The Killing Hands (4 page)

We follow Grove up to his office, and wait while he checks his e-mail. “Okay, here we go. Blood analysis indicated no alcohol whatsoever and no other drugs in his system, prescription, nonprescription or illegal.”

“Mmm…” Ramos rests his chin on his thumb and runs his forefinger across his lips. “Doesn't rule out the drug theory. But it makes him more likely to be the seller than the buyer.”

“He could have still been the buyer if the stash was empty, so empty it was out of his system,” I say. “He needed supplies.”

Ramos nods. “You're right, could be either if the drug theory holds.” He sighs. “Or maybe we're just looking at old-fashioned premeditated murder.” He slips his hands into his pockets. “With the usual motives…If it's not money, could be jealousy or revenge.”

“But without an ID we don't know who'd benefit financially from his death, or who could be jealous of him, or who might have wanted revenge. Plus we've got those old injuries—a rough past like that ties in with drugs or some sort of criminal activity.”

Grove nods. “And they're not injuries from boxing or anything like that. I'll send the dental records out, see if we get any takers.”

“Thanks, Doc.” Ramos takes his hands out of his pockets. “After you, Anderson.”

I thank Grove with a handshake.

“I'll make sure I include you on my e-mail list for this case,” Grove says.

“Appreciate it.” I give him a nod before turning to the door.

Ramos says goodbye and is by my side within a few seconds. “Damn.” He lets out a long sigh as we move down the corridor. “Let's hope we get a hit on a missing person.”

The L.A. coroner's office is always busy, always full, and today is no exception, with gurneys lining the corridor—the dead waiting for their turn. I squeeze between the body bags. “Anything from Forensics yet?”

“No, not yet. But it's probably time I touched base with them.”

“County lab?”

“Uh-huh.” He pulls his phone out.

I go through the forensic evidence in my head. We've got the light, which is probably being meticulously examined and then glued back together as we speak, then the cigarette butt, from which DNA will be extracted. DNA will also be isolated from remnants of the witnessing student's urine and cross-referenced with the sample he gave police. I'm sure it'll be a match, but it's always good to check out the account of anyone who discovers a homicide victim. Then the fence and building debris were dusted for prints which need to be processed, and some lucky bugger's got the job of going through all the nearby building-site remnants that were removed for further examination. Leave no stone unturned.

“Did you get many prints?” I ask.

“Yeah, they lifted quite a few from the bricks and they're still looking at the fence and some wood that was lying near the vic, too. I'll check with Prints first.” Ramos finds a number in his phone and dials.

I think he's dreaming—it's early days yet—but I keep my mouth shut. The crime scene would have been dusted for prints, and these would be awaiting processing at the county lab, with the head of the fingerprint area, Maggie Court. She's great—very professional and a lovely woman—but like any lab servicing such a large area, it's hard to keep up with the caseload.

I listen in to Ramos's side of the conversation and gather the current status—the fence has been examined and some prints from it are being run at the moment. That's pretty fast. Looks like we hit the lab on a slow day. Next he asks to be transferred to Sam Gould, the head of DNA at the lab. Again, I glean the gist of things—the DNA's still being processed. Finally Ramos asks to be transferred to Sally Hart and I soon realize from the conversation that she's the lab tech working on the parking-lot light. Based on my vision, I'm sure the light wasn't a coincidence. When the killer turned away from his dying victim, he looked at the light and it was
already broken. There's no doubt in my mind. But I can't give Ramos or Sally Hart a heads-up. What would I say?

Ramos hangs up. “Sally Hart will have the light reconstruction finished in about two hours. She suggested we come over at five so she can take us through it in person.”

“Fine by me.” A visual's always good and I don't know how our killer took it out.

“I'm going back to the station for a couple of hours to check in with my people. You want to come?”

I consider it for a moment, but then decide my time is best used elsewhere. “Thanks, but I might head back to the Bureau. I'll see you at the lab.”

In the coroner office's parking lot we part ways in our government cars. But instead of going back to the field office, I wait until I see Ramos drive past and give him a wave while pretending to be on the phone. Once I'm sure he's out of the parking lot I head back to our vic.

My ID is enough to get me back into the morgue and buy me some time alone with the unidentified male. My aim is to induce another vision, something more than a flash of our vic in pain and shock. I stare into the face of the man and wonder what he was like in life. What was his occupation? I look at his hands and notice they're smooth, indicating he didn't earn a living from manual labor. In fact, his hands are so well maintained they look manicured. His cuticles are neat and trimmed, his nails rounded with perhaps a millimeter of overhang between the end of the nail and the fingertip. I decide to check his toenails, too, curious as to whether his impeccable grooming extends to his feet. Sure enough, his feet are smooth and his toenails also look manicured. So we've got an expensively dressed male who has regular manicures and pedicures, someone meticulous about his appearance and who can probably afford to keep himself well-groomed—unless he was living beyond his means and was so in debt that someone took payment in the form of his life.

