Vigilante (8 page)

In the gang-corrupted streets, she was heralded by Evergreens as a hero. They claimed she had the courage to stand up to City Hall. Her attorney, who mostly worked her cases pro bono, claimed Lita had never been convicted of a felony, even though she did have a sealed stolen-car beef dating back to when she was a juvenile.

When I was finished, I had compiled a long list of people who hated her guts. A lot of them were cops.

Capt. Stephanie Madrid was well known to everyone in the department. She was a hard-ass who ran the Advocates Section at IA. Advocates were police officers who had the job of prosecuting accused officers. In essence, they were advocates for the department. Defense reps were the officers picked by the accused to defend them. A defense rep could be any officer on the LAPD as long as they were below the rank of captain. The chief advocate had supervisory responsibilities over both the advocates and defense reps. It was a big, important job and Captain Madrid ran a large machine that brought police officers charged with malfeasance before administrative Board of Rights hearings. Hundreds of cops had found themselves facing boards because of Lita’s mostly frivolous complaints.

When I finished, I rubbed my eyes, which were fatigued from hours on the Internet. It was a depressing compilation of facts and angry people. I had a long list of G-sters and cops to look into, including a prickly IA captain. Stephanie Madrid was often referred to as the “Queen of the Dark,” so I certainly wasn’t looking forward to conducting a suspect interview with her.

One thought was buzzing around me like the angry green blowflies in Lita’s kitchen: this certainly was the perfect case for
V-TV.

At five o’clock Hitch called to say he was just leaving the ME’s office. I suggested we meet for a beer in a bar called the Copper Buckle across the street from the Police Administration Building. A lot of cops came in there for drinks after work, and it was usually packed.

We found a booth in the back and sat across from each other over foaming mugs. I gave Hitch a copy of my background information on Lita and he slid my copy of the ME’s report over. Instead of reading the paperwork, we filled each other in verbally and would go through the paperwork later. After I gave him Lita’s background info, he started recapping the coroner’s report.

“The two bullet wounds to the head were made by nine-millimeter copper-jacketed Federals. They were one-hundred-twenty-nine-grain Hydra-Shok hollow points and were fired postmortem,” he began.

“If she was already dead, it sounds like the doer had some personal issues with the vic,” I said, thinking of my long list of angry cops.

“Lita was beaten to death first,” Hitch went on. “Head trauma, body trauma, and massive brain hemorrhage on the right side of the cerebellum, which Ray says was the immediate cause of death.”

“How about DNA?” I asked.

“Nothing on her body. Her nails had soap under them. Maybe she brushed her nails. Maybe the killer did. No soap where we found her, so it didn’t happen while she was lying on her kitchen floor. The body was clean. No foreign hair or skin traces, no vaginal DNA. It was so clean, in fact, the coroner thinks the corpse could have been hand vacuumed, which means the unsub knew what he was doing.”

Again,
I thought,
cop.

We drank our beers while I turned pages on the ME report. When I finished scanning the analysis, I looked up at him.

“We got nothing here to hold Carla or Julio Sanchez.”

“I still think there’s an outside chance they could be good for it,” Hitch replied.

“Except we don’t have enough to charge them. Even if CSI matches their prints to prints inside the house it may not matter, because Carla used to live there. How about time of death?” I asked.

“Still working on it. Her stomach content analysis came back just before I left, so it’s not on that top sheet. I clipped it to the back page. Lita had a mostly digested meal of beef enchiladas and Mexican beans. Ray thinks when she died it was maybe four hours old. If she ate at eight, which is just a guess, then she might have been killed around midnight. That fits with the lights still being on and the absence of rigor mortis.”

“Enchiladas? So much for the Bolognese sauce.”

“Once every ten years or so, I’m wrong,” he said, smiling ruefully. “That TOD estimate is also supported by lividity and maggot gestation. Ray will try and dial it in a little closer tomorrow by figuring in the ambient room temperature and adjusting for the temperature’s effect on larva development.”

