Riding the Snake (1998) (8 page)

The autopsy room was on the third floor of the County Medical Building across from Parker Center.

Dr. Paul Dickson, known in the "canoe factory" as Dr. Death, was doing the organ recital. He always referred to the cadaver he was working on as the "guest of honor." They now definitely knew from prints and identification it was Angela Wong. He had made a thorough examination of the corpse, then photographed it before and after washing it. The knife cuts were gruesome and everywhere. He was bent over, studying the wounds through the pull-down magnifying glass mounted above the metal-drained autopsy table. He began reading observations into the microphone over his head in a friendly, almost conversational voice. He'd seen too much to be shocked by anything.

That was about to change.

The room was white tile and uncomfortably cold. Air conditioning hissed valiantly but still failed to completely remove the collection of distasteful smells in the morgue: chemicals, preserving fluids, and the sweet, sickening odor of rotting flesh, naturally dissolving in a self-liquefying bath of butyric acid.

Tanisha was standing near the corpse's feet, watching the autopsy with a small recorder in her hand so that she could make her own observations as well as gather stray thoughts that hit her during the gruesome procedure.

"Looks like a very narrow, very sharp blade . . . extremely honed, like a razor at its edge. Most of these cuts are only two
-
to three-eighths of an inch deep. All major muscle groups and tendons have been attacked. The tendons have all been severed and have snapped back, recoiling against the bone. Must've hurt like a bitch." Dr. Death pushed the mike back and put his hand on the abdomen. Then, for a second, he also thought he could feel something moving inside. He turned to Cindy Masatomi, who was just entering the room with the Stryker-500 oscillating autopsy saw.

"Found it," she announced. "It was in Calvin's room. His burned up an hour ago." She set down the saw. It was an extremely ugly little tool that cut bone by rapid forward and backward strokes . . . almost like an electric kitchen knife. Dr. Dickson took his hand off the abdomen. "What's your estimated T
. O. D
., Cindy?" he asked.

"When I got to her house, her liver temp was ninety-nine point three. At one degree an hour, starting at a normal liver temp of one-oh-two, I'd guess she'd been dead maybe three hours when we got there." She looked at her watch. "Over four now."

Dr. Death put his hand back on Angela's abdomen. "So, what the hell is this? It's not a uterine pregnancy. With no blood flow, the fetus would've been dead hours ago." He picked up a scalpel from the tray. "Guess we aren't going to find out by just talking about it."

He began to work on her vaginal area, carefully making an incision, widening the canal. After making the preliminary cut, he washed the area with a small, flexible tube to clean off the small amount of blood that leaked out of Angela Wong's already pale, blood-drained body. Then he pulled the ceiling-mounted magnifying glass back down and looked carefully at his incision.

"Whatever this is, it's way up there. Hand me the Rigby six-and-three-quarter-inch vaginal retractor," he demanded, and Cindy grabbed a pair of long scissor forceps and handed them to the Coroner, who used them to probe deep inside the body.

"Son of a bitch, what is this?" he said again. He couldn't grip it, so he picked up the scalpel and made a slightly deeper and longer cut. Rewashed, then reexamined.

Tanisha found herself holding her breath. She was looking right at the dead woman's reproductive system, and, as had happened before when she attended autopsies, she couldn't help but put herself on that table. Autopsies were sterile postmortem procedures that reduced human beings to meat. The cadavers were turned into body canoes opened with Y-cuts from clavicle to abdomen. All the organs were removed, examined, weighed, measured, and returned, but not to the place they were in originally. They were just dumped back in and the incisions were sewn up with the same crude stitches you would find on a supermarket turkey. If anything had police value, it was preserved and sent to the holding vault for later legal use. The scalp was peeled back and the head opened, and the brain that had once contained all of life's intimate thoughts was poked and examined like a shellfish on the beach. When Tanisha let herself think about it, about this woman, who had laughed and cried and made love, it devalued Angie in ways that were indescribable.

