Another Way to Die

by Philip Cox

  There was no security mechanism here, so they were able to go straight in. A wide flight of stairs was directly in front of them, so they climbed up to the second floor. Mrs Epinoza lived in apartment twenty-six. She came to the door immediately after Leroy knocked. She made them hold their badges in front of the spyhole before she opened the door.

  After he had introduced himself and Quinn, Leroy asked, ‘Mrs Epinoza, we’re following up on your missing persons report concerning Danielle Scott. I understand she lives on this landing?’

  ‘She does and I did report her missing. Come in, come in.’ She ushered them both inside her own apartment. She was very slight, easily in her seventies, with unnaturally black hair tied in a neat bun.

  ‘When did you first notice her missing?’ Leroy asked.

  ‘It was about five days ago. I don’t see much of her, we don’t socialise in that sense. I just see or hear her leave her apartment in the morning and come back in the evening. I might occasionally take in a package for her if it gets delivered while she’s out. Now and again, usually at the weekend, either she’ll come in here for a coffee or I’ll go in there.’

  ‘You noticed her missing five days ago,’ Leroy said. ‘But she might just be away, on vacation somewhere, away through work?’

  Mrs Epinoza shook her head. ‘I would know if she was going to be away. She would tell me. She has a cat – a ginger tom cat. T.C., she calls him. If she was going to be away, she would have asked me to feed him.’

  ‘I see.’ Leroy glanced over to Quinn. ‘And what about the cat now?’

  ‘Well, after I noticed she hadn’t been home, I called the police, and I’ve been going in to feed him. Danielle gave me a key, you see.’

  ‘You’ve been going into the apartment?’ Leroy asked.

  ‘Of course. I can’t let her cat starve, can I?’

  ‘When you noticed she hadn’t been home, and you were concerned, why didn’t you call her? If she gave you her key, she must have given you her cell phone number.’

  ‘Oh, she did. I tried to call her several times, but it always asked me to leave a message. I did, twice, but when she didn’t call me back, I had the feeling something was wrong. Something is wrong, isn’t it, otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘Mrs Epinoza,’ Leroy said, ‘I’m sorry to tell you that we believe Danielle has been murdered.’

  She put her hand to her mouth and welled up. ‘Oh, my God. That poor child. Are you sure?’

  ‘I’m afraid so, ma’am.’

  She said nothing; hand still on her mouth, she stood slowly shaking her head.

  ‘If you have a key to Danielle’s apartment,’ Leroy asked, ‘would you mind letting us in there?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Visibly flustered, she bustled away into her kitchen and returned with a key. ‘Here you are. She has an alarm: there is a keypad in the closet next to the door. Press 0902.’ She handed Leroy the key. ‘You will return it, won’t you? I’ll need it to go on and feed T.C.’

  ‘We’ll come back here before we leave,’ Leroy smiled. ‘Which is her apartment?’

  ‘Just across the hall. Twenty-five.’

  They let themselves into Danielle Scott’s apartment, Quinn silencing the alarm. They heard a faint meowing, and a ginger and white cat appeared in a doorway. Quinn knelt to stroke it. It purred as it rubbed its head against his leg.

  ‘What are we going to do about this?’ Quinn asked. ‘Animal Welfare?’

  ‘Going to have to. Mrs Epinoza can’t continue coming in, and we can’t give the cat to her. It’s part of Ms Scott’s estate.’

  They walked around the apartment. It looked clean and neat and tidy.

  ‘No sign of any struggle anywhere,’ said Quinn and walking from the lounge to the bedroom and back.

  Leroy sniffed and went into Danielle’s kitchen. Next to an empty bowl was a cat litter box; Leroy peeped inside. Quinn joined him and checked the trash bin.

  ‘The bathroom’s clean,’ he said. ‘Which is more than I can say for here. That explains the smell: there’s five-day old rotting food in here.’

  ‘And cat shit in there.’ Leroy pointed down to the litter box. He looked around the apartment again. ‘Can you go ask her about relatives? Maybe she has an address for the mother. I’ll carry on looking round here.’

