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  22 P.A. Brown

  Too wound up to rest now, though he knew he would pay for the neglect sooner rather than later, Chris tried David’s cell. No answer. He fi nally broke down and called the Northeast Station.

  He wasn’t surprised that David wasn’t there, and no, he wasn’t going to leave a message with the offi cious desk sergeant who answered the phone.

  Hanging up, he set about making a pot of coffee. If he couldn’t rest, he might as well make the most of his time. While he waited for the coffee, he took the clothes out of the drier and trotted back upstairs, folding and putting them away. Then he cleaned the already spotless bathroom and tidied the bedroom.

  Sergeant and Sweeney, the Siamese cat David had brought to their relationship, followed him around until he got the hint and fed them both. Sweeney wrapped around his ankles, purring hoarsely, throwing one jaundiced eye at the dog he had fi nally grown to tolerate. Barely. Chris scooped the cat up.

  “You miss him too, don’t you?” Chris rubbed the sleek seal-colored head. He glanced down at Sergeant. “He didn’t happen to mention where he was going, did he?”

  Neither animal answered.

  Tuesday, 10:20 am, Carillon Street, Atwater, Los Angeles Another body; another dead woman.

  David had lost count of the number of corpses he had seen in his ten years as a homicide detective. Instead he concentrated on studying the body on the bed. Whatever struggle she might have waged, in the end it didn’t show on the unmarked, vanilla plain face. In the background an air conditioner hummed loudly.

  David was glad for his suit jacket; the room was cold. It was also almost antiseptically clean. He rubbed his pock-marked face. His skin felt mottled with goose bumps.

  “It seem cool in here to you?”

  L.A. BYTES 23

  “Some people got more money than brains.” Martinez, his partner of nearly twelve years narrowed his dark eyes and took in the bed and its occupant. “How long you fi gure she’s been dead?”

  The scent of decay rode the cool air. But faint, just a hint of the mordant stench to come.

  “No fl ies.”

  “She kept a clean apartment.”

  “You really think she always kept it this cold?” David pulled on a pair of gloves and crouched beside the bed. He couldn’t touch the body, but while they waited for the coroner, he could look around. “Who did you say found her?”

  “Neighbor called it in,” Martinez said. “Our Lady of Antarctica here didn’t go to Sunday mass, something she never missed. She rarely left the place except to go to church. Neighbor thought maybe she’d gone to visit family, then she missed a very special church meeting yesterday. According to her, this proved something was wrong. So she fi nally convinced the super to open up this morning.”

  Like an under-smell that grew on his senses, the stink of decay ripened. Despite his fi rst thought that this was a new body, David suddenly knew she’d been a corpse for a while. Instinct hewn from years of being a cop. Instinct he trusted. Atop the bedside table sat an alarm clock and a fi ve by ten framed picture of a gangly teenage boy and Nancy Scott. Mother and son? Nephew?

  No way it could be grandson. Not enough age between them. He looked around. One other picture, the same boy, slightly older. No images of a man who might be the father. Never married? Didn’t jibe with the woman being so religious. Divorced? Widowed? He looked back at the body.

  “Somebody didn’t want her found.”

  “ME’s on her way,” Martinez said, pulling on a pair of thin gloves. Powder puffed out and lingered briefl y in the cool, still air.

  “Let’s toss the place. Ten says she’s been dead forty-eight.”

  24 P.A. Brown

  David studied the dead woman’s left hand on top of the fl owered comforter. He noticed the faint purplish hue at the ends of her fi ngers. He crouched beside the bed, taking a closer look without touching. “Seventy-two.”

  “Put your money where your mouth is.”

  “You’re on.” David moved to stand up, and paused, fi ngers braced on the carpeted fl oor beside the bed. In the shadows formed by the comforter something darker lay concealed.

  Casually, David fl ipped aside the covering. He reached in and pulled out two tiny, dark brown paper wrappers.

  “What have you got?”

  David leaned back on his heels. He raised a wrapper to his face and gingerly sniffed. “Chocolate.”

