The Stephanie Gorman investigation has languished since January. Her sister, Cheryl, has not called recently and the detectives feel guilty because they have no news for her. Dave Lambkin and Tim Marcia hope to return to the case, but the murder of the elderly San Fernando Valley couple, which they picked up in February, has attracted extensive press coverage and pressure is mounting to find the killer.
Lambkin recently discovered that a local television news show runs a regular series on unsolved homicides. He and Marcia plan to approach the station hoping that a feature on the Gorman case may jog a memory, unearth a clue, encourage a tipster.
On a warm Tuesday afternoon in early spring, Marcia and Lambkin are hunched over their desks in their tiny Rape Special office, studying stacks of pawnshop reports in an attempt to link the elderly woman’s stolen jewelry to a suspect. Marcia answers the ringing phone. His face reddens during the brief call. “Just what we need now,” he says to Lambkin. “A sexual assault-murder in Los Feliz.”
“What’s the story?” Lambkin asks.
“Female in her fifties doesn’t show up for work for a few days,” Marcia says. “A coworker goes to her apartment and he finds her on the bed. Possible blunt force trauma to the back of the head. The woman’s a doctor.”
“A physician?” Lambkin asks.
Marcia nods.
Rape Special is supposed to investigate every rape-murder in the city, but all the detectives in the unit are overwhelmed with cases. Lambkin pages his lieutenant, explaining when she calls back that he and Marcia are still swamped with leads to track on the murder of the elderly couple. He is leaving for vacation next week, he continues, and Marcia will be tied up in court for the next few months because one of his cases is about to go to trial. The lieutenant says she will call RHD officials and attempt to work something out.
A few minutes later, an RHD lieutenant stops by and tells Lambkin that Homicide Special detectives will investigate the murder; Lambkin and Marcia, however, will have to assist at the crime scene. He adds that the victim was a prominent member of the Filipino community and a well-known physician. Homicide Special, he says, is well equipped to handle the investigation.
At the victim’s apartment, Lambkin and Marcia confer with Brian McCartin and Chuck Knolls. Over the past six months they have continued to investigate Luda Petushenko’s murder, working with the DA to prepare the case for the preliminary hearing. They also have been inundated with numerous officer-involved shootings and a few threats against officers. McCartin is philosophical about these cases, but Knolls has been increasingly annoyed. The early morning OIS callouts, the extensive paperwork, the time away from his homicide investigations all irrate him. Now, as he examines the crime scene, he is clearly energized by the prospect of a new murder.
The victim, sixty-three-year-old Lourdes Unson, lived in a twenty-eight-unit apartment building on a busy thoroughfare in Los Feliz, a gracious neighborhood near Hollywood. The tan stucco structure is a typical boxy 1960s-style apartment building, but it is lushly landscaped with thick stands of banana plants in front, framed with pink geraniums, red and white impatiens, and yellow rosebushes. The building’s name, emblazoned on a sign in front—THE RAVENCREST APARTMENTS—evokes Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles. The units face an interior courtyard, with a lawn bordered by palm and ficus and a small pond where brilliant orange koi dart about. Flaming bougainvillea spill over railings and the first bone-white lilies of the season are beginning to blossom.
Unson lived on the second floor, in a back corner. Inside, six detectives and the two Homicide Special lieutenants move quickly and efficiently about the small one-bedroom apartment. Several LAPD criminalists dust for fingerprints, vacuum the carpet for fibers, dab the bed with tape for hair strands, and scan the bedroom with an ultraviolet light for semen traces.
The apartment, with gray carpeting, generic furniture, and plastic slipcovers on the dining room chairs, looks like a motel room. There is not a single picture on the wall, not a single framed photo on a shelf. The only personal touches are statues of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph beside a votive candle on a living room end table. The detectives are perplexed by Unson’s sleeping arrangements: the living room sofa is covered with a sheet, blanket, and pillow, but the mattress in her small bedroom is stripped. There is no bedroom dresser; instead a dozen plastic garbage bags filled with clothes ring the room. Clean laundry is stacked up by a wall. A jumble of letters and bills cover a metal television table.
