The Killing Hands Read online

  Pulling the front section of skin forward doesn’t shed any more light on the cause of death. We could already see the exposed windpipe and hyoid bone. However, congealed blood around the other layers of skin in the throat and neck confirm the force of the blow. If his throat hadn’t been literally torn from his neck, the guy would have had a mighty bruise. But he died before the bruise could show up.

  As Grove’s examining the neck area, he uses one of his instruments to part the tissue around the vic’s neck and points to a thin, ropelike structure. “See here…the vagus nerve is inflamed. Probably from the force applied to the throat before the weapon perforated the skin.”

  Again, I picture a big strong man as our attacker.

  “The vagus nerve runs in between the carotid artery and the jugular.” Grove uses one of his instruments to point to the carotid and jugular on either side. “And while the carotid has been totally perforated and the vagus shows signs of trauma, the jugular is intact.”

  The three structures—artery, nerve and vein—are all very close to one another, but the weapon has managed to only affect two of them.

  We hang around while Grove checks all the organs and takes samples as necessary, before putting them back in and closing our guy up.

  “Let’s go check the blood work,” he says, snapping off the gloves and taking off his medical gown before washing his hands and turning off the recording gear.

  We follow Grove up to his office, and wait while he checks his e-mail. “Okay, here we go. Blood analysis indicated no alcohol whatsoever and no other drugs in his system, prescription, nonprescription or illegal.”

  “Mmm…” Ramos rests his chin on his thumb and runs his forefinger across his lips. “Doesn’t rule out the drug theory. But it makes him more likely to be the seller than the buyer.”

  “He could have still been the buyer if the stash was empty, so empty it was out of his system,” I say. “He needed supplies.”

  Ramos nods. “You’re right, could be either if the drug theory holds.” He sighs. “Or maybe we’re just looking at old-fashioned premeditated murder.” He slips his hands into his pockets. “With the usual motives…If it’s not money, could be jealousy or revenge.”

  “But without an ID we don’t know who’d benefit financially from his death, or who could be jealous of him, or who might have wanted revenge. Plus we’ve got those old injuries—a rough past like that ties in with drugs or some sort of criminal activity.”

  Grove nods. “And they’re not injuries from boxing or anything like that. I’ll send the dental records out, see if we get any takers.”

  “Thanks, Doc.” Ramos takes his hands out of his pockets. “After you, Anderson.”

  I thank Grove with a handshake.

  “I’ll make sure I include you on my e-mail list for this case,” Grove says.

  “Appreciate it.” I give him a nod before turning to the door.

  Ramos says goodbye and is by my side within a few seconds. “Damn.” He lets out a long sigh as we move down the corridor. “Let’s hope we get a hit on a missing person.”

  The L.A. coroner’s office is always busy, always full, and today is no exception, with gurneys lining the corridor—the dead waiting for their turn. I squeeze between the body bags. “Anything from Forensics yet?”

  “No, not yet. But it’s probably time I touched base with them.”

  “County lab?”

  “Uh-huh.” He pulls his phone out.

  I go through the forensic evidence in my head. We’ve got the light, which is probably being meticulously examined and then glued back together as we speak, then the cigarette butt, from which DNA will be extracted. DNA will also be isolated from remnants of the witnessing student’s urine and cross-referenced with the sample he gave police. I’m sure it’ll be a match, but it’s always good to check out the account of anyone who discovers a homicide victim. Then the fence and building debris were dusted for prints which need to be processed, and some lucky bugger’s got the job of going through all the nearby building-site remnants that were removed for further examination. Leave no stone unturned.

  “Did you get many prints?” I ask.

  “Yeah, they lifted quite a few from the bricks and they’re still looking at the fence and some wood that was lying near the vic, too. I’ll check with Prints first.” Ramos finds a number in his phone and dials.

  I think he’s dreaming—it’s early days yet—but I keep my mouth shut. The crime scene would have been dusted for prints, and these would be awaiting processing at the county lab, with the head of the fingerprint area, Maggie Court. She’s great—very professional and a lovely woman—but like any lab servicing such a large area, it’s hard to keep up with the caseload.

  I listen in to Ramos’s side of the conversation and gather the current status—the fence has been examined and some prints from it are being run at the moment. That’s pretty fast. Looks like we hit the lab on a slow day. Next he asks to be transferred to Sam Gould, the head of DNA at the lab. Again, I glean the gist of things—the DNA’s still being processed. Finally Ramos asks to be transferred to Sally Hart and I soon realize from the conversation that she’s the lab tech working on the parking-lot light. Based on my vision, I’m sure the light wasn’t a coincidence. When the killer turned away from his dying victim, he looked at the light and it was already broken. There’s no doubt in my mind. But I can’t give Ramos or Sally Hart a heads-up. What would I say?

  Ramos hangs up. “Sally Hart will have the light reconstruction finished in about two hours. She suggested we come over at five so she can take us through it in person.”

  “Fine by me.” A visual’s always good and I don’t know how our killer took it out.

  “I’m going back to the station for a couple of hours to check in with my people. You want to come?”

  I consider it for a moment, but then decide my time is best used elsewhere. “Thanks, but I might head back to the Bureau. I’ll see you at the lab.”