  “So our victim’s mowing down on chocolates in bed.”

  Martinez glanced sourly at a book on the night table. There was an image of a half-naked man and woman entwined on the cover.

  “My wife reads that crap. What do they get out of it?”

  “Fantasy. It’s not about you.”

  Martinez scowled. “So, she’s reading bad literature and indulging in a candy fi x.”

  “Where’s the rest of the chocolates?” David prowled the room, staring down into the wicker garbage pail. A yellow bag lined the receptacle. “Where’s the empty box? Where’s the rest of the garbage?”

  They moved systematically through each room. Splitting duties, David took the bedroom, probing closets and drawers, and under the sparse furnishings that fi lled the pin-neat apartment.

  The rugs were spotless, the furniture looked like a showroom.

  David ran one gloved fi nger over the top shelf of a knick-knack showcase. It came away dust free.

  Martinez took the bathroom and David could hear the rattle of the medicine cabinet as he rummaged through it, and the slam of drawers. Martinez even whisked aside the shower curtain, though what he thought he might fi nd was anyone’s guess.

  L.A. BYTES 25

  Another body? No one in this place would be so bold as to die anywhere but neatly on the bed, like the woman had.

  David stacked up piles of paper and scrapbooks that he found in a drawer, piling them on the kitchen table, roughly sorted by type. Receipts in one, hand-written notes in another. Doctor’s appointments, grocery lists, phone numbers, addresses.

  Martinez came out carrying the wicker trashcan from the bathroom. “No sign anyone but her lived here, or stayed long enough to leave anything behind. Just female stuff.” He knelt and tipped the trashcan contents onto a sheet of plastic on the fl oor, sorting through it carefully with gloved fi ngers. He held up an empty vial.

  “Insulin,” he said. “From a Doctor Vanya Parkov, Glendale address.”

  She was a diabetic.

  David opened the refrigerator and they peered inside.

  Whoever the woman was, she had been no gourmand. More vials of insulin. Homogenized milk in a plastic jug and a no-name brand of orange juice claiming to be fresh-squeezed crowded the side panel. The fridge also held a jar of pickles, ketchup, a half-empty jar of Miracle Whip, cold meat, cheese slices, raw carrots and six potatoes sprouting eyes. The cupboards were almost as empty. David pulled out a few cans of chicken noodle soup, two cream of mushroom and a boxed Kraft Dinner.

  No chocolates. No candies of any kind.

  “Somebody comes visiting,” David mused. “Brings her chocolates, which she’s not supposed to have, then takes them when they leave?”

  “Maybe she tells her visitor don’t leave stuff to tempt her?”

  “Or maybe the chocolates are more than chocolates,” David said. In his gut he knew this wasn’t a natural death. “Bag it all. We take it to forensics. Let them sort it out.”

  ■ □ ■ □

  26 P.A. Brown

  David extended his card to the tiny woman with pumpkin-colored hair.

  “Mrs. Crandall? Alice Crandall?”

  She took the card and held it between her fi nger and thumb like it might be the devil’s calling card. She barely glanced at it.

  Alice had been the victim’s neighbor for “nigh on fi ve years, young man,” she told the two detectives. “That’s why I told that young pup that there was no way Nancy committed suicide. She’d have paraded naked down Glendale Boulevard sooner than she’d have killed herself.”
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  “We’re here to listen, Mrs. Crandall.” David tipped his head and kept his face neutral. He fl ipped open his notepad and wrote the day’s date. “We’d like to ask you a few questions about your neighbor, if we could. Nancy Scott was her name, is that correct?”

  “Nancy Amelia Scott,” Alice said. “That was her full Christian name, rest her soul.”

  “You knew her fi ve years. Did she move in fi ve years ago, or did you?”

  “I’ve been on this same spot of earth since before my good husband Lloyd passed, nigh on eleven years ago it was, rest his soul. He was a good man. Salt of the earth.”

  David scanned the room. From what he could see it looked like Alice had furnished the place during the height of the beige eighties and never recovered from it. If there was a spot of color anywhere, he couldn’t fi nd it. “So Mrs. Scott moved in fi ve years ago. Was she by herself?”

