City of the Lost (12 page)
Authors: Stephen Blackmoore
I step inside and flick the light switch. The lamp’s been knocked to the floor, casting eerie shadows through the room.
Whoever broke in did a thorough job. Cushions are sliced open, stuffing on the floor. Books in a pile, pictures off the wall.
I rush to the bedroom closet, throw it open. The safe’s sitting wide open. Nothing’s missing, not the cash, not the guns.
Nothing except the stone.
Chapter 12I sift for half an hour
before giving up. It’s not here. Neumann said I’ve got some kind of link to it. Maybe if I close my eyes and wish really hard, it’ll call my name or something.
before giving up. It’s not here. Neumann said I’ve got some kind of link to it. Maybe if I close my eyes and wish really hard, it’ll call my name or something.
I try it. No such luck.
What do I know? I’m starting to panic. I can tell because I’m pacing. I only pace when I’m starting to lose it. I force myself to stop moving and think.
Wherever it is, I’m not going to find it standing in a pile of busted CDs and overturned furniture. I start righting things, sift through piles of books and tossed through clothes.
The light outside my window goes from black to gray. I clean the house up best I can, but the thief did such a thorough rollover, the place looks like hell no matter what I do.
By the time I’ve got things at least livable, the sun’s poking over the palm trees.
As I’m sorting through a pile of random crap, I find something I know I’ve never had before. It’s a broken piece of a blue card. Like a credit card, but a hole punched in one corner and the words LA COUNTY DE in raised letters. A library card? I pocket it, not sure what to do with it.
So, how do I find the stone? I don’t know where to start.
The best person I know at finding stuff out is Carl. But after our fight in the gym I doubt he’ll talk to me.
Besides, he’ll want to know why I’m looking. What happened to my house. What happened last night. I can’t pull him into this. He’s my friend. Was my friend, at least. Now, I don’t know.
I push the thought aside. Focus. People, I know how to find. You ask a bunch of questions, break some fingers. Go to the last place they were seen.
That gives me an idea.
I find my toppled computer. It’s dented, and the side’s been torn off, but other than that it works fine. I run a quick internet search on the burglary in Bel Air that started this whole mess.
In a few minutes I have the name of the guy who owned the stone, Kyle Henderson, and his address.
Henderson took a bullet during the burglary. Went into Emergency with a sucking chest wound, went out in a body bag. He hung on long enough to tell the cops that it was three guys and was able to give a description of one of them.
The police have thoroughly gone over the place. I don’t doubt that. I don’t know if he was married, had children, or anything else about him. If I’m lucky maybe I can get someone to talk to me, maybe a neighbor. See if maybe there’s something anyone might not have asked.
Of course, Bel Air people don’t usually talk to folks like me. Roughing up a rich soccer mom with private security a minute away doesn’t appeal, but I’ll figure something out.
With a place to start, my mind calms down enough to think about things a little. Who’d want the stone? Anybody who knew about it, that’s who. And that list keeps getting longer. Neumann, Giavetti, Frank. I look over the card Samantha gave me, wonder what her role is in all this.
No time like the present. I wonder if she’s an early riser. I dial the phone, get her voice mail.
Before I can leave a message someone starts hammering on my front door.
I hang up, pull the Glock.
I smell him before I get there, but I don’t need to do that to know who it is. I know that knock. It’s a cop knock.
“Goddamn you wear a lot of aftershave,” I say, opening the door. Frank looks like shit. I doubt he’s slept much. “Is that the same suit you were wearing last night?”
“Fuck you,” he says, elbowing his way in. He looks at the gun in my hand, ignores it. He’s got a pair of Samsonites under his eyes, hasn’t shaved. I’m wondering if the reality of what’s going on is finally sinking in, and he can’t handle it. I don’t blame him. I keep wondering when it’s going to really hit me.
“By all means, come on in.”
“I don’t have time to—The fuck happened in here?” He’s in shock, looking at the shambles of my living room like he’s never seen a burglary before.
“Wild night. What can I do for you, Detective?”
“We’re going to the morgue.”
“Thanks, but I already have a place to stay.”
“It’s Giavetti.”
“Yeah?” I say. “He finally walk out of there?”
“Dunno,” he says. “Somebody sure as hell did.”
The main morgue for L.A. County is across the river on Mission. It’s a sad little neighborhood. Everything covered in a fine layer of gray from the nearby rail tracks and the car smog from the 5 Freeway. I can see the sun rising hazily over the city as we wend our way through early morning traffic.
“I thought you kept regular hours,” I say. “Why so early?”
“Not like the morgue closes.”
“No, but you do.”
“Since when do you worry about me?”
“Since you’re the one who’s keeping me out of the massacre at Giavetti’s.”
“Yeah, well you don’t have to worry about that anymore. The place burned down last night. Any evidence you might have been there went up with it.”
“Accident?”
“What do you think?”
“Any leads?”
He glances over at me, his cop stare coming out for just a second. “Besides you? Where’d you go last night, anyway?”
“Out. How about you, Detective? Giving B&E a try? Looking for a new career?”
“Like you’ve got anything I want. I got better things to do than roll your place, Sunday.”
The back and forth is just going to piss us both off, so I drop it. “So what happened at the morgue?”
“Got a call from a guy I know over there. Owes me for not busting his ass on a narcotics charge. I asked him to keep an eye out for anything weird and let me know soon as it happens. I dropped some cash to have him go over the nightly security tapes. Thinks he’s got something.”
“Anybody else know?”
“Shouldn’t. He’s too freaked out to talk about it.”
