Sudden Exposure (12 page)

I moved in at a run, keeping close to the trees. I was nearly into the curve when I spotted the ambulance, its spinning roof light turning the sheet on the gurney red, the dark blue Volvo wagon in the driveway black, the ground around it a bloodier brown.

Behind me, brakes screeched, one after another. Ahead, a couple in bathrobes stood in a yard. Acosta sprinted to them; he’d ask about suspects. I checked the redwood stand, flashing my light into the shades of black. Pereira was coming up behind me now, checking yards, behind cars. In a dark, wooded area like this only a fool would be spotted. Any suspect with a dime of sense would be long gone. I ran on toward the ambulance.

Holding the IV, one medic was climbing into the back of the ambulance after the gurney. My chest went stiff as the protective vest. I was expecting to find Bryn dead. She wasn’t … yet. I peered up into the ambulance and saw enough of the blood-covered face to know I didn’t want to see more. Her honey-colored hair was so clean, so shiny. Every time I looked at death, it was always the same; the edge never wore off. I grabbed the second medic.

“ID?”

“Full pocketbook. Driver’s license, credit cards, the lot. Name’s Bryn Wiley.”

Bryn, not Ellen. A wave of relief washed over me, then a second wave—guilt. “She alive?” I forced out through my clenched throat. I didn’t want to hear the answer.

“Barely.”

I followed him around to the cab. “She conscious?”

“Hardly.”

“Any sign of suspects?”

“No.”

“The victim, where did you find her?”

“In the driver’s seat, the Volvo.” He climbed in, hit the lights and siren.

An officer had to accompany her in the ambulance, for that one-in-a-million chance she would regain consciousness and make a dying declaration about her killer. Even then, for it to be accepted as evidence in court she had to have known that she was dying. I was real glad to be in charge of the scene; I didn’t want to ride across town looking at what was left of her face. Acosta was three feet away. “You ride with the victim. Sorry.”

“Sure.”

“Her purse is in there,” I said, shutting the door after him as the ambulance pulled away. I didn’t tell him to go through the purse, he’d do that. The medics had been first at the scene, first to see the body. “Get the medics’ statements at the hospital.” He’d call me as soon as he knew anything. Chances were, the first thing he’d have to report would be the time of death.

I watched the red lights waver and die behind the curtain of redwoods. Now, in the emptiness, my stomach lurched. But I didn’t throw up. I don’t.

Pushing away the picture of her bloody face, I called the dispatcher for time and case number. Taking out my notebook, I concentrated on noting the medics’ names and observations, the time the ambulance left, and Acosta’s presence in it. I could feel myself go numb making the shift into “all business.” I surveyed the Volvo. The driver’s window was two-thirds gone, but what was left held a bullet hole. Irrationally, I thought how furious Bryn would be that she’d wasted the time to get the window replaced—when she couldn’t even have delegated the job to Ellen because Ellen didn’t drive.

Inside, shards of glass lay everywhere except on the driver’s seat. The backseat was covered with one of the comforters from the house, the black and white one.

Headlights glowed white from both ends of the street. There was a squeal of brakes. Patrol officers from other beats. I had Leonard freeze the scene. “Run the cordon fifteen to twenty feet around the car. Wide as you can. Into the street. Include the house.”

He nodded, got the yellow crime-scene tape out of his trunk, and began stringing it between two trees at the end of the driveway, around to the railing by the house steps, and on to three more trees before it made a circle of sorts. The sureness of each move reminded me how deceptive was his shambling appearance. “Scene frozen by 24—his badge number—17:24,” I added to the record.

On the radio, patrol officers vied for the dispatcher’s attention. House lights came on in upstairs windows across the street: Doors banged shut. I handed out assignments: Sapolu, containment; Murakawa and Pereira, crowd interviews (technically everyone there was suspect; they’d all have to be interviewed, later taken to the station for statements); two officers to go door-to-door uphill, another pair downhill. And Bryn’s house, we needed to get in there. The situation that ended with Bryn in the driver’s seat, shot, could have started in the house. The suspect could have run back inside. Ellen could be there, dead or dying—or she could be the suspect.

“Heling,” I called as she loped up. “Take MacElroy and Zonis. Go through the house. Could be one or more responsibles inside, could be another victim.” The trio would clear one room after another, keeping together, protecting each other.

