Next Victim (18 page)

"Oh, is this a holiday weekend? I had my head so far up my ass, I didn’t notice."

She ticked a cool glare at him. "Just pointing it out. ME’s not here yet; neither is SID. Not that there’ll be much for SID to look at down there."

SID was the Scientific Investigation Division, the forensics experts. Dodge had to admit that Painter was right. No trace evidence would survive the fire—which might be why the blaze had been set in the first place.

"Any reason we should be thinking arson?" he asked.

"Lot of flammable chemicals spilled everywhere. Beakers and stuff, you know. Place went up like a torch. Could’ve been intentional, I don’t know."

"You have no opinion?"

"It’s not my job to have an opinion."

She sounded tired. Probably she thought she was tired. She was wrong. Let her spend the next fifteen years wearing a badge, taking shit from every asshole on the street, making no money, pissing her life away. Then she would know how it felt to be tired.

He thanked her for the recap, then got two pairs of the waterproof boots and hung around, waiting for his partner to show. By now the sun was jostling the treetops at the far end of the quadrangle. There was a line of rust-colored smog on the horizon, as usual, but the sky overhead was turning blue. Of course its clarity was an illusion. The goddamn smog was everywhere, but up close, you couldn’t see it. Dodge thought there might be some sort of metaphor buried in that observation, but he didn’t bother to dig it out.

Bradley arrived a few minutes later, at 6:15. Dodge filled him in, and then the two of them pulled on their boots and walked into Life Sciences. It was an old building constructed of solid brick, with hardwood floors slightly bowed from decades of hard use. Skylights in the atrium let in the sun. Dust glinted in the air, mingling with flecks of floating ash.

The door to the stairwell was across from the elevators. A sagging length of crime-scene tape was strung across the doorway. They ducked under it and took out their flashlights, beaming them down the metal stairs into the dimness below.

Dodge caught the smell at once. He felt his stomach clench like a fist. The odor was sickening, like a barbecue gone bad.

"Whew," Bradley said. This was as close to an expletive as Dodge’s partner ever used. He was a family man, Al Bradley—or had been, till Cheryl sued him for divorce and took the kids to Seattle to live with their new daddy, a real estate salesman named Bob. Dodge thought it would do Al some good to cut loose with a nice stream of profanity now and then, but the guy was a straight arrow.

"Breathe through your mouth," Dodge advised, trying to sound cool, as if the stench didn’t bother him.

Bradley nodded. "Always do. I’m a mouth-breather by nature. You never noticed?"

They went down the stairs, noting the black tracks of firefighters’ boots stamped on each steel tread. Any other shoe prints—those of an intruder, say—would have been obliterated.

At the bottom of the staircase, they followed the boot prints and the smell to a ruined space that had been Organic Chemistry Lab II.

The laboratory was a single large room arrayed with the charred, skeletal remnants of wooden counters. The countertops had blistered over, the wood cracking and bumping up like alligator scales. Three-legged metal stools lay here and there, the cushioned seats incinerated.

Although a basement, the lab was not windowless. A row of narrow, horizontal windows ran along the top of the room at ground level. Daylight entered, diffusing in the thick, sooty air, barely penetrating the murk.

Dodge passed the beam of his flashlight over the rubble, revealing wet mounds of debris and pools of bubbling flame retardant sprayed by extinguishers. As the fire captain had said, there were puddles of water here and there, amid piles of waterlogged ashes, but most of the thousands of gallons of water had disappeared through large drainage grates recessed in the corners of the lab.

Glassware was all over the floor. Dodge remembered Painter mentioning
beakers and stuff
. There were plenty of beakers and flasks and vials and test tubes and every other sort of glass container. A few were intact, but most had been either shattered or melted, and in some parts of the room, mounds of fallen glassware had actually fused into surreal volcanic cones.

"What a mess," Bradley muttered. His flashlight swung up toward the ceiling, where fluorescent lighting panels hung down on strands of electrical wire, the plastic covers warped. He aimed the beam at the far end of the room, illuminating rows of cabinets hollowed out by flame.

The smell was really bad now. All the windows had been smashed, either by the firefighters or by the thermal impact of the fire itself, but there was little breeze entering the room. The air was stagnant, choking.