In the living room, Knolls and McCartin spot several empty jewelry boxes on an ironing board. They debate whether the victim was robbed. In the bedroom, Marcia and Lambkin supervise the criminalists. “He could have masturbated in another room,” Lambkin tells the technician with the ultraviolet light. Confident and in his element, Lambkin turns to Lieutenant Farrell and adds, “Some of these offenders kill first and masturbate afterwards. Some of them ejaculate in unusual places. We’ve found semen in nostril cavities.”
“Is that how you do it?” Farrell asks with a sly smile.
“I’ll tell you after I retire.”
A coroner’s investigator arrives and the detectives file into the bedroom while he examines the body. The room is warm and stuffy and beams of late-afternoon sunshine seep through the closed blinds, motes of dusk flickering in the light. Unson is on her back in the center of the bed, naked from the waist down, legs spread and hands raised in a defensive position. Blotches of blood streak the insides of her thighs. Her neck is bruised, so the investigator surmises she was strangled. Dried blood dapples both ears. Her brown cardigan sweater and redand-green striped blouse are disheveled. An expression of surprise and fear clouds her eyes. Her mouth is open in a rictus of agony, with a wad of gum clearly visible beneath the tongue.
The coroner’s investigator studies the bruising along her inner thighs and shins and an abrasion above her right breast. Clotted blood mats the hair at the back of her head, and the top of the mattress is stained with brownish red blotches. “She’s been dead for a while,” he says, pointing to her side and the backs of her legs, which are the deep purple color that indicates lividity, or settling of the blood. He then cuts a small incision just above her waist and plunges a thermometer into her liver, which enables him to estimate the time of death: the body cools at about 1 1/2 degrees per hour until it reaches the ambient temperature.
“This gal’s been dead probably thirty to thirty-six hours,” the investigator says.
The detectives figure she was attacked two days ago, on April 15—Easter Sunday. She probably died around midnight.
A coroner’s criminalist clips Unson’s fingernails, combs her pubic area for foreign hairs, and swabs her vagina and anus with a Q-Tip for semen. After he swabs her breasts and neck for saliva and semen, an LAPD photographer sets up his camera.
“I was watching CSI the other night and laughed my head off,” the photographer tells the detectives. “They picked up a dead baby and didn’t even look for trace evidence. There was no coroner around, no photos, no nothing. Then they barge in on the detectives, push them aside, and interview the witnesses. On another show, they picked up hairs with tweezers. Obviously, you use gloves so you don’t damage the hair. One detective told me it was so bad he wanted to shoot his TV.”
He is still lambasting the show when Knolls and McCartin return to the living room. Inexperienced detectives study a crime scene at eye level, swiveling their heads and searching for clues. Experienced detectives usually scan the ground, where gravity often scatters the most immediate leads. Knolls and McCartin crouch on the balls of their feet like catchers and study the carpeting for several minutes, lost in thought. They attempt to intuit the violent scenario of action and reaction.
Strewn about by the front door are a key ring, a half-filled shopping bag, and a toppled fan. The detectives surmise that Unson had just returned from the store and entered her apartment, keys in hand, when the killer surprised her from behind and stormed through the door.
They spot a chair by the front door. Beside it, there are indentations in the carpet and, nearby, a half-dozen medical magazines. They figure that Unson knocked the chair back while she struggled, which scattered the magazines stacked on the seat.
Knolls and McCartin study the coffee table, set at an angle from the sofa. Unson has bruised shins, so they assume she banged into the coffee table as she tried to escape.
Near the coffee table is a pair of glasses with a lens popped out. The detectives suspect the killer punched her in the face.
“Looks like a stranger case,” McCartin says. “She sure didn’t let him in the door.”
Knolls nods. “He blitzed her.”
Detective Ron Ito returns from the medical clinic where Unson worked and briefs Knolls and McCartin. “Coworkers said she’s a very shy woman. She won’t even examine men. She’s very religious and goes to church all the time. Has a brother who’s a priest. Doesn’t drink, smoke, or have sex. Her life was work to home, home to work. Had a very regular schedule. Always on time. Before she started work she wiped her desk off with a paper towel and cleaner. Brought her lunch every day in Tupperware. She’s a squeaky-clean victim. She didn’t do anything to invite this. She told everyone that in two years, when she turned sixty-five, she was going to retire and return to the Philippines.”
