There were seven of us sardined around the conference table in Captain Armstrong’s office on Thursday morning. At one end our captain was talking to Lieutenants Stobaugh and Dreyfuss about the upcoming LAPD Night at Hollywood Park. Lexington-born and -bred until his family moved to Los Angeles during World War II, MacIverson Armstrong came from a long line of horse breeders and had the ponies in his blood. Engravings of thoroughbreds decorated his walls, along with a dozen photos of him posing with the Metropolitan Bureau’s Equestrian unit and standing in the winner’s circle at Santa Anita, dwarfing jockeys like Willie Shoemaker and Eddie Delahoussaye.
Gena Cortez sat beneath the picture of Armstrong and Shoemaker, in the middle of the table directly across from me. A dusty blue murder book sat open before her, and she was making notes in a small notebook. As she closed the binder, I noticed “ROBERTS, K & E, 78-592–3” printed on a square of white paper inserted in a pocket on the book’s spine. Cortez gave me a weak smile, averting her eyes as she slid the binder across to Billie Truesdale, who sat next to me. Steve Firestone sat at the other end of the table, biting a hangnail and staring out the window. The epitome of the well-dressed RHD detective, he wore a starch-stiff, long-sleeved white shirt and rep silk tie held in place with an LAPD tie pin. He had barely spoken to me when I came into the office that morning, which was fine with me. He could rot in hell for all I cared.
Like Steve, I had dressed conservatively for the morning’s meeting. While I knew instinctively what had happened between him and me the day before wasn’t my fault, I had selected a cream-colored shirt with a high collar to cover the faint hickey Steve had put on my neck and a boxy beige pantsuit that called no attention to my figure or anything else. I felt as if I were virtually fading into the room’s cream-colored walls, which was also fine with me.
Everyone came to order when Captain Armstrong cleared his throat. At six-six, and about two-ten, with a thick mane of silver hair, Armstrong was the last of a dying breed, still holding firm Chief Parker’s thin blue line. And with forty-two years on the job and nineteen at the helm of RHD, he had earned the respect of LAPD homicide detectives everywhere, even the hard chargers of South Bureau. Big Mac, they called him, as a sign of deference and respect. But for others, me included, another nickname applied that I thought better suited his pony-loving, hobnobbing style, one that went with his initials—Captain MIA.
“I just wanted it to be clear to everyone at RHD and South Bureau that I consider these cases to be very special circumstances,” he said. “And I don’t mean just because of the connection to Detective Justice.” There was a slight dip of Armstrong’s patrician head in my direction.
He pulled off his tortoiseshell cheaters and pointed at each of us in turn. “The way I see it, we’ve got several opportunities here. One, to clear the Lewis case. Two, to nail the sonofabitch for the Roberts family murders and clear two more cases. And three, to find out where this bastard’s been hiding since nineteen seventy-fucking-eight. If there’s an underground escape route for the likes of Lewis, I want us to be the ones to find out where it is and plug it up before the FBI or some other agency does and makes us look like fools—or some of these other low-life thugs figure out how to access it.”
Tony Dreyfuss broke in. “We understand how important the Lewis case is to the Department, sir. But with all due respect, South Bureau’s first priority has got to be the Mitchell murder. Councilwoman Moore’s office and his attorney, Sandra Douglass, are all over me like a cheap suit, demanding we devote every available resource to this case. And we can only hold the press at bay for so long with a one-liner about a suspicious death.”
The tabloids must’ve called Lieutenant Dreyfuss’s office, too, not to mention the always-persistent Neil Hookstratten of the Times. I half-raised my hand. “Excuse me, Lieutenant,” I broke in, “but I think the reason the captain brought us all together is because the two cases are connected. According to Ed Carmichael of Peace in the Streets, Lewis surfaced about a week before he was killed and went to Carmichael asking questions about the gallery’s owner, Dr. Mitchell, and the TAGOUT program. And according to a witness—” I heard, and pretended I didn’t, the noisy scraping of Steve Firestone’s chair, his audible sigh “—Dr. Mitchell was either at the scene talking to Lewis Friday afternoon or in the vicinity when Lewis got popped.”
Stobaugh frowned down the table. “We got a statement from this witness, Firestone?”
“Not unless you’re willing to check into the funny farm to get it.” Steve sat back in his chair and cracked a small smile. “But I’ll let Detective Cortez explain.”
