Life Sentences (12 page)

Her body grew taut with waiting.
She was furious, heartsick, but Gaines said nothing. He just smoked
his cigarette down to the filter.

"Why is he looking at
me?" she asked Jack shrilly. She didn't realize her voice could get
that high.

Jack's eyes narrowed. He turned
to Gaines and said, "You gave me your word." He planted himself
between them. "This is bullshit. I'm not
gonna
put up with it."

The prisoner held his eye. "I
haven't broken my word."

"No contact means no eye contact!"

There was a dreamlike quality to
the scene. "Give this woman some peace, for God's sake!" The
prisoner said nothing. He tipped his head and squinted at the sky while
the sun's rays slashed down on him.

Jack took a few steps forward and
slapped the cigarette out of Gaines's mouth. "Break time's
over," he said. "Hey, hey." Tully crushed the cigarette underfoot.
He made sure it was out before pocketing it, not wanting to leave any
evidence of their rule bending behind. "Break's over," Jack
told the others. After a tense moment, they got back on the trail and continued
walking under the full blaze of the sun. After a quarter of a mile or so,
they took a right fork that skirted the western edge of a meadow, then descended
into another small canyon. Gaines nodded toward a section of forest
that the park crews hadn't pruned yet. The trail was marked with little
flags of orange plastic and overgrown branches. "Over there,"
he said.

"Where?" Jack left Daisy's
side. "Off the trail there?" Gaines pointed with his chin into
the far reaches of the woods beneath the shadow of the mountain. A hot
breeze stirred the dried-out leaf mulch at their feet as the officers
and their prisoner left the footpath and moved in a northeasterly direction.
They stopped beneath a stand of towering ponderosa pines, where the
earth had recently been disturbed. Broken branches and telegraph weeds
were crushed under a few carelessly placed rocks, and the soil emitted
a repugnant smell.

Daisy could feel the air being
sucked out of her lungs as she moved toward the Up of the grave site.
Oh, Anna, are you really buried in this
forgotten part of the world?

Several officers took out their
emergency shovels and began to dig. Soon Jack and Tully joined in, rolling
up their sleeves and bending to this gruesome task.

Daisy backed away, a bitter taste
rising in her throat. She watched the shovels tunnel into the earth, and
after a few minutes, a human foot came into view.

Jack asked one of the officers to
take Daisy back to her motel before they exhumed the body from its shallow
grave.

"I don't want to go," she
said. Her eyes were glazed, and her skin was translucent.

"You're in shock," he told
her. "It's better this way."

"No."

He held her eye. He wanted her to
trust him, not just now but in the future. Knowing how incredibly vulnerable
she was made him feel even more responsible for her. He'd heard the low
primal moaning of too many family members not to want her gone from the
scene. "I'll call you later, okay?" he said.

A uniformed officer escorted
Daisy back down the unmarked trail, and Jack watched as she disappeared
behind the tree line. Then, sensing a commotion behind him, he turned
in time to see two County Sheriff's Department officers hustling Roy
Gaines onto the waiting helicopter. He displayed little emotion as
he glanced back at Jack, his eyes clear and seemingly bemused. This was no
evil genius. Without a whole lot of pressure from the police, he'd given
it all up-the body, the dump site, his connection to the victim. A detective's
best friend was the perpetrator's tendency to brag. His desire for the
spotlight.

As the chopper buzzed away, Jack
knelt on the ground and studied the corpse.
Hm. Not much good news here
. A body outdoors in warm weather
immediately began attracting hordes of insects looking for a good place
to lay their eggs. At first glance, it would appear that Anna Hubbard
had been moldering in her grave for three or four months now, since there
was very little left of her but leather, sinew and bones. However, Jack
knew that as far as dead bodies were concerned, looks could be deceiving.
The state of
decomp
depended on several variables-weather,
soil conditions, insect activity. In Anna Hubbard's case, she'd been
alive five weeks ago, according to her mother. Five weeks, and this was
all that was left of her. The maggots had long since crawled away from the
corpse and burrowed into the ground, taking with them over 80 percent
of her total body weight.

