Bleeding Out (3 page)

“Well done,” Crocetti said, snapping his gloves off. Except for Noah, everyone waited patiently while Crocetti wrote down notes. Although he taped the autopsy proceedings he still insisted on hard copy. Frank appreciated his lack of faith in technology, even though it slowed the whole process. She looked around at four other steel gurneys, each being autopsied by one of Crocetti’s staff. She knew there were plenty more bodies waiting in the cooler and was pleased the old man had gotten to Agoura as soon as he had.

“Were any of those blows enough to kill her?” Noah asked.

“I can’t say for sure until I see inside,” answered the coroner without looking up. “From the bloat on her abdomen it feels like we’ll find a significant trauma of some sort.”

That told them nothing, and Noah continued his restless pacing, biting on a thumbnail. Pulling on new gloves, Crocetti turned and said, “All right, Jack. Let’s scrape the nails, and Dr. Lawless, if you would care to comb her hair out I will proceed with the rape test.”

The three whitecoats went efficiently about their tasks, wresting clues from the hidden holds of the victim’s body. Frank watched Crocetti apply toluidine solution to the oral, anal, and vaginal areas, while Noah continued his pacing.

“I wonder if they’ve put Les in the game yet,” he said to Frank. “We’ve been working on her dribble. I hope she keeps her head up like I showed her.”

He turned around when Crocetti murmured, “There we go.”

The toluidine had showed up on the anal cavity, staining the entire area dark blue as it reacted to the polysaccharides on the abraded skin tissue. Frank found that curious. Whoever had this girl had plenty of time to rape her, in any way he wanted, yet curiously he’d only sodomized her.

With the external exam over, Crocetti was ready to cut the big coroner’s
Y
that would show them the inside of Melissa Agoura. The two doctors and two detectives peered into the body and no one there needed a medical degree to realize blood had pooled in places where it should never be.

Crocetti’s replacement said, “Wow,” and as the old coroner cut away the chest plate he noted into the mike, “Massive hemorrhage is apparent.”

The old man could probably do this with his eyes shut and one arm tied behind his back, yet he cautiously and daintily cut the thoracic organs from their moorings, another meticulous attention to detail that drove the detectives batty. After examining the right lung he put it in a weighing pan and instructed Dr. Lawless to explain what she saw. She rearranged the organ and studied it for a moment, then pointed at a tear.

“You can see where it’s been punctured at the bottom here. The tissue is ripped, not cut, and the puncture doesn’t extend more than,” she quickly grabbed a ruler, “four centimeters.”

“What made it?” Noah asked, but Crocetti shook his head at him. He didn’t want to commit to that yet, and Noah returned to his frustrated pacing. Chin in hand, Frank continued her impassive observation. When he was satisfied the young woman on the table hadn’t been asphyxiated, Crocetti turned his attention to the abdominal cavity. He poked and prodded, then straightened, arching the stiffness out of his back.

“What do you see, doctor?”

Dr. Lawless quietly poked and prodded too, finally saying, “There’s considerable trauma to numerous organs, any of which could have been the cause of death.”

Pointing with a scalpel tip she traced the path of the injuries, starting with the grossly ruptured rectum. Perforations in the bladder and intestine followed the trajectory of perforations in the liver, stomach, and pancreas.

“Good,” Crocetti commented when she was done, then continued excising and measuring organs. Further inspection showed that the bruising continued well below the skin, involving numerous bones and organs as well. She’d been hit pretty hard, but the lack of lacerations suggested she may have had some type of padding between herself and the assailant’s weapon. The doctors couldn’t say what sort of weapon that might be.

With a flourish, as if he were asking her to dance, Crocetti asked his replacement if she’d like to finish the autopsy.

“Sure,” she said easily, and proceeded to excise the neck organs. Without flinching, Frank could watch the torso being slit and eviscerated, or see the skull-saw spray hot bone before the brain was lifted out with a last, small gasp, but cutting into the neck still made Frank glance down at her feet. When Dr. Lawless moved onto the head area, Frank resumed her observation. Other than a mild concussion, the doctors found no further injury to Melissa Agoura.

“Jack, please finish.”

