L. A. Heat (11 page)

“Gotta hand it to you,” Martinez finally said.
“You got more balls than me, spending the night with a bunch of
joto
—”

“Stop saying that!”

“What?”

“
Jotos. Jotos
! You act like they’re not
human.”

“Hey, it’s just an expression—”

“Yeah, the same one those punks used last night
before they tried to kill one of them.”

“What the hell—”

He told Martinez about the gay-bashers.

“
Idiotas
. Don’t they know they should stay
down in the barrio?” He shook his head, then caught David’s look. “
Dios
,
you don’t think I’m like that, do you? I told you, it’s just an expression.”

“An ugly one. Do me a favor and stop using it.”

David liked Martinez, respected him as a cop, and
for all his blatant displays of intolerance, Martinez
was
a good cop. He
treated everyone, doer and civilian, with a mild contempt that was almost
casual in its delivery.

Still, David could all too easily imagine what
Martinez would say if he found out what had really happened last night.

David couldn’t believe what he had done. Letting a
suspect get through his guard like that. Letting himself be kissed—worse,
losing it and kissing the guy back.

Tuesday,
9:40 am, Cove Avenue,

Silver
Lake, Los Angeles

Chris woke amid a tangle of
sweat-soaked sheets. He blinked away sleep and groaned when the bedside phone
rang. Who the hell would call this early—then he looked at his clock.

“You planning on coming in today, Bellamere?”
Becky’s voice was pitched low as though to keep someone from overhearing. “I’m
holding Petey at bay with some story about you talking to clients off-site, but
he’s getting nasty. Wants to know when you’re checking in. You sick?”

“Jesus, Chapman, why’d you wait so long to call.”

“Last time I checked, Bellamere, you were old
enough to wipe your own ass.”

Chris groaned.

“Must have been some night,” Becky said. “You fit
to work?”

“Let me go stick my head in a bucket of water.
I’ll be right there.”

Fifty-five minutes later he nearly ran down Tom
Clarke as he stepped off the elevator.

“You expect everyone to get out of your way,
Bellamere?” Tom glanced at his watch. “Running late?”

Becky wrinkled her nose when she saw him. “Wow.
Who was he?”

“Nobody!” Chris snapped. A sudden image of David
flashed through his head. Could he have been wrong about the way David
responded last night? Had he misread things that badly? “Maybe I just
overindulged.”

“Ha, Bellamere.” She popped a stick of Juicy Fruit
in her mouth. “So, who was he?”

“Don’t go there, Chapman.”

Chris spent the morning fielding phone calls from
various clients. At lunch he settled for take-out,
chiles rellenos
from
a nearby Mexican place. His phone rang. He let it go to voice mail.

He got iced tea out of the vending machine and ate
half the chiles, then played his messages. Damn, that last call had been from
Des.

Chris had his speed-dial on the BlackBerry, so he
grabbed that. Des picked up on the third ring.

“I was right?” Des giggled. “That cop’s gay? Man,
he looked like he was ready to do you right in my front hall. So, you guys go
back to his place? I know you didn’t go home, I called often enough.”

Chris rubbed the back of his neck, sorry now he
had called. He really didn’t want to talk about last night. “Maybe I wasn’t
answering the phone.”

“You took him to your place? I want gory details.
Give me the dish, boyfriend.”

“Nothing to dish,” Chris sighed and popped the
last batter-covered Anaheim chili into his mouth. “He dropped me at my car. I
went home.”

“Right. So, are you going to see him again?”

*****

The phone rang as he let himself
into his house later that afternoon.

“Chrissy, you’re a hard man to find.” Trevor’s
smoky voice smoothed Chris’s nerves, even though he hated being called Chrissy.
“I’ve been calling for hours.”

“Gotta keep the tax man happy. What’s up?”

“I was hoping we could get together, but I’m
heading out of town on a job.”

Trevor worked for one of the fringe production
companies as a script supervisor, a tedious job he once explained meant
watching out that if an actress wore pink slippers in one scene, she had on the
same footwear when the next scene was shot two weeks later. Trevor had a
hundred catty stories about the newest Hollywood talent. Especially the cute
little gay hotties who tried so hard to play it straight.

