Bleeding Out (2 page)

“Do you know who the girl is?” he asked. “How old is she?”

“We don’t know who the victim is. She appears to be in her midteens, but we won’t know until we have a positive ID.”

“What was the cause of death?”

That was Sally Eisley, from KTLA. Loud, obnoxious, in your face, absolutely without scruples. Absolutely knockdown gorgeous.

“We don’t know yet. The—”

“Oh come on, Lieutenant! You must have some idea.”

Lieutenant Franco twitched her lips in a semblance of a smile but her eyes remained cool, locked onto Sally’s.

“I have plenty of ideas,” she admitted, “but no facts. When I know the facts—”

“You’ll know the facts,” Sally finished in a frustrated singsong.

An Asian woman Frank didn’t recognize said, “Lieutenant, you’ve been here for over three hours. Do you have any indication who might have done this?”

“We do not.”

“She looked pretty battered. Do you think it was a hate crime? Racially motivated?” asked Tom Blake from the
LA. Weekly.

Frank slid around the battery comment. “At this time we have no motive.”

“Doesn’t it seem obvious that a white girl killed in a black neighborhood might involve a racial motivation?”

“That is not at all obvious.” Frank didn’t add that the girl was dumped there but not necessarily killed in the neighborhood.

“But it
could
be,” Blake persisted.

Frank reiterated, “We have no reason to suspect that at this point.”

They both knew it
could
be a race crime, but admission would come across as confirmation that it
was
a race crime. Frank wouldn’t take the weak bait, and Blake shared Sally Eisley’s frustration.

Above the din of questions Frank could hear a siren wailing toward them. That could only mean Foubarelle or some other brass-hat was on the way.

“Sorry. That’s really all we have right now. We’ll let you know as soon as we learn more.”

Frank spun on her heel, motioning Johnnie and Noah toward the unmarked. Sally Eisley and her cameraman tried to block her path.

“How do you think she was killed, Lieutenant? Just between you and me?” Sally spoke in the confidential tone of a co-conspirator. She was new to the station, but aggressive and a real go-getter. Frank doubted she’d be on the morning crew for long. Frank offered another neutral comment and tried to move around Sally, but again the reporter dodged in front of her.

“Off the record, Lieutenant. I swear.”

The tic of a smile Frank had given Sally earlier was a little wider this time and lasted a second longer. It almost reached her eyes.

“Promise?” Frank asked, and Sally agreed eagerly. The lieutenant lowered her head toward Sally and glanced around as she opened the car door. Then she bent closer to the perfectly coifed hair framing Sally Eisley’s perfectly gorgeous little ear. Frank’s lips moved against the starched blonde strands.

As Captains Foubarelle and Bedford stepped self-importantly from their car, Frank slipped into hers. Johnnie steered them quickly into the light traffic and Noah leaned over the seat.

“Hey. What’d you say to Sally?”

Frank was mulling over the peculiarities of the case and she answered laconically.

“Told her she’d stepped in dog shit.”

Johnnie chuckled. Twice already, Frank had made his day.

The way he stormed into her office, Frank knew that if she had balls, Fubar would be busting them. Almost shouting, he demanded, “Why didn’t you wait for us at the high school this morning?” Frank sighed and tipped her chair back, steepling two fingers against her lips. “What the hell was going on out there?” The captain wasn’t a bad guy, just incompetent, and Franco resented incompetency. In her line of work it could get people killed. She’d admit he’d only been captain for six months, but she was sure if his learning curve was graphed it would show up as a horizontal line.

In a monotone Frank explained, “We’d been on that case for hours. Before that we were at another scene for three hours. The good citizens of L.A. pay us for an eight-hour day, John. We were already into the seventh hour of our day, with no paper generated on either case. We could have wasted more time standing around like idiots for the cameras, or we could have come back here to do some work.”

Foubarelle opened his mouth to interrupt, but Frank dropped her chair and leaned toward him.

“If you want to pay my guys overtime, I’ll have them jumping around in monkey suits for you, but until then, we’ve got murders to solve. We don’t get that 74 percent clearance rate by dicking around with Tom Brokaw all day.” Finished, Frank sat back.