“Carla said she was there at eleven and Julio confirms it. If you believe them, it puts Carla outside the window on this preliminary time of death,” I said.

We ordered two more beers. After they arrived I said, “Just for the hell of it, I checked on Nix Nash’s whereabouts, not that I think he did it, but I would have loved to get a way to stir him up a little.”

“Tell me.”

“He was in South Florida for some fund-raiser when she died.”

“I still don’t think we should cut the Sanchezes loose,” Hitch said.

“They’re on a seventy-two-hour hold. We could hang on to them for another day.”

“I think that’s what we should do. Their bags are already packed and if we guess wrong and they really are the doers, it’s
hasta la vista
on those two. On a murder one, we’ll never extradite them from Mexico.”

I nodded my agreement. It had been a long, depressing day. Neither of us wanted this damn case.

So we packed up the paperwork, finished our beers, and went home.

CHAPTER

11

“So tell me about Nash,” Alexa said. We were sitting in the backyard of our Venice canal house. The sun was just setting and the cloud-filled sky had turned to a mosaic of fiery colors. I can usually maximize the benefits of a beautiful sunset better than anybody can, but this evening I was barely aware of the bright oranges and purples that were part of the trailing edge of the February storm that had threatened a much-needed rain but had passed on without dropping any.

After I filled her in on
V-TV
’s ubiquitous host, Alexa pumped me for case facts on Lita’s death.

“Start with your suspects,” Alexa said, obviously concerned about the possibility of a police doer.

“It’s a very polarized list. Half my names are gang assholes from competing sets who Lita had dustups with or enemies of her brother, Homer. The other half are cops she filed complaints against. Even Captain Madrid made the list.”

“Stephanie may be a bit of a hard-ass, but that lawsuit and the false-reporting case she got the DA to file were only to back Lita off from all those nuisance complaints,” Alexa defended. “Captain Madrid was just doing her job.”

“Easy for you to say, because she’s your pit bull. I wonder what Nash’s take is going to be.”

We were drinking Coronas as the evening cooled. A family of ducks beat ass across the wind-rippled canal toward a thicket of reeds near the shoreline. Our cat, Franco, was hunkered in the bushes licking his chops, but the ducks were out of range.

“Nix Nash says he wants me to give him a chance to prove he’s a good guy,” I continued. “In one breath he calls me Shane and tells me he just loves police. Then, in the next, he tells me he can feel the future and he sees me going into a pot of boiling oil with some chopped vegetables.”

“He threatened you?” Alexa said, surprised.

“You had to be there, but yeah. And he knew Lita from when he practiced law here. He told me he was going to use her on his L.A. show as a police expert. His story is he flew in from Boca Raton and landed at around eight this morning, then drove over to Lita’s house to take her to breakfast and do an interview. When he pulled in, he says Patrol was already stringing crime scene tape.”

“You believe that?”

“I know he was in Florida ’cause I checked. But I think he knew to go to Lita’s because he’s got a mole in our department. He’s already spying on us from the inside.”

“Be careful, Shane. I hope you remember what happened in Atlanta.”

“You hope I remember? Which one of us was it who threw a shoe at the TV set over that dumb-ass Piedmont Park bust?”

“You. I threw that cute little Let’s Screw pillow you gave me for our anniversary.”

Alexa reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a piece of paper.

“What’s that?”

“I had Danny do a full background on Nash, state and federal,” she said. “There’s some interesting stuff here that’s not common knowledge.”

I groaned loudly, then closed my eyes. “Tell me. I can’t read another depressing personal history.”

She glanced down at the sheet of paper before setting it on the table between us. “Nix is the third of four brothers. All of his sibs are Dade County cops. His father and uncle were also on the force down there, so it’s a law enforcement family. They’re all rock-hard southern conservatives. He was actually named after President Nixon. But for some reason Nix didn’t qualify for the Dade County PD. I’m looking into it. I think he had a medical issue. Anyway, instead of MDPD, he ended up on the Florida Marine Patrol, which basically patrols the rivers and swamps in Dade County, including the Florida Everglades. FMP was a big deal during the drug cowboy days in the late eighties.”