"Can't get the damn . . . What is this?" Doc Dickson said, as he reinserted the vaginal retractors and finally got a solid grip on something and started to pull it out.

"Son of a bitch is fighting to stay in there. . . ." He pulled harder and finally, after almost two minutes, dragged a half-dead rodent of some kind out of her.

"Jesus H. Christ," he said in awe. "It's a fucking rat."

The animal lay on its side, starved of oxygen but alive, with its red eyes open. Then it squeaked once and a few moments later died.

Tanisha Williams had never met Angela Wong, but she was appalled at the poor woman's torturous ending. She promised herself that she'd get the sadistic motherfucker who did this.

Easier said than done.

Ray Fong wanted the case back. He was standing in front of Tanisha's desk at the Task Force headquarters on Spring Street, looking down at her through holiday eyes rimmed in red.

He was half-tilted.

It had been midnight when he'd stumbled over to the pay phone at the Red Dragon Bar in Chinatown and called the Duty Desk to check in. He'd heard about the Wong killing from the Officer On Duty. The O
. O. D
. told him about the Death of a Thousand Cuts and the rat Dr. Death had found in the vic's vagina. Ray had instantly known it was a "Hot Grounder," police terminology for any high-profile case. Ray had pulled himself away from the bar and driven his P
. O. V
. the twelve blocks from Chinatown back to Spring Street, hoping he wouldn't get stopped by some Dudley Do-Right with a stick up his ass. Ray knew he would never beat the needle with the load he was packing. He used his magnetized I
. D
. card on the security elevator and eventually found the Soul Sister at her desk, talking quietly on the phone.

"Can't have the case, Tanisha. Sorry," he said drunkenly as she hung up the phone.

"Can't hear you, Ray."

"This is a fucking Triad hit. You can't have the case. Gonna be a Hot Grounder. Needs Asian policing. You'll get blitzed. Nobody's gonna tell you shit."

"Am I the wrong color, Ray, or the wrong sex?" she said, six weeks of isolation, inactivity, and anger heating the exchange. They locked gazes. Each knew she was both, but the new P
. C
.

Department guidelines made this the pink elephant standing in the room that nobody ever mentioned. Even on Chinese New Year.

"I'm the primary on this homicide," she continued. "I've just about had it with this shit. I'm a licensed experienced investigator, and if you try and take it from me, I'll file a discrimination suit against you and the Department."

Ray looked at her, wishing he hadn't had the last two Tsing Taos. He was definitely swacked and not up to this. "We'll talk about it in the morning," he said, retreating, buying time to get sober.

"We're not gonna talk about shit, Ray. This is my D
. B
. I went to the autopsy. I policed the crime scene. I'm on it. Go eat a fortune cookie."

He left without replying.

Of course, she knew it wasn't going to be that easy. She also knew this was going to be a high-profile media case. There were always leaks in the Department, especially in the Coroner's office. The rat-in-the-vagina story was worth a couple of hundred at any TV station in town. It would probably make the A
. M
. news.

After the rat had been cleaned up and photographed by Doc Dickson, she had taken it to the evidence vault and booked it as part of case HF-235-98, which made Angie the 235th homicide in L
. A
. in the first two months of 1998. The city was off to a brisk start. She didn't leave the rat downtown. She signed it out and took it home in the shoebox her new Pearla low-heeled sandals had come in. She stopped by her apartment and put the rat in her freezer. The things a girl will do for her job. Then she had gone back to ACTF to finish the paperwork.

The rat in her freezer was different from any rat she'd ever seen. It had loose, hairless skin and was cylindrical in shape, with short but powerful forearms and legs. Dr. Dickson had said it was a male rat and had measured him. Head to tail, he was thirty centimeters long, about a foot. He weighed 1.7 kilograms, three and three-quarter pounds. She was going to take him to her vet tomorrow and find out everything she could about the rodent. As a girl in South Central L
. A
., she'd had more than a passing acquaintance with rats, growing up with a houseful of the uninvited bastards. She didn't think it was a native American rat, at least she'd never seen one like it before.

