2

Shortly before eight o’clock Monday morning, McCartin crosses the squad room on the way to his desk. Haro stops him.

“How’s your case look?” Haro asks.

“We locked up the suspect yesterday,” McCartin says, attempting to suppress a smile.

“Yesterday?” Haro asks incredulously.

“You got it. That’s what happens when you put a real detective on the case,” McCartin says, chuckling as he hurries to his desk.

“Butt licker,” Haro mutters.

Back in their own squad room, at their own desks, which are side by side, McCartin and Knolls sift through the growing mound of paperwork on Luda’s murder. Robbery-Homicide Division is on the third floor of Parker Center, nicknamed the Glass House by the prisoners transported to its holding cells. The eight-story structure stands in the heart of downtown Los Angeles, a block from city hall, the city’s best-known architectural landmark. While city hall is a classic Art Deco skyscraper with distinctive serrated, sloping walls, Parker Center is a bland glass and steel building that it looks like an enormous refrigerator. Built in 1955, the LAPD headquarters—renamed, in 1966, to honor former chief William H. Parker—was shoddily constructed and is now decrepit and cramped. The floors sag. The plumbing leaks. Paint peels in the hallways. Some of the offices have furniture and décor right out of Jack Webb’s Dragnet.

RHD also has changed little in decades. Robbery Special and Rape Special have their own small squad rooms. Homicide Special, adjacent to the two units, consists of one large room with two rows of twelve battered metal desks flanking a narrow passageway. One lieutenant supervises the detectives on the west side of the room and another is responsible for those on the east side. The large white “on-call” board, which looms on the front wall of the squad room, lists detective teams that are available to be dispatched to fresh homicides. Detectives from the two sides of the room—known as Homicide I and Homicide II—alternate by the week. Although they are separated only by an aisle, there is a subtle rivalry between the two squads; detectives develop a strong loyalty to their side of the room. They are sometimes reluctant to share information and have, on occasion, accused their counterparts of leaking news to the press. The unit handles about twelve to fifteen complex murder cases a year, with the workload split between the two groups.

A speckled black-and-white linoleum hallway leads to the splintered squad-room door. With its ancient wooden filing cabinets, dusty Venetian blinds, harsh overhead fluorescent lights, and black-and-white wanted posters taped to the walls, Homicide Special has the feel of a 1940s film noir precinct. Only the computers appear anachronistic. The detectives still do not have voice mail and there is no receptionist. They are frequently interrupted by the ringing phone and impatiently scribble messages for one another.

The Homicide Special detectives do not seem out of place in this relic of a room. All twenty-four are men. (The two female detectives are both working on task forces in other buildings.) Most are white. Almost everyone wears a dark suit, pressed white shirt, conservative tie, and shoes buffed to a gleam. Decades ago, supervisors in the unit decided that because Homicide Special detectives were supposed to be the city’s best detectives, they should look like its best detectives. The tradition continues. McCartin is dressed today in a formal dark blue suit, white shirt, and blue-and-red print tie; Knolls wears a gray suit, white shirt, and green print tie.

Their lieutenant, Don Hartwell, who is in charge of Homicide II, was once a chef in one of the city’s best French restaurants. This morning he is regaling a detective with a detailed account of a meal he enjoyed Saturday night at the renowned Westside restaurant Vincenti. The mullet, he says with a look of wonder, was flown in from Italy. He cuts his gastronomic reverie short, however, when he spots McCartin and Knolls. He wants to hear about their visit to Luda’s apartment.

At the division stations, supervisors often micromanage detectives’ cases, but at Homicide Special the two lieutenants and the captain of the unit give investigators a great deal of latitude. They believe that if a detective is promoted to RHD, he has earned the perquisite of independence. Many, having handled more than a hundred murders before they transferred to the unit, have their own, idiosyncratic ways of working. All the Homicide Special investigators are detectives second or third grade—the top rank for an investigator. If they were at division stations they would supervise other detectives.

The competition for positions at Homicide Special is intense, with more than a dozen applicants, all of whom have extensive homicide experience, for each opening. The two lieutenants interview the candidates, question their supervisors, assess their investigative background, and then rank them. They are seeking poised, articulate detectives. Many of the victims in the cases Homicide Special investigates are prominent people, and the investigators must be able to establish a rapport with witnesses from all strata of society. The lieutenants eventually present their assessments to the head of RHD, Captain Tatreau, who makes the final decision.