Handley proceeded to replace the various body parts while the old man gave the detectives his back to write further notes. Noah rolled his eyes at Frank and tapped his watch. Arms folded patiently, Frank nodded. Finally the coroner gave them his full attention.

“Well, detectives, I think you pretty much have your answer. In my opinion this girl died of massive internal hemorrhage induced by multiple organ rupture, seemingly initiated by a pointed, long-handled instrument. The shape of the perforations seems consistent with the use of an irregularly-sided instrument, such as,” he held up a small specimen bottle, “a tree branch. I believe the lab analysis will conclude that these fragments, found around various perforations, are wood. Dr. Lawless?”

“I’d say that’s it in a nutshell.”

“Oh, one more thing,” Crocetti added playfully. “According to the path of insertion, the fellow you’re looking for will probably be left-handed.”

“Aww, man.” Noah flapped his arms and shuffled in a tight circle. He complained to Frank, “For
this
I’m missing my kid’s ball game?”

He’d really enjoyed the first few games. He was barely able to keep the football helmet above his eyes but he’d had fun anyway. His dad seemed to enjoy it, too, and he’d been struck with wonder: for the first time in his six years he was having fun with his father. It was an unusual feeling, but a good one, and the boy wanted it to always be like that.

Sometimes his father would yell when he dropped the ball or tripped over his own feet. Once, the Pop Warner coach had gently interceded, explaining to the angry man that six-year olds weren’t very coordinated, that that would come with time.

“It better,” his father had menaced.

By the next year, he made it clear that he thought the boy’s coordination should have arrived. Shoves and smacks replaced the verbal threats. The other parents would look away. The coach refused to have the boy on his team if the father continued hitting him. So his father stopped. In public.

Franco spent most of her days and many of her nights in Figueroa, LAPD’s roughest district. The ‘hood had started as a peaceful community in which mainly black sharecroppers strived for their piece of the American Dream. As industry waned over the ensuing decades, crime and the inevitably profitable drug markets became the ‘hood’s economic mainstay. With more crackheads and gangbangers in Figueroa than any other division in the LAPD, the American Dream had twisted cruelly into a nightmare. Now the population was largely Hispanic, with blacks accounting for slightly less than 20 percent of the residents. Asians, many of them Korean, rounded out the demographics.

Taquerias crowded next to fried chicken stands, and Easter egg-colored stores advertised fish cleaned and fresh chitterlings. Old brick buildings, peeling paint and heavily graffitied, sported architectural flourishes that were too high off the ground to be ravaged by vandalism and testified to the more optimistic roots of South Central Los Angeles.

Frank had been assigned to Figueroa right out of the academy, probably with the assumption that she’d quit. But instead of leaving, Frank had embraced the ‘hood, sharply aware no other division could challenge or test her as much. At thirty-nine, her mastery of the mean streets was no longer a question, either for herself, her colleagues, or the
veteranos
and OGs within the division. Except for the unending mysteries of who killed who and why, Figueroa offered few surprises.

After a grueling sixteen-hour day, Frank pulled gratefully into her driveway. Though she lived in an old suburb of South Pasadena, her house was not the typically modest Los Angeles bungalow. Its last owner had been an architect with more imagination than money and a penchant for split-level ranch houses. Consequently, the center of the house was dominated by a huge sunken living room with a beamed ceiling. It was surrounded by two tiers of polished wood leading up to a tiled corridor. On the north and south sides doors opened off the corridor into various rooms, but to the east behind the living room the floor widened to accommodate an open corner kitchen and a large dining table, which Frank used as her desk.

Loafers clicking noisily on the tiles, she walked to the bedroom, turning lights on along the way. She paused in front of an old mahogany dresser to dump her service revolver, badge, ID card, and beeper, then emptied her pockets of coins, latex gloves, her wallet, notepads, pens, scraps of paper, and an unused roll of film. Feeling ten pounds lighter, she changed out of her work clothes into ripped shorts and a holey T-shirt that Mrs. Fontina had laundered and folded as carefully as if they were part of Frank’s trousseau.

