L.A. Boneyard (27 page)

On the floor at their feet, Sergeant shifted so that he was pressed against David’s legs. They both looked down at the snoring dog. “He misses you,” Chris said. He looked up to meet David’s gaze. “So do I.”

“Yeah,” David’s voice was husky. “I’m glad I stopped by.”

“Joanne said you came by yesterday.”

“Well, yeah, I was hoping to catch you...” No mention of finding the locks changed. But then David would never deliberately embarrass someone for any reason. David took another swig of beer and looked away.

“What’s going on with the car?” he asked. “They made a decision yet?”

“They say not,” Chris said. “But it can’t be much longer. I don’t see how they can try to fix it. It’s a write-off.”

“Yeah, well, you know insurance companies. What will you get to replace it?”

“I don’t know.” Chris took a sip of Chardonnay. “I’ll look around. Something with some room to carry equipment, though most of my work no longer involves equipment procurement.

Someone else delivers that. Maybe you can help me when I go looking. You know me and cars, I like driving them but picking one out...”

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“Sure,” David said, not even trying to hide his enthusiasm.

Chris saw his drink was almost empty. He offered him another. David looked down at the brown bottle in his hand.

He looked like he was going to accept, then he shook his head.

“I shouldn’t. I’m driving.”

Chris almost said he could stay here, but something stopped the words in his mouth. There was still unfinished business between them. Unfinished business called Jairo.

“So how’s work?”

“Fine.”

“Anything interesting happen?”

“No.” David seemed to realize the conversation was a nonstarter. He ventured, “How about you. Your new contract working for you?”

“It’s going well. We’ve made good progress in a short time.

We may beat our deadline. There’s a bonus if we do.”

There usually was in Chris’s line of work. He often got bonuses for a job well done. There were no bonuses in police work, unless you counted putting a piece of scum behind bars for a very long time a bonus. David never got kudos for a job well done, not even verbal ones. There was always someone waiting to criticize the work he did. Questioning his methods.

Success was never a factor.

David nodded. “You were always so good at your job. You deserve the bonuses.”

“It’s fun working with Becky again. I’m glad I finally talked her into to crossing over to the dark side,” he laughed at the reference to her going out on her own and forgoing a steady pay, since with him, she only got paid if she worked. He couldn’t afford to keep a payroll going for non-production. But when she got paid, she got paid well. And she trusted there’d be enough work to make it worthwhile.

“She still living with Clay?” David asked.

“Yeah.” Chris was still laughing, as though he hadn’t in a long time, and he was finally letting go. “She keeps saying she’s L.A. BONEYARD
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going to make an honest man of him, but really, can you see her married?”

It was David’s turn to laugh. “No, not really.”

They both skirted the five-hundred pound gorilla in the room; there was no reference to Jairo by either of them all evening. David did mention Martinez once. “I think he’s having the time of his life, beating
chollas
at their own game. But he doesn’t mean to stay, or at least so he says.” He set his beer bottle down on the coffee table. Chris immediately picked it up.

David stood.

“You going so soon?” Chris couldn’t hide the sorrow in his voice. David met his gaze and something in him surrendered.

He stepped closer to Chris, his hands coming up to grip Chris’s biceps. Then his mouth came down on Chris’s.

His breath was hot against Chris’s throat; he could feel his own pulse on David’s lips. He growled and dug his fingers into David’s thick hair, dragging his face down, and ramming his mouth over David’s again.

They were both breathing hard by the time they broke apart.

“Chris—” David stroked his face, smoothing the hair back from his forehead. Their eyes met and held. What passed between them was raw lust, untamed by the deprivation. Maybe grown stronger.

Chris was so hard he hurt. He couldn’t help it, he rocked his hips forward, moaning when David’s thigh went between his legs.

David’s voice was hoarse, “I’m going to get him transferred.

I won’t see him again, ever. I promise.”

“Oh David—”

“Let’s go to bed—”

But then a memory/nightmare image broke through Chris’s lust. Jairo doing exactly this and David responding with the same fever. He jerked away from David, staring up at his face with disgust and horror.

“I can’t... Oh, God, I want to, but I can’t...”

