Visible Threat (2 page)

2

M
AGDA
B
OTEVA
heard the sound of sirens slicing through the air, coming closer, and for a moment her heart stopped. Were they on the way to stop Demitri? Would they put an end to the madness she could do nothing about?

Without realizing it, she held her breath. But the sirens, and maybe her salvation, faded away. Letting out a ragged breath, Magda felt her shoulders sag. She brought her hand to her mouth and closed her eyes. Now, nothing competed with the sound of the beating. Magda heard the young girl beg Demitri to stop hitting her and then cry out for forgiveness, but the beating continued, and Magda could not stop it.

To say or do anything while Demitri was this angry would shift his focus to her, her husband, Anton, or
 
—God forbid
 
—her own young children. As sorry as she felt for the unfortunate girl enduring Demitri’s cruelty, Magda could not and would not change places with anyone on the receiving end of his vicious rage.

Standing at the far end of the warehouse, as far away from Demitri as possible, staring through a dirty window at rain falling on a choppy ocean, Magda flinched with every slap. Sucking in a shuddering breath, she crossed her arms tightly over her chest. Her inability to help the girl caused guilt to rise up like bile from a sour stomach. The guilt soon morphed to a feeling of utter helplessness.

I may not be the one being beaten,
she thought,
but Demitri holds me just as captive as he holds that girl.
A decision she’d made years ago, to borrow money from Demitri to start a business, had turned into a heavy chain entangling her life, sometimes threatening to suck the very breath from her body.

Finally the slapping stopped. The crying and the whimpers didn’t. Magda heard Demitri shout orders and then a struggling and a scraping as he dragged the girl across the rough floor because she didn’t move fast enough. Magda could picture in her mind’s eye Demitri’s hulking form lifting the bleeding girl and throwing her into the small room where he would keep her locked up until it suited him to release her.

The door slammed.

The lock clicked shut.

Demitri was out of patience, and Magda told herself to be careful.

“Magda, Magda, where in the devil are you?” he growled.

“Here. I’m here.” Quickly Magda turned and moved across the floor to Demitri as fast as her spike-heeled boots would allow. Fury creased his brow, and she prayed it had nothing to do with her.

He wiped his hands with a rag, then tossed it into the corner. “Hurry. That brat has made me late; don’t you make me later.”

Magda grabbed her purse. “I’m ready to go.” She followed him outside, holding the purse over her head because of the rain. She climbed into the car while Demitri shut the heavy metal outer door of the warehouse. Magda could hear him cursing the rain.

He slammed the huge padlock closed and jogged to the car. Magda worked to keep an expression of neutral indifference on her face as Demitri climbed into the driver’s seat, angrier now because he was wet. If he thought she had any opinion at all about what he’d done to the girl, the car ride into the city would be unbearable. Demitri made her part of these power plays to ensure she understood her place in his world. She couldn’t let him see the pity she felt for the girl, the disgust she felt for herself, or most of all, the hatred she felt for him.

Anton’s face floated into her thoughts, and she bit her lip to keep from sobbing. Her dear Anton was a Christian, a religion Magda flirted with only because it pleased her husband, not because she felt the same way he did about it. Her father’s atheism was too deeply ingrained in her, and life had convinced her she could never give in to the hope that a Supreme Being existed who really cared for her. The fact that no God intervened to help the people Demitri victimized seemed to prove her opinion.

Regardless, she didn’t mind Anton taking their children to church or reading the Bible to them. Sometimes she listened,
enjoying the family time and watching the rapt attention her children gave their father. For some reason the last story she’d heard him discussing with them came to mind.

It was about the first murder, when Cain slew his brother, Abel. Magda remembered wondering why Anton would tell their children such a story, but as he continued, she realized what he sought to teach them. Anton’s pleasant voice explained a deep meaning of the story: God knew that Cain had murdered Abel, but he asked Cain, “Where is your brother?” He was giving Cain the chance to come clean, to be redeemed, Anton told the twins.

Alas, the murderer would not confess. Instead he answered with a dodge: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Anton said that Cain was without excuse. He should have been his brother’s keeper, should have been more connected, more careful for the life he took. The essence of humanity, her husband explained, is that we are all God’s children, brothers and sisters, and we need to take care of one another.

Magda bit her lip to keep from crying, knowing Anton would be repulsed if he knew what had transpired in the warehouse today . . . and many times before this. And if his God did exist, Magda would be like Cain, guilty and without defense. Even though none of the girls had been her blood sister, there was an ethnic bond, a human bond. If Anton’s God did exist, and he asked Magda about the girls, would she answer with a question like Cain: “Am I my sister’s keeper?”