“Too bad. I was thinking of heading down to the
Pit for a drink later,” Chris said. Trevor was the only man Chris had ever met
who could actually purr when he spoke. So many men tried for the effect, but no
one did it better than Trevor. A shiver of lust raced along Chris’s nerve
endings. Trevor was just what he needed to take the sting out of David’s
rejection. He tried for some purr of his own. “How about you leave in the
morning? I’ll serve breakfast in bed.”

“No can do, babe. Got business to attend to,” he
said, sounding distracted. “But you and me, we got some unfinished business of
our own to take care of, don’t we?”

“When will you be back?”

“That’s what I like to hear. Enthusiasm. I’ll only
be gone a few days. Keep next weekend open for me, okay?”

“Consider it yours.”

Tuesday,
5:25 pm, Piedmont Avenue, Glendale

David unlocked his car. His cell
chirped.

“Davey,” Martinez said. “Got something you might
want to see. How soon can you get back here?”

It was nearly five-thirty. “Why don’t you grab
something from the deli?” David said. “I’ll meet you in twenty.”

Thirty minutes later David found a pastrami on rye
on his cluttered desk. Martinez was nowhere to be seen. Half a dozen folders
lay beside the sandwich, plus one manila envelope with his name on a
computer-addressed label. There was no postmark. He picked up the envelope
after unwrapping his pastrami. Martinez had remembered to get extra mustard.

Martinez appeared at his elbow, nearly knocking
the other half of the sandwich off the desk as he planted his butt.

David rescued his dinner and waved the envelope at
him. “When did this come in?”

“Front desk called just after four.”

David slit it open with a fingernail and peered
uneasily inside. What he saw made him glance up at Martinez. “Got a pair of
gloves handy?”

Martinez handed him a pair. David slipped them on,
and Martinez leaned forward as David reached in and pulled out a California
driver’s license and a photograph.

Daniel Anstrom. Nineteen-year-old sophomore at the
University of Southern California. North Hollywood address. Both of them stared
at the young face. David felt despair tighten the muscles of his stomach as he
studied the photo, which had been printed out on flimsy paper from a digital
file. It showed a dumpster, this one with a backdrop of mountains. Somewhere
north of Los Angeles proper. He flipped to the next image, recognizing it
easily: Angeles Crest Highway.

“Think anyone filed on him?” Martinez asked, but
even his voice sounded strained.

It took less than ten minutes to find the report,
taken three weeks earlier. Anstrom’s parents had called it in, waiting the
requisite forty-eight hours after their son disappeared, though they insisted
he wasn’t the type to just vanish.

David called the California Highway Patrol and
told them what to look for. Then he sent the envelope and all its contents down
to the lab for analysis.

The rest of the day was spent trying to locate
Anstrom’s parents, who weren’t answering their phone. David spent the next day
catching up on paperwork, which was never in short supply.

Thursday night he ate a hastily prepared supper of
frozen stir-fry tossed with soy sauce on some left-over rice while catching the
tail end of a Dodgers home game. When they lost seven to two he knew it was
time to call it a night.

He almost made it to sleep before the bedside
phone shrilled.

“Better get down here,” Martinez said.

David sat up. “Highway Patrol found something?”

“No. Looks like our boy delivered a fresh one to
our doorstep.”

Thursday,
7:45 pm, County Coroner’s Office,

North
Mission Road, East Los Angeles

The morgue assistant brought out
the sealed body bag, and David signed off on it.

No confirmation yet it was their killer’s work,
but David’s gut told him it was. The fact the body’s temperature was still 95.2
degrees when discovered proved to be the only definite piece of evidence. A
patrolling officer had spotted something suspicious on her rounds and left her
car to investigate. Rigor hadn’t even set in.

“Our boy’s got brass balls.” Martinez casually
appraised the body on the table. “Getting bigger every day, too. Brazen,
dumping a body like that.”

David frowned. The latest John Doe had been dumped
on the front steps of a house undergoing renovations less than five hundred
yards from the Northeast station. So far no one inside or outside the station
had reported seeing anything. Brazen wasn’t even the word.