I shake my head, it doesn't add up…the grooming seems to be in opposition with his healed wounds. Not many highly
paid professionals get into bar fights or confrontations with gangs on the weekend. But then there's the age of those injuries.

I nod my head as I come to the only logical conclusion. This man spent at least part of his life, maybe his late teens and early twenties, involved in violence but then turned his life around. It would explain the well-healed wounds and bones, and his current state of maintenance. Maybe his past came up to bite him on the ass. I'm jumping to conclusions, but all the pieces fit…extremely well.

I take a deep breath in and clear my mind of all thoughts, including my preconceptions. I need to see something about this man's life…or death. As each thought pops into my head, I force it out. I need my mind to be still. In this state of near meditation, I am the most receptive to visions. Eventually I'm rewarded.

I open my eyes and I'm staring at the lifeless face of the victim lying on the hard metal in front of me. I replay the vision. Both his voice and the caller's were barely audible, but it sounded as if they were talking in another language. I try to replay a word or two in my head, something I could repeat or spell to try to find out the language, but it's spoken too softly and too quickly. Okay, what else was there? Whatever he and the caller were talking about, it was heated and I felt many emotions pulsing through the victim. He was initially shocked but that soon turned to concern…maybe even fear. That was quickly replaced by anger, but once
he'd thrown his phone, a sense of sorrow or loss was the only remaining sensation.

I sigh, trying to piece it together. I don't think it fits with a drug deal gone wrong. So how does it fit with other motivations for premeditated murder? It could be blackmail of some sort. Shock and horror over what the caller knows or has, then anger that he's being blackmailed, and finally sadness as he realizes he has to submit to the blackmailer's demands? That would fit. What about jealousy? Could the caller have been the jealous partner of some woman, accusing our victim of impropriety? That might fit with the victim's emotions, too—he's concerned, then angry that the caller's discovered the affair, but also sad because it will have to end. I shake my head. The emotions align with many motivations behind murder, and wild speculation won't get me anywhere.

I try to induce another vision, but after twenty minutes and nothing, I sign out of the morgue and head back to my car. A glance at my watch tells me it's 4:00 p.m. Not enough time to go back to the office and work on another case. Even without factoring in the travel time, an hour's not long enough to get inside the mind of a killer or victim. You need to immerse yourself in the case, live it and breathe it. Working on something else now will be useless and it will take my mind away from our Little Tokyo victim.

I drive to the lab at California State University and spend thirty minutes in my car flicking through the case file again…live and breathe it.

A
t 4:55 p.m. I enter the building and ask for Sally Hart, showing my ID. At the elevator doors on the third floor I'm greeted by a frizzy redhead in her mid-twenties wearing thick but stylish glasses. Her creamy skin is dotted with freckles. She wears well-cut jeans with square-toed ankle boots, a black sweater and a tailored purple jacket that emphasizes her petite waist. The smile that accompanies her outstretched hand reveals straight white teeth.

“Agent Anderson, nice to meet you.”

I shake her hand. “You, too, Ms. Hart. Or is it Dr. Hart?”

She laughs. “Not yet. Another year of study, I'm afraid.” She fingers her glasses. “I just got a call from Detective Ramos. He's running a few minutes late.” She turns around. “Come through.”

We make our way along a series of corridors and doors until we get to her lab. The light, now mostly assembled into one large piece from the million shards of glass, sits on her desk. It's a square, dark orange frame with four square panels of glass, underneath which sit the powerful bulbs. At the base of the frame is a large round hole, which marks the place where the light attaches to the post. With the reconstruction complete, four distinct bullet holes can easily be seen.

“Nice job,” I say.

“Thanks. There are a few pieces missing—” she points to tiny gaps that are barely noticeable on first viewing “—but they're all insignificant…except for these ones, obviously.” She bends down and points to the small holes in each panel of glass.

“Bullets.”

“Uh-huh,” she says. “Looks like a .45. It splintered the glass here, here, here and here.” She points to the tiny cracks that radiate from each hole.

“Does Ramos know this yet?”

“Yeah, I called him once I'd finished it.” She straightens up. “That's why he's late—he stopped off at the crime scene to set the techs up to take another look around, this time for some bullets.”

“A bullet…gee, that'd be nice.” A bullet would give us something we could match to a weapon; good for court, and sometimes good if the weapon's unique striation marks are already in the ballistics computer database.

