Trail of Echoes (6 page)

My eyes roamed her body, stopping at the weird coloring.
Differing lividity
. Why had he moved her so much?

Brooks walked to the other side of the table. “One injection mark on her right thigh.” He pressed the pedal, then grunted.

“Maybe she was diabetic,” I offered.

He grunted again, then pressed the pedal, directing his attention to the girl's discolored feet. “Significant bruising on the top and bottom of the patient's left foot. The discoloration suggests a Lisfranc injury and occurred while the patient was alive. X-ray will confirm.”

The girl's right hand was curled into a fist.

“Now examining the patient's closed right hand.” He pried open her fingers.

She held a dull white object the size of a Jelly Belly and flecked with brown grit.

Brooks squinted at whatever it was. “The patient is holding a tooth in her right hand.”

Before I could ask a follow-up question—whose tooth, her tooth, which tooth, why a tooth?—I blurted, “What color were her eyes?”

Brooks clicked off the mic and snapped,
“What?”

“Her eyes.”

“I'm looking at her feet right now, Detective.”

“What color?”

“Green or hazel.”

“Wait. Birthmark. I read that—”

“Are you gonna let me—?”

I stepped over to the counter and grabbed the maybe pile of missing persons reports. Holding my breath, I flipped through each document.
Not her … Not her … Her!

The color photo was one of those glamour shots taken at the mall. This girl had green eyes, a wide nose, and cashew-colored skin. She wore lots of fuchsia eye shadow and coats of purple lipstick. If you wiped away the paint that had tramped her up to look twenty-seven years old, she'd be the girl now lying on Brooks's table.

“Thirteen-year-old Chanita Lords,” I said. “Missing since Friday, March fourteen.”

Brooks sighed, and his shoulders slumped with relief.

“At least now she has a name,” I said, my gaze still on the photograph.

“Five days have passed since Friday,” Brooks said, nodding. “He kept her alive for at least two of those days.” He looked down at Chanita Lords. “At least that's what her body's telling me.”

“Let's talk about the tooth,” I said.

He opened Chanita's mouth, then shone light into the darkness. “Probably hers—there's an empty space where it would be. Can't tell when it was removed, though. More tests needed.”

“Why pull it out?” I asked. “Why let her keep it?”

“Don't know.”

“Strange.”

“Let's do internal,” he said.

“Before you do,” I said, “can you tell me what killed her?”

He shook his head. “Not right now.”

“And latent prints on her body?”

“Once they send over a tech, we'll look.”

“Mind if I scoot, then?” I backed away from the table, not strong enough this morning to endure heart, kidneys, and guts in a scale. “I'd like to confirm with the family now that we know.”

He waved me away. “I'll try to get all the tests pushed through as quickly as I can.”

Dressed now in a respectable light-gray pantsuit and loafers, I trudged back out to the parking lot bustling with cars beneath stormy gray skies. As I neared the Crown Vic, I noticed a small white object sitting on its roof.

It had been carved out of marble. A woman—a goddess, maybe—held the head of a bearded man in one hand and a knife in the other.

Hunh
. A tchotchke you'd buy in a souvenir store near the Colosseum in Athens.

I glanced around the parking lot: no one was looking in my direction. Not the trio of secretaries in panty hose and Easy Spirits and not the sheriff's deputy hoisting a travel mug and a lunch cooler. I squinted at the figurine for a moment more, plucked it from the roof, and shoved it into my coat pocket.

Not every day you found a goddess on the roof of your car.

I slid behind the steering wheel. “Now, where am I going?” I peered at Chanita Lords's missing person report again and found the girl's address. “Crap.”

6873 Hillcrest Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90008.

Today would be a long, long day.

 

11

A little after nine o'clock, I parked in front of the wrought-iron security gate that “protected” Chanita Lords's apartment complex from the terror lurking on the streets. The gate sat wide open—terror would have no problem gaining entry. Barefoot toddlers wearing soggy diapers and clutching baby bottles filled with red punch zigzagged from apartment to apartment, rambling close to stairways and trash chutes.