  Quinn went back and spoke to Mrs Epinoza while Leroy looked around. He shook his head. There was nothing that stood out for him. Nothing out of place, nothing disturbed. On a previous case, as he went through the victim’s house, it was obvious a picture had been removed from the wall, a picture of the victim’s killer.

  Making sure Quinn was still absent, he crouched down and stroked T.C.

  ‘Hey Kitty,’ he said softly. ‘What happened to her? Whatever did happen, it didn’t happen here.’ As he stood up, he recalled another case where a widowed senior was left for dead by his son. Left in the house with his Alsatian, which, after several days of not being fed, began to eat its master.

  Leroy went into the bedroom, and began to go through the dresser. In one of the top drawers, there was a pile of documents, held together with a thick rubber band. He began to leaf through the documents.

  Quinn returned.

  ‘Well?’ Leroy asked.

  ‘She said Ms Scott was thirty-seven. Turned thirty-seven on Labor Day.’

  ‘The alarm code - 0902,’ Leroy observed. ‘Her birthday.’

  Quinn nodded. ‘She confirmed what the MPU told me. She assumed Ms Scott was divorced – she was single at any rate. No children. No visitors. There was a man friend, but she had not seen him for months.’

  ‘No name for him?’

  ‘No. She was never introduced. She confirmed that Ms Scott had said her mother lived up in Sacramento. There was never any mention of a father or any other family members. She said Ms Scott never talked about any, and she didn’t ask. Doesn’t know where in Sacramento her mother lives.’

  ‘That’s okay. In one of the dresser drawers, I found a stack of birthday cards, all with ‘love from Mom’ inside. One envelope was unopened. The postmark is this year, and it seems to be the mother’s handwriting. Her address is on the back of the envelope.’

  ‘That’s a lucky break. Sacramento?’

  ‘Sacramento.’

  ‘We heading up there, then?’

  Leroy shook his head. ‘Not today. It’s about a five and a half hour drive up there. We can head up there tomorrow morning. That will give Perez a chance to arrange some liaison with the Sacramento Police Department. Get them to have a female officer accompany us. The mother has no idea her daughter’s even missing; one more day won’t hurt. She might need to come down to identify the body.’

  ‘Couldn’t she?’ asked Quinn, nodding his head over in the direction of apartment twenty-six.

  ‘She knows the victim, so she could do, legally. It depends if she’s willing to. Come on, let’s go check with her. I’ve seen all I need to see here. There’s no sign of any struggle here, nothing out of place, no sign of blood anywhere. There’s no sign of anybody breaking in and attacking her. If she was incapacitated here, then she must have let the intruder in. No intercom downstairs, so anyone could walk off the street and up here. But I’m guessing Mrs Epinoza would have noticed.’

  ‘Are you saying she might have known him?’

  ‘Possible, I guess; but unlikely. No, I’m guessing she was abducted somewhere else. Strange: this guy clearly does a lot of homework, a lot of research. Didn’t he realise how vulnerable she was here?’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. Let’s go. We need to get the place designated a crime scene; and get the forensic team over here. And call animal welfare about the cat.’

  Quinn gave T.C. some more food, and they locked up Danielle’s apartment. Leroy knocked on Mrs Epinoza’s door. He said they were done for now, and asked about identifying Danielle’s body.

  ‘If you need me to,’ she agreed. ‘It would save her mother heartbreak.’ As if by explanation, she added, ‘My own s
on was killed in Iraq, many years ago.’

  ‘I’m very sorry to hear that, ma’am,’ Leroy said. ‘Some other officers will be coming over to go through Danielle’s apartment. We’re going to put some tape over the door, so you won’t be able to go in anymore.’

  ‘But what about…?’

  ‘Detective Quinn here has just fed the cat, but we have to call the animal welfare team. They’ll house it until Ms Scott’s next of kin, presumably her mother, decides what to do with it.’

  ‘They won’t put him down, will they?’

  ‘No. Don’t worry; they won’t do that. Her mother might decide she wants him; if not, he’ll be rehomed.’

  ‘You don’t want him yourself?’ Quinn asked. ‘If Ms Scott’s mother doesn’t?’

