The Burning Plain (29 page)

In every mouth he worked a broken sinner between his rake-like teeth. Thus he kept three in eternal pain at his eternal dinner.

Then, within a few days after I shipped Bob Travis’s ashes to his parents, three things happened.

The first was an unexpected package that arrived one afternoon from Parnassus Studio. Inside was a videotape of a movie called
Letters
and a note from Asuras’s secretary: “Mr. Asuras asked me to send this to you.” I had no idea why he had sent it but the title was familiar and then I remembered. It was the movie I’d brought tickets to on my date with Alex. I slipped the tape into the VCR. The movie was a Parnassus production and because it was based on a book by Agatha Christie, I expected a period piece. Instead I found it was set in contemporary San Francisco and involved a series of grisly murders which had in common that the victims’ names were in alphabetical sequence, from A to D. D was as far as I got, at any rate, because after that murder—in which the victim was beheaded, his chest carved open and his head shoved into the cavity—I turned the movie off. After twenty years of examining crime-scene photos, I knew most of what there was to know about how human bodies can be violated, so it wasn’t that these images made me squeamish. What repelled me was their clear pornographic intent, as if this butchery was sex by other means. I assumed the gift was a gloss on our discussion of evil, but this wasn’t evil, just appallingly bad taste.

THEN, LUCAS ODELL
dropped by on a Sunday morning as I was lying in bed, wading through the
Times
, drinking tea because I’d run out of coffee. The doorbell chimed. I pulled on a pair of jeans and a tee shirt. Looking through the peephole, I saw Odell, dressed as casually as I was, holding a big white bag. I opened the door.

“Sergeant,” I said. “You always arrive unannounced.”

“This time I brought breakfast,” he said, holding up the bag.

“Come on in,” I said.

“You’re not going to ask me why I’m here?”

“I’m sure you’ll let me know in your own good time. Is that coffee I smell?”

By now he knew his way around my house and went directly into the kitchen, where he laid breakfast on the table: two large cups of Starbuck’s coffee and four pastries, muffins, a cheese danish, a croissant. I poured orange juice, brought him milk and sugar for his coffee and we settled in at the table. He politely offered me the danish. I politely insisted we share it. I was surprised at how happy I was to see him because I thought I had long ago outgrown the need for father figures, but he stirred that longing in me. From the way he treated me, I saw he reciprocated the feeling, but neither of us spoke of it.

He was eyeing me with a grin. “You look like you just rolled out of bed.”

I yawned, glanced at the clock. It was after ten. “I’m afraid so. I was out last night and didn’t get back until late.”

“You have a date?”

“Odell, what a question. No, I was out with a friend. Dinner, a movie.”

“You’re a good-looking young fellow, Henry,” he said, through a mouthful of bran muffin. “You should get out more.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

He chugalugged coffee. “I mean it. You’ll be old and fat soon enough and no one will want you. Get it while you can.”

“You give your daughter the same advice?”

He smiled. “Believe me, my daughter doesn’t need my help in that department. She runs girlfriends hot and cold.”

“Do you know what the phrase cognitive dissonance means?”

“Seeing ain’t believing?” he ventured.

“Basically,” I said. “That’s how I feel when I talk to you. You look like Archie Bunker, but you sure don’t sound like him. On the subject of gays, anyway.”

“My daughter came out to me when she was seventeen, I had to choose between the things I was taught about homosexuals and what I knew about her,” he said. “I’m a practical man. It wasn’t a hard choice.”

I thought about Ron Travis. “Not every parent feels that way about their gay kid.”

He stuffed a bit of muffin his mouth. “Things are changing. Be patient.”

“They’re not changing fast enough for my friends who’ve died.”

“Close friends?”

“The man I lived with,” I said. “He died about a year ago.”

He nodded, as if in confirmation. “I wondered why you were alone.”

I shrugged. “I’m alone because I’m cranky and choosy.”

He smiled. “You know Tim down at the station? My jailer? He’s single.”

“Are you trying to set me up?” I laughed. “Is that why you dropped by?”

“It’s just a suggestion,” he said. “It’s not why I dropped by. I came to see you about Gaitan.”

My mirth evaporated. “What about him?”

“I’ve been conducting a little unofficial investigation,” Odell said, clawing a chunk from the second muffin. He popped it into his mouth. “You were right. He planted the fiber evidence in the cab.”

“I’m listening.”

“The fiber samples they took from Amerian’s body disappeared out of the evidence locker at the crime lab after they were analyzed.”

