Fair Warning - Jack McEvoy Series 03 (2020)

by Connelly, Michael

  That was when the Shrike would follow him out.

  JACK

  30

  On any story reported by a team there always comes the awkward decision of who writes it and who feeds the facts to the writer. Writing together never works. You can’t sit side by side at the computer. The one who writes generally controls the tone of the story and the way the information is delivered, and usually gets the lead byline too. This was my story and it was my call, but I was smart enough to know that Emily Atwater was the better writer and I was the better digger. She had a way with words that I did not. I would be the first to admit that the two books I had published were heavily edited to the point of being reorganized and rewritten. All kudos to my editors but the royalty checks still went to me.

  Emily was a lean writer, a follower of the less-is-more school. Short sentences gave her stories momentum and I was not blind to this. I also knew that putting her name first in the byline would not reflect badly on me. It would look like we had equal billing because it would be in alphabetical order: Atwater and McEvoy. I told her she could write the story. She was at first floored and then thankful. I could tell she believed it was the right call. She was just surprised I had made it. I thought the moment helped me make up for some of my missteps with her lately.

  This decision to put her in the writer’s chair freed me up to do more digging and to review what I had already reported.

  It also gave me time to notify people who had been helpful on the story and whom I had promised to alert. Christina Portrero’s mother and Jamie Flynn’s father were high on this list.

  I tried to make these notifications by phone, and the calls were more emotional than I had anticipated. Walter Flynn in Fort Worth burst into tears when I told him the FBI had now officially linked his daughter’s death to a serial killer who was still at large.

  After the calls were out of the way, I started pulling together my notes and making a list of other people I needed to call for the first time or to check back with for any new information. We essentially had twenty-four hours even though we had told Rachel Walling we needed twice that. It was a journalist’s trick to always say a story would take longer to report than it really did, or would be published later than it actually would. It gave us an edge against the investigation’s being leaked and our being scooped on our own story. I wasn’t naive. Rachel was taking the story into the FBI’s Los Angeles Field Office. There probably wasn’t an agent in the building who didn’t have an I’ll-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine deal with a reporter somewhere. I had been burned by the FBI on more than one occasion and still had the scars.

  Topping the list of who I needed to find and talk to was Hammond’s unknown partner. There were emails scattered throughout the printouts from Hammond’s house that indicated that he had a partner on Dirty4 who handled the digital aspects of the dark-web venture while he handled the lab work. The partner’s email identified him only as RogueVogueDRD4 and he used a Gmail account. The same alias was listed on the DRD4 site as the administrator. Rachel had said before leaving that she was confident the FBI could run it down, but I wasn’t sure about that and didn’t want to wait for the FBI. I contemplated directly reaching out to RogueVogue in a message. And after discussing it with Emily I did just that.

  Hello. My name is Jack. I need to talk to you about Marshall Hammond. It wasn’t suicide and you could be in danger. We need to talk. I can help.

  I hit the send button and let it fly. It was a long shot but a shot I had to take. Next, I started organizing what I would transfer to Emily for the story. She had not started writing and I could hear her on the phone in her cubicle making calls to watchdog agencies and observers of the genetic-analytics industry for general comments on what this sort of breach could mean. Every story had to have a lead quote—a line from a credible source that summed up the outrage, or tragedy, or irony of the story. It underscored the greater implications of the report. This story was going to trade in all of those elements and we needed to come up with one quote that said it all: that no one was safe from this kind of intrusion and horror. It would give the story a deeper resonance than a basic murder story and would get it picked up by the networks and cable. Myron would be better able to place the story with one of the big media guns like the Washington Post or the New York Times.

  I heard Emily briefly summarize what we had found and what we would publish. As in her writing, she had a way of keeping it short and to the point. Still, I was getting nervous listening to her. My story paranoia was kicking in. We had to be careful when we solicited these comments because every one of those experts and industry observers could turn around and tip off a reporter they had a source relationship with. The trick was to give them enough information to respond with a usable quote without giving them enough to pass to another reporter.

  I tried to tune her out and go about my work, reviewing the early stages of my investigation before I knew what I had stumbled into. I thought about calling the LAPD detectives and asking if I had been cleared yet through DNA analysis and if they had made any headway on the case. But I concluded that would be a waste of time as I was persona non grata with Mattson and Sakai.

  Next I thought about causesofdeath.net and realized I had not checked the website since I saw the initial flurry of responses to my query. It had been a great starting point for me in connecting the cases linked—I believed—to the Shrike, and now I checked for more.

  I went to the message chain I had started with the inquiry about atlanto-occipital dislocation and saw that three messages had been posted since I last checked. The first was a followup by Dr. Adhira Larkspar to her first post, in which the chief medical examiner had asked the original poster—me—to identify himself.

  This is a reminder that this forum is open to medical examiners and coroners’ investigators only.

  The warning did not stop two others from posting. A day earlier a medical examiner in Tucson, Arizona, reported that they had an AOD case with a female victim that was attributed to a motorcycle accident. The case was six months old and no other details were offered.

