A Deadly Legacy Read online

  “I’ve got one here,” I called out to no one in particular.

  “I’ve got the other one over here.” Amelia was crouched next to our second victim. Her thin, angular face was set with emotion, but her soft eyes, slanted slightly so that you could mistake her for Asian, betrayed nothing.

  The victim looked like the bank manager according to the picture on the wall behind his desk. He was on the floor next to his desk where a picture of his wife and kids stared down at his now lifeless body. Then a voice only a mother could love pulled me up out of the hole.

  “John?”

  “Yeah, Don.” Don Esterhaus, one of the detectives in the robbery division, wandered over.

  “We have the two dead suspects outside, one got away.”

  “Yeah? How?”

  “One of the witnesses says that he was the last one in but when all the shooting started he took off out the back and drove off.”

  “Did anyone see him? See what he looked like? See the car? Any-fucking-thing?”

  “I’m working on it.”

  “Okay, Donnie.” Don Esterhaus sounded like he gargled with gravel and he only needed to say about four sentences to me before I would start getting pissy with him. Tall and lanky with graying hair that stood on end most of the time, he was both comical to look at and scary to listen to. He’s a good cop so I try to tolerate it, but listening to him is like fingernails on a chalkboard. This was his case now.

  We stepped outside. “Who went down?”

  “Patterson,” Gonz answered.

  “No shit.”

  “Bullet got around the Kevlar, hit him in the side. He also took one in the neck.”

  “Where’s Mike?” Mike Shin was Gregg Patterson’s partner in patrol. Mike was part of our little group.

  “At County, where they took Patty.”

  A cop goes down, the day turns to shit for everyone.

  TWO

  The boy pulled the covers over his head as he listened.

  What the fuck do you want from me, Angie?

  Be a man. Come home after your shift ends, not at two in the fucking morning. You see your whores on your time, not on mine.

  Angela, c’mon . . .

  She was crying now. No, no, no . . .

  He promised himself that he would never make his wife cry. He promised himself a lot of things.

  It was almost nine p.m. by the time I got home. It had started to rain again. The canal that ran outside my house looked full and I made a mental note to go on the Internet to see if the Venice canals had ever flooded over.

  The lights from all the houses along the canals reflected off the water. A couple of people were out in their canoe and I could hear the soft murmur of their conversation. I grabbed my mail out of the box and unlocked my door. It was only when I stepped over that threshold that my shoulders loosened and my back stopped hurting.

  This home isn’t much, but it’s mine. The front walk is all flagstone with elfin thyme growing wild between the stones. Two steps run the entire length of the deck and lead up to a wall of French doors that are the main entrance to the house. The deck is large, so’s the barbecue.

  Once you go through the French doors, you enter into the living room where a fireplace sits along the wall with furniture placed around it. Alex’s wife Lisa helped after the ex left. Women love my kitchen. They can’t understand a man who has a kitchen like mine and doesn’t cook. I’m a real mystery.

  I changed and grabbed a beer out of the fridge. The light on the answering machine was blinking obnoxiously so I pressed the message button.

  “John, hi. Just checking in. Heard about the bank robbery. I wanted to make sure you were okay. Call me. I’ll worry until you do.”

  Marisol, the ex-wife. I never in a million years dreamed I’d have an ex-wife. Being Catholic, an ex-anything was not in my family’s vocabulary. I met Mari about five years after I came out here. I was thirty five at the time and ready to settle down. A detective in Homicide was getting married. Mari was his wife’s sister. We met at the wedding. It was one of those look-across-the-room-and-lock-eyes-blah-blah-blah scenarios that seemed so dumb on TV or in the movies, but not so dumb when it’s happening to you.

  Mari was twenty five and a virgin, or so she said. On our wedding night I got the surprise of my life. Not only was she not a virgin, but she knew tricks that even I didn’t know about, and that’s saying a lot. Her cherry disappeared long before she met me. It was the tricks that kept me from fleeing the scene, until one night I came home and saw her legs flying in the air and someone else’s bare ass pointing to my ceiling.

