The First Cut (16 page)

Takeda handed the swabs he’d taken of Lynde’s vagina to his young assistant, Jason, who took them to a microscope and began examining them.

“There are several vaginal tears.” Takeda pulled a light closer and probed with gloved fingers. “First and second degree with bleeding. Bruising also.”

Kissick didn’t move to look, but Vining did. She stood behind Takeda and bent over his shoulder. He obliged by pointing out the damage.

“Brutal rape,” she said.

“Could possibly involve the insertion of foreign objects. The anus shows evidence of trauma also.” He rolled back the stool and stood. “We’ll gather as much as we can for a rape kit.”

Kissick hadn’t moved from his spot three feet from the table. “What do you mean, as much as you can?”

“We have vaginal and anal swabs and blood and hair samples, but you may have noticed that Officer Lynde has no pubic hair.”

Part of the rape protocol was combing the victim’s pubic hair to search for possible transfer of the assailant’s hair.

Vining frowned as she looked at Lynde’s pelvis. “She came in that way?”

“Smooth as a baby’s bottom. This wasn’t a so-called bikini wax. This hair was shaved, not pulled out.” Takeda drew his glove across Lynde’s mons pubis.

“There’s another situation that robbed us of potential evidence.” Takeda picked up Lynde’s hand. “Her fingernails are short and clean. We swabbed what we could from underneath and found nothing but soap residue.”

“She knew about evidence,” Kissick said. “You would think she would have wanted to be as filthy as possible whether she was found dead or alive.”

Takeda added, “Everything points to a thorough scrub-down before her body was disposed of. The deputy coroner at the crime scene reported finding the hair on Lynde’s head damp. Combing turned up weeds and dirt consistent with the hillside. Her hair felt sticky to me. I washed a sample under water and a bubbly substance came off.”

“Cream rinse,” Vining said.

Takeda pulled locks of Lynde’s hair through his fingers. “Someone went to the trouble of combing it after washing it. It’s tangled and full of weeds but it’s not matted.”

Kissick paced, too frustrated to remain still. “He brutalizes her for over two weeks, treats her like a piece of meat, then washes her hair and puts in cream rinse so it won’t hurt when it’s combed out. Doesn’t jibe.”

“Lolita?” Vining suggested. “He could have forced Frankie to do it, but if I were her I would have done a half-assed job, figuring he was trying to destroy evidence, so maybe she was already dead.”

“What about semen?” When Kissick asked the question, all three turned toward Jason who was peering into the microscope.

Takeda called him by name.

Jason looked up, surprised he was the object of attention. “We’ll need a closer look, but I’m not finding semen. I do see a foreign substance. We’ll have it analyzed, but if it’s what I think it is, it’s condom lubricant.”

Kissick’s clenched teeth made depressions in his cheeks.

Vining moved closer to Lynde’s wrists then to her ankles. “Impressions on her skin. Likely ligature marks. Not consistent with rope or twine. Perhaps handcuffs.”

Takeda probed the slash wound in Lynde’s neck, directing a lamp beam on it. “This cut was made by a good, sharp blade in an unhesitating hand. A straight edge at least six inches long. Whoever inflicted this injury was strong. The blade nicked her spinal cord.”

He circled the table until he was behind Lynde’s head and tipped her chin, revealing bruises beneath her jawbone.

“I suspect he held her from behind with his left hand like this. She struggled, thus the bruising. He inserted the knife here and pulled across to the right.”

“Right-handed,” Kissick said.

Takeda drew his hand across Lynde’s hair, smoothing strands of it from her face. He took his time, seeming to drift into private reflection.

After a while, he said, “That concludes my external examination.”

He moved to the next task, his hand hovering over a tray of instruments before selecting a scalpel. “Jason, I’m ready.” He began his Y incision.

T
HE AUTOPSY PROCEEDED EFFICIENTLY. LYNDE’S ORGANS AND ARTERIES CONFIRMED
what seemed obvious from her appearance—she had been healthy and fit.

Takeda dissected the uterus, probing the interior with his gloved hand. “You suspected she had an abortion two months ago? I find no evidence of abortion.”

“You can’t tell whether she’s been pregnant?” Kissick asked.

“I can determine that she’s never given birth and hasn’t been pregnant very recently. That doesn’t rule out the possibility that she had an early term abortion without complications at some point. Two months is ample time for the endometrium to return to normal.”