“How could they match the fibers they found in the car if the fibers were gone?”

“They did it on paper,” he replied. “They analyzed the fibers from the trunk and matched them to the earlier analysis of the fibers from the body.”

“No one bothered to mention to me the sample had disappeared.”

“No one knew but the lab. I also called the FBI and talked to their fiber guy about your theory of how the fibers should’ve shed if the body was wrapped in a blanket in the trunk. He said you were right.”

“Why did you call the FBI?”

“I wanted an objective opinion,” he said.

“You don’t trust your crime lab?”

He shrugged. “Someone in the lab removed the fiber sample and gave it to Gaitan.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“There’s no other way it could’ve been done, because the lab people are the only ones who would have had access to the sample.”

“That’s circumstantial, at best.”

“Gaitan has an old partner from his Antelope Valley days. Jim Roca. Roca’s brother-in-law works in the lab. Hair and Fiber. His name is Stan Bedell. He did the analysis.”

“Gaitan and Roca still keep in touch?”

“They and a couple of other deputies own a cabin up at Big Bear.”

“Was Roca part of the vigilantes you were sent to Antelope Valley to break up?”

“He was one of the ones that was transferred.”

“What do you think happened?”

“Gaitan sees Bedell’s name on the fiber report and calls his
compadre
Roca,” Odell said. “Roca has a word with his brother-in-law. The sample disappears.”

“Wouldn’t Bedell have to account for it?”

Odell shrugged. “There’s thousands of bits of evidence in the locker. Some of it gets lost.”

“It was several weeks between the discovery of Alex’s body and the impounding of the car. Did Gaitan hang on to the fiber sample all that time?”

“Yeah, waiting for his opportunity to use it,” Odell said. “You see, I told you the good news first. There’s bad news, too.”

“What’s that?”

“The bloodstain in the trunk they matched to the Baldwin boy, that wasn’t a plant.”

“You’re sure?”

He nodded. “They drew blood for a tox screen,” he said. “The remaining sample’s never been tampered with.”

“What about the paint transfer on the cab?”

“It’s like you said, no one asked the lab how old the scratch was. The car’s out of impound. There’s no way of telling now.”

“But it’s possible that Gaitan planted the fibers and scraped the car against the fence at the same time.”

“Yeah, it’s possible,” he said. He tore off a piece of the croissant. “Of course, there’s that eyewitness who claims she saw Travis coming out of the alley where Amerian was dumped.”

“A witness procured by Gaitan,” I reminded him. “I never interviewed her. It seemed pointless after Travis died. Did I tell you he said he wasn’t using the cab the weekend Alex was murdered?”

Odell was unimpressed. “What else was he going to say?”

“His alibi was that he used the cab after his car broke down. I saw a receipt that shows he didn’t take his car into the shop until the Wednesday after Alex was killed.”

Odell said, “All that means is that Gaitan planted the evidence in the wrong car, not that Travis didn’t kill Amerian.”

“If he did, it’s inconsistent with the other two killings,” I said. “Serial killers don’t change their methods.”

“The man’s car broke down. He needed another vehicle to pick up his victims,” Odell said. “I’m sorry, Henry, but just because Gaitan planted evidence doesn’t make Travis innocent. Gaitan didn’t make the case up, he made it stronger.”

“What are you going to do about him?”

“I don’t know.”

“If Travis had lived and you had given me this information, he would’ve walked.”

“Yeah,” Odell said. “Maybe.”

“Would you have told me?”

“If he confessed to you he was the killer, would you have told me?”

“It’s not the same thing. A defendant has his fifth amendment right against self-incrimination. You have a duty to turn over exonerating evidence.”

“It didn’t exonerate him,” he said. He eyed my untouched pastry. “You going to eat that?”

I pushed the plate across the table. “You would’ve let the man go to prison on falsified evidence?”

“The man was guilty,” Odell said, munching the danish.

A couple of nights later, I was watching the local news when, on the screen, behind the anchorwoman’s bland, robotic face, came a fuzzy picture, clearly from a driver’s license, of a dark-haired girl. I hit the volume button.

“… the remains of twenty-four-year-old Katherine Morse were found in a shallow grave in a remote section of Griffith Park this afternoon by two hikers. The woman’s family in Fresno had not heard from her for several months, after she told them she was moving from the Bay Area, where she had lived, to Los Angeles. Police had declined to list the woman as missing, because she had been out of touch with her family before. Today, however, the mystery of her whereabouts was tragically solved. Now, on a happier note …”

Katherine Morse. Katie. Alex Amerian’s roommate.

