A black-and-white with its light bar flashing was parked in front of 1214 West 139th. A heavyset black woman and a skinnier Hispanic woman, both getting close to middle age, descended on Colin as he got out. “Did that lousy son of a bitch do for old Mrs. Mandelbaum?” the black woman demanded fiercely.
“I don’t know yet, ma’am,” Colin said. “I got here from the station as fast as I could when the call came in. That was ten minutes ago, fifteen tops.”
“They ever catch that bastard, they oughta hang him up by the nuts,” the Hispanic woman said.
Privately, Colin agreed with her. He wouldn’t say so publicly. Gabe Sanchez would: “That sounds goddamn good to me.”
“How come you ain’t caught him?” the African-American woman asked. “You shoulda done it a long time ago, you wanna know what I think.”
Colin agreed with her there, too. All he could say, though, was “We’re doing our best, believe me. And now I need to see what we’ve got here.”
He started up the driveway to the house. The lawn was green. That meant less than it would have before the supervolcano blew. No more brown, neglected lawns in L.A. these days, not with all the rain that came down. But it was also neatly mowed and edged. Well kept-up: that was the phrase.
Just about all the South Bay Strangler’s victims who lived in houses had kept them up well. For a split second, Colin wondered if that meant anything. Then he saw a guy in a blue sweatshirt-a Filipino, was his first guess-standing on the front porch, and forgot about that. “Who are you? What are you doing there?” he barked.
“My name is Oscar Flores, sir.” Filipino, sure enough: name, looks, and accent all told the same story. “I had not seen Mrs. Mandelbaum for several days, so I flagged down the police car when it came by. The officers, they had to break down the front door”-which stood open behind him-“and they told me not to go in after them. But I am afraid there is no good news inside the house.”
Colin was afraid of the same thing. The sick-sweet odor welling out through the door might have been stronger, but there was no mistaking it. Something in there had died a while ago, and he could make a good guess about what it was.
“Maybe it’s natural causes.” Gabe Sanchez grabbed for whatever straws he could find.
“Nah.” Grimly, Colin shook his head. “They wouldn’t’ve called for us if it was natural. They just would’ve sent for the meat wagon, and that would’ve been that.” Gabe’s heavy-featured face fell. Colin had got one step ahead of him.
Into the house, with another warning to Mr. Flores not to follow. Colin didn’t know what he expected. Overstuffed Victorian furniture, probably. That was the kind of stuff you figured a little old lady would have.
What he saw instead was Fifties or Sixties modern: almost as outdated, but in a very different way. Sharp angles. Plastic. A low chair that looked as if no little old lady who wasn’t also a gymnast would ever be able to escape it. An abstract clock on the wall.
“Meet George Jetson,” Gabe muttered, which wasn’t far wrong. Colin was reminded of the spidery building in the middle of LAX that had been planned as the control tower but ended up as a restaurant that didn’t do much business because it was so hard to get to. That pieces of concrete started falling off it a few years before the eruption didn’t help, either.
One of the uniformed cops came back into the living room. She looked green around the gills. Who would blame her? That smell was stronger in here. And she’d just been with what caused it. She managed a nod. “Lieutenant. Sergeant. She’s. . back here.” A gulp punctuated the short sentence.
“Thanks, Jodie,” Colin said, as gently as he could.
The hallway between the living room and the bedroom had dozens of pictures on the walclass="underline" Mrs. Mandelbaum and her children and grandchildren and maybe great-grandchildren. There were even a couple of old black-and-whites showing somebody who’d likely been Mr. Mandelbaum.
In the bedroom lay the old woman’s earthly remains. Near them stood the other officer from the black-and-white, a strapping ex-Marine named Albert. Strapping ex-Marine or not, he looked greener than Jodie had. He managed the pale ghost of a smile, almost as if he were the sun outside. “Sorry to bring you out for another one, Lieutenant. If it is, I mean.”
“Oh, it is,” Colin said. “Or else it’s a copycat, which would be about as bad-or a little worse, depending on how you look at things.” His hands folded into fists. “Maybe he slipped up this time. Maybe we catch a break.”
How often had he said something like that? As often as the Strangler murdered someone in San Atanasio, plus a few more times when he was talking about dead old ladies in other South Bay towns. How many times had he been right? The next would be the first.
Out in the living room, Jodie started talking to somebody. Colin spun on his heel and hurried up that icon-filled hallway. If Oscar Flores had got snoopy, tearing him a new asshole would make Colin feel a little better. It was the one thing he could think of that might.
Only it wasn’t the neighbor who’d worried about poor Mrs. Mandelbaum. It was Dr. Ishikawa and Mike Pitcavage, with a DNA technician trailing the coroner. Nodding towards Ishikawa, Pitcavage said, “I hitched a ride on the ambulance. When I heard it might be another Strangler case, I wanted to see it for myself as soon as I could.”
“Okay,” Colin said: more an acknowledgment than anything resembling thanks. That the police chief rode in the ambulance and not in his own car spoke unhappy volumes about what the supervolcano eruption had done to fuel supplies and San Atanasio’s sorry economy.
Pointing back to the hallway, Jodie said, “This woman had a lot of family. They’ll be screaming when they find out.”
Chief Pitcavage’s mouth twisted. “Why didn’t they call her and notice she didn’t call back, then? How much do they care?”
“We’ll find out when we get in touch with them,” Colin said. “Chances are, we’ll find out in stereo.” Notifying next of kin might have been the part of the job he disliked most.
“Let’s have a look at the body and see if we can determine whether it is a Strangler case,” Dr. Ishikawa said. “The media will be most interested in learning about that. Of course, Lucy is the one who will make absolutely certain.”
Lucy Chen, the DNA tech, reminded Colin of a Chinese version of his wife. They were about the same age, and they both had the same air of unhurried competence. But Lucy was an expert on the double helix, not on the behavior and misbehavior of magma.
“Happy day,” Colin said. Lucy’s presence, and Jodie’s, kept him from adding some stronger opinions. As far as he was concerned, the one good thing about the eternal-seeming power and gas shortages was that the blow-dried dimbulbs with the expensive clothes took longer to get to a crime scene. If they wouldn’t have shown up at all, that would have pleased him even more. Some things, though, were too much to hope for.
“It’ll be back here, I bet. I’ll follow my nose,” Mike Pitcavage said. He found Mrs. Mandelbaum’s bedroom with no trouble at all. He was younger than Colin, but he’d been a cop even longer because he hadn’t gone into the service before putting on the blue uniform. How many tract homes had he walked through? Enough so, dozens of different floor plans seemed as familiar as the house he lived in, no doubt.
The coroner squatted by the corpse. His nose wrinkled; the smell in the bedroom was pretty bad, all right. “What do you think?” Colin asked, keeping his voice as neutral as he could. He knew what he thought, but that wasn’t what he was trying to find out.
“If the DNA does not show this to be a Strangler case, I will be very much surprised,” Ishikawa replied. Lucy Chen nodded. After a pause for breath (and after his face announced how much he wished he didn’t need to breathe in there), the coroner added, “Most of the victims are discovered in a less advanced state of putrefaction.”