Early December becomes mid-December. Carrillo and Gonzales interview Donna Lee Meyers’s known associates and come up short on hard suspects. It’s becoming a long, hard one–the kind you solve or don’t solve while other cases accumulate.
It’s creeping up on Christmastime. The bureau lunchroom is draped with red and green banners and packed with an assortment of sugar-soaked treats.
Bulldog-vultures swoop by and chow down–pecan pies and toffee clusters hook you on the first bite.
Talk flows. Food disappears. Nineteen ninety-four is winding down in a swirl of rapid-fire conversation.
Bill Sieber’s midway through his standard epic pitch: how a friend’s daughter was murdered in Olympia, Washington, and boy did the cops screw up the case! Bill’s a primo monologuist. He’s got his audience hooked–even though every detective has heard the story six dozen times. Lieutenant Frank Merriman’s interjecting punch lines, smiling his standard shit-eating grin. Frank grins 96 percent of the time. Somebody should transpose his brain waves to TV so the whole world could cut in on the laughs.
Cheryl Lyons zips by. She’s got electric turquoise eyes–or she’s wearing electric turquoise contact lenses. The late jack Hoffenberg bootjacked Cheryl’s persona for the female lead in his novel The Desperate Adversaries. Cheryl the 1973 narc became Cheryl of the Paperback Pantheon. Cheryl’s pensive today–will the county notch in eight more murders and top its all-time yearly high of 537?
Ike Sabean thinks it’s a lock. Ike works juvenile Missing Persons–and must be considered a certified genius.
You’ve seen his work on milk cartons–the photos of missing kids and the number to call if you spot them. Ike developed the idea in cahoots with a Chicago dairyman. He got a total of sixtyseven dairies and industrial firms to display the pix–and ran up a 70 percent local found rate until the public became inured to the photos. Ike’s also a board-licensed mortician. He explains the allure of his moonlighting job thusly: “I like to work with people.”
Jerome Beck lingers by the chocolate-chip-cookie plate. Beck was the technical adviser on the flick Dead Bang. He also wrote the story. Guess what? The director of that movie named the Don Johnson–portrayed lead character “Jerry Beck.”
Big Gil Carrillo walks in. The floor shakes; a serving bowl full of Jell-O jiggles. Gil buttonholes Louie the Hat and runs the Donna Lee Meyers crime-scene pix by him.
They discuss defensive wounds and blood-spatter trajectories. Louie’s got a spaced-out woman in tow–a psychic he consults every so often.
They call him “the Hat” because he always wears a Tyrolean porkpie with a feather in the band. If you fuck with Louie’s hat, Louie will fuck with you. A few years ago, some LAPD clown snatched Louie’s hat and goofed on Louie’s shaved head. Louie unhesitatingly popped him in the chops.
Big Gil walks off. Louie hobnobs with his psychic. Don Garcia tacks a notice to the bulletin board: Bulldog wristwatches make wonderful Christmas gifts!
The computer women look pissed. All this holiday bonhomie is drowning out the volume on their soap opera.
The boss is teething on the Guevara case. His ceramic bulldog is teething at the fur ball on the tip of his Santa Claus cap–Dan Burt likes to dress the beast in seasonal headwear.
Ray Peavy’s crew got the job–a double abduction/murder way the hell out in Lancaster. Deputy Liova Anderson and Sergeant Joe Guzman caught the first squeal–one baffling whodunit.
Peavy’s laying out a chronology for Dan Burt. It’s an informal captain’s office confab–and the open door encourages kibitzers.
Anderson got the initial call on Wednesday, November 3o: a body dump out in the desert. Liova drives up to Palmdale/Lancaster and views the stiff: a male Latin with his hands, face, and crotch scorched.
The victim was wrapped in a baby blanket, doused with a flammable agent, and burned. Liova picks up a strong vibe: The genital scalding indicates some sort of sex murder.
Liova has to work solo for the first seventy-two hours–Joe Guzman, a nationally known expert on gang violence, is off giving a lecture in Texas. She knuckles down and hauls.
She attends the postmortem on Friday. The doctor pulls a bullet out of the dead man’s head and tags the cause of death as a “gunshot wound.” He cuts the dead man’s fingers off, rehydrates them, and rolls a clean set of prints.