Vining sighed. “Crap.”

Takeda looked at her. “Evidence of abortion is important to your case?”

“Would have made the motives of some of the players clearer,” she said.

“Sorry. Hopefully her stomach contents will hold secrets to help you.” Using a ladle, Takeda spooned the contents into a plastic tub, examining as he slowly poured. It looked like thick, lumpy soup.

“She ate within three hours of her murder. Food usually moves through the stomach within three hours. She had a substantial meal, which would take longer to process. It’s been fairly well digested by the stomach and was moving into the small intestine. I see small bits of meat, likely beef, and something green and leafy. I detect alcohol.”

“Steak, salad, and a cabernet.” Vining glowered. “Wonder if she was that well fed all along or if that was a special last meal.”

“The X-ray showed a foreign body in her stomach.”

“Meaning?” Kissick asked.

Takeda peered into the plastic tub as he moved the ladle through the stomach contents. Setting the tub down, he pulled open her stomach. He grabbed forceps.

“Jason, a small tray, please.

“Voilà.” The object Takeda dropped onto the tray made a metallic clatter when it hit the steel. He tilted the tray for the others.

Kissick couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “Is that a crown off a tooth?”

“That’s what it appears to be, folks.” Takeda held it up with the forceps. “A porcelain veneer crown off a molar.” He dropped it back onto the tray. “It must have fallen off one of Officer Lynde’s teeth and she swallowed it. Jason, would you please put up the shots of Miss Lynde’s skull?”

Jason took a stack of X-rays from an envelope and shuffled through them. He pulled down films from clips on the light box, shoved in the new ones side by side and switched on the power.

“She has five fillings.” Takeda pointed them out. “No crowns. Nothing’s missing.”

He returned to the autopsy table and jammed his index finger inside Lynde’s slightly open mouth. “There are no jagged teeth, nothing suggesting a missing crown.”

“Dr. Takeda, a crown must be very individual,” Vining said.

“I’m not a forensic dentist, and I will call one in, but I would say it’s about as unique as a fingerprint. It’s cast to fit the structure of both the tooth it sits on and that of the opposing tooth. It’s something that can be individualized to the exclusion of all others.”

Kissick was incredulous. “How can you get a crown out of somebody else’s mouth?”

“A possible scenario,” Takeda began. “It came loose from the tooth of the person who owned it, who set it aside. Miss Lynde picked it up and swallowed it. It’s small enough, it’s likely it would have passed through her G.I. system. Since it’s not broken down by the stomach acids, hard to pinpoint exactly when she ingested it.”

“She was alive when she was scrubbed down,” Vining said. “He knew it would be a signal that her time was nearly up. He may have forced her to do it herself to torture her, to tell her they’ll never link your murder to me. She complied because she had a card up her sleeve.”

Vining smiled as she walked to the body. She put her hand on Lynde’s hair and spoke to her, ignoring the gore of her mutilated body. “You clever girl.”

F I F T E E N

B
ACK AT HER DESK, VINING REVIEWED THE ATTENDEES OF THE THIRTY-FOURTH
annual Police-Citizens Awards Luncheon. The event had not been open to the public. Formal printed invitations were sent out by Community Services.

There were over two hundred guests, but more than half were PPD officers and employees. Another dozen or so were city officials. There were three judges from the local superior court and a couple of deputy district attorneys from the Pasadena office. Nine PPD officers and employees received awards for length of service. Twenty-one officers, volunteers, and others associated with the PPD received awards for dedication to duty. A PPD officer and a sheriff’s deputy were awarded the Silver Medal of Courage for rescuing a man from a burning house. Seven citizens were honored for heroism. Many of the award recipients brought spouses, parents, and children.

A local news personality served as mistress of ceremonies. A three-piece jazz combo provided entertainment. There was a photographer. A writer from the local newspaper covered the event. PPD’s chief was there as was the deputy chief and four commanders.

The remaining attendees were generally citizens with ties to the community—local business owners, graduates of the PPD’s Citizen’s Police Academy, doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs—people from all walks of life who had an interest in supporting the police and hobnobbing with real-life heroes. The event was held at the Ritz Carlton in Pasadena, a stately space that the locals still called the Huntington Hotel.

