Fangs Out (36 page)

“We survived a life-and-death experience,” I said. “That makes us brothers—or sisters—depending on how politically correct you want to get about it. I just want to look down at the dirt bag for a few seconds and gloat. Call it a catharsis.”

“What’s a catharsis?”

“It’s an arrangement. You let me have my little moment of satisfaction, I’ll spring for dinner afterward.”

The detective mulled my proposal, then said, “If anybody asks who you are or what you’re doing, you let me do the talking. You touch nothing, stand where I tell you, do what I tell you. Understood?”

“Roger.”

We made arrangements to meet in the parking lot of a church one block from the sheriff’s department’s Pine Valley substation, about forty highway miles east of downtown San Diego, just off Interstate 8. Rosario would then drive us to the scene, which was less than two miles from the substation. Her partner, she said, would not be coming along. Lawless’s wife was in labor. They were expecting twins.

No way was it a date with Rosario. Of that I convinced myself. My having asked the detective out to dinner was nothing more than reimbursement for a favor asked and granted. And even if it was a date, what Savannah didn’t know would never hurt her. Still, as I hiked up the trail, staring at Rosario’s bottom, I couldn’t help feeling that I was somehow cheating on Savannah. A tart taste rose up behind my tongue and stayed there.

T
HE BODY
was draped with a yellow tarp and surrounded by yellow crime scene tape looped in a loose circle around creosote bushes on either side of the trail. A pair of uniformed deputies, one African-American, the other white, guarded the scene, wiping sweat from their faces and sipping from plastic water bottles. They both looked bored and overheated. On the slope twenty meters above them, a ponytailed civilian in a green windbreaker with “SDSD Crime Lab” printed on the back was sweeping over the mountainous terrain with a metal detector, searching for what I assumed were spent bullets.

“What’s the story on the ME, Alicia?” the African-American deputy asked Rosario as we approached. “We’ve been here since before lunch.”

“Medical examiner’s swamped,” Rosario said. “Murder-suicide in Carlsbad, and the trolley splattered some transient down in Chula Vista. They said they’ll get somebody up here as soon as they can. Shouldn’t be much longer, fellas.”

Per protocol, the body was to remain untouched until a representative from the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s office arrived to declare the victim officially dead. They would then determine the approximate time of death by making a small cut with a pocket knife and jabbing a meat thermometer into the deceased’s liver.

Human beings begin losing heat at a rate of about one and one-half degrees Fahrenheit per hour as soon as they die. The warmer the weather, the slower they cool. Count down from 98.6, factor in ambient air temperatures, and you can get a reasonably accurate idea as to time of death. Rosario didn’t have to explain that part of it to me; I’d learned all about meat thermometers when I was with Alpha. More than once, we determined how many hours behind our intended targets we were by measuring the core temperatures of their dead compatriots, whom they often left behind to lighten their loads, in the vain hope of outrunning us.

“Who’s your friend?” the black deputy asked Rosario, dipping his chin in my direction.

“DA’s office,” Rosario said.

“Never seen him before.”

“He’s new.”

“He got a name?”

“He’s working undercover,” Rosario said.

“Gotta log him in, Alicia,” the white deputy said, pulling out a small spiral notebook from his back pocket. “You know the drill. Anybody who comes in or out of a crime scene—”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Rosario said dismissively, “they gotta get logged in.” She looked over at me, drawing a blank. “What’s your name again?”

“Jake Gittes.”

The deputy wrote it down. I spelled it for him.

Rosario squatted beside the body and looked up at me.

“Ready to do this?”

I nodded.

She peeled back the tarp.

Lazarus was laying on his back, facing uphill, wearing a black dress shirt, untucked, his arms and legs splayed like he was making a snow angel. There was a baseball-size splotch of dried, rust-colored blood just below his diaphragm, and a hole the size of a dime in the center of the splotch. Half a button was missing where the bullet had nicked it before penetrating his torso.

“Entry wound?”

“That would be my guess,” Rosario said.