A few minutes later, a neighbor approaches and says they should investigate “a nut” in one of the ground-floor units who “runs around where he doesn’t belong.” Knolls continues inspecting the crime scene while Lambkin and McCartin walk downstairs to interview the man. First, however, Lambkin asks Marcia to grab a hat from the trunk of their car. He explains to McCartin that he has just called two dog handlers whom he has worked with during previous rape investigations. One of the dogs is a bloodhound, which follows scent trails. The other, a Labrador, performs “scent discrimination”—it compares scents and alerts its handler to a match.
Lambkin wants the man in the ground-floor unit to handle the hat. Then he will see if the Labrador picks out the hat after sniffing something the killer has touched. Many detectives believe that in this high-tech age, dogs are a hopelessly antiquated investigative tool. Lambkin and Marcia, however, are more innovative than the typical hidebound LAPD detectives.
McCartin knocks on the man’s door and tells him he wants to question him briefly. While they chat, McCartin notices a pair of women’s shoes stuffed into a trash can, which piques his interest because the neighbor told him the man lives alone. The man reluctantly follows McCartin into the courtyard. Although the evening is warm, with clear skies, he is wearing a long green raincoat. He is unshaven and stares off into the middle distance with a slightly demented expression.
Lambkin introduces himself to the man and then holds out the blue baseball cap. “Have you seen anyone wear this hat?”
The man, who tightly grips the sides of his raincoat, is reluctant to touch the hat.
“Am I a suspect?” he asks suspiciously.
“No,” McCartin says with a dismissive wave of his hand. “We’re talking to all the residents.”
Finally, the man touches the edge of the hat and then holds it gingerly.
When they return to the victim’s apartment, Lambkin grabs his cell phone and checks the man’s record. He is not a registered sex offender, which disappoints Lambkin.
At dusk, the detectives linger on the deck outside Unson’s apartment, waiting for the dog handlers. Palm fronds crackle in the warm breeze, which carries the scent of freshly cut grass. On the western horizon, the setting sun streaks the puffy cloud banks magenta.
Unson lived on Los Feliz Boulevard, in an apartment district, but to the north, spacious homes with red tile roofs and winding driveways dot the hills. In the classic noir movie Double Indemnity, the murder victim lived in this neighborhood. His elegant Spanish Revival house, which was flanked by palm trees, was an anomalous setting for such a cynical crime.
As the houses in the hills fade to silhouettes, and the clouds darken from purple to charcoal, Marcia tells a few detectives about the first time he used a bloodhound. A young girl was alone in her family’s Pacific Palisades apartment when a man wearing a gas mask broke into her room, raped her, and ran off. Marcia, who was assisting the lead detectives, knew that sheriff’s investigators occasionally relied on bloodhounds to track suspects. He volunteered to call the dog handler.
The bloodhound led the detectives outside the apartment, down an alley, around the block, back into the complex, and right to the front door of another apartment. Detectives questioned the tenant, a man in his early twenties who lived in the unit with his father, a fireman. He denied raping the girl. When his father returned home, however, the detectives found an identical gas mask in his car. Eventually, criminalists matched the DNA recovered from the victim’s body with the son, and he was convicted of the rape.
At dark, the bloodhound handler arrives. Ted Hamm is a volunteer with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, an agency that, in contrast to the LAPD, is open-minded about the efficacy of scent dogs. He runs a device that looks like a small vacuum cleaner over Unson’s mattress for about a minute, drawing the suspect’s scent. He then removes a five-by-nine-inch sterile gauze “scent pad” from the vacuum and places it in a plastic bag.
When the Labrador handler arrives, he arranges the blue baseball hat and several other items on the courtyard grass. The scenario is similar to a lineup: the chocolate Lab—the “discriminating dog”—sniffs the scent pad, wanders by the items on the grass, and then scampers off. “If your killer’s scent had been on the hat,” the dog’s handler says, “he would have barked his head off.” Lambkin and Marcia are convinced that the man who handled the hat is not their suspect.
