Alien Nation #1 - The Day of Descent (8 page)

“So what are we looking at?” Angie asked him as they stood looking at the victim’s car, ten feet away.

Sikes was confused by the question. “I just got here. How should I know?”

Angie jammed her hands into her front pockets and frowned at him. She was shorter than Sikes, slender, and quite appealing in her jeans, white Reeboks, Gap shirt, and loose linen jacket. But her gold badge flashed from the folded-over case jammed in her jacket pocket, and her suddenly serious manner told Sikes that the lesson was about to begin. With any luck, it probably wouldn’t last more than a year or two.

“You should know because you’re a detective, detective.” Angie nodded her head at the victim, slumped behind the wheel and just visible through the car’s open driver’s-side window. “Examine the scene and tell me what happened.”

Sikes glanced at the others near the car, ignoring the parking garage attendants who stood fifty feet away, held back by another yellow tape strung across the ramp entrance to this level. Two S.I.D. technicians grinned back at him. Their standard-issue Scientific Investigation Division cases were open at their feet, so Sikes knew they had already examined the scene. The crime photographer was no longer taking her pictures, so her job was done as well. And Angie had been here at least a half hour before Sikes had arrived, so that meant that
all
the police work was finished, and it was up to Sikes now to duplicate that work and come to the same conclusion everyone else had come to before the M.E. and the meat wagon arrived to cart away the stiff.

Okay, Sikes told himself as he pocketed his sunglasses and squinted in the bright morning light. It’s just like a test at the academy. He ran his hand over his bristled hair and had the pleasant thought that now that he was in plainclothes he could finally let it grow again. He walked over to the car and began to study the scene.

The white Continental was a model from the early seventies, back when they were the size of a small yacht and got about three miles to the gallon. It was in cherry condition, no sign of dust, maintained by someone who appreciated it. He stated his first conclusion. “I’d guess that this is the victim’s car, not stolen.”

“Why’s that?” Angie asked.

“A car like this, wouldn’t make any sense to steal it. Not enough demand for it. Miserable gas mileage. Obviously owned by someone who loved it and who’d report it gone in a flash. Plus it’s too noticeable for someone to steal to use in a crime.”

“Could it be the killer’s car?”

Sikes studied the Continental. Whoever owned this car would be just as likely to kill someone in it as Sikes would be to kill someone in his limited-edition Mustang. Too messy. An act of disrespect for a superb piece of machinery. But just before he started to speak he realized that Angie had asked him a trick question.

He glanced back at her. “Do we
know
it’s a murder?”

Angie licked her finger and marked off a point on an imaginary scoreboard. “That’s one for the rook. Take a look inside and tell me what you think.”

Sikes held his nostrils shut and leaned in through the window, being careful to keep his feet away from the chalk circles marked off underneath the car door. Blood spatters, he assumed.

After a few seconds he pulled his head out again and took a deep and cleansing breath. He was just about to put his hands on the car’s window frame to steady himself when he saw the dull white powder from the technician’s attempts to dust for prints in the same location. Of course, Sikes thought. If the killer steadied himself when he leaned in, that’s where he would have put his hands, too. And he had seen enough to know what kind of crime had been committed here.

“It’s a murder,” Sikes said. “And going by the way the blood’s coagulated, it happened at least eight hours ago.”

“How do you
know
it’s murder, Sherlock?”

Sikes glanced back at the victim. He still wore his seat belt. “Powder burns on the forehead,” he said. If the victim had killed himself by holding a gun to his forehead—right between the eyes, Sikes noted—the small black spray pattern of burning gunpowder would be tightly grouped around the entrance wound made by the bullet, a .45, from the size of it. But the powder-burn pattern that did appear was sparse, almost nonexistent. Sikes guessed the killer had stood about five, maybe even six feet away. “Unless the stiffs got arms like an orangutan, someone else pulled the trigger.”

“Two points,” Angie said. “What else?”

Sikes bent down, held his nose again, and looked back inside the car. The driver’s window was down, and the passenger-side window was open as well. But he could see the irregular fragments of segmented safety glass just where the window went inside the door. The other window had been shattered by the bullet after it had taken off the back of the victim’s skull. “Okay. A murder. Gunshot wound to the head is the cause of dea—” He caught himself again. “Is the
probable
cause of death.” Only the M.E. could rule on the cause of death. Detectives were only to state what they observed, not draw medical conclusions.

