Fair Warning (Jack McEvoy #3)(66)

I was stunned by the message and read it several times before taking another breath. Obviously, the hanging in Burbank had to be Hammond, and I noted that GTO had not called it a suicide. I had no doubt that Rachel’s take on Hammond’s death had been on the money. Maybe the coroner’s office was onto it as well.

The second death was what had my full attention. A fatal fall in Northridge. Calling a death a fatal fall did not rule out the possibility of murder. I needed to get more details. Northridge was a Valley neighborhood. I called the LAPD’s Valley Bureau, identified myself as a journalist, and asked for the lieutenant. I wasn’t connected for nearly five minutes but refused to hang up, being better at waiting games than most of the people who didn’t want to talk to me.

Finally, I was connected.

“Lieutenant Harper, how can I help you?”

“Lieutenant, this is Jack McEvoy. I work at a consumer-watchdog website called FairWarning and—”

“How can I help you?”

“Okay, well, I’m looking for information on the fatal fall up in Northridge today. Like I said, we are a consumer watchdog and we pay attention to workplace injuries and accidents, et cetera. I was hoping you could tell me what happened.”

“A guy fell off the roof of a parking structure. That’s it.”

“What parking structure? Where?”

“He was in the mall up there and when he left he went to his car and then jumped or fell off the roof of the garage. We’re not sure which yet.”

“Did you identify the victim yet?”

“Yes, but we’re not putting that out. We haven’t found next of kin. You’ll have to get the name from the coroner.”

“Okay. What about age?”

“He was thirty-one, I think my guys told me.”

The same age as Hammond, I noted.

“There wasn’t a note or anything?”

“Not that we’ve found. I need to—”

“Just a couple last questions, Lieutenant. Were there any cameras that showed the fall and could shed light on what happened?”

“We do a camera canvass on these sorts of things and we haven’t found anything yet.”

“Who is the investigator assigned to this?”

“That would be Lefferts. He’s lead.”

“Thank you, L-T.”

“You got it.”

A five-minute wait for less than a minute of information. I next went to the website of the county medical examiner’s office and pulled down the staff menu. I was trying to find out who GTO might be. None of the medical examiners fit the bill, but when I looked at the list of coroner’s investigators, I zeroed in on Gonzalo Ortiz. My guess was that his middle name began with T.

Sometimes a phone was the best way to get what you needed—like when you are trying to penetrate the LAPD. But for the coroner’s office I wanted to go in person. I wanted a face-to-face with GTO because I sensed from the message on the causesofdeath board that he might be a guy who would talk. Maybe it was a long shot, but I wanted to take it. I shut down my computer and walked over to Emily’s pod. She was typing up notes from one of her calls.

“I think I found Hammond’s partner.”

She immediately stopped typing and looked up at me.

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t get a name yet.”

“Then where is he?”

“The coroner’s office. He fell off a parking garage a couple hours ago, broke his neck. I’m going to go down there to see the investigator, see if he’ll talk.”

“You mean broke his neck like we’re seeing here?”

She pointed to her screen, meaning the whole case. I nodded.

“There’s a coroner’s investigator who I think has put two and two together. He posted to me on the message board less than an hour ago. I want to go see if he’ll talk. The LAPD won’t tell me shit.”

“But doesn’t he think you’re a coroner after the way you first posted?”

“I don’t know. The head medical examiner sort of outed me but he still posted.”

“Well, don’t dawdle. We have a lot to do.”

“Dawdle? Not my style. I’ll call you after I get there.”





31

It was my first time to the coroner’s office in at least four years. It had been a regular stop for me when I covered crime for the Times and later the Coffin. But at FairWarning death had not been my beat until now.

The death complex, as I termed it, was on Mission Road near the County–USC Medical Center in Boyle Heights. The two medical centers—one for the dead, the other for the living—were attached by a long tunnel that once facilitated the movement of bodies from one side to the other. The original office sat close to the street, a forbidding brick structure that was nearly a hundred years old and now was mostly used as a souvenir shop and for meeting rooms. They did big business selling toe tags, coroner’s blankets, and other morbid items to the tourist trade.

Behind the old structure was the new modern structure with clean lines and soothing beige tones. There was a glass-doored entrance that I used to get to the reception desk. I asked for Investigator Gonzalo Ortiz. The receptionist asked what my visit was in reference to.

“Uh, the police told me to talk to the coroner’s office to get information about a death,” I said. “It happened today up in the Valley.”