In the den at the other end of the house an expensive stereo system nestled between walls of books. Frank checked the CDs in the turntable, then hit the play button. Van Halen pounded through the house. Frank padded into the adjacent room, a garage that years ago she’d converted into a gym. A Soloflex was bolted in the center of the room, a bench and racks of weights lined one wall, and a punching bag hung on the opposite side next to a treadmill. Frank set it for the highest angle, then started burning off the day while David Lee Roth begged a pretty woman to stop a while. But Frank didn’t hear him; she was busy thinking about the Agoura case.

She and Noah had spent the evening first with the girl’s parents, later with her boyfriend. They had quickly ruled out Fubar’s idea about a drug buy gone bad; Agoura had no reason to be in the area, and no one could think of who she might know in the ‘hood or at Crenshaw High. Although the Agouras lived only a dozen miles from the high school and had been in Culver City for eight years, they never had occasion to venture into even the fringe of South Central.

From all her family said, Melissa Agoura seemed like a pretty typical teenager. She was a sophomore at Culver City High, a B-C student, with no extracurricular involvements. She babysat for a couple of neighborhood kids, made enough money that way and from her allowance to go to the mall with her girlfriends and the movies with her boyfriend. He’d admitted they liked to drink and smoke dope, but adamantly insisted they never used anything harder.

He and Melissa had been going together for almost a year. On weekends, if the weather was good, they liked going to the beach, but a lot of times they just went over to the rec area and hung out in the sun or splashed around near the fish ponds. He acknowledged that he fooled around in the scrub with her and tried to get her to go on the pill, but she wouldn’t do it. His grades were a little lower than Melissa’s. He didn’t like school, worked part-time at a mechanic’s on Cienega, and said he wanted to drop out of school and work full-time.

Noah was going to run him through the files tomorrow, but it didn’t seem likely at this point that he was involved with Agoura’s death. There were the girlfriends to interview, too. Two of them had called her house when she failed to meet them at the park. They’d planned on watching some boys from their school play baseball, a common activity for them on weekends. Weekdays, the same two friends came over to do homework and watch
Oprah.
Agoura and her brother were always fighting over the TV. He was only thirteen. Her little sister was twelve and adored Melissa. Posters of Leo DiCaprio and Hanson hung in their shared bedroom between posters of
Titanic
and the Spice Girls.

Jaime Agoura managed a tire store in West Hollywood, and Virginia Agoura was a bank teller at the Wells Fargo on Sepulveda. The Agouras were struggling to get by and somehow managing. Their kids weren’t exceptional, but they were good kids. And now this. Frank had seen the shock and disbelief a thousand times, the certainty that the cops standing in their doorway had to be mistaken, that it couldn’t be
their
child.

By the time she slowed the treadmill, Frank’s T-shirt was heavy with sweat. The machine always made her feel wobbly, so she dismounted carefully, letting the effect fade as she toweled off. She eyed the Soloflex and thought about skipping it. Instead she straddled the seat and briefly worked her torso. She’d do arms and legs tomorrow. Right now she was ready for a beer.

The beer and a warm shower made Frank sleepy, but she sat on the kitchen counter in her pajamas and chugged another bottle, flipping through the paper. After years of nightmares and insomnia, Frank had hit on a formula that usually guaranteed sleep: brutally long hours on the job, hard work in the gym, and a specific blood alcohol level. Though she was tired, she wasn’t about to start tampering with the combination.

When Noah poked his head in Frank’s office the next morning, he could tell his boss had already been there for a while. She looked up, saw him grinning at her, and sat back.

“What’s up?” she yawned.

“Looks like you’ve been.”

Frank’s hair was dry where it touched her collar in a sharp line, but it was still damp where her sunglasses held it away from her face. She was wearing a V-neck sweater over a button-down shirt and her sleeves were shoved over her elbows. That usually happened after at least her third cup of coffee.

“How long you been here?”

Frank ignored the question, holding up the
LA. Times
instead.

“See we made the third page of the Metro section?”

“Yeah. The eleven o’clock news, too. ‘Racially motivated attack.’ Jesus. Like we don’t have enough trouble already. RHD on this yet?”

Frank shook her head and swung her polished loafers onto a corner of the desk. RHD was the LAPD Robbery-Homicide Division. They handled the more sensitive cases, the ones they thought the average homicide dick was too stupid to work properly. Frank hated it when they snagged her cases, and she was damned if she was going to let them have this one. Though she knew she’d be powerless to stop them if they wanted it.