Bleeding Out (7 page)

Frank got home around eight o’clock, pumped and pressed, slammed a couple of beers, and fell asleep with an
FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin
on her chest. At some point she woke up enough to turn off the light and stretch deeper under the thin down comforter.

A while later her own cries jerked her out of sleep. Frank stumbled from the bed, tears blurring her vision. Still not sure where she was, she groped toward the bathroom. She slapped cold water on her face but couldn’t look at herself. Clutching a towel, she breathed into it deeply, unable to wash away the dream or the pain it had summoned.

The water running in the sink didn’t drown the shotgun still pounding in her head, and no matter how tightly she squeezed her eyes, Frank couldn’t stop seeing Mag’s bewildered face. She rinsed and rinsed under the running water, sure she was still covered in blood. She fought for reality, forcing herself to acknowledge the blue towels, her pink brush, the words on the tube of toothpaste.

“Clean teeth…healthy feeling gums…a great taste,” Frank whispered. Finally she dared a glance in the mirror, certain there’d be blood all over her. Instead, she saw her own bewildered face. That broke the spell. With a strangled cry, Frank slammed a fist into the mirror. The glass exploded and Frank cursed, slugging with her other fist. Panting like she’d just sprinted a quarter mile, Frank stared at her bloodied knuckles, wincing at the glass splinters stuck under the skin. The pain was clear and clean, and it distracted Frank from her inner anguish. A fat silver shard was imbedded in the back of her gun hand. Frank yanked it loose. Mesmerized, she watched as her blood flowed against the white porcelain. After her heart slowed a little and her breathing evened out, she plucked out the most obvious shards, clamping her teeth down against the pain even as she relished it. Welcomed it.

“Let’s get you a drink,” she murmured, wrapping the towel around her hand and talking herself into the kitchen.

“You’re alright,” she whispered steadily. “Everything’s okay. Everything’s alright.”

She was reassuring herself like she’d done as a kid, when her mom was on a manic high and breaking dishes so they could go out and buy a new set, or when she was in bed for the tenth day in a row and Frank had eaten absolutely everything edible in the house. Carefully taking a glass out of the cupboard, she filled it with Scotch. She drained it. Bleeding, still shaking, she poured more.

The alarm startled Frank out of a deep sleep. She was stunned by the ache in her head. She threw a hand over the buzzer only to feel worse pain. Then she remembered the dream and its terror, smashing her fist in the mirror, and the blood, and trying to wash it away with Scotch as she’d roamed uneasily through the empty house.

Frank sat up woozily, reaching for the bedside lamp with her left hand. It was stiff and swollen too, but at least it wasn’t throbbing like the right. The light stabbed through Frank’s eyes and lodged in her brain. When she rolled out of bed her stomach rolled with her. Stepping gingerly into the bathroom, she searched for lurking shards she hadn’t mopped up last night. She groped under the sink for a bottle of Pepto Bismol, chugged a quarter of it, and chased it with four aspirin. She dozed under the hot spray of the shower until the pharmaceutical cocktail took effect.

The fine cut of her suit couldn’t mask the slump in Frank’s shoulders as she mixed sugar in water over the kitchen sink. The drink would simultaneously fight her dehydration and fatigue. Although the coffee trickling through the percolator smelled noxious, the caffeine would help move the fog out of her brain. Frank had been through this before, she knew the drill.

Thirty minutes later she was at her desk, still exhausted, her hand on fire, but at least the worst of her physical pain had eased. The other, she couldn’t do anything about. The phone rang in the squad room and she heard Noah answer it, then a second later he whistled. When he draped his lanky frame around her doorway, she squinted at him through the haze of her hangover.

“We got a 187 at Carver Junior High. Female Caucasian. Looks like a teenager. Naked and beat to shit.”

Frank was up and swinging into her jacket before Noah had finished talking.

“Come on,” she said to Gough as she breezed by him. He protested he wasn’t on the clock yet, and Frank whirled on him with more than fury in her eyes. He grumbled but put down his paper and followed. As they clattered into the garage Frank pulled out her cell phone and dialed Foubarelle’s home number, but before it rang, she disconnected and began calling her detectives in instead. The three of them piled into the same car and drove under the low dark clouds that hovered over the city.