  I copied the posting and shot it over to Emily in an email alerting her that we might have a fifth case to look into. Her response came quickly.

  That can be a follow-up. Right now we have to go with what we have confirmed and get the story out.

  I didn’t respond. The latest message on the forum chain had drawn my full attention. It had been posted only twenty minutes earlier.

  Wow, we just caught two of these in the same day! A hanging in Burbank and a fall in Northridge. Coincidence? I don’t think so—GTO

  I was stunned by the message and read it several times before taking another breath. Obviously, the hanging in Burbank had to be Hammond, and I noted that GTO had not called it a suicide. I had no doubt that Rachel’s take on Hammond’s death had been on the money. Maybe the coroner’s office was onto it as well.

  The second death was what had my full attention. A fatal fall in Northridge. Calling a death a fatal fall did not rule out the possibility of murder. I needed to get more details. Northridge was a Valley neighborhood. I called the LAPD’s Valley Bureau, identified myself as a journalist, and asked for the lieutenant. I wasn’t connected for nearly five minutes but refused to hang up, being better at waiting games than most of the people who didn’t want to talk to me.

  Finally, I was connected.

  “Lieutenant Harper, how can I help you?”

  “Lieutenant, this is Jack McEvoy. I work at a consumer-watchdog website called FairWarning and—”

  “How can I help you?”

  “Okay, well, I’m looking for information on the fatal fall up in Northridge today. Like I said, we are a consumer watchdog and we pay attention to workplace injuries and accidents, et cetera. I was hoping you could tell me what happened.”

  “A guy fell off the roof of a parking structure. That’s it.”

  “What parking structure? Where?”

  “He was in t
he mall up there and when he left he went to his car and then jumped or fell off the roof of the garage. We’re not sure which yet.”

  “Did you identify the victim yet?”

  “Yes, but we’re not putting that out. We haven’t found next of kin. You’ll have to get the name from the coroner.”

  “Okay. What about age?”

  “He was thirty-one, I think my guys told me.”

  The same age as Hammond, I noted.

  “There wasn’t a note or anything?”

  “Not that we’ve found. I need to—”

  “Just a couple last questions, Lieutenant. Were there any cameras that showed the fall and could shed light on what happened?”

  “We do a camera canvass on these sorts of things and we haven’t found anything yet.”

  “Who is the investigator assigned to this?”

  “That would be Lefferts. He’s lead.”

  “Thank you, L-T.”

  “You got it.”

  A five-minute wait for less than a minute of information. I next went to the website of the county medical examiner’s office and pulled down the staff menu. I was trying to find out who GTO might be. None of the medical examiners fit the bill, but when I looked at the list of coroner’s investigators, I zeroed in on Gonzalo Ortiz. My guess was that his middle name began with T.

  Sometimes a phone was the best way to get what you needed—like when you are trying to penetrate the LAPD. But for the coroner’s office I wanted to go in person. I wanted a face-to-face with GTO because I sensed from the message on the causesofdeath board that he might be a guy who would talk. Maybe it was a long shot, but I wanted to take it. I shut down my computer and walked over to Emily’s pod. She was typing up notes from one of her calls.

  “I think I found Hammond’s partner.”

  She immediately stopped typing and looked up at me.

  “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t get a name yet.”

  “Then where is he?”

  “The coroner’s office. He fell off a parking garage a couple hours ago, broke his neck. I’m going to go down there to see the investigator, see if he’ll talk.”

  “You mean broke his neck like we’re seeing here?”

  She pointed to her screen, meaning the whole case. I nodded.

  “There’s a coroner’s investigator who I think has put two and two together. He posted to me on the message board less than an hour ago. I want to go see if he’ll talk. The LAPD won’t tell me shit.”

  “But doesn’t he think you’re a coroner after the way you first posted?”

  “I don’t know. The head medical examiner sort of outed me but he still posted.”

  “Well, don’t dawdle. We have a lot to do.”

  “Dawdle? Not my style. I’ll call you after I get there.”

  31

  It was my first time to the coroner’s office in at least four years. It had been a regular stop for me when I covered crime for the Times and later the Coffin. But at FairWarning death had not been my beat until now.

  The death complex, as I termed it, was on Mission Road near the County–USC Medical Center in Boyle Heights. The two medical centers—one for the dead, the other for the living—were attached by a long tunnel that once facilitated the movement of bodies from one side to the other. The original office sat close to the street, a forbidding brick structure that was nearly a hundred years old and now was mostly used as a souvenir shop and for meeting rooms. They did big business selling toe tags, coroner’s blankets, and other morbid items to the tourist trade.

  Behind the old structure was the new modern structure with clean lines and soothing beige tones. There was a glass-doored entrance that I used to get to the reception desk. I asked for Investigator Gonzalo Ortiz. The receptionist asked what my visit was in reference to.

  “Uh, the police told me to talk to the coroner’s office to get information about a death,” I said. “It happened today up in the Valley.”