She laughs. “That's exactly what Detective Ramos said.” She takes her glasses off and gives them a polish. “I've just started the computer analysis looking at the angle of the bullets, the likely position of the shooter and the possible resting place of the bullets, but I think it'll be another hour or two before I can give the techs anything more concrete to help them pinpoint where the bullets might have landed.” Hart takes me over to her computer. “I've triangulated the initial angle of the bullets, based on the way the glass shattered, and it puts the shooter somewhere between here and here, depending on his height. All four bullets were fired from the same spot and I've followed the possible trajectories through for someone five-five to six-five.” She points to two dots on her computer, but so far it's just blank space, with no obvious visual relationship to the crime scene.

I look at the basic computer-generated model and try to overlay it in my mind's eye with the crime scene. “That takes him right back to the fence line, if we're talking a five-five perp.”

The trajectory of the bullet tells us the angle it traveled, not its point of origin. But Hart's made a sensible call on the height range, and following the bullet's trajectory, the shorter he is the farther back he would have had to stand to produce the same angle.

“I haven't inputted everything into the model yet.” She shuffles through some papers and pulls out a photocopy of the crime-scene sketch that would have been done by Ramos or one of his detectives. It shows all the key structures and points of evidence and includes exact measurements between items. Hart compares her computer breakdown with the sketch, measuring out the distances. “Yup, right on the fence, assuming the sketch is accurate.”

Experienced cops know the importance of the sketch, know that it can become critical to solving the case or that it can become essential evidence in court.

“It's Ramos…it'll be spot-on,” Hart continues. “So the fence line is the farthest point and if our shooter's around six-five you're looking at him standing level with the edge of this parking spot.” She points to the crime-scene sketch. “I've still got to finish the model and then work out the bullet's trajectory after it hit the light.”

“Could it have been a clean-through shot?” I walk back to the light to take a closer look and soon have my answer. The light has a thick metal backing, so once the bullet went through the glass, it would have hit the metal and ricocheted off somewhere.

“No, the angle's wrong,” Hart confirms.

“How big are the bulbs in these things?”

She pulls an industrial-looking bulb, nearly the size of her hand, from a box on the floor. “This is the brand used in the light.”

I picture the scene, picture the shot. “How high is the light?”

“Twenty-four feet.”

I raise my eyebrows. “So he's a reasonable shot—to blow out all four bulbs.”

She nods. “Probably. Depends on the time of day when he took the shot.”

“Go on.”

“Well, I'll have to do a reconstruction to be sure, but I imagine the bulbs themselves would be most visible in daylight, with the sun behind the shooter. Whereas if the sun's in his eyes it'd be harder—”

The phone on Hart's desk cuts off her sentence. “Hold on.” She picks up the phone. “Hart…okay.” She hangs up. “Ramos is on his way up now.” She unclips her security pass from her jeans waistband. “I'll go buzz him through.”

While I'm waiting, I take another look at the computer and the light. The glass that covers the bulbs is slightly frosted, so with the right lighting the bulbs would be easily visible.

A few minutes later Ramos and Hart arrive. Ramos gives me a nod and a smile and I listen in while Hart runs through her findings to date with Ramos, showing him the light itself and then the computerized trajectory.

“I've set the team up to search the whole parking lot.”

She nods. “I'll keep working on the trajectory, see if I can't narrow that search area down for you.”

“Before dark?” Ramos glances at his watch.

Hart shakes her head. “I doubt it. Sorry.” She pauses. “I'm also going to run a reconstruction of the shooting, see if I can't give you guys a rough time of day. Or at least eliminate the possibility of a night shot.”

I know the shot wasn't taken after the murder, but our killer could still have taken the light out earlier in the evening.

“That'd be great,” Ramos says. “If it was a daylight shot it'll help prove premeditation.” Like all good law-enforcement personnel, Ramos is already thinking about the evidence from a jury's point of view, thinking about how we can get a conviction. He pauses. “A likely time of day will also help when we're canvassing for possible witnesses. So far we've come up with a big fat zero from the area.”

“I'll set it up for three tomorrow,” Hart says. “You guys are welcome to sit in.”

“Thanks. I'm hoping we'll have something else by then,
but—” Ramos gives her a smile “—if you're all I've got I'll be here.”

“Gee, thanks.” Hart smiles. “You sure know how to make a girl feel wanted.”

 

I leave the lab at 5:45 p.m., giving myself just enough time to get home and grab a snack before my kung fu class. I've been studying kung fu for nearly eight years, and in addition to attending classes three times a week I also have one-on-one sparring training with my teacher for half an hour before the Monday-night class.