Homicide Special was once a more cohesive unit. Because the detectives had lighter caseloads, they had more time for the socializing that engendered an esprit de corps. They spent many nights after work drinking in the downtown bars, and they often golfed or hunted together on weekends. Today, the Homicide Special detectives are younger and many have small children; they have less time for drinking and golfing. The two-man teams often work independently, without help from other detectives. As a result, the unit feels fragmented, with a dozen pairs of partners orbiting around the squad room, only occasionally revolving in unison.

After the detectives brief Hartwell, they scrupulously log every scrap of paper, notebook, photograph, greeting card, note, document, bill, receipt, and matchbook recovered from the apartment. The rest of the morning is spent compiling the murder book, the three-ring, royal blue plastic binder that summarizes a homicide case. It contains all the data gathered during an investigation, including evidence lists, crime scene photographs and diagrams, statements from patrol officers, suspects, and witnesses, and a day-to-day—sometimes hour-to-hour—chronology of the investigation.

When the detectives finish organizing the murder book, McCartin calls the homicide detective who investigated the murder of the dis membered Russian hooker found in the storm drain near the ocean. The detective confirms that her pimp was Mher, but says she had been out of the business awhile. He does not believe that Mher killed her. Still, Knolls and McCartin are concerned that the two murders might be connected.

The detectives have no witnesses to Luda’s murder, not even a neighbor who heard a shot. They do, however, have two potentially devastating pieces of evidence: the videotape and the shell casing. Every weapon engraves distinctive groove patterns on the bullet it releases. For decades, ballistics technicians have used these patterns to match recovered bullets with suspects’ guns. With semiautomatic pistols, however, detectives can use a still more advanced and reliable method of identification. A new computer process makes it possible to create digital images of the unique markings of spent cartridges (or shell casings). An FBI database can compare and match these markings with ammunition found at crime scenes nationwide. If the same gun was used, detectives can now quickly connect shootings from different jurisdictions.

Later in the afternoon, the detectives drop off the casing at the LAPD ballistics lab. They also plan to obtain the bullet, removed at the autopsy, so ballistics technicians can analyze it. When they return to the office, McCartin calls Jennifer Amo and sets up an appointment for the next day.

The FBI’s office in West Los Angeles is located on the seventeenth floor of the Federal Building, a boxy, unadorned white tower on Wilshire Boulevard. Amo and her female supervisor greet the detectives in the FBI lobby and escort them to a conference room. The women seem stiff and reserved.

“I really have to apologize for the way some of the LAPD guys acted the other day,” Knolls says when everyone is seated. “That’s just old-school thinking. But we want to start fresh.”

McCartin mentions his work with FBI agents on the unsolved-murder task force. “I know the FBI has changed,” he says. “I’m very open and more than willing to work with you. If we can work together, I’ll give you what we have.”

“When we find the shooter, we’ll be out of your hair,” Knolls adds.

Amo and her supervisor appear to relax. The supervisor says she will do what she can to help them.

Amo tells the detectives they are investigating Russian white slavery. She and her supervisor then briefly explain how crime rings with contacts in the former Soviet Union and Los Angeles obtain Mexican tourist visas for young Russian and Ukrainian girls. The girls, some of whom are naive aspiring models, are smuggled into the United States from Mexico and “purchased” by madams. The girls are forced to pay off their passage by working as prostitutes.

Spreading several dozen enlarged driver’s license photos of pimps, madams, prostitutes, and smugglers on the table, the agents point to a few of the players and give the detectives thumbnail background sketches.

Luda, Amo says, was smuggled into the country in May. She worked for Mher and his wife, as well as for Lana, another Russian madam. Mher is Armenian, but he grew up in Los Angeles. An FBI informant claims that since the murder, no one has seen him.

The meeting is short but productive. The agents and the detectives agree to share information during the course of their respective investigations.

The detectives always work an eight A.M.-to-four P.M. shift, and although it is “end of watch” by the time they leave the FBI building they agree to drive to Hollywood and interview a few Russian hookers whom Amo had identified during the meeting. During the first few weeks of a fresh case, Homicide Special lieutenants do not complain about overtime.