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He whirled and fled up the stairs, leaving David with his fading tumescence and a confused dog. After about five minutes, in which he half expected David to follow him—and would he have sent him away again? He would never know. He heard the soft click of the front door closing and knew he would have to creep downstairs to lock up.

He did and he went to bed soon after. To his surprise he slept like the dead, though he was not refreshed when he dragged his butt into the shower the next morning.

Friday, 7:45 AM, Northeast Community Police Station, San Fernando
Road, Los Angeles

The day shift was just drifting in, chairs scraped the tile floor, the sharp smell of coffee permeated the always stale air.

The smell of conflicting deodorants and colognes fought for dominance amid the walls of posters, flyers and peg boards.

On the wall overlooking both of their desks, the murder board David and Jairo had begun the first day of the case, the day they had come back from Griffith Park, was now a mass of crime scene photos, mug shots, and questions still unanswered.

Jairo had put up a hand-written diagram listing everyone’s name involved in the case from the dead women, the missing women, Sevchuk, Mikalenko, the Avenues’s unnamed connection, and a shadowy figure with no name, and no stats. Oddly, and totally unexpectedly, he had added the dead drive-by banger on Drew.

The Cypress Park banger shot in Avenues territory. Did he see a pattern that wasn’t visible to David?

David pulled the thick murder book out of the ancient green cabinet and opened it to the first page. Halyna Stakchinko had her own murder book, even though it looked like all three were now inextricably intertwined.

Finishing up yet another report, he added it to the growing puzzle. He thought they had a handle on what had happened to the three women, but the key answer was still missing. Why?

Why had Mikalenko, who stood to profit so much from both the babies and the women themselves, killed them? And why L.A. BONEYARD
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did he go to so much trouble to get them good medical care, assure they were healthy, and that their babies were too, if all he was going to do was erase them? David had seen murders done for the flimsiest, and most ridiculous of reasons, though usually those kinds were impulse killings. A fight gone wrong. A towering rage unchecked. But this had the ring of deliberation.

What had changed to make Mikalenko turn from calculating businessman to cold-blooded killer? The press frequently labeled such crimes senseless, but the truth was that there were reasons for everything. They just didn’t always make sense to anyone but the killer.

Or were they chasing the wrong cat here? Could Mikalenko be telling the truth? But if he didn’t kill the other two women, who did?

The more he stared at what they had uncovered so far, the less he understood. He was almost glad when Jairo came in. At least he’d have someone to bounce ideas off of.

“I don’t get it,” he said without preamble. “Why did Mikalenko turn on them? He’s always been pretty cold up until now. It was all a business transaction. What changed?”

“He did,” Jairo said. “Or he didn’t, and this is his true face.

Maybe there are more than these three women. Maybe he has impulses.”

“And maybe he didn’t do it.”

“So we’re looking for a second doer? Murder partnership.

Pretty rare.”

Like all Academy trained cops, both David and Jairo took courses on not only criminology, but on psychology. David had spent six months in Quantico being taught by the world renowned behavioral profilers. He’d even met FBI Agent William Hagmaier, who had gained Ted Bundy’s trust, while he sat on Florida’s death row, and got the killer to admit to over thirty sadistic slayings over the years he targeted young women.

“He might have a partner,” David conceded. “But I don’t read him that way. I think he’s just a mercenary man who sees profit in everything, and doesn’t care about the consequences.

Not a disorganized, impulse killer. And there’s never been any
232 P.A. Brown

sign of sexual abuse or posing in any of the victims.” David tapped his fingers across the surface of the blue binder. “I think the key is in the doctor. I want to take another run at the house on Leland. Stakchinko, Konjenko and Katrina Mydry, plus the missing Lapchuk, spent their last days in that house. We already know Konjenko kept a diary of sorts. Why not the others? I want to tear that place apart before I release it back to Larson.

Then we need to go back to Mikalenko.”

Jairo nodded. “Before or after the DA’s visit?”

“After. We won’t have time before.”

