They identified themselves and explained why they needed to speak to her. She didn’t invite them inside the house but was willing to describe the man who had brought the van to the garage.
‘Javier dealt with him outside. It was just that I wanted to make a personal call and the owner is real strict about that, makes me use the pay phone on the sidewalk just outside the gate. So I go to use it but the guy with the van was already there and he gave me a look that really scared me. I went away but I was pissed because it was an important call I wanted to make.’
Scott asked, ‘Did you hear him say anything?’
‘Well, when I came over, he was speaking up so I heard him. It was like he was talking to one of those computer voices, y’know? Like an operator? He said, “Arizona” real loud.’
‘Anything else?’
Margarita shook her head. ‘No. Soon as he said that was when he realized I was there.’
‘Can you describe him?’ Eric asked.
‘Just a skanky guy. White.’
‘Hair color? Eye color?’
‘He had a patchy beard that was kinda blond. I think his hair was blond but his hat hid most of it. I don’t remember what color his eyes were. Maybe brown?’
‘What was his voice like? Any accent?’
‘No. I just heard him say that one word.’
Eric pulled out his card and repeated what he’d said to Ruiz earlier about calling if she remembered anything further. When they were back in the Suburban, Scott said, ‘You might just get that gold star, Ramos.’
Eric started to reply but then Scott’s cell phone rang. He picked up, listened, and said, ‘We’re on our way back now.’
He looked at Eric. ‘Tony’s got a name to go with the surgical plate Thirty-two One found.’
Eric slapped the dashboard in excitement. ‘Hot damn!’
‘She’s an Eleanor Patterson. Lance is checking her out right now to see if she was reported missing.’
‘I told you. We’re on to this guy.’
‘We’ve got to track him down yet,’ Scott cautioned as he started the car.
‘Yeah, but if we’re interpreting Margarita right, we know he’s headed to Arizona. We know the color, the make, and the potential model of the van.’
‘But no license plate and no name of the perp.’
‘I’m not letting that stop me,’ Eric asserted. ‘We need to issue a BOLO to Arizona.’
Scott glanced at him as he drove to the canyon road that would take them back to their office. ‘Let’s do Be On the Lookouts for Arizona and California. He may not have made it to AZ yet.’
‘OK,’ Eric agreed. ‘We’ll ask LAPD to put it on their BOLO boards.’ Now his cell phone rang and he answered. He muted the call as he listened and said, ‘Lance is putting through a Detective Kragen from Carlisle PD, regarding the Patterson case.’
Scott nodded and went quiet.
When the caller identified himself as a coroner from Alaska, Carol put him through to Steelie in the lab. Steelie brought the phone to the computer so she could have the digitized X-ray of Thomas Cullen’s head on her screen, then she took the call.
‘Chuck Talbot,’ the matter-of-fact voice said. ‘Anchorage ME’s Office.’
‘Dr Talbot. Good to hear from you.’
‘Chuck’s fine. Look, this whole situation with the John Doe bullet has caused a bit of a stir up here.’
Steelie couldn’t read his tone. ‘Oh?’
‘It’s probably for the best, I don’t know. But that’s not your problem. I’m calling to inform you of a positive ID for this John Doe as Thomas Cullen. We’ll be posting it on the ACB network this afternoon.’
Steelie jotted a note. ‘This is great news. Can I ask how you got the match?’
‘Dental. It turns out the teeth were where the breakdown was. Or maybe I just want to blame the odontologist.’ He chuckled. ‘We’ve been having a feud for years. But I can’t actually blame him.’ He paused. ‘Are we confidential here?’
‘Absolutely,’ Steelie replied quickly. ‘All communications between our agency and coroners are confidential.’
‘Fine. So the odont gave us the dental chart on the Doe and we submitted it to the police misper unit for them to put it on NCIC. Like most coroners, I don’t have direct access to NCIC. Been trying to get a terminal in my office for, what, seven years? Ten? Anyway, I gave the dental to Missings. Didn’t go anywhere, I’ve now discovered.’
‘Well, you definitely can’t blame the odont for that.’
‘No but I’m still tryin’. Seems that, on request, my autopsy tech sawed out John Doe’s max and mandible and couriered it to the odont for the dental report before starting the craniotomy. When I got round to doing the autopsy, I got the bullet no problem but I didn’t have the mouth and I assumed the bullet was fresh. Figured the palate would show perimortem trauma, as the rest of the body didn’t show signs of cause of death and the tissue was too decomposed for toxicology. So the main result of the post was that bullet. Case closed.’
‘You’ve obviously got the mouth back now, though?’
‘Oh, we’ve had the mouth back this whole time. It’s been sitting in the fridge. Just no one looked at it when it came back from the odontologist to see if the trauma to the palate was peri or antemortem, or healed or what. And it is healed. That is definitely old trauma, old gunshot. So, we’re all having to tighten our belts. My tech was hasty, I wasn’t thorough, the odont only reported on the dentition itself and didn’t bother to describe the palate, and our police unit didn’t do the other half of its job.’
‘Well,’ Steelie said, wanting to ameliorate the impact of this sorry but not unusual laundry list. ‘Even without you ageing the bullet correctly, NCIC would have made this ID if only your postmortem dental info had been uploaded into the system. So I don’t think you have too much to beat yourself up about.’
‘You think getting cause of death wrong is nothing to beat myself up about? Huh.’
‘I meant, this was situational; it’s not like you need to go back to med school. But speaking of COD, do you have anything there?’
‘Now that the bullet’s ruled out? No. I mean, there wasn’t much left of this guy for me to work with. No marks on the bones. It’ll probably go down as undetermined, for both cause and manner.’
‘And contact with the Cullen family?’
‘I’m going to be calling them myself. I’ve got someone at a funeral home up here that can handle shipping the body back across state lines.’
Steelie looked down at the notes she’d been making. ‘Well, Chuck, I guess I don’t have any more questions.’
He cleared his throat. ‘I’ve been asked to reassure you that we are making some procedural changes up here so we’d prefer if you didn’t go public with how this ID came about.’
Steelie’s cheeks burned. ‘We don’t do that. We’re just trying to facilitate identifications, and quietly.’
‘Sure. But you never know what you might set off.’
‘What do you mean?’ Steelie asked warily.
‘Ever picture what it would look like if every parent of a missing person found out that thirteen-thousand-odd coroners and MEs, between them, have tens of thousands of Jane and John Does sittin’ on ice in this country? Just do the math. You’ve got a hundred thousand missing persons, at least. They’ve got one parent each, maybe two, and a couple of siblings. That makes for a heck of a march on Washington.’
Steelie had indeed pictured this but she wasn’t prepared to admit it in this context. ‘And that’s a heck of an imagination you’ve got there, Chuck. But we’re not a lobby group. We’re not allowed—’
‘But,’ the coroner cut her off. ‘What I’m also saying, Ms Lander, is that I’m not sure that would be a bad thing.’
He signed off and Steelie was left looking at the phone in her hand, wondering how many other coroners shared Dr Talbot’s take on that kind of pressure from families. If she were still in graduate school, she’d do a survey. Maybe she could get someone else to do a survey. She walked to the front of the building, summoning Jayne from her office as she went.