Blood Flag: A Paul Madriani Novel (10 page)

THIRTEEN

F
or the first twenty minutes we drive in silence. Noland was right. The traffic is bumper to bumper. A few miles farther on, Harry finally kicks in. “This doesn’t make any sense.”

“What do you mean?” I say.

“Well, look where we are.”

I’ve been on autopilot since leaving Brauer’s house, my eyes glued to the unmarked police car in front of us, not paying much attention. I look at one of the overhead road signs as we approach it at walking speed. It’s the interchange from I-8, turning south onto State 125.

“What was she doing way out here?” says Harry. “You said when Sofia left the office on Friday she was headed directly to Brauer’s place?”

“That’s what she said. In fact, as I recall, she was in a hurry.”

“Could it be she had another stop to make?” says Herman.

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe that’s why she was in a rush?” Herman sits in the backseat looking at my eyes in the rearview mirror.

We drive on, another twenty minutes in grinding freeway traffic to where Highway 94 turns into a divided four-lane road. Noland keeps going. We pass through a mixed area, houses and retail, an occasional restaurant and some light industrial plants along the road. Here the development starts to turn spotty. There are open areas of chaparral where the excavators have not yet found their way.

I notice some flashing lights up ahead, two California Highway Patrol cars parked on the side of the road, one of them blocking a dirt easement into an area of undeveloped land. Noland slides into the right lane. I stay right behind him. He hits the emergency lights in the beast and the strobe starts flashing. Cars around us immediately slow down. One of the patrol officers jumps in the car blocking the dirt road and pulls forward just enough for us to pass behind him.

Noland guns it and we follow him down the dusty road. He disappears in the billowing cloud that boils up in front of us. I slow down so as not to pile into him from behind. I see his brake lights go on as he rounds a bend, and suddenly we’re there.

It’s a wide spot on the road carved out by the bulldozer that graded it. Washboards cut into the sandy soil from the last heavy rains, now more than two years ago, indicate that the road has been here awhile. Parked on top of the ripples at the edge of the road on the other side is the coroner’s wagon. Next to it is the forensics van. There are three other patrol units and another unmarked car parked up ahead. On the road off to one side a flatbed tow truck is winching a vehicle onto its tilt tray, getting ready to haul it away.

I glance over. Harry sees it, too.

I hear him sigh. It’s a hollow sound I’ve never heard from Harry before, like the vapor of a ghost as it leaves his body.

Until this moment I suspect that each of us, Harry, Herman, and myself, perhaps the women in the office, each of us without saying a word, fed the famished shadow of a chance that somehow the cops were wrong. That it wasn’t Sofia who was lying out there on the parched ground under that hot sun. That a merciful God would spare us the pain and offer up some other lost child. But now as we sit here listening to the hum of the car’s air conditioner, all hope dies. Its spirit ascends on a roiling cloud of dust as the truck moves toward the highway carrying on its back the little blue car, Sofia’s Kia Rio, which every day for months now had been parked like an old friend in the lot behind our office.

I turn off the car’s engine and the three of us get out. Overhead I can hear the rotors of a helicopter as it circles like a vulture a few thousand feet above us. One of the local television stations no doubt following up on a lead from their police scanner.

We walk to the other side of the road and join up with Owen and Noland. A few feet away, yellow tape anchored to several steel stakes marks off the immediate crime area. Beyond the tape, about forty feet away and up a slight incline, they have erected a small white tentlike cabana maybe eight or ten feet square. Under its shade, two figures, each of them down on one knee, are working. They are wearing coveralls looking like surgeons. I know that Sofia is there, though I cannot see any part of her.

Owen buttonholes one of the forensics guys as he walks by headed toward their van. “What do they have, anything yet on time of death?”

“Best they can figure, by the time they found the body she’d been there at least two days, maybe longer.”

“So they don’t think it was Saturday or Sunday?” says Owen.

The guy shakes his head.

“You think they’ll get anything more precise when they do the autopsy?” asks Owen.

“Not likely. An animal of some kind got at her. They aren’t gonna find any stomach contents. And the core heat from her body is long gone. It gets cold out here at night. Any radiant heat coming out of her now is coming from the sun. They figure she’s been here at least two days, from the insects and the ground underneath her.”

