Next Victim (23 page)

Another thing about the movies—the morgue technicians always wore surgical masks. So did the cops, when they were played by somebody like Brad Pitt or Robert De Niro. But this was real life, and nobody wore a fucking mask. They would think you were a wuss if you wore a mask. You just stood there breathing whatever germs and shit were there to be breathed, and you were stoic about it.

Dodge had visited the morgue many times, because it was often necessary for at least one detective working a case to observe an autopsy. Today he had drawn the detail while Al Bradley had gone back to Reseda. Truth was, he didn’t mind. He still thought there was a story here, one that might be worth another two grand from Myron Levine.

Besides, he had no problem with taking a trip to the morgue. Sort of liked it, in a way. The place impressed him—all these pathologists working with quick efficiency, unpacking their lifeless patients, taking samples of fluids and organs, dictating comments into microphones suspended overhead. The comments would be typed up into transcripts attached to the official reports, the vials of fluid and plastic containers of heart and lung tissue would be sent to the lab for analysis, and the lab reports would go into the file as well.

It was fucking incredible, really, how the county of Los Angeles had succeeded in making the autopsy an assembly-line process—dissection on a mass scale, an army of doctors and lab technicians all working together to reduce body after body to its raw components, while reducing the fact of death itself to a sheaf of paperwork.

Every time he came here, he had the same thought:
This is how it ends. This is all there is
.

He didn’t give a shit about religion and all that metaphysical crap. Death was a pile of flesh on a sheet of steel with gutters to carry off the sluice of blood. Nothing else. Just that.

Today, though, he wasn’t going to witness an actual autopsy. There was always a backlog of corpses in the morgue. An autopsy was almost never scheduled until at least twenty-four hours after the deceased had been found. All that was happening now was a postmortem radiology session. Winston was going to shoot X rays of the victim’s teeth, then compare them with the antemortem dental records of Scott Maple, who remained missing and unaccounted for.

Had the dead man been a South Central gangbanger—or, for that matter, a South Central honor student—there wouldn’t have been any rush to identify his remains. But when the victim was presumed to be a lily-white college student in lily-white Westwood—an affluent kid with affluent parents attending an affluent school in an affluent neighborhood—well, pull out all the goddamn stops, fast-track this case, get it cleared.

"We’ll do a full set of radiographs," Winston said as she pried open the corpse’s mouth with a wedging instrument. "Put on your aprons and gloves."

Dodge and the assistant complied. You weren’t a wuss for wearing a lead apron in the X-ray room. There were your nuts to worry about. Radiation caused impotence or sterility or something.

"Guess there’s no doubt how the guy died, anyhow," he said, just for the sake of conversation.

"There’s always doubt." Winston sounded weary.

"I don’t know, Doc." He knew Winston hated being called Doc. "Looks to me like the cause of death was proximity to an open flame."

"He’s burned, all right. Full thickness burns throughout the epidermis and dermis. But that damage could be postmortem. We’ll need to see his trachea. If there’s soot in the airway below the vocal cords, then he lived long enough to inhale smoke."

The X-ray machine made a prolonged humming sound as the first bite-wing was shot. The image was displayed in black and white on a video screen in the workstation.

"That’s the most likely finding," Winston went on. "Plenty of toxins in a chemistry lab. Hydrogen chloride, hydrogen cyanide, benzene, ammonia, sulfur dioxide, you name it. Or just plain old carbon dioxide—the blood samples will tell us his carboxyhemoglobin level, and if it’s over fifty percent, we’ve got a winner."

"You enjoy your work too fucking much, Doc." The f-word just slipped out. He normally didn’t curse around female colleagues if there was any chance he could get them into bed, and he hadn’t entirely given up on Winston. She might not be a dyke. Maybe he’d just asked her out on the wrong day of the month. PMS made women crazy.

"I’m simply aware of all the possibilities," Winston said, unruffled. "Smoke inhalation is only one of them. Thermal trauma to the larynx is another. It can cause spasms that bring on suffocation. Or there’s vagal inhibition, which produces reflex cardiac death—"

"Okay, okay."

