Dead Spots (Scarlett Bernard #1)(21)
Jesse spent the morning making phone calls, trying to identify the three victims. Now that the bodies had been reassembled, it was easier to identify them as a female in her late twenties, a Caucasian male in his early thirties, and an African American male in his midforties. Their clothing, when it was pieced together, had been unremarkable: T-shirts and jeans from the mall, a blazer from Brooks Brothers, a pair of Nikes. The Caucasian male had painted his fingernails black and ripped his designer jeans, but that wasn’t a particularly helpful identifier in Los Angeles. To Jesse’s surprise, none of them had been carrying any kind of ID, not to mention a purse or briefcase. The victims’ fingerprints weren’t on record anywhere, and no one had reported them missing.
The coroner’s report had been released, but it left more questions than answers. All three victims had been shot first, one by one, in both legs. The shots themselves weren’t fatal, but the injuries would have incapacitated the victims so that the killer could take his time with them. Cause of death was technically blood loss: the two main arteries—femoral and jugular—had been severed on all three bodies, and the victims had bled out. The blood work analyst theorized that each of them had belly-crawled away from one side of the clearing, as if to escape their attacker. Postmortem, the bodies had been dismembered and eviscerated, the blood shaken out of the limbs and the intestines spread around the clearing. It was grisly and horrifying, and Jesse was grateful that at least that part had been done postmortem.
The details were important but didn’t really help to point in any particular direction. As it stood, the investigators were spinning their wheels. Who were the victims? Why were all three missing their identification? Did they go to the park willingly, or were they forced there from somewhere else? And how had they gotten to the park in the first place? LA was a driving city; everyone used a car to go anywhere. But no abandoned cars were found in the vicinity of the park, so Jesse had called cab companies and bus depots, trying to find anyone who remembered driving the three victims. No one had seen three people like that together, but there were plenty of young women and middle-aged men in cabs that night. One of the uniforms would be going around later with retouched photos of the victims’ faces.
At noon, Jesse went to see his supervisor, Captain Miranda Williams. A thick-waisted woman in her early fifties with a large hooked nose, Williams was the opposite of every police captain in the movies his family made. She was maternal, concerned, determined, and loyal. Jesse liked her a lot and was happy that he’d been assigned to her division—even if she didn’t seem that happy about it herself. Williams, like the other detectives in the unit, still seemed skeptical that Jesse had anything going on between the ears. Yesterday that had weighed on his mind, but a lot had changed since then. He had other concerns.
Williams was putting the phone down as Jesse knocked on the doorframe and entered. She gestured for him to take a seat. Jesse thought she looked as tired as he felt.
“Please tell me you have new information, Cruz. The press is starting a frenzy over this case. They’re calling it the new Black Dahlia, and you know how well that turned out for the department.”
“Yes, ma’am. And unfortunately, I don’t have any news. But I did have an idea.”
“Go ahead.”
“La Brea Park isn’t all that far from the airport. If the three of them were taken from LAX, it might explain why three such different people were all killed together. Like a random thing.”
“Uh-huh.” She seemed unconvinced.
“I thought I could take the pictures of the deceased over to LAX, show them to some baggage people, the guys who run the security cameras. If they were coming from somewhere, we could get ID that way.”
Williams thought it over and finally shrugged. “I think it’s a pretty big stretch, but at this point, we’re willing to consider anything. Go ahead. Just call me if you find anything, and get a report back to me before the end of the day, all right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jesse said.
He knew he’d actually have to do the wild-goose chase at the airport—these things had a way of coming back to haunt you if you didn’t follow through—but he could squeeze in a couple hours of his own investigation in the meantime. He drove to Scarlett’s, feeling a little nervous. At least it was broad daylight.
Chapter 8
Tuesday night was another rough one. When I finally made it into bed, I found myself trapped in a mental loop, thinking about the murder and Eli and my job. The freelance gigs I get are good—I occasionally attend important pack meetings where there might be extra tension, or chaperone vampires in the business world when they can’t avoid a daytime meeting, stuff like that. But I need the steady income of my crime scene job. If not for that, I had absolutely no idea how I’d make a living. I didn’t make it through a single semester of college, and I had no skills or non-supernatural job experience. I didn’t think McDonald’s would care if, one time, I hid three severed limbs, a pool of blood, and a dead hundred-year-old desert tortoise in twenty-five minutes. No, I needed to keep my job, whatever it took, if I wanted to keep eating.
When the alarm went off at eleven thirty, I woke up stiff and cranky, still wearing my clothes from the night before. I dragged myself out for a run, showered, and pulled on yesterday’s jeans and a dark-brown T-shirt. No need to dress up for the geeks. I impatiently tugged a brush through my long hair and pulled it up in a clip while it was still damp. I checked the mirror. Good enough.