“Maybe we’re getting that damn El Nino after all,” Gough grunted from the backseat.

“I could live without it,” Noah replied, but Gough, the gardener, insisted the rain would be good.

“It’ll fill up all the reservoirs so we won’t have to do water rationing. God, I hate that.”

As usual, Noah drove and Frank turned her attention to the city outside her window. She saw the broken houses, rubble-strewn lots, crippled cars, cryptic banger messages on anything that held still long enough. An old woman slowly pushed a grocery cart piled with cardboard and tattered plastic bags. She looked as gray as the sky, and an image of the light fading from Mag’s eyes squeezed into Frank’s head. She clenched her jaw tightly and forced her thoughts back to work.

If this was another job by the same perp, they were fucked. RHD would be all over it, especially with another white girl. Fubar and his brass monkeys would be jumping down their throats, and the media would go ape-shit. That was the down side. On the up side, if this job was related to Agoura, it might provide new material for them to work.

As if reading her mind, Noah started speculating
on
the similarities so far between this call and Agoura’s. He was excited, but Frank was withdrawn and answered him with only a small dip of her head, hoping he’d have the good sense to leave her alone today.

They’d been through a lot of blood and a lot of beer together. Frank had been there at the hospital when his first child was born—she was Leslie’s godmother. When Tracey was on the warpath, Noah spent a lot of nights in Frank’s guest bed, and Frank had crashed on their couch a time or two. He knew why she put in the excruciating hours, pounded mercilessly on the weights, and why he poured her into a cab sometimes at the Alibi. He was also the closest Frank had to a friend. She knew that sooner or later he was going to ask her what was wrong.

He parked across from the school. As she fumbled for the door handle with her bandaged hand, Frank noticed his wondering glance. Ike and Bobby were already there, talking with a knot of uniformed police and onlookers. A gust of raw wind blew Frank’s jacket open, and she buttoned it with her good hand. She didn’t bother talking with the responding officers, letting Noah do it instead. She stood within earshot, dreading the telltale signs of another dump.

Frank peered under the white sheet covering the victim’s body. No clothes, no ID. The girl was heavily bruised, sprawled akimbo on the broken concrete. Frank looked around. There was nothing for them to work with, but she had already requested crime scene techs. She checked behind her, relieved at least that there were no news vans. She knelt on one knee and gently lifted the cover sheet away.

Under it, a young girl was fixed forever in the transition from child to woman. Bruises painted her soft skin with all the colors of an impending storm—deep purple mixed to black, dark gray tinged with yellow, magenta fused to sallow green. The girl’s hair spread out behind her, dull and knotted. Her eyes were half open and buried in dark pillows of flesh that puffed up from the twisted nose below. Clots of old blood clogged the nostrils.

Frank made a couple of notes on her pad, then continued her examination. The skin next to the girl’s nose was split deep enough to reveal her right cheekbone. Other than a rawness which could have come from a gag, the bottom of her face was remarkably untouched. Her lips were full and parted softly. Frank knelt closer and lifted the upper lip with her pen. Her right front tooth was chipped.

Discoloration in a line around her throat indicated strangulation, but when Frank searched under the eyelids she couldn’t see any signs of petechial hemorrhage. The left collarbone jutted abnormally under swollen, vividly hued skin. The welter of bruises continued almost unbroken to her knees, which were scraped as well. They had already scabbed, indicating the abrasions were made before she was dumped. Frank checked the exposed edges of the body for drag marks, but the bruising was too severe to reveal slight marks. Heavier scrapes might show up when the coroner’s people rolled the body. Chafing around her ankles and wrists suggested she’d been bound.

Frank chewed on the inside of her lip. She’d seen a lot of battery in sixteen years, but this was right at the top of the list. Agoura’s beatings had been severe, but if the perp who’d done this girl was the same guy, he was escalating his assaults to a new level.

Handley arrived, out of breath, coat flapping. His buttons would never again meet their respective holes on the far side of his protruding belly. He started his perusal of the body as Frank looked over at Noah. He was kneeling too, on the other side of the girl, and Frank heard him whisper something. He had lost his characteristic enthusiasm. When his eyes met Frank’s they were sad.