At least there was no doubt where the body lay. The stink drew them directly to it. It was sprawled near the back of the lab, between two counters, partially buried in ceiling tiles that had popped loose and rained down on the floor.

Dodge and Bradley knelt by the corpse. Enough was left of the pubic area to confirm that it was a man. Dodge brushed away the foam tiles and exposed a charred, crinkly face. The hair was gone—all of it, even the eyebrows. Eyes like poached eggs swam in their sockets, all the color boiled out of them.

The sight didn’t bother him. He’d seen gangbangers decapitated by shotgun blasts. He’d seen horrendous stabbings and mutilations. He was inured to the insults that could be directed at the human body. But the smell was something else.

"Maybe after this," Bradley told him, "you’ll lay off the pastrami burritos." Pastrami burritos were Dodge’s current poison of choice. They were sold out of a fast-food cart on Santa Monica Boulevard by a Filipino entrepreneur.

"No way," Dodge said. "I need my fix. Anyway, those burritos don’t smell anything like this."

"They smell worse."

Dodge studied the corpse. The victim’s clothes had been entirely burned away. He lay in a pugilistic posture, legs bent at the knees, arms pulled up as if sparring.

"Think he died defending himself?" Bradley asked.

Dodge said no. "The muscles contract because of the heat. Probably postmortem."

"You sure? Those look like wound channels on his arms."

"Splits in his skin. Heat contraction again. Like a fucking frankfurter on a grill. Gets hot, splits its seams."

Dodge started humming the Oscar Mayer song. Bradley told him to knock it off. "It’s not funny. This is somebody’s kid."

"Somebody’s crankhead. Come on, Al, we both know what went down here. Asshole’s got a key to the lab, sneaks in late on a weekend night to cook up some meth. Maybe GHB or something more exotic. Uses this ‘special project’ of his for cover. Tonight his luck runs out. Either he fucks up the recipe and the lab catches fire, or his competition whacks him and torches the place."

"That’s all speculation," Bradley said. "I say he was clean."

"You have such touching faith in human nature."

"No. I just have two kids of my own." Bradley brushed away a few more ceiling tiles, then recoiled. "God."

He had exposed the victim’s chest, where skin and muscle had been burned away altogether, leaving a gap through which the heart and lungs, relatively undamaged, were visible.

"Quite a view, huh?" Dodge smiled. He was getting used to the smell. "It’s like those models they use in science class—the transparent guy with all his guts showing through."

"You’re just chock-full of analogies this morning." Bradley swallowed. "What’s weird is that his internals look pretty much intact. I mean, outside he’s a toasted marshmallow, and inside he’s still in one piece."

Dodge nodded. "That’s normal. Body fluids prevent the inner organs from reaching the same temperature as the skin."

"How do you know all this?"

"Experience," Dodge said shortly. He didn’t bother explaining that one of his first homicide cases had involved a teenager who’d set his parents’ mobile home on fire, with them inside. They hadn’t let him get a tattoo. He’d been a little upset about it.

"And your experience tells you this is a crime scene?" Bradley asked.

Dodge hesitated. He knew the kid had been cooking meth. But it would be easier to call it an accident and let it go. Easier on the school, the kids’ parents, and most of all, himself.

But there was the media angle. College brat supplements his folks’ handouts by turning school property into meth house. Blows up his worthless ass—or gets his ass blown up by pissed-off street rivals who don’t like competition.

That was a story. Myron Levine would pay decent bucks for it, because the college was in Westwood—and Westwood was "affluent."

"Yeah," Dodge said, calculating what he could squeeze out of Levine for inside details on this case, "it’s a crime scene."

Bradley looked away. "Hope you’re wrong."

"Why? What difference does it make?"

"Maybe just because…well, because this would be a real bad way for an innocent kid to die."

Dodge couldn’t argue with that. But what Bradley didn’t understand, even after eighteen years on the street, was that nobody was innocent. Everybody was into something. Everybody was corrupt, tainted, dirty. Some were honest about it, and some put on an act—but no one was clean, ever.

The vic, whether Scott Maple or someone else, had been involved in something ugly. No matter how Dodge looked at it, this case was a whodunit.

