Crime Rave (2 page)

Sunday November 1, 2000

2:00 AM

The Wreckage

C
rime tape marks the scene of the Hollywood Hills Massacre in a brutal ring, the yellow and black harsh in floodlights against the muted gray of rubble, marking the spot where more than thirty thousand partygoers danced to their deaths. Save four: a woman in a werewolf costume missing a leg, a pale man dressed as a vampire with no discerning wounds, a middle-aged lady whose screams shut down the entire site until medics tranquilize her, and fourth, an exotic South Asian bird girl with bleach-blonde hair. Four survivors of the largest explosion Los Angeles has seen since the SS Sansinena blow-up at the Port of Los Angeles back in ’76. The difference is on that day in December only nine lives were lost. Today goes down in history as the biggest hit the city has ever taken. In fact, it’s the biggest attack ever to take place on American soil, the 168 deaths in the Oklahoma City bombing now dwarfed by this new magic number of roughly 35,486. It was a bad night, turned into a morning with no intention of getting better.

LAPD Homicide Captain Ward Anderson’s voice booms through a megaphone, instructing hundreds of patrol cops to keep press at bay and for the canine unit to release their dogs in the search for bodies and other survivors. Captain Anderson: tall, slim, African-American, with a deep voice that belongs to a much larger man, doesn’t need the mic but uses it anyway. He likes the weight of it and the ever-further gravitation of his words. With him are Homicide Detectives Atticus Red Feather and Synthia Günn, who survey the site that once housed eccentric motel magnate Charles Wallace Crane’s mansion. Half Lakota, half white Detective Red Feather, thirty-nine, wears his long dark hair in a braid down his back, secured with leather cord. Thirty-one-year-old Detective Günn’s Scandinavian roots are evident in her white-blonde hair and sharp features, framed by a severe pixie cut and a perpetual scowl that give her Nordic features a cruel edge.

Around them, LA’s most notorious landmark is now a glorified pile of dust and scattered body parts that the crime scene investigators bag and tag, double and triple checking their work, anxious for the hundreds more people needed to cover what’s left of the now-demolished hill.

The governor’s on site in a state of shock, adding work to the already-stretched patrolmen who shield him from the press hounds. The mayor is en route and a task force sets up along the perimeter to deal with the evidence, awaiting dozens more members flying in from around the world, torn from war zones and covert missions to deal with problems closer to home. On the other side of Los Angeles, family members of the dead queue up at the Beverly Center with DNA samples to assist the ID process. Not that there will be anything with which to match their hair and toothbrushes: The site is vaporized, through and through.

A cordon of police officers pushes back eager press coming from all over the country, vying for the story of the century, already assigning blame, shouting questions and clicking their telephoto lenses in spite of repeated yells to move away and stop. Someone’s gonna get a baton in the face, it’s that kind of morning.

News helicopters buzz overhead, ignoring the no-fly zone Captain Anderson declared over the explosion site. Despite the chaos, despair hangs over the site in a mushroom cloud. The metaphysics of tragedy. Disbelief gives way to resignation as the scale of devastation hits home moment by moment, too vast to comprehend. Underneath it all the question of who’s responsible itches worse than shingles. But the show must go on. And each cop knows his part, plays it like it’s his last.

The captain clips off the megaphone and turns to Detectives Red Feather and Günn. “Here’s what we’ve got so far.” Captain Anderson’s face is creased with sleep and he’s missed several spots with his razor. The white stubble against his dark skin belies his otherwise youthful appearance.

“Charles Wallace Crane was the organizer of this Halloween night ‘rave’ party.” Anderson makes air quotes with his fingers. “Tickets went on sale thirty days ago at the usual points; clothing stores, Ticketmaster, etc. Vendors were informed if they ran out of tickets they could call a one-eight-hundred number and more tickets would be delivered. At last count, they sold approximately 35,486 tickets.”

“Thousand! You’ve gotta be kidding.” Red Feather’s mouth drops open.

“I shit you not, Atticus.” Captain Anderson hands him the party flier: A glossy Technicolor display of a haunted mansion framed by speakers emblazoned with a skull and the words FULL LUNACY. The captain continues. “This doesn’t necessarily mean that all thirty-five-thou-plus were in attendance, some might have left early, some might have been on their way—”

“But not many,” Günn interrupts, “once the drugs kick in, they stay all night.”

“Always Miss Sunshine.” The captain pulls a wry smile.

Günn shrugs, her scowl transforms to disgust. “It’s true, Boss. Got a niece up in San Fran who loves these things. Wears these huge baggy pants that look like a skirt until she walks, plastic bracelets like a five-year-old. She wears a goddamn pacifier around her neck.” Günn has the urge to spit but reins it in.

