I slipped her my card and said, “If you think of something that might be helpful, please give me a call.”
She studied the card and said, “Your name sounds familiar.”
My stomach clenched.
“Didn’t you catch some serial killer?”
I nodded, relieved.
“I think I read about you in the paper.” She glanced at the card again. “Levine,” she muttered to herself. “That ends in a vowel. You I — talian?”
I shook my head.
She turned her head and studied me out of one eye. “You look I — talian.”
“When I was a young patrolman, Italian suspects would call me paisano. Once I was investigating a Greek loan shark, who dropped some of his mother’s baklava off at the station for me. He thought I was a landsman, so I’d cut him some slack.”
“Yeah, you could get lost anywhere in that part of the world.” She took a deep drag off her cigarette, exhaled, and fanned away the smoke. “Pete looked a little like you-when he was younger and thinner.” She dropped her cigarette, ground it into the dirt with her big heel and stared off at the onion fields, tears sluicing down her face. When I put my hand on her back, she began to sob, her chest heaving. She looked up at me and said, “Pete was a good guy. He just had his problems, like everyone else.” She kicked at the dirt with the toe of her boot. “Shit. I want you to find that son of a bitch.”
I nodded and said, “I will.”
I drove back to the freeway at dusk as the sun curled over the Tehachapis, the ridges lit a burnished gold in the dying light. The last light lingered on the western horizon, streaking the sky charcoal and crimson. Overhead, the first stars glinted and the moon shone like a chunk of ice in the crystalline desert sky.
Speeding back down the San Gabriels, I pulled a small, digital, voice-activated recorder out of my briefcase, which was rigged with a microphone in the corner. All the way home I listened to the interviews of Relovich’s ex- wife and uncle.
CHAPTER 4
I drove through the desolate downtown streets early the next morning, past crackheads dozing under bus benches and winos sleeping in cardboard boxes, and parked in Chinatown, which was bustling with families arriving for dim sum breakfasts. After picking up a cup of jasmine tea and a bag of bao — fluffy steamed buns brushed with syrup and stuffed with mushrooms and ginger-from a Chinese bakery, I headed back to Cesar Chavez Avenue and crossed the bridge over the Los Angeles River, a thin stream of brackish water purling down the graffiti-scarred cement banks. I headed to the coroner’s office, a bland, two-story tan building off a dreary East Los Angeles street lined with fast-foot restaurants.
I parked and munched on the bao and sipped the tea. When I finished, I cut through the back entrance, pulled powder blue scrubs over my clothes and booties over my shoes, and then slipped on my breathing-filter mask. I walked down a hallway, which was the same color as the scrubs, past the fluorescent lights that zapped the insects drawn to the corpses, and entered the autopsy room. I grimaced as I was assaulted by the distinctive amalgam of formaldehyde, decaying flesh, and disinfectant. A dozen bodies were lined up on shiny steel gurneys, and pathologists and technicians were bent over the corpses, probing, peering, cutting, snipping, dissecting, and slicing. Metal troughs and chrome counters gleamed under the bright overhead lights. The brown tile floor was stained with blood and stippled with tissue.
“Busy weekend?” I asked Dr. Ramesh Gupta, who was examining Pete Relovich’s waxy, gray body.
“Quite hectic, Ash,” Gupta said, in a lilting, melodious East Indian accent. “Eleven homicides last night, plus three suicides. One was a jumper.” He frowned and shook his head. “From a freeway overpass. At rush hour. Very messy. Anyway, glad you’re back. God knows, the LAPD can’t afford to lose a man as perceptive as you.”
“Thanks Doc. I’m glad you’re on this one.”
Relovich was a big, beefy guy with broad shoulders and a thick neck. But on the metal gurney, naked, streaked with blood, he looked victimized and vulnerable. Relovich’s brown eyes glittered under the fluorescent lights, as lifeless as imbedded marbles.
The countless corpses I had seen rarely had looks of terror or horror on their faces, which had surprised me when I finished basic training and saw my first dead bodies. Often, they looked simply confused or disoriented. But Relovich had a curious expression: his mouth was open and his eyes were slightly narrowed as if he was about to raise an index finger and say, “I disagree.”
I bent over the body and spotted a thick scar on the side of his nose. That must have been where the bullet fragment entered his nasal cavity before landing in his mouth. I don’t think I would’ve had the balls to spit it out, carry my partner to safety, and then return fire.
When I pick up a case late-like this one-the victim is an abstraction for the first day or two. It is not until the autopsy, until I see the victim splayed on the gurney, cold and gray, the dangling toe tag, that the murder becomes palpable to me.
Now, looking down at Relovich’s corpse, I felt a great responsibility. To him. To securing justice. And I felt a great burden. I knew that if I didn’t solve this case, it would never be solved. It’s all on me. I looked around at the other bodies on the gurneys and thought of my murdered relatives. They never had a proper burial. Nobody investigated their deaths. Their killers were never brought to justice. Not one of them even has a tombstone.
Gupta snapped his fingers and said, “Wake up, Ash.” He pointed to the neat, round hole below Relovich’s lower lip. “A clean entry wound.” He then lifted Relovich up, and I spotted at the base of his head the jagged, star- shaped exit wound.
“I’ve got a complicated diagnosis for you,” Gupta said gravely. “Cause of death, mode of death, and manner of death can be summed up like this: B.B.T.S.”
“I don’t know that one,” I said, perplexed. “You better explain.”
“Brains blown to shit,” Gupta said with a high-pitched giggle. Still smiling, he grabbed a scalpel off the counter and made a large Y-shaped incision from Relovich’s shoulders to his navel. An autopsy technician, wielding a huge pair of clippers, crunched through Relovich’s ribs and removed the sternum.
“No matter how many times I hear it, I hate that sound,” I said.
Gupta lifted the rib cage and peered inside, like a mechanic searching for a missing spark plug. Pointing to an expanse of brown, pitted tissue he said, “Very dirty lungs.”
“Well, he did work in Los Angeles.”
“No. He was a smoker.”
After deftly trimming out Relovich’s heart and other internal organs, weighing them, and logging the information on a clipboard, Gupta grabbed a metal ladle, dipped it into the open chest cavity, and poured a small quantity of blood into a glass vial. “See how easy that blood pours? Your victim expired quickly. No thickening or clotting at all.”
“Coroner investigator estimates time of death at about twenty-three hundred,” I said. “But I don’t trust their estimates. What’s your take?”
Gupta jabbed at the stomach contents with the scalpel. “I’d say the investigator was pretty close.” He pointed to a checkerboard of partially digested brown meat fibers and what appeared to be white potato chunks. “He probably ate dinner a few hours before he was killed. That food had just started working through his digestive system.”
Gupta dissected Relovich’s neck, snipped out the larynx, and then with a few deft slashes just above the throat, removed the U-shaped hyoid bone, which was encased in pink tissue. He pointed to a jagged edge of bone and said, “The hyoid’s cracked. Your guy was probably strangled.”
I pointed to Relovich’s hands. “No defensive wounds at all. An ex-cop like him would have been fighting to his last breath. Doesn’t make sense.”
“I agree.”
“So what’s the cause of death. Gunshot or strangulation?”
With tweezers, Gupta lifted Relovich’s lips and studied the gums. He then examined the tissue inside the
