L.A. Bytes (16 page)

the mask he could smell burnt brick and the odor of cement dust.

The dog kept his nose to the uneven ground, blowing up puffs of dust as he searched. After what seemed like hours, Sarah halted the dog. She produced a handkerchief from her back pocket and the dog obliged her by snorting in to it.

She met David’s quizzical gaze. “Fine dust like this, it clogs his nose and he loses the scent.”

They worked their way into the front foyer. Soon after that Maverick barked and lay down facing a pile of wood and brick that looked like any other debris. His once black coat was now gray. When he lowered his head and barked dust billowed around his head.

“Over here,” Sarah called out. “He’s found something.”

David scrambled over a shattered wooden beam and dropped to his knees beside the dog. Ignoring the splinters and stone chips that dug into his bare hands, he pulled aside the debris, throwing it behind him. His breath came in shallow grunts. Beside him Maverick grew more excited.

“Chris! Can you hear me?”

Maverick’s barks echoed in David’s head. Shards of brick sliced into his fi ngers. He dug deeper, searching frantically, shouting Chris’s name as he struggled to reach the bottom.

“I see something!” Sarah called out. Martinez was on his cell, shouting into it.

David spotted the denim-clad leg beyond what had once been drywall and tile. Glass littered the heavy blue material. A wet, red stain darkened the edge of the denim. It looked fresh.

Side by side David and Sarah dug through the rubble, joined by Martinez. Within minutes they had cleared legs and hips and were working on the upper body. Even before he saw his face, David knew it was Chris.

His skin was waxy and pale, and he didn’t seem to be breathing.

“Chris?”

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“Careful,” a newly arrived EMT cautioned. “We need to get him out of there with a minimum of movement.”

More EMTs arrived, and slowly but inexorably David and the others were pushed aside. He stood helplessly on the sidelines as the professionals removed the last of the debris from the unmoving Chris and eased him onto a stretcher board. They pressed an oxygen mask over his pale face.

“Let’s get him out of here,” an EMT shouted. “We’ve got a bus waiting.”

While David watched, Chris was rushed down what remained of Ste. Anne’s steps and shoved into a waiting ambulance. Sirens rising, the ambulance vanished between a pair of cherry red fi re trucks.

Wednesday, 1:45 pm, Northeast Community Police Station, San Fernando
Road, Los Angeles

David emerged from McKee’s offi ce and the fi rst thing he saw was a grinning Martinez.

“You ready to roll, partner?”

David had let Martinez drag him home to change before they raced to USC County General where Chris had just gone into surgery.

At that point Martinez took a phone call. McKee insisted David present himself at the Northeast Station immediately.

After forty minutes with McKee, who made it clear the only reason David still had a job was due to his superior’s due diligence and support, David was offi cially reinstated. David had enough respect for McKee to keep his opinions to himself.

“The only place I’m rolling is back to USC.” David threw his partner a sour look. “You can brief me on the way.”

Martinez led the way to his car.

“We got the warrant for our victim’s place and we got those pictures you were looking for.”

“The son? Adam?”

“Yeah. We’ve got a couple of uniforms visiting all the units in Nancy Scott’s apartment with Adam’s photo. So far we’ve got some hits, people saw Adam coming and going, but nobody’s too clear about dates or times. People just admit they saw him every week or two.”

David slipped back into cop mode with ease. “We’ll need to revisit them. Maybe we can jog some memories. What about the tox reports? Any word?”

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“I was gonna call them today. They’re dragging their feet.

They always do when you don’t stay on top of ‘em.”

They agreed that while David was seeing about Chris, Martinez would call CFSI and see if he could drag a preliminary report out of them. Depending on how that went, they would plan the rest of their day. David called the hospital.

Chris was still in surgery.

David waited impatiently for someone to come on the phone.

Finally, a woman picked up the extension.

“Detective Laine?” she asked.

“Yes. Can you tell me what happened to Chris?”

“The patient suffered head trauma due to falling debris, some internal bleeding and bruising as well as two cracked ribs.”

“What’s his condition?”

“He’s still in surgery. Once he goes into ICU we’ll have to wait for him to regain consciousness so we can assess his mental acuity.”