  I drove her there to some degree. I watched my mother lose a husband to the job. I watched how she suffered and struggled to make ends meet. I never wanted that for any woman. There is nothing harder or less gratifying than being married to a cop, and if Mari didn’t see it for herself, then I was determined to show her. I started staying out late instead of going home because it’s easier to talk to other cops at the bar about your day than to your wife. And when I was home, I shut her out. Silence was the name of that game. Finally, she just wanted out and I blamed her for not understanding me. I liked Mari a lot better now that she was someone else’s problem.

  I stared at the phone another second or two and then punched the ‘delete’ button. We were speaking—just not tonight.

  I finished my beer and turned on the TV. The robbery was playing front and center on all the stations, the big story being that they caught the guy who got away—killed him. Shitty way to go.

  ††††

  I’d just poured a cup of coffee for myself the next morning when Alex came into the break room which also served as an interrogation room at Pacific.

  “Let’s roll,” he said.

  I took a quick swig of my coffee. “Fuck,” I muttered. Way too hot. I poured the contents from my ceramic LA County Coroner mug into a paper cup with a lid. I would not be denied.

  “Where we rolling?” I asked, my tongue numb from the hot coffee. He told me.

  “Body parts? Are you shittin’ me, Alex?”

  “Yeah. I’m shittin’ you, pendejo. You mind joinin’ me?”

  “Not at all. Can I suggest a to-go cup for you? Loosen that rodent that crawled up your ass and died.”

  Alex drove down Washington Boulevard to the beach. The sand was clean and white, and the ocean was a dark blue unique to the coast of southern California. “What kind of body parts are we talkin’ here?” I asked nonchalantly, thinking he’d know.

  “Gosh, John, I should have asked. I’m sorry.” This is another thing he does; he gets all snarky when he’s nervous.

  “Problem?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Want a Xanax?”

  “Nah. I’m on my way to see body parts. What do I need a Xanax for?”

  I laughed. Probably not a good idea because he was serious. Alex was a great cop. Smart, efficient, intuitive. But he was like a southern belle with the vapors when it came to death and decay. What he was doing in Homicide was a mystery. He originally came over from forensics, now called the Scientific Investigation Division, ten or so years ago. I mean, why does a person do that to themselves?

  “SID on their way?”

  “One can hope, Johnny.” I just shook my head.

  I started my career in the NYPD. I was hired with the department two days after I turned twenty-one. It was the early 80’s . . . and being a cop was everything I thought it would be until I saw my first dead person. An old wino was dumpster diving and died in pursuit of his next meal. It was summertime and the smell was what attracted attention. My partner and I were the first on the scene. My partner was more experienced and sent me to ‘handle’ things. The smell was the first thing that got to me. I climbed up on to the edge of the dumpster to get a good look-see and fell in. Just moving the body slightly sent a gaseous smell coursing through the air. His body just kind of . . . burped and a whole new set of smells came forth. Now this was already a neighbo
rhood with its own unique set of odors and combined with this particular scent, it put me over the edge. I got out of there quick then fought to keep the bile down for the next hour. The homicide dicks had a good time with that. It wasn’t long before I was one of them and got to make fun of patrolmen, too. But I didn’t do it very often. I remembered how hard it was your first couple of years on the force. Now, nothing phases me. That is how I’ve survived for so long in this business. Alex? Different story.

  We pulled up to the shack where they take your $9.50 to park at the beach all day and drove all the way to the other end of the parking lot. A lifeguard truck was parked there waiting for us along with a patrol car.

  “Couple of patrolmen sealed the area off, detectives,” Officer Bagnell told us.

  “I’ll take you down if you’d like,” offered the lifeguard.

  “Sounds good,” Alex said, not meaning it.

  We cruised along the beach in the yellow lifeguard truck until we reached the yellow tape.

