“True.” I’d read the autopsy findings. Read the entire file, starting with Paz and Fellows’s initial report and ending with the pathologist’s dictated drone and the packet of postmortem photos. How many such pictures had I seen over the years? It never got easier.
“No scream,” I said, “because of the heart wound?”
“Coroner said it could have collapsed the heart, put her into instant shock.”
He snapped thick fingers softly, then ran his hand over his face, as if washing without water. What I could see of his profile was heavy as a walrus’s, pocked and fatigued.
He smoked some more. I thought again of the preautopsy photos, Hope Devane’s body ice-white under the coroner’s lights. Three deep purple stab wounds in close-up: chest, crotch, just above the left kidney.
The forensic scenario was that she’d been taken by surprise and dispatched quickly by the blow that exploded her heart, then slashed a second time above the vagina, and finally laid facedown on the sidewalk and stabbed in the back.
“A husband doing that,” I said. “I know you’ve seen worse but it seems so calculated.”
“This husband’s an intellectual, right? A thinker.” Smoke escaped the car in wisps, decaying instantly at the touch of night air. “Truth is, Alex, I want it to be Seacrest for selfish reasons. ’Cause if it’s not him, it’s a goddamn logistical nightmare.”
“Too many suspects.”
“Oh yeah,” he said, almost singing it. “Lots of people who could’ve hated her.”
CHAPTER
2
A self-help book changed Hope Devane’s life.
Wolves and Sheep wasn’t the first thing she published: a psychology monograph and three dozen journal articles had earned her a full professorship at thirty-eight, two years before her death.
Tenure had given her job security and the freedom to enter the public eye with a book the tenure committee wouldn’t have liked.
Wolves made the best-seller lists for a month, earning her center ring in the media circus and more money than she could have accumulated in ten years as a professor.
She was suited to the public eye, blessed with the kind of refined, blond good looks that played well on the small screen. That, and a soft, modulated voice that came across confident and reasonable over the radio, meant she had no trouble getting publicity bookings. And she made the most of each one. For despite Wolves’s subtitle, Why Men Inevitably Hurt Women and What Women Can Do to Avoid It, and its indicting tone, her public persona was that of an intelligent, articulate, thoughtful, pleasant woman entering the public arena with reluctance but performing graciously.
I knew all that but had little understanding of the person she’d been.
Milo had left me three LAPD evidence boxes to review: her resume, audio- and videotapes, some newspaper coverage, the book. All passed along by Paz and Fellows. They’d never studied any of it.
He’d told me about inheriting the case the night before, sitting across the table from Robin and me at a seafood place in Santa Monica. The bar was crowded but half the booths were empty and we sat in a corner, away from sports on big-screen and frightened people trying to connect with strangers. Midway through the meal Robin left for the ladies’ room and Milo said, “Guess what I got for Christmas?”
“Christmas is months away.”
“Maybe that’s why this is no gift. Cold case. Three months cold: Hope Devane.”
“Why now?”
“ ’Cause it’s dead.”
“The new lieutenant?”
He dipped a shrimp in sauce and put the whole thing in his mouth. As he chewed, his jaw bunched. He kept looking around the room even though there was nothing to see.
New lieutenant, same old pattern.
He was the only acknowledged gay detective in the LAPD, would never be fully accepted. His twenty-year climb to Detective III had been marked by humiliation, sabotage, periods of benign neglect, near-violence. His solve record was excellent and sometimes that helped keep the hostility under the surface. His quality of life depended upon the attitude of the superior-of-the-moment. The new one was baffled and nervous, but too preoccupied with a dispirited postriot department to pay too much attention to Milo.
“He gave it to you because he thinks it’s a low-probability solve?”