Even as she considered the question, a deeper horror rose to grab her in the throat. Worse than the fact that she hadn’t
acted to save the girl today was the knowledge that this was not the end. The poor girl crying in the warehouse now would not be the last one Demitri victimized. How many more could Magda let suffer?

She knew that as long as her family was in danger, there was no answer to that question.

3

B
RINNA COULDN’T GET OUT
of the wet cotton K-9 jumpsuit fast enough. Lieutenant Harvey had ordered her to take the rest of the night off. He’d wanted to make it an emergency suspension, but Sergeant Rodriguez had talked him out of it. Harvey was adamant about filing an internal affairs complaint on Brinna, but he would go through normal channels without making it an emergency situation. Brinna had time to think about a response or obtain union representation before she faced a formal complaint.

Doesn’t matter,
she thought, pulling on some dry sweatpants.
I’d do it again. The girl is safe and sound, and the creep is in jail.

“Hey, John Wayne.” Her friend Maggie, damp but no longer dripping, entered the locker room. As she squished across the floor, it was obvious the water had settled into her shoes. “I swear, just when I think you can’t surprise me, you do. Ignoring Lieutenant Harvey?” She faced Brinna with her hands on her hips. “Are you crazy?”

Brinna rubbed her hair with a towel and sighed, letting the towel rest on her shoulders. “You of all people know why I kept going. Corliss needed to be stopped before he hurt the girl. How could I have backed off?”

“But the way the rain was falling and he was driving . . . Gee, Brin, what if he’d crashed and Nikki was hurt or killed in the crash? What then?” Maggie shook her head and took off her wet gun belt.

“It didn’t happen that way,” Brinna answered, even though her gut clenched at the thought. There’d been a dozen places during the pursuit where a tragic crash scenario could have played out.

“But it could have. Don’t you ever consider the risk?”

Brinna shrugged with a nonchalance she really didn’t feel. “Why second-guess? The girl is safe; that’s all that matters.”
Why didn’t I stop when I knew that I should? I never would have forgiven myself if anything had happened to Nikki because of me.

The end result is all that is important,
she told herself as Maggie continued dressing. Mentally she erased the thought of an alternative ending, denial calming her stomach and easing her mind.

4

J
ACK TOOK THE CALL
from dispatch as soon as he sat down at his desk, before he even got his first sip of coffee. It was five minutes after 8 a.m.

“Detective O’Reilly, we’ve got a DB in the water at the end of the San Gabriel River. Jogger found her
 
—no ID.”

“Foul play?”

“NFD.” The dispatcher paused while Jack considered the “no further details.” There must be something, he thought, or this wouldn’t be a homicide.

“Sorry, Detective, my computer hiccuped. The patrol unit on scene says there appears to be signs of a beating. I’ll send the entire call to your computer.”

“Let them know we’ll be en route.” Jack noted the location and looked at the clock. His partner, Ben Carney, was not yet in the office, and that gave Jack an opportunity to review the call. He punched up the message from dispatch and saw that the dead body was a young girl. His stomach
tightened, but not as badly as it would have three months ago.

Jack had been back in homicide that long after taking a break from the detail. He’d had a rough time getting over the loss of his wife and found it impossible for a while to deal with the violent deaths homicide assignments sent him to. A short stint in patrol helped him refocus and heal, and he felt stronger with every case. He and Ben had handled and successfully closed three murder cases in two months. But this was the first female victim to cross their desk.

I’ll be okay,
he thought as he finished the last page of the call and his stomach relaxed.
And we’ll catch the guy who put her in the flood control, and that will make me feel even better.

Strengthened by fresh resolve, Jack got up and went to the duty board to sign out and grab a set of car keys. He and Ben were David-Henry-6, and he’d just finished marking them out in the field when Ben jogged in.

“Hey, sorry I’m late. There was a crash on the freeway.” Ben stopped at the board and frowned. “Already?”

“Yep, body in the San Gabriel River. Already got us a ride.” Jack held up the keys.

Ben sighed and turned around the way he’d just come, Jack beside him.

The San Gabriel River wasn’t really a river, but a flood control channel. During the brief Southern California winters, it could swell to river strength when there was rain and runoff, but the rest of the year it was basically a concrete basin. With the rain they’d experienced the last few days, the river had been raging.

There were two ways to reach the spot they were dispatched to. They could take a water company access road, unlock a gate, and drive over a dirt lot. The second way was a bit faster and the one they chose: drive along the bike path on the riverbank. Uniform patrol units had unlocked the bike gate and blocked the area off to any other bike or foot traffic, so Jack and Ben quickly reached the area where the body had been found.

