The White Angel Murder (4 page)

She had a boyfriend: James Christopher Arnold. Stanton called the two phone numbers they had for him and got an error message letting him know the numbers were disconnected. There was a brief official statement taken on the day she was discovered, but it was less than three paragraphs and didn’t give any specific details about her life.

He flipped through some of her bills: credit card statements, bank statements, utility bills; he came to a copy of her work schedule printed from an online calendar. He looked to the day of her death: she was scheduled to work that morning, but the rest of the week were all evening shifts. Alcoholics were notoriously bad at morning shifts and waitress’ schedules were usually flexible; if she was working that morning it meant she had to be somewhere that evening.

The homicide report was twelve pages with a fifteen page supplemental report. The case had been worked by two detectives, both under thirty years old. The necessary information in the report made up about two pages. The other ten were filler. An attempt to cover up the fact that they had nothing to go on. There was no mention that Tami was to work the morning shift the day she was killed.

Stanton pulled out the first photo from forensics and it sent a shock through his body. He dropped it and looked away. It had been too long and he hadn’t prepared properly. There was a taxi waiting on the curb outside and he watched it a few moments before turning back to the photo. He stared at it and then took out the coroner’s report and placed them side-by-side.

The brutality of it made him think of an animal attack and one line in the coroner’s report stuck out to him:
Feces found in the subject’s esophagus matched the feces found over the bed sheets
.

He pushed the coroner’s report away and stared at the photograph a long while before putting it back in the box.

*****

Stanton went outside and decided on walking around the block. The sun was hot and sweat began to form on his forehead. There was a little café nearby and he walked there and sat down in a booth by himself and ordered a turkey sandwich with soup.

There was a couple sitting near him. They were older and weren’t speaking to each other. The man was missing a finger on his right hand and his nails had grit underneath them. His dentures were placed on a napkin and he gummed some soup as his wife ate a thick hamburger. She looked at Stanton and then away.

“
I forgot to ask if you want anything to drink?” the waitress said as she placed the sandwich and soup on the table.

“
No, water’s fine.”

He stared absently out to the street, watching people walk by, enveloped in their own lives and oblivious to those around them. Tami had been that way.

Stanton paid for his food without eating and left the café.

7

Stanton drove to Interstate 8 and headed northwest to La Jolla. It was evening but the sun was still out and the freeways were not as packed as they would have been an hour ago.

He had read everything in the box and looked at most of the photographs forensics had taken. There was a video too, but he couldn’t watch it yet. The coroner’s report was detailed, even to a fault. Stanton knew the pathologist that had performed the autopsy; he had a daughter Tami’s age.

There was still daylight left when Stanton pulled to a stop in front of the Ocean Vista Apartments. The coroner placed her death at around one in the morning, at least four days before she was discovered by her boyfriend. Maggots had been found at the scene and they were excellent for determining time of death for a corpse as the incubation period in the egg and the hatching process were the same length of time from one specimen to the next.

It would have been better if he had come here at one in the morning and seen the apartment as
he
had seen it that night. But it was currently rented and he didn’t want to impose that on the tenants.

There was mention of a manager finding the body with the boyfriend, but when he knocked at the leasing office, which was just one of the apartments, a woman answered and said the previous manager had moved out. Stanton walked upstairs to 2-F and knocked on the door. A slim male in cut off shorts with a cigarette dangling from his mouth answered.

“
Yeah?”

“
I’m Detective Stanton with the San Diego Police Department. I think we spoke on the phone.”

“
Oh, yeah,” he said, lighting the cigarette. Stanton guessed it was an attempt to cover the strong odor of marijuana pouring out of the apartment. “So you just like wanna look around, right?”

“
Yeah.”

He opened the door. “All right, cool.”

Stanton had called ahead and made sure the tenants understood that the police were coming. They would be more at ease when they had the opportunity to hide anything they might not have wanted him to see.

There was a young girl on the couch, maybe eighteen. Her eyes were rimmed red and she had a piercing through her nose. She stared absently at Stanton but didn’t say anything.

“
So, why you wanna look around again?”

Stanton ignored him and began to his left, behind the door. He ran his eyes along the baseboards and then up the wall. The kitchen table was glass with only two chairs. The
Anarchist’s Cookbook
was open on a page showing how to tie a grenade to a fence with a piece of rope so that the pin would pull when the fence opened. Stanton saw out of the corner of his eye the male glance to the girl; they had forgotten to hide the book.

The kitchen was small and the microwave was bolted above the oven. The night the police arrived, half a sandwich had been found on the coffee table with large bite marks that didn’t match the victim. He had made himself a meal before leaving.

Stanton ran his eyes past the kitchen into the living room. The carpet was tattered and cigarette burns adorned it like spots on a leopard. He noticed the sliding glass door. The frame looked worn, an off shade of gray. But the lock was new chrome.

“
Did you guys replace the lock on the sliding door?”

“
No,” the male said. “Why?”

“
Is that the same lock as when you moved in?”

“
Yup.”

“
How long have you lived here?”

“
Bout seven months.”

Stanton began walking down the hallway and the male followed him. They walked into the bathroom and Stanton glanced quickly at the bathtub. He then went to the bedroom. The door was open and he walked in and stood in the entryway.