“A pacifier?” Captain Anderson is getting too old for this shit.

“Ecstasy makes you grind your teeth, Boss, so they chew on those instead.”

“Oh for God’s sake.” The generation gap gets wider and wider.

“Yeah.” Günn spits anyway.

Captain Anderson shakes his head and continues. “The lifestyles of the young and stupid aside, we got thirty-five thousand potential vics here, making this the single largest terrorist act to take place on American soil. Feds will be here, so we gotta make sure everything goes copacetic.” Anderson looks at the mess around them. He has a smear of ash on the sleeve of his black jacket. “The explosion took place at approximately twelve thirty in the AM, November first, but paint me pink and call me cotton candy if this doesn’t go down as the Halloween massacre. The press is gonna have a field day with this one.”

“Wasn’t it a Halloween theme rave, Boss?” Günn’s social skills leave much to be desired. She holds up the orange and black flyer that features a menacing haunted house surrounded by flying bats and a set of speakers adorned with a grinning skull.

Captain Anderson’s face flashes with annoyance, the kind that results in a write-up for insubordination.

Red Feather intervenes, shooting Günn his now-patented
shut the motherfuck up
look. She puts her hands up and takes a step back.

The captain takes a deep, composing breath. “About twenty minutes after the explosion we received a video at Hollywood PD from a group calling themselves the Bad Vibe Kids. They claim responsibility for the explosion. We’ve got ’em on the surveillance tapes, but they covered up their license plate. In the confession they said, I quote, ‘We did it for their own good.’”

Red Feather fills his mouth with air and expels it fast. “Fuuuuck.”

“Prints all over the video and the envelope, all with priors, drug dealing, DUI, arson, reckless endangerment. Patrol’s on the way to pick them up at their last-knowns.” Günn and Red Feather nod.

“We got four survivors, one male and three females. One female in a werewolf costume badly wounded, her leg’s been severed. Male, shaken up but otherwise unharmed. Hysterical middle-aged woman—she’s the one whose screaming damn near shorted out all our equipment—and I’ve got no fucking idea what she’d be doing at a ‘rave’ party.” He does the air quotes again. “Another female who looks more like a bird than a human, but I leave that for the hospital to sort out. Witnesses to the explosion from around the city said they saw a bright flash and then the boom went up into the sky, like a reverse tornado.”

“A what?” Günn cannot keep the annoyance from her voice. “That’s not even possible.”

Anderson shrugs. “Multiples corroborated that the explosion—well—
imploded
into the sky. They saw the debris flying upward, every last bit of the hill with it.”

Red Feather looks up, thinking of the Sky Gods his father told him about as a child.

“I’m not the religious type, but fuck me if survivors at all isn’t some kind of miracle.” Captain Anderson runs his hand through his thick batch of hair.

Günn scoffs. “I don’t believe in miracles. I believe in evidence.”

“Then you’d better take a hard look around here, Detective. And we’re just getting started.”

Anderson, Red Feather and Günn eye the acreage that just yesterday housed one of Los Angeles’s strangest landmarks. The Crane Mansion and the hill upon which it rested had been man-made. The gonzo Crane and his billions from a global motel industry went toward constructing the eyesore of a hill and its nonsensical mansion atop. Angelenos protested, arguing that the structure would ruin their iconic skyline. Crane’s money won and ten years later the “Motel Chain Mansion”—as it became known around town—was complete, jutting through the heart of Hollywood. A thorn in the side of a concrete city.

“Anything else, Boss?” Red Feather looks back at Anderson as Governor Bernard Brooks arrives with his entourage. The captain’s cue for publicity hour.

“Keep an eye on the CSIs for now, make sure they bag whatever body parts are still here. When you’re done, head to Spruce-Musa Hospital, I want witness statements from the survivors before the Feds take over. You get every last drop on what they remember, I don’t care if they are traumatized or what, you grill ’em. Then get back to the station. We’ll have those Bad Vibe goons in custody by the time you do.”

“You got it, Boss.”

Captain Anderson hitches up his pants, fixes his tie. “Ok then, time for my close-up.” Günn brushes the smudge of ash from his sleeve in a rare gesture of kindness. Anderson nods in thanks and strides to the mass of paparazzi craning their way for a peek around the cordon of police officers.