As he surveyed the surrounding area first, Jack could tell by the debris and dirt mark made along the concrete bank when the water was rushing down the channel that it had been much higher during the night than they were seeing now.

He felt anger bubble up as his perusal reached the pale body caught in trash and debris about halfway up the bank. Jack studied the young girl’s body
 
—she lay facedown about five feet below him
 
—and the area adjacent, looking for any evidence that might lead them to her identity and to the killer. Even from this distance, he could see the girl had endured a tremendous amount of abuse before her death, and what he saw was heart-wrenching. Bruises and what looked like the lines of a belt crisscrossed her back. Old bruises, visible even after the insult of death. The patrol unit was right to call them. This was no accidental fall into the river; it was definitely a murder, and he became angrier by the moment.

What will we see when the coroner turns her over?

A TV program came to mind, one of the many that dealt with crime scene investigations. No stupid TV show could ever capture the full heartbreak and tragedy of a homicide.
No dramatic reenactment could adequately re-create the reality of a brutal killing. Up close, no makeup could turn your stomach, no fake odor could duplicate the stench of decay, and no model could rip your heart out when you thought of the pain, waste, and tragedy you were witness to.

And nothing ever hit Jack quite as hard as when the victim was so young and vulnerable. His fists clenched and unclenched, and he wished there were something or someone he could squeeze to find out the identity of the animal responsible.

The coroner arrived just after the LBPD lab technician, who began photographing the scene before anything was touched or moved. Once the entire scene had been recorded, Jack and Ben slipped on gloves and stepped down with the coroner to the body, moving carefully on the steeply angled concrete. While Ben assisted the coroner with a cursory exam, Jack dug around in the debris for anything that might be clothing or possessions, but all he found were plastic grocery bags, cans, bottles, bits and pieces of trees and shrubbery, and mud. Below them, the San Gabriel River flowed a dirty-brown color.

When it was time to lift the girl from the channel, Jack and Ben helped position the body carefully on the sheet the coroner unfolded. As they lifted, Jack doubted she weighed a hundred pounds. The threesome carried the girl up and out, placing her carefully in the body bag waiting for her. Once on level ground and before the bag was closed, they did a more thorough overview of the girl’s battered body.

“Most of these marks are old,” the coroner said. “I don’t
see bullet holes or knife wounds. It’s possible, from the bruising on her neck, she was strangled, but I can’t make a complete assessment here.”

Jack nodded. Aside from the abuse, there was nothing present on or near the girl to tell him who she was or what exactly killed her. She was nude, probably in her teens, or maybe a petite adult. Only one distinct mark tagged the girl’s body that wasn’t a bruise. It was a tattoo on her right hip, very detailed, of a rose wrapped up in a chain. Jack had seen his share of tattoos, from prison art to trendy designs, and this was certainly unique. The lab tech stepped up to take photos of the artwork to be shown around to different tattoo shops if the girl couldn’t be identified any other way.

“Want me to see if Brinna and her dog are available to search the area?” Ben asked. “Of course, she might not find anything,” he continued. “This body could have been dumped way upriver. It rained hard last night.”

Jack bit his lower lip and considered his partner’s words before answering. “Look carefully,” he said finally. “I don’t think she’s been in the water that long. I think a trip downriver with all the debris present in the water right now would have cut her up a lot more. The autopsy will give us a more definitive answer about the injuries, but I think she was dumped nearby, and the only reason she isn’t in the ocean right now is the stuff she snagged on.” Jack pointed back to the tangle of trash, branches, and one beat-up shopping cart they had just climbed past. The current from the river had not yet dislodged the entire mess.

“Maybe you’re right,” Ben conceded, bending down next
to the girl. “The water would have been much higher last night. If she’d been caught up in the tangle then, there would be more scrapes where the concrete bank rubbed against her.”

Jack nodded and folded his arms. This November had been a wet one
 
—record-breaking in fact. The dirt line he’d noticed before proved that the water had raged very close to the top at some point during the early morning hours.

Yes,
Jack thought,
she went in after the rain ended, around dawn. I’m sure of it.
He scanned the area, squinting in the early sunlight, the first bright, sunny day in a while. The body’s location and the crime scene were just past the second-to-last bridge before the river emptied into the Pacific Ocean, on a bare section of land across from the Department of Water and Power.

The body could have been dumped from the bridge or from the access road. It would have been a hike if the killer used the access road, but it was secluded, well hidden from prying eyes, she was light, and that was the route Jack’s instincts told him the killer took.

“Yeah, see if Brinna’s available,” he said to Ben. “Tell her we want her to check out the access road and the surrounding area in case any evidence was dropped or disposed of.”

“Will do.” Ben pulled out his handheld radio and requested the K-9 unit.