“You suspect brain damage?”

“He was buried in that rubble for an unknown period of time.

We have to suspect there was oxygen deprivation. We just don’t know for how long, or what damage there might be. We won’t know until he wakes up.”

“What are the chances of a full recovery?” He knew his agitation was showing “Chris is my husband.”

“We’re hopeful,” she said. “But if you’re looking for a fi rsthand account of what happened, you might be disappointed.

Often victims of this sort of trauma suffer permanent short-term memory dysfunction. He might never remember what happened to him today.”

David scrubbed his hand through his unruly hair. “Thank you, Doctor. I appreciate your being straight.”

“If you need to talk to him, I suggest you come back tomorrow.

He might be aware enough to talk then.” Her tone grew shrewd.

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“But if you want my advice, I’d just let him be for a couple of days. He’s likely to be pretty confused when he fi rst wakes up.”

“Thank you,” David muttered and disconnected after giving her his pager and cell phone number.

The early November sun splashed across the hood of Martinez’s mud-brown Crown. “He’s still in surgery,” he said fl atly. David squinted through the window at the street ahead, past a chugging orange, red and white metro bus.

“Let’s go talk to some techs then.”

“They got a report for us?” David asked. Last he’d talked to anyone at the lab they had nothing for him.

Martinez buffed his knuckles across his chest. “I always deliver.”

“I am impressed.”

The technician, a tall, robust African-American man, led them into an outer room. He carried two blue folders. His name tag said R. Ronaldson. “You’re wanting to see this, then.” He fl ipped open the folder and drew out a thin sheaf of stapled paper, which he handed to David.

He glanced through the document. His attention was immediately riveted by one line.

“Hydrocyanic acid?” David said. “Don’t tell me, it was in the chocolates?”

“There was a high degree of lactic acidosis and evidence of pulmonary edema. Your victim ingested roughly three hundred grams of chocolates and at least one hundred and seventy-fi ve milligrams of potassium cyanide.”

“Who dosed her?” Martinez muttered.

“Sorry, I don’t do whodunit.” Ronaldson stuffed the report back into the folder. “I just read the output. I leave the easy stuff to you.”

“Anything off the candy wrapper?” David asked. Which was going to be harder, tracing the candy or the poison? Were they
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still looking at the son? Poisoning was personal. Hard to see it being done by a stranger. Not impossible, but... would Nancy Scott have eaten a box of chocolates handed her by a stranger?

“Residue? Fingerprints?”

“High quality cocoa, cocoa butter, hazelnut... If it helps, they were high quality chocolates. Probably European. Sorry, no prints.”

“Can you give me a brand?” David asked.

“If you bring me a sample I might be able to match it, but so far I don’t think anyone’s started a database of chocolates.”

“Can you tell us anything else?”

Under David and Martinez’s watchful gaze he pulled out another report. “Some hair and fi bers were recovered from a carpet.” He glanced at the papers he pulled out of the folder.

“The bedroom carpet. Not too surprising, most home vacuums suck at getting that kind of stuff.” He snorted at his own joke.

“One thing you have to keep in mind is that hair’s pretty inert. It tends not to break down in a stable environment. So I can’t tell you how long they’ve been there.”

“But can you type them?” David asked. He’d worry about proving how the hair got there after he knew who it belonged to.

“Six distinct DNAs. One belongs to your victim. A second, male, is a close relative, so I’m guessing your victim’s son. The rest are unknowns.”

Meaning they weren’t in any database. Neighbors maybe, Alice for sure. No way to test all the possible visitors.

“And then there was the cat hair. Now that was interesting.”

“Cat hair?” David glanced at Martinez. “You remember anything about her owning a cat?”

Martinez shook his head. “Where was this hair?”

“That’s the interesting part,” he said. “It was recovered from the victim’s clothing.”

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“Why is that interesting?” David asked.

“Because that’s the only place it was found. If your victim had owned a cat, or even if one had been in her place for a short while, I would expect to fi nd cat hair in the carpet and bedding or chairs.”

“So how’d the hair get on her?” David asked. “The killer?”