The interview was set for eight and David and Jairo were at the Men’s Central several minutes early. The DA, Ann Marie DeSoto, met them in the interview room after the two detectives signed their guns into security. Feeling somewhat naked without his Smith & Wesson, David led the way to where Sevchuk waited with his attorney.

The recorder was turned on, introductions were made all around, coffee distributed.

DeSoto spoke first. “I have the list of charges we are prepared to enter against Dr. Jozef Sevchuk. Do you have anything to add to this, Detective Sergeant Laine?”

“Only that it appears the second body in the Griffith Park grave was a Katrina Mydry,” David said. “And not Natalya Lapchuk, as we first thought. We’ll need to check if this woman was also a patient of Dr. Sevchuk.”

DeSoto nodded and handed the papers she had prepared to Sevchuk’s lawyer, Barney Pearlman, who slipped a pair of reading glasses on and read them slowly, his fleshy lips pursed in concentration. Finally he slipped the glasses off and met first David’s gaze then DeSoto’s.

“What are you offering my client?”

“Reduction of conspiracy to commit homicide to criminal misdemeanor, first degree murder reduced to second. Ten to fifteen years concurrently. With good behavior your client could be out in eight years.”

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“And facing deportation and revocation of his medical license.”

DeSoto shrugged. “That’s not in my playing field; that would be up to Immigration and the Medical board. I’m telling you what I can offer.”

Pearlman and Sevchuk held a whispered conversation.

Pearlman leaned back. “In exchange for what?”

DeSoto ticked off each point on her neatly clipped pink nails. “He tells us everything he knows about Valerian Mikalenko, AKA Mickey, and his involvement in the deaths of Halyna Stakchinko, Zuzanna Konjenko and Katrina Mydry.

With additional time off, if he can tell us where Natalya Lapchuk is. What he knew about Mikalenko’s plans for the babies born to those women, and any others he knows of and what was his involvement with the death of those fetuses.”

“And if he doesn’t know anything?”

“Then he has to convince me of that. And I might have been born at night, but I assure you it wasn’t last night. I believe your client knows a great deal he’s not telling us. We’re willing to toss him back in exchange for a bigger fish.”

“Ten to fifteen is hardly being tossed back. Time served and deportation.”

“Unacceptable. This level of crime has to be punishable by something. Dr. Sevchuk betrayed not only his Hippocratic Oath, but the trust of all those women who looked to him for safety. He hoped to profit from their misery.”

More hurried whispering. Sevchuk was beginning to look like a whipped dog, who only expected more abuse, and was resigned to it. Finally Pearlman nodded grimly. “My client accepts, though he thinks he is being given a raw deal here.”

DeSoto was cool and didn’t say any of the things David might have, like what kind of deal did Halyna, Zuzanna and Katrina get? But it wasn’t his place to comment on the charges.

It was just his job to give DeSoto the facts to back up those charges.

“Does he know where Natalya is?”

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“He says not. She had wanted to return to Ukraine. Maybe she got out.”

“Maybe.” David was doubtful. He would check the flights to Eastern Europe but didn’t hold out much hope. Chances were Natalya hadn’t got her passport back.

David turned the tape on and Mirandized Sevchuk, who looked paler and paler as the words fell between them. Finally David said, “So start talking. Tell me everything from how you met Mikalenko, to how he brought in the women, and what he said about them. Surely you must have wondered about this man who had so many pregnant women around him. Did you know he was running a baby brokerage?”

“No! Mikalenko first called me nearly eighteen months ago.

He knew of some Ukrainian immigrants who were in need of a doctor, that is all. One of them was pregnant, and she wanted a Ukrainian doctor. She did not trust American doctors. I am sorry—”

David waved him on.

“Natalya was the first. I thought nothing of it, until Mikalenko brought me another pregnant girl, and he offered me ten thousand dollars to be present for the children’s birth.”

“Did he ever say why he offered this?”

“He was...” Sevchuk shot a glance at his lawyer, who nodded reluctantly. Sevchuk sighed and went on. “I thought I could do the girls some good. Sometimes I do not think Mikalenko treated them very good. They feared him.” He saw the contempt on David’s face. “But you must understand. They loved him, too. He was everything to them, and he told them he would take care of them.”