“That means Friday night,” says Owen.

“It looks like it.”

“Any shoe prints or tire tracks?”

The guy shakes his head. “Ground’s too dry. Too much sand. Couldn’t get a thing. They’re still checking for hair and fibers around the body. Then we’ll move her. They bagged her hands and they’ll check under her nails when they get her to the morgue. We might find something there. One of her nails is broken.”

“Which hand?” I ask

“Index finger on the right. Who are you?”

“She broke it in the office Friday afternoon,” I tell him.

“Who’s he?” the guy asks Owen.

“This is Madriani,” says Owen. “The lawyer she worked for.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“ID’ing the vic,” says Owen.

The other guy nods.

This at least is the official justification for our presence here. The real reason they are letting us get this close to the scene is to silence Harry. Owen doesn’t want my partner gossiping with Gwyn regarding Jerry Noland’s loose lips. Get on her wrong side and she might flame the two detectives the next time they find themselves in her courtroom. Homicide is a small world, and in San Diego County, Gwyneth Riggins owns a chunk of it. Become a liability to prosecutors in court and homicide detectives, even seasoned ones, can find themselves back doing snatch-and-grab misdemeanors and traffic cases.

“Sofia broke her nail in the office Friday afternoon,” I tell them. “I remember because she complained about it; my better half tried to help her fix it. She filed it and touched it up with an emery board.”

“If she did we’ll see it under the scope. I’ll make a note,” says the tech.

“We thought it would be easier for them to ID the body than to drag in the family,” says Owen.

“That’s fine. Just watch where you walk and don’t get over the body where you might drop hair or fibers. Go suit up. Put your name on the list and sign off so we can clear you if they find anything later.” He nods toward the van.

We do it, Harry and I. The two cops are uneasy allowing Herman near the scene until they have an alibi for him. Herman doesn’t fight it. He says he’d rather remember her as she was, the last time he saw her in the office.

We don the white polypropylene coveralls with hoodies. They are disposable and cheap, a pack of twenty-five, one size fits all, in this case 3X. We roll up the pant legs and tape them, then do a little tuck and roll with tape on the sides so we don’t swim in them. We cover our shoes with blue booties, snap on a pair of latex gloves, and march toward the short path beyond the yellow tape.

One of the assistants to the medical examiner leads the way. Owen is geared up and following behind us. We walk up the rocky path. It’s covered in splinters of shale sharp enough to pass for broken glass. As we get closer I can see her on the ground, sprawled in the shade under the white tent. Her feet are toward us. She is still wearing the bright yellow dress, tight, and short above the knees, though it has been pushed up and is now stained, either by dirt or blood, I can’t tell which. As we get closer, the medical examiner, who is still huddled over her, sees us approach. Quickly he grabs a large white towel and drapes the entire midsection of her body with it.

“I understand you’re here to make the identification.” The ME stands up.

I can barely force myself to look at Sofia’s face. It is badly swollen, her lips parched and split. Her once-beautiful hair is now tangled and littered with dry leaves and twigs from the brush around her. Her eyes are open, bulging, staring out at nothing, a horrified gaze fixed on infinity. Around her throat is a deep ligature wound, like a black tattoo cut into the flesh, a quarter of an inch or more in width. I try to blot out the fact that I am looking at Sofia, concentrate on the details in front of my eyes, try to stay objective. I know I will never get another chance.

Whatever the killer used for the ligature was sufficiently thick and strong to complete the job. Anything more fine would have either snapped or cut the flesh, resulting in external hemorrhaging. The only bleeding around her throat appears to be under the skin. The solid unbroken line around the front of her throat leads me to believe that whoever did it came at her from behind.

Harry and I introduce ourselves to the ME. Harry is still looking. He can’t take his eyes off Sofia on the ground.

“Do you recognize her?” asks the ME.

“Barely,” I tell him. “But it is her. It is Sofia.”

“Who?” He looks at me and then back at the clipboard in his hand.

“Sorry. Her legal name was Sadie Leon. We knew her by her nickname, Sofia. She worked for us at the firm.”