She would find out where this rat came from and what, if any, pet store had sold the animal. It would probably turn out to be a long, exhausting quest, but she knew that was what homicide investigations were about. Her training officer at the Academy had told her probationary class that police work was like piloting airplanes--endless hours of boring, uninteresting drudgery, punctuated by a few seconds of ass-puckering fright. She was used to the drudgery, but she didn't count on the ass-puckering fright that was coming her way.

While Angie Wong was getting the hairless rat taken out of her vagina, Wheeler Cassidy was getting his sister-in-law's luggage out of the United baggage claim. He hauled the suitcase out to his Jag and put it in the trunk. Liz and Hollis seemed determined not to speak to him. He tried to comfort Liz first, then his twelve-year
-
old nephew, but Liz snapped at him.

"He'd really rather not talk right now," she said, hotly turning her anger and distress over Pres's death directly on Wheeler, as if Pres hadn't been his little brother. As if he didn't love Prescott, too, way down deep under the anger and resentment.

He and Liz had never quite found a level place to stand. Everything about Wheeler seemed to annoy her. She preferred ladder climbers, upwardly mobile world-beaters who saw their futures in terms of milestones of accomplishments: that new house in Bel Air or that Young Presidents Organization membership. You had to be under forty and be president of a firm that employed at least one hundred people to be in Y
. P. O
. Pres had been president of Y
. P. O
., so let's hear it for Pres . . . give Pres the long cheer. Give Wheeler the Bronx cheer, which his sister-in-law, Liz, had done quite adequately last Christmas.

All of them were gathered around the Christmas Eve dinner table at the mansion on Windgate, the warm glow of Christmas schnapps smoldering in their bellies.

"Life isn't about golf, other people's wives, and goofy pranks," she'd said, bringing his mood of holiday cheer to a bone
-
chilling halt. "Honestly, Wheeler, it's one thing to shoot beer into the Bruin rooting section when you're nineteen. It's another thing to do it at thirty-seven."

Of course, he hadn't done it at thirty-seven, but the point was made. He sat there at his mother's long, elegant dinner table in a two-hundred-year-old high-backed Queen Anne chair, feeling lower than lizard shit. He looked up at his aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews. Cassidys all. Nobody said anything. Neither Pres nor his mother had come to his defense. His mother had just picked at her oysters Florentine with a fork. He had been forced to endure Liz's criticism without comment. "Honestly, Wheeler, it's sad the way you just do nothing, just hang out at that country club bar, swilling vodka all day,"

It wasn't vodka, it was blended Scotch, Vat 69, his trademark hops, but he didn't correct her. He endured the criticism, his cheeks burning in humiliation.

What made it so devastating was that the very things that had defined him as a young man and brought him glory at U
. S. C
. were now the same things that were labeling him and bringing disgrace. He knew that he had been on a threshold of some kind for almost six months. Like a kid on a high cliff, overlooking a swimming hole with his toes hooked over the rocky edge, he'd been looking for the inner strength to jump to a new kind of life. But he was stuck, afraid to go forward, afraid to stay where he was. He'd been teetering there, waiting for courage, hating himself for his indecision.

They pulled up the driveway at Prescott's three-million-dollar Bel Air French Provincial. Wheeler got the suitcase out of the trunk and led them, without comment, up to the front entrance. Once on the front steps, he froze. The front door had the same brutal hash marks next to the lock that he'd seen on the back door of Angie's house. Then he heard movement in the house upstairs in the master bedroom. He backed up and set the suitcase down. Liz was coming up the cement steps. He grabbed her arm and led her and Hollis back to the car.

"Wheeler, what on earth . . . ?"

He shushed her, putting his finger up to his mouth, then handed her his cellphone and pointed to the foot of the drive.

"What is it?" she said, whispering now.

"Somebody's in the house. I want you to call the police."