Hamm sets another scent pad beneath the nose of his seven-year-old bloodhound, Scarlet, a tracker. After she sniffs it, he pats her on the side and she ambles through the courtyard, nose down, and into the apartment’s parking lot. Knolls and McCartin follow and Lambkin and Marcia remain at the apartment.
The tenant who handled the baseball cap stands in the corner of the parking lot chatting with a woman. Scarlet trots right past the man without lifting her nose from the asphalt. Hamm whispers to Knolls and McCartin, “It looks like the weird guy is just plain weird. I don’t think he’s your man.”
The dog spends several minutes sniffing about the parking lot, which is encircled by a tall chain-link fence. Finally, she follows a trail, pushes her nose up against the fence, which faces a jazz club parking lot, and barks.
“Your guy probably hopped the fence,” Hamm tells the detectives. “We’ll get our exercise tonight.”
They walk out the apartment’s front door, past the jazz club, and into its parking lot. The dog sniffs the lot and leads Hamm to a six-foot-high wrought-iron fence bordering a sidewalk. “I think the guy hopped this fence, too.” They circle around the jazz club, to the sidewalk, and Scarlet picks up the trail again, straining against her leash.
The dog leads Hamm down the sidewalk, beneath a graceful canopy of avocado trees. The detectives follow, crunching across a carpet of dried brown avocado leaves.
“Stand back,” Hamm tells the detectives. “She starts pissing when she’s on the scent.” A second later the dog urinates while she walks. Knolls and McCartin jump off the sidewalk and onto a lawn. Scarlet trots down several long blocks, past Craftsman-style bungalows, clapboard cottages, stucco apartments, and Spanish-style houses with tiled courtyards. The smell of star jasmine and mock orange lingers in the air. The dog then abruptly swings left, down a sidewalk and back to Los Feliz Boulevard. She leads Hamm into a building and, eventually, to the parking lot in back. The building is a few hundred yards from Unson’s apartment and part of the same complex.
“No person who pulls anything like this goes straight home,” Hamm tells the detectives. “They do a big loop. Our guy made a circle from the apartment and back to an area very near the crime scene.… Maybe he drove off from the parking lot. This tells me he lives right around here.”
While Knolls and McCartin have been following the bloodhound, several divisional homicide detectives interview residents at the apartment building. They confirm that Unson was extremely shy and that she never had visitors. It is highly unlikely, the residents said, that she would allow a man to enter her apartment.
Knolls and McCartin plan to interview the residents themselves. But by the time they finish examining the apartment it is almost midnight, so they will wait until tomorrow. Standing outside their car, they analyze the murder before driving back downtown.
“There’s a lot of broads to rape,” Knolls says. “Why her?”
“Maybe he’s a predator,” McCartin says. “She’s an easy target. Quiet and vulnerable. Maybe he was watching her.”
“It’s got to be someone local, probably right there in the same apartment building,” Knolls says.
McCartin leans against the trunk and says, “I don’t know a lot about rape, but I doubt this guy’s a first-timer. Might be a serial rapist.”
“We’ll put the DNA through,” Knolls says. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“Here we are, a couple of ghetto cops,” says McCartin, who, like Knolls, spent about five years investigating murders in South-Central before he transferred to Homicide Special. “First case we work together, we gotta learn about the Russian culture. Now we might be onto a serial rapist. It was a lot easier back in the ‘hood.”
On Wednesday morning Knolls attends the autopsy while McCartin peruses sex crime reports from the neighborhood. Unson is a tiny woman, only five foot one and about a hundred pounds. An autopsy technician lays her on her back, in the center of a metal gurney, among half a dozen other corpses. The room smells of disinfectant and decomposing flesh.
The pathologist begins by examining her injuries. “Bruise between third and fourth knuckle,” he tells Knolls. “Abrasion by the clavicle and abrasion by the right side of the neck. Could be from a grip. There’s blood in both ears. That’s really weird.”
He studies the dried blood on the back of Unson’s head and then peers between her thighs. “See the abrasions?” he tells Knolls. “That’ll be important to establish sexual assault.” The pathologist turns his attention to her head, lifting her lips with tweezers and studying the red petechiae on the gum line. He then points out more speckling inside her eyelid and on the outer edge of her eye.
