At the far wall of the greenhouse, several large yellow bags were neatly stacked.
The potting mix Binchy had seen Phil Duke bring home from the garden supply house.
To the left of the bags was a massive heap of loose dirt. Five feet high, shaped like a first-grader’s clumsily drawn mountain.
Oddly messy for this precise herbarium.
The flashlight searched, floundered.
Found something.
Sprouting from the top of the pile. Melon-shaped.
Large melon.
We got closer. The stink beat us mercilessly.
Melon with eyeholes... wet, sloughing rind.
So much bloat and rot that a first glance told you nothing.
A second glance refined the perception.
What had once been a human head. The mouth degraded to a black O, the eyeholes tiny caverns leading to nothing.
Milo retched. “I’m losing it.” He ran past me and out.
What possessed me to stick around for a few more seconds, I’ll never know.
Something was wrong with this Gehenna. Then it came to me: the silence. No flies. No maggots destined to be flies.
All at once, the silence was gone, replaced by a clanging in my head, metallic, insistent.
I took one last look at the head and walked out. Slowly, deliberately.
In control. Nothing was going to rush me.
When I got out, Milo was at the top of the driveway, sucking air.
I did the same. Thinking about Gerard Waters’s body, kept in a warm, moist place before being dumped in the Palisades.
Milo recovered enough to talk, but his voice was weak. “C.I.’s and techs on their way. I warned them. Go hazmat.”
“Considerate,” I said.
“See something like this, you aim for any virtue you can snag.”
Chapter 46
Phil Duke got stashed temporarily in the West L.A. holding jail, Tyrell Lincoln completing the paperwork and going home with Milo’s blessing. Marlin Moroni stood guard at the house, saying, “I don’t mind, got the next four days off, gonna drive to Laguna Seca for two-wheel day, run my Indian around the track.”
Moe Reed drove the brown van back to the station, both rookies the passengers. Ashley Burgoyne would be answering questions, soon. We all would.
The crime scene army would take a while to arrive, busy with three other murders, one in Lancaster, two in South Central.
Milo and I gave Duke’s house another go-round, searching for the ruby with no luck.
“Like you said, Ricki’s got a safe. For all we know, she’s the big winner, took it and split.”
I said, “You see her as the mastermind?”
“I don’t know what I see, other than that... thing in the mulch has to be Bakstrom. Meaning everyone else is dead and she might not be.”
We went outside where he smoked a cigar and I let my thoughts settle.
I said, “I’m still seeing Deandra as the boss. The ruby was important to her. She might’ve kept it close.”
“Meaning?”
Moroni had shut the front door. I pointed at it.
“What?” said Milo.
“On her person.”
He puffed hard. Walked to Moroni who stepped away and let him open the door. Staring inside, he returned, got on the phone to the night desk at the crypt. “Pedro? Milo. What’s your investigator’s ETA? Can you see if they can snap it up a bit... I know, but what’re you talking about, coupla gang thingies, mine’s way more interesting... we’ve all been doing it a long time, Pedro. It can still happen, something you never saw before, trust me.”
Twenty minutes later, the white, blue-striped crypt van rolled up with two drivers, ready to do the usual sit-by until the C.I.’s okayed transport. A few minutes later, a larger van, the mobile crime lab.
Last to arrive was a blue sedan bearing two investigators, one I knew as Gloria, a former nurse, one I learned was Tish, a former respiratory therapist.
Both wore knit tops, jeans, and sneakers. Gloria said, “Where’s the decomp situation?”
Milo said, “Out back, a greenhouse. First do the one in the house, she’s clean.”
He told them what he needed.
Tish said, “Pedro said it could be interesting. I might start thinking he’s credible.”
They approached the body the way experienced C.I.’s do. Gloving up and taking time to observe, then recording the scene orally and visually, Tish using her cellphone to snap pictures, capturing every wound, Gloria speaking into a mini-recorder.
She counted the shell casings from Burgoyne’s service gun, said, “That’ll be fun for the techies.”
Back to the wounds. “Not much mystery about cause.”
Down to the shorts. “Not much by way of clothing and I don’t see any bulges in the pockets but let’s give it a go.”
She patted the garments as Tish continued to film.
Nothing in the four pockets of the short-shorts, same for the cups of the top, which turned out to be a bra from Trashy Lingerie.
“Nope, sorry,” said Tish. “Any reason we shouldn’t tell the guys to transport?”
I said, “Is it okay to take off the shorts, right here?”
Everyone looked at me.
I reiterated the logic I’d given Milo.
He said, “Oh.”
Tish said, “You think it could be up her? Yick.”
“Just a thought.”
Gloria said, “Protocol is to disrobe them back at the crypt.” A beat. “Why not, better than something falling out and we don’t see it.”
Tish said, “Hey, we’re all grown-ups.”
Down came the shorts, sliding fluidly after an initial tug.
No panties.
A thin gold chain belted the widest part of Deandra Demarest’s lovely, flaring hips. Tugged down at the center by a bit of weight.
A red stone the size of a large cocktail olive dangled at the precise center of a vertical strip of dyed-blond pubic hair. Partially concealed by the hair but the harsh overhead light zeroed in on the ruby and set off sparkles.
“Whoa,” said Tish. “We’d have seen that back at the crypt, we’d figure fake, one of those stripper deals, we’d probably stash it in some locker.”
She looked at me. “You’re a smart man. Or you understand women.” Crooked smile. “Both possibilities scare me.”
Chapter 47
The ruby was photo’d, logged, placed in an evidence envelope, and handed over to the crime scene techs. After a call to Noreen Sharp from Milo, delineating precisely.
She said, “Over to us, huh?”
“Safest route.”
“Only route, Milo. I’m driving over there now, find the right place for it.”
It didn’t take long for Deandra Demarest’s body to be bagged, gurneyed, and wheeled to the blue-striped van.
The C.I.’s left.
One of the techs said, “Now what?”
Milo said, “The dirty work. Sorry.”
“We do plenty of hazmat.”
“I asked for two extra masks.”
“Got them, too.”
“God bless you.”
“We hear that all the time,” said the tech.
“You do?”
“Not.”
He and his partner laughed.
Whatever helped.
The airtight greenhouse had prevented the entrance of flies and the compression of the soil heap had partially preserved the body. But you can’t stop nature, and bacteria and tiny mites migrating from the plants did their thing, albeit at a far slower pace than blowfly maggots.
Decomp had spread downward, concentrating on the exposed head, leaving the legs below the knees and the feet pristine. The arms and hands were somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, with all ten fingers still able to serve up decent prints.