They decide to approach the case’s dramatis personae in concentric circles, interviewing peripheral players—the prostitutes—first, then gradually moving inward, to madams, pimps, smugglers, and, finally, potential suspects, such as Mher. To interview him now would be useless; they have no witnesses, no concrete evidence, and no leverage.

McCartin drives his unmarked blue Chevrolet Malibu east on Santa Monica Boulevard, through Beverly Hills, north on La Cienega, moving slowly through rush-hour traffic. He then heads east on Sunset to Hollywood. Although the gentrification of Hollywood is under way, the section of east Hollywood they pass is a shabby neighborhood of strip malls and fast-food restaurants. The detectives decide to eat before the interviews, and McCartin suggests the Boston Market he has spotted on a corner.

“Since we’re just starting out as partners, one thing you should know about me: I don’t like chains,” Knolls says. He points to another corner and says, “Let’s eat at that hole-in-the-wall Mexican place. That looks good.”

Over soda and excellent tacos laced with cilantro, they examine the photos and jot down the addresses of the women identified by Amo as prostitutes. They decide to “door-knock” the women without calling first. McCartin drives west toward a spectacular sunset, the fiery, sinking sun irradiating the smog on the horizon with splashes of burnt orange. They pass the Château Marmont, where John Belushi overdosed on a cocaine-and-heroin speedball, and then south to West Hollywood, past hip, trendy Melrose Avenue.

The first woman they hope to interview lives just south of a stretch of Melrose lined with art galleries and antique shops. Homes in the Hollywood Hills glimmer in the distance. A warm breeze carries the fruity, tropical smell of night-blooming jasmine.

The woman who answers the door is in her mid-twenties and blonde, in a low-cut pink velour top and skintight jeans. She has long lavender fingernails and wears a wooden cross around her neck. A flicker of anxiety clouds her eyes when the detectives identify themselves, but she invites them in and sits cross-legged on a sofa. Until recently, she says, in heavily accented English, she lived here with her boyfriend, a professional boxer. This piques Knolls’s and McCartin’s interest because Luda’s face was so badly beaten. But the name the woman mentions isn’t familiar to either detective.

The woman says she works as a hairdresser and denies knowing Luda. McCartin shows her the driver’s license photographs that Amo provided them. She says she cannot identify anyone.

Knolls knows she is lying, so he asks, sounding exasperated, “Do you know anyone who is a criminal?”

“No,” she says. “I wish I could help you. But I can’t.”

The interview lasts less than ten minutes. The detectives learn absolutely nothing. As they walk back to the car, Knolls says, “I don’t believe a fucking word she says.”

“When I shook her hand, it was really sweating,” McCartin says. “We need to get her to the station and poly”—polygraph—“the shit out of her.”

The next apartment they visit is located in a down-at-the-heels section of east Hollywood, a Russian immigrant neighborhood of crumbling duplexes and apartment buildings. When an elderly, stout woman opens the door, the scent of overcooked cabbage and onions spills into the hallway. She speaks no English, so she finds a neighbor, who explains that the young woman the detectives are looking for moved some time ago. But the neighbor knows her phone number and calls her. She agrees to meet them in front of her old apartment. When she arrives, they drive her to the Hollywood Division station, a two-story redbrick building across the street from a rickety bail-bonds office.

Perched on a metal chair, in the corner of a small, spare interview room, the woman attempts to appear nonchalant. But a twitching jaw muscle reveals her apprehension. She is petite and wears no makeup; her blond hair, which looks natural, is cut in a short pageboy. She is dressed in a conservative white sleeveless blouse and black slacks. The woman says she is twenty-four, but she could pass for a UCLA sophomore.

She tells the detectives in passable English that she emigrated from the Ukraine four and a half years earlier. After Knolls asks a few preliminary questions, McCartin points at her.

“Are you a prostitute?”

“No,” she says without conviction.

“I don’t believe you,” he says, glowering.

She takes sip of water and stares at a wall.

While her gaze is averted, Knolls scowls at McCartin, irritated that he has confronted the woman so quickly. Knolls had planned a number of softball questions to draw her out.

McCartin and Knolls have worked together for only three days and can’t yet read each other, can’t discern when to let the other detective take the lead and when to interject a question.