“I’m leaning toward strangulation, not blunt force trauma, as the cause of death,” the pathologist says. “We’ll pop her open now and get a better idea.”
He grabs a scalpel and cuts a large Y-shaped incision in her chest. Using a tool that looks like a hedge clipper, he clips the ribs with a loud crunch. After lifting the rib cage, he studies the internal organs and points to the lungs, which are a vivid pink.
“Beautiful lungs,” he mutters. “Definitely not a smoker.”
He removes her sternum with a scalpel, then slices out the internal organs and neatly lines them up on a tray. With a metal ladle he scoops out blood and pours it into a glass vial.
“See the liquidity of that blood?” he tells Knolls. “It shows she died pretty quickly. There’s no clotting.”
The pathologist points out the undigested food in Unson’s stomach, a viscous brown and white substance. “Looks like some meat fibers … maybe chicken … some rice, some onions.” He nods thoughtfully and says to Knolls, “This should help you out with a time of death. Most people don’t wake up in the morning with a full stomach. She definitely had a good meal. A meal like that would take six to eight hours to go completely through her system. That meal had probably been in her stomach for a few hours.”
After the pathologist transfers some of the stomach contents to a glass bottle, he cuts through her matted black hair with a scalpel, peels back the skin, and examines the gleaming skull. He points to the streaks of purple on the sides of her head.
“There’s a little hemorrhaging on the left side and more on the right side by her ear.” He clenches his fist and punches the air a few times. “This woman was definitely beaten.” He runs a forefinger around the skull. “No fractures, though.”
The pathologist dissects Unson’s neck, points out more purple hemorrhage specks on the muscle, and snips out the larynx. After removing the hyoid bone, just above the throat, he shows Knolls a jagged white edge jutting out of the purple tissue. The bone was fractured, which usually means the victim was strangled.
“I’m favoring a manual strangulation as the cause of death.” He points out the purple slashes on the side of her neck. “I don’t think a ligature was used, because of these uneven spots of hemorrhaging around the neck tissue. It’s not circular.”
Knolls tells him that nobody in the apartment building heard her scream.
“She probably couldn’t speak.” The pathologist holds his right hand up, fingers bent like a claw, and shakes it. “I think he got her like this, with one hand, right below the vocal cords. It was very quick. That’s why nobody heard anything.”
Back in the squad room, Knolls tells McCartin, Lambkin, and Marcia about the autopsy. A detective sitting nearby says, “I’ll never forget my first autopsy. I was feeling real shaky and an autopsy technician came by and said, ‘Detective, do you need a hand?’ I turned around and he put a cut-off hand on my shoulder.”
Lambkin says that he checked a California medical registry and discovered that their victim was listed years ago under a different last name, so an ex-husband might be roaming around. “Also, there’s a few decent sexual offenders living in the neighborhood.”
Marcia tells Knolls that the ultraviolet light found no semen stains on the bed or in the apartment. “But a lot of these guys have ED—erectile dysfunction,” Marcia says. “Some can’t ejaculate; some can’t get an erection.”
“We still need an explanation of why she slept on the living room sofa,” Lambkin says.
McCartin looks baffled. “That’s a pretty strange way for a doctor to live.”
The detectives complain that the fingerprint technician who dusted the apartment was too cavalier. “He told me,” Marcia says, “that he couldn’t get prints off the bed frame because there was too much dust.”
“He told me he couldn’t lift prints off the door frame because it’s not a printable surface,” Lambkin adds, grunting with disgust. “How could the door frame be an unprintable surface? That’s where we got our print in the Gorman case.”
“Because she’s such a loner,” Knolls says, “prints might very well be the key to this case.”
McCartin calls the department’s Scientific Investigation Division and arranges for a new team of print technicians to dust the apartment, more assiduously this time. He also requests that they use the chemical ninhydrin to lift fingerprints on the bedroom and living room walls.
