Pacific Homicide Read online

  Davie entered the driveway from Culver Boulevard, pressed her ID to the security sensor, and waited for the gate to retreat. For the past month, she had been assigned to Pacific Division, which was number fourteen of twenty-one decentralized police stations. It covered 25.74 square miles carved out of the 468 square miles comprising the city of Los Angeles. The station served about 200,000 Westside vegans, movie stars, and gangbangers in the neighborhoods of Venice Beach, Oakwood, Mar Vista, Playa del Rey, Playa Vista, Palms, and Westchester. Its western border was the Pacific Ocean with Culver City to the east, the Los Angeles International Airport to the south, and National Boulevard to the north.

  After the 1992 Rodney King riots, politicians decided that division sounded too militant. The next chief adopted a community-policing model and Pacific Division became Pacific Area Community Police Station. Subsequent regimes lopped off words until the brass and the politicians settled on Pacific Area Police Station. Most cops still called it Pacific Division. Burglaries and thefts topped the list of crimes in the hood, but homicides kept four full-time detectives occupied and Davie was grateful to be one of them.

  Vaughn lingered in the parking lot to make a phone call. Davie entered through the back door. Before heading to her desk, she ducked into Records to pick up a blue three-ring binder and a set of twenty-six dividers that would make up the guts of Jane Doe’s Murder Book. All LAPD Murder Books were organized the same way. Only the victims were unique.

  None of the binders on the shelf were new. The city was broke. Some days, detectives were lucky to find an ink cartridge for the printer. Davie selected the binder with the least wear, but the shabbiness of the castoff annoyed her. Jane Doe deserved better.

  The air in the detective squad room smelled of a TV dinner rotating in the microwave. Something Italian. Lasagna. Davie heard the radio dispatcher broadcasting a 211-robbery call and saw three Burglary detectives huddled outside the door to the Situation Room, probably calculating how to survive the mountain of Category II cases that landed on their desks each day, the ones with no fingerprints, no witnesses, no forensic evidence, and no hope of ever being solved.

  She glanced to her left. Through the glass window of his office, she saw Lt. Ivan Bellows sitting at the conference table, talking to somebody she couldn’t see. Davie had only been at Pacific for a month, but it was long enough to know that detectives in the squad room considered Bellows a soulless bean counter who only seemed to care about statistics. He had never worked as a detective. Some thought he didn’t understand the mindset. She didn’t know him well enough to judge.

  As she headed to her desk, her boss, Det-3 Frank Giordano, braced his hands on the arms of his chair and hoisted himself up to greet her. He let out a groan, breathing deeply to control his pain. He had torn the ligaments in his knee during the takedown of a suspect in the Oakwood projects two months ago. Davie figured at his age he should have known better. Chasing bad guys was a young cop’s game.

  She set her notebook and the binder on her desk. “You okay, sir?”

  “Peachy.”

  Giordano limped toward her, his bulk casting a shadow over her desk. His starched white shirt crinkled as he rested his arm on the cubicle partition. “Solve the case yet, kid?”

  “No, sir, but I’m working on it.” She filled him in on what she and Vaughn had learned at Hyperion. “I’m hoping Missing Persons can tell me who she is,” Davie said.

  “Tough case, but you need the experience if you want to be a good Homicide dick. You haven’t paid your dues until you’ve taken at least five or six cases to trial and sweated it out on the witness stand while some defense attorney treats you like you’re on trial.”

  She slid the dividers onto the rings of the binder and filed her chrono notes on the Blount interview under Section #1. “Yes, sir.”

  “And stop calling me sir. Makes me feel old. Call me Frank.”

