The Juan Doe Murders: A Smokey Brandon Thriller (12 page)

Late afternoon I felt at loose ends, so I put on sweats and a fanny-pack with my new S&W in it, and walked across the road to the bay. It’s not so wise a thing to take a walk down its shrubby paths in the dimming light, but the 700-acre bay has a drawing power hard to resist. Days, it is host to bicyclists, boaters, fishers, joggers, and busloads of children on field trips. Nights, it seethes with a Mardi Gras of birds and beasts.

Before I moved here there’d been two murders, one a schoolgirl, another a woman with roses stuffed between her legs. The only trouble of late has been a few shouting matches between “wheelers” and “walkers.”

The writer Marcel Proust had a horror of sunsets—so operatic, he said. I thought of that while I admired the brass-rose sky. In the air was a sweet smell of damp sage, tidal brine, faint decay, and cliff flowers.

An older couple came down the trail ahead of me. A dove that had huddled unseen on the graying path spurted off between us. The couple said there was a heron back there choking down crab like no tomorrow.

“Really?” I said. “I’ll look for it.”

They moved beyond me. Then the man looked back and said, “It’s getting kind of dark. I’d be careful if I were you.”

The woman was a comfortable contrast, yet it was she who added, her forefinger raised, “You young people sometimes forget how bad it can be, all the weirdos in the world these days.”

“Right,” I said. “Have a good evening. I won’t go far.”

“That’s good,” they chimed.

FOURTEEN

I
 wanted to see the ankles of Doe Two. The damage there might show more clearly now, this subtle development called a “second event.” A coroner’s deputy named Mona told me, “No problem,” picked up a camera, and rose from her chair with an effort that strained her black twill pants. On her blouse was a large, brightly painted version of a carrot-haired Bette Midler. I commented on it. Mona got a satisfied grin on her face and said, “My alter ego.”

In the cooler by Doe Two she folded the plastic cover down. “The marks do appear to be consistent with punctures from canine teeth,” she said.

“But if that occurred after he was dead there would be no blood, right? There was blood.”

“I’m not a doc but that would be my assumption. Here’s something else,” she said, “up here.” She pointed to irregularities on the bridge of the victim’s nose and under both eyes. “My guess is he was held tightly, very tightly, by some sort of binding. He could have been cuffed too. We have faint red at the wrists.”

“Nothing like a belt or cuffs at the scene,” I said. She just shrugged a shoulder and said she’d snap off some shots for me and bring them into the autopsy room, which was my next stop.

I said thanks and went on. The techs and docs were at their stations. Lenore was not among them. Trudy wasn’t there either, whom I half-expected although it is not a requirement for the forensic jock to attend.

The San Juan Creek Doe was as Trudy described. Haircut. Young. Hispanic. Dr. Margolis was the examiner. Good. I asked if he saw similarities in any of these cases. He pointed to the hole in the forehead and said, “Other than that, no.”

When Mona brought in the Polaroids, I asked him what he thought caused the marks on the face and ankles of Doe Two. “I’d guess it’s a contusion from a leather belt,” he said. “See this?” He spread his gown to show a brown belt with lacing top and bottom. “Something to think about,” he said, then turned back to his work.

At a Fifties-style diner a few blocks away I ordered a bagel and cream cheese and coffee. Dishes clattered, voices screeched. I looked out at the blue, blue sky and had a sudden feeling of disassociation, as if I belonged nowhere. I watched people come and go, their conversations heard yet not heard.

A belt, I thought. Okay. Victim restrained, brought to that hill in Nellie Gail by the water tanks. No. Victim on that hill, then restrained, because he was carefully set against the tree, and it would be too hard to lug a bound body, living or dead, up the hill. Why there? What about the coyote bites?

I ate my meal but still sat there, tapping my finger on the side of my cup, unwilling to go. Then I had it: The boy was shot while restrained against the tree, and left for dead. An animal came by. It chewed on the boy’s ankle, maybe trying to pull him down for better vantage. Perhaps the boy moaned. Perhaps the killer, still nearby, heard the moan, and came and sent a second round through the same portal as the first. But why, then, did I not find a second slug? No. The boy was shot. He did not die. Coyote came, sniffed. Bit. Boy, though unconscious, kicked. Coyote fled. Boy died. Coyote waits. Simple.

I left a message for Stu that I was going back out to Nellie Gail. I was glad he wasn’t in because he would say there’s no point. A crime scene opened to the public can no longer deliver anything to serve as evidence for prosecution. But I went anyway, to satisfy myself. This time I brought a magnifying glass to more closely inspect the bark on the opposite side where the body leaned. I thought I saw faint impressions but could not be sure. It meant nothing. Nor was any shooter hiding in the bushes. No one to throw his hands up and say you got me girl, I surrender.

Joe wasn’t in his office when I got back, but later I saw him involved in conversation with a detective at the bench by the microscopes so I didn’t go in. He left a message on my office voice-mail about getting together, and I left one for him. When I didn’t hear again, I figured maybe something came up with David.

Late in the afternoon a colleague came by and told me she’d just come from a scene involving a starved and beaten child of four. The child was alive, the mother wasn’t; she finally did the world a favor and drank strychnine. My colleague broke down at my desk. I held and comforted her. Then she said, “Fuck. I’m getting out of here,” and left.

