chapter eight

“So?” Shin was waiting for me at his desk on the third floor, nervously cracking his knuckles as he elbowed aside the evidence bags from the Devonshire case. “How’d it go?”

I flashed him my badge. “But you’re going solo to the autopsy.” As I glanced at the bag holding the contents from the deceased’s purse, I filled him in on the O.I.S. verdict.

“Could be worse,” Shin said, clearly relieved. “They benched you. They didn’t kick you off the team.” He handed me a flash-dot. “The Devonshire girl’s phone records just came in. Have fun with the read through.”

“You’re actually enjoying this,” I said.

Shin’s grin and waving fingers were his reply as he headed out. The news feed playing on my computer was grim. More kids stricken with Alz-X, more bodies turning up on the streets since Nieto had been been released.

I turned off the newsfeed, put my feet up, and started the slog backwards through three months of phone records.

An orphaned foster kid, Britney had nobody in the way of family. I was hoping to get a sense of who she was and looking for patterns or anything unusual.

A glance at the log of calls from July through the first week of October showed Britney Devonshire had made over 1,500 texts to a local number that the system identified as belonging to a Mercedes Delblanco. A quick search revealed Delblanco was another stripper employed by Sandy Beaches. From her photo, I recognized the Latina with the blue-black hair I’d seen at the club.

Flipping past the phone log to the transcription detail, I started in on the cache of texts. The fifteen hundred back and forths between the girls confirmed Mercedes Delblanco as Britney Devonshire’s BFF from work. I slogged through texts debating the merits of various makeup tips, including passionate discussion of favorite lip and nail color complete with emojis and multiple exclamation points. The deceased favored a shade called Apricot Dream. I remembered her chipped, bitten nails from the crime scene.

Neither woman was a fan of their boss Sandy Rose. Complaints were frequent. There was a spike in the number of texts at the end of August. The uptick in volume apparently centered on Sandy’s decision to cut Mercedes’ hours and move her to the afternoon shift at the beginning of September. Britney had stayed on prime time in the evenings. Sandy had merited a few choice epithets, but there was no mention of drug tests, random or otherwise.

There was, however, girltalk about clients: shared advice on who was a good tipper and who failed to observe the look don’t touch rules of the establishment. But none of the clients seemed to be anything but minor nuisances.

Barring the litany of complaints Mercedes had about her ex-husband Raul, the usual chatter about boyfriends was surprisingly thin on the ground for a woman as attractive as Britney Devonshire. Mercedes dated, but her friend was either less forthcoming, or had less to report. Until a few weeks before her death when a few references to somebody Ms. Devonshire had met recently popped up, including one elated text complete with emoticon: he said yes Merc!!! 🙂

Timecode showed Britney had fired off that text the same week Sandy Rose had canned the now dead stripper—just a week prior to her death.

Britany Devonshire’s last text to Mercedes, sent only a couple hours before her estimated time of death, read: Bye-bye to the 818. Movin on up.

I switched back to the main log listing phone calls. Scanning timecode of incoming calls, I found one number that matched the timeframe for both texts. Moreover, Britney Devonshire had made three additional outgoing calls to that same number earlier in the month. The system showed the number she’d called only a couple hours before her death belonged to a Dr. Gabriel Lee.

Another quick search told me Dr. Lee was a sixty-three-year-old microbiologist employed by Genesys, a biomed research facility in Sun Valley. He was married with one teenaged son. I sat back in my chair and stared at the data. Why had the stripper contacted a microbiologist old enough to be her grandfather once, let alone five times in three weeks? Was he a client/john from the club, a friend, or something else, something more?

Her glove phone camera roll turned up mostly selfies and badly-framed shots of her cat. But there were a couple pics of a woman in a purple bikini I recognized as Mercedes Delblanco. In the picture Mercedes squinted at the camera as she stood on Zuma beach near the lifeguard station nearest the parking lot. I scrolled through the rest of the photos, but there was no Dr. Lee. No men at all in fact, which once again pointed to a black hole in the boyfriend department.

I put down the log and picked up the evidence bag of some of the deceased’s effects. Her purse held the California driver’s license I’d already seen, but no wallet. Like most people, she’d apparently charged all her purchases to her barcode. A small pink bag of makeup held some lipstick, mascara and a half-empty bottle of the apricot nail polish she favored. The only other item in the bag was a little pocket Bible.

Britney Devonshire’s apartment had held an e-reader stuffed with gossip rags and travel magazines, but no books or religious paraphenalia. The title page told me the Bible had belonged to her long-dead mother. I started to flip through the pages and something fell out.

A grimy print out, it looked like a fuzzy identity barcode—then I turned it on its side.

“A blood spot?” I said the words aloud.

Blood spots, the colloquial term for genetic partial prelims, were a standard part of my job. The down and dirty genetic analysis of a single drop of blood revealed enough about the donor to make for an economical identifier that was nonetheless accurate to over ninety-eight per cent. Thirty years ago, blood spots had been confined to the criminal population where blood or saliva was harvested upon arrest. Once big data companies saw the potential, however, the pool of registered individuals had expanded. The fastest growing market had been neo-natal.

Many prospective parents wanted to know the medical forecast for their progeny, and fetal partial prelims were tailored to indicate undesireable genetic traits, both existing and potential.

This blood spot wasn’t from the crime lab or the outside lab the LAPD used for its genetic contract work. That meant it hadn’t been harvested from Britney Devonshire’s prior arrest for soliciting. That also meant it likely was neo-natal.

I texted Shin to call me straightaway.