Sometimes, Homicide Special partners take longer to meld into a team than detectives in the local divisions do. They are experienced, skilled investigators, accustomed to following their instincts and solving murders their own way. Homicide Special detectives were promoted downtown because they had been successful employing their own sometimes idiosyncratic methods. As a result, many are unwilling to compromise or change their approach.

Knolls shows the woman a picture of Luda and several driver’s license photographs. She does not identify anyone.

McCartin taps a pen beside the picture. “What happened to her could happen to you if we don’t find these people.”

“I don’t care about drugs,” Knolls says, counting on his fingers; “I don’t care about prostitution. I don’t care about illegal immigration. I don’t care about tax evasion. I’m a homicide detective. All I care about is who killed this girl.”

“I don’t know nothing,” she says, sullenly.

“Are you afraid that if you talk to us, someone will hurt your family back in the Ukraine?” Knolls asks.

Her eyes widen for a moment and she appears as if she is about to nod. Instead, she shakes her head. “I don’t know her. I don’t know nothing.”

After a few more questions, the detectives realize the interview is pointless. They watch the woman walk out of the station, undulating like a Hollywood Boulevard hooker.

“That’s no welfare walk,” Knolls says. “She swings it.”

McCartin watches with disgust. “We’ve got too many barriers here: language, culture, attitude. We’ve got to get a Russian speaker on board, working with us every day. It’s like we’re going to bat blind-folded. I worked in the ghetto too long. I can’t read these Russian white people.”

Knolls riffles through the stack of photographs. “We need to find the weak link.”

“It could be a crazy ex-boyfriend who beat her to teach her a lesson,” McCartin says.

“But why kill her?” Knolls asks.

“Could go a lot of ways. Our guy may be Russian mafia. It’s quite open now.”

Although the interviews tonight produced no useful information, they have at least “tickled the wire,” McCartin says. The two girls will probably call others being monitored by the FBI, to discuss the detectives’ questions and, Knolls and McCartin hope, Luda’s murder.

As they drive back downtown to Parker Center, Knolls confronts McCartin. “You’re like a bull in a china shop.”

“What do you mean?” McCartin asks.

Knolls says angrily, “I’m trying to get her to relax. But you go after her almost as soon as she sits down.” He imitates McCartin’s New York accent and barks, “ ‘Hey, you a hookah?’”

“I felt we needed a different approach,” McCartin says, sounding defensive. “I’m sick of these bitches lying to us. You weren’t going to get shit with her anyway.”

“It’s worth a try. Why blast her right away?”

“I thought that was the best way to go.”

“You’re a bull, all right,” Knolls says. “A New York bull.”

They ride the rest of the way in silence.

McCartin’s background is typical for the NYPD, but unusual for the LAPD. The son of a New York City fireman, he grew up in the Bronx, and moved to Westchester County in grammar school. His father and his four grandparents were born in Ireland. His father’s father, who was wanted by the British because of his IRA activities, slipped out of Ireland in 1919, boarding a steamer in Wales, and made his way to New York, where he worked as a sandhog on the Lincoln Tunnel. Unlike some Southern Californians, who have tenuous attachments to their roots and their jobs, McCartin has a strong identity. He’s an Irish cop.

After high school, McCartin attended Norwich University, a private military college in Vermont. At the end of his sophomore year, he enlisted, eventually joining the elite 82nd Airborne Division and making thirty-seven jumps. His next goal was flight school, but his father, who now owned a hardware store in the Bronx, had suffered a heart attack and McCartin was needed at home. For the next few years, he managed the store during the day and attended college at night. After graduation, he joined the New York City Fire Department and was assigned to a station in Harlem at 139th Street and Amsterdam Avenue.

But after a year he craved something different, a break from his father’s routine. In college he had taken a police science class. One of the other students, a small-town cop, had mentioned that the LAPD was “a sharp department” with a beautiful academy, and Los Angeles was a city where it was sunny almost every day. McCartin decided to apply.

On a vacation in February 1983, McCartin flew to Los Angeles and took the LAPD entrance exam. During his two weeks in Southern California, it rained for twelve straight days, but when the LAPD accepted him, he moved immediately.

