Guilt Read online

  I-told-you-so nods. One of them said, “It’s always the stubborn ones. We’ll take it from here, Lieutenant.”

  Milo said, “You sure as hell will,” and went to call the anthropologist.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Liz Wilkinson had just finished a lecture at the U., would be over in twenty. Milo went to make more calls and I sat with Holly Ruche.

  All vital signs fine per the EMTs, but she needed to rest and get down some fluids. They gave me custody of the Gatorade squeeze bottle, packed up and left for an emergency call near the 405 freeway.

  The first time I offered the bottle to Holly she clamped her mouth and shook her head. The second time, her lips parted. Several sips later, she smiled and lowered her right hand until it rested atop my left. Her skin had warmed. She said, “I feel much better … you’re a psychologist for victim aid?”

  “I do what’s needed, there’s no set routine.”

  “I guess I am a victim. Of sorts.”

  “It had to be rough.”

  “It was horrible. Do you think he’s going to dig up my entire yard?”

  “He won’t do anything unnecessary.”

  “That sounds like you’re covering for him.”

  “I’m judging from experience.”

  “So you work with him a lot.”

  “I do.”

  “Must be … ooh.” She winced, touched her belly. The black jersey of her top puffed. “She’s moving like crazy—it’s a girl.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Girls rule.” She grinned. “I’m looking forward to having a little BFF.” Another grimace. “Wow, she’s being really hyper … oh, my … that one smarted a bit, she’s kicking me in the ribs.”

  I said, “First baby?”

  “You can tell?” she said. “I’m coming across like an amateur?”

  “Not at all. You’re young.”

  “Not that young,” she said. “I’m thirty-one.”

  “That’s young.”

  “My mother had me when she was eighteen.”

  “That’s younger.”

  She laughed, grew serious. “I didn’t want that.”

  “Starting so young.”

  Her eyes shifted upward. “The way she did it … but I always knew I wanted it.”

  “Motherhood.”

  “Motherhood, house, yard, the whole domestic-goddess thing … it’s going to be great.” Looking past me, she took in the crime scene techs studying the tree segments. They’d arrived fifteen minutes ago, were waiting for Liz Wilkinson, had placed a white cloth over the blue box. The fabric had settled into an oblong; a deflated ghost costume.

  Holly Ruche said, “I can’t have them turning my property into a disaster zone or something. I know it’s not much right now but I have plans.”

  Not a word about the tiny bones. I wondered why a married woman would avoid the plural form.

  “It was all coming together,” she said. “Then that crazy tree had to—”

  Movement from the driveway caused us both to turn. A man around Holly’s age, skinny-but-soft, bald and bearded, studied the felled tree before heading over. He wore a long-sleeved blue shirt, gray slacks, brown shoes. Beeper on his belt, iPhone in his hand, aviator sunglasses perched atop his clean head.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey,” he said.

  His wedding ring matched hers. Neither of them took the greeting beyond that. He had one of those faces that’s allergic to smiling, kept several feet between himself and Holly, looked put-upon.

  She said, “Matt?”

  His attention shifted to the hand she’d continued to drape over mine.

  I stood, introduced myself.

  He said, “A doctor? There’s a problem, health-wise?”

  “She’s doing well, considering.”

  “Good. Matt Ruche. She’s my wife.”

  Holly said, “Doctor as in psychologist. He’s been giving me support.”

  Matt Ruche’s eyes narrowed. “Okay.”

  His wife flashed him a broad, flat smile. “I’m feeling much better now. It was crazy. Finding it.”

  “Had to be … so when can we clean up?”

  “Don’t know, they’ll tell us.”

  “That sucks.”

  “They have to do their job, Matt.”

  He touched his beeper. “What a hassle.”

  “The stupid tree fell down,” said Holly. “No way could anyone—”

  “Whatever.” He glanced at his phone.

  I turned to leave.

  Holly Ruche said, “Hold on, one sec.”

  She got to her feet. “Do you have a card, Dr. Delaware?”