The detectives watch as Pete Mazzotti, head of Hollywood PD forensics, extracts the four-foot remnant of a lizard tail costume from under a layer of ash and calls to Detective Red Feather. Mazzotti photographs it
in situ
with a Polaroid camera. The machine hums and haws before spitting out the image. Mazzotti holds the photo like it’s glass, waits for the image to develop. He’s satisfied, puts the photo with the growing pile of crime scene snaps and turns to Red Feather, showing him the piece.

“This must have been some wild party.” Mazzotti studies the prosthetic detail that went into this lizard tail. It looks almost real, a prehistoric relic.

Red Feather shakes his head. “What a fucking mess.”

“Royal.” Pete makes a note on his clipboard and places the tail in a body bag.

“You find anymore costume bits you let us know. DNA’ll take forever but if we got descriptions we can make public…gonna be a hell of a time putting names to what’s left. Tell your team.”

“You got it, Detective.”

Red Feather looks at Günn. “I just don’t get how anyone managed to walk away from this.”

Günn tilts her head and frowns. “I guess we’ll find out when we interview them. Maybe they were, I dunno, somewhere else when it all went down.”
There has to be a reasonable explanation.

“She was missing her leg,” Red Feather reminds the pedantic-to-a-fault Günn.

“I know. Aren’t we lucky we caught the night shift?” Günn flashes an uncharacteristic smile.

A yell from one of the CSIs gets everyone running over to the far side of the site.

“You’re fucking kidding me!” Mazzotti wonders if he’s still sleeping.

An investigator holds up a decapitated head, purple hair, one eye. Not a costume.

“A cyclops?” Red Feather’s brow furrows.

Mazzotti pries open the eye, bloodshot, bright green iris. “Birth defect, I’m guessing. There’s herbs that’ll stop the brain from splitting into two lobes in uteri. The mom must’ve been big on alternative meds and didn’t realize until it was too late.” Mazzotti shrugs. “Or she could have been poisoned.”

“Well,” Günn says, “her mistake, our gain. A one-eyed girl is gonna be a piece of cake to ID.”

“Always the pragmatist, huh Günn.”

Günn scowls. Mazzotti places the head into a plastic baggie. Tags the location, scribbles on his clipboard. “Rave parties. What a bunch of freaks.”

“What about Charles Wallace Crane? Weirdo recluse living on his homemade hill goes and actually throws a rave, God knows why, that gets blown all to hell?” Entitled Richie Riches like him get Günn’s blood boiling something awful.

Red Feather feels a tinge of sadness as he looks at the one-eyed girl, her skin made opaque by the plastic bag. She looks so young, too young to be at a rave. Now dead.

Mazzotti places the head in the growing pile of bagged body parts recovered from the wreckage. “It’s strange that we have body parts at all, truth be told. Taking into account the state of vaporization on the hill, I can’t even begin to explain how these bits and bobs made it.” He’s going to win Criminalist of the Year after he publishes on all this. Maybe he’ll get that raise he’s been promised, even before the salary freeze ends.

“And the four survivors?” Günn added.

Mazzotti shakes his head. “Yeah, I got nothing. Except maybe divine intervention, but that ain’t gonna fly when this all goes to court.”

Red Feather’s cell phone rings. He walks away from Günn and Mazzotti. Talks. Hangs up. “HQ. They’ve got three of the perps in custody. Captain says two are brothers, other’s a friend. Oldest one is twenty-five, youngest is eighteen-flipping-years old.” Red Feather feels that same sadness steal over him.
What happened to these kids to drive them to mass murder?

Günn wishes she’d be the one to interrogate the little shits.

“Oh for God’s sake,” Mazzotti says. “They on drugs?”

“Guess we’ll find out soon enough.” Red Feather does a three-sixty of the site.

Günn snorts. “Not with the Feebs on the job. Those tools couldn’t get a call girl to talk if they paid her.”

Red Feather and Mazzotti laugh, but it’s a hollow sound. There is too much death around them as they breathe in the ash of what was once people, scattering to the wind.

“Pete, you got any other notable pieces here?” Red Feather looks at the nearby stack of plastic baggies.

“Actually, yes. Take a look at this one.” Mazzotti shows them a half a head with neck and shoulder attached. The eye is open and shines metallic through the plastic. “I thought it was some kind of paint or contact lenses at first, but it’s not. Her eyes are silver.”

“No way,” Günn says, taking the bag to examine it. “You’ll test it at the lab to make sure.”
It can’t be silver
, she thinks,
not possible.

“Goes without saying. And here, this one.” Mazzotti rifles through the pile and pulls up a piece of torso bagged in clear plastic. “When Miller handled it he got real sick, puking and then he passed out. I took a swab, but my guess it’s got some kind of poison on it.”