During the next decade, he walked a beat in a South-Central housing project, cruised Venice in a patrol car, and served as a training officer. In the early 1990s he was promoted to detective and soon made it to homicide, where he was overwhelmed with more than twenty murders a year.

Several of the gang murders McCartin investigated were as complex, brutal, and rife with witness intimidation as the organized crime cases he used to read about in the New York tabloids. McCartin was assigned to a task force that investigated Cleamon “Big Evil” Johnson, the leader of the notorious 89 Family Bloods; Johnson had killed more than twenty people, detectives suspected, but had evaded arrest because witnesses were too terrified to talk. The task force eventually brought Big Evil down, sending him to death row. McCartin’s work on the case and his assignment to an FBI-LAPD unsolved-murder team helped facilitate his promotion to RHD.

McCartin’s life now is a world away from the Bronx. He lives more than sixty miles east of downtown, in rural Riverside County, on two and a half acres. His wife and children love horses, so he plans to build a barn and tack room. The commute, however, is hellish. He usually rises at four A.M. to avoid the morning traffic, arrives at Parker Center at 5:30, and works out in the basement gym before starting his shift. On occasion, McCartin takes the train to the downtown station. Because of his dark business suits, fellow commuters probably assume he is a corporate lawyer or a sales executive. His cop eyes, however, give him away; they exude suspicion and a certainty that almost everyone he encounters during his workday will lie to him.

On Wednesday morning McCartin calls Amo for background on the two women he and Knolls interviewed Tuesday night. She confirms that the first, the one whose ex-boyfriend is a boxer, is a call girl. The demure-looking woman, Amo says, “is a prostitute and up-and-coming madam who is big time in the organization.”

Later in the morning, an Armenian-American detective who has heard about the murder stops by RHD to share information on a Russian stolen-car ring he is investigating. Knolls says he has an Armenian suspect—Mher—who grew up in Los Angeles. Could Mher be involved with the Russian mafia? Knolls asks. The other detective explains that the Russian mob hires members of Armenian Power an Armenian-American street gang based in Hollywood—as enforcers.

“Great,” Knolls says sarcastically. “If we can’t get through to the dollies, how are we going to get through to these gangsters?”

Homicide Special detectives often pick up cases late, after the divisional detectives realize the complexity of the investigation. Fortunately, the Luda Petushenko case was assigned only a day after the murder, but Knolls and McCartin still missed the fresh crime scene, the initial interviews, and the autopsy.

On Wednesday afternoon, they decide to stop by the coroner’s office to talk to the pathologist and examine the body. Usually, they would rely on the autopsy notes compiled by the original detectives. But the slash marks on Luda’s face and neck pique their interest.

The pathologist removes Luda’s body from a metal rack in the “cooler,” sets it on a gurney, and wheels it to a corridor outside the autopsy room where he meets the detectives. Luda’s corpse is in a clear plastic body bag, tied with twine at the ankles, thighs, and waist. The body is stiff, slightly decomposed, and the skin is waxy. The partly opened body bag leaves her upper torso exposed. Thick, crude stitches run down the center of her chest where her internal organs were removed during the autopsy. Slightly above the left nipple, there is a dime-sized, red-rimmed circle: the entry point of the .45-caliber slug.

As doctors and technicians scurry down the hallway, the pathologist studies the deep, plum-colored bruises that streak and speckle Luda’s face and neck. “There’s a lot of contusions on the jawbone and side of the face,” he says. “There’s a large hemorrhage on the back of the neck. But I don’t think she was strangled. I’ve done a lot of cases with women who were strangled and their nails were usually damaged from the struggle.” He points to Luda’s ice-blue acrylic fingernails. “No damage at all. In all my time here, I’ve never seen one that went down so quickly. Boom, boom. It happened like that,” he says, snapping his fingers. He shadowboxes, throwing a few crisp punches. “There was bruising on the brain. It was like a shot from a boxer.”

McCartin and Knolls nod simultaneously.

The pathologist waves a palm above Luda’s arm and says, “They’re clean. No bruising at all. That’s unusual regarding trauma and women.” He adds, “she was taken down first. Punched or struck with an object. She was alive when she was shot. There was a lot of blood in the cavity on her left side.”

Knolls crouches beside the gurney and points to the slashes on her neck, the side of her face, and cheek. “What do you think made those marks?”