“Three points,” Angie said.

Sikes began reciting from the procedural checklists he’d had to memorize. “I’d run the registration, check the roof and doorframe for the killer’s prints in case he touched anything when he leaned inside, and check out the asphalt in that direction”—he waved to the other side of the car—“for bullet fragments.”

Angie joined him beside the car. Sikes realized he almost didn’t notice the smell anymore. “We ran the registration. Car belongs to one Randolph Petty. Address in Westwood.”

“Did you run the victim’s license?” Sikes asked.

Angie looked over the top of her frames again. “Randolph Petty. Male, Cauc. White hair. Hundred forty pounds. Age seventy-two.”

Sikes nodded. That fit the description of the body in the car.

Angie had another question for him. “What makes you think the killer might have leaned into the car?”

Sikes shrugged. “I’m guessing robbery, so . . . he reached in to take something. Right?”

Angie slapped a pair of surgical gloves into Sikes’s hand, and when he realized what that meant he wished he had called in sick after all.

Within twenty minutes the late Randolph Petty was lying stiffly on a meat-wagon gurney, still more or less in a sitting position. His head was encased in a plastic bag, just in case any bullet fragments seeped out with what was left of his brains. His pants pockets had held a grand total of $1.27 in change and no wallet. There was nothing in the glove compartment, in the front-seat storage console, or on the floor, either.

“Four points for the rook,” Angie said as she peeled off her gloves. Sikes didn’t know why she had bothered putting them on, considering she had made him move the body and pat it down. “No wallet equals robbery.”

But Sikes was a dogged student. “Maybe he didn’t need to carry his wallet.”

“How was he going to pay for parking?” Angie asked.

“They validate here.” Sikes nodded at Angie’s skeptical frown. “I bought my daughter a Nintendo at the Good Guys. For her birthday, just a couple of weeks ago.” The big electronics store was three levels down and connected to the parking garage. “First two hours are free, with or without purchase.”

“Don’t get carried away, rook. He’d still need to carry his license and insurance in something. And usually that means a wallet.”

It was only his first day on the job, and he still had a headache that was ripping through his skull like the San Andreas Fault, but Sikes was no longer sure that theft of a wallet was enough to explain what had happened here.

“Look,” he said testily, “if I wanted to rip off wallets, why would I do it up here? I mean, so I pull out my gun, get the guy to hand his wallet over, and then what? I’m on the fifth level of a parking garage. It’s going to take a minute or two to get down to the exit, and then I’ve got a stop light and the traffic on La Cienega or Beverly or Third to worry about. If anyone sees anything, I’m nabbed within a block.” Sikes shook his head emphatically. He had walked foot patrol around Sunset and Highland long enough to know how wallets and purses were best stolen—ground level, bad lighting, easy getaway.

Angie regarded him patiently. “So what does that wonderfully convoluted chain of reasoning suggest to you, Detective Sikes?”

“Uh, that something else was stolen,” Sikes said.

Angie checked her watch, then glanced over at the S.I.D. techies who were shooting the bull with the meat-wagon drivers. “The rook hits pay dirt in twenty-seven minutes, boys. What do you think? Does he get another point?”

Sikes felt the tension in his shoulders ease. The techies gave him two thumbs down. The meat-wagon boys gave him one down and one up. He sighed and pulled his sunglasses back out of his pocket. The test was over.

Angie looked at Sikes as if to say, so what should I do?

“Good work,” she told him. “Slow and plodding but good.”

Sikes rubbed at his eyes and saw little fireworks go off. He put his sunglasses back on. “Can we save some time and you just tell me what else you’ve got?”

“Poor baby,” Angie said pitilessly. And then the real lesson began. “Look, Sikes, thoroughness is good in its place, but in a murder case the trail starts going cold in thirty minutes. Now, I know you know that, because of the bang-up job you did back of Mann’s six months ago. That was good police work because you acted fast, went on gut reaction. You stick at this and you’re going to find out that sometimes it’s better to just rush off and follow your instincts instead of sitting around deliberating and evaluating every possibility.”

