“You have to catch him first,” I said.
“I always get my man,” Mike said, nudging me with his shoulder. He held the door for me and we walked through the back passage to the elevators. I had never been in the bowels of headquarters before. From the general scruffiness, I guessed that nothing had been refurbished since Jack Webb retired.
Next to the elevators there were two wide, jagged cracks in the plaster. With a pencil, someone had labeled the cracks “Whittier Narrows Quake” and “Sierra Madre Quake,” and dated them. When the elevator door opened I was reminded that disasters always come in threes. I stepped inside anyway.
“What are we going to do here?” I asked.
“Get some real coffee.” Mike pushed the button for the third floor.
“And after that?”
“Start working on the girl’s ID.”
Mike was forever telling me that assignment to the Major Crimes Section of the Los Angeles Police Department was the ultimate any detective could hope for: high-profile murders, serial shit, VIP details, all the good stuff. He said the detectives who worked majors were America’s creme de la creme of big-city dicks. He wouldn’t lie to me. Then again, Major Crimes was where Mike worked.
When we walked into his office that late Saturday afternoon, things were fairly quiet. A couple of detectives were cleaning up paperwork from a shooting in the Valley they had rolled on the night before, four members of a Korean family found dead in their home. A second two-man team had tickets for the evening game at Dodgers Stadium and were just hanging out until it was time to go. I don’t know why they didn’t find someplace more comfortable.
The Major Crimes Section has space within the Robbery-Homicide bull pen. The office is a long, narrow room badly in need of paint and housekeeping. There are the requisite ranks of gun-metal filing cabinets lining the walls. Two dozen or so detectives work literally shoulder to shoulder at old library tables and scarred metal desks set in two parallel rows down the length of the room. Each detective’s work territory is marked off by a plastic blotter and some essential clutter: family snapshots, potted plants, trophies, personal computer terminals, telephones, case files.
Densely packed on the floor around the city-surplus chairs, and under the tables, jutting into the narrow aisles, balancing on every flat, nonmoving surface, are cardboard file boxes crammed with case files.
I sipped my coffee and looked up at the wild African boar head mounted on the wall over Mike’s work area.
“Family member?” I asked.
“My first mother-in-law,” he said. “Number two is down in the locker room.”
“Uh huh.” His chair squeaked when I sat in it. “Now what?”
“You’re going to make a list of everything you know, or think you know, about Pisces. There are probably a couple thousand missing juveniles in the state computer system. Anything you can think of that will narrow down the list will help.”
While Mike called the county coroner and ordered a dental workup to be done on Pisces, I started writing: female Caucasian, age fourteen, five-two or -three, ninety-five pounds, eyes brown, natural hair unknown, first name may be Hillary, possibly from Southern California, right-handed, played the piano, athletic build, pierced ears, mother may have lived at the beach. Virgin.
Mike called Sacramento and talked his way through the switchboard until he got the state investigator working juvenile records who was on call for the weekend.
“Detective Mike Flint, LAPD Major Crimes,” he said. “Who am I talking to?”
He listened and gave me a thumbs-up.
“Hell yes, Art, I remember you,” he said into the telephone. “That particular homicide convention was the end of my marriage. Your wife ever speak to you again?”
He laughed a whole lot louder than I suspected the joke from the other end merited.
“I just hope you weren’t so drunk you forgot you owe me a big one.”
More male-bonding laughter.
“You got it. Now I’m calling in the debt. You ready? Okay, I got me a female juvenile Jane Doe at the county coroner’s office. I’ve ordered the dental workup. They promised me they’d do it now and get it sent out to you ASAP. In the meantime, this is what I have.”
He read off my list, exactly as I had written it.
“I don’t know how long she was missing,” Mike added. “So give me some variety in the height and weight, age maybe a year or so either way. If you could do a computer Tab run and get me a list of all possibles, and get it to me overnight, I might consider your debt paid in full. Besides, it’s Saturday night. I know you’ve got nothing better to do.”
Mike’s smile gradually died as he listened to Art on the other end. He seemed all seriousness when he responded.
“Don’t think about it,” Mike said. “We were all over with a long time before that. Guess we just needed a kick in the pants to realize it. Good talking to you, pal. I’ll be watching for your report.”
He cradled the receiver.
“Do you know everybody?” I asked.
“Everybody who counts.”
“What do we do until Art’s report comes back?”
“Track down the ring,” he said. “Go over the field interviews from the crime scene. Make passionate love.”
“In which order?” I asked.
“Take your pick.”
I got up and started clearing a space on his table. “Let’s do that last item first. Right here. Right now.”
He laughed, but I saw the cast of doubt in his eyes. He wasn’t sure how far I would go. I liked knowing that he didn’t have me all figured out. When I began to tug at his shirttail, he grabbed my hand.
“Let’s go talk to the Bunco-Forgery guys,” he said. “That little manufacturer’s symbol stamped inside the band of the ring is probably registered in their book.”
“Whatever you say,” I said, and put his desk back in order.
We spent about an hour poring through a registry of copyrighted jewelers’ symbols, comparing each one to the sketch Mike had made of the stamp inside Pisces’ ring.
“What does the symbol look like to you?” he asked.
“Could be an R or a G,” I said. “Or maybe a Greek omega. What do you think?”
“Just keep looking. If the ring came from a large chain store or wholesaler, figuring out who made it probably isn’t going to lead us anywhere.”
My eyes got tired from using a big, scratched magnifying glass. I wasn’t very hopeful.
Mike was far more patient, meticulously looking back and forth between possibilities in the book and the sketch, and back to the ring. He made notes of a few of the more likely candidates. Finally, he handed the ring to me and pointed to a listing in the book.
“Got it,” he said. “It’s no Greek whatsis. It’s a rainbow.” The listing he showed me was for a custom jeweler down in Long Beach, Rainbows.
“Custom jeweler,” I said. “That’s a break.”
“We’ll check it out.”
“What happens when we identify her, Mike? We still won’t know who killed her.”
“Maybe not,” he said. “It’s just part of the drill, Maggie. Don’t you want to know who she is?”
“Of course I do,” I said. “But it seems to me that we’re looking for two different girls. One of them was a middle-class teenager who took music and learned how to set the table. The other was Pisces, the street urchin. Which one of them was murdered?”
“Good question.” The pager on Mike’s belt sounded, and he unclipped it from his belt. “The thing is, they’re both gone.” He put his reading glasses