Some Degree of Murder (6 page)

He turned to face me. “I loved her,” he said. “She was my daughter.”

“Your wife said that Fawn hated her. Do you think that’s true?”

Taylor sighed. “That’s her grief talking. Fawn didn’t hate her or me. She was just going through a phase. She was struggling.”

“Struggling with what?”

“Becoming a woman. Being wealthy. Living by the rules. The same things every kid goes through, I would say.”

“No special problems?”

“I don’t think so. She was just acting out and took it too far.”

“Usually,” I told him, “running away is a response to something. Either a single incident or sometimes just a build up over time. Can you think of anything like that in Fawn’s life?”

Taylor sat staring at the walkway below us. After a few moments, he shook his head. “I really can’t, detective. She just…rebelled.”

I watched him carefully. “Were you two close?”

“I was the only father she ever knew. I don’t think Andie ever told her otherwise.”

Steven Taylor met my gaze and I read his eyes. They were troubled, but without guilt. “I asked your wife was if she thought it possible that you and Fawn had an inappropriate relationship.”

His eyes registered confusion for a moment, then widened in surprise. “You mean sexually?”

I nodded and watched him.

A hint of anger flared in
his eyes but it was gone immediately, replaced by sadness. “No, detective. Fawn was my daughter. I loved her. There was nothing…inappropriate.”

“Your wife was angry that I asked.”

“I’m not surprised. She’s very sensitive about the issue of Fawn’s fatherhood.”

“You’re not?”

He shrugged. “I realized there was nothing I could do about it. And I loved Fawn, so I adopted her.”

“Can you think of anything else that might help me in this investigation?” I asked.

He appeared lost in thought and my words roused him. “No. Nothing. But I’ll give it some serious thought.”

I handed him one of my business cards. “Call me if you think of anything. Or if your wife does.”

He took the card from my fingers and slipped it into his shirt pocket. “I will.”

I wa
s
meeting her at Aphrodite’s Greek Restaurant for dinner. The restaurant was just around the corner from my hotel and came highly recommended by the front desk clerk, especially their wine bar. I got to the restaurant thirty minutes before we were supposed to meet and took a seat at the counter in the small bar. A number of tables were in the area for those who didn’t want to eat in the more formal dining room. Several groups occupied the tables.

The wine bar at Aphrodite’s was softly lit with music reminiscent of the fifties
.

Behind the bar, a tall, slender blonde with piercing blue eyes and a bright smile walked over to me. “What can I get you?”

“Do you have any beer?”

She winked at me and her smile never faded. “Sure we do, although none of them are domestic. We’ve got Bridgeport’s Indian Pale, Weidmer’s Hefeweizen and Guinness.”

“Guinness.”

With a bounce to her step, she went into a nearby room and came out with a tall black can of Guinness and a chilled glass. She popped the top and a strong hiss escaped. With a long pour, she filled the glass completely and shook the can. From inside the can, a hard rattle could be heard.

“Did you know they put a nitrogen capsule in the cans to keep the beer fresh?”

I nodded and pulled the glass over to me. “What’s your name?”

She extended her hand. “I’m Catherine.”

“I’m Virgil,” I said
and shook her hand. Her skin was cool on mine for a moment before she slipped away to help a table full of customers.

A small dark-skinned man stepped into the wine bar and his eyes scanned the tables. He wore a deep blue club shirt over khaki pants and a thick gold watch covered his wrist. By the way several of the patrons deferred to him, I made him for the owner of the place. He waved hello to a group of people before he turned and strolled back into the restaurant.

I grabbed my beer, took a sip and closed my eyes.

I opened them back up when I heard a familiar voice say, “Virgil?”

Her eyes were frantic as they moved around the bar, searching for anyone she might know.

“Relax, Andie,” I whispered to her.

“I can’t. Someone might recognize me and I told Steve I was shopping.”

“Listen,” I said, trying to get her mind away from her worry. “That’s Dean Martin singing right now.”

She focused her eyes back on me. “What?”

I pointed up to the speakers. “That’s Dean Martin. Just listen.”

We sat quiet for a moment and listened to
Ain’t That a Kick in the Head.

“Is that supposed to mean something?”

“No, I just wanted you to think about something else for a moment.”

She stared at me for a moment before a small smile creased her lips. Her manicured hand carefully picked up her glass and she sipped the Cabernet she had ordered. “You look different,” she finally said.
“Your eyes are harder and your face is thinner than I remember.”

