Rosario dug an inhaler out of her shoulder bag and sucked deeply. “Better now,” she said after a minute, standing erect and finger-combing her sopping hair. “Adult asthma. This getting older thing blows.”
“After the age of thirty, the body has a mind of its own.”
“You just make that up?”
I shook my head. “Bette Midler.”
“You don’t exactly strike me as the Divine Miss M type, Logan.”
“Are you kidding? I’m huge into musicals. Nothing finer in my opinion than a big Broadway production number.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“You’re right. I’m not. Musicals make my butt hurt after about ten minutes. I just remember random stuff. Pointless facts to know and tell.”
“Like why buzzards are bald.”
I smiled.
Rosario drew a deep breath and continued walking uphill while I fell in behind her. A half-mile or so below us, I could see the winding dirt road where I’d been arrested after escaping the clutches of Ray Sheen who, according to Rosario, was still on the lam.
I had persuaded her to let me look at Lazarus’s body, to stare down at the face of the man who’d caused me to crash my airplane. She’d turned me down at first, saying department policy prohibited unauthorized civilians from entering designated crime scenes. I countered by pointing out that the guy hadn’t tried to kill me; he’d tried to kill us.
“We survived a life-and-death experience,” I said. “That makes us brothers — or sisters — depending on how politically correct you want to get about it. I just want to look down at the dirt bag for a few seconds and gloat. Call it a catharsis.”
“What’s a catharsis?”
“It’s an arrangement. You let me have my little moment of satisfaction, I’ll spring for dinner afterward.”
The detective mulled my proposal, then said, “If anybody asks who you are or what you’re doing, you let me do the talking. You touch nothing, stand where I tell you, do what I tell you. Understood?”
“Roger.”
We made arrangements to meet in the parking lot of a church one block from the sheriff’s department’s Pine Valley substation, about forty highway miles east of downtown San Diego, just off Interstate 8. Rosario would then drive us to the scene, which was less than two miles from the substation. Her partner, she said, would not be coming along. Lawless’s wife was in labor. They were expecting twins.
No way was it a date with Rosario. Of that I convinced myself. My having asked the detective out to dinner was nothing more than reimbursement for a favor asked and granted. And even if it was a date, what Savannah didn’t know would never hurt her. Still, as I hiked up the trail, staring at Rosario’s bottom, I couldn’t help feeling that I was somehow cheating on Savannah. A tart taste rose up behind my tongue and stayed there.
The body was draped with a yellow tarp and surrounded by yellow crime scene tape looped in a loose circle around creosote bushes on either side of the trail. A pair of uniformed deputies, one African-American, the other white, guarded the scene, wiping sweat from their faces and sipping from plastic water bottles. They both looked bored and overheated. On the slope twenty meters above them, a ponytailed civilian in a green windbreaker with “SDSD Crime Lab” printed on the back was sweeping over the mountainous terrain with a metal detector, searching for what I assumed were spent bullets.
“What’s the story on the ME, Alicia?” the African-American deputy asked Rosario as we approached. “We’ve been here since before lunch.”
“Medical examiner’s swamped,” Rosario said. “Murder-suicide in Carlsbad, and the trolley splattered some transient down in Chula Vista. They said they’ll get somebody up here as soon as they can. Shouldn’t be much longer, fellas.”
Per protocol, the body was to remain untouched until a representative from the San Diego County Medical Examiner’s office arrived to declare the victim officially dead. They would then determine the approximate time of death by making a small cut with a pocket knife and jabbing a meat thermometer into the deceased’s liver.
Human beings begin losing heat at a rate of about one and one-half degrees Fahrenheit per hour as soon as they die. The warmer the weather, the slower they cool. Count down from 98.6, factor in ambient air temperatures, and you can get a reasonably accurate idea as to time of death. Rosario didn’t have to explain that part of it to me; I’d learned all about meat thermometers when I was with Alpha. More than once, we determined how many hours behind our intended targets we were by measuring the core temperatures of their dead compatriots, whom they often left behind to lighten their loads, in the vain hope of outrunning us.
“Who’s your friend?” the black deputy asked Rosario, dipping his chin in my direction.
“DA’s office,” Rosario said.
“Never seen him before.”
“He’s new.”
“He got a name?”
“He’s working undercover,” Rosario said.
“Gotta log him in, Alicia,” the white deputy said, pulling out a small spiral notebook from his back pocket. “You know the drill. Anybody who comes in or out of a crime scene—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Rosario said dismissively, “they gotta get logged in.” She looked over at me, drawing a blank. “What’s your name again?”
“Jake Gittes.”
The deputy wrote it down. I spelled it for him.
Rosario squatted beside the body and looked up at me.
“Ready to do this?”
I nodded.
She peeled back the tarp.
Lazarus was laying on his back, facing uphill, wearing a black dress shirt, untucked, his arms and legs splayed like he was making a snow angel. There was a baseball-size splotch of dried, rust-colored blood just below his diaphragm, and a hole the size of a dime in the center of the splotch. Half a button was missing where the bullet had nicked it before penetrating his torso.
“Entry wound?”
“That would be my guess,” Rosario said.
“So, whoever shot him, shot him more or less from face-on position.”
She nodded.
He was squinting and his jaws were parted. His lips were pulled back like he was grinning — and not one of those half-hearted grins, either, the kind you manage after enduring your father-in-law’s oft-repeated favorite joke about the rabbi who walks into a bar. We’re talking laugh your butt off like it’s 1999. Who knew death could be so funny?
“How do you know this guy’s Lazarus?”
“How do I know?” Rosario stood and pointed. “I know because his truck’s parked a quarter-mile down the trail. I also know because he matches the description of C.W. Lazarus on file at DMV. Hair, eye color, height, weight, and age. Everything. Who else is it gonna be?”
“You check his driver’s license?”
“The wallet’s probably in his back pocket. We can’t get to it. Not until the coroner shows up and signs off.”
“So, you haven’t run his fingerprints?”
“Like I said. Not until after the coroner’s investigator signs off.”
The corpse had dark, well-barbered hair and long flared sideburns. His left cheekbone bore a scar I recognized. It was shaped like the Nike corporate logo. A “swoosh.”
“His name’s not Lazarus,” I said, staring down at the man’s dead, laughing face. “His name’s Ray Sheen.”