  In the coroner office’s parking lot we part ways in our government cars. But instead of going back to the field office, I wait until I see Ramos drive past and give him a wave while pretending to be on the phone. Once I’m sure he’s out of the parking lot I head back to our vic.

  My ID is enough to get me back into the morgue and buy me some time alone with the unidentified male. My aim is to induce another vision, something more than a flash of our vic in pain and shock. I stare into the face of the man and wonder what he was like in life. What was his occupation? I look at his hands and notice they’re smooth, indicating he didn’t earn a living from manual labor. In fact, his hands are so well maintained they look manicured. His cuticles are neat and trimmed, his nails rounded with perhaps a millimeter of overhang between the end of the nail and the fingertip. I decide to check his toenails, too, curious as to whether his impeccable grooming extends to his feet. Sure enough, his feet are smooth and his toenails also look manicured. So we’ve got an expensively dressed male who has regular manicures and pedicures, someone meticulous about his appearance and who can probably afford to keep himself well-groomed—unless he was living beyond his means and was so in debt that someone took payment in the form of his life.

  I shake my head, it doesn’t add up…the grooming seems to be in opposition with his healed wounds. Not many highly paid professionals get into bar fights or confrontations with gangs on the weekend. But then there’s the age of those injuries.

  I nod my head as I come to the only logical conclusion. This man spent at least part of his life, maybe his late teens and early twenties, involved in violence but then turned his life around. It would explain the well-healed wounds and bones, and his current state of maintenance. Maybe his past came up to bite him on the ass. I’m jumping to conclusions, but all the pieces fit…extremely well.

  I take a deep breath in and clear my mind of all thoughts, including my preconceptions. I need to see something about this man’s life…or death. As each thought pops into my hea
d, I force it out. I need my mind to be still. In this state of near meditation, I am the most receptive to visions. Eventually I’m rewarded.

  He gets into a car and starts the engine. He’s alone. His cell phone rings and he’s talking. He’s upset…annoyed. He raises his voice. The caller hangs up and the man’s left with a dial tone. He yells into the silent phone and then throws it across the car. It ricochets off the passenger door and lands on the seat.

  His anger turns to grief, and tears trickle down his face.

  I open my eyes and I’m staring at the lifeless face of the victim lying on the hard metal in front of me. I replay the vision. Both his voice and the caller’s were barely audible, but it sounded as if they were talking in another language. I try to replay a word or two in my head, something I could repeat or spell to try to find out the language, but it’s spoken too softly and too quickly. Okay, what else was there? Whatever he and the caller were talking about, it was heated and I felt many emotions pulsing through the victim. He was initially shocked but that soon turned to concern…maybe even fear. That was quickly replaced by anger, but once he’d thrown his phone, a sense of sorrow or loss was the only remaining sensation.

  I sigh, trying to piece it together. I don’t think it fits with a drug deal gone wrong. So how does it fit with other motivations for premeditated murder? It could be blackmail of some sort. Shock and horror over what the caller knows or has, then anger that he’s being blackmailed, and finally sadness as he realizes he has to submit to the blackmailer’s demands? That would fit. What about jealousy? Could the caller have been the jealous partner of some woman, accusing our victim of impropriety? That might fit with the victim’s emotions, too—he’s concerned, then angry that the caller’s discovered the affair, but also sad because it will have to end. I shake my head. The emotions align with many motivations behind murder, and wild speculation won’t get me anywhere.

  I try to induce another vision, but after twenty minutes and nothing, I sign out of the morgue and head back to my car. A glance at my watch tells me it’s 4:00 p.m. Not enough time to go back to the office and work on another case. Even without factoring in the travel time, an hour’s not long enough to get inside the mind of a killer or victim. You need to immerse yourself in the case, live it and breathe it. Working on something else now will be useless and it will take my mind away from our Little Tokyo victim.

  I drive to the lab at California State University and spend thirty minutes in my car flicking through the case file again…live and breathe it.

  Four

  At 4:55 p.m. I enter the building and ask for Sally Hart, showing my ID. At the elevator doors on the third floor I’m greeted by a frizzy redhead in her mid-twenties wearing thick but stylish glasses. Her creamy skin is dotted with freckles. She wears well-cut jeans with square-toed ankle boots, a black sweater and a tailored purple jacket that emphasizes her petite waist. The smile that accompanies her outstretched hand reveals straight white teeth.

  “Agent Anderson, nice to meet you.”

  I shake her hand. “You, too, Ms. Hart. Or is it Dr. Hart?”

  She laughs. “Not yet. Another year of study, I’m afraid.” She fingers her glasses. “I just got a call from Detective Ramos. He’s running a few minutes late.” She turns around. “Come through.”

  We make our way along a series of corridors and doors until we get to her lab. The light, now mostly assembled into one large piece from the million shards of glass, sits on her desk. It’s a square, dark orange frame with four square panels of glass, underneath which sit the powerful bulbs. At the base of the frame is a large round hole, which marks the place where the light attaches to the post. With the reconstruction complete, four distinct bullet holes can easily be seen.

  “Nice job,” I say.