“One of our criminologists suggested it was the butt end of a forty-five,” the pathologist says.

“Could he have stomped on her?” McCartin asks. “Maybe those are boot marks.”

“Don’t think so,” the pathologist says.

“Could he have braced her against something?” Knolls asks. “Maybe the object he jammed her against made those marks.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” the pathologist says. “Maybe an end table.”

“Or a bed,” McCartin says.

The pathologist scrutinizes Luda’s neck. “There’s a real linear pattern to it.”

“Maybe someone was torturing her,” Knolls says. “Or maybe someone coldcocked her with a three- or four-knuckle ring.”

McCartin asks the pathologist if he can determine the time of death.

Luda’s body was discovered early Thursday morning. The pathologist estimates that she was killed Wednesday morning at about six o’clock. “Most people peak at full rigor mortis in eighteen hours in ambient temperature,” he says.

“But we believe she was on the phone at nine o’clock the morning she was killed,” Knolls says. “Is that possible?”

“Heat will accelerate it,” the pathologist says. “Cold will delay it.”

“The North Hollywood guys said the air-conditioning was on full blast,” McCartin says. “Somebody didn’t want that body stinking and discovered. It was cold as a meat locker in there.”

The pathologist nods. “Then she could have been alive at nine o’clock.”

When they return to the squad room, McCartin studies the videotape shot outside the front door of Luda’s apartment building, attempting to compare the images with the driver’s license photos from the FBI. The video runs so fast he cannot clearly see the faces. He plans to ask the LAPD electronics lab for help.

Knolls tracks down Leyla, the Russian woman who found Luda’s body. Because her English is so limited, he arranges for a Russian-speaking detective from another LAPD division to translate. The detective has a busy caseload and is only free for the day.

Almost six feet tall, Leyla is a zaftig young woman in tight black pants, a gold anklet, and a diaphanous blouse. Her lacy black bra is clearly visible. She has an Eastern European cast to her features, with high cheekbones, an oval face, and cupid’s-bow lips.

McCartin hands her a cup of coffee. Knolls flashes his business card and points to the word “Homicide.” “That’s all I’m interested in,” he says, as the Russian-American detective translates. Knolls then delivers his mantra: “I don’t care about dope, immigration, prostitution, green cards. All I want to know is who killed this girl. We want the truth.”

Leyla nods nervously. She tells them she met Luda at Troyka, a Russian market in Hollywood. Both were buying telephone cards to call home. They exchanged phone numbers and a week later Luda called.

“How many times were you at her Studio City apartment?” Knolls asks.

“Four or five times,” she says.

“Was Luda working?” Knolls asks.

“No. She didn’t have a work permit.”

“How’d she get money?” Knolls asks.

“I don’t know. That doesn’t interest me.”

Knolls sighs with exasperation.

“So if I tell you she was a prostitute, you’d be shocked?” McCartin says sarcastically.

Leyla spots a straw on the table, drops it into her coffee, and takes a delicate sip. “If I knew she was a prostitute, I’d never go to her house.”

McCartin fixes Leyla with a suspicious look. “Are you a prostitute?”

She does not wait for the translator. “Nyet.”

“Then how do you pay your rent?”

She sips her coffee through the straw. “My parents send me money.”

“What do they do?” McCartin asks.

She says her father is a police chief in the Ukraine, adding that she knows nothing about smuggling rings, prostitution, escort services, or Russian criminals.

Frustrated, the detectives leave the room to confer. They know she is lying, but agree that they do not want to push too hard at this initial stage. They do not want to alienate her. If Leyla asks for a lawyer, the interview is over.

They return to the room and ask her to recount the day of the murder. She begins by saying that Luda asked her for a 9:30 wake-up call. They planned to buy hair-care products at a nearby mall that afternoon. Leyla called at 9:30, but nobody answered and she figured that Luda was sunbathing by the pool. At 1:45 she drove to the apartment and waited by the underground garage. When someone opened the garage security gate, she sprinted inside and rode the elevator to Luda’s apartment, which was usually unlocked.

The detectives are disappointed to hear how Leyla slipped into the apartment building. The videotape may be less helpful than they had hoped.

“It was very quiet inside,” Leyla continues. “I thought she was by the pool. I went to use the restroom, then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something on the floor, lying next to the bed. I realized it was Luda. I thought she was drunk or asleep. But then I saw her face. It was very swollen and blood was on her neck.”