Sikes said nothing. It felt as if he should be taking notes, but he remembered he had left his notebook and pen back on his dresser in his bedroom. What a great way to start the first day of the rest of his life.

“So,” Angie continued. “
I come
up here,
I see
the car and victim, and in
one minute
I know it’s murder and that there’s not going to be a wallet.”

“A minute,” Sikes said.

Angie smiled. “It’s a gift. So anyway, you’re right, this isn’t the place for a perp to be ripping off citizen’s wallets. So whatever the perp was after was something else. I knew that in a minute five. Now you tell me, what was the perp after?” She snapped her fingers at him. “C’mon, you’ve already almost said it.”

Sikes nodded. “A Nintendo set.”

Angie beamed. “Good boy.”

“Or a stereo or a television . . .”

“Or any one of numerous fine consumer items on sale at the electronics emporium below,” Angie agreed. “Me, I’m betting it was a portable stereo, maybe with a CD player.”

Sikes waited for the explanation. He was certain she had one.

She did. “This is the fifth level, Sikes. With all those stairs, whatever happened up here was a young person’s crime. Ergo, whatever was stolen was something that a young person might want to steal.”

Sikes could feel sweat trickling down his neck. He decided he needed to get into the shade pronto. It was late October and unseasonably hot, even for L.A. “So what do I do now?” he asked.

“What do you think you should do?”

“I think you should
tell
me what to do.”

Angie mercifully seemed to understand that she had prolonged the torture enough for one day. “Okay, Sikes, school is out for now. What we’ve got here is a random killing. That means we’ve got almost no chance of solving it, so that means it’s not a high priority. You okay with that?”

Sikes nodded. Right now he was okay with anything that meant he could sit down soon.

“So the only thing we can do is to see if we can put ourselves into a position where we might get lucky. We’ve got three ways of getting lucky on this one.” She held up a finger. “One, we find out that the late Mr. Petty was involved in a blood feud with some other old guy who threatened to kill him and who owns a .45. That’s a long shot, but you never know.” She held up another finger. “Two, there’s a witness out there somewhere. That’s a real long shot.” The third finger came up. “And three, we find out what was stolen, and by tracing it we find the perp. That’s the longest shot of all.”

Then Angie finally took pity on Sikes and led him over to the open door of the nondescript gray city hearse so he could rest on the back bumper in the vehicle’s shade. The techies and the drivers were still waiting for the M.E. to show up so they could take the body away. Angie gave Sikes her notebook and pen so he could take notes on what he had to do next: mind-numbing, tedious legwork—the heart and soul of being a real homicide detective.

First Sikes was to go to Randolph Petty’s home and find out if anyone in his life had a motive for killing him. Next Sikes would have to dig through Petty’s personal effects to try and recreate what the man might have had in his wallet by way of credit cards, cash, and checks on the night he had died. Through court orders Sikes would then have to contact all the credit-card companies and banks to see what Petty might have purchased recently that might have made him a target for the killer. Maybe a credit-card slip or a chance remembrance by one of the sales staff in a nearby store would show he
had
purchased a portable stereo at the Good Guys or an equally enticing item somewhere else. Maybe a canceled check would show that his purchase had been traveler’s checks from the American Express Travel office on the corner. Whatever, it was Sikes’s job to track it down. And then,
if
Petty had purchased something that might have provided the motive for the crime, Sikes had to try to trace it.

Sikes dutifully wrote down everything Angie said, with visions of a blizzard of paperwork burying him in peaceful, cool whiteness.

“Think you can handle that?” Angie asked.

“Yep,” Sikes said. Sitting down was good. The shade was good. The work she had just outlined for him was bad, but he’d worry about that later, maybe by the end of the week.

“Okay, then,” Angie said. “I’m going to give you two days on it. If you don’t turn up anything, then it goes to the bottom of the to-do list, all right?”

“Two days?” Sikes asked with real surprise.

“In the time we’ve been sitting here, rook, two other murders have been committed in our fair city. If we work hard, maybe we can solve one of them. See what I mean?” She punched him lightly on his shoulder. “I’ve got another call to roll on. You wait here for the M.E.”