  From the shelf above her gray cubicle, she pulled out a list of telephone numbers she had compiled in her years on the job. The movement caused the collapse of several softbound manuals she also kept on the shelf, including two volumes of the California Penal Code, a Homicide Investigation manual, and a dog-eared paperback edition of The American Heritage Dictionary she’d had since college. All the information in the manuals could be found online, but she preferred the tactile experience of holding a real book in her hands. She rearranged the manuals and made a mental note to buy a set of bookends.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Giordano leaned toward her and lowered his voice. “You’ve been here a month, Richards, so by now you should know I don’t allow any sissies, babies, pussies, or thin-skinned peeps on my team. If you turn out to be a Lone Ranger with a chip on your shoulder, I’ll boot your ass out of Homicide before you have time to join the coffee pool.”

  She suppressed the urge to return fire. Maybe this was just a belated welcome-aboard speech he gave to all his detectives. If not, this assignment was going to be a long bumpy ride. “Roger that.”

  “One more thing,” he continued. “Robbery-Homicide Division may get all the glory, but divisional detectives are the best in the department because we don’t cherry-pick our cases. We investigate every murder that comes our way, and we don’t bitch, moan, or expect rock star treatment. How does that sound to you?”

  “Like an old Dragnet episode, Frank.”

  She immediately regretted the comment. Before coming to the division, she had asked around about Giordano. People who had worked with him told her he was a smart, fair-minded supervisor who backed his detectives. After hearing that, she lobbied Giordano to consider her for a vacant slot in Homicide. When a position opened, he’d called her. Another supervisor might have accepted her because he needed a woman on his table to avoid any affirmative action shit that might roll downhill from headquarters and land on his desk. Not Giordano. Instead, he had assigned her as IO on the Jane Doe case. She needed to prove to him he’d made the right decision.

  “I’m glad we understand each other,” he said.

  As he turned and limped toward the lieutenant’s office, she thought she saw Giordano smile, which made her think she had passed some sort of test.

  Davie dialed the number for the Missing Persons Unit. A female answered and delivered the greeting verbatim from the LAPD manual: “Good afternoon. Los Angeles Police Department Missing Persons Unit, Detective Kim speaking. May I help you?”

  Few detectives used the canned civility, but Davie let it stand without comment. She gave Kim what stats she had on Jane Doe #3, including the braces and the spiderweb tat on her right elbow.

  “How long has she been dead?” Kim asked.

  “Hard to say.”

  “You have any idea how many adults are reported missing in this city?”

  “I only need to find one of them.”

  Kim let out a throaty sigh. “How tall is she?”

  Davie thought of the woman’s long slender bones and calculated based on proportions. “Can’t be sure because of the condition of the body, but I’d guess five-seven or -eight.”

  “I’ll look through the reports, but we’re short-handed at the moment. I’ll have to call you back.”

  “I’ll hold.”

  Davie waited through several seconds of silence. Finally, Kim said, “Suit yourself.” The line went quiet.

  The irritated tone in Kim’s voice made it clear she felt inconvenienced. Davie wondered if Kim would try to punish her with a long payback hold. Just in case, she made a note of the time. If Kim decided to play games, Davie would have proof of the delay tactic in the Murder Book. She was surprised when Kim returned to the line a few minutes later.

  “Here’s something interesting. This report was filed two days ago but we just got our copy this morning. I haven’t had time to follow up yet. If the chief would kick loose a little overtime pay, maybe we’d get more done around here.”
r />   Davie wasn’t interested in budget issues. “Who is she?”

  She heard papers rustling.

  “Name’s Anya Nosova. Her boyfriend reported her missing, a guy named Andre Lucien. His California driver’s license states he’s forty-three. She’s nineteen. Big age difference. She’s five-eight, one hundred pounds, long blonde hair. She wears braces and has a spiderweb tattoo on her right elbow.”

  The click of puzzle pieces falling into place was always a good sound. “That’s her. That’s my victim.”

  “Lucien claims the two had a fight and she walked out on him. She’s from Kiev, Ukraine. Doesn’t have any friends or relatives in the area, so when she didn’t come back to their apartment, he got worried and contacted police.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “That’s the interesting part. He filed the report at Devonshire Division but he lives in 90293. Isn’t that zip in Pacific?”

  “Yeah, Westchester. Body was found at Hyperion, just a few miles away. Did he call in the report?”