I sipped the last of my beer and put the glass on the side of the table. “I did some time.”

“I know.
I read the papers after you left.”

“They made me sound worse than I am.”

“You almost killed a man.”

“I did what I was supposed to do.”

Catherine, the bar maid, walked over to the table. “You need another Guinness?”

I smiled at her. “That’d be great.”

She looked over at Angie who stared wide-eyed at me. “Another Cabernet?”

Andie bobbed her head without taking her eyes off of me. Catherine gave a small nod before walking away.

“You okay?”

She nodded.

“I did three years for that. I haven’t done any more time.”

“Are you still working for that man?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“He held up his end of the bargain. I wanted to keep working for someone who kept their word.”

Catherine came back with our drinks. After she put Andie’s wine down in front of her, she popped another can of Guinness and poured it into a fresh glass. She winked at me before she walked off.

“I’m going to find who hurt Fawn. You know that, right?”

She stared at me over the lip of her wine glass.

“I’m doing this for me but because you asked as well, right?”

She emptied her glass and put it on the table. “Yes,” she said softly, her lips wet from the wine.

“That means you’ll be part of it. You can’t tell anyone. Not Steve. Not the cops. No one.”

“I understand that.”

“Was Fawn using?”

“Using?”

“Dope. Drugs.”

She shrugged. “I think she smoked some marijuana occasionally.”

“No, not weed. Something harder. Maybe crank. Probably crack.”

“Crank? Crack? What’s the difference?”

“Crank is methamphetamine. Crack is jacked-up cocaine.”

“No way
. She was a good girl.”

“Did she have a boyfriend?”

“She didn’t have a steady boyfriend.”

“Who’s her best friend then?”

Andie thought for a second. “That would be Natalia Romanov.”

“Is she Russian?”

“Yeah.”

“Where can I find Natalia?”

Andie pulled out pen from her purse and wrote the address down on a napkin.

“Are you going to talk to her?”

“Yeah.”

“Want me to call her for you?”

“No.”

She checked her watch and looked up at me.

“I’m good,” I said to her.

Andie slid out of the booth and put her hand on my shoulder. “Thanks,” she whispered in to my ear.

I watched her walk out of the restaurant before turning back to my beer.

“She’s pretty,” Catherine said as she came over to collect Andie’s empty glass.

“Yeah.”

“Your wife?”

“Nah. Old girlfriend.”

“I see,” she said with a smile and walked off to the bar.

I got up and followed her to the counter where I asked her for the tab. She wrote it quickly up and slipped the check to me. From my pocket, I pulled several bills and dropped them on the hardwood counter.

“What are you doing later tonight?” I asked her as she collected the money.

Catherine tilted her head. “Going home to my husband.”

I tapped
the pen on my notepad. It was filled with scribbled lines and question marks. I kept staring at the words, waiting for that magic moment when inspiration would leap off the page.

So many dead ends, so early in the case. Fawn Taylor was a poor little rich girl who had ran away from home because her parents had a few rules and they had the guts to stick to them.

No useful forensic evidence whatsoever. The crime scene may have been next to a dumpster, but it was clean of any meaningful evidence. All I got from the M.E. was that she was strangled to death and appeared to be sexually assaulted. No word back on the workup of her clothing.

I reached for the coffee cup and took a sip. The cup was three-quarters full, but the coffee inside was cold. I put it down with disgust.

Usually, after the physical evidence, it was the victimology that helped the most. But in this case, even that wasn’t very helpful.

Who was she? A fourteen-year-old runaway whose parents live in a small mansion.

What did she do? No idea. Once she took off from home, she was no longer a student. What did she do for those two weeks after she ran away?

Who did she know?
Her parents, who gave me no indication of being involved. Her friends, all of whom turned out to be little prom princesses in the making. None had any idea where Fawn had been spending her time once she ran away.

Essentially, Fawn Taylor was a ghost for the last two weeks before her murder. My canvass of the East Sprague strip came up empty. No one knew a thing. Big surprise there.

And now I had another ghost to deal with. At least with this latest one, I could hope for an AFIS hit on her fingerprints to give me a jumping off point.

“My Lord, Tower,” Ray Browning boomed from the other side of the cubicle wall. “You
’re tapping your pen so hard that it sounds like road construction over there.”

“Sorry.”

Browning peeked around the cubicle, a half-eaten sandwich in his hand. I didn’t have to ask what kind it was. Even if I couldn’t smell it, I’d have known. Every day, for the last twenty years, he eats a tuna sandwich for lunch. Mustard, no mayo.

