“Okay then, let’s clear it,” I said.
We both pulled our guns and approached the dwelling slowly, staying away from the front window to defeat a possible line of fire.
Just then a shot rang out from the hillside on our left. Hitch spun around and went down, blood blossoming from his right leg.
“Shit!” he screamed.
I fell on top of him to protect him from additional fire. I couldn’t tell exactly where the shot had come from. I had my gun trained on the hillside but couldn’t see anyone. When I looked back down at Hitch I saw that he was bleeding badly from his thigh.
“Up there,” Hitch grunted, pointing to a scorched stand of trees on the right edge of the old burn.
I could hear someone crashing through the dried foliage up in the tree line. I rolled off Hitch and checked his leg. The shot hadn’t hit an artery, but he was losing a lot of blood from a huge exit wound. I pulled off his belt and fixed a tourniquet around his right thigh, a few inches above the wound.
“Hold this in your teeth and keep it pulled tight,” I said, handing him one end of the belt, which he clamped between his molars, keeping the pressure on by pulling his head back while still aiming his Beretta in the direction the shot had come from.
I ran back to the car and grabbed the dash mike, switched to the county sheriff’s frequency, and made my broadcast. “This is LAPD D-Fifteen. In the hills above Flintridge. We have an active shooter with shots fired and one officer down. I’m at a mountain trailer site in an old burn area half a mile up a dirt road east of Haverson. Cross street Corona. Send backup and EMTs.”
I jumped in the car as that call got retransmitted and rogered. I pulled the Acura up to the spot where Hitch was lying and put the car between him and the hillside to shield him from any additional fire. The shooter might have a scoped rifle and could be dialing up a kill shot.
“Go get me some payback, dawg,” Hitch hissed through teeth still clamped tightly around the belt tourniquet. “I’m good. I’ll cover your run.”
“Paramedics are coming. You sure?”
“Go.”
I left him and started across the open clearing. I made it with no additional shots fired. Clutching my weapon, I clamored up the mountain grade toward the stand of burned trees. It was a charred hillside, the leafless, misshapen, burned-out trees giving the landscape the blackened look of a war zone.
I searched for broken branches, scuffs in the dirt, or anything that looked like a recent track of any kind. I will admit right now that I’m not much of an outdoorsman, but it didn’t take me long to realize the shooter was gone and I was actually sort of lost.
I turned and headed back down, finding my way by stopping occasionally to listen for traffic noise from the 210 Freeway, which I knew was to the north.
After about fifteen minutes I made it down to the clearing where a half a dozen sheriff’s cars and an EMT fire unit were now parked near the Acura.
Hitch was lying in the back of an ambulance with his leg in a compression bandage. The bleeding had stopped, but he had refused to be transported to Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, insisting instead that he remain in charge of our crime scene until I got back. He had also refused to let the uniformed deputies search the trailer without my being there.
“This is a secondary crime scene in a current LAPD homicide investigation,” I explained to the lead sheriff.
Before going inside the trailer I told the ambulance driver to get going. The EMTs rolled out using red lights and siren, taking Hitch to the hospital. Then, with two sheriff’s deputies flanking me, I approached the trailer. There was a Vespa motor scooter chained to the trailer hitch, which I assumed was Lee Bob’s only transportation. That meant he was probably on foot until he could steal something. I kicked open the Airstream’s door and stepped across the threshold.
The trailer reeked inside. The smell was a pungent mixture of chemicals. I was familiar with this odor from taking down meth labs in the past. It’s produced by cooking a mixture of ephedrine, anhydrous ammonia, red phosphorus, paint thinner, Freon, and battery acid. The reek told me that at one time in the not-too-distant past this Airstream had manufactured crystal meth. Biker gangs had these things parked in remote wilderness areas all around L.A. In the middle of the night with the windows closed to keep the telltale odors from escaping, stringy- haired crystal cookers would fire up their stoves and brew bubbling batches of crank. They picked remote spots like these because of the hard-to-disguise stink these chemicals produced when heated. Most meth cookers ended up inhaling copious quantities of their brew, which killed millions of brain cells and turned them into mumbling idiots. Meth labs also tended to explode more frequently than suicide bombers, and from the look of the Airstream that’s exactly what had happened. The original stove had been ripped out, but there were extensive burn marks where it had once stood. A boarded-up window told me that one of these brain-dead assholes had thrown his flaming pot of crystal out the window, where it had promptly ignited the brush and burned down the adjoining hillside. With the trailer ruined, Lee Bob had moved in.
I checked over the rest of the room. A stained sofa was pushed against the wall opposite a new small one- burner butane stove, which looked to me like a recent addition. There was a paint-chipped, cigarette burn-scarred dresser. No mirror, no shower. In the back of the trailer, a toilet sat behind a dirty brown curtain.
I knew I was in the right spot because on the dresser I saw a half-empty box of 129-grain Hydra-Shok Federals.
CHAPTER 42
A quick survey of the Airstream trailer revealed a potential treasure trove of evidence. A pair of rubber boots were in the back of the small but cluttered closet along with some wadded-up camouflage clothing. As soon as I had done a quick no-touch search, I backed out of the trailer with the two uniformed sheriffs, secured the site, then got on the phone to the crime scene techs and got them rolling.
While I waited for CSI to arrive, I talked with the sheriffs about trying to track Batiste up into the hills by utilizing their mountain rescue team and a fire department chopper. They said they’d get on it. As soon as the techies arrived I turned the crime scene over to them and took off for Huntington Hospital.
As I drove, I began to fit a few more pieces of the puzzle together. The original stove from the burned-out Airstream had been removed and replaced with a small camp stove, a less elaborate cooking device. I wondered if that was Lee Bob’s purchase. It was the kind of unit you could pick up in any outdoor supply store. The stove had only one butane burner and no oven and would barely heat a pot of coffee or can of beans. It would never accommodate a complicated gumbo recipe. Maybe Lee Bob had grown tired of eating warmed-over supermarket pork and beans. Maybe that was why he brought the groceries to Lita’s the night he planned to kill her. Admittedly strange behavior, but my gut told me that might have been what had happened.
Alexa and Jeb were in the waiting room when I arrived at Huntington Hospital. Hitch was already in surgery, so we went down to the cafeteria to get some coffee. On the way they explained to me that the admitting docs in ER had told them the wound was through the meaty part of Hitch’s thigh and, barring infection, wouldn’t cause any lasting damage.
“This whole deal is pretty much blown,” Alexa said as we returned to the surgery wing and settled on the waiting room couch with cups of cafeteria coffee. “We still don’t have any direct evidence against Nash, and if Batiste gets away, all we’ve got is just an interesting theory.”
“There’s gonna be plenty of direct evidence in that Airstream,” I told her. “There’s a pair of rubber boots in the closet that look like Baffins, and I’m betting there will be a triangular scar on the left sole which will match our crime scene print. He also left a box of nine-millimeter Federals on the dresser. If we can match up the lead content in that box to the slugs in Lita’s floor, that could put Lee Bob in her kitchen with the murder weapon. It’s more than enough to bust him. Like you said, it doesn’t directly tie Nash to her murder, but it’s a start. All we have to do is get our hands on Batiste and flip him.”
She heaved a deep sigh. “If we don’t catch Batiste, it’s just a semi-weak circumstantial case.”