The smell was hard to take. He breathed
in through his open mouth while Dr. Theodore
Swanzy
of the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner's Office knelt in the weeds
and brushed the dirt off the victim's skull. Because the body had been buried
during a drought, mummification had occurred. The twenty-eight-year-old
woman's eggplant-colored skin reminded Jack of a wet T-shirt that had dried
over bones. The corpse's skin was shoe-leather tough, and the scalp with
its long auburn hair had slipped off the skull and lay coiled in the dirt.
The hands had sloughed off their bones like gloves, and clinging to the
skeletal fingers were bits of decayed flesh that the beetles hadn't run
off with yet. The victim wore a faded denim dress, a bra and white cotton
underpants. Her shoes were missing. In the folds of the dress were stray
fly pupae that reminded Jack of rat droppings. A beetle scuttled across
an anklebone, and Jack's heart twisted for an instant as he imagined
her laughter. He saw her eyes sparkle. Funny how death could reduce
you to nothing-all those dreams, all those longings, gone in an instant.
How was that possible?

"What's the time of death?"
he asked Ted
Swanzy
.

"Hard to tell." Fast approaching
his seventh decade, Dr. Theodore
Swanzy
was in
dire need of a nose hair trim. He had a face like a mottled paper bag
and a voice as high and rasping as an electric razor from yelling at his
medical students and residents all day long. "Judging from the state
of preservation and the number of larvae I've counted so far, I'd say
at least a month."

Jack nodded. It fit with the timeline.

"See this area of the victim's
neck where it's badly degraded?" Ted said, pointing it out as if he
were back in the classroom. "See this area of trauma around the throat
where the scratch marks have opened up all this underlying tissue? Now,
that's what I'd call prime blowfly real estate. A female blowfly will choose
the quickest route into the underlying fat and muscle tissue. In this
instance, they left the face intact and went for the open wounds on the
neck. You can see that the victim's face has remained relatively untouched,
because the flies have chosen to lay their eggs where the major trauma
took place."

Jack glanced up. "Are you saying
she was strangled to death?"

He gave a curt nod. "I'm guessing
it was a two-handed attack to the front of the neck, where the maggot presence
is most prominent."

An hour later, they loaded Anna
Hubbard's remains onto the morgue van for transport to downtown L.A.,
where the body would be held in cold storage. After the van had pulled
away, Jack stood for a moment and assessed the scene. The case had to be
airtight. Never mind that the suspect had led them directly to the body,
most criminal defense attorneys were sharks. They'd do anything to
win. It wasn't so much about their client's rights or serving justice as
it was about them winning a case and getting their faces plastered all
over the six o'clock news.

The mountain's shadow had moved.
Jack could feel the sun against his shoulders now, could sense the big
blue dome of the sky beyond the treetops as he breathed through his nostrils,
full of the stench of decay. The stink molecules clumped together, sticking
to your nasal passages long after you'd left the scene. The only way to
get rid of them was to sniff water, an old trick.

Jack knew that an official release
of the findings from the Medical Examiner's Office could take weeks.
Anna Hubbard's dentist back East was shipping her dental charts via UPS,
and print matching could take several days due to backlog, but Jack wanted
a positive ID this afternoon if possible. He left the tech team to complete
its grid search, got in his state-of-the-art junk heap with its broken side
mirror and rattling suspension and drove down the mountainside in
the steadfast glare of late afternoon. Once he was on the freeway, he
activated his cell phone and dialed the number of Daisy's motel.

"Hello?" She sounded
groggy.

"It's Jack. Sorry to bother
you." The sun reflecting off somebody's rear windshield stunned
his eyes, momentarily blinding him. "I need you to ID the body for
me, today if possible."

"Oh God…"

"Before we can proceed with
an autopsy. I'd like to get a jump on things."

"All right," she said weakly.

"Daisy, I'm sorry about your
loss." He had been proud of her; she had not reacted hysterically
the way some family members did. "Meet me there in half an hour.
I'll give you the address."

Everything gleamed inside the
autopsy suite-the stainless-steel organ scales, the instrument trays
with their sharp-edged scalpels and rib cutters, the cold metal autopsy
tables. The Los Angeles County Medical Examiner's Office was open
24/7, and today every station bustled with preoccupied pathologists
and medical students hovering over dead bodies.

"Busy week?" Jack asked
the mortuary technician.

"April's the worst," he said
with a shrug. "One good thing about the dead, though. You never lose
a patient." Already a hard-core cynic in his Office of the Medical
Examiner T-shirt, the young blond mortuary tech escorted Jack and Daisy
past the autopsy stations toward the back door.

"Where are we going?" Daisy
asked, her voice sounding leveled off.

"The
decomp
morgue." The tech pushed open a heavy metal door.

"Step right up." Jack held
the door for her, and they crossed the loading platform into a separate,
smaller building where the badly decomposed bodies were housed. Daisy
moved gracefully past him, looking particularly frail beneath the sodium-vapor
lighting. He could tell she was suffering, but there wasn't much he could
do about it.

