The Murder Book

putrefaction. The coroner was guestimating a half day to a day since death, but no way to know how long the body had been lying there or what temperature it had been stored at. The logical guess was that the killer had driven up last night, after dark, placed the corpse, zipped right onto the 101, and sped off happy.

No passing motorist had seen it, because when you were in a hurry, why would you study the dirt above the on-ramp? You never get to know a city unless you walk. Which is why so few people know L.A., thought Milo. After living here for two years, he still felt like a stranger.

Elmer Jacquette walked all the time, because he had no car. Covered the area from his East Hollywood flop to the western borders of downtown, poking around for cans, bottles, discards he tried to peddle to thrift shops in return for soup kitchen vouchers. One time, he'd found a working watch- gold, he thought, turned out to be plated but he got ten bucks for it, anyway, at a pawnshop on South Vermont.

He'd seen the body right away- how could you not from up close, all pale in the moonlight, the sour smell, the way the poor girl's legs had been bent and spread- and his gorge had risen immediately and soon his franks-and-beans dinner was coming back the wrong way.

Jacquette had the good sense to run a good fifteen feet from the body before vomiting. When the uniforms arrived, he pointed out the emetic mound, apologizing. Not wanting to annoy anyone. He was sixty-eight years old, hadn't served state time since fifteen years ago, wasn't going to annoy the police, no way.

Yessir, nossir.

They'd kept him around, waiting for the detectives to arrive. Now, the men in suits were finally here and Jacquette stood over by one of the police cars as someone pointed him out and they approached him, stepping into the glare of those harsh lights the cops had put all over the place.

Two suits. A skinny white-haired redneck type in an old-fashioned gray sharkskin suit and a dark-haired, pasty- faced heavyset kid whose green jacket and brown pants and ugly red-brown tie made Elmer wonder if nowadays cops were shopping at thrift shops.

They stopped at the body first. The old one took one look, wrinkled his nose, got an annoyed look on his face. Like he'd been interrupted in the middle of doing something important.

The fat kid was something else. Barely glanced at the body before whipping his head away. Bad skin, that one, and he'd gone white as a sheet, started rubbing his face with one hand, over and over.

Tightening up that big heavy body of his like he was ready to lose his lunch.

Elmer wondered how long the kid had been on the job, if he'd actually blow chunks. If the kid did heave, would he be smart enough to avoid the body, like Elmer had?

'Cause this kid didn't look like no veteran.

CHAPTER 6

This was worse than Asia.

No matter how brutal it got, war was impersonal, human chess pieces moving around the board, you fired at shadows, strafed huts you pretended were empty, lived every day hoping you wouldn't be the pawn that flipped. Reduce someone to The Enemy, and you could blow off his legs or slice open his belly or napalm his kids without knowing his name. As bad as war got, there was always the chance for making nice sometime in the future- look at Germany and the rest of Europe. To his father, an Omaha Beach alumnus, buddying up to the krauts was an abomination. Dad curled his lip every time he saw a 'hippie-faggot in one of those Hitler beetle-cars.' But Milo knew enough history to understand that peace was as inevitable as war and that as unlikely as it seemed, one day Americans might be vacationing in Hanoi.

War wounds had a chance of healing because they weren't personal. Not that the memory of guts slipping through his hands would fade, but maybe, somewhere off in the future…

But this. This was nothing but personal. Reduction of human form to meat and juice and refuse. Creating the antiperson.

He took a deep breath and buttoned his jacket and managed another look at the corpse. How old could she be, seventeen, eighteen? The hands, about the only parts of her not bloody, were smooth, pale, free of blemish. Long, tapering fingers, pink-polished nails. From what he could tell- and it was hard to tell anything because of the damage- she'd had delicate features, might've been pretty.

No blood on the hands. No defense wounds…

The girl was frozen in time, a heap of ruin. Aborted- like a shiny little wristwatch, stomped on, the crystal shattered.

Manipulated after death, too. The killer spreading her legs, tenting them, pointing the feet at a slight outward angle.

Leaving her out in the open, horrible statuary.

Overkill, the assistant coroner had pronounced, as if you needed a medical degree for that.

Schwinn had told Milo to count wounds, but the task wasn't that simple. The slashes and cuts were straightforward, but did he count the ligature burns around both wrists and ankles as wounds? And what about the deep, angry red trench around her neck? Schwinn had gone off to get his Instamatic- always a shutterbug- and Milo didn't want to ask him- loathed coming across uncertain, the rookie he was.

He decided to include the ligatures in a separate column, continued making hash marks. Reviewed his count of the knife wounds. Both premortem and after death, the coroner was guessing. One, two, three, four… he confirmed fifty-six, began his tally of the cigarette burns.

Inflammation around the singed circles said the burns had been inflicted before death.

Very little spent blood at the scene. She'd been killed somewhere else, left here.

But lots of dried blood atop the head, forming a blackening cap that kept attracting the flies.

The finishing touch: scalping her. Should that be counted as one giant wound, or did he need to peer under the blood, see how many times the killer had hacked away the skin?

A cloud of night gnats circled above the body, and Milo scatted it away, noted 'removal of cranial skin,' as a separate item. Drawing the body and topping it with the cap, his lousy rendering making the blood look like a beanie, so inadequately offensive. He frowned, closed his pad, stepped back. Studied the body from a new perspective. Fought back yet another wave of nausea.

The old black guy who'd found her had heaved his cookies. From the moment Milo had seen the girl, he'd struggled not to do the same. Tightening his bowels and his gut, trying to come up with a mantra that would do the trick.

You're no virgin, you've seen worse.

Thinking of the worst: melon-sized holes in chests, hearts bursting- that kid, that Indian kid from New Mexico – Bradley Two Wolves- who'd stepped on a mine and lost everything below the navel but was still talking as Milo pretended to do something for him. Looking up at Milo with soft brown eyes- alive eyes, dear God- talking calmly, having a goddamn conversation with nothing left and everything leaking out. That was worse, right? Having to talk back to the upper half of Bradley Two Wolves, chitchatting about Bradley's pretty little girlfriend in Galisteo, Bradley's dreams- once he got back to the States, he was gonna marry Tina, get a job with Tina's dad putting up adobe fences, have a bunch of kids. Kids. With nothing below the- Milo smiled down at Bradley and Bradley smiled back and died.

That had been worse. And back then Milo had managed to keep his cool, keep the conversation going. Cleaning up afterward, loading half-of-Bradley in a body bag that was much too roomy. Writing out Bradley's death tag for the flight surgeon to sign. For the next few weeks, Milo had smoked a lot of dope, sniffed some heroin, done an R and R in Bangkok, where he tried some opium. He'd even hazarded an attempt at a skinny Bangkok whore. That hadn't gone so great, but bottom line: He'd maintained.

You can handle this, stupid.

Breathe slowly, don't give Schwinn something else to lecture about-

Schwinn was back now, clicking away with his Instamatic. The LAPD photographer had spotted the little black plastic box, caressed his Nikon, smirked. Schwinn was oblivious to the contempt, in his own little world, crouching on all sides of the body. Getting close to the body, closer than Milo had hazarded, not even bothering to shoo the