I'm only a block away from the school when my BlackBerry rings. The traffic's too heavy to glance down at the display to see who's calling, but my headset is configured to pick up after two rings.

“FBI, Anderson.”

“Hey, it's Darren.”

Detective Darren Carter and I met sixteen months ago, when I was new to the Bureau and working out of the Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico. I was investigating a serial killer who'd struck in Washington, D.C. but started off on Darren's turf—Tucson, Arizona. We hit it off immediately and have stayed in contact. And if I'm honest, Darren's a contender to maybe, just maybe, break the drought of men seeing me in lingerie. Or maybe not. Most days I don't want any contenders in that department, but sometimes…

“What's up?” I ask.

“The usual. Murder. You?” Darren works in Homicide.

“Surprise, surprise, it's murder in L.A., too.”

He sighs. “Why do we do it?”

I know he's not serious, but I answer him anyway. “To get justice for the victims and hopefully save potential victims.”

“That's right.” The comment sounds flippant but I know it's not, not coming from Darren. Darren and I have both been touched, personally, by murder. For me it was my
brother when I was eight, and for Darren it was his aunt, over ten years ago.

“What's your case about?” Darren asks.

Cases are confidential, to a point, but there's no harm in discussing the basics with a fellow law-enforcement professional.

“Little Tokyo murder. No ID and the guy's got a weird throat injury. You?”

“Nothing that interesting. Gunshot wound and we've got a jealous ex-boyfriend we like for it. We're waiting on evidence from the lab, but the ex isn't that bright. I think the forensics will nail him.”

“So you've got your man.”

“Looks that way.”

“I'm just starting out on this one. No suspects yet.” I swing into a parking space just outside the studio. “Listen, Darren, I've got to go. Kung fu class.”

“Oh, yeah, Monday night. You can tell me all about the weird throat wound another time. Go kick some ass.”

I laugh. “Will do.”

I rush into the school right at 7:00 p.m., but still have to get changed. The place is quiet, with only three people here so far—my teacher, Sifu Lee; his assistant, Steve; and Marcus, one of the other advanced students. Lee is on the warm-up mats going through a series of blocks and strikes, and Steve and Marcus are both stretching in one corner. Lee looks up when I burst through the door.

“Sorry I'm late. I'll be out in a second.”

He nods. Lee's in his forties and half-Chinese. His five-eleven frame is muscular, but not bulky, and extremely strong. He trained in China and Hong Kong in many different kung fu forms before choosing Tiger and Crane. He then trained to
sifu
—master—stage and has been teaching in L.A. for over fifteen years. And, L.A. being L.A., he's also had some involvement with the film business, training students who've gone on to become stunt doubles in movies.

In the changing room I pull on my uniform: baggy black pants, a black T-shirt with the school's logo on the
front and my black sash. I also slip into my special martial arts shoes before running out to join Lee.

“I take it you're not warmed up?”

“No, sorry.”

While Lee continues his own training, I do some quick stretches to warm up my legs and follow through with rotations of most of my joints. I pay particular attention to my shoulders and elbows, knowing how easy it is to jar those joints or hurt the surrounding muscles if you're not warmed up.

When I'm ready I give Lee a nod. We start with punches, which he counts out as I strike the pad he holds in front of me. Once we've done straight punches, arrow punches and leopard punches, we move on to blocks. Lee gently throws pre-arranged punches and kicks my way, which I defend.

We've been going for fifteen minutes when Lee says, “Ready to spar?”

“Sure.” I'm definitely warm…and sweaty. I take a drink of water and suit up in my protective gear, putting on my shin guards, gloves and helmet. My groin guard is underneath my uniform from when I was getting changed. Lee only puts on a helmet and a groin-piece over his clothing—his hands and shins are rock hard from thirty-five years of conditioning. Once we're on the mats, Lee and I bow to each other.

“Okay, try to hit me.” He gives me a teasing smile.

Our individual sparring time always starts off this way and, as usual, the invitation is enough for my competitive spirit to hit overdrive. I stand side-on to him, in horse, guard up. He mirrors this position, waiting for the first incoming strike.

I go with a left jab, followed quickly by a right, then a left, then a right. He blocks them all effortlessly and with precision, but I don't let this discourage me. A right hook punch followed by a straight kick and then a roundhouse kick still leave me no closer to hitting my target, and, in fact, I can feel a slight buzz in my shin where his forearm blocked my kick and connected with my leg. I'm wearing shin guards, but his
forearms are amazingly hard. Damn, he's good. Then again, I probably shouldn't be able to connect a blow with my instructor. Not when he's been studying kung fu most of his life.