We pull into the parking lot and slide into a space reserved for police officers. The morgue has been here for a long time, white facade and redbrick all around. Never been in myself. Always figured when I popped by, it’d be in a bag.
“They do the autopsy yet?”
“Doubt it. They’re backlogged over a week. Goddamn mess. Corpses stacked on corpses. Three to a drawer on a bad day.”
We go in. Disinfectant, heavy stink of days-old rot, cut open bodies. I’d fit right in.
Air fresheners in random corners of the lobby add a nice floral tinge. It might help, but with my newly sensitive nose it just smells like somebody shit on a rosebush.
Frank flashes his badge and signs us in. The receptionist hands us ID badges.
“We’re here to see DeWalt.”
The receptionist makes a call, and a nervous looking guy in surgical scrubs comes out a minute later. He’s got a haggard look, bloodhound jowls.
“Frank,” he says, eyeing me suspiciously. I don’t look like a cop. I just don’t give off that vibe. Then again, this guy’s been around cadavers so long, maybe I’m tipping his radar.
“This is Detective Patterson,” Frank says pointing at me. “He’s cool.” DeWalt calms down instantly.
He takes us into one of the refrigerator rooms. The place is all cold steel and ceramic tile. Noticeably rank. There’s a small desk and computer crammed over to the side. He’s talking in a low whisper. God knows why, nobody back here but him, Frank, and dead people.
“So, I’m checking last night’s tapes and around one a.m., I get this.” He brings up the video on his computer. It’s the hallway we just came through.
Nothing for a second. Then a naked man, old and withered, hobbles out of the refrigeration room, crosses over to another room. It’s hard to tell if it’s Giavetti, because his face is turned away from the camera.
DeWalt fast-forwards the video. “That’s the locker room he went into. He comes out about twenty minutes later.” Sure enough, he hobbles back out, but now he’s got surgical scrubs and a lab coat. He turns and heads toward the front door, and that’s when we catch his face.
It’s Giavetti all right.
“Fuck me,” Frank says.
“Is this what you were looking for?” DeWalt asks. “This guy hide in a bag and come in or something?” He’s reaching and he knows it, but the alternative doesn’t bear thinking about.
“Yeah,” Frank says. “Yeah, it’s what we’re looking for. Anybody sign out last night around then?”
“Nope. Camera caught him leaving, though. Walked right past the night receptionist like she didn’t even see him.”
“Probably didn’t,” I say. Frank gives me a look telling me he’d rather DeWalt stayed in the dark.
“Okay. Can you crack open one of these drawers?”
DeWalt hesitates. “This is just some guy hopped a ride on a morgue wagon, right?”
“Yeah,” Frank says. “Just some psycho. Probably came in to fuck an overdose or something. Good thing you brought this to me.”
DeWalt’s nodding. Necrophilia’s something he can understand. “Yeah. Just some psycho,” he says. “So, what drawer you’re looking for?”
“Guy came in yesterday morning from that shootout up in the hills.”
DeWalt winces. “He’s not one of the messed up ones, is he? Most of them are still double bagged to keep them in one piece.”
“GSW to the skull.”
“Oh, the headshot? Yeah he’s right here. We had to double them up. He’s in here with a multiple stab wound.”
DeWalt starts to slide open a drawer. Frank stops him.
“Why don’t you go and get some coffee, okay?” he says.
DeWalt looks from Frank to me and back again. “You sure?”
“Yeah. We’ll let you know if we need anything.”
DeWalt leaves, anxiously looking over his shoulder at us. Frank closes the door behind him.
I slide the drawer open, unzip the body bag.
“This isn’t Giavetti,” I say. “I’m not even sure it’s a person.”
“The fuck are you talking about?” he says, coming over to me. I step aside to give him a good look.
“Fuck me,” he says.
The body looks like it was pulled from the pyramids at Giza. It’s nothing but a mummy dressed in a Lakers T-shirt and jeans that are now five sizes too big. The skin is tight and dried out, bones poking through the stab wounds. I’d swear he was a hundred years old before he died. The toe tag says he’s nineteen.
There’s a list on the inside of the drawer, an extra body bag underneath.
“DeWalt said he was double drawered. So this is the second guy,” I say.
“Christ, what happened to him?”
I pull the drawer next to Giavetti’s, unzip the bag. A woman. Same thing.
“Same thing that happened to this one,” I say.
I pull more drawers open, check bodies. All of the ones around Giavetti’s drawer are in the same condition. Mummies. They’re all the same up to three bodies away from where he was stored. Some of them are more dried out than others.
“How did he do this?” Frank says.
I shrug. “Fuck if I know. Sucked ’em dry, maybe? Pulls out fluids like a vampire?”
“That’s disgusting,” Frank says. I agree. The human body’s got some pretty vile things in it. I should know, I oozed a lot of them out last night.
“Maybe it’s something else. All of these were brought in within a day after he was. Maybe there was some, fuck, I dunno,
life
left in ’em? Maybe he pulled it out of them? Used it on himself?”
life
left in ’em? Maybe he pulled it out of them? Used it on himself?”
“That’s insane.”
“You got a better idea? It’s not like he walked out of here with half his head missing.”
Frank looks at the open drawers, the mummified corpses. “I need a cigarette,” he says, walks out the door.
It explains a lot, but Frank’s still having trouble with it. Hell, I’m having trouble with it. Dead’s dead. You’d think he’d need a live body to pull some kind of vampire schtick. But the hell do I know? Maybe he just needs meat.
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