  It was a carefully crafted answer that did not contain a falsehood but didn’t exactly tell the whole truth. I hoped that the answer plus my somber demeanor would lead her to believe I was there as next of kin to someone awaiting autopsy. I didn’t want her calling back to the investigations department and announcing that a reporter was in the lobby. If GTO refused to talk to me, I wanted him to tell me so to my face.

  The receptionist asked my name and then made a call. She spoke briefly to someone and then looked up at me.

  “What’s the name of the deceased?” she asked.

  Now I was cornered. But I had an out. Burbank was considered part of the Valley so I could still answer without lying.

  “Marshall Hammond.”

  The receptionist repeated the name and then listened. She hung up without another word.

  “He’s in a meeting and will be out as soon as it ends,” she said. “There is a family room down that hall to the right.”

  She pointed behind me.

  “Okay, thanks.”

  I walked down the hall, hoping there would be no one in the “family” room, but had no such luck. This was Los Angeles, where more than ten million people lived. And died. Some unexpectedly, some by accident, and some by murder. I knew that the county coroner’s office had a whole fleet of pale blue vans with racks in the back for making multiple-body pickups. There was not a chance the family room would ever be empty.

  In fact, the place was almost full with small groups of grieving people huddled in silence or in tears, probably hoping there had been a mistake and it wasn’t their loved one they had been asked to come identify or to arrange for transfer and burial.

  I didn’t mind skirting the truth with the receptionist but here I felt like an intruder, an impostor they assumed was among them in loss and grief. I had been in their place once, with my brother, and I had knocked on the doors of homes where loved ones had been taken by violence, but something about this room was sacred. I felt awful and thought about making a U-turn and just waiting for Gonzalo Ortiz in the hallway outside the door. But instead I took the first seat near the door. The last thing I wanted was to interact with someone in the throes of their own pain hoping to assuage mine with a smile of understanding. That would be like stealing.

  The wait felt like an hour as I listened to murmured pleas, and one woman began to wail. But the truth was that no more than five minutes after my arrival I was rescued from the family room when a Latino man in his fifties, dark-skinned with a salt-and-pepper mustache, stepped in and asked if I was Mr. McEvoy. I was up and out of my seat faster than I could say yes. I led him out into the hallway and then hesitated when I realized he had to lead.

  “Let’s take a shortcut,” he said.

  He waved me down the hall in the opposite direction from Reception. I followed.

  “Are you Investigator Ortiz?” I asked.

  “Yes, I am,” he said. “And I have a private meeting room set up.”

  I decided to wait till we got to the private room before explaining who I was and what I wanted. Ortiz used a card key to swipe the lock on a door marked authorized personnel only, and we were admitted to the pathology wing of the complex. I knew this because of the odor that engulfed me as we entered. It was the smell of death cut with industrial-strength disinfectant, a sweet and decidedly sour smell that I knew would stay in my nasal passages long after I left the premises. It prompted me to remember the last time I had been in this place. It was four years earlier, when the chief medical examiner had gone public with complaints about health and safety issues in the complex coupled with budgetary issues that affected staffing and crippled service. He reported autopsies being backed up by fifty bodies at a time and toxicology testing taking months instead of weeks. It was a move to persuade the county commissioners to give him the budget he had requested, but it only resulted in the chief’s being forced out of his job.

  I doubted much had changed since then and was thinking of bringing up the issue with Ortiz as a way of b
reaking the ice when I informed him I was a journalist. I could mention the stories I wrote about the deficiencies for the Velvet Coffin in hopes that it would help convince him to talk to me about the atlanto-occipital-dislocation cases.

  But as it turned out, I wasn’t going to have to tell him I was a journalist or worry about breaking the ice. It had already been broken. Ortiz led me to a door marked meeting room b. He knocked once and opened the door, holding his arm out to usher me in first. As I entered I saw a rectangular table with six chairs in the middle of the room. Sitting at the far end of the table were Detectives Mattson and Sakai.

  I probably revealed my surprise with a slight hesitation in my step but then I regained speed and entered the room. I did my best to recover with a half-smile.

  “Well, well, LAPD’s finest,” I said.

  “Have a seat, Jack,” Mattson said.

  He hadn’t bothered intentionally mispronouncing my last name. I took that as a sign that maybe he had learned something from the stunt he had pulled arresting me. My surprise slipped into bafflement. Were they following me? How did they know I was coming to the coroner’s office?

  I took a chair directly across from Mattson, and Ortiz took the seat beside me. I put my backpack on the floor next to me. There was a momentary pause as we all stared at one another. I decided to start out incendiary and see what it got me.

  “You guys here to arrest me again?” I asked.

  “Not at all,” Mattson said. “Let’s put that behind us. Let’s try to help each other here.”

  “Really?” I said. “That’s different.”

  “Are you the one who made the post on causesofdeath?” Ortiz said.

  I nodded.

  “Yeah, that was me,” I said. “And I guess you’re GTO.”

  “That’s right,” Ortiz said.

  “Jack, I admit it, you put this thing together,” Mattson said. “That’s why I think we can help each—”