“Case giving you problems?” he asked, taking a bite of his foul concoction and chewing.

I shrugged. “Running low on places to go with it.”

“Little rich girl have a boyfriend from the wrong side of the tracks?”

“Not as far as I can tell.”

“Diary?”

“Typical teenager crap.”

“Parents?”

“Mom and step-dad.”

He raised his eyebrow. “Step-dad? That sounds promising.”

I knew what he was thinking and shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“Any signs of it?”

“Some.”

“Like?”

“Like she was an early bloomer. She was probably sexually active at thirteen. Sharp downturn in grades. Marijuana use. Hated her parents.”

Browning nodded, chewing as he listened.

“He just doesn’t seem the type,” I offered.

“What’d you get from Forensics?”

“Very little.”

“Sexual assault, right?”

“Probably.”

“So no fluids?”

I shook my head.

“Hairs?”

“Nope. But I asked Cameron to double-check.”

“I wouldn’t count on getting anything out of that,” Browning said. “He’s pretty thorough.”

“I know. But the M.E. did the comb and comparison.”

“What?” Browning’s eyebrows shot up. “Why?”

“I dunno. But Cameron’s going to double-check the work.”

“That’ll piss off the M.E., no doubt.”

“He’s doing it off the books.”

“That’s fine, as long as he doesn’t find anything.” Brown took a deep breath and let it out. “It’d be nice to have something physical to either eliminate or link the step-dad, wouldn’t it?”

I agreed. “A lot of things would be nice. I’m batting about .037 on this one.”

“Not even good enough for the minors.”

“Not even good enough for little league.”

“Be careful,” he warned with a grin. “Crawford’ll send you back to patrol. Take your detective’s shield away from you.”

“At this point, he’d be doing me a favor.”

Browning chuckled as he tossed the last bite of his sandwich into his mouth and chewed it up. He wiped the corners of his mouth with his thumb.
“Keep working it, John,” he said. “Something will break.” Then he disappeared around the corner of the cubicle.

I tossed my pen onto my desk and leaned back in my chair. I put my hands behind my head and stared down at my notepad.

“Damn,” I muttered at the squiggly lines and question marks.

I was still staring at them when the phone rang fifteen minutes later.

The antiseptic odor of the autopsy room hung in the air, though I couldn’t tell if it was drifting down the hall to Cameron’s office or if the stench was coming off of his clothing.

I ignored the smell and leaned forward.

“You’re a hundred percent sure?”

Cameron half-shrugged. “No, not a hundred percent. Say ninety-eight. The fingerprint is definitely a match. I’ll try to locate her dental records eventually to shore it up. If it becomes a sticking point, we’ll have to pull DNA from the parents.”

I looked down at the printout he’d handed me, identifying my unknown victim.

Serena Gonzalez. Nineteen years old. I had her date of birth and a flag for a misdemeanor arrest in California. That was probably where she was printed. That was it, but it was a hell of a lot more than I had before Cameron called.

“Good work, Cam.”

Cameron leaned back in his chair, holding the arm rests and tapping all of his fingers at once in a rolling rhythm.

I watched him for a moment. Then, “What?”

He let out a long breath and looked around quickly, as if anyone else could have been hiding in his tiny office. Then he leaned forward. “I don’t like it, John.”

“Like what?”

“Doing shit behind the M.E.’s back. If he finds out, I could get fired.”

“You’re civil service. They can’t fire you.”

“They can with just cause.”

I gave him a look.
“You found something, didn’t you?”

Cameron looked away.

“What is it? What’d you find?”

He looked back at me. “I can’t get fired over this.
I mean it. I’ve got a baby coming.” His voice raised in pitch as he spoke. “I’ve got a wife. Responsibilities.”

“I know.”

Cameron let out another long breath and motioned toward the door. “Close it.”

I stood to push the door closed.

“What did you find, Cam? What are we talking about here?”

He removed his glasses and set them on the desk. “I found hairs.”

“Where? On who?”

He held up his hands to slow me down.

“I finished going over the clothing from the Gonzalez case. I found a single hair on her shirt.
At the navel or so. I’d have to put the shirt back on her to be any more exact, but definitely near the midriff.”

“What kind of hair?”

“Head hair. From a white male.”

“Can you get DNA?”

He shook his head. “Not likely. It was broken, not plucked. No mitochondria tissue.”

“The root, you mean?”