Cortez squirmed in her seat and glanced at me from under her dark lashes as if to say, Don’t blame me, I didn’t want to do this. “Jerry Riley, the witness in question, suffers from schizophrenia,” she began. “After Detective Justice’s first, er, encounter with him on Tuesday, he became progressively more agitated. The building manager said he got so bad by Wednesday they had to have him admitted to the VA psych unit out in Brentwood. I’ve called his doctor out there to see if they’ll let me interview him, but they’re not budging. They’ve got him on a seventy-two-hour hold. No visitors, no exceptions.”
I could feel myself recede further into my clothes. Did my questions press Mr. Riley too far and into an inpatient unit, mumbling his Star Wars visions to whoever would listen? God, I hoped not.
“It’s not a lot to go on, Captain,” Stobaugh acknowledged before Armstrong did it for him, “but we’ll stick with it nonetheless.”
Armstrong compressed his mouth in a thin, mirthless imitation of a smile. “Cinque Lewis was a drug dealer when the Department last had contact with him. Any evidence he was trying to use these juveniles in the TAGOUT program to rebuild his distribution network?”
“If he was, he was doing it without the knowledge of Reggie Peeples, the owner of the gallery,” I replied. “He and the staff said Lewis hadn’t contacted anyone there.”
“People say a lot of shit,” Steve said, not quite under his breath.
I tried to ignore that end of the table and concentrated on making my case to the senior officers in the room. “I’ve known Reggie Peeples practically my whole life. I know he’s struggled for a long time with Spiral West, but he’s not the kind of man to run drugs to make ends meet. And if he were, wouldn’t Peeples have been the one to meet with Lewis instead of sending an emergency-room physician?”
“But didn’t you say at the scene that Mitchell had a drug problem?” Billie asked.
“Yeah, but that was prescription painkillers. That’s a whole different kettle of fish than street drugs. Plus his boss said he was clean.”
“The way that fool was behaving Friday night, I wouldn’t be surprised if he was on something again,” Dreyfuss pointed out and turned to Billie. “Check it out with his friends and associates at the hospital, and see if they can expedite the toxicology results from the post. And let’s get Cooper to check into whether any of these TAGOUT members have gang affiliations or a drug history.”
I offered to provide Billie with the brochure from the art show, which included the names of TAGOUT members. “There’s something else you might want to check into with Cooper, too.” I told her my suspicion that the recently deceased Givens may be the same person who ratted out Cinque Lewis’s Black Freedom Militia to the Department back in the seventies. “Maybe Lewis found out it was Givens who set him up all those years ago and came back to get revenge.”
Captain Armstrong had turned to Lieutenant Stobaugh to review staff deployment on the cases. Stobaugh leaned forward in his chair, eager to redeem himself and his team after my overzealous presentation of Jerry Riley as a witness. “I’ve assigned Firestone as primary on the Lewis murder investigation with Cortez and Justice providing backup. Detective Cortez will stay on Mr. Riley and try to hustle up some leads among Lewis’s old gang connections. Detective Justice will lend assistance to them and be a resource, given her knowledge of the case file. And, with your permission, I’d like to grant South Bureau Homicide’s request for Detective Justice to act as liaison to them on the Mitchell case. We need to coordinate our investigations as much as possible.”
Armstrong squinted over his cheaters at Steve. “You’ve been awfully quiet, Detective Firestone. Can you afford to spare Detective Justice on this one?”
“Fine by me,” Steve mumbled around his hangnail a little too petulantly for my taste. But Armstrong didn’t seem to notice. Maybe I was just being overly sensitive.
After giving us his initial perspective and expectation of the outcome, our captain had rapidly lost enthusiasm for the details and was surreptitiously peeking at a Racing Form hidden in his paperwork. He rose abruptly from the conference table, our signal that the meeting was over and he was on to more important matters.
“Let’s ride this one into the winner’s circle,” he said. Or, on second thought, maybe it was just time for Captain MIA to make a call to one of the Las Vegas sportsbooks. He gathered up the papers under his arm. “I smell a winner here.”
I waited until we were in the parking lot before confronting Steve. “So when were you going to tell me I had the liaison assignment?”
“It had to be cleared with Armstrong.”
“But you knew Stobaugh was going to request the assignment. He wouldn’t have done it without talking to you.”
Steve’s face was a blank mask of indifference, but I could see the anger smoldering in his hazel eyes.
“The least you could’ve done was say something. You’re supposed to be my supervisor, Steve.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said. “Maybe it’s time we make a change.”
“That’ll look just great in my jacket right before my promotion review.”
He shrugged. “Your choice, Charlotte. It didn’t have to be this way.”
