Fallen Angels

A
LSO BY
C
ONNIE
D
IAL

Internal Affairs

The Broken Blue Line

FALLEN
ANGELS

CONNIE DIAL

Copyright © 2012 by Connie Dial

All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

For information, address:

The Permanent Press

4170 Noyac Road

Sag Harbor, NY 11963

www.thepermanentpress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dial, Connie–

Fallen angels / Connie Dial.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-57962-274-9

eISBN 1-57962-306-9

1. Police—California—Los Angeles—Fiction. 2. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3604.I126F35 2012

813’.6—dc23                                 2011051392

Printed in the United States of America.

To Paula and Patricia Milazzo

ONE

C
aptain Josie Corsino stood near the open door and studied the dead girl’s face. She’d seen plenty of corpses during her twenty-one years with the Los Angeles Police Department, but still thought it was odd the way each victim had such a unique expression—fear, surprise, anger, resignation—but this was new: the dead girl was smiling.

What dying people thought or saw in the last few seconds before vacant stares signaled cognitive life had gone forever was something that always fascinated Josie. Despite all the claims by those Sunday morning television evangelists, she knew there was really only one way to find out. She wasn’t that curious.

The victim looked young, maybe early teens, but a premature beauty with thick blond hair, perfect skin and a well-developed figure flaunted in tight designer jeans and a spandex halter top. At the moment, the girl smelled like sour milk and was unattractively sprawled on the couch in this living room with a bloody gaping hole in her right temple and her brains splattered all over the wallpaper. A chrome-plated semi-automatic handgun lay on the floor between a leather ottoman and her lifeless fingers.

“Recognize her, Captain?” A uniformed sergeant asked from the doorway. It was three a.m. and Josie was having trouble recognizing the sergeant. She looked at his name tag, Richards.

“You work Hollywood, Sergeant Richards?” She thought she knew most of her patrol guys even though they transferred in and out every month—the chief’s clever shell game designed to fool the public into thinking there were lots of cops on the streets as he shifted warm bodies from division to division riding the crime waves.

“No ma’am, Rampart, but it was quiet tonight so I rolled on the call. I know this place.”

She nodded at him and thought, cops, we’re all alike . . . little kids chasing fire trucks and sirens. The Hollywood Hills party house. Josie knew it too. Her vice and narcotics detectives had conducted more than a dozen investigations at this house for high-priced prostitution and drug parties.

The lab squints and a few detectives had gathered in the kitchen waiting for the coroner. Lieutenant Tony Ibarra looked up when she entered.

“You recognize her?” Ibarra asked.

“No, but I guess I’m the only one who doesn’t,” she said.

“Hillary Dennis,” Ibarra said, looking surprised by her ignorance when she shrugged. “She’s one of those up and coming kiddie movie stars, making millions between drug and alcohol binges.”

“Sorry,” Josie said. She didn’t follow Hollywood gossip and only watched classic black and white movies on television. “It’s late; I’m tired. Tell me again why you need me here.”

“Headline stuff,” Ibarra said, giving her the “duh” look.

“A teenager’s suicide?”

“Who said it was a suicide? It’s a homicide, and she’s a movie star.”

“I saw the gun near her body . . . you got the shooter?” Josie never understood why Ibarra couldn’t just tell her the whole story instead of feeding it to her piecemeal and forcing her to ask endless questions to get information he knew she needed. He was a middle-aged man but behaved like an old querulous woman. His promotion to lieutenant came late in his career and he never seemed entirely comfortable in the position, but that didn’t stop him from stepping up, taking charge and making terrible decisions. He was shorter than Josie and she felt he always tried to stand anywhere but next to her. With his small stature, lean body and tendency to mumble, Ibarra seemed to fade into the background when she was anywhere in the room. His parents were Cuban, and his one valuable asset to her division was his ability to speak fluent Spanish.

“Don’t know. It was a party, but the cockroaches scattered. We caught the stupid one, but he claims he’s just the caretaker and doesn’t know who else was here. We’ll test his hands for gunshot residue, but I don’t think he did it,” Ibarra said.