On my way home I kept switching the radio on and off. The sky was dark with threatened rain. I stopped to mail a letter and rent a video, and when I filled my tank with gas I kept an eye out, watched the shadows, saw in every car or crowd a killer.

Fifty. Five-O. Is it old? Is it young?

All I know is, no matter how I march the numbers forward or back, stand them on their head, measure them off like tick-marks on a ruler, fifty, blessed fifty, is too young to relinquish impact upon this world. Fifty is too young to die.

I was in the snack room the next morning around ten getting a cup of machine-dispensed chicken soup, reading a report at the
same time from the FBI on how drug use is now higher in female juveniles than in males, and speculating on why that should be so. The cup of soup was scalding. I set it on the counter for a better grip so I could pour some of it off and add cold water, when I heard from the lips of a man in the hallway the words, “Oh, no!
Shit
, you say,” in that distinctive tone that tells you he’s just heard something you don’t want to. Then all I caught was a word here or there.

But as the men moved past the aperture of the door, it was the last few words I heard that devastated my heart: “He was supposed to turn fifty next Monday, wasn’t he?”

That would be Joe.

I shot out into the hall and caught up with them. These were men I didn’t know well, men who’d probably not heard grapevine dispatches that Sanders and Brandon were a pair.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

One of them said, “Joe Sanders had a massive heart attack.”

The floor fell away. I put a hand on the wall but recovered before they noticed. “When?” I asked.

“Six o’clock this morning, at home.”

The other one said, “A lot of heart attacks occur in the morning. That’s why I don’t do my exercises right off.”

“Better just to stay in bed,” the first man said, “catch a few winks.”

I piled into the director’s office. “What happened to Joe Sanders?”

Paul Ferris looked up, paused, and said, “He died.”

“No he didn’t,” I said, taut as a spring.

“I’m afraid it’s true. I checked at Irvine Med Center.” He looked at me differently now, as if recalling that Joe and I are more than colleagues. “Why don’t you take a seat, Smokey?”

“Who reported it?”

“His ex-wife. That’s who they had on file.”

“There’s some mistake. This can’t be true.”

“Why don’t you sit down?” Paul rose and rounded the desk to come toward me.

Fucker. Leave me alone, is what I felt. I walked away.

I drove. I parked. Several times. I cried.

On a long dirt road off Sand Canyon I sat under eucalyptus trees so tall they seemed to be the heavens. Sat there thirty minutes or so with the window down, studying rows of plants, the dry dirt beside the car, the patterns of shed leaves ranging in color from gray to wine. Above, the sky was without tone or variation. Birds flitted, but not with energy.

I fell into a spasm of hard weeping, recalling moment after moment of Joe. Joe and me, Joe and Ray, Joe and others. This man could not be gone. My heart raged against life and anyone I knew who’d slighted him, shorted him, not given everything he’d expected. I myself stood high on that list for omissions and commissions, for why hadn’t I recognized the warning signs?

My throat ached. My eyes burned as if I’d walked through smoke. The flesh of my face had a quivering life of its own.

Within minutes of reaching home, I had a call from Joe’s son. We cried, recovered, cried again. I asked if he was going to be okay. He said yes, yes, but there was one thing. Then all I heard were sobs. “David, where are you? Are you at home?”

“I’m not at my apartment.”

“Your mom’s?”

“No.”

“Where, then?”

“I’ll have to call you back.” He hung up.

Then one of those reprieves you see only in your trembling dreams occurred. Paul Ferris called…to say Joe wasn’t dead.

“I’ve been trying to reach you,” he said. “Apparently a nurse blew off her mouth when she didn’t have all the facts.”

My knees were weak and I sat. Joe, alive!

The director waited, then said, “You need somebody there?”

“No. No.”

“So they’re watching him real close now, that’s all I know. If you need some time off,” Paul said, “it’s okay.”

“Paul, I just got off the phone with his son. He still thinks his father’s dead.”

“His mother phoned us,” he said. “She thinks you might know where he is.”

“I don’t. He didn’t say. He’s very upset.”

When we hung up I grabbed my keys, flew out the door, raced down the stairs to my car. All I could think of was, “He’s
alive
.”

They wouldn’t let me in. I couldn’t even be sure Joe would get the message I left at the nurse’s station.

I fell into bed exhausted when I got back.

The next morning Joe was still in ICU. I found his Jennifer’s phone number in the book under Joe’s old listing and called her. We commiserated, then I asked about her son. She was worried sick: She still couldn’t reach him. My heart tore for him, but there was nothing I could do. I went in to work.

A strange thing happens when the mind is under stress. There’s fog, and clumsy thinking. And then, for no reason I can put a name to, sometimes there’s heightened clarity.

I went to Property and checked out the belt I bagged from the Nita Estevez case. I remembered it had laced edges. Again I processed it for prints. I got nothing I could use. I examined the photos Mona had made of the Nellie Gail Doe and tried to compare the ripples across his face with what I saw on the belt before me. It couldn’t be a match. The case circumstances were too different. But it was interesting: a laced belt as a binding or ligature in both these cases.