“What is this about, Steve . . . if you can’t have me in bed you don’t want me on your team?”
As I was unlocking my car, Steve put a hand on my arm. “Listen, Charlotte, I . . .”
I jerked away. “Maybe I should warn Gena Cortez about what to expect working under you. And maybe Lieutenant Stobaugh, too!” I opened the car door and put it between us. He turned four shades of red, spun on his heel, and walked quickly to his car in the next row.
“Hey, Steve?”
“What?”
“Touch me again, and I’ll blow so many holes in you, you’ll look like Swiss cheese.”
They had held up the autopsy until we arrived. Lewis’s freshly washed body lay waiting for us on one of a half-dozen stainless-steel autopsy tables in the room, naked as the day he was born.
Dr. Cassie Reynolds, a whisper of a woman, no more than five feet two, walked into the suite with a scowl showing on that part of her face not covered by the blue paper mask. “We’re squeezing a lot in here today for your benefit, Detectives,” the medical examiner grumbled behind the mask, “so we don’t have a lot of time to be wasting!”
I adjusted my breathing mask, checked my watch. It was only a little after ten. Reynolds sounded exactly like Ted Receiros, the county’s chief coroner. Dr. Receiros was a maniac about punctuality. As if the dead had a schedule to keep.
As we took our places against the institutional tan-colored wall, Reynolds started examining the body while Humberto Peña, a Department tech on the case, stood nearby. Blonde curls poking from underneath her surgical cap and a reedy voice may have made Reynolds seem a little like Shirley Temple, but Cassie Reynolds was all woman and all business.
The wall felt cold against my back, but no colder than the vibes I was getting from Steve. We stood listening silently to Reynolds, several awkward feet from each other, all our usual jokes and banter idling somewhere in the backs of our throats.
“The body is that of a well-nourished, thirty-three-year-old black male with white hair and green eyes,” she began. She rolled back Lewis’s right eye, the only one left intact. “No, check that, brown eyes.”
I leaned away from the wall in time to watch her peel off a contact lens from Lewis’s pupil. Firestone’s thick eyebrows shot up above his mask despite his nonchalant pose against the wall.
Reynolds moved around to the left side of the body, where Lewis’s prosthesis had been removed. “You guys ever seen one of those bionic arms?” she asked. “They can run as much as forty thousand dollars plus the cost of the surgery to prepare the arm to be fitted with it.”
Peña, short, dark-haired, with the whitest teeth I’d ever seen, brought over an open file for us to read. It was a report on the device Lewis wore. “The prosthesis is a battery-operated electric arm composed of fiberglass and steel with a silicone glove,” I read. The attached photos showed it had been peeled like an onion, the skin-colored, glovelike covering slipped off the pale inner shell and metal framework of the device. The inner workings of the arm resembled something out of that Terminator movie. In a close-up shot they had taken, the name “Hoggman-Dorrangle, San Jose, California,” and the six-digit serial number were visible on the interior of the wrist of the metal frame. Reynolds explained that manufacturers keep a list of the licensed prosthetists who buy their equipment, who in turn keep records of the patients whom they outfit with limbs containing the numbered parts. “He should be easy to trace once you get that prosthetist’s name.”
I held up one of the photos and signaled to Peña. He nodded, and I slipped it into my pocket.
Reynolds had moved up to Lewis’s face. “He’s got these funny little scars on his cheeks,” she told Steve, “although they’ve been mitigated somewhat by plastic surgery. Was he an African trying to assimilate?”
“Gang initiation, back in the seventies,” I replied. “Can you tell how long ago he had the plastic surgery?”
“Not with any accuracy. But it looks as if it was some time ago. This is odd, too.” Reynolds’s already-high voice had gone up another half an octave. “The face and extremities are blue-gray in appearance . . .”
She swore softly. I checked to see if Steve heard. He had and had come off the back wall to see what was up.
Reynolds and Peña were standing over Lewis’s head. “I don’t know how she missed this,” she whispered to Peña, obviously upset. “Would you get that wire we were looking at last week? And get Alexander, too, will you? Here,” she motioned and reluctantly stepped aside. “You need to see this.”
The thin straight groove around Lewis’s neck was unmistakable. Lance Mitchell’s neck bore the same groove, although someone tried to disguise it after the fact to look like autoerotic asphyxiation.
Steve found his voice: “Strangulation was the cause of death?”
Reynolds gave a quick bob of her curls. “There’s enough cyanosis in the victim’s face and body, and petechiae—you know, those little hemorrhage spots in the eye—to indicate it, yes.”
