Danny smiled. “You’ve got forty-eight hours to change your mind.”
“Or?”
“Or I’m taking everything I know about you to the papers.” Gordean snapped his fingers; a waiter came over; Danny walked out of the restaurant and into the rain. He remembered his promise to call Jack Shortell, hit the phone booth across from the agency, dialed the Hollywood Station squadroom and heard, “Yes?,” Shortell himself speaking, his voice strained.
“It’s Upshaw, Jack. What have you got on–”
“What we’ve got is another one. LAPD found him last night, on an embankment up from the LA River. Doc Layman’s doing him now, so–”
Danny left the receiver dangling and Shortell shouting, “Upshaw!”; he highballed it downtown, parked in front of the City Morgue loading dock and almost tripped over a stiff on a gurney running in. Jack Shortell was already there, sweating, his badge pinned to his coat front; he saw Danny, blocked the path to Layman’s examination room and said, “Brace yourself.”
Danny got his breath. “For what?”
Shortell said, “It’s Augie Luis Duarte, one of the guys on your tailing list. The bluesuits who found him ID’d him from his driver’s license. LAPD’s had the stiff since 12:30 last night–the squad guy who caught didn’t know about our team. Breuning was here and just left, and he was making noises that Duarte blew his tail last night. Danny, I know that’s horseshit. I was calling around last night looking for you, to tell you our car thief and zoot stick queries were bust. I talked to a clerk at Wilshire Station, and she told me Breuning was there all evening with Dudley Smith. I called back later, and the clerk said they were still there. Breuning said the other three men are still under surveillance, but I don’t believe him.”
Danny’s head boomed; morgue effluvia turned his stomach and stung his razor burns. He beelined for a door marked “Norton Layman MD,” pushed it open and saw the country’s premier forensic pathologist writing on a clipboard. A nude shape was slab-prone behind him; Layman stepped aside as if to say, “Feast your eyes.’
Augie Duarte, the handsome Mex who’d walked out the Gordean Agency door two nights ago, was supine on a stainless steel tray. He was blood-free; bite wounds extruding intestinal tubes covered his stomach; bite marks ran up his torso in a pattern free of overlaps. His cheeks were slashed down to the gums and jawbone and his penis had been cut off, inserted into the deepest of the cuts and hooked around so that the head extended out his mouth, teeth clamped on the foreskin, rigor mortis holding the obscenity intact. Danny blurted, “Oh God fuck no”; Layman said, “The rain drained the body and kept the cuts fresh. I found a tooth chip in one of them and made a wet cast of it. It’s unmistakably animal, and I had an attendant run it down to a forensic orthodontist at the Natural History Museum. It’s being examined now.”
Danny tore his eyes off the corpse; he walked out to the dock looking for Jack Shortell, gagging on the stench of formaldehyde, his lungs heaving for fresh air. A group of Mexicans with a bereaved-family look was standing by the loading ramp staring in; a pachuco type stared at him extra hard. Danny strained to see Shortell, then felt a hand on his shoulder.
It was Norton Layman. He said, “I just talked to the man at the Museum, and he identified my specimen. The killer wears wolverine teeth.”
Danny saw a blood W on cheap wallpaper. He saw W’s in black and white, W’s burned into Felix Gordean’s face, W’s all over the rosary-clutching wetbacks huddled together grieving. He saw W’s until Jack Shortell walked up the dock and grabbed his arm and he heard himself say, “Get Breuning. I don’t trust myself on it.”
Then he saw plain blood.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
A stakeout for his own son.
Mal sat on the steps outside Division 32, Los Angeles Civil Court. He was flanked by lawyers smoking; keeping his back to them kept light conversation away while he scanned for Stefan, Celeste and her shyster. When he saw them, it would be a quick men’s room confab: don’t believe the bad things you hear about me; when my man gets ugly about your mother, try not to listen.