To Die For (4 page)

The following year, around came a memo requesting applicants for a second detective in the unit handling crimes against persons—robbery, rape and homicide. Greco thought detective work would not only be a good change, but it would be more satisfying than working patrol. Plus, he could team up with McElvain, who shared his hard-charging zeal. He filled out the request form, hoping he would at least be considered for the job.

Greco soon realized that he needn't have worried. The stampede of applicants for the detective's job never materialized. The salary for detectives and street cops were identical and the move to detective was not considered a promotion within the Perris P.D., it was a lateral move. The only difference was the hours. Detectives worked 9 to 5. Patrol officers got alternating three-day weekends off.

Greco was the sole applicant. By default, he became a detective in May 1993. The department immediately shipped him off to a two-week homicide seminar in neighboring Orange County.

Within days, he was handed his first homicide. The victim, a prostitute and drug addict, was found spread-eagled and partially clothed behind an industrial building, by a fence at the rear property line. Animals had attacked the remains. Despite being badly decomposed, the body was spotted from the sky by recreational balloonists near the small airport in Perris. The coroner estimated that she had been dead about two weeks. She had been badly beaten, but the coroner could only guess at the instrument because of the condition of the body. The victim's boyfriend, also an addict and probably her pimp, had reported her missing eight days after she was presumed dead. He was suspect number one. Greco worked the case the best he could, but no evidence tied the boyfriend to the murder and the case remained unsolved.

And now this. Greco had barely sat down with his coffee that morning before his supervisor phoned him about Norma's murder. He'd grabbed his 35 mm camera, a notebook and a tape recorder, and pointed his teal Taurus station car toward Canyon Lake, about 20 minutes southwest of Perris. Excited and nervous, he ran through mental checklist of all the things he'd learned from homicide school about preserving the crime scene and investigating the murder. But doubt invaded his thoughts. After all, he told himself, he'd failed his first time at bat. He hadn't solved his first homicide. My god, he thought, how am I going to solve this one? Greco considered the responsibility and his stomach churned. This wasn't some dope addict or prostitute that no one would miss. An elderly victim in an affluent community like Canyon Lake would have friends and neighbors, adult children and maybe adult grandchildren, all of whom would look to him for answers—and an arrest. It was no secret that he would have to answer to them as well as his own department, but nothing would approach the pressure Greco eventually put on himself.

On his way to the scene, Greco passed the deserted rolling hills of Kabian Park, pushing the Taurus, carving up the twin black ribboned highway toward Canyon Lake. He felt tension creeping into his neck and shoulders and tried calming himself by going back to the homicide school checklist: maintain the crime scene, preserve and document evidence, photograph and collect everything for processing later, particularly fingerprints, blood, hair and fiber evidence. He repeated it over and over until common sense started to assert itself. First of all, he told himself, the responding officers at the scene will have already taped off the scene and kept everyone out. Secondly, the criminalists and ID techs are trained to take crime-scene photos and physically collect evidence. They have the tools and equipment to preserve fingerprints, blood and trace evidence.

Greco knew that part of his panic stemmed from his lack of experience with murders. You don't investigate a homicide the same way you do a car theft or a burglary or a rape. Most veteran homicide detectives have a procedure or protocol to follow—most rookies had plenty of battle-scarred older guys to follow around and ask questions. There were none on the Perris P.D. and Greco didn't know of any he could ask for help. Without the benefit of experience or a detective mentor, he had no personal guidelines, no comfortable pattern of his own. Greco couldn't resist beating himself up one more time—he was so green, he had never before called out the ID techs and county criminalists to work a crime scene. They hadn't been necessary at his first homicide.

Greco shook his head. He knew his self-doubt came from his feeling of failure, and his fear that he could have done more to solve the prostitute's murder. Wallowing in guilt and inadequacy would take him nowhere. His mother had taught him that. If you write a script for your own failure, she used to tell him, it will come true.