There was a single bed and a nightstand, clothes strewn on the floor. One window overlooking the parking lot. He sat on the bed. The closet was full of sneakers and tank tops. A few posters of women in bikinis and Bob Marley were nailed up. There were no stains on the carpets other than cigarettes, nothing on the walls or ceiling. It now held only ghosts of what had happened.

Stanton rose. “Thanks for letting me look around.”

“
No worries. Hey, why were you wanting to look around anyway?”

“
Someone came through here once that I wanted to see. But they’re gone.”

8

Stanton walked into the little barbeque shack as soon as they opened. He had been waiting in the car until nine and watching the surfers pack up their things and head to their day jobs.

The shack was much bigger than the exterior let on. There were at least twenty tables and a few booths. A large bar sat at one end and the kitchen was to the right of the entrance. It was dark and there were few windows, most of the illumination provided by neon beer signs throughout the space.

“
Can I help you?” a young girl said.

“
I’m looking for the owner.”

“
Tim? He’s in the kitchen. I’ll get him.”

Stanton went and sat at the bar. He ran his fingers along the top and felt the notches from drunks placing bottles down too hard. A small bowl of peanuts was next to him and he noticed a bottle cap inside.

“
How’s it going?”

Tim was tall with a belly and thick arms. He towered above Stanton and threw a rag he used to wipe his hands over his shoulder.

“
Good.”

“
I’m the owner. What can I do for you?”

“
Jonathan Stanton. I’m with the San Diego Police Department. I’m doing some follow up on Tami Jacobs.”

“
I smoke a joint in the back and you roll up in minutes. Beautiful young girl’s raped and killed and you can’t find who did it.”

Stanton saw the anger in his face and said, “The Department’s got its head up its ass most of a the time. That’s why I’m here. I’m gonna find who did this.”

The cadence and volume of his voice matched Tim’s.

“
Yeah. Well, I ain’t got that much to tell you. Police already talked to me when it happened.”

“
I know. But there was something I wanted to ask you about.”

“
What?”

“
You had her on the schedule to work a shift the morning she was killed. I don’t see her as a morning person. Did she always work them?”

“
No, her shift was nights I think. If she was working morning means she traded shifts with somebody.”

“
Do you know who?”

“
Been too long, man. Couldn’t say.”

“
Any way you could find out?”

“
I don’t keep schedules for longer than a few months. Probably deleted it.”

“
Could you check anyway?”

“
Yeah, I guess I could.”

Stanton placed his card on the table. “Thanks. Please call me if you find that name.”

9

The body had stiffened to the consistency of a 2 x 4.

It lay in the sand, one arm up, reaching for help that never came. The surf rolled in on the beach and the sun was rising above the horizon, painting the ocean a soft hue of orange.

A group of sand crabs were crawling over the corpse and Maverick “Hunter” Royal kicked them off with his wingtips. One fell near him and he crushed it, a green gelatin splashing up over his pant leg.

“
Shit.”

“
Hunter, what the fuck you doin’ here?”

Detective Daniel Childs walked next to Royal and folded his arms, seemingly not noticing the body two feet away.

“
Danny boy,” Royal said, “Oh Danny Boy, Oh Boy,” he sang.

“
Cut the shit, Hunter. What’s going on?”

“
Just doing some reporting for the fine people of San Diego.”

“
You’re not a reporter, you’re a damn parasite. And how’d you find out about this so fast?”

“
I got my sources. And five thousand daily readers disagree: I am a reporter.”

“
Fuck off. And if you fucked with my crime scene I’m taking you to the cage for the night.”

“
I didn’t touch anything,” he said, holding his hands up in surrender.

Royal began walking away, just far enough for Childs to turn toward the body. He then pulled out a small camera and began taking photos. There was a particularly good one of Childs slapping on latex gloves as he examined the head of the victim from up close. Even if he was an asshole, Royal thought, I’m still gonna make him look good.

He took about twenty photographs and turned to leave. Two uniforms leaned against a cruiser next to his Viper. One of them ran his hand over the hood and looked inside the sports car, checking the door to see if it was open. Royal would have to payback that little disrespect. Maybe make something up about the officer getting sex from hookers instead of taking them in. They all did it anyway, he figured.

When he got closer to his car he saw that one of the uniforms was Henry Oleander. He nodded to him and Oleander said something to the other officer, causing him to walk away and go farther down the beach.

“
What’s up, Hunter?”

“
Henry. How’s the Mrs?”

“
Good. We’re having our second kid soon.”

“
Congrats.”

“
Yeah,” he said, looking over to Childs. “So you want a line?”

“
What’ve you got?”

“
How much?”

“
Something I can sell to the
Times
or
Examiner
, thousand bucks. Something I gotta put on my blog, hundred bucks.”

“
There was a murder couple years back. Young girl named Tami Jacobs. You remember it?”

“
Yeah,” Royal said. He had paid five hundred dollars to be let into the apartment to snap a few photographs before the coroner’s body movers took the corpse. It’d been a shit-storm when the San Diego PD saw photos of their crime scene all over the web the next day.

“
Been assigned to the Cold Case Unit. Guess who’s the detective? Jonathan Stanton.”

“
No shit?”

“
No shit.”

Royal pulled out a wad of cash from his pocket. He gave five hundred dollar bills to Henry and said, “Five now. Twenty more if you can get me the files of everyone in Cold Case.”