Leyla takes another sip of coffee and says, “I bent over and saw a little hole in her chest. Blood was coming out of her ears. I checked the pulse on her arm, but it was already very cold.”

She then called Mher on her cell phone. She tells the detectives she did not call the police because she is not comfortable speaking English.

McCartin shows her a picture of Mher and asks, “Can you identify him?”

“That’s Mher, the man I called.”

“How’d you end up with his phone number?” Knolls asks.

“Because Luda was a guest at his house for a time and she told me if I ever needed to get hold of her to call him.”

“How did Luda meet Mher?” McCartin asks.

“At a restaurant, I think.”

“You think he could have killed her?” McCartin asks.

“No. He went to the police several times on his own because he wanted to know what happened.”

“You don’t seem too upset about stumbling onto a murder scene,” McCartin says.

“That’s just my character,” she says, smiling cryptically. “I don’t show my emotions in front of other people.”

“You involved in anything illegal?” McCartin asks.

“No.”

“You willing to take a polygraph?” McCartin asks.

“Sure,” she says uncertainly.

“You realize we have a lot of interviews left,” McCartin says. “If we find out you’re lying to us, you could be deported or tossed in jail.”

“I said what I said,” she says flatly.

“When you were in the apartment and saw her body, was a television on?” Knolls wonders if the sound could have muffled the gunshot.

“She didn’t have a television,” Leyla says. “Even though she had a lot of cash, she didn’t want to spend the money. She was saving all her money so she could bring her daughter over.”

“Did she talk about her daughter a lot?”

“All the time. She told me: ‘I want to see my daughter. I’m dying. I can’t live without her.’ She had a picture of her daughter in her wallet. Whenever she pulled it out, she kissed it.”

If Luda did not work, McCartin asks, how did she plan to pay for her daughter’s passage to the U.S.?

She tells him that Luda had a boyfriend—Mischa, a wealthy Russian man. The Saturday night before the murder, Mischa hosted a birthday party for Luda, which Leyla attended, at a Russian nightclub in Hollywood. A teenage boy, a friend of Luda’s, was also at the party.

“She was separated and her husband’s still in Kiev,” Leyla says. “She talked about marrying again—this time to a rich guy. Maybe Mischa. She said if she could not find a rich guy to marry her this year, she would go back home.”

At the end of the interview, Knolls asks if she has Mischa’s telephone number. He is surprised when she nods and opens her telephone book.

McCartin and Knolls head back downtown, frustrated with the interview and each other. McCartin feels that often, when he asks a question, Knolls interrupts too quickly, breaking his line of inquiry. Knolls believes that McCartin is too abrupt and confrontational. To avoid another argument, they segue to a strained chat about Leyla.

As McCartin pulls onto the freeway, he says, “These broads are tough as nails. They’re emotionless.”

“Can’t get a straight answer out of them,” Knolls says.

“They’d deny the earth is round,” McCartin says. “But at least Leyla put us onto Mischa. I’m going to call him when we get back. I’ll try to get him to come by tomorrow.”

The next afternoon, while the detectives wait for Mischa, they tell Lieutenant Hartwell about the fruitless interview with Leyla.

“You’ve got all these Russian girls who’ve only been here a few years, with no apparent jobs, yet they’re all well dressed, driving nice cars, looking prosperous, living in beautiful apartments,” Hartwell says, laughing. “Isn’t America a great country?”

McCartin could not find an LAPD Russian speaker on such short notice, but he has managed to procure the services of a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department translator. Mischa shows up in midafternoon and follows the translator and the detectives to a small interview cubicle in the back of the squad room. Short and pudgy with gray hair and gold-rimmed bifocals, he looks more like a grandfather from the old country than a sugar daddy. His clothes, however, are flashy: he wears black suede shoes with shiny silver buckles, a long-sleeved black silk shirt, and lime green linen pants.