  I found one. Matt Ruche reached to take it. She beat him to it. He flushed clear up to his scalp. Shrugging, he began texting.

  Holly gripped my hand with both of hers. “Thanks.”

  I wished her good luck just as Liz Wilkinson strode into the yard, carrying two hard-shell cases. She had on a pantsuit the color of bittersweet chocolate; same hue as her skin, a couple of tones lighter. A white coat was draped over one arm. Her hair had been straightened recently and she wore it loose and long. She saw me, waved, kept going.

  Someone must’ve prepped her because she headed straight for the tarp, put on the coat, tied her hair back, gloved up, stooped, and drew the cloth back deftly.

  “Oh, look at this poor little thing.”

  The bones seemed even smaller, the color of browned butter in places, nearly black in others. Fragile as lace. I could see tiny nubs running along the chewing surfaces of both jaws. Un-erupted tooth buds.

  Liz’s lower lip extended. “Buried under the tree?”

  I pointed out the hole. Liz examined the blue box.

  “Swedish Hospital? Never heard of it.”

  “Closed down in ’52. What do you think the box was originally used for?”

  “Maybe exactly this,” she said.

  “A morgue receptacle?”

  “I was thinking something used to transfer remains.”

  “The baby died a natural death in the hospital and someone took the body?”

  “Bodies don’t stay in hospitals, they go to mortuaries, Alex. After that, who knows? Regulations were looser back then.”

  I said, “The box is solid brass. Maybe it was intended to transfer lab specimens and someone thought iron or steel increased the risk of oxidation.”

  She returned to the skeleton, put on magnifying eyeglasses, got an inch from the bones. “No wires or drill holes, probably no bleach or chemical treatment, so it doesn’t appear to be a teaching specimen.” She touched the tooth buds. “Not a newborn, not with those mandibular incisors about to come through, best guess is four to seven months, which fits the overall size of the skeleton. Though if the baby was neglected or abused, it could be older … no fractures or stress marks … I’m not seeing any obvious tool marks—no wounds of any sort … the neck bones appear to be intact, so cross out strangulation … no obvious bone malformations, either, like from rickets or some other deficiency … in terms of sex, it’s too young for sexual dimorphism. But if we can get some DNA, we can determine gender and possibly a degree of racial origin. Unfortunately, the backlog’s pretty bad and something this old and cold isn’t going to be prioritized. In terms of time since death, I can do some carbon dating but my gut tells me this isn’t some ancient artifact.”

  I said, “The box was out of active use in ’52, those newspaper clippings are from ’51, and the house was built in ’27. I know that doesn’t determine the time frame—”

  “But it’s a good place to start, I agree. So rather than go all supertech from the get-go, Milo should pull up real estate records, find out who’s lived here, and work backward. He identifies a suspect, we can prioritize DNA. Unless the suspect’s deceased, which is quite possible if we’re talking a sixty-, seventy-year-old crime. That’s the case, maybe some relative will cooperate and we can get a partial.”

  A deep voice behind
and above us grumbled, “Milo has begun pulling up real estate records. Afternoon, Elizabeth.”

  Liz looked up. “Hi, didn’t see you when I came in.”

  Milo said, “In the house making calls.”

  And taking the detective walk through the empty space. His expression said that nothing obvious had come up. “So what do you think, kid?”

  Liz repeated her initial impressions. “Not that you need me for any of that.”

  He said, “Young Moses needs you, I appreciate your input.”

  Detective I Moe Reed was her true love. They’d met at a swamp full of corpses.

  She laughed. “Moses appreciates me, too. Say hi when you see him, which is probably before I will.”

  She stood. “So what else can I do for you?”

  “Take custody of the bones and do your wizard thing. If you need the box, you can have it, otherwise it’s going to the crime lab.”

  “Don’t need the box,” she said. “But I’m not really sure I can tell you much more.”

  “How about age of victim?”