She shrugged. "I don’t like making assumptions."

"Yeah, I get that impression." He tried a little wit. "Maybe you should have your own TV series.
Winston, ME
."

She actually smiled, a rare thing. "I’ve heard worse ideas." To her assistant: "Okay, take the other bite-wing."

The radiograph machine hummed again. It was something called an MDIS—Mobile Digital Imaging System. The rotating arm of the device could be moved manually to shoot the subject from various angles.

"We’re lucky his damn teeth didn’t burn up," Dodge said, for no particular reason.

"Teeth burn only at temperatures exceeding one thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Fillings last even longer. They can survive temperatures of up to sixteen hundred degrees."

"Learn something new every day on this job." He didn’t mean to sound sarcastic, but he did anyway. He tried to compensate by adopting a friendlier tone. "You ever see one this bad?"

"I’ve seen everything. This one is nasty, though." Winston looked over the body with professional detachment. "Third-degree burns over more than seventy percent of the anterior body surface. Tissue desiccation and avascularization, skin blackening and contraction, probable artifactual fractures of the carpi and metatarsals—"

"Fractures?"

"Postmortem. Caused by the shortening of the ligaments attributable to thermal injury. The small bones crack under the strain."

"But no sign of foul play?"

She smiled again. "I thought you said the cause of death was obvious."

"Like you, Doc, I don’t make assumptions."

"A wise policy. So far, I don’t see anything to suggest that John Doe was a victim of anything other than bad luck or his own stupidity. But I could be wrong."

"You are," a voice said from behind them.

Dodge and Winston both turned. A woman in a gray suit and a string tie stood in the doorway of the room. It took Dodge a moment to remember where he’d seen her.

The elevator in the Federal Building. Special Agent Tess McCallum, the lady fed who’d brushed him off.

Now here she was, stepping right back into his life.

Interesting
.

26

Tess had spent the past two hours following a zigzag path that had led her, without knowing it, closer and closer to this room in the morgue.

Her first stop after leaving the MiraMist had been the Santa Monica Police Department, where she’d cornered the watch commander in his office, flashed her FBI creds, and asked about any crimes reported within the last twelve hours that involved chemicals, chemical supply companies, or labs—break-ins, burglaries, anything. She was particularly interested in the theft or unauthorized use of equipment meant for analyzing unknown substances.

The watch commander had nothing. He seemed relieved when she left. She supposed she was acting a little feverish. She was on the hunt, and it felt good. She felt…hell, she felt
alive
, and that had been a rare feeling for her in the past two years.

Her next stop was the LAPD’s West Los Angeles divisional station on Butler Avenue. Another watch commander, another office. Same question. This time she got results.

Since midnight there had been three incidents within LA city limits that met her criteria. One was the theft of chemicals—but no equipment—from a San Pedro warehouse. The second was a break-in at a North Hollywood laboratory, which sounded promising until Tess learned that it was a photographic lab and the burglar, a teenager, had been caught in the act, thanks to a silent alarm.

That left the most serious incident, a fire in a basement chem lab on a university campus. Tess wasn’t sure what to make of the fire. If Mobius had entered the lab to use or steal some equipment, why torch the place? Then she was told that an unidentified corpse, possibly a student, had been found in the debris. And things started to make sense.

From the Butler Avenue station she went into Westwood, visiting Fire Station 37. Most of the crew who had worked the blaze had gone off duty—platoon change was at seven A.M.—but she found one fireman working a double shift, filling in for a buddy with weekend plans. He hadn’t discovered the body himself, but he’d seen it. No, he hadn’t seen any sign of foul play, but the remains had been in bad condition. Arson? The fire department had sent a team from the arson unit to check it out, but he and his crew had left before the squad arrived. They had seen only the two LAPD detectives working the scene.

Tess knew the detectives’ names from the report—Alan Bradley and James Dodge. The names seemed familiar, but she wasn’t sure why.