“So, whoever shot him, shot him more or less from face-on position.”

She nodded.

He was squinting and his jaws were parted. His lips were pulled back like he was grinning—and not one of those half-hearted grins, either, the kind you manage after enduring your father-in-law’s oft-repeated favorite joke about the rabbi who walks into a bar. We’re talking laugh your butt off like it’s 1999. Who knew death could be so funny?

“How do you know this guy’s Lazarus?”

“How do I know?” Rosario stood and pointed. “I know because his truck’s parked a quarter-mile down the trail. I also know because he matches the description of C.W. Lazarus on file at DMV. Hair, eye color, height, weight, and age. Everything. Who else is it gonna be?”

“You check his driver’s license?”

“The wallet’s probably in his back pocket. We can’t get to it. Not until the coroner shows up and signs off.”

“So, you haven’t run his fingerprints?”

“Like I said. Not until after the coroner’s investigator signs off.”

The corpse had dark, well-barbered hair and long flared sideburns. His left cheekbone bore a scar I recognized. It was shaped like the Nike corporate logo. A “swoosh.”

“His name’s not Lazarus,” I said, staring down at the man’s dead, laughing face. “His name’s Ray Sheen.”

Rosario blanched. “Ray Sheen, from Castle Robotics? You sure?”

I was.

From down the trail came the sound of somebody hacking up a lung. He trudged into view, pushing a rolling metal gurney upon which rested a folded green body bag and a brushed aluminum tool chest. He was a heavyset man in his late thirties with a shaved head, black polyester dress pants, and a short-sleeved white shirt, the tails of which refused to stay tucked. His forearms were a miasma of colorful tattoos. A digital camera was slung over his shoulder. His name tag identified him as “E. Schlosser.”

“They don’t pay me enough for this,” he said, wiping his soaking florid face.

“The Medical Examiner,” Rosario said, “has arrived.”

Schlosser’s first move was to de-tarp the body and snap about 200 photos. Then, wheezing, he got down on all fours, reached under the corpse, and extracted a red, eel-skin billfold, which he handed up to Rosario without being asked.

“At least we know it wasn’t a robbery,” Rosario said.

The uniform deputies both nodded.

She opened the wallet, pulled out a California driver’s license, studied it for a second, then held it up for my inspection.

The name on the license read, “Raymond Francis Sheen.” The photo matched the man with the distinctive scar on his left cheekbone who’d tried to murder me.

Swoosh, indeed.

Twenty-four

R
osario and I occupied a corner booth at La Jolla’s Su Casa, an unpretentious, windowless bunker of a restaurant renowned for its verde crab enchiladas and
camarones al mojo de ajo
—jumbo shrimp sautéed in garlic butter and white wine. I’d ordered my usual
chile verde
burrito, but after two baskets of homemade tortilla chips, salsa, and multiple refills of spicy pickled carrots, I was about ready to call it a night. Not Rosario. She was still sorting through events of the day, eyes gleaming, eager to ponder the jigsaw puzzle that her homicide investigation had become.

“You know what I’m wondering?” Rosario asked, sipping her second margarita.

“Tell me.”

“How big it’s gonna get.”

“Excuse me?”

“I meant this case.”

“The case. Right.”

Rosario licked the salt from her glass. “Why? What did you think I meant?”

“The case. Obviously.”

Her lips curled in a wry smile. She knew exactly what I meant.

I reached uncomfortably for another pickled carrot.

After hiking back down the trail and dropping me off at my Escalade, Rosario had driven home to change for dinner. I’d done the same, stopping off at the YMCA in La Mesa where I’d paid the ten-dollar day rate to shower and try to look presentable. Now here we were, me in a semi-clean polo shirt and Levis, and her wearing a floor-length, leopard print sundress with spaghetti straps that were made to be slowly untied. The look was decidedly un-detective-like.