McCartin and Knolls cruise north from downtown on Interstate 5, past the graffiti-scarred cement banks of the Los Angeles River, swirling with water after the rainy winter and flanked with cattails. They pull off the freeway and head west on Los Feliz Boulevard, past sprawling 4,000-acre Griffith Park. The sun streams through the majestic deodars—planted more than eighty years ago—and streaks the sidewalk with light and shadows. At Unson’s apartment, the detectives instruct the print technicians to dust for prints in a number of new areas, including the railings by the stairwell, the doors leading to the parking lot, and the back fence, which the bloodhound indicated the killer might have climbed over during his escape.
As Knolls walks through the courtyard, a tenant calls out, “You should look into some of her disgruntled former patients.”
Knolls nods without raising his head.
Another neighbor informs him, “My brother’s a cop. I think it was someone she knew. I guarantee that’s where you should look.”
The comments reinforce Knolls’s belief that every man in Los Angeles believes he can do two things better than the experts: manage the Dodgers and solve murders.
He returns to Unson’s apartment, finds her phone book, and notes the numbers for her priest and a few out-of-town friends. He plans to call them tonight. After scouring the rooms for clues to her ascetic life, he yells to McCartin, “Hey, we might have another Imelda Marcos here.” He shows him the thirteen pairs of shoes stored inside a plastic garbage bag beside her bed.
McCartin studies her “Catholic Family Appointment Calendar.” On Good Friday she circled “Fast and Abstinence,” and scrawled: “Station of the Cross.” Two days later, McCartin figures, she was killed. In a drawer, he discovers stacks of receipts, which reveal her circumscribed routine. Every evening after work she stopped by a drugstore and purchased water and other small items, ate at a Filipino restaurant, and then apparently returned home. There is not a single dish in her kitchen cabinets.
“It’s kind of sad to die like this,” he tells Knolls. “Alone, in an empty apartment, with no family around.”
The next morning, a detective yells across the squad room to Knolls that Unson’s brother is calling from the Philippines. The detective runs his fingers under his eyes to indicate that the man is crying. Knolls picks up the phone and confirms the brother’s fears. “Yes, she was,” he says softly. “I don’t want to hold anything back from you.… No, it was strangulation. But at this point I want you to keep that to yourself.… I’d like to ask you a few questions.…”
Afterward, Knolls briefs McCartin. “All of her family’s still in the Philippines. They’re coming out here next week. The brother says she lived in this apartment for two years. That makes her seem even stranger because of all her stuff in boxes and garbage bags. She was a very private person and had no relationships with men. She was very frightened of the city, very scared of strangers. At the previous place she lived, she had multiple locks on the doors. The brother says her father was a decorated officer in the Philippine army. He was extremely strict. That probably accounts for her compulsive disorder and her fear of men.”
“Is that your diagnosis, Dr. Knolls?” McCartin asks in a German accent.
“Okay, smart-ass, how come a lady like this had a different last name years ago?”
McCartin shrugs.
“It was a green card marriage only,” Knolls says. “She never lived with him.”
A detective from the division near Los Feliz calls McCartin and tells him that about five weeks ago two patrol officers responded to a “family dispute” radio call at the apartment building where Unson lived. The woman told the officers that a man who had recently moved into her apartment “forced me to have sex with him” a number of times. When the officers hauled the couple to the police station, the woman recanted. No charges were ever filed. The detectives plan to interview the woman tonight.
Later in the morning, Lambkin crosses the squad room to tell Knolls and McCartin that crime reports for the area reveal that an accused sex offender lived right next door to the victim. The news provides the exhausted detectives, who worked until midnight the past two nights and woke up each morning before five, with a burst of adrenaline. They speed to Los Feliz and interview the apartment complex’s manager.
He tells them an Armenian woman lived next door to Unson, but moved out twelve days before the murder. He was not aware that her son, who stayed with her occasionally, had been arrested for a sex crime. “But I did know,” the manager says, “that he was a felon who had some outstanding warrants.” The apartment has been unlocked since last Thursday, the manager says, because a handyman has just painted it and installed new carpeting.
Knolls and McCartin check in with the new crew of fingerprint technicians and discover that their persistence has been rewarded. Although the ninhydrin yielded no prints, the crew did manage to lift several more from Unson’s apartment using traditional methods.