She drove to the crime scene but found it guarded by campus security guards who would not let her go inside even after they looked at her badge. This was a local crime. The feds had no jurisdiction here.

Quartz lights were positioned near the outside windows, and Prosser pumps sucked out standing water through thick hoses. The guards told her that some people from the city fire department’s arson unit were at work in the laboratory. Eventually one of the guards condescended to see if the chief investigator would talk with her.

He came up wearing heavy canvas fatigues, knee-high rubber boots, and thick gloves, with a crowbar clutched in one hand and a camera hanging by a strap around his neck. His face was sooty and streaked with sweat, and he looked more like a coal miner than an investigator of any kind.

The investigator said his team had been working the site for three hours and had at least another hour to go. They had determined the site of origin in the middle of the room and were checking nearby electrical appliances and connections for signs of an overload. Most fires originated with electrical faults. "But even if we find a problem with the wiring, it doesn’t prove much. A fire this hot will burn the insulation right off the wires and cause a short circuit."

"It was a hot, fast fire, then?"

"With the fuel load in that room? You better believe it."

"So you can’t say it was arson?"

"Can’t say much of anything yet. Normally what we look for is evidence of an accelerant at the origin point. And we have it—deep char, serious spalling of the concrete floor, burn-through of the counters in that area."

"So you know an accelerant was used," Tess said.

"Yeah, but the thing is, the whole lab was full of accelerants. Half the chemicals stored there were flammable—acetone, methylated spirits, solvents. And if it was arson, you’ve got to figure the arsonist used the stuff that was available. I took samples of the floor—"

"A concrete floor? You ripped it up?"

"No, it was spalled—that means chipped. So I could just sweep up the chips. And I put down some fuller’s earth, let it absorb whatever was on the surface, and collected the dirt for analysis. Did that in undamaged parts of the room, too, for control samples. It’s a science, you see. There’s a procedure—"

"Okay, okay. Sorry to interrupt."

"Anyway, even if the lab finds accelerants in the samples, which I expect they will, it won’t prove much."

"How
can
you prove it?"

"Not sure we can. It could have been arson, but it also could have been an experiment that went wrong and caused an explosion that spread as a fire. Or spontaneous combustion of chemical-soaked rags. Or a faulty electrical circuit…"

"What do you think it was? What does your gut tell you?"

"My gut tells me somebody set that fire. But my gut has been wrong before. Maybe the autopsy will tell us more."

"Where’s the body?"

"County morgue. Where else?"

So here she was, at 3:15 P.M., stepping through the doorway of the radiology room and realizing why the names Bradley and Dodge had seemed familiar.

The two cops in cheap suits. Dodge was the obnoxious one.

And naturally, he was the one who was here.

27

"I’m wrong?" Winston said, giving the visitor a chilly reception. "Would you care to explain just how you know?"

Agent McCallum was unfazed. She approached the table, allowing Dodge a good look at her. He liked what he saw. In the elevator she had been distracted, nervous. Now she was focused and intense, a cat waiting to pounce.

"Because I know how this young man died," McCallum said. "And who killed him." She looked his way and nodded in recognition. "Hello, Detective Dodge."

He tried out a warm smile. "Hey, Special Agent."

She turned to Winston. "Tess McCallum, FBI." Her ID folder came out, but Winston didn’t bother to look. "I’m part of a task force tracking a serial killer. I think he killed this man."

"Well, that’s an interesting theory." Winston was acting territorial. She didn’t appreciate this McCallum barging in and telling her she’d missed something.

"Look at his neck," McCallum said. "There should be a transverse knife wound above the Adam’s apple."

Normally a slashed neck would be difficult to overlook, but the cracked, creased, crisped flesh hid any other damage. Winston studied the neck for a long moment.

"I see it," she said. "Incision begins near the left carotid. Travels across the anterior cervix just above the cricoid cartilage in a semicircular track, and terminates immediately before the right carotid."

"Ear to ear," Dodge said. "But he missed the arteries."

McCallum shook her head. "He didn’t miss. He never cuts the carotids. He wants his victims to bleed to death slowly."