I gave it a day before I decided the coincidence that both Alex and Katie had been murdered was worth looking into, if for no other reason than to assure myself it was a coincidence. Since her body had been found in Griffith Park, her murder was under the jurisdiction of LAPD, but I figured Odell could obtain a copy of the police report.

“Odell,” he barked into the phone, when I reached him at the West Hollywood station.

“It’s Rios,” I said. “I have a favor to ask you.”

“A favor?” he said. “Do I owe you?”

“Morally.”

He laughed. “Shoot.”

“A couple of hikers in Griffith Park found the remains of a young girl on Friday,” I said. “Her name was Katie Morse. She was Alex Amerian’s roommate. She disappeared the day after he was murdered.”

“Yeah, I heard about that.”

“Interesting coincidence,” I observed.

“I remember the girl was heavy into drugs. That’s a dangerous lifestyle.”

“Did anyone actually follow up and try to find her at the time Alex was killed?”

“I couldn’t tell you offhand,” he replied.

“I’d like to look at the police report.”

Silence. “Maybe I would, too,” he said.

“Can you get it?”

“I’ll call you back.”

I heard from him the next morning.

“It’s pretty straightforward,” he said. “Cause of death was blunt force trauma. The medical examiner says her skull was smashed. She was buried in a shallow grave. No signs of rape, but there wasn’t much left after the animals got to her.”

“When was she killed?”

“Sometime in the last three months,” he said.

“Nothing more specific?”

“The last time anyone heard from her was her brother in Fresno. She sent him a birthday card around the middle of June.”

“The middle of June covers a lot of ground,” I said.

“Amerian was killed the first weekend,” he reminded me. “That’s the beginning of June, no matter how you slice it.”

“But you don’t have a specific date.”

“You must be real good on cross,” he said. “No specific date.”

“Didn’t it worry her family that they hadn’t heard from her in two months?”

“The father told LAPD Katie was a drug addict who left home when she was seventeen,” he said. “Reading between the lines I’d say they didn’t care if they heard from her or not. The brother tried to file a missing person’s report with LAPD in July, but after they got the full story from the parents, they declined to accept it.”

“What kind of substances did she abuse?”

“Ecstasy, Special K, plus stuff I’m sure there’s no name for yet.”

“Those are party drugs,” I said. “She wasn’t an addict, she was just a club kid.”

“If you say so,” he replied, the disapproval in his voice reminding me he was a cop.

“Do you think her disappearance is related to Alex’s murder?”

“We don’t even know when she disappeared,” he said. “All we know is that she wasn’t there the morning after.”

“The place had been tossed,” I said.

“Or maybe they were bad housekeepers,” he replied. “Look, if she sent her brother a birthday card in the middle of June, she was still alive.”

“Anyone bother to ask him if the card had a return address?”

“I’m sure LAPD is working on it.”

“What’s the brother’s name?” I asked, reaching for a pen.

“Come on, Henry,” he said gruffly. “You know I’m not giving you that information.”

“It’s relevant to Travis’s case.”

“Travis is dead,” he replied. “You don’t have a client, you don’t have an interest.”

“Will you at least tell LAPD about a possible connection?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll pass that along.”

Odell was right, of course. I had no evidence Katie had disappeared the Friday Alex was murdered. She could simply have not come home that night. At the time, Richie claimed she was dealing drugs, and if that was true, fearing the cops, she might not have returned to the apartment at all once she heard Alex had been killed. But certain images of that morning disturbed me when I remembered them: the phone, pulled from the jack and left lying in the hall; the cardboard boxes in her room full with rumpled clothes; the missing computer; the screen that had been removed from one of the windows in the back of the house. Something had happened there that night. As I mentally walked myself through the apartment, I remembered taking a receipt of some kind from her desk, a pay stub. I found it in my wallet, tucked away with the two unused movie tickets to Letters. Until I held the tickets between my fingers, what I remembered about Alex Amerian was inextricable from the grotesque manner of his death. But now he came back to me, in vivid physical detail, and I relived again the shy hopefulness I’d felt when he agreed to go out with me, the surge of desire when he walked through the door of the restaurant. I remembered how we’d slipped into each other’s nakedness and how Josh had seemed to inhabit him, and I remembered the ugly scene afterward, his blood dripping from the doorknob. My memories of Alex unfolded like a movie, from our first meeting to the jagged final images, the black-and-white photos of his mutilated body. The discovery of Katie’s body was like an unexplained coda. I felt, without being able to say why, something crucial was missing.