Carcass Trade
Authors: Noreen Ayres
For Tom
alongside in the dream
Grateful thanks is offered to the following for their help during the long haul:
Members of
the Fictionaires,
with special thanks to
Barbara DeMarco
Orange County Sheriff-Coroner's Department
Cherry Van Stee,
Deputy Coroner
Maureen Albrecht,
Deputy Coroner
Larry Ragle,
Director of Forensic Services, Retired
Larry Harris,
Lieutenant, Search and Rescue Reserve Unit
Michael Lynn,
Sergeant, Coroner Support Reserve Unit
Richard Olson,
Lieutenant, Public Information Officer
Gary Bale,
Investigator
Long Beach Police Department
Larry Chowen,
Police Officer, Patrol
Bob Mahakian,
Police Officer, Administration
Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department
Larry Mitchell,
Crime Scene Investigation, Scientific Services Bureau
Barry Fisher,
Director, Scientific Services Bureau
Newport Beach Police Department
Patrick O'Sullivan,
Detective Sergeant
California Highway Patrol
Bruce Lian
and
Greg Moorehead,
State Traffic Officers
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Randy Aden,
Special Agent
U.S. Customs Service
Michael Fleming,
Public Affairs Officer
Other experts of talent and grace
Shirlie Banta, Greg Block,
Cecelia Fannon, Dr. Kathleen Ryan, Al Tank, Sandy Tourigny,
Harold Trask, David Vincent,
and
Ryan Watje
Wise and Sharp-Eyed Editors
Bob Shuman
and
Liza Dawson,
and copyeditor
Kathy Antrim
Wise and Charming Agents of the William Morris Agency, East and West
Michael Carlisle
and
Amy Schiffman
My families, both of them
And again, in memory of Gary Brazelton
There must be wisdom with great Death;
The dead shall look me thro' and thro'.
âAlfred Lord Tennyson, “In Memoriam”
1
Up on the hill CC Rider ambled along with his red tail curled over his back and his nose down, sniffing. He stopped just over the burned car wreck that lay on a ledge in the canyon below him and gazed toward us on the roadside just getting out of our cars.
We were in a cut of Chino Hills called Carbon Canyon, a part of northeastern Orange County where, at the start of the century, an oil probe hit a gusher along the Whittier fault line and released centuries of compressed single-cell diatoms that flooded the area with oil boomtowns. Now these same canyons shelter restive yuppies and biker barons taking the narrow curves that snake from the coastal valley to the desert plain by way of Cleveland National Forest.
CC Rider moved downhill on the roadside nearer to where there might be some evidence of a car going over the side, but not so close that anyone could throw a net over him and haul him off to some county dog motel.
“Keep that dog away,” I called to the deputy standing near his cruiser. A red county fire truck was parked ahead on the shoulder, with only one fire fighter in the cab that I could see.
“We been trying,” he said. He removed his pistol from the holster and mock-shot him, and CC on the hill watched and then rose and walked over a little way, tucked his rear under, and defecated near a clump of creosote bush. Then he gave two finishing kicks, sending a weak plume of rain-softened leaf bits into the air. I first came across CC Rider a year or so ago, when I'd been called out on a cocaine-related homicide near a patch of defunct oil rigs crouched and ready for calisthenics in the weeds. While we worked, the dog ran around the steel structures and watched to see if we were doing it right, the investigation, and the park ranger told us then that the dog belonged to no one, but the bikers at Los Lobos named him CC for Carbon Canyon and fed him scraps and got him drunk every once in a while.
The morning sun had broken through the mist and the air carried an unsettling smell of char as I stood by the trunk of my car waiting for my passenger, Doug Forster, to hear the last of “Devil with the Blue Dress” on the oldie station and bring me my keys so I could get my evidence kit out. Doug and I are civilian employees of the sheriff-coroner's department, in the forensic services section, commonly called the crime lab. He shoots most of our photos since the man who used to be on this shift got canned for using crime-scene shots in an art exhibit in Laguna Beach.
While I waited for Doug, I tried to figure how a two-ton missile landed sideways on a table ledge with its wheels to the canyon wall, assuming it flew off the road going up an incline on a right-bending curve.
I heard Doug's voice behind me say, “I know a recipe for roadkill.” He nodded toward a ribbon of brown ants I'd disrupted coursing toward a flattened snake the color of straw near my rear tire, but at first I thought he meant what lay in the burned wreck, humor being one of the ways cops and their cousins cope. Wearing a white turtleneck and jeans, Doug looked like a college student. His dark hair shone and his skin was baby smooth with no beard shadow. Once I heard our front-office clerk say she thought Doug was real buff, meaning cool and hunky. My own taste runs to the old and ragged, Joe Sanders style. I expected Joe to be pulling up in a moment. I'd put a call in for him.