Mischa, who immigrated to the United States in 1977, insists he does not need a translator. Knolls starts with some brief biographical questions. Mischa says he is in his mid-fifties and works as a salesman for a Russian vodka company. Three months ago he met Luda at the Troyka, the same Russian market where Leyla said she met her. He was never inside Luda’s apartment; he always picked her up outside, and they spent nights at his house. The last time he saw Luda was at her birthday party. On the day she was murdered, they were supposed to stop by a pawnshop, where he planned to buy her a television. But when Mischa called the apartment, a detective answered and instructed him to drive to the North Hollywood station, where he was interviewed the first time.

When McCartin asks him how Luda supported herself, Mischa responds earnestly that she sold clothing in the Ukraine, and he assumed she continued to operate the business while in Los Angeles. He feigns surprise when McCartin tells him that Luda was a prostitute. They dated about once a week and, he insists, he never paid her.

McCartin and Knolls look disgusted, tired of the hookers and crooks snowing them.

The translator suddenly jabs a forefinger at Mischa. “You’re a vor v zakonye” (a fraternal order of professional criminals in Russia that dates back hundreds of years). He points to Mischa’s hands. On one is a faded tattoo of a heart pierced by a sword, on the other, a sunflower.

“Those are gulag tattoos,” the translator says.

“That’s bullshit!” Mischa shouts. “I got those when I was nineteen and I was in the Russian army.”

So far McCartin has restrained himself, but now that the translator has challenged Mischa, he feels free to go after him.

“If you keep lying, we’ll throw you in an INS holding tank right now,” McCartin bluffs.

“I don’t know who killed her, I swear to God,” Mischa sputters. “I have a daughter. If something like this would happen to her, I don’t know what I’d do. I come to the police station on my own. What more can I do?”

Mischa is flushed now, breathing heavily through his nose and wheezing.

Knolls raises a palm. “Okay, okay. Let’s all calm down.”

The detectives and the translator confer outside in the squad room. They need some leverage, McCartin says, or Mischa will continue to lie.

“That’s right,” the translator says. “A guy like him isn’t afraid of the American police. You’re Boy Scouts compared to those Russian cops. The prisons here are country clubs compared to the gulags.”

McCartin tells the translator they found a picture at the apartment of Luda and Mischa posing together at her birthday party. If they threatened to run the photograph in Los Angeles’s Russian newspaper, he asks, would that encourage Mischa to talk?

“Maybe,” the translator says. “His associates might think he’s attracting too much attention.”

When they return to the interview room, Knolls tosses the picture on the table. “We need some way to officially confirm her identity. We’re going to run this picture in the Russian paper if we don’t get any information by next week.”

“No problem,” Mischa says, attempting to appear unconcerned. Then he asks, “Why do you need to run that picture?”

“We need information,” McCartin says.

“Can the information be anonymous?” Mischa asks.

“That’ll work,” McCartin says.

“She used to send clothes to her daughter in the Ukraine,” Mischa says, suddenly helpful. He names the shipping service she used. “They must have some records that could help you officially identify her.”

Mischa tells the detectives he’ll ask around about Luda. “One thing I can tell you, though. It’s not an old-school type who did this murder. It’s a newcomer. It’s that new breed.” He shakes his head in disgust, like a father who cannot understand why his son wears an earring.

Before the interview ends, McCartin again asks Mischa if he ever visited Luda’s apartment. Mischa denies even entering the building. If he is caught on the videotape, however, or if his DNA matches the semen in one of the condoms, McCartin knows they might have enough to arrest him for the murder.

After Mischa and the translator leave, McCartin and Knolls slump in their chairs and put their feet up on their desks. The squad room is empty on this late Friday afternoon and they sit in silence for several minutes. Glaring through the Venetian blinds, the harsh summer sun casts striped shadows on the desks and walls. The detectives look dispirited and enervated.

Exactly one week ago they picked up the case, and their progress has been negligible. Everybody they interview lies to them. The cultural chasm frustrates them. They have heard other detectives mutter that their case is a loser, consigned to unsolved purgatory. Haro never solved his Russian-Armenian organized crime murder. McCartin and Knolls worry that their case is headed in the same direction.

But Homicide Special detectives have one singular advantage: time. Divisional detectives might spend a week or two investigating a murder before they are assigned the next case. They might be forced to juggle half a dozen investigations simultaneously. Homicide Special detectives have the luxury of focusing on a single case for an extended period of time.

While the investigation seems stalled, the afternoon has yielded one positive development: their request for a full-time Russian translator has been granted. He begins next week.