“Should I include her nickname as an alias?” he asks.

“I would. Her family called her that and a lot of her friends knew her only as Sofia.”

He makes a note. “Is there any doubt or question in your mind as to her identity?” he asks.

I shake my head.

“How about you?” He looks at Harry.

“No. It’s her.” Harry seems devastated. No stranger to crime scenes, this one hits where it hurts.

“She’s still wearing the same outfit she had on Friday afternoon at work,” I tell the ME. “Same dress. Same jacket.”

He makes another note. “When was the last time you saw her?”

“We already have all of that,” says Owen. “I’ll send you a copy of my notes when they’re printed up.”

“Good,” says the ME.

There is a spot like brown rust on a sliver of the yellow fabric near Sofia’s knee. It peeks out from beneath the edge of the towel covering her midsection. The knee itself appears to have suffered some kind of an abrasion but no apparent bleeding. This means that the blood is coming from somewhere higher up on her body.

“What about that?” I point to the spot of blood.

The ME follows the line of my eye, sees where I’m looking, and says, “We’re pretty sure it’s all postmortem. Probably a coyote or an abandoned dog. It happens. She’s been here awhile.”

I’m still looking at the spot on her dress.

“Trust me, you don’t want to see it,” he says. “We won’t know for sure until we finish the postmortem, but I doubt it has anything to do with the cause of death.”

“So you’re pretty sure she was strangled?” says Harry.

“That’s our best guess. Fortunately we found her before the animals could finish the job. Otherwise we might never know. Listen, thank you for your help. I’m sure her family will appreciate it.” The ME gestures with his head toward the cop that it’s time for us to go, that he has work to do, and then he quietly steps away.

“Where are her shoes?”

“What?” The ME turns back to look at me.

“Her shoes? Did you already bag them up?” I scan the ground around her. They are nowhere in sight.

“No. As a matter of fact, we didn’t. Do you know what they looked like?” he says.

“High heels, stilettos, maybe five inches high. They were shiny, off white, what you might call cream-colored. They looked like patent leather, but I’m sure they weren’t. They were probably vinyl, plastic of some kind. She wore them almost every day no matter what outfit she had on.”

“We used to kid her about them.” Harry’s voice catches. “She said she’d get a new pair for Christmas. Now I guess she won’t.” Harry the stalwart, the old warhorse, starts to tear up. “Sorry.” He wipes it away with the sleeve of the Tyvek suit.

“It’s all right,” says the ME. “We wouldn’t be human if we didn’t do that once in a while.”

“Where are they?” I ask. “Her shoes?”

“We don’t know,” he says. “They weren’t in her car. We know that. And we didn’t find them here.”

“It’s possible the animals might have carried them off,” says Owen.

“Both of them?” says Harry.

“Or chewed them up,” says the cop.

“In which case forensics would have found little pieces all over the ground,” I tell him. I take a few steps back toward the path leading toward the tape and turn. The bottoms of Sofia’s feet are perhaps the only part of her body that seems untouched. Except for some ground-in dust they are remarkably smooth. I look at the path that Harry and I walked up to get here and then check the bottom of my left foot. The blue bootie covering my shoe has been punctured and shredded in at least one place by the sharp pieces of shale along the path.

“One thing is certain. She didn’t walk up here barefoot,” I tell him.

“No. We don’t think so, either.”

“She was killed somewhere else and her body dumped here,” I say.

“Not necessarily,” he says.

“How else do you explain it? She didn’t fly here.”

“No, but she might have walked.”

“Explain?” says Harry.

“It’s possible she knew her killer, maybe someone she trusted. Maybe they came here to talk out a problem. Whoever killed her walked her up here with her shoes on, strangled her on the spot, and then took her shoes.”

“Why?” says Harry. “Why would he do that?”

“We don’t know. We’re not sure. Perhaps as a trophy,” he says.

“A foot fetish?” says Harry.

“We’ve seen it before,” says the ME. “About four months ago. Another young woman, strangled the same way, her body was found on the beach near Oceanside. Her shoes were missing. High heels,” he says. “Some men get off on them.”

“I don’t buy it,” says Harry.