“So he was strangled, then shot?” I asked. “There were two killers?”
“I’d say so,” Reynolds replied. “From the trajectory of the bullet through Lewis’s head and the angle at which it hit the wall, the shooter would have to have been standing next to the victim, shooting straight across, not shooting down from a height above the victim’s body. And the mark from his neck suggests the same thing—he was strangled from a standing position.”
This was a new wrinkle, one that took a moment to digest. “So one person stood behind him, strangling him,” I began, “while the other came up and shot him for good measure?” It seemed like a lot of anger for two people to be carrying. “Where’s his wallet?”
Reynolds waved me toward a table where Lewis’s personal effects were displayed. I peered at Mitchell’s wallet in the bright lights and opened it up. The cash he had borrowed from Aubrey and his driver’s license were gone, but a handful of credit cards in his name were there along with a fistful of receipts and some of his business cards.
I considered the pictures of the body taken at the scene and realized what had bothered me that night when Steve had first shown me the wallet. Lewis had crumpled down on his left side when he fell, his left arm pinned beneath him like a boxer gone down for the count in an old cartoon. Yet in the picture of the wallet’s position, it peeked from under Lewis’s left shoulder as if it had been tucked under him rather than had fallen with the body. I wondered if anyone on the scene noticed it that hectic Friday night. As far as I was concerned, the whole thing pointed in only one direction.
Someone had planted that wallet under Cinque Lewis’s body after he was killed. Someone who wanted to set Lance Mitchell up for the murder.
But I just couldn’t wrap my mind around the notion that Reggie Peeples was involved, regardless of what Steve had insinuated in Captain MIA’s office. Lance Mitchell was a key fund-raiser for TAGOUT, someone that Uncle Reggie should have wanted to keep around as long as possible, not frame for a murder.
But I had to face the facts: Cinque Lewis had been asking around about Reggie Peeples, Lance Mitchell, and TAGOUT a week before he was killed. Maybe Lewis did reach Mitchell and set up a meeting. Maybe Mitchell took reinforcements with him, Peeples or one of the kids. For some reason they argued, maybe struggled, and one of them ended up strangling Lewis while the other one shot him. Afterward, they got scared, split up, and Mitchell ran smack dab into us on the street.
Had Lewis tried to get back into the business by approaching them about using TAGOUT as a front for drug dealing? There was certainly no evidence of it from what I saw at the gallery during the opening or last night either. But what if they were already running drugs, as a way of raising money for the organization? Those high-powered bankers and entertainment types at the reception would be a built-in market. Maybe Lewis had set them up in business and later started jacking them up for more money to remain their silent partner. But the two hundred dollars Mitchell had borrowed from Aubrey Friday afternoon would only be a drop in the bucket, hardly enough to buy a man’s silence. And it still didn’t explain why Lance Mitchell’s wallet would have been planted on Lewis’s body after the fact.
Peña returned with a length of steel wire in his hands, which he passed to Reynolds. She carefully slid it close to Lewis’s neck. “Just what I thought.” She nodded grimly. “Your killer was a southpaw, too.”
As was Mitchell’s murderer, according to François Ha, the coroner’s criminalist. Was Uncle Reggie a lefty, too? “What is this?” I asked.
“Shipping wire, the kind they use for heavy-duty cargo boxes.” Peña spoke with a soft Castilian lisp. “It’s very similar to wire used to bind the wrists of Givens and that other O.G. in that Lucky Ones hit. Our guy here was a vetrano, too, wasn’t he?”
“He was a founder, an O.G. all right, but the Black Freedom Militia was more like one of those Panther offshoots.”
Peña shrugged. “Either way, muerte es muerte,” he said under his breath.
“But this one didn’t die easily,” Reynolds noted. “You can see where the victim was cut by the wire here, and here.”
I made a note while peering at marks on the body’s right fingers and hand that Reynolds indicated. Lewis had obviously struggled with his assailant. And while it should have been caught at the scene or in Processing that night, under the circumstances last week I wasn’t surprised it had been missed.
Cassie Reynolds, however, didn’t look very forgiving. She straightened up, stretched her back, and asked with a little more force where Mikki Alexander was.
“Cassie, I hope you won’t sweat Alexander over this,” I said. “How many bodies did you have in here over the past week? Fifty, damn near sixty? You guys would have to be infallible not to miss something.”