  “Thith muthst be the plathe.” I said in my best Daffy Duck voice. We jumped out of the truck, thanked the lifeguard, and asked him to stick around.

  The sand was littered with what looked like a liver and a heart. A few feet away were the intestines and a stomach. A little further up on the sand was a creature I couldn’t make out, all white and hairless with a big, long rat-tail sticking out the rear. It looked like a cross between an otter and a rat and it was intact so the parts clearly weren’t from it.

  “You call this in?” I asked the lifeguard. “Looks like animal parts here.” This was something he should have known. As I said . . . you have a dead body, you call. You have human body parts, by all means, call. I work under those parameters.

  “Yeah,” he said. “But that’s not.” I followed his finger and as the tide came in, so did someone’s arm. “Thought I was seeing things,” he added.

  “You’re not.” The arm, intact from the shoulder to hand, came to rest on the wet sand next to a pile of kelp. A sand crab ran for cover.

  Alex observed the arm as it rolled ashore with a wave. “What the fuck, now, Johnny?”

  “Good question padna.”

  ††††

  I had a dream once. I was driving through a neighborhood I didn’t recognize. Everywhere I turned, body parts lay strewn: A leg next to a mailbox, an arm in the petunia bed, bejeweled fingers tossed carelessly on freshly manicured lawns. I turned a corner and headed up the next block, thinking I’d seen the last of it. I hadn’t. It was on the last block (I knew it was the last block, because the highway lay just ahead, and I felt the relief of knowing it would all be over soon) that I came full circle, back to that point where you gain clarity, focus.

  A head was perched crookedly on a post where a silver mailbox should have been, eyes following me, mouth curled into a mocking smile. The mouth moved but no sound came out. I stopped, rolled down my window and leaned out. The sun was going down and it was cold. Leaves rustled and fell from trees, twirling into neat, orderly piles as they reached the ground. This made perfect sense to me.

  I listened. Lips moved, forming the words I still could not hear.

  What now, Johnny. What now?

  I awoke in a cold sweat, breathless. In that brief moment between nightmare and reality I knew that I would become a cop and that the decision had been cemented the moment he had taken his last breath.

  The head belonged to my father.

  THREE

  The boy was cornered. They had chased him behind a bush where no one could see what was going on. One boy held his arms while the other boy punched him repeatedly in the stomach. He slumped down finally and the boy holding him let go, unable to hold the dead weight. The air shifted and the hitter and the holder looked up and so did the boy.

  Who’s first? The boy’s father stood with his belt wrapped tightly in his right hand. Not waiting for an answer he grabbed the boy who was punching his son by the arm and swung the belt across his backside again and again. Then he grabbed the boy holding his son and did the same, not stopping until he felt the lesson was learned. With gentleness and love in his eyes, he turned to his son.

  You go on home, Johnny. I’ll be along in a minute. And as the boy walked across the street to his house, he saw his father grab both boys and take them home where he would advise their fathers to give them more of what he just gave them. He could do this because he was a cop.

  No one touched him again after that day.

  I stepped away from the chatter that was going on between Alex, the two patrolmen, and the small crowd that had now gathered on the beach. Since we had no body, this was not exactly a job for the coroner. Wasn’t exactly sure it was a job for us. I called Peter Tabor anyway, just to say hi.

  “You need me there?”

  “You wanna come?”

  “You have a body for me yet?”

  “No.”

  “Then I won’t come. I always prefer to have a body, John . . . if it’s all the same . . .”

  “Yeah, whatever . . . I don’t disagree. I wouldn’t mind having a body myself.”

  Tabor was a young, hip, science nerd with a shaved head and four earrings in his left ear. He was meticulous in his work and he took it all seriously tongue-in-cheek. You needed that combo in our line of work; otherwise, you ended up taking early retirement with vodka in one hand and your police-issue 9 mil in the other.

  “Who’s there?” he asked.

  “Uh . . .” I looked around. “A couple of patrolmen, Alex . . .”

  “I mean from SID, John.”

  “Some woman with dark hair and a mouthful of teeth.”