Doug nudged the snake tail with his foot and said, “We could whip up a peanut sauce, thread him on a stick and roast him: snake satay.” He put his finger and thumb together like a delicate waiter, then looked across the road into the canyon at the charred car.
“Are you trying out for the Laff Stop, or what?”
“Think I'm good enough?”
“Hell no.”
“Damn,” he said, and brushed his hands across his jeans as if grass were sticking to them.
We crossed the road some distance from where the cruiser and the fire truck were parked and went partway down the slope and stood, getting the feel of the scene. Except for the black mar against the cliff, the surrounding area was not touched by flame or fury. We had been warned that this one was ugly: The car, with whoever was in it, was entirely burned. Though the paint on the license plate had boiled away, the numbers, which were raised, could be read, and when the deputy ran the plate he learned the 1974 Cadillac was owned by a woman from Beverly Hills, and stolen. That qualified it as a crime scene on a slow morning, even if it did look like a simple accident. The call had come in around six in the morning to the San Bernardino sheriffs from a motorist who'd seen a smoking car over the side on Highway 142. The civilian, doing his Good Samaritan best, had shagged down the hill with his heavy-duty flashlight and tried to get a look inside, but the ledge and the slippery debris prevented more than a verification that it was indeed a beached vehicle, so he plowed back up the hill and phoned from the market in Sleepy Hollow just over the county line where he'd had his morning cup of coffee not ten minutes before.
I said to Doug, “How much damage do you think the fire crew and the civilian did?”
Before he could answer, a deputy shouted and waved his tablet at us. We trudged back up to the shoulder.
While Doug was signing in, I suggested we do the area sketches and wide shots before going down to examine the wreck, and he said, “I hate a woman boss.”
“Not as much as she despises you. Now boogie on up the road and get me some tire impressions, Private.”
The deputy smiled and stepped away so he could motion to a couple of slow cars to keep on moving. I'm not really Doug's boss. I just happened to be the lead on this investigation. I've got five years' seniority on Doug, both at the lab and in life, and at twenty-eight his urges to compete are in full flower. Or maybe he was just trying to impress the deputy.
I signed in, Brandon, initial: S.
Samantha's my given name, but most people know me as Smokey, so the letter works either way. In my younger, stupider, and in some ways happier days, I was Smokey Montiel, a dancer, an entertainer, you might say, in Vegas. A stripper. When I first sought a job in law enforcement, they ran a routine background check because, among other things, they don't want embarrassment to come to an agency from a person's previous employment. But if my former foolish job interested anyone particularly, I never heard about it, though I admit I downgraded the job to “dancer,” and right after that got to list a few years' stint behind a grocery store cash register while I went to college. Way back then I stopped wearing makeup, cut my hair and wore it straight and stayed out of the sun so it wouldn't be so blonde, and took to wearing clothes that if not hid then didn't announce my figure, and in no time I was a cop working jail duty up north. And then one day I wasn't, but dealing with the aftermath of minds much weirder than mine, and feeling my chip was at least on the stack for justice.
“Let's go have a look,” Doug said, following me down the slope.
I put my kit down, took out my pad, and set an
N
on top of the grid paper for the north marker. At the bottom, I wrote my name, the date, and the words “Tape-measuredânot to scale.”
“Come on, let's see what's up,” he persisted.
“Doug, do you know you sound like a whiny little kid?”
“I
am
a whiny little kid. That makes me smarter than you, see, 'cause I get what I want.”
“Go take your pictures.”
“Okay, I'm going down.”
“No.” I made a swift motion to the roadside.
He said, “See? That's what I hate about women. Changing their minds all the time.”
“I meant the road shots.” The reason I wasn't in a hurry to approach the wreck was that a man who'd been around the lab a long time before me told me from the start: Go slow and you might get lucky. Go fast and the expressions on the faces of the victim's family when the court case fails because of something you botched will stay with you for years.
Enunciating slowly and in a near whisper, I said to Doug, “Find us some skid marks, will you, before every looky-loo in the county messes them up.” He followed my gaze to the road shoulder where a car and a bicyclist were stopped as if the deputies' orders shouldn't pertain to them. Only when one of the officers began walking toward them did they ease away.
Doug pointed a finger at me and said, “You lack a serious level of prurient interest, you know that?” then hunched away, turning back for a quick grin. It's not that he has no respect for the dead. It's just that each of us handles this kind of work in a different way. I require a long lead-in.