In the courtyard, an elderly man in house slippers is sitting in a plastic lawn chair, chain-smoking. He waves the detectives over and whispers theatrically, “I’ve got some information for you.” They follow him into his musty, cluttered apartment.
Rubbing his palms together, he says, “This is what I wanted to tell you two officers. There’s a lady in this apartment building who knows something. I think it might be important for you. She heard two young fellas speaking in some kind of foreign language. Very loud talking. Then she heard two screams. She said these fellas came in the front door, but she thinks they went downstairs and might have climbed the back fence.”
Knolls and McCartin are intrigued because this scenario corresponds with the trail the bloodhound followed. They wonder if the language this woman heard was Armenian.
“When did she hear these screams?” Knolls asks.
“Sunday night.”
Unson was probably killed Sunday night.
“I told her that I assumed she talked to the detectives. She said she hadn’t. She’s afraid. I told her to do the right thing.”
“When did you have this conversation?” McCartin asks.
“Last night. I missed Jeopardy!, so it must have been between seven and seven-thirty.”
The detectives ask him some general questions about the building’s residents, casually mentioning the Armenian woman who lived next door to Unson.
“I didn’t know her too well, but I saw her son a lot. He visited most every day.”
“When was the last time you saw him?”
“Eight or nine months ago. He used to bum cigarettes from me. He was always friendly and nice to me. But the police were looking for him one time. There was some sort of warrant out for him. A detective told me, ‘Stay away from him. He’s a violent person.’”
After the interview, Knolls and McCartin lug their briefcases and murder book to a table in the courtyard. For a few minutes, they sit in silence, enjoying the sunshine and watching the koi, flashes of orange in the murky pond.
Finally, Knolls says, “This is how I see it. They find her body noon Tuesday. Thirty-six hours earlier would put the time of death at midnight Easter Sunday. This knucklehead is Armenian, so I’m presuming he’s a Christian. Maybe he didn’t know his mom moved. So he shows up on Easter Sunday to visit her, finds out she’s gone, but sees the apartment is open and empty. He hangs around for a while, until Lourdes makes her nightly dinner run. Her meal wasn’t digested, so she probably ate at about six or seven P.M. When she comes back, he sees his opportunity and nails her.”
Later, the detectives knock on the door of the woman who heard the loud voices and the woman who claimed she was raped and then recanted. Neither is home.
On Friday, as the detectives study stacks of Lourdes Unson’s shopping receipts and bank statements, Knolls makes a disquieting discovery: Unson deposited $1,783 at a bank ATM—on Monday. This means she was not murdered on Easter night, their timeline is entirely inaccurate, the coroner’s estimated time of death is wrong, and the woman who heard the screams is irrelevant. Looking discouraged, they prepare to reassess the past week’s work. Now they wonder whether she was abducted or followed home from the ATM machine.
The bank is just a block from Unson’s apartment. The manager checks the records and confirms that Unson deposited the money on Monday. When she tells the detectives when the deposit was made—12:59 P.M.—they are even more confused. Unson’s supervisors said that she worked from ten A.M. to six P.M., Monday through Friday. She was extremely punctual and never called in sick.
“Did she withdraw a large sum on Monday?” McCartin asks the manager.
“She just got a hundred dollars cash back from the ATM.”
The manager agrees to request the ATM videotape immediately, so the detectives can see whether anyone accompanied Unson to the bank.
Knolls and McCartin drive back downtown in silence. There was no money in Unson’s purse at her apartment, and they found no receipts indicating she purchased anything on Monday after withdrawing the cash. They surmise that the killer pocketed it.
“This just got a lot more complicated,” McCartin says.
“Yeah, but at least it narrows things down for us,” Knolls says. “Now we don’t have to worry about Sunday. We just have to focus on twenty-four hours—from Monday to Tuesday.”
McCartin mentions that he has worked late every night this week and has not seen his children since last Sunday. Knolls volunteers to stick around the squad room tonight and review all of Unson’s receipts in an attempt to track her movements on Monday. He tells McCartin to leave on time today.
Knolls stares out the car window, studies the smoggy horizon, and says, “Something’s not right here. I don’t know what it is. But something’s not right.”