  “I’ll get it as close as I can,” she said. “We can also x-ray to see if some sort of damage comes up within the bones, though that’s unlikely. There’s certainly nothing overt to indicate assault or worse. So we could be talking a natural death.”

  “Natural but someone buried it under a tree?” He frowned. “I hate that—it.” His shirt had come loose over his paunch. He tucked it in, hitched his trousers.

  Liz said, “Maybe covert burial does imply some sort of guilt. And no visible marks doesn’t eliminate murder, asphyxiating a baby is way too easy. And it’s not rare in infanticides.”

  “Soft kill,” he said.

  She blinked. “Never heard that before.”

  “I’m a master of terrible irony.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  Milo and I returned to Holly Ruche. Her husband was gone.

  She said, “He had a meeting.”

  Milo said, “Accountant stuff.”

  “Not too exciting, huh?”

  Milo said, “Most jobs are a lot of routine.”

  She scanned the yard. “I’d still like to know why a psychologist was called in. Are you saying whoever lived here was a maniac?”

  “Not at all.” He turned to me: “You’re fired, Doc.”

  I said, “Finally.”

  Holly Ruche smiled for half a second.

  Milo said, “That woman in the white coat is a forensic anthropologist.”

  “The black woman? Interesting …” Her hands clenched. “I really hope this doesn’t turn out to be one of those mad-dog serial killer things, bodies all over the place. If that’s what happens, I could never live here. We’d be tied up in court, that would be a disaster.”

  “I’m sure everything will turn out fine.”

  “Just one little teensy skeleton?” she snapped. “That’s fine?”

  She looked down at her abdomen. “Sorry, Lieutenant, it’s just—I just can’t stand seeing my place overrun with strangers.”

  “I understand. No reason to stick around, Holly.”

  “This is my home, my apartment’s just a way station.”

  He said, “We’re gonna need the area clear for the dogs.”

  “The dogs,” she said. “They find something, you’ll bring in machinery and tear up everything.”

  “We prefer noninvasive methods like ground-penetrating radar, air and soil analysis.”

  “How do you analyze air?”

  “We insert thin flexible tubing into air pockets, but with something this old, decomposition smells are unlikely.”

  “And if you find something suspicious, you bring in machines and start ripping and shredding. Okay, I will leave but please make sure if you turned on any lights you turn them off. We just got the utilities registered in our name and the last thing I need is paying the police department’s electrical bill.”

  She walked away, using that oddly appealing waddle pregnant women acquire. Hands clenched, neck rigid.

  Milo said, “High-strung girl.”

  I said, “Not the best of mornings. Plus her marriage doesn’t seem to be working too well.”

  “Ah … notice how I avoided telling her how you got here. No sense disillusioning the citizenry.”

  Most homicides are mundane and on the way to clearance within a day or two. Milo sometimes calls me on “the interesting ones.”

  This time, though, it was a matter of lunch.

  Steak, salad, and scotch to be exact, at a place just west of Downtown. We’d both spent the morning at the D.A.’s office, he reviewing the file on a horrific multiple murder, I in the room next door, proofreading my witness statement on the same killings.

  He’d tried to avoid the experience, taking vacation time then ignoring messages. But when Deputy D.A. John Nguyen phoned him at mid-night and threatened to come over with cartons of week-old vegan takeout, Milo had capitulated.

  “Sensible decision and don’t even think of flaking on me,” said Nguyen. “Also ask Delaware if he wants to take care of his business at the same time, the drafts just came in.”

  Milo picked me up at nine a.m., driving the Porsche 928 he shares with his partner, Rick Silverman. He wore an unhealthily shiny gray aloha shirt patterned with leering sea lions and clinically depressed angelfish, baggy, multi-pleated khakis, scuffed desert boots. The shirt did nothing to improve his indoor pallor, but he loved Hawaii so why not?

  Solving the multiple had taken a lot out of him, chiefly because he’d nearly died in the process. I’d saved his life and that was something neither of us had ever imagined. Months had passed and we still hadn’t talked about it. I figured it was up to him to broach the topic and so far he hadn’t.