  “Thanks. There are a few pieces missing—” she points to tiny gaps that are barely noticeable on first viewing “—but they’re all insignificant…except for these ones, obviously.” She bends down and points to the small holes in each panel of glass.

  “Bullets.”

  “Uh-huh,” she says. “Looks like a .45. It splintered the glass here, here, here and here.” She points to the tiny cracks that radiate from each hole.

  “Does Ramos know this yet?”

  “Yeah, I called him once I’d finished it.” She straightens up. “That’s why he’s late—he stopped off at the crime scene to set the techs up to take another look around, this time for some bullets.”

  “A bullet…gee, that’d be nice.” A bullet would give us something we could match to a weapon; good for court, and sometimes good if the weapon’s unique striation marks are already in the ballistics computer database.

  She laughs. “That’s exactly what Detective Ramos said.” She takes her glasses off and gives them a polish. “I’ve just started the computer analysis looking at the angle of the bullets, the likely position of the shooter and the possible resting place of the bullets, but I think it’ll be another hour or two before I can give the techs anything more concrete to help them pinpoint where the bullets might have landed.” Hart takes me over to her computer. “I’ve triangulated the initial angle of the bullets, based on the way the glass shattered, and it puts the shooter somewhere between here and here, depending on his height. All four bullets were fired from the same spot and I’ve followed the possible trajectories through for someone five-five to six-five.” She points to two dots on her computer, but so far it’s just blank space, with no obvious visual relationship to the crime scene.

  I look at the basic computer-generated model and try to overlay it in my mind’s eye with the crime scene. “That takes him right back to the fence line, if we’re talking a five-five perp.”

  The trajectory of the bullet tells us the angle it traveled, not its point of origin. But Hart’s made a sensible call on the height range, and following the bullet’s trajectory, the shorter he is the farther back he would have had to stand to produce the same angle.

  “I haven’t inputted everything into the model yet.” She shuffles through some papers and pulls out a photocopy of the crime-scene sketch that would have been done by Ramos or one of his detectives. It shows all the key structures and points of evidence and includes exact measurements between items. Hart compares her computer breakdown with the sketch, measuring out the distances. “Yup, right on the fence, assuming the sketch is accurate.”

  Experienced cops know the importance of the sketch, know that it can become critical to solving the case or that it can become essential evidence in court.

  “It’s Ramos…it’ll be spot-on,” Hart continues. “So the fence line is the farthest point and if our shooter’s around six-five you’re looking at him standing level with the edge of this parking spot.” She points to the crime-scene sketch. “I’ve still got to finish the model and then work out the bullet’s trajectory after it hit the light.”

  “Could it have been a clean-through shot?” I walk back to the light to take a closer look and soon have my answer. The light has a thick metal backing, so once the bullet went through the glass, it would have hit the metal and ricocheted off somewhere.

  “No, the angle’s wrong,” Hart confirms.

  “How big are the bulbs in these things?”

  She pulls an industrial-looking bulb, nearly the size of her hand, from a box on the floor. “This is the brand used in the light.”

  I picture the scene, picture the shot. “How high is the light?”

  “Twenty-four feet.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “So he’s a reasonable shot—to blow out all four bulbs.”

  She nods. “Probably. Depends on the time of day when he took the shot.”

  “Go on.”

  “Well, I’ll have to do a reconstruction to be sure, but I imagine the bulbs themselves would be most visible in daylight, with the sun behind the shooter. Whereas if the sun’s in his eyes it’d be harder—”

  The phone on Hart’s desk cuts off her sentence. “Hold on.” She pick
s up the phone. “Hart…okay.” She hangs up. “Ramos is on his way up now.” She unclips her security pass from her jeans waistband. “I’ll go buzz him through.”

  While I’m waiting, I take another look at the computer and the light. The glass that covers the bulbs is slightly frosted, so with the right lighting the bulbs would be easily visible.

  A few minutes later Ramos and Hart arrive. Ramos gives me a nod and a smile and I listen in while Hart runs through her findings to date with Ramos, showing him the light itself and then the computerized trajectory.

  “I’ve set the team up to search the whole parking lot.”

  She nods. “I’ll keep working on the trajectory, see if I can’t narrow that search area down for you.”

  “Before dark?” Ramos glances at his watch.

  Hart shakes her head. “I doubt it. Sorry.” She pauses. “I’m also going to run a reconstruction of the shooting, see if I can’t give you guys a rough time of day. Or at least eliminate the possibility of a night shot.”

  I know the shot wasn’t taken after the murder, but our killer could still have taken the light out earlier in the evening.

  “That’d be great,” Ramos says. “If it was a daylight shot it’ll help prove premeditation.” Like all good law-enforcement personnel, Ramos is already thinking about the evidence from a jury’s point of view, thinking about how we can get a conviction. He pauses. “A likely time of day will also help when we’re canvassing for possible witnesses. So far we’ve come up with a big fat zero from the area.”

  “I’ll set it up for three tomorrow,” Hart says. “You guys are welcome to sit in.”

  “Thanks. I’m hoping we’ll have something else by then, but—” Ramos gives her a smile “—if you’re all I’ve got I’ll be here.”