“Maybe. Could be someone she visited,” Martinez said. “But if your killer owns one it’s good circumstantial. What color was the thing?”

“Tortoiseshell,” Ronaldson said. “So you’re looking for a female.” At their quizzical look he added, “Sexual dimorphism is a trait linked to the specifi c sex of an animal. For the most part only female cats can be tortoiseshell.”

David nodded. “Still, it only helps us catch a killer if we can fi nd him and his cat.”

They left the tech to his equipment and his evidence and made their way outside. A faint, lingering blush of pink stained the western sky.

Before Martinez unlocked the car, they shared a look over the roof.

“We gotta fi nd the son,” Martinez said.

“He gave us a contact, didn’t he?” David had been out of touch for a while, but he was sure he remembered getting an address and phone number from Adam.

“Yeah. Number was disconnected in September. I sent a couple of uniforms out to the address. Nada.”

“He skipped?”

Martinez shrugged and scratched a mole on his neck.

“Landlord says he gave his sixty days’ notice all regular like. No forwarding, but still, nothing hinky about it as far as the landlord could remember, though he did leave before his sixty days was up. But he was all paid up, so the landlord didn’t seem to care. If our guy’s running, he sure planned it all out in advance.”

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“Where’d his mail get diverted to?”

“Didn’t. My guess is he already had a mail drop. We’ll run DWP and phone searches, see if he transferred anything with him.”

David grunted. He looked over his folded hands at the red brick and glass Hertzberg-Davis building. The brand new forensic center was a far cry from the outdated facilities they’d used prior to its opening. His thoughts raced. Maybe Adam
had
planned the poisoning. Except, if he had, why did he come back to his mother’s apartment that day? If he was cagey enough to plan this homicide he must have known he’d be the prime suspect. Why not just vanish? He could have been on the other coast before anyone started looking for him.

“If he’s still here he must have an agenda,” David said, fi nishing the thought aloud. He thought of Nancy Scott as they had fi rst seen her, lying in her bed, looking like she had just fallen asleep. He swung around to stare hard at Martinez. “I want to go talk to Lopez.”

They drove east to Mission Road, struggling through late afternoon traffi c, where they found Lopez in her offi ce. She was peering over her glasses at a monitor, working on something and tapping away at her keyboard with two fi ngers. She looked up when he entered.

“Cyanide,” he said, leaning over her desk, palms fl at on the scarred metal. “The dosage our victim got, how fast would it hit her?”

“Ingested?”

“Probably in chocolates.”

“Ten-fi fteen minutes.”

“Not instantaneous?”

“No. She’d start to get very ill within those fi fteen minutes.

She’d feel dizzy, nauseous, maybe even restless.”

“Anything else?”

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“Rapid onset would cause convulsions and heart failure.”

Lopez propped her elbows on the desk and laced her fi ngers together. “The principal toxicity results from the shutting down of cellular respiration. The cells can’t get the oxygen they need, so they fail. Tissues with the highest oxygen requirements like the brain and the heart are the most affected by acute cyanide poisoning.”

“So she wouldn’t just lie down and die?”

“It might be quick, but it’s not that gentle,” Lopez said. “It’s not what I’d call a nice way to die.”

“Our victim was arranged all neat and peaceful in her bed, like she’d just dozed off watching TV. From what you’ve just told me that’s about as likely as Martinez suddenly developing a taste for Gucci.”

She blinked. “That’s not an image for the faint of heart.”

“No, I guess it isn’t. Thanks, Lopez.”

“Anytime.”

David rejoined Martinez in the car. Martinez cranked the engine on and rolled down the window.

“Where to?” he asked.

David opened his mouth to say the victim’s place when his cell went off. He yanked it off his belt and stared at the text message on the tiny screen. His mouth went dry.

“The hospital,” he croaked. “It’s the hospital.”

Martinez threw the car into gear and they squealed out of the lot in a cloud of burning rubber.

Wednesday, 5:30 pm, USC County General, State Street, Los Angeles
Thick, gummy residue matted Chris’s eyelashes and raised tears as he forced them apart. He blinked. All he could see were blurs of dull white and gray. A distant beeping throbbed in his skull.