“I thought his TV show main title said he was a Dade County cop,” I interrupted.

“Me too, but Danny checked it on Hulu. The main title says he enjoyed an early career in South Florida law enforcement, which technically includes the Florida Marine Patrol.”

“Okay, go on.”

“Well, he supposedly resigned, but Danny made a few calls and found out that it wasn’t quite that cut-and-dried.”

I sat up straighter and looked over.

“Apparently there was a killer operating in the Florida Everglades in the nineties,” Alexa continued. “This whack job was killing tourists and fishermen who ventured too far back into the swamp. The unsub turned out to be an illiterate French-speaking Cajun sociopath named Lee Bob Batiste. The way this supposedly goes, Nash and his partner arrested Batiste for operating an airboat while intoxicated. When they searched him they found six driver’s licenses in his wallet belonging to victims of the serial killer.

“Nash was ambitious and wanted to get off the water and into FMP Detectives. He knew a little Cajun and started interrogating Batiste about why he had these six DLs in his wallet and Batiste immediately confessed to all the murders. Problem was, Nash was so eager to make his serial murder collar, he never Mirandized Batiste.

“Lee Bob Batiste was released from custody and disappeared back into the Florida swamp, never to be seen again. Because Nix Nash had caused this miscarriage of justice, and because the victims’ families were enraged, there was a lot of pressure on him to resign. Six months later, after the fuss had died down a bit, that’s what he did.”

“Not exactly the way it looks on his TV show,” I said.

“Apparently, as a favor to all the cops in his family and because they waited the six months till it got off the front pages, the connection to his resignation was glossed over.”

“Explains better why he hates cops.”

“He’d say that the Marine Patrol mistake was a lesson learned and it’s why he is so down on sloppy investigations.”

“Right.” I was getting irritated again. “What else?”

“We know most of the rest. He decided to study law and became a lawyer in the late nineties. He moved to L.A., passed the bar and made a career suing cops here, got prosecuted for embezzling, lost his license, went to prison, wrote a book, got rich, yadda yadda yadda.”

I sat there thinking about all of it. The sun had dipped below the horizon and the colorful but rain-heavy sky was turning gunmetal gray. Alexa went inside, but I lingered for a few minutes thinking about my options.

The twenty-four-twenty-four-hour rule governs most homicides and states that the last twenty-four hours of the victim’s life and the first twenty-four hours of the murder investigation are the two most important time frames in the case.

During my search into Lita’s life, I had begun to formulate those time lines and work on setting up a victimology. Victimology is the study of the victim’s life. You try to determine what she was doing when she died that might have drawn the killer to her. In addition, you are looking for personality traits, habits, or relationships that might suggest motive, method, or opportunity. That included employment, dating history, sexuality, reputation, and criminal record. I had plenty to start with.

The twenty-four-twenty-four-hour rule also postulates that something might have happened during the last twenty-four hours of the victim’s life that could be the inciting event for the murder. The argument with Carla over the ceiling fan being a perfect example.

However, I was beginning to suspect that Lita’s murder had nothing to do with that ceiling fan or Carla and Julio Sanchez. We would hold them a little longer to be sure, but I suspected that the real reason for Lita’s death might actually lie, as Nash had suggested, in the murky depths of her tangled anti-police obsession.

Hitch and I might be hunting brother cops.

CHAPTER

12

I went inside and found Alexa waiting for me in the bedroom. She was lying in bed reading a crime stat report, but she was also wearing a sexy pink negligee and she looked beautiful. I needed something beautiful to end my day. I stretched out beside her and moments later we were making love.

Even though my head was spinning with this case, I could always find a way to lose myself with her. We began our lovemaking on the bed but consummated it on the floor. The way that happened was Alexa, always a playful lover, started tickling me and we ended up rolling off the side of the bed.

When we were done, I held her, feeling her warm breath against my neck.

“He’s not going to get us,” she whispered in my ear.