“We ran the VIN,” she said. “The truck belonged to Sheen’s cousin, Charles Walter Lazarus. He’s a mechanical engineer. Used to work for Castle Robotics. Sold the vehicle to Sheen three months ago, after he got a job in D.C. Sheen also owns the MINI you went riding in, along with an Audi turbo and a ’65 Mustang. He never filed an ownership change on the truck.”

“Wanted to avoid paying state sales tax, probably.”

“It happens.”

Deputies, she said, had reached Charles Lazarus by phone earlier in the day at his home in suburban Maryland, where he’d just returned from a month-long business trip to Europe and Asia. His alibi, according to Rosario, was solid; Lazarus could account for his whereabouts literally minute-by-minute over the previous week, thus ruling him out as a suspect in the trashing of my airplane or in any recent San Diego County murders.

“So, you’re back to square one,” I said. “You don’t know who shot Sheen. And you don’t know who stabbed Janet Bollinger.”

Rosario sat back, pondering what I said. Her arms were draped across the top of the booth, affording me an excellent view of her impressive superstructure that I tried to ignore as I reached for another carrot. If this was a date, it was among the strangest I’d ever been on.

“I keep coming back to Walker,” she said. “He had ties to both Sheen and Bollinger. Plus, he keeps an airplane out at Montgomery Airport. I checked. He rents a hangar there. He would’ve had easy access to your airplane.”

She theorized that Walker had borrowed Sheen’s pickup and driven it to the airport that night.

“Trucks come and go at airports all the time,” Rosario said. “He figured a truck would draw less attention on the flight line than a car.”

“Walker paid me to fly down here and do some work for him. Why would he want to monkey with my engine?”

“No clue.” Rosario tapped some ice from her drink into her mouth and chewed it. “But I do know he would’ve had ample reason to want to shoot Sheen. Sheen was sleeping with his wife. Men have been killed for a lot less.”

Her dangly silver earrings sparkled seductively in the candlelight.

I closed my eyes and massaged my forehead. Hub Walker was the last man I wanted to suspect of anything.

We sat for awhile without speaking.

“It would help if we recover a bullet,” Rosario said finally. “At least a shell casing.”

“It’ll be a relatively small bullet,” I said.

“What makes you say that?”

“Because I heard it.”

“You
heard
Sheen get shot?”

“Pretty sure.”

Rosario was incredulous. “And I’m only hearing this now? I thought we . . .” She paused in mid-sentence as our grandmotherly waitress arrived with our meals.

“Muy caliente.
Very hot. Please be careful.” She set two platters heaping with steaming Mexican food on the table. “Is there anything else I can get you? Another margarita for the lady? More club soda for the gentleman?”

“No gracias,”
Rosario said.

“No, thanks.”

“Enjoy.”

Rosario watched me ladle an ulcer-inducing amount of salsa while ignoring her food.

“Did I hear you right? You say you heard Sheen get shot?”

“Single discharge, approximately 800 meters down range, approximately ten minutes after we parted company. Definitely sounded smaller than the .45 he was carrying. Nine-millimeter would be my guess.”

The burrito was excellent. I ate probably faster than I should have. It was impossible not to.

“For a flight instructor,” Rosario said, “you seem to know an awful lot about guns.”

“Like I said . . .”

“Yeah, yeah. You’re into TV.” She picked at her enchiladas, eyeing me suspiciously but also intrigued. “Ever used to watch
Miami Vice
back in the day?”

“Occasionally.”

“Best cop show ever.”

“I beg to differ. Andy Griffith was the best cop show ever.”

“Andy Griffith wasn’t a cop show,” Rosario said.

“Andy played a cop, did he not?”

“A little before my time but, yes, I seem to recall he did.”

“And do you concede that the word ‘show’ in the
The Andy Griffith Show
connotes that it was, in fact, a show?”

“I’ll concede that.”

“I rest my case.”

She smiled and watched me eat. “Unfortunately, I don’t have Andy Griffith. But I do have all five seasons of
Miami Vice
on DVD. You interested in maybe grabbing some ice cream at my place after this and checking out a little Crockett and Tubbs action?”