“This guy’s a fucking monster.”

Frank quietly sucked in a deep breath and nodded impassively. Much as she hated to, it was time to call Foubarelle. At least the press hadn’t gotten wind of it yet. That looked like the only break they were getting. When Jack rolled the dead girl, they saw unmistakable signs of anal assault and lots of dried blood. Frank’s ardor for the chase was suddenly dampened. Whoever had done this was loose, was good, and probably would do this again. What she’d read from her Quantico notes the other night indicated she could well have a serial perp on her hands.

The realization only made the gray day darker. When Foubarelle arrived, Frank didn’t mention anything about a serial perp. She listened to the SID techs scream at him for being called out on a case with no evidence. They hated Frank but she didn’t care; they were the evidence experts, not her. A lot of cops liked to hot-dog a scene, but Frank wasn’t about to lose a case because of an evidentiary oversight on her part. If there was nothing there, she wanted to hear it from SID.

On the other hand, she and her squad had the rare respect of the coroner’s personnel. Detectives were always pushing their vies to the front of the coroner’s to-do list, but Frank rarely allowed her cops to do that. The morgue had enough work to handle without every homicide detective in the LAPD trying to get their victims cut first. Frank saved her requests for true emergencies, like today. As Handley made an incision over the liver, ready to insert the thermometer that would help determine the time of death, Frank said quietly, “Jack, I know you’ve got at least a dozen bodies in line before this one, but it would really help if you could push this ahead.”

She tipped her head toward Foubarelle. “And it’ll save Crotchety from having to deal with him because I can guarantee that’s his next stop.”

Jack frowned, playing with the power he had on the street. He knew it ended with a sharp command from his boss once they got back to the morgue.

“I’ll see what I can do,” he said pompously.

“I’d appreciate it.”

Frank turned to deal with Foubarelle just as the first news van showed up.

The next time his father took him into the office with a magazine tucked under his arm, the boy knew what to do. He responded to his father’s touch, feigned interest in the pictures, kept shoving his hand against himself like his father was doing, first as he was beginning to think it wouldn’t happen this time, his father ordered him breathlessly to get down and accompanied him quickly onto the bright green rug. He tried to pretend it was grass and that he was outside playing. Soon his mother would call him in for dinner and his father wouldn’t hurt him with anything more than a hearty slap on the shoulder.

After his father got off, he told the boy to leave. He walked painfully up the stairs and quietly closed his bedroom door behind him. Curling into a ball under the covers, he reasoned that at least this time it hadn’t taken very long. He slipped into a nap, comforted by a familiar image of himself straddling the stuffed bear he kept under his pillow.

Squad 93 spent the day canvassing the area. A janitor had found the body on the sidewalk in front of the school. Dispatch received his call at 0613 hours. It had been cold last night. Not a lot of people had been out, and parked cars obscured the body from the street. The victim was found on her back, but lividity indicated she’d been dead for at least ten hours. She’d been left on her stomach—whoever killed her hadn’t moved her until her blood had settled anteriorly. She had to have been dumped sometime before dawn, which also explained why she hadn’t been discovered earlier. Frank had SID print the cars on the school side of the street. Maybe their guy had bumped into one and steadied himself with a bare hand. She copied the license numbers and makes. Flanking the school were a shoe repair shop and a taqueria. Two vacant buildings, a styling salon, a mom-and-pop burger stand, a Frostee Freeze, and an Assembly of God church were across the street. They were all covered with sprawling gang tags. A boarded and crumbling building in a large, weedy lot looked like a shooting gallery, and Frank had uniforms bagging matchbooks and cigarette packs, torn soda cans, used hypos, potato chip bags—all the trash in there. She wanted everything printed. A pile of old clothes and rags looked like a makeshift bed. If somebody’d been in here last night she wanted to know who.

The church had had a service the day before but it had finished by 8:00 p.m. and there wasn’t another scheduled until noon today. No one opened when they knocked, no lights were on. They talked to people at the food joints, which all closed at 11:00 or midnight. The salon was open 9:00-6:00, shoe repair 8:00-5:00. No one was around at the time they believed the body was dumped.