seen him disappear before. A rental Dumpster decorated with graffiti emitted foul odors of rotting food and old cement. She thought about Little Houdini and innocence lost.

  At fourteen, she had been learning how to panhandle and had stayed a few nights in an abandoned building with some of her new wino friends. Hotel Hell reminded her of those - times. Some alcoholics ended up in alleys drinking cheap wine from brown paper sacks. She had begun there. When she was a teenager, she rarely had the sense to be scared. That came later as she learned what the stakes were. Not caring whether she lived or died gave her an edge until she found out how many bad places existed in between. Jail. Pain. Heartbreak. Humiliation.

  She heard a loud noise of wood tearing inside the abandoned hotel. This was followed seconds later by a terrified yelp and a crashing thump. Traffic continued on the street unaware. She ducked under a flap of chain-link. The back door hung open. The smell of urine was overpowering. A mist of fine dust escaped into the sunlight. The walls creaked as if giving voice to a sigh.

  She kicked aside debris, pulled the door all the way open, and listened. The stink was stronger, definitely of human origin. It reminded her of one of those horrible nursing homes. She picked up a length of steel pipe.

  "Are you all right?" she called into the darkness. The walls cracked, like old bones settling. She wondered what the odds were of the building taking this moment to collapse.

  "Dave?"

  She took another step.

  "Over here, Officer," she said loudly adding impersonating backup to her growing list of sins. Something small and furry ran over her feet. She screamed. The rush of adrenaline gave her impetus. She used the pipe to rip a sheet of plywood from one of the windows and daylight flooded in. The dust was thick, but the sickening putrid stench had diminished. She suspected it was still there and that her sense of smell had shut down in self-defense.

  Iudging from the center counter, double sinks, and gaps where large appliances had once stood, she figured she was standing in what must have been the hotel’s kitchen. There was a large gap in the ceiling overhead and beneath it a pile of clothing. No, not clothing, but a clothed body. She knelt beside the still form of Painter Dave and pressed two fingers to the side of his neck. The skin was warm, but there was no pulse. She turned
him on his back, trying to remember the CPR mnemonic.

  "Two and five keep them alive."

  But was that two chest compressions and five breaths or the other way around? She tilted his head back and blew air into his mouth. His thin chest rose in response, which meant his airway was clear. She found the spot on his sternum and pumped the heel of her hand against his heart muscle. Blood spurted from the jagged crevice slashed across his neck below his left ear, and she realized she was not going to be able to make a difference. Painter Dave had one more thing in common with Sleaze John. They were both dead way too young.

  She lifted his hand, still clenched tight. Wiping tears from her cheeks with the sleeve of her shirt, she pried his fingers open to see what was so precious. It was a dog tag. Jasper’s tag, the loop at the top gapped open as if it had been pulled violently from its ring.

  Upstairs, a door slammed.

  Munch pocketed the thin metal token and rose cautiously.

  "Charlotte?"

  She heard whispered exclamations and running feet. The sounds echoed weirdly through the building, the voices muted and urgent. Something large slammed against the floor above her. The sound was sharp, something hard slapping against an equally hard surface. Not the cushioned thud of flesh, but furniture or a fixture.

  "Get out," a voice yelled down to her.

  "I need help/' she called back. "This boy is hurt."

  Above her, someone giggled. It sounded feminine, and it creeped her out royally.

  "I’m not kidding." She heard a touch of hysteria in her voice.

  Now several voices added to the giggle, coming from different angles above her. Mocking jungle calls, like monkeys laughing, hooting, taunting. They grew bolder and closer. A shadowy form jumped across the hole above her. Chunks of plaster and dust sifted down around her, landing in her hair and on her shoulders. Grit filled her eyes. She could taste the powder in the back of her mouth. The walls started chiming. It took her a moment to make sense of the sound. The pipes.

  They were beating on the water pipes.

  How many there were, where they were, she had no way of knowing. She did know that she was outnumbered by the little bastards and seriously out of her element. She backed out of the ringing building and ran to the limo to use the phone.

  Rico was wrong about one thing. It had already gotten uglier.

  ***

  She called 911. The operator was suspicious. Her system showed that Munch was on a mobile phone, which meant the operator’s locater system was ineffective. Munch had to repeat herself several times, spell out her name, and provide the limo’s license plate.

  When the police got there, the body was still as she’d left it. She told the officers that she had come looking for her run-away niece, that she’d heard some of the kids took refuge in the old building. Finding Dave had been happenstance. The larger of the two patrol cops—Officer A. North, according to his nameplate—took Munch aside.

  "His name was David?"

  "Painter Dave. That’s what he told me the other day, anyhow."

  "So which time that you found him are you chalking up to chance?" Officer North was one of those sarcastic types. Dave’s blood had yet to dry on her blouse. The last thing she needed was this cop giving her attitude.

  "I just meant that I didn’t know him from Adam yesterday. He came up to me in my car and started talking to me."

  "And you were looking for your niece, you say?" North’s tone and expression suggested that he thought she was making up that part, that she didn’t have a niece, that she was in his town just to get in his way.

  She handed him one of the flyers she had made of Charlotte. North rested a hand on the butt of his revolver as he perused the handout. She almost laughed out loud. It was going to take more than the revolver to intimidate her.

  "I’m gonna need to see some photo ID," he said.