“Officer, what’s going on?” demanded a woman in a raincoat. She was leaning over the cordon, almost falling forward.

“There’s been an injury. Step back away from the scene, please.”

“Injury to who?”

“Step back, please.”

“I
live
here, I’ve got a right to know.”

“Step back,
please.
I’ll be with you as soon as I can.” Grudgingly, she stood upright and moved onto the street, muttering. Her only audible word was “rude.”

I wrote down the last of the assignments and times. Sapolu, on contain, was moving like a terrier, barking at one incursion after another. Barking politely. The biggest problem with a homicide scene is keeping the extraneous sworn officers from tromping all over it. “Any of our friends want a look,” I said, “tell them you’re documenting everyone who comes on the scene, and we’ll take elimination prints from them. And, of course, they’ll be subpoenaed when the case hits court.”

Inside Bryn Wiley’s house, lights went on in the living room. Good sign. I waited till the bedroom light shone, and called to Leonard. “Spray your light on the ground on the driver’s side of the car. See if there’s a casing there.”

“Right.”

Tanner, from beat 18, ran toward the scene just ahead of a student with a notebook, a reporter for
The Daily Californian.
In another ten minutes everyone with a police scanner and an inadequate social life would be at the scene. Before the Cal guy could speak, I said, “Much too soon. You’re looking at a couple hours before we have anything worth your time. Go to dinner and come back; you won’t miss anything.”

I noted down Tanner’s arrival and the time, and that of the Cal reporter just for good measure. “Tanner, sketch the scene.”

“Smith!” It was Leonard.

“Got something?”

“You bet. Number one.” He flashed the light three feet inside the cordon. It shone on a bullet casing.

“Number two.” He moved the light six inches to the right. “Number three.” The beam shifted two feet forward. “Number four. A thirty oh six, don’t you think? Take down game bigger than you, Smith.”

I glanced at Tanner to make sure he was noting the casings, then asked Leonard, “Nothing beyond there?”

“Nope. By the time he got the fourth shot off, she must have gone down.”

“Maybe,” I said, cautioning myself against creating scenarios in my mind. Once in place it’s hard not to adjust every new fact to fit in. “I’d say this makes you the finder of record.”

Leonard groaned. Now anyone who found any evidence at all would bring it to Leonard and he would sign it in. It was no boon for Leonard, but it meant the whole team wouldn’t be tied up in court.

I took my own flashlight off my belt and aimed it at the nearest casing. Could be from a 30.06 rifle cartridge; Raksen, the lab tech, would know. And damp as the ground was in this ever-shaded spot, there should be usable prints. I suggested that to Leonard.

“Could have been a suspects’ picnic here, Smith. You’ll be lucky to get a decent toe or heel with all the foot traffic that’s been through here.”

“Maybe near the last two casings.” He would have landed harder there.

“Cement. Look, Smith.” He aimed his flashlight at first one then another cement disk. “Only two goddamned garden steps in the place, and he lands on them.”

“Chooses them, surely. It’s hard to imagine such a stroke of luck. It makes me think of the nudist leaping off the railing at the end of the path from Rose Street—like someone who knows this spot.”

We were standing in front of a redwood, small in the annals of redwoods, but huge compared to normal trees. The trunk was a good three feet in diameter. “Perfect spot to wait for her to pull up. Then all he had to do was step out and shoot.” I looked across the street. “And disappear into that grove of trees before anyone saw him. Rope that off and check it out, and I’ll send Raksen over after he’s done here.”

“Right.”

“Officer! What the hell’s going on here!” A man in sweats pushed in between us.

My radio crackled. “Adam nineteen?” I glanced at Leonard and moved away. Leonard’s beat was Telegraph Avenue; he was used to handling crowd problems.

I flicked the mike on. “Nineteen.”

“I got the CHP dispatcher who took the nine one one call. The cellular phone.”

Bryn’s
cellular phone. What kind of person would lean over Bryn Wiley’s bleeding body and use her phone to call us? Why bother? You don’t fire four shots at a woman and then when she’s hit, call the police. “What exactly did the nine one one caller say? What kind of voice?”