Vining blinked at the long list of names. There would be hotel employees to check out as well. This was going to take lots of hours and would likely lead nowhere. Such was much of the work they did—following dead ends. And it had been her idea. She had to follow through.

She started making marks beside names to check out. She skipped employees of the PPD, city officials, and others whom she knew. She excluded the women. Even though Frankie appeared to be partying with Lolita, Vining sensed a man pulling the strings. Frankie went for attractive, dangerous men, like Moore, enjoying the threat of a lit fuse burning closer. Lolita in the picture at the strip club was part of his game, not Frankie’s.

She heard Caspers on the phone in the adjoining cubicle, trying to make sense out of the leads, questioning the people who had called in, pressing for specifics, probing their motives. He was doing his best with a job as thankless as hers.

She pared the list down to forty-seven men. Each would have to be run through the criminal databases that would report warrants, wants, felony arrests, and certain misdemeanors. She didn’t have birth dates, but it was likely safe to exclude anyone without a local address. NCIC would bring up phonetic matches with the names entered. This was an advantage as there was no telling if the names on her list were accurate or complete. The names also needed to be run through the DMV.

She wasn’t in a position to be a diva, but someone else could do this job. She wanted to get to the bottom of what went on between Moore and Frankie. He was hiding something. If it was important enough for him to hide it, it was worth her time trying to uncover it.

She thought of a way to shortcut the luncheon angle. She called the manager at the Pasadena Ritz Carlton who told her they kept security tapes for a month before copying over them. He would check. It was possible somebody screwed up and didn’t properly rotate the tapes. He’d also obtain a list of employees who worked the luncheon.

She said she’d be right down. She took her purse from her desk drawer and picked up her list of forty-seven luncheon guests to investigate. From the war room, she took a copy of Frankie’s missing person poster and the artist drawing of Lolita as seen at the strip club. She went to Sergeant Early’s office and rapped on the doorjamb.

Early waved her inside.

Seated at his desk, Sergeant Cho muttered, “How are ya, Vining? First one here this morning. Last one out. Sorry now you didn’t stick with me?”

“Cho, stop harassing my investigators,” Early said.

Sergeant Taylor piped up from his desk. “His mother didn’t breast-feed him. Ruined him for life.”

“Leave my mother outta this.”

Early called Vining over. “I got a call from a woman over on San Rafael. Her house overlooks the bridge. Says she’s got something on her security camera the night Frankie’s body was dumped.”

“Okay, I’ll go there before I head to the Huntington Hotel. Kissick fill you in about the luncheon?”

“Yeah.” Early did not sound enthusiastic. “Hope the reward brings in better information. We could use it.”

Vining could see the strain taking its toll on her. Frankie’s body had been found thirty-six hours ago. The clock was quickly ticking toward the forty-eight-hour mark. If they had no solid persons of interest by then, cases went cold fast.

“Take Caspers and go over there.”

“Caspers? Sarge, all due respect, but I think I can handle talking to some trophy wife in San Rafael and the Huntington Hotel’s manager on my own. Caspers is busy following up leads. If I may suggest, it’s a better use of manpower.”

Cho was amused by her backpedaling.

“Okay. Fine.” Early took a two-way radio from a charger and handed it to Vining. “We were giving you a car today.”

“I’ll get it tomorrow. I’ll take my own car.”

“We’ll do it right now.”

“Really. It’s fine. I’ll get it tomorrow.”

“You just want to get the hell out of here.”

“I haven’t been outside all day. I’m getting cabin fever.”

“Go. Don’t forget to let us know where you are.”

“Sure. Sarge, by the way, is there someone who can run the names of these luncheon guests?”

“But of course. Sergeant Cho, you have anyone I can use?”

“Unfunny, Early.”

On her way out, Vining swung by her desk and picked up the notebook labeled with her name.

It was midafternoon and hot. The sky was blue-white, blanched by the heat. It was still good to see it.

Vining again headed for the bridge, crossed it, and turned left on San Rafael Avenue. It was a neighborhood of large, architecturally significant homes at the end of long drives sequestered behind security gates. The hilly streets meandered. The landscaping was lush. It was a neighborhood where it looked as if nothing bad could happen. Vining knew there was some truth to that. Other than the occasional car or home burglary, goings-on here rarely attracted the attention of the police. Family dramas, however, were played out even in the best homes.