“There was no way she could have caught this at the scene,” Steve agreed, much to my surprise. “We couldn’t roll the homicide van to the scene in all the chaos, so we didn’t have adequate lighting. And in addition to the darkness, Alexander was trying to do her job under cover from the National Guard. Hell, I was nervous out there, and I had a gun. Far as I’m concerned, the whole thing was above and beyond the call of duty. I don’t want to see her get punished for making a small mistake under the worst of conditions.”
Plus, Mikki Alexander had moved heaven and earth to get these two postmortems scheduled together. Steve and I both knew jamming her about an error on the Lewis case that was caught anyway would only make her regret having worked so hard on our behalf. And be unlikely to do it again.
The medical examiner allowed herself a tight smile that gave me hope she might let the new coroner’s investigator slide. She turned and pointed to Lewis’s head. “There’s a one millimeter gunshot entry wound at the right temporal bone about three millimeters behind the right ear.” She put down her ruler and checked her measurements against a photo from the case file. “There’s no blackening around the entry opening, and the entrance wound is star-shaped with flaps directed outward from the skull. The muzzle of the weapon left a clear and distinct imprint on the victim’s head. It was a contact shot, right against the skin,” Reynolds summarized. “You should be able to get a good match on this one, if you’ve got a weapon.”
Thanks to the .38 Roxborough had found at Mitchell’s house, we might.
Reynolds had selected a scalpel from the tray and started to make the Y-incision in Lewis’s body—cutting from each shoulder to the middle of the sternum and across the midline—that would end up making him look a little like a butterflied crustacean, his internal organs to be removed, examined, and catalogued.
I stepped outside to check my messages and make a couple of calls. There was one from Aubrey about Lance Mitchell’s funeral arrangements. Next I called Hoggman-Dorrangle in San Jose to find out where Cinque Lewis had his fancy arm made. They checked their computers and gave me the name of a prosthetist in Las Vegas, who in turn told me from the serial number the device was fabricated in 1983 but he couldn’t remember the name of the patient. He agreed quite readily to check his records and get back to me as soon as possible with a name and an address.
A couple of hours later, Steve Firestone had been replaced on the back wall by Billie Truesdale, who had joined me for the Mitchell post. It was late afternoon by the time Dr. Reynolds finished. She had confirmed what Mikki and François Ha had told us the day before—that Mitchell was strangled by a left-handed person using the same kind of ligature that killed Lewis and was then hung to make us think it was some kind of masturbatory sexual “accident.”
Billie and I stood on the morgue receiving dock talking about what our next moves should be when my stomach started growling. “Let’s grab a burger at Teddy’s,” I suggested. Teddy’s, down on Eighth Street near Wall, was an old diner run by an even older interracial couple, Theodore and Helga Roosevelt. “And, naw I ain’t no Rough Rider!” the elderly black man would yell out at least once a day to the Asian and Latino garment and floral workers studying for their citizenship exams and the police officers from Parker Center and Central Division who came to sit cheek to jowl on the worn red vinyl stools or in the equally decrepit booths. Watching Teddy sling hash, flip burgers, and shoot the shit about life in L.A. was one of the benefits of working downtown.
Billie and I found a booth in a corner and ordered double chili cheeseburgers. “My daughter would love this place,” Billie said.
For an awful moment I felt the hole, the space where Erica had been. Billie must have seen it on my face. Her own instantly registered her embarrassment. “Oh, God, Charlotte, I’m sorry.”
My face felt like lead, but I was able to keep up the smile. “Hearing about other people’s children doesn’t usually bother me. It’s just lately . . . what’s her name?”
Billie pulled out a photo from her wallet. A toddler the color of elm bark with little braids held by a rainbow of barrettes smiled up at me, breaking my heart. “Turquoise,” her mother beamed. “I adopted her a year ago. She’s three now.”
“You adopted her by yourself?”
“Couldn’t wait forever for some dream lover to come along and sweep me off my feet in order to have kids. In our line of work, you see too many children needing homes. I eventually had to do something about it, even if I don’t exactly fit the Huxtable model.”
That one statement spoke volumes about Billie Truesdale. “Love is all that counts,” I said carefully. “And I can tell Turquoise is getting plenty of that from her mom.”
Billie nodded and looked relieved. “I love her to bits,” she admitted.
Helga shuffled over with our drinks. “Well, she’s gorgeous.” Despite my words, I was surprised at the thorny vines of envy constricting my heart. I took a deep breath and shook them off. “What did you dig up on the kids in the TAGOUT program?”