Greco was half-Japanese, half-Italian. His father was an intelligence officer in the air force, stationed at the Fuchu Air Force Base, when he met Greco's mother in 1957. Greco and his three sisters were typical military brats, living all over the United States and Japan, usually spending no more than a few months in each new place. Greco, often mistaken for being Hispanic, remained fluent in Japanese. As he was growing up, his mother constantly encouraged him to think positive—there was nothing he couldn't do.

As he sipped his coffee, the previous day's panic returned. Sitting at his desk on the morning after Norma's body had been found, Greco organized his notes, typed them into his laptop computer and wrote his report, poring over every detail, trying to find a direction. No break-in. No known theft. Victim lived alone. A vicious attack. Greco wished that some of the physical evidence would yield a clue. The problem was that the criminalists couldn't identify a perpetrator working only with a hair or a fiber from Norma's house. An expert has to compare strands of hair collected from a crime scene with strands of hair removed from a suspect and then determine whether the samples came from the same person. But since different people can often share similar hair characteristics, a jury is unlikely to convict a suspect based solely on hair samples. The same goes for shoeprints. Greco was estatic that Cooksey found one—Greco was so inexperienced, he hadn't even known it was possible to collect it. He'd heard of making molds of shoe impressions in mud, for example, by using plaster. He had watched, fascinated, as Cooksey had literally peeled the dusty print off the floor. The shoeprint had the potential to be a promising piece of evidence, but first he needed a suspect's shoe to compare with the one lifted from Norma's entryway.

The knives, though, might yield what Greco wanted. He was counting on getting a good fingerprint from one of them. That would be a spectacular break. A fingerprint, unlike hair or a shoeprint, can positively identify one person and only one person—if it was a good, clear, full print. That would practically guarantee a conviction. When he'd sent the knives out to the lab first thing that morning, the lab techs told him they could probably have results by the afternoon. Better yet, Greco was hoping that the killer had left behind a little DNA, perhaps under Norma's broken fingernail, perhaps from the blood on the chair on the stairway landing. DNA is as impressive and convincing as evidence can get in a courtroom, although it doesn't exactly identify a suspect the same way a fingerprint does.

DNA test results are reported to juries through statistics. For example, an expert might testify that there's a 1 in 20 million probability that another person on earth shares the same genetic characteristics as the defendant. The prosecutor usually argues that those numbers make it rather unlikely that anyone other than the defendant deposited his or her DNA at a crime scene.

He would sort through the evidence later in the week and decide which items to ship to the state DNA lab in Sacramento, hundreds of miles north. Of course he would send the knives, the fingernail clippings, the scrapings, and perhaps the carpet samples, although it was unlikely that the killer had been injured and dropped a convenient sample of blood. It typically takes a crime lab several months to perform DNA tests and interpret the results.

Greco wasn't going to wait around for a lab report when there was no guarantee of turning up the suspect's DNA. He ran through precepts from homicide school. What was the motive for attacking this elderly woman? Norma Davis had been among the most vulnerable groups of potential victims, children and the elderly—those least able to protect themselves. They were also the least likely to place themselves in harm's way. One doesn't see senior citizens or toddlers involved in drive-by shootings, lurking in dark alleys, spray-painting graffiti, selling drugs and making trouble in the streets late at night. Norma Davis was exactly where she should have been—in her own home. Greco remembered the teaching materials that mentioned domestic violence as one possible cause for extreme violence in homicides committed in the home. In fact, he remembered that one of the two homicides at Canyon Lake within the last five years had claimed the life of a woman who had been killed by her estranged husband. In the more recent case, a parolee had committed murder, then dumped the body at Canyon Lake. But Greco doubted that, at 86, Norma Davis was in a physically abusive relationship. As far as he knew, she lived alone. Greco was trained to start his search for a suspect within a close radius of the victim's home, and to consider the involvement of family numbers and caretakers. Norma's family? The only member he knew was Jeri. She was wearing Nikes, she had access to the residence, and she was the last person to see the victim alive. What did she have to gain from Norma's death?