“Male. No accent. Sounded young. Shocked. Said a woman had been killed and gave the address.”

“That’s all?”

“Dialogue, yes. But the thing was, Smith, well, CHP’s embarrassed about it. And it was just a split-second mistake. But at first CHP thought it was a call from the field.”

“From one of their own? Why?”

“She said it sounded professional. Momentarily. She was just about to chew him out … Because it’s a busy night. She thought he was taking up air time on the emergency channel to call in plates. She caught the mistake in a second, but …”

Plates. License plates. Nora, Ocean, Pablo. “His voice sounded young?”

“Yeah. His voice, Smith, it broke.”

“Thanks, Control, you’ve been a big help. Ten-four.”

“Ten-four.”

I turned toward the dark house on the other side of the construction site. Karl Pironnen’s windows were dark. But I was willing to bet he was sitting inside them, trying to peer out through the coating of slobber left by Nora, Ocean, and Pablo. Pironnen was sixty years old. Did voices that age still break? As terrified as he seemed of people, when he opened the door to me in my uniform, I’d be likely to find out.

If he was still there by the time I could cut loose of the scene.

All the lights were on in Bryn Wiley’s house now. I wanted to get in there, into Bryn’s nightstand, her letters, her medicine closet, to see the trinkets she kept to remind her who she was. And I needed to go over the car.

The fronds of the redwoods rustled and the wind blew off the freezing night waters of the Pacific. I heard shoes slapping the street behind me, heavy, moving fast. I turned, hoping it was Raksen.

It wasn’t. Looking down at me was Grayson. His arms were folded across over his chest, his mustache almost covering lips pressed together in annoyance. He was the scene supervisor; it was his scene now. “What’ve you got, Smith?”

I gave him a rundown on the scene and watched him listening for omissions, noting things to change. His finger was rubbing against his cuff, itching to point, to assign, to wag. I half-smiled. Guys come on the scene, they want to mark their territory.

While that finger was still rubbing, I held out my notes to it. Pages of names and times and assignments.

Heling came up behind me. “Smith, the house is clear. The small bedroom’s really clear. Clothes, but nothing else. No papers, no photos, no books. Like the occupant just came for the weekend. And the weekend’s over.”

Behind the crowd, another marked car pulled up.

The red pulsar lights took twenty years off the driver’s graying red hair. But when Inspector Doyle hoisted himself out, those two decades crawled back on, weighing down his every move. He’d had surgery a few years ago, never would admit the cause. Never quite bounced back. His dark Windbreaker fluttered loosely in the wind, as if it had been made for a larger man—him, before he went under the knife.

As he hurried across the street, futilely trying not to favor his left leg, I realized how much it mattered to me to be in charge of a case, to be the one who got all the reports, the conclusions; the one who could see into the soul of the case. Investigation is a team effort. All jobs are vital. Maybe, I thought looking at Grayson, I just wanted to make my mark.

But no, it was more than that in this case. It wasn’t just that my knowledge of Bryn Wiley and her life would be watered down in the retelling. It wasn’t that I even liked her; I hadn’t. But I cared enough about her to close her file for her. And to get the person who had stood waiting behind the redwood to blow her face off.

Doyle would be doing assignments now. Bryn Wiley’s house. The Volvo. Karl Pironnen. He’d give me only one. The physical evidence is vital; it was tempting. It wasn’t going to change. Heling could list the contents of a room. But interviewing suspects is the heart of the investigation. Few things are as important as those first statements, hearing them in person, seeing the suspects’ reactions, getting the small facts, the asides, the nuances you’ll use to trip up suspects later. When you merely read a transcript, you miss those little things. Without the initial interview you’ve got nothing to judge against. I’d seen Karl Pironnen before; I had a baseline for him.

I briefed the inspector, told him about the space under Sam Johnson’s house—a beaver dam of hiding places for a suspect, or for Sam Johnson himself. He assigned Heling’s team back to the house, and took on the car himself.

I turned and strode down the street, rerunning my talk with Pironnen, seeing him when he wasn’t a suspect, setting in mind the standard of innocence against which to judge his words, gestures, silences. Despite the probable hygienic deficiencies, I would interview him inside his house, and see what the dwelling told about him, and I would see his face in the light.