  ‘Oh, no; I wouldn’t want to. Not permanently. Feeding twice a day is one thing; but there’s the vet, and clearing up… you know.’

  ‘I understand. Thank you for all your help, ma’am. Remember the other teams will be over, and somebody from the coroner’s office will be contacting you about identifying her.’

  She nodded. ‘She’s not…’ – she touched her own face as she spoke - ‘cut up, is she?’

  ‘No, don’t worry. You’ll just need to look at her face, and it looks like she’s sleeping.’

  They said their goodbyes and returned to Leroy’s Taurus.

  ‘Can you tape the door?’ Leroy asked. ‘I’m going to call Hobson about Jane Doe Two.’

  Quinn took a reel of black and yellow tape from the trunk and went back inside to seal Danielle Scott’s apartment. When he returned, Leroy was siting in the passenger seat. Quinn got in the driver’s side.

  ‘My call to Hobson went to voicemail,’ Leroy explained. ‘I asked him to call me back asap.’

  ‘Back to the station?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll need to update the lieutenant, and we’ll check where we are with the vehicles and prints. And we’ll get the forensic team over.’

  ‘And Animal Welfare.’

  ‘And Animal Welfare. Then we can clock out if we can. We have an early start tomorrow morning.’

  Quinn took one more look at the pink and grey façade of the Sunset Apartments as he waited for a truck to pass. ‘Nice lady,’ he said as they drove away.

  ‘Yeah,’ agreed Leroy, thinking about what she said about her son. ‘Nice lady.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  It was that evening when Hobson eventually returned Leroy’s call.

  ‘The report on Jane Doe Two,’ he had explained, ‘is almost identical to the report on Jane Doe One.’

  ‘I expected them to be,’ Leroy replied. ‘You said almost identical: where are they different?’

  ‘Only in the number of stab wounds. Two was stabbed twenty-three times.’

  ‘Whereas One had nineteen stab wounds.’

  ‘Correct. Which means that the internal organ damage on Number One doesn’t appear quite as severe. But there was still massive trauma. I’m confident the same weapon was used, however: the dimensions of the entry wounds are virtually the same.’

  ‘And the pentagrams?’

  ‘Exactly the same. I’ve compared the photographs, side by side.’

  ‘Any evidence of sexual assault?’

  ‘In this case there is slight - very slight - bruising to the vaginal entrance, but I can’t establish a timeline.’

  ‘So it could have been caused before?’

  ‘Could have. Those two slight differences aside, a carbon copy. The height and weight were almost the same. Both were one hundred fifty-three centimetres in height.’

  ‘In English, Russ.’

  ‘For the Luddites, that means just over five feet tall. She weighed 53.07 kilograms - that’s one hundred seventeen pounds – compared with one hundred twenty-eight pounds of Jane Doe One.’

  ‘Jane Doe One has a name now, subject to formal identification: Danielle Scott.’

  ‘I’ll note that. Anything on Two?’

  ‘Nothing as yet. They’re both very slight, aren’t they?’

  ‘I guess you called say that. What are you saying? That the killer was on the small side?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m saying yet.’

  *****

  Leroy filled in Quinn on this conversation as they began their drive to Sacramento. Quinn slowly nodded as he took it all in.

  ‘So we’re nowhere on the restroom video, nowhere on prints on the two vehicles, and we don’t know who one of the victim is, is that about it?’ he asked.

  ‘Pretty much,’ Leroy conceded. ‘That’s what I had to tell Perez this morning.’

  ‘What’s his take on all this?’

  ‘I don’t really know. He’s clearly following our progress, for obvious reasons, but hasn’t made any real comment, just keep him in the loop.’

  ‘We’re going to be out all day, aren’t we?’ asked Quinn.

  ‘Five, six hours one-way journey. We should get back to LA tonight. Sure, we could get someone from the SPD to see her for us, but I want to tell her myself. Perez has arranged for a female officer to meet us at the house. She’s going to get there for one.’

  Their route began on the I-5 and came to an end on the 80. Leroy drove.

  ‘That exit there,’ Quinn pointed out. ‘H Street. El Dorado Way is off H.’