He would start with Jeri.

*   *   *

Greco's head was so buried in his notes, he didn't see Wyatt McElvain standing over his desk.

“I got a call from this psychic,” McElvain said.

Greco looked up. It wasn't his friend, Jim McElvain, whose life he had saved. This was the
other
McElvain. Wyatt McElvain was the sergeant who supervised the Perris P.D.'s operations at Canyon Lake and knew a lot of the residents. He had been at the crime scene the day before.

“He says there's gonna be another murder,” McElvain said. “In two weeks. He says it's a woman. The murderer. He thinks it's a woman.”

Greco kept a straight face. You've got to be kidding, he thought. He had more than enough work to do and the last thing he needed was to chase down some lunatic.

“You're real funny,” Greco said.

McElvain offered the phone number. The guy lived in Canyon Lake. What did he have to lose? Greco paused for a second, then wrote it down.

*   *   *

Greco stayed glued to his desk doing paperwork; he worked on his other cases and tried calling Jeri periodically without success. He figured she was out making funeral arrangements. That morning, Greco had sent a community service officer—a non-sworn officer—to drop off the film from his personal camera at a one-hour developer. The officer returned by mid-afternoon with his prints. The official crime-scene photos were being developed by the county lab, which typically took about a week to make prints.

Greco looked carefully over his own photos, referring to them as he wrote his report. When he finished, he labeled the photos and placed them in his manila folder case file, which he put in the filing cabinet next to his desk.

During the afternoon, Greco called the lab periodically to see whether the technicians had gotten any prints from the knives. By late afternoon, they had results: No identifiable prints. Back to square one, Greco thought.

Greco decided to start interviewing other witnesses. The first stop was the hardware store, which was in a small, outdoor strip mall just outside the Canyon Lake gates. A receipt from Norma's purse showed that she'd been there just hours before the coroner estimated that she was killed on Monday, Valentine's Day. One of the employees recognized Norma's picture from her Canyon Lake membership card. She said that Norma had had two mail keys made. The time on the receipt was 11:33 a.m., but the clock on the register was an hour ahead, so Norma was actually there at 10:33 a.m.

When Greco asked if she remembered anything unusual about Norma, the employee said, “She had a hard time walking.”

Greco sighed, remembering Norma's swollen ankles and Jeri's remarks about the bypass surgery. Norma could not have escaped from her attacker if she'd tried.

Since he was in the area, he decided to take a chance and drop by Jeri's house. She lived in Canyon Lake.

He found the address on one of the development's winding streets and parked the station car in front of a house somewhat smaller than Norma's. When he knocked on the door, Russell Armbrust opened the door and invited him in. He was polite and cordial. Russell excused himself to find Jeri and offered Greco something to drink. He declined. It was a nice, airy place with a living room that, like many others in the development, overlooked part of the golf course. Greco took a seat on the couch. From where he was sitting, he could see a large painting of a clown.

Before leaving the station, Greco had drawn up a list of questions. He had reviewed suggestions from an FBI manual about preparing a homicide victimology: a compendium of the victim's personal history, family relationships, friends, employment, personal habits and behavior. FBI theory states that most homicides involve someone related to the victim. Digging out as much information as possible on the victim invariably puts you closer to the suspect. Greco considered Jeri an important contact because she would probably provide most or all of the information about Norma. He thought that his focus would have to be on the family. But since she was also potentially a suspect, Greco also wanted to spend time with her and begin establishing a rapport. Building trust would be important if evidence showed that Jeri was responsible for Norma's murder because, Greco reasoned, she'd be more willing to confide in him or confess if she trusted him. And if Jeri was not responsible, she was more likely to share information leading to a suspect. At this first meeting, Greco wanted to introduce himself and get a read on her. After delivering his standard opening and the standard condolences, he knew exactly what he was going to ask.