“Gregory Underwood has a bunch of minor beefs on his record consistent with being with a tagger—misdemeanor vandalism of bus shelters, trespassing in a bus yard, misdemeanor possession of marijuana, that kind of stuff. Fairly minor, but it establishes a pattern.”
Underwood’s record was by far the most extensive of any in the TAGOUT group, but his running buddy, Peyton Bell, was right behind him. “It’s a damn shame, really,” Billie said. “Kids come from these difficult home situations, don’t know which way to go. Too often it’s toward the gangs.”
I pointed out that Peyton Bell seemed to have a pretty solid home life.
“He does now, but who knows what his life was like before he was adopted,” she replied.
According to the court records, Billie said, the Bells had adopted Peyton almost seven years ago. “He must’ve been ten or eleven at the time,” I pointed out. “Kind of old for an adoptee.”
Billie agreed. “No telling what kind of foster-care situation he was in. I really admire people who adopt older children; there aren’t enough of our people doing it. But the problems they can open themselves up to . . .”
Helga arrived with our food. I took a bite of my burger and caught the juices dribbling down my chin with a napkin. “What else have we got?”
“Not a lot. We know Mitchell’s autoerotic accident was a setup, and then there’s that bogus call to Dr. Scott. Now if you ask me, the caller was one of two things.” She ticked off the possibilities on her French-tipped nails. “Either a witness to the killing or an accomplice who dropped a dime on his partner for some reason. But either way, it’s gotta be someone who knew they could get in touch with Dr. Scott through Mitchell’s exchange.”
I pulled out my notebook and went down my list. In addition to Underwood, Peyton, and Reggie Peeples, all of whom had seen Aubrey with Mitchell at the gallery along with a hundred others, it included everyone who worked in California Medical Center’s ER plus administration, the CaER staff, even his estranged wife. “We could narrow it down if we had that tape,” I sighed.
“Voilà!” Billie pulled a cassette out of her purse along with a small recorder. “Picked it up today. I’ve listened to it, and I don’t hear anything remarkable, but the voice may mean more to you than me.”
It didn’t. Just a man who sounded like he was three sheets to the wind, slurring his words from a phone booth. People seemed to be walking by him, and I could hear the noise of cars starting up. “What was the caller’s location?” I asked.
“A phone booth at the corner of Slauson and Overhill, in Windsor Hills.”
“That’s in the County Sheriff’s jurisdiction,” I frowned. “If that’s the same person that called Dr. Scott’s exchange to drop a dime on Mitchell’s murder, saying he was from the Sheriff’s Department would have been a logical mistake. Sheriff’s deputies roll through there all the time, checking on the businesses and La Louisiane, that Creole restaurant near the corner. There’s a phone booth next door there. One was probably rolling by when our tipster called.”
“So what . . . our caller goes out for gumbo after finding a dead body?” Billie asked. “That’s pretty cold-blooded.”
“You and I have both seen worse,” I reminded her. We ate our burgers in silence until I asked her if she’d heard from Aubrey Scott.
“No, but the public relations director at the hospital called. Wanted to know when we’re releasing details of Mitchell’s death to the press. I told her the notices should go out today. I won’t be surprised if the television stations pick it up by this afternoon.”
“Are you calling it a murder?” I asked.
She shook her head. “Suspicious death for now. I want whoever did Mitchell to think we’re still scratching our heads.”
“Any word on the gun yet?”
“Untraceable. No serial number on it, and the prints have been wiped clean.”
No breaks there. I started flipping through my notes. “So where do you want to begin?”
We agreed I would go back to the office, set up some meetings with the staff at California Medical Center who knew Mitchell, and have Cortez dig a little deeper on the kids’ alibis. “I’d like you to be involved in as many of the interviews as possible since you’ve met these folks,” Billie said. “That’s an advantage.”
She sucked noisily at her straw. “I overheard Reynolds telling Humberto Peña they’d gotten some pressure from Councilwoman Moore’s office to release the body for the funeral. You hear anything about when the service is gonna be?”
“Dr. Scott called to say it’s Saturday at two.”
“Did he now?” There was a twinkling question in her eye I decided to ignore. “How come so quick?”
“I guess Dr. Holly doesn’t care if his friends and family can make it or not.”
Billie clucked softly. “Too bad his mother or somebody else can’t make the arrangements.”
“She’s still his wife,” I pointed out. “And you know how that goes.”
Billie nodded. “Do I ever.”
“You wanna go?”
She bobbed her head again. “If I can get a baby-sitter. I’m sure it’s going to be a real show.”