  Leroy left the freeway at that exit and seven minutes later was pulling up outside the house. A Sacramento Police Department patrol car was parked across the street from the house. Leroy pulled up directly behind the patrol car. A black uniformed officer climbed out.

  ‘Lou-Ann Cheadle,’ the officer said, holding out her hand. ‘Good drive?’

  ‘Long drive,’ said Leroy. We left LA at six thirty.’

  ‘It looks as if she’s in,’ said Cheadle as they crossed the road. Danielle’s mother’s house was a small bungalow-type dwelling, a small yard at the front and round the side. There was no sign of a car on the driveway. Leroy knocked. A tall, wiry woman with grey hair answered. Cheadle introduced herself and the two detectives. Mrs Scott invited them inside.

  ‘To begin with,’ Mrs Scott said, ‘I’m not Mrs Scott. I am Danielle’s mother. My first husband - Danielle’s father - went by the name of Scott, but I remarried. My name is now Cutler.’

  ‘Mrs Cutler,’ Leroy confirmed. ‘Is Mr Cutler around?’

  She shook her head sadly. ‘He passed on some five years ago. I live alone. I’m assuming you’re calling about Danielle? She was my first husband’s child. She began using Scott again after she got divorced.’

  ‘Please sit down, Mrs Cutler,’ said Cheadle softly. ‘These officers have come about your daughter.’

  She sat on the couch, Cheadle next to her. Leroy sat down on the chair opposite. Quinn remained standing.

  ‘Mrs Cutler,’ Leroy said, ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but your daughter -’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ her mother said. ‘She’s dead, isn’t she? Why else would you come all the way from Los Angeles?’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  Cheadle put her hand on Mrs Cutler’s.

  ‘How... what happened?’

  ‘We believe she was murdered.’

  Mrs Cutler put her other hand on top of Cheadle’s. ‘You believe?’

  ‘Subject to a formal identification, but on photographic evidence, we believe it’s your daughter.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In Los Angeles.’

  Mrs Cutler said nothing. She withdrew her hand from Cheadle’s and sat still for a moment, processing the news. Eventually, she spoke.

  ‘I’m hardly surprised, to be truthful.’

  ‘Oh?’ asked Leroy. ‘How so?’

  Mrs Cutler took a deep breath and began. ‘Danielle and I aren’t… weren’t that close. In fact, we were estranged, I think the terminology is, and had been for some time. Her father left us when she was about three years old. I’ve no idea where he is, and I don’t care. I met my second husband a few years later and we marrie
d. We had a son – Danielle’s half-brother. David died two years ago, but was retired from his job as a clerk at the State Capitol Building. While he worked there, he got Danielle a job there, as an intern, to begin with.

  ‘Well, she had other ideas. She wanted to be an actress, and in spite of our misgivings and protests, she moved down to Los Angeles. She went for a few auditions, all unsuccessful, and spent most of her time waiting at tables. We half expected her to return here after a while, but one day, she told us on the telephone that she had found an alternative way into the movies. She called them adult movies, and said that lots of movie stars begin that way. I called it pornography and told her it was shameful and dangerous. She got to know a man who was twice her age and wrote the scripts for those movies. She married him, but that marriage lasted no longer than six months.’

  ‘Can you recall the name of this man?’ Leroy asked.

  Mrs Cutler shook her head. ‘She never told me. I didn’t want to know.’

  Leroy paused a beat, then asked another question.

  ‘So you and Danielle had not been in touch for some time?’

  ‘No. I tried to call a few times, but she never returned any calls. I used to send her a card every September second – that was her birthday, but she never…’ She took another deep breath to compose herself, then asked: ‘Will I need to go to Los Angeles to identify her body?’

  ‘Not necessarily, Mrs Cutler. Her neighbour, the lady who first reported her missing, has agreed to carry out the formal identification. That would get the formalities out of the way. Would you still like to see her? Once the medical examiner has completed his enquiries, the coroner’s office will contact you concerning the funeral arrangements.’

  ‘I’m not sure if I want to see her lying on a slab. How was she murdered?’

  Leroy replied, ‘Mrs Cutler, you don’t really…’