He looked at me as if he were considering chastising me for using such an unscientific term. “I can’t say for sure how the hair got there, but it’s the only piece of human or animal foreign matter I could find when I processed her clothing.”

“So, if it belongs to her killer,” I said, “then we’ve narrowed the field down to a white male which gets rid of about seven percent of the city’s population. Leaving me only ninety–three percent to wade through.”

“Forty-six,” Cameron said. “Roughly.”

“What?”

“Forty-six percent. The hair belongs to a white male. You can eliminate all non-whites and all females. That leaves forty-six percent. Roughly.”

“Forty-six percent of four hundred and eighty thousand only leaves, what? A couple hundred thousand suspects?”

Cameron smiled slightly. “Roughly.”

“Well, then I guess we’re making progress. Did you find any carpet fibers at all?”

“None. But there’s more on the hair.”

I motioned for him to continue.

“After I found the head hair on Gonzalez, I went back to the hair samples on the Taylor case. I checked over the clothing again, but didn’t find anything. But when I re-examined the pubic hairs from the combing and checked every single one, I found a foreign hair.”

I sat up straight. “From Fawn Taylor?”

“Yeah. It was broken off, too, so no mitochondria. But it was definitely an adult pubic hair belonging to a white male.”

“Same guy?”

Cameron shrugged. “No way to tell without DNA. Like you said, there’s a couple hundred thousand of them living in the area. And I don’t even know if we can get sufficient DNA material from either sample to test. The FBI has more sophisticated equipment, so I could send the samples to Quantico for analysis…”

“But…?”

“But that costs money.”

“So? It’s a murder case. The department will pay for it.”

“And it requires the M.E. to sign off.”

“So?” I asked, but I knew what he was driving at.

“So that means he’ll know I double-checked him. He’ll get pissed off. He’ll –“

I held up my hand to stop him.
“You just tell him what you told me. You found the hair. Then you called me to tell me about it. I asked you to do a second pass over the clothing and samples from the Taylor case. Everyone is so serial killer happy around here, anyway, so that’ll make sense to him. Just tell him ‘that’s the way you do it here.’”

Cameron chewed his lip.

“He can’t touch you, Cam. He’s a contracted employee. You’re civil service. He can make your life less than perfect for a while. But if he steps too far, he’ll be the one in trouble, not you. And, either way, his contract will be up at some point. But you’ll still be here. Because you’re a civil service employee. Get it? When he’s gone, you don’t want look back and realize that we could have done a better job.”

“Okay,” Cameron said. “I’ll play it the way you said. He’ll probably buy it.”

I stood, said “Thanks” and left the antiseptic smell of the dead behind.

Se
rena Gonzalez was in the local computer system. She only had one entry and it was a month old. Patrol Officer Westboard stopped her at Sprague/Madelia for suspicion of prostitution and did a field contact report. I waded through the menus and got to his narrative. It was brief, but I read it anyway.

Subject was walking down Sprague Avenue dressed in provocative clothing. Claimed to be staying at the Palms Motel at Sprague and Ivory. Said she was walking home from the Club Tip Top, where she worked as a stripper. California driver’s license provided. No wants. Released her with a warning.

I was grateful that a patrol officer took the time to document a field contact. That five minutes of work he did a month ago probably saved me from tramping around the East Sprague corridor, showing her picture and trying to put together some idea of where she stayed and where she worked.

I needed to go to the motel and verify she still lived there prior to the murder. If she did, I’d have to execute a search warrant on her room. Then go to the Tip Top and interview people there.

I hit the Print button, sending Westboard’s field contact to the printer so I could put it in my case file.

I could do the Tip Top interviews on my own. That was no problem. But I had to update Crawford if I was going to do a search warrant and by department policy, I couldn’t execute it alone. That meant help. Which meant Lindsay.

I backed out of the Field Contact menu and went to the Main Menu. I typed in Gonzalez’s name and date of birth and sent it to California Department of Licensing. Less than three seconds later, the computer beeped at me. I pulled up the response. There were seven listings for a Serena Gonzalez, but the one with the matching date of birth was on top and highlighted. I selected it.

Serena Gonzalez showed an address in Salinas, California. I had no idea where that was, but there was an atlas at the reference desk. Her license had been issued three years ago. That would’ve been her first license, I realized. And her last.

So now I had to locate Salinas and give their Police Department a call. Something else I could do on my own. And not as pressing as the motel room search warrant.

It was time to see the Crawfish.