And even if it ended up making him some money, it was going to fuck up his weekend, that was for goddamn sure.

19

The low buzzing of her cell phone startled Tess out of a deep sleep. She looked at the bedside clock—the digital readout said it was 6:47 A.M.—then fumbled for the phone, kept in her purse on the nightstand. She dropped it, had to grope for it under the bed, and finally managed to answer.

"McCallum," she said.

"What the hell’s going on with you? I had to let your damn phone ring fifteen times." It was the unmistakable, slightly nasal, ever-welcome voice of the Nose.

"I’m a sound sleeper," she told Michaelson.

"Then you might want to consider turning up the goddamned volume on your phone."

"I wasn’t expecting any calls."

"You weren’t expecting any calls. Perfect. Then I guess you weren’t expecting another dead body. But guess what? We’ve got one."

She sat up. "Where?"

"MiraMist Hotel, Santa Monica. Be there ASAP if you don’t want to get shipped back to Denver on the next flight."

She really disliked this man. "I’ll be there," she said tightly.

"That’s big of you. Oh, and, McCallum? You ever make me wait more than five rings to get through to you again, I’ll have your ass."

Click. He was gone.

She had fallen asleep fully dressed and had no time to change. Quickly she ran a toothbrush over her teeth and gums to get rid of the morning taste, then placed a DO NOT DISTURB sign on her door. There was a chance she would have time to come back for a quick shower later this morning, and she didn’t want the maid busy in the room. She could live with an unmade bed, anyway.

Before leaving, she switched on the air conditioner, setting the thermostat to seventy-two degrees. The room was getting stuffy, and the day was already warm.

Tess met Andrus in the lobby of the MiraMist. "Sorry," the AD said, "you can’t go up there just yet."

"Why not?" She had rushed in from the Valley, violating every municipal traffic law at least twice. The last thing she’d expected was a delay in visiting the crime scene.

"Michaelson called you too soon. He should have waited."

"Waited for what? Where is he, anyway?"

"Still on his way over. Look, grab some breakfast, relax for a while—"

"Relax? I’m not in the mood to relax. One of these rooms is a crime scene, and I want to look at it."

"Not yet. It’s…off-limits." Andrus said it with a light flutter of his eyelids that told her he was concealing something.

She drew him aside, into a shadowed alcove. "What’s up, Gerry?"

Using his first name was a signal. It meant they could talk as friends, not bureaucrats. But he merely looked away.

"Just be patient, Tess. Things are taking a little longer upstairs than expected."

"What things? You mean somebody’s already up there?"

"Another investigative team is working the room."

"
Another
team? This is a RAVENKIL crime scene."

"It’s more than that."

"More? Come on, Gerry, I have a right to know what’s going on. I’m part of the task force."

"You’re part of it because I pulled rank to violate bureau policy and bring you here. Don’t make me rethink that decision."

There was steel in his eyes, as chilly as the steel temples of his eyeglasses. Tess took a step back.

"You can’t take me off this investigation."

"I wouldn’t want to." His voice was noncommittal.

"No, I’m saying you
can’t
."

"Your personal feelings—"

"My personal feelings are not the issue. He sent me a new postcard, remember? He’s been in contact with me. Has he made contact with anyone else?"

The question was unnecessary. She took Andrus’s silence as her answer.

"Exactly. Which is why you need me working this case. So don’t try to threaten me, and don’t act like you’ve done me a favor bringing me to LA. Violating bureau policy…We’re dealing with a multiple lust murderer, and bureau policy is to catch him, and that’s why I’m here."

Andrus stared past her, his jaw working silently, and Tess wondered if she’d pushed too hard. Everything she’d said was true—but there was some truth on his side, as well. Under normal circumstances she would not have been part of this detail. Andrus had expended some of his carefully hoarded political capital to get her to LA. The fact that he’d done it out of self-interest, in the knowledge that a resolution of the case would reflect well on his leadership of the LA office, didn’t mitigate the debt she owed him.

"Things are complicated, Tess," he said finally. "I’m not at liberty to go into all the ins and outs. Let’s just say that I
do
need you on the task force—you’re right about that—but I need the cooperation of other elements within the bureau, as well."