  “Nope. He signed the paperwork himself. Odd that he drove over thirty miles to report her missing when he could have gone to a station less than four miles from his apartment.”

  “Maybe he wanted to delay the investigation,” Davie said.

  “If he killed her, why report her missing at all?”

  “Hedging his bets. The victim must have friends or relatives somewhere. Eventually they’d start asking questions. If her body turned up, he’d look like a concerned boyfriend. If it didn’t turn up, he’d still look like a concerned boyfriend.”

  “Good luck proving that.”

  “Prisons are filled with criminals who underestimated the police.”

  If the victim was Anya Nosova, Davie doubted the girl had thrown herself into the sewer over a fight with a boyfriend. Somebody had murdered her. If so, that made Lucien a person of interest in Nosova’s death. She needed him to interview him as soon as possible.

  Davie grabbed Kim’s report as soon as it slid into the fax tray and hurried back to her desk computer. Anya Nosova didn’t appear in any of the law enforcement databases, but Andre Lucien had a rap sheet. No domestic battery charges had been filed against him, no violent crimes at all, only a couple of drug-possession arrests with no convictions. She couldn’t find any recent employment records, but Lucien owned a BMW and he lived in a decent neighborhood, so he had to have some source of income. Based on his arrest record, she wondered if he was supporting himself by selling drugs.

  “Hey, partner,” she said. “Let’s roll. We have a lead in the Jane Doe case.”

  Vaughn stood in the gray cubicle across from hers, staring over her shoulder. “Don’t look around, Davie. You won’t like what you see.”

  Davie turned to see Det. Spencer Hall strolling out of the lieutenant’s office, flashing a boyish grin as he scanned the squad room, searching for an audience. The overhead lights caught strands of premature gray in Hall’s blond hair, making them seem translucent. Under his navy V-neck sweater, he’d undone the top button of his white oxford shirt and loosened the knot of the rep tie. The getup made him look like an overgrown Catholic-school boy.

  Her gaze glided down his trim frame. He’d lost weight. She’d heard he’d recently reconciled with his wife. The broccoli Nazi must have put him on a diet.

  “I wonder what he’s doing here,” Davie said.

  “He’s the new man on the Burglary table.”

  She stared at Vaughn, looking for any indication he was joking. “Pacific Burglary?”

  “Sorry. I should have told you. The transfer list for the new DP came out yesterday.”

  The transfer list outlined changes in duty assignments for each twenty-eight-day deployment period. Hall was joining Pacific in a few days and that meant only one thing for her—trouble.

  Six months ago, she and Spencer Hall had been detectives assigned to Southeast Division, she in Burglary, and he in Major Assault Crimes. Hall’s partner had been in court, so Davie went with him on a routine follow-up call for one of his domestic battery cases. When they arrived at the house, the suspect was in the bedroom, beating his wife. As Hall pulled the man away from the victim, the man grabbed Hall’s gun. Davie killed him to save Hall’s life.

  After the shooting, the LAPD had prodded, analyzed, and questioned everything from Davie’s judgment to her sanity. Hall thought they should stop communicating until the OIS investigation was over. She felt that would show a lack of solidarity but he was adamant, so she agreed.

  Then buzz began to spread along the Blue Grapevine that Hall had had the situation under control when Davie panicked. She assumed Hall had started the rumors. Maybe the pressure of the investigation had been too much for him or maybe he felt a need to shore up his reputation as a tough guy who didn’t need a woman’s protection. She had no proof Hall was behind the trash talk. Some things you could never prove. It was the detective’s curse.

  She had never defended herself against those lies, at least not in public, deciding instead to fight them with competence. Soon after the shooting, Hall moved to Hollywood station. He hadn’t spoken to her since. She had remained in Southeast until her recent transfer to Pacific.

  Once Hall arrived at Pacific, avoiding him wouldn’t be an option. The squad room was too small for that. Everybody would sense the tension. Everybody would be watching.