The captain had read dozens of management books, replete with all the tricks about how to jockey oneself into a position of physical power, but even standing over Frank he felt smaller than her. Foubarelle hadn’t come up through the ranks, and at times it cost him. In eleven short years he had jumped from patrol cop to patrol sergeant, served briefly as a vice detective before making vice lieutenant, then on to homicide captain. He was making strides in the political process but at the cost of respect among the people he supervised. They knew he fell asleep at night dreaming that chief was stenciled on his office door. But Foubarelle wasn’t out to bust chops, he was merely being politically expedient. When his chain was yanked, he turned around to yank Frank’s.

Now he took a softer tack with his contumacious lieutenant. She was right that he enjoyed supervising a homicide squad with such a large percentage of cleared cases, large at least for the Figueroa district. He knew Frank was responsible for that number and he knew it made him look very good.

“I’m sorry,” he offered, turning up his hands in conciliation. “I know you’ve got a lot of work to do. Tell me about this girl.”

Frank ignored the patronization, wondering just how much she could trust Foubarelle with. He had a tendency to leak valuable details, but then she realized they didn’t have any valuable details. Yet.

“White girl, midteens. Noah may have ID’d her on an MP bulletin. I asked Crocetti to do her ASAP.”

She paused for a moment knowing the captain’s next step would be a call to the coroner. He never actually went to the morgue but he was the first to redball the old coroner when a hot case was pending. That was good for Frank; Foubarelle’s phone calls usually got the autopsy done faster while keeping the heat off Frank and her squad.

“Valley girl coming to score a little coke in the ‘hood?” he asked.

“I don’t think so.”

The girl didn’t have any of the earmarks of a kick down. Frank explained how the victim had been brutally assaulted, how some of her bruises looked older than others. She told Foubarelle what the coroner’s tech had told her, that the cause of death was possibly due to internal trauma. There were no obvious external causes. Usually someone in a jammed-up drug deal was capped or stabbed and just left for dead.

“But she was dumped?”

“Yeah. Nothing at the scene. I called SID in just in case—you might get a call about that.” Frank shrugged again, then added, “I’m going to work this with Noah.”

Foubarelle nodded, pleased.

“Keep me posted on this, Frank. I want to know everything you know, when you know it, okay?”

“Sure.”

Foubarelle turned to go, saying, “And I want to see the protocol as soon as you have it.” He knew it was important to leave with the upper hand.

“What an asshole,” Frank thought, watching him leave with his imaginary dignity intact. She picked up a stack of messages and sifted through them, crumpling some and tossing them in the trash. She pulled the phone toward her but then sat back, rhythmically tapping the small slips of paper into a tidy pile.

Frank visualized the dead girl sprawled naked on the concrete. She’d been mauled, from her neck down to her knees. Some of the bruises looked older than others, indicating she’d been beaten over a period of time, not just in a sudden pique of anger. Frank remembered that her face was relatively unscathed.

And why was she dumped in plain view on a sidewalk in front of a school? Vacant lots, weedy road shoulders, empty buildings— those were common dump areas. Ike and Diego were working a possible connection to the school, either the girl’s or the killer’s.

She traded the messages in her hand for the MP bulletin. It looked like the same girl. Melissa Agoura. Sixteen years old. From Culver City. She’d disappeared from Kenneth Hahn State Recreation Area three days ago. The bruises could be consistent with those dates.

She’d
been
attractive, Frank thought, sailing the bulletin back onto her desk, then dialing the phone. Returning her calls and waiting for a correct ID was more productive right now than speculating.

Noah was bent over one of the two typewriters in the office that actually worked. Slipping into her jacket, Frank informed him, “Coroner called. Handley matched our girl to the bulletin. And Crotchety’s ready to cut. Let’s go.” She slapped him on the back and started walking away.

“Aww, man, Leslie’s got a game at 3:30. If I left now I could just make it,” he pleaded.

“Come on. It’s good for you. Builds character.”

“I’ve
got
character,” he argued, rising nonetheless. He grumbled all the way to the morgue, and she let him. Noah was off hours ago, adored his kids, and hated autopsies. She’d have watched the autopsy alone on a less sensitive case but she wanted him in on this one.