  “That would be Julie Sebastian. She’s good. Be nice to her.”

  “I’m always nice.” I hung up. The alleged Julie Sebastian was crouched down over the severed arm. I walked over and Alex followed.

  “John Testarossa, out of Pacific. My partner, Alex Ortiz,” I said by way of introduction. I used to love Dragnet.

  “Julie Sebastian,” she answered. “And I know Alex.”

  “What do we have?” Alex, right to the point. No time for pleasantries.

  “Well,” she said, crouching over the arm again. “I’m guessing by the musculature and bone size the arm belongs to a male.”

  “Can you get any prints?”

  “Yes. I have very good ridge detail here. Also, it appears that the arm was not cut or severed.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “Well, usually when a limb has been cut, there are marks from the knife or saw on the bone. But I see nothing like that here.” She stood.

  “Called tool marks, Johnny,” Alex said. It was good to have a partner who could decipher some of the technical crap, what with his brief dance with SID. It doesn’t give him a pass from the ball busting, though. We affectionately refer to his squeamishness as the Pussy Factor. He doesn’t care for it.

  Julie Sebastian continued. “We’ll know more, of course, when we get the arm in for analysis.”

  “Wh . . .” I started.

  “Tomorrow or the next day,” she finished, walking away.

  “She always do that?” I asked Alex.

  “She’s been at it a while, John. Keeps things moving along if she can anticipate questions.”

  “Yeah, but it’s rude,” I mumbled as he led me away toward our car. “How old is she anyway?”

  “Too young for you, bubba.”

  “She knows you, huh? How come I don’t know her?”

  “I know lots of people you don’t know. You don’t have to know everyone I know, do you?” he asked incredulously.

  “Yes.”

  A homeless man took a leak in the sand a few feet away. The bathroom was twenty yards ahead of us. Pieces of foil were woven into his matted hair.

  “I know her because I had a career in SID once for about five minutes, remember?”

  “I remember. And the day you left I got all kinds of lucky.”

  “That you did, cabron.” Depending o
n Alex’s mood, this could mean ‘pal’ or ‘dick-head’.

  ††††

  To help us along with the many cases we have going simultaneously, we will occasionally get a phone tip—anonymous or otherwise. I was on the phone the next morning speaking with a ‘tipster’ who claimed he witnessed the brutal slaying of fifteen ‘African-American males, ages 24 to 37, all of them under four feet tall and weighing 180 lbs’. The ‘brutal slaying’ allegedly happened over on Slauson Bouelevard. Last night at midnight. Exactly.

  “Something happen on the night shift we need to know about?” I asked Alex. I was on hold while this witness ‘consulted his notes’.

  “You mean the brutal slaying of fifteen African-American males ages 24 to 37 . . .” offered Gonzo who just walked in. “He called earlier this morning, too. Ginger took the call. I understand they’re all pygmies,” he finished. Ginger, our civilian clerk, worked the front reception desk and took the brunt of all the crazy shit that goes on here.

  The man came back on the line and before I could ask him if he’d called this in before, he informed me that he witnessed the ‘entire massacre’ from his CH-47 ‘Chece-nook’ as he called it. He ‘sir-yes-sired’ me quite a few times.

  “You military, son?” I asked.

  “Ooo-rah!”

  “Marine?”

  “Semper Fi!”

  I glanced over at Alex. He and Gonz were leaning against Alex’s desk, smiling that I got stuck with this nutbag.

  “What’s your name, Marine?”

  “PFC Jeffrey Jason Alton, SIR,” he shouted. I quickly pulled the phone from my ear and everyone in the room chuckled. Kramer from patrol, never one to be left out of a laugh, was the latest to join us.

  “Listen, Jeffrey, we could use a little more help here with this situation. Why don’t you come in? Help us out.”

  He hung up. My right ear was still ringing.

  “You get to the bottom of all this yet, John? Big case. Could come apart at the seams . . .” Gonz went on, still the jokester.