drug trafficking. Drug enforcement was a futile closed circuit. Drug use was an insane and entirely understandable reaction to life in bumfuck L.A. County. He learned these things driving elevated freeways.
He worked Major Frauds in ’78 and moved to VOIT in ’79. VOIT stood for Violent Offender Impact Team. It was a small unit mandated to apprehend serial armed robbers. The job crossed over to Homicide.
Ann got a calling. She obeyed it on instinct. She entered nursing school and excelled at the work. Her stab at independence resurrected their marriage.
He respected her profession. He respected her pursuit of a career at age forty. He liked the way her calling meshed with his new calling.
He wanted to work Sheriff’s Homicide. He wanted to investigate murders. He wanted it with a passionate sense of commitment.
He called in some favors and got it. It brought him to the body off the roadside and the body in the Marina. It brought him to the girl stunned mute by rape and blunt-force trauma.
His ghosts.
13
He learned some things about murder early on. He learned that men killed with less provocation than women. Men killed because they were drunk, stoned and pissed off. Men killed for money. Men killed because other men made them feel like sissies.
Men killed to impress other men. Men killed so they could talk about it. Men killed because they were weak and lazy. Murder sated their lust of the moment and narrowed down their options to a comprehensible few.
Men killed women for capitulation. The bitch wouldn’t give them head or give them her money. The bitch overcooked the steak. The bitch threw a fit when they traded her food stamps for dope. The bitch didn’t like them pawing her 12-year-old daughter.
Men did not kill women because they were systematically abused by the female gender. Women killed men because men fucked them over just that rigorously and persistently.
He considered the rule binding. He didn’t want the rule to be true. He didn’t want to see women as a whole race of victims.
The issue of free will perplexed him. Many female murder victims put themselves in harm’s way and passively co-signed their death warrants. He didn’t want to concede the point. He had a gender-wide crush on women. It was big and random and essentially idealistic. It kept him faithful when his marriage strayed bad.
His first victim was female.
Billy Farrington broke him in at Sheriff’s Homicide. Billy was a black fashion plate. Billy wore custom suits to crime scenes replete with stiffs purging stomach gas and feces. Billy taught him to read crime scenes very slowly and deliberately.
Billy was 55 and near the end of his law-enforcement career. Billy had a big block of vacation time accrued. Billy let him work the Daisie Mae case solo.
It was a body dump up in Newhall. A man spotted a burning bundle and extinguished the flames. He called the New-hall Sheriff’s Station. The watch commander called Sheriff’s Homicide.
Stoner rolled out. He sealed off the crime scene and examined the body.
The victim was fully clothed. She was white and elderly. Her face was contorted. She looked almost mongoloid.
She was wrapped in a U.S. flag and some baby blankets. The bundle was cinched with electrical cord. The blankets were soaked in gasoline or a similar noxious accelerant. She looked like she took some bludgeon shots to the head.
Stoner walked the area. He saw no footprints, no tire tracks and no discarded bludgeon tools. The area was hilly and brush-covered. The killer probably carried the body up from a nearby access road.
A coroner’s team arrived. They went through the victim’s scorched clothing.
They found no identification. Stoner found a gold chain necklace. It looked like a peace sign or some kind of weird-ass symbol.
Stoner bagged it. The coroner’s team removed the body.
Stoner drove to the Hall of Justice and checked recent missing persons reports. Nothing matched his Jane Doe. He put out a teletype. It stressed the victim’s necklace and said she might be mentally retarded. He called the Information Bureau and told them to put out the word on Jane.
Channel 7 News ran a TV spot that night. Stoner got a call a few minutes later.
A man said he made the necklace. The pendant was an AA symbol. He sold the necklaces at AA meetings in Long Beach.
Stoner drew a picture of the necklace and wrote up the facts on his case beneath it. He added his name and number at Sheriffs Homicide. He mimeographed a hundred copies and distributed them at every AA meeting in the Long Beach area.
A man named Neil Silberschlog saw the flyers and called him. He said the victim sounded like an old AA girl. She was known as Daisie Mae. She was running with a young guy named Ronald Bacon. Silberschlog lived near Bacon. Bacon was driving Daisie Mae’s ’64 Impala. Daisie Mae was nowhere around. Silberschlog thought the deal was hinky.
Stoner drove to Long Beach and met the informant. Silberschlog ID’d a morgue photo of the victim. He said she wasn’t retarded. She was just a crusty old drunk.