  When we finished at the court building, he looked anything but celebratory. But he insisted on taking me out for a seventy-buck sirloin-T-bone combo and “all the Chivas you can tolerate, boy-o, seeing as I’m the designated wheelman.”

  An hour later, all we’d done was eat and drink and make the kind of small talk that doesn’t work well between real friends.

  I rejected dessert but he went for a three-scoop praline sundae drowned in hot fudge syrup and pineapple sauce. He’d lost a bit of weight since facing mortality, was carrying maybe two forty on his stilt-legged seventy-five inches, most of it around the middle. Watching him maximize the calories made it tempting to theorize about anxiety, denial, masked depression, guilt, choose your psychobabble. I’d known him long enough to know that sometimes gluttony was a balm, other times an expression of joy.

  He’d finished two scoops when his phone signaled a text. Wiping his chin and brushing coarse black hair off his pockmarked forehead, he read.

  “Well, well, well. It’s good I didn’t indulge in the firewater. Time to go.”

  “New case?”

  “Of sorts,” he said. “Bones buried in an old box under an older tree, from the size, a baby.”

  “Of sorts?”

  “Sounds like an old one so probably not much to do other than trace ownership of the property.” Tossing cash on the table, he got up. “Want me to drop you off?”

  “Where’s the property?”

  “Cheviot Hills.”

  “No need to drive all the way to my place then circle back.”

  “Up to you,” he said. “I probably won’t be that long.”

  Back at the car, he tucked the aloha shirt into the khakis, retrieved a sad brown tweed sport coat from the trunk, ended up with a strange sartorial meld of Scottish Highlands and Oahu.

  “A baby,” I said.

  He said nothing.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Seconds after Liz Wilkinson left with the bones, Moe Reed beeped in.

  Milo muttered, “Two ships passing,” clicked his cell on conference.

  Reed said, “Got all the deed holders, El Tee, should have a list for you by the time you get back. Anything else?”

  “That’ll do it for now, Mos
es. Regards from your inamorata.”

  “My what?”

  “Your true love. She was just here.”

  “Oh,” said Reed. “Yeah, of course, bones. She have anything to say?”

  “Just that she thinks you’re dreamy.”

  Reed laughed. “Let’s hope she holds that thought ’cause we’re going out tonight. Unless you need me to work late or something.”

  “Not a chance,” said Milo. “This one won’t earn overtime for anyone.”

  Reed was waiting outside Milo’s office, holding a sheaf of paper and sipping from a water bottle. His blond hair had grown out a couple of inches from the usual crew cut, his young face was pink and unlined, belying his old-soul approach to life. Massive muscles strained the sleeves of his blue blazer. His pants were creased, his shoes spit-shined. I’d never seen him dress any other way.

  “Just got a call, El Tee, got to run. Blunt force trauma DB in a bar on Washington not far from Sony Studios.”

  “Go detect.”

  “Doesn’t sound like much detection,” said Reed. “Offender’s still at the scene, patrol found him standing on top of the bar yelling space demons made him do it. More like your department, Doc.”

  “Not unless I’ve offended someone.”

  He laughed, hurried off. Milo unlocked his door.

  One of Milo’s lieutenant perks, negotiated years ago in a trade-off deal with a criminally vulnerable former chief of police, is his own space, separate from the big detective room. Another’s the ability to continue working cases, rather than push paper like most lieutenants do. The new chief could’ve abrogated the deal but he was smart enough to check out Milo’s solve stats and though he amuses himself with chronic abuse of “Mr. So-Called Hotshot” he doesn’t fix what isn’t broken.

  The downside is a windowless work space the size of a closet. Milo is long-limbed and bulky and when he stretches he often touches plaster. When he’s in a certain mood the place has the feel of an old-fashioned zoo cage, one of those claustrophobic confinements utilized before people started thinking of animals as having souls.

  He sank down into his desk chair, setting off a tirade of squeaks, read the list, passed it over.