Brightly lit and recently renovated,
the
decomp
morgue contained some of the newest
forensics technology in the country. They followed the mortuary tech
over to the cooler with its capacity for seventy-four bodies-double
rows of thirty-seven refrigerated units. 'Take a deep breath,"
Jack told her. "Don't think. Just look."

The refrigerated units were
kept at one degree above freezing. A blast of frigid air hit them as the
mortuary tech rolled a drawer open and unzipped a body bag.

Daisy's initial instinct was to
draw back, but Jack held her firmly in position. "Is that her?" he
said.

Anna Hubbard's mummified corpse
lay pitifully inert on the cold steel table, her face a ghoulish Halloween
mask. It took a few moments for the shock to wear off, but then Daisy shook
her head vigorously.

"What?" he said, startled
by this response. "Daisy. I need you to stay focused."

"That dress…"

"What about it?"

She shook her head again. The
dress was sleeveless with a pattern of tiny pink flowers on denim fabric.
"I've never seen it before," she said. "I'm thinking…"

"Take your time."

"It's not her."

"What?"

"That isn't Anna's hair,"
she said, pointing at the scalp curled inside the body bag. "Anna's
hair is longer and redder than that."

"Redder?"

"Coppery red."

He took out his notebook and riffled
through its pages. He thought she'd said auburn, but he couldn't find it
anywhere in
bis
notes. He hadn't even questioned
the fact that this was Anna Hubbard. "Okay, hold on." He examined
the leathery wrists, looking for slash marks from an old suicide attempt.
He couldn't find any.

"It's not my sister!"

It hit Jack all at once. "The
bastard lied to us."

Jack drove Daisy back to her motel,
preoccupied by a puzzling question. Why had Gaines led them to the
wrong body? Was it a deliberate act of deception? Jack doubted the prisoner
had gotten the bodies mixed up, since most serial killers remembered
every detail of their crimes. No, Roy Gaines was playing mind games. But
why? What purpose did it serve? They had him on two first-degree murder
charges now. It was self-defeating.

The stop-and-go traffic reminded
him of that old joke:
What do you call a
car that's stuck in rush-hour traffic? A stationary wagon
. He glanced
over at Daisy. He wanted to comfort her but didn't know how. Old jokes probably
wouldn't do it. As his car bumped over the patchwork parking lot of the
Shooting Star Motel, Jack realized he'd never been so thirsty in his life.
His tongue felt like a dried apricot. He would drop Daisy off and go to
Bugg's
Place.
Bugg's
was a cop
bar. Drinking was Jack's way of blowing off steam. He would go to
Bugg's
and get drunk and joke about today and talk about
us versus them. Outsiders never understood us versus them. His three
ex-wives certainly hadn't understood it. Other cops were the only ones
who understood us versus them, and going to
Bugg's
would make Jack feel less alone.

Now he parked his car and got out
and escorted Daisy to the door of her cabin.

"Would you like to come
in?" she said, fear flickering in her eyes. "Just for a minute?"

Jack recognized the fragile state
she was in. As a courtesy, he stuck his head in the door and glanced around
the room-cerulean-blue walls, double bed, an old wooden bureau with
lots of drawers, a
minibar
. He licked his dry
lips.

"I don't want to be alone,"
she told him, standing too close. "I'm afraid."

A cop could so easily take advantage
of a person in this condition. "
Lemme
check
it out for you," he offered, stepping inside. "Then I've really
gotta
go."

The sun's electrified rays slanted
into the room through the smoky, half-closed blinds. He walked around the
room and opened the bathroom door. The shower stall was empty. The closet
was empty. "All clear," he said.

"So where do you think she is?
My sister."

He was feeling more compassion
than usual. They were both restless. There was nothing to do but pretend.
"She may very well be alive," he told her.

"Really?"

It pained him to go on. He could
tell that her sense of boundaries was beginning to unravel.
"No," he admitted. "I doubt it, given the circumstances."

"But that's just your opinion,
right?"

"Yeah. That's just my opinion."

Her rosebud mouth drew taut.

"Hey," he said in an emphatic
way. "What the hell do I know? I can't read the future. I just stick to
the facts."

"I can't stop shaking,"
she said, hugging herself.

"I should go."

She made a sudden unexpected move,
leaning against him with her soft-swaying body, and Jack grew tense beyond
belief. A heavy sweat broke out on his face as she touched the cracked
leather holster underneath his left arm. "So what happens
next?" she murmured.

Next was nightmares, loss of appetite,
withdrawal from loved ones. The pattern was inevitable. But he responded
evenly, "We're going to keep looking. We're going to do everything
we can."