  She handed him her driver’s license without looking at him.

  "Your attitude isn’t helping," he said.

  "This has been pretty fucking traumatic all around, you know?" She didn’t usually swear in front of people she didn’t know, but, hey, kids didn’t die in her arms every day either.

  "How long is this going to take? I’ve got to pick my children up from school. I'd like to go home and change first."

  "You’re not going anywhere until I say so."

  Several responses came to mind, suggestions involving parts of his anatomy and members of his immediate family. She held her tongue. The way this day was going, he would probably arrest her.

  A fire truck and paramedic arrived. The various uniformed personnel went inside the building to look at the body, wrote things on clipboards, spoke on their radios, and conferred with one another. Munch met the patrol sergeant and retold her story. He thanked her.

  Officer North returned her driver’s license.

  "In your expert opinion," she said, striving for the proper balance of deference without giving ground, without groveing, "was this an accident or a murder?"

  He looked back at the building. "I don’t know. Maybe it was suicide. We get a lot of that around here."

  "Sad, isn’t it? Kids so young think they’re already out of options?"

  "People get trapped in narrow lives."

  "How’s that?" she asked, surprised at his use of metaphor.

  "Their world is what they see day in and day out. Mean existence has a way of shrinking, choking the life out."

  She felt a stirring of empathy for this guy She didn’t know why he’d chosen to be a cop, why anyone would choose to be a cop, but the reality of the work had to hold its share of disappointments. She took off her sunglasses so he could see her eyes. "l have a friend who's a cop in West L.A. Mace St. John."

  "Sure. I know who that is." North’s face relaxed, started to look human.

  She didn’t tell him that they had met when he came to arrest her. That was a long time ago, and beside the point.

  "He told me once about the first murder he ever came across. He was on patrol and they got a call to investigate a shooting. Two brothers. One was dead on the kitchen floor, the other was sitting at the table—gun in front of him. Mace said the first thing they did was secure the weapon."

  The cop nodded in agreement. That's what he would have done also.

  "Mace asks the guy ’What happened?’

  "The brother goes, 'I shot the son of a bitch.'"

  Officer North was still wearing his sunglasses. They picked up the reflection of the coroner’s wagon arriving.

  "Mace thinks, ’Cool, we solved the case.’ His partner asks the guy ’Why’d you do it?’

  "’Look at that.’ The brother points at the fried hamburgers still on their plates and says, ’He always took the biggest one. Always."’

  North smiled. "Exactly. An ounce of ground beef finally tipped the scales."

  Munch noticed that her sunglass lenses were smeared. She fogged them with her breath and wiped them clean with her shirttail. "You ever hear of a guy around here they call Mouseman? He has kids steal for him, commit home burglaries."

  "Is your niece hooked up with this guy?"

  She put her shades back on. "There’s some connection."

  "Why do they call the guy Mouseman? He pay the kids in cheese?"

  She smiled at his lame joke to show him that they were all being friendly here. "I don’t know. He must be giving them something good."

  The cop looked up and down the boulevard, then spit in the curb. "Around here, that could be anything."

  Munch nodded.

  Then North surprised her again by asking, "What did you want more than anything when you were a kid?" The question was personal, but not offensive. She wished she’d thought to ask it herself.

  "Love, acceptance. I didn't know it then." She shook her head and chuckled. God or the universe or whatever had a way of sending her the most unexpected messengers. "How about you?"

  "I wanted to play pro ball."

  "Well, yeah, if you
’d let me finish. Fame and fortune were on my short list, too."

  "You’ve got cop connections," North said. "You might want to check with the narcs, they got guys working undercover at the high schools, look about fifteen. If anyone’s heard of your Mouseman, it’d be one of them."

  Chapter 13

  Munch left Hollywood and headed for West L.A. It was already almost three. The kids would be out of school soon. Rico was probably good and pissed off. She called his direct line. He answered as he always did.

  "Chacon."

  "Mancini," she echoed.

  "What?" he said flatly No sense of humor. He was really ticked.

  "I found a body."

  "Who? Where?"

  "That kid I was meeting in Hollywood. He fell or was pushed or jumped. We’re not sure which. There was a nasty gash in his throat."

  "Who's we?"

  "Officer North, the coroner, just about everybody who was there." She fingered the dog tag in her pocket.

  "You couldn’t call me?"

  A childish point. She was calling him now, wasn’t she? "I have something to show you. Dave had it in his hand. I forgot about it in all the excitement."

  "You forget a lot of things."

  He was one to talk. She mentally counted to five, resisting the urge to hang up. That wouldn’t help Charlotte.

  "This cop I talked to had a good idea."

  "What was that?" Rico asked, sounding as if he was doing some mental counting of his own.

  "He said I should talk to undercover narcs who work the high schools, that they might have heard something more about this Mouseman guy. Can you introduce me to one of them?"

  "Let me tell you why that’s not going to happen. We’re working the case. I’m giving it top priority. It’s a dangerous situation and more complications are not what we need. In other words, I don’t want you sticking your nose in or your neck out."

  "What you want and what I want hasn’t always been the same thing. Charlotte is still out there somewhere. She needs help. Her disease might not be physical like I first thought, but her mental health is every bit as critical."

  "I’ve made up my mind," Rico said. "I don’t want you starting shit with this guy Mouseman or whoever the hell."