No, I don’t need a Luminol… No, I don’t need a DNA on the blood on the bungalow floor,” Mike Cabello barked into the phone. “Of course it’s the victim’s blood!” He was talking to a serology technician at the crime lab. “Whatever happened to common sense?” he muttered, slamming down the phone.
Jon Johnson sat at the desk next to Cabello’s in the noisy, cluttered, cavernous squad bay, scanning the latest report from the lab. “Meg Davis’s shoes don’t match the prints around the Nathanson house or outside Maxi Poole’s house,” he said. “But the prints show they were definitely women’s shoes. Guess a lot of women have black Reeboks—my wife has two pairs, black and white.”
“And none of the hairs or fibers from either house matched anything they swept up in the Davis woman’s room or car,” Cabello put in. “Also, Meg Davis was left-handed—”
“Yup,” Johnson replied, “the dog was slashed in the left jugular and on the left side of the body. Maxi Poole said she’s sure the intruder wielded the weapon in her right hand. Can we assume it was a she?”
“Not really—men committing crimes have been known to wear women’s shoes, and this perp is evidently big on disguises.”
“Well, can we rule out Meg Davis?” Johnson threw out.
“And release the body for burial? Let’s wait on that,” Cabello said. “Maybe we’ll get a lead on the damn cross.” He had found out that only one cross had been made for the Black Sabbat shoot. Wonder of wonders, Maxi Poole had actually called that one in—her priority had changed from working on the station’s coverage of the murders to saving her own skin, he figured.
“What about Meg Davis’s bedroom?” Johnson asked. “They’ve got movers there now, but we have an order in place that no one can touch that room. Can we lift it?”
“Might as well,” Cabello mused. “Salinas and Brown raked that joint top to bottom. They defrosted the freezer. They pulled the stove apart.”
“We’ll tell the mother if she happens to find that cross in the move, give us a shout, huh?” Johnson grinned.
“Very funny,” Cabello grunted. “If she finds the damn thing after our guys tore the place apart she can have my job.”
“Who’d want it?” Johnson scoffed, his gaze scanning the Homicide section with its ninety-plus desks laden with dirty coffee mugs, stacks of newspapers, mountains of files, and the occasional picture of a spouse or kids whom the sweating men and women who worked there rarely saw.
“Yah, she’d love the overtime deal, huh?” Cabello laughed. Detectives in the bureau worked two weeks straight, then got three days off, which was a joke—most of the time they worked right through their scheduled days off. And their time sheets read nine to five, which was another joke—they often worked all night. It was regulation to list overtime on their weekly time sheets, along with the reasons why they felt the overtime was justified, but most of them didn’t bother because they never got paid for it. Their overtime was routinely red-penciled, even if they wrote that they were working past five o’clock because a killer was holding them at gunpoint chained up in a cellar. Not good enough. The detectives would kid each other when they met in the squad room or in the field at two, three, four in the morning. “Working pretend overtime, huh?” they’d say.
Mike Cabello and Jon Johnson were pretend-overtime kings. They had been in the Hall until after three o’clock that morning, interrogating and processing Alan Bronstein and William James. They had both got home and logged a couple of hours’ sleep when the calls came that Jack Nathanson’s widow had been murdered at the Beverly Hills Hotel. They met at the crime scene to oversee the activity there, then came into the office to brainstorm the case. Over the department’s bad coffee, they were trying to make sense out of what they knew, and how it fit together.
“So what have we got on the Orson woman?” Cabello asked.
“No struggle,” Johnson said. “Nothing under her nails. Perfect uptown manicure. Probably didn’t have a chance to put up a fight.”
“And the key?”
“Her own fingerprints on it. Not even smudged. Looks like she opened the door herself, still had the key in her hand when she was attacked, then dropped it—”
“And the killer dragged her inside, then pulled the door closed and locked on the way out, to buy some time to get away,” Cabello finished. “What about footprints around the bungalow?”
“They’re photographing now, but Garcia says it’s a swamp. The sprinklers drenched the area overnight, and they don’t think they’ll get anything useful. Some dust on the veranda. The techs are supergluing, but they’re not optimistic.”
“Our two lock-’n’-key boys are present and accounted for,” Cabello noted. “Bronstein was released on bail at seven-fourteen this morning, and Billy-boy’s still in the tank.”
“If Bronstein was the mastermind behind these murders, Janet Orson would not have been on his kill sheet,” Johnson observed, “He was in love with her. Boy, his whole world fell apart, big-time, in the space of a few hours.”
“Yah, couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” Cabello groused. “Christ, I’m beat.”
“Well, get over it,” Jon said. “It’s gonna be a long day.”
“Okay, moving down the checklist: No robbery—it didn’t look like anything was disturbed in the bungalow, you agree?”
“Funny, the only one who would know for sure is Bronstein. The hotel people say he moved her into the place on Sunday; then they had dinner in the hotel dining room. On Monday he took her to the Sonora Cafe, a tony restaurant on La Brea, and last night they went to the movie premiere in Century City, then to Mortons for a nightcap,” Johnson intoned, reading from his notes.
“And we know he slept with her in bungalow 16, at least on Sunday night,” he went on. “We couldn’t get any confirmation about Monday. But we’re talking constant companion here. Do you want to haul him over to the bungalow to have a look?”
“Nah”—Cabello shook his head—“I don’t want to look at his ugly face again today. Besides, you saw the body. Diamonds in her ears, diamonds in her hair, bracelet worth a zillion bucks—” The phone on his desk pealed, aggravating his throbbing head.
“Yah!” he rumbled into the mouthpiece. “Uh-huh… Okay, thanks.” He put down the receiver.
“Big surprise,” he deadpanned to Johnson. “Same blade, same wounds, same bloody fucking cross. So what have we got?”
“Same killer,” Johnson said.