  “That man was a saint, he was. Why, even Father Barnaby used to remark as how good he was, never drank a tipple in his life and worked until they forced him to retire at sixty-fi ve. Not that he wanted to leave, mind you, the man loved to work, almost as much as he loved to talk—”

  “Yes, Mrs. Crandall,” David said. “I’m sorry for your loss, but if you could just answer some questions about your neighbor.”

  L.A. BYTES 27

  “Lloyd would have loved Nancy. She was a pious woman, never heard a curse word come out of her mouth. Even Lloyd wasn’t that good.”

  “When was the last time you actually saw Mrs. Scott, ma’am?”

  David persisted. Patience was a virtue, his own, less than saintly, mother might have said, but there were times when patience could take a fl ying leap. “You mentioned her missing Mass on Sunday. So if she wasn’t there, when did you see her last?”

  “Sunday Nancy always came with me,” Alice said. “She wasn’t born a Catholic; she told me that right after I fi rst asked her to join me at Incarnation. Was born a Presbyterian but never found satisfaction in that faith.” Alice dug her short, unpolished nails through the tight mass of bright hair. “She strayed, she said, and when she found her way back, she decided the good Lord meant her to be part of the true faith, so she come and joined our church. She asked for my help then,” Alice said proudly. “She asked me to help her fi nd her way back to God.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” David said. Beside him Martinez harrumphed softly. “But I still need to know when you last saw Nancy alive.”

  Alice eyed Martinez coldly, then smiled at David, revealing impossibly even, white teeth. “Are you Catholic, young man?”

  “No, ma’am, I’m sorry. I’m afraid I’m not.”

  “Pity.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Now ma’am—”

  “I know,” Alice said. “When did I last see her?”

  “Yes, ma’am—”

  “I’ll tell you if you stop jabbering. Can’t stand a man who always interrupts. Her son was like that, you know. Always cutting in, interrupting his mother like everything he had to say was pure gospel and the rest of us should just shut up and listen.”

  “Her son, ma’am?” David leaned closer, pen poised over his dog-eared notepad. “Mrs. Scott had a son? What about a Mr.

  Scott?”

  28 P.A. Brown

  “No Mr. Scott. He was her past, she used to say, she was her own future. She never spoke of him. If he was anything like her son, I can understand why.”

  “Would you know where we might fi nd this son?”

  “He comes around, regular as church bells,” Alice said. “Every other Wednesday.”

  “And the last Wednesday he was here?”

  The woman shrugged her thin shoulders. “Week or so ago.”

  The corners of her mouth lifted in a smile. “Why, I guess that would be two weeks ago tomorrow.”

  David and Martinez traded looks. “Yes, ma’am,” they both said.

  “I guess you can ask him these questions.” Alice smiled slyly.

  “Oh, and the last time I saw Nancy was Saturday morning. We walked down to the market to buy groceries.”

  “What did Mrs. Scott buy?” David asked, remembering the nearly empty refrigerator. And the chocolate wrapper.

  Alice sniffed. “Orange juice, couple of cans of soup, bananas and a newspaper. I never saw such a one for not eating proper. I don’t know how she stayed healthy.” Her face suddenly screwed up. “I guess she didn’t though, did she?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “You still think she killed herself?”

  “That’s up to the medical examiner to determine,” David said.

  “Will you be by to talk to that boy of hers tomorrow?”

  “We just might do that, ma’am.”

  Alice smiled again. “Well, I won’t tell him you’re coming.”

  David almost smiled in return. “You have a good day now.”

  “You fi nd out what happened to Nancy, and I’ll have a good day.”

  L.A. BYTES 29

  She shut the door of her apartment behind them, leaving them standing in the musty hallway looking at each other in bemusement.

  “Guess we come by to talk to junior, then,” Martinez said.

  “Where do you think he was all this time?”

  David pulled out the car keys and jangled them against his leg.