Lopez used sterile water and the first of many
clean swabs to wipe the blood off the damaged face. The morgue assistant
captured the results of her work on film. David knew he’d be heading back to
the Nosh Pit with those pictures. His stomach rolled over at the idea.

“Interesting,” Lopez muttered. “What do we have
here?”

She used a pair of forceps to tease something out
of the bloody folds of skin around the victim’s throat. From where David stood
it looked like dark strands of gore-covered linguine.

“What is that? Film?” David leaned in to get a closer
look.

“VHS stock, if I’m not mistaken.” She continued to
work the material out one inch at a time, taking care not to break it.

“He wasn’t strangled with it, was he?” Martinez
asked.

“Not strong enough,” Lopez said. “I suspect the
ligature strangulation was performed by something else, and this was wound
around before the actual strangulation occurred.”

“What makes you say that?”

“The material’s all but embedded in the skin. That
could only occur if the force of the ligature material acted to drive the tape
under the skin.”

David leaned forward. “Can it be cleaned?”

“We’ll isolate any latents, and test for DNA, but
sure, I think it can be cleaned up.”

“Haven’t been to a good movie in ages,” Martinez
said. “Think this is a blockbuster?”

“I think it’s a message.”

“Original,” Martinez muttered. “Why can’t he be
like everyone else and send badly composed poems?”

Lopez slid the bloodstained film into a steel bowl
and handed it to the morgue assistant. “Check into cleaning this. Carefully, we
don’t want it damaged.”

The morgue assistant nodded and carried the bowl
toward the sink where racks of chemicals were stored.

Lopez patiently continued to clean the corpse,
exposing a face that had probably been handsome, though it now bore the
unmistakable marks of someone else’s rage.

“Does this one seem more personal to you?” David
moved around to study the body from another angle. He kept rubbing his temple,
where a headache lurked. “Another question: Was he drugged?”

“Something eating you?” Martinez asked.

“He’s decompensating fast.” Psychiatric jargon for
falling apart. Their killer was losing it. “Getting sloppy.”

“Sloppy is good. We can use sloppy.”

David thought of Chris. Psychopaths were cool,
until they decompensated, but as cool as Chris was? If he was guilty, then he
was a veritable iceberg and his lies were Oscar quality.

He stared down at the ruined body on the slab. Who
was he to the killer? Had Chris known him?

As soon as possible David got them to roll the
body’s prints and run them through the Automated Fingerprint Identification
System, but no hits came back.

Returning to the station, David and Martinez went
over what they knew. Not much. It was back to legwork. David already had a pair
of newly assigned D’s canvassing the area where the body had been dumped. He
couldn’t find out anymore here; it was time to hit the Nosh Pit again.

He told Martinez as much.

After several minutes Martinez picked up the
nearly empty murder book that had been started for the latest victim and
flipped through it. He met David’s gaze.

“You want me along?”

Technically David knew they should go together. It
was a solid lead he had developed on his own, but now it should be worked by
both partners. Only, he didn’t want his
partner
around for this one.

“It’s a no-brainer, so if you got something you
want to work on your own...” he murmured.

Martinez kept worrying the murder book as though
he wished he could produce answers out of it. “I’m thinking that film angle
should be addressed,” he said.

“Go for it, then,” David said.

Martinez looked grateful. “You want me there, I’m
beside you, man, but I gotta confess those places give my
cojones
the
willies.”

Which pretty well summed it up, David thought
sadly. “Just make sure you let me know if you find anything, eh,
compadre
?”

“How about we report back with our findings, say,
around one?” He flipped his sleeve back to look at this watch. Nine-thirty.
“That ought to give us both time to do our thing.”

“I’ll bring the pizza.”

“Forget the anchovies this time, okay?”

“And you call yourself a cop.” Martinez was still
shaking his head as he strode away from his desk. He spun around and glared
back at his partner. “Don’t tell me you want me to forget the hot peppers,
too?”

David grinned. “Nah, those I can handle.” He kept
a bottle of Rolaids in his upper drawer just for that situation.