  “Forget about Hall,” she said. “Let’s roll. I’ll sign out the shop.”

  Davie opened Giordano’s desk drawer and logged out the keys to a dual-purpose Crown Victoria. The ride was a standard police sedan but in case they got into trouble, it was also equipped with lights and a siren.

  Vaughn winked. “Like I said before, partner, you’re a machine.”

  He was wrong. She wasn’t a machine, but she had worked too hard to let Spencer Hall destroy her career. She would confront him before he got to the division. She just had to find the right time.

  3

  It was Tuesday morning and Malcolm Harrington stood in his sixth floor office at Figueroa Plaza in downtown L.A. surrounded by the detritus of a dead man’s life. He brushed a speck of lint from the sleeve of his custom-made suit and glanced out the window to the concrete below. The view was dismal compared to the panorama of Santa Monica Bay from his former deep-carpet law office in Century City, but Harrington was content.

  Three days ago, his photograph had appeared on the front page of the Los Angeles Times, accepting a handshake from Mayor Lloyd Gossett and the job of Inspector General of the Los Angeles Police Commission. He had replaced the former IG, who died in a scuba diving accident. The man had gone in the water alone, a miscalculation that proved fatal. Unfortunate as his death was, it had provided Harrington with the opportunity of a lifetime, so he felt a measure of gratitude to the man.

  A tentative tap on the door interrupted his musings. His new assistant, Maggie Perez, stepped into the room holding two empty boxes and a roll of packing tape. She was attractive but not beautiful, from the X generation or perhaps a millennial. He could never remember what came after Baby Boomers, his own generation. The skirt of Perez’s business suit was too short and the jacket too tight for his taste. Nonetheless, the girl seemed smart and eager to please. He’d wait a few days before counseling her about professional office attire.

  “Sorry to bother you,” she said. “I need to remove some things from your desk.”

  Perez had an annoying habit of ending her sentences on a high note, like she was asking a question. That, too, had to change.

  He motioned her inside. “I’ve already emptied some of the clutter. It’s in the trash can.”

  Perez seemed confused for a moment and then reached into the wastebasket and retrieved an abalone shell filled with paperclips and a photograph of a model-thin blonde woman with three tow-headed children. She gently placed both into one of the boxes.

  �
��There are some files you need to look at,” she said. “There was no time to sign them before he—” Her voice rose to high C and then broke off. “You might want to review them while I’m packing, in case you have any questions.”

  Harrington checked his Patek Philippe watch, a gift to himself after his first million-dollar jury award as a civil litigator. He had a meeting at noon, but there was enough time to review the files.

  “Fine,” he said. “Bring them in.”

  Perez left the room and returned shortly with a stack of file folders, which she separated into two piles on his desk. She pointed to the smaller stack. “These cases are closed. They just need your signature. The others … well, you’ll see from my notes.”

  He glanced at the closed files, hoping to dispense with them before the day was out. As he read the labels, he saw a familiar name on an officer-involved shooting case—Davina Richards.

  Davina, Davie for short. He was surprised to learn that she had become an LAPD detective just like her old man but not surprised that she was in trouble with the department. When Harrington last saw her fifteen years ago she’d been a teenager, but he hadn’t forgotten that cloud of red hair and those green eyes, shooting death darts at him from the bench behind the defense table in a courtroom in downtown L.A.

  “Why is the Richards case in the closed pile?” he asked.

  “The LAPD ruled the shooting was within policy. The Police Commission agreed. You just need to sign off on it and I’ll do the rest.”

  “I’m not going to rubber-stamp someone else’s decision. I have the final say now.”

  Perez stared at the folders to hide her discomfort. “Of course. It’s your call. Are you familiar with the case?”

  “No, are you?”

  “Somewhat.” She picked up the file and opened it to refresh her memory. “Richards was a Burglary detective. Hall worked Major Assault Crimes. They were on a routine follow-up call on a domestic violence case. When Hall entered the house, he found Abel Hurtado beating up his—”