Josie slid her slender frame onto the bench in the breakfast nook without asking Ibarra why he thought the caretaker wasn’t involved. She was done with him and started checking out the room. It was a gourmet kitchen with a huge granite-top island, sub-zero refrigerator, and two professional stoves. She loved to cook and felt a touch of envy. Her kitchen was 1950’s vintage, big but designed by Betty Crocker or some other ancient woman of that era. Somebody put a lot of money into this place since the last time she saw it. Thinking about the kitchen was a nice distraction. She hated dealing with Ibarra, but for now he was in charge of all her detectives. His people knew their jobs, but he insisted on sticking his nose in their business, making things more complicated than they needed to be. She would talk to Red Behan later when she got to her office at Hollywood station. He was the homicide investigators’ immediate supervisor who usually managed to get things done despite Ibarra’s oversight.

“Who’s living here, now?” she asked. “Is this still a party rental?”

“Nope, according to the caretaker some big-deal downtown attorney bought it the end of last year. He’s in New York on business.”

The caffeine deprivation headache was drilling like a jackhammer in Josie’s brain. She would call press relations and have them prepare something for the media. The hordes would eventually discover the identity of the victim. Ibarra should’ve handled it, but he wouldn’t or couldn’t. It was easier for him to dump his responsibilities on her, so he could continue playing detective.

“Did you notify the bureau?” she asked but knew the answer.

“Not yet.”

Josie said she would make the notifications and take care of the media. She knew Ibarra was delegating up, but everything would get done right if she did it. She’d been stuck with him since she took command of Hollywood division less than a year ago, but had learned to work around his incompetence. She was too busy to do his job, but it was especially important now to make him look good. The captain at Wilshire division wanted a detective commanding officer who spoke Spanish. Josie knew he’d try to steal the bilingual Ibarra if she could make him seem halfway competent. It was a difficult task, and Ibarra wasn’t helping.

H
OLLYWOOD STATION
was nearly empty when Josie arrived. She’d left Ibarra at the crime scene gossiping with a busty neighbor who looked like somebody who used to be famous . . . skeletally skinny and surgically altered. Josie waved at the graveyard shift watch commander who looked irritated that the captain would dare show up on his watch. If Josie came in this early, it usually meant she wanted to talk to him or look over his shoulder to see what he actually did for his paycheck. Josie knew Lieutenant Howard Owens worked in the middle of the night to avoid her. She’d inherited him as well as Ibarra from her predecessor. She gave him a hard time because he was lazy and had made it known he didn’t like having a female boss. Eventually she’d have to deal with Owens, but kept prodding him hoping he’d either get better or retire. The rest of her lieutenants had proven to be topnotch, but Ibarra and Owens were useless and a constant source of irritation.

Owens should have retired years ago, but the money was too good. This guy was a prime example of why she hated
DROP
, the city’s deferred retirement plan. It was another bureaucratic Ponzi scheme designed to make the department look bigger, with a lot of dead weight kept afloat with the promise of more money after retirement.

He was in her office before she could close the door.

“What’s up, Howard?” she asked, feigning interest.

“Somebody’s gonna have to deal with all the calls we’re getting on this homicide. I haven’t got time to babysit every reporter who needs a thirty-second sound bite. I got real work to do . . .”

“Give them to me,” she said, interrupting him. “I’ll handle the press, and why don’t you ask a day watch supervisor to have his team relieve your guys at the crime scene before they go up to roll call so you can all go home on time?” Josie crossed her arms and waited. Owens was a big man, taller than her, and she was nearly six feet. He had thinning blond hair that never looked combed and a receding chin that disappeared into his flabby neck. He seemed to enjoy complaining, and she’d just taken away his reason to whine. His pink face flushed; he mumbled something and walked away. Kill the turd with kindness, she thought, loving her job at moments like this. Howard Owens was a guy who’d made Josie’s life miserable many years ago when she was a young uniformed officer, one of the few females in patrol, and he was her training officer. She’d promoted faster than him and knew he expected her to retaliate for his prior asinine behavior. She never had any desire to get even because she figured her success really irritated him and that was the best revenge.