Awkward, skinny, all flapping hands and feet, Noah looked more like a scarecrow than a crack homicide detective. He was consistently the worst shot in the department and the best cop Frank had. What he lacked in physical presence he compensated for with instinct, intelligence, and compassion. He was rarely more than a step behind Frank and often one or two ahead. She’d felt a twinge of guilt reassigning this case to Noah, knowing it could be messy. It was already distracting Noah from the little family life he had, but selfishly, Frank was glad to be working with him. The least she could do was let him carp. Besides, that was another of Noah’s specialties.

Noah grimaced when they entered the cool, tiled autopsy room and started breathing through his mouth. The girl’s body was on a metal autopsy table. An assistant was measuring it. Frank didn’t recognize the woman in scrubs standing next to Crocetti.

“All right, ladies and gentlemen—” he peered over his bifocals at Frank—” and I only use the term
ladies
because Dr. Lawless is present, let us begin.”

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Crocetti didn’t mind women in law enforcement. In fact, he rather liked it, but he expected them to act like women. Frank was more like one of the guys, and this irritated the old man. He was cranky by nature, hence the nickname Crotchety, but he was getting crankier the closer he got to retirement.

As he swabbed the body, the coroner made introductions.

“Dr. Gail Lawless, Detective Noah Jantzen,” Noah extended his hand, “and Lieutenant Franco.” Frank nodded curtly, not even looking at the woman she was being introduced to. Crocetti continued. “Dr. Lawless is my hapless though far more attractive replacement.”

The old man swung his head from one woman to the next and remarked curiously, “They certainly grow you girls tall these days. It must have been all that Wonder Bread.”

Frank glanced at the new ME. She was indeed tall, but flat and thin, like Modigliani’s blue woman. Frank thought Bobby Taylor— one of her detectives who’d minored in art—would have been pleased with the analogy. Dr. Lawless had smiled wryly at Crocetti’s comment, and Noah was grinning goofily. He had a thing for tall women. Frank could tell he was already smitten.

“Any idea what made the bruises?” Frank asked, all cool business and efficiency.

Bending intently over the body, Crocetti responded, “Hasn’t anyone ever told you, Lieutenant, that patience is a virtue?”

He poked and prodded for a moment, made a few comments to his colleague, then straightened, frowning sourly.

“It looks like this poor girl was mistaken for a bowling pin. There are so many bruises here it’s hard to tell where one ends and another begins. You know,” he said toward the body, “I have a granddaughter this age.”

A shake of his head chased the thought away, and he gruffly asked for details about the case. Noah told him what they had so far.

“Well,” the old man sighed, “let’s see what we can find here.”

Crocetti lowered his bald head over the table, enunciating carefully for the microphone.

“Victim appears to be a healthy teenage Caucasian female. Brown hair, brown eyes, height—?”

“Sixty-four inches,” Handley responded loudly. Crocetti repeated the height and when he asked for the weight Jack called out, “One hundred twenty-four pounds.”

“You don’t have to scream,” complained the old man, then calmly continued.

“Victim has all her teeth, in good condition. No apparent scars, tattoos, or abnormalities. Right shoulder appears dislocated.”

Crocetti measured a cut on the left side of her chin and noted the associated hematoma.

He carefully examined the rest of the bruises, asking Dr. Lawless for her opinion. She outlined specific ones with a gloved finger, noting, “The patterns appear more rounded than linear where the contusions don’t overlap. The bruises are deep, but the absence of laceration suggests she was hit with something relatively flexible or soft. The varied discoloration suggests they were inflicted over time.”

“Do they look like they could be older than three days?”

“It’s possible, but these are certainly consistent with that time frame…don’t you think?” she asked Crocetti.

He was beaming at his replacement. “I do indeed, my dear. Now tell me what else you see.”

“Well, there are slight adhesive traces on her wrists and ankles, along with a mild abrasion, and the skin’s a little paler there, suggesting she was bound with some sort of tape.”

“Was she gagged?” Frank thought aloud.

Lawless bent closer to Agoura’s face.

“Probably,” pointing to faint traces of adhesive around Agoura’s mouth.

“This looks consistent with the other adhesives, and we’ll see what we get back from the mouth swabs.”