last night, so she had taken the kids out to a movie. When she got home she came in the front door, didn't see her husband, and figured he was still at work. She went to bed, but woke up at two. Michael was still not home, so she called the squad and found out that he had gone EOW three hours earlier. She started to worry and began looking around, and finally found him head-shot on the back porch. She managed to get the kids to a neighbor, then called it in.
Basically, she knew nothing. Heard and saw nothing.
It's SOP in all homicides to regard the spouse as a prime suspect until the facts prove otherwise. But the truth was, Barbara Nightingale looked and sounded legit to me. Still, I couldn't let my suspicion that this was done by a bunch of angry commandos at SRT color my thinking. I had to keep all options open; collect information and evidence with no preconceived bias.
Alexa was right. This was going to be huge-a media frenzy. I had only Jo and Beverly to assist me, and neither had much homicide experience. I could use more help.
When I walked back into the living room I asked Beverly King, 'So, where's Ruta? Think he's ever gonna show?' Even though he was a jerk, at least he was an experienced one.
Beverly shrugged, probably relieved that her partner was MIA, but came to his defense anyway. 'Maybe his pager batteries are dead.' Which is sort of the adult equivalent of the dog ate my homework.
Sergeant Brickhouse was starting to direct the forensic techs onto the porch, so I went outside to stop her.
'Let's just hold off on all that for a minute. I don't want anybody to touch anything for a while.'
'Why?' she argued. 'We need to get on this. Bag and tag the vie, get a liver temperature to establish time of death, search for trace evidence.'
'Just calm down for a minute, okay?'
'I don't work for you, Scully,' she said angrily. 'You don't outrank me either.'
I pulled her off the porch, holding her muscled arm. She was hard to move-big and strong. I led her out of earshot of Beverly King and the CSI techs. We stood in the backyard, ten or twelve yards away.
'Let the fuck go of me,' she said. 'I don't…'
'Work for me, I know. But how 'bout working with me?' She glowered, but I charged ahead. 'How much time did you spend in homicide before you went to IAD?'
'That's not the point. I'm here at the direct request of Sheriff Messenger, Enrique Salazar, and the county supervisors. My department has a lot at stake now. This dead officer was ours. I'm your jurisdiction on this shooting,' she said hotly.
'This isn't the time or place to have it out, but I'm damned tired of fighting with you for control of the wheel. We need some guidelines.'
'Here's a guideline! Stop trying to tell me what to do.'
'I've done over a hundred homicides. I have a way I do it. Why don't you take advantage of that, instead of resenting it?'
She looked at me, anger still flaring. 'Okay. This should be fascinating. So why don't we start with the body, since the body is the reason we're all here?'
'The body isn't going to get up and leave, so there's no need to rush.'
'You don't even want SID to get started? That's nuts.'
'While you and the sheriffs were on the porch holding Michael's hand, half the city desks in town were wandering around inside, screwing up the evidence. We can't change that now, but I want to take a minute and work out an operational theory. The crime scene might have been altered. I wanta think this out for a minute.'
'The porch is the crime scene,' she fired back, then added defensively, 'I kept it as clear as I could.'
Then the second L. A. myth made an unscheduled appearance. 'Where the hell were you? I called you at three a. M. It doesn't take forty minutes to get here from Venice.'
I took a deep breath to control my anger.
'We don't know what the crime scene is. Since I don't see a bullet hole in the back door or porch, we don't know where this happened. He could have been shot inside and dragged out here. The biggest mistake that is usually made in a homicide investigation is prescribing too small an initial crime scene area. If I could rope off the entire block, I'd do it. Now let's just back off for a minute and try to work up a shooting theory.'
She was looking at me, her chest, rising and falling. Hyperventilating. Pissed.
'Look,' I said, 'this is bad form standing out here arguing. We'll have this out later. For now, let's do it my way.'
She turned and walked off, leaving me standing there.
The truth was, I always stretched the edge of the crime scene to the farthest point out, and walked that area first, marking anything that looked out of place. After I had the immediate scene under control and the body was secure, experience had taught me that it's extremely hard to keep people from prowling the edges of the site. Neighbors, and even other cops, patrol the border, and if it's a large area it's easy for some well-intentioned schlub to pick something up or leave a footprint. We could find some cop's bootprint, plaster it, then start running off in the completely wrong direction of looking for a killer wearing size-ten combat boots.
Once I spent two weeks working a hair follicle our CSI techs found at a murder scene. The lab reported that the hair had undergone an amber tint dye job. It also had traces of an expensive French shampoo and a special French conditioner. A good potential lead. I put it out on the news that we were looking for an upscale killer with tinted amber hair who uses an expensive, French shampoo and conditioner.
A week later, I'm looking in Alexa's bathroom cabinet and I see all those same products in there. It turned out that the hair had fallen off my own coat and belonged to my wife. It's very hard to protect a crime scene, so I always start at the far edges first, and work in toward the body.
I walked the perimeter carefully, examining the ground, looking down, shining my police flashlight. The sun would be up in a few hours, but I couldn't wait, because I had seen the anger and pain in Gary Nightingale, the deadly resolve and violence in Rick Manos. I had also promised Alexa I wouldn't let this investigation drift.
The projectile had entered Michael's head from the front, the same as Billy Greenridge. The slug caught him square in the forehead, right between the running lights. He had fallen where he was shot and since the bullet had not hit the house or the door behind him, that meant it probably came from the side. To miss the house completely, the shooter had to have been firing from either the far right or the far left portion of the back yard.
I started walking around out there, searching for the shooting location. About forty yards away, behind an old lemon tree, I saw footprints. Boots. Big ones; size thirteen at least. The lowest limb of the tree had a fork about five feet up from the ground. A perfect place to cradle a rifle barrel. I called the crime techs over and showed them the footprints and the tree limb. They started photographing and getting ready to plaster the impressions.
I kept looking around on the ground on the right side of the tree. About forty feet away, lying under a small hedge, I spotted the casing.
I called Jo Brickhouse over and pointed it out to her. Beverly King followed. It was an ArmaLite.223, the kind of ordnance common to AR-15 assault rifles.
It didn't escape my notice that the long guns SRT had been using up at Hidden Ranch were AR-15s. The.223s were very fast rounds, with a muzzle velocity of over three thousand feet per second. The projectile is designed to tumble and break into smaller pieces on impact. After we photographed it, I leaned down and retrieved the brass, again using my pen tip. I held it up and we all stared at it.
The casing was a deadly calling card, and all three of us were thinking the same thing. Finally, Beverly King put our thoughts into words: 'This seems way too easy.'
Chapter 24
The strong santa Ana winds whipped September leaves off the elm trees that lined Sherman Way, driving the temperature up further, scattering trash from overflowing garbage cans, and blowing down our yellow crime scene tape.