  “We’ll have to make sure to ask, now won’t we?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Tuesday 1:50 pm, North Mission Road, Los Angeles The Los Angeles County Coroner’s offi ce was a low-slung colorless building within shotgun distance of the I5; the eternal roar of traffi c drowned out any attempts at conversation. Golden afternoon light glinted off the smog rolling in off the distant freeway. The air smelled of diesel, and gas, and acrid dust.

  David eased the unmarked into park and waited for Martinez to clamber out before he slipped off his seat belt. He sat in the heat and early fall sun that poured through the open car window and blinked to clear his head. The muzziness of encroaching exhaustion clouded his mind; he began to regret his haste in returning to work, but he was damned if he was going to beg off.

  He pushed aside the rush of vertigo that hit him when he stood, and followed Martinez into the air-conditioned building.

  They donned a plastic apron, mask, gloves, and covered their shoes with booties before entering the autopsy room. Harsh fl orescent lights illuminated over a dozen bodies in various stages of postmortem exam. There was a weird purple glow from the bug zappers scattered throughout the building. Every table was occupied; the Los Angeles morgue was one of the busiest in the country.

  They found the deputy coroner, Teresa Lopez, prepping Nancy Scott’s body. She nodded at David and Martinez and indicated the illuminated viewing box, which held the X-rays she had taken earlier.

  “No visible external trauma.” With gloved hands she propped one of the victim’s eyelids open. “Conjunctiva’s pinkish, and the pupils are dilated.”

  “She sick?” Martinez asked.

  32 P.A. Brown

  “Can’t tell you,” Teresa said. “Yet.”

  “We think she was diabetic,” David said. “We found insulin in her fridge and an empty vial in her garbage.”

  Teresa nodded. Wielding a scalpel she made the Y-incision then moved aside while the morgue assistant used what looked like a pair of gardening shears to crack open the ribs and remove the sternum. Teresa fl ipped up the rib cage, revealing the body’s internal organs.

  “Interesting,” she murmured. “I see signs of hemorrhaging.

  Not consistent with insulin shock.”

  David glanced away while Teresa deftly removed the heart, lungs, liver and kidneys, weighed them and prepped samples for tox screening. She also extracted blood and urine samples as well as the contents of the victim’s stomach, which she would have analyzed.

  “Tell me if she ate chocolates.” In reality he knew she would tell him everything the woman had eaten for several hours prior to her death.

  “Can you tell us when she l
ast took an insulin shot?” Martinez asked.

  “Sorry, there’s no accurate way to measure that.”

  “Cause of death?” David fi nally asked, after the victim’s brain and been removed, and weighed.

  “Inconclusive,” Teresa said, and Martinez rolled his eyes.

  “Sorry guys. We’ll see what the tox screens show.”

  David stripped off his gloves as he headed for the door, a muttering Martinez trailing in his wake. They fi nished removing their gear and tossed them into the nearest hamper.

  Outside, the late afternoon sun bounced off the car straight into David’s brain. The distant rustle of heat drove air through some nearby palms. The dull headache he had been harboring during the autopsy fl ared into a head-pounding drill. He winced as he slid behind the wheel.

  L.A. BYTES 33

  “Dios,” Martinez said softly. “You okay? You look like shit.”

  “Thanks.” David cranked the key and the engine rumbled to life. “It’s nothing.”

  “Bull.”

  David looked at him sharply, a mistake since the sudden movement made the entire parking lot spin. He closed his eyes.

  The passenger door opened and the whole car rocked when Martinez got out. Seconds later the driver’s side door jerked open.

  “Get out, I’m driving.”

  David hesitated only long enough to draw in one shuddering breath, then released the wheel and slid out. When he slipped into the seat Martinez had recently vacated, he made the mistake of meeting his partner’s angry glare.

  “What the hell are you thinking?” Martinez snapped. “You loco, man?”

  “I’m fi ne—”

  “Mierda! Que eres un idiota loco? You want to put me in the hospital this time?”

  Martinez jerked the wheel around as he backed out, nearly sideswiping a coroner’s wagon. The driver laid on the horn and gave them the fi nger.