Next door, the two palm trees that had flanked the entrance to my childhood home still stood, but wind, fire, and disease had lopped off the top of the right palm, and
BPS
in red spray paint and bullet holes of varying calibers had nearly destroyed the trunk of the left tree.

Dark clouds gathered in the sky above. Because, of course.

“Home sweet hell,” I muttered, shouldering my bag.

Back in 1960s Los Angeles, the community of apartment buildings located between Hillcrest Avenue and La Brea Avenue earned the nickname the Jungle because of the surrounding lush green: palm and banana trees and hillsides covered in wildflowers and wild mustard. Many apartment units were larger than some single-family homes, and the units' swimming pools made having to use laundry rooms doable.

“My dad's old Ford Maverick used to wheeze up this hill,” I told Colin over the Motorola. “Boys in the yellow apartment building over there, the one with the couch on the lawn? They used to throw bottles at Tori and her friend Golden because they wouldn't stop to talk. And we used to chase monarch butterflies in the park around the corner.” I sighed. “Once upon a time, the Jungle used to be cool.”

“So what happened?” Colin asked as he tried to park his Cavalier a few feet from my old apartment building.

“The Riots,” I said as my fingers brushed against the marble figurine in my coat pocket. “Burn, baby, burn. Terrorists in Dickies. PCP. Guns…”

“And now look at you: the Man.”

I frowned as he pulled the car in and pulled the car out again. “You park like a ninety-year-old. It's gonna be lunchtime by the time you—”

“It's a weird space.”

“Yeah, it's one of those parallel spaces the size of a car.”

Finally, Colin parked, then climbed out of the Cavalier. His gray wool suit looked a little baggy on him—sick-skinny. As he made his way to my car with his binder, he tightened his gray striped tie, then blew his nose into a tissue.

“I missed you,” I said.

“Whatever, Lou.”

“No, seriously. I had to do all the reports and shit. I hate that stuff and you do it so well. So yes: I missed you.”

Colin eyed me, waiting for the jab. When the jab didn't come, he said, “Why are you being so nice…?” He squinted, then grinned. “Hey, now!” He held up his hand, ready to high-five.

I cocked my head. “What?”

“You and Sam last night, right? Explains you being nice to me, the glowing skin…”

“Why can't I say something kind, first of all? And, second, why are you in my bed? Sam and I didn't hook up, not that it's any of your—”

Colin rolled his eyes. “Oh, c'mon, Lou. What the hell's your deal?”

I gaped at him. “Dude. We were at a crime scene for how many hours yesterday?”

He smirked. “That's when you need to get laid the
most
.”

“Can we now focus on work, please?” I gazed at apartment buildings with swanky names that hadn't changed in twenty years. Baldwin Manor. Hillside Terrace. Ocean Breeze Homes. Crumpled-up paper, aluminum cans, and glass bottles littered patches of dirt where lush grass had grown back in the eighties. A few tenants and their homies loitered on the balconies of the apartment-ground units. Everyone had noticed Colin's and my cars, and breakfast joints had been snuffed out and the Game's “The City” had been turned down.

The sights, smells, and sounds of this place gave me a twisty stomach and damp palms. A small but not insignificant part of me wanted to hustle back to my car and race down the hill. But the larger part of me—the part that wore a badge and gun and owned a set of steel ovaries—refused to scamper.

I hadn't walked this small stretch of sidewalk since my tenth-grade year. That's when Mom and I moved to a different, less jacked-up neighborhood, Tori-less, Dad-less.

“Look.” Colin pointed to a nearby telephone pole.

A yellow “Missing” flyer featuring Chanita Lords's photo had been stapled into the wood.

Colin yanked the paper from the pole, then handed it to me.

In this picture, the teen's hair hid beneath a dark-colored do-rag. She wore no makeup, but her eyebrows looked freshly waxed. Her French-tipped fingernails rested on her cheeks.

Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop
.

Colin said, “Somebody's shootin'.”

“I fell for that trick once,” I answered, remembering a certain storage facility and a certain crazy man named Christopher Chatman.

“We get warrants for her bedroom and phone?” Colin asked.

I nodded. “Luke should be sending them over any minute now.”

“Good mornin', Officers.”

The overly solicitous voice belonged to a young black man stretched out on the hood of a black Cutlass Supreme. He wore red corduroy house shoes, red Clippers basketball shorts, and a white wife beater as clean as a southern grandma's bathroom floor. Green and blue ink swirled on his arms and neck—
BPS
,
RIP
, illegible names, faces of crudely drawn females.

“Morning.” I held up the yellow flyer. “You know her?”

“Maybe.” He pulled a cigarillo and a lighter out of thin air, then lit up. “That's some shit right there. I heard some Mess-cans have a hand in that. They tryin' to take over up in here.”

Colin cocked his head. “Why would Mexicans kidnap her?”

“C'mon, Officer,” Dude said. “I know y'all got to pretend that shit ain't like it is. But
you
know and
I
know that they want us gone. They tryna chase us out like they did to all the niggas in Highland Park. And please: y'all ain't about to bust some Mess-can Eighteenth Street bangers. Nah. Y'all want us to go head to head,
mano
to
mano.
” He puffed on the cigarillo, then added, “These Mess-cans keep on messin' with our girls, shit's gon' jump off fo' sure.”

“What you smoking in there?” I asked. “You paranoid as fuck.”

Dude was right about the race thing, though. The Latino gang, Eighteenth Street Westside, co-terrorized the Jungle to the Black P-Stones' displeasure. City officials tried to downplay the hostilities between the two gangs by claiming that the violence wasn't racial but stemmed from desires for more territory and the always-expanding drug trade. Despite injunctions that prohibited members from hanging out in certain neighborhood “safety zones,” both gangs started randomly killing children who lived outside those zones. Two weeks ago, a black gang member shot and killed a three-year-old Mexican boy. Two days later, a Mexican gang member shot and killed a ten-year-old black girl. Neither child nor their parents had been affiliated with gangs, but had still been targeted. If not for the color of their skin, then what?

In Dude's opinion, Chanita Lords represented yet another casualty in this unacknowledged race war.

In truth, white people were actually about to take over up in here just as they were taking over Highland Park. Developers planned to tear down the Jungle and replace it with a hospital campus, new shops for folks riding the still-in-construction metro train, and expensive apartments and condos that folks like Dude and Eighteenth Street thugs could never, ever afford.

“You bang?” Colin asked him now.

I clamped my lips together to keep from laughing.

Dude chuckled. “Sound like you just learned that word yesterday, Officer.”

Colin blushed. “Just answer the question.”

“Naw, I don't bang,” he said, avoiding my glance.

I squinted at him. “So that
BPS
on your left bicep stands for…?”

“Boston Public School,” he said, grinning.

I rolled my eyes. “And the tat that says ‘Nita' on your left wrist?”

He gaped at it, and his brows knitted as he tried to come up with an explanation.

“You think it's possible that Chanita's disappearance is related to something more … nasty and fucked up?” I asked.

Dude studied the cigarillo between two tobacco-stained fingers. “Like Jeffrey Dahmer and shit?” He curled his lip and shook his head. “First of all, ain't no white man without a badge gon' come up in here and snatch no girl.” He nodded at Colin. “Y'all some crazy sons a bitches, but y'all ain't
that
crazy.”

An LAPD helicopter now buzzed overhead, and we all glanced up at it.

“So nobody odd around that doesn't belong?” Colin asked.

“There's this Chester that lives in Nita's complex,” Dude said. “Raul Moriaga. Now
he's
fucked up.”

“So you and Chanita,” I said, eyes on Dude's tattoo. “You were
dating
?”

“I ain't said that,” Dude spat. “She was … a good friend, know what I mean?”

My skin crawled, and my mouth opened to reply, but then closed. Dude had to be older than sixteen. He had to be older than
eighteen
. I opened my binder. “What's your name?”

“Ontrel.”

“Last name?”

He didn't reply.

I cocked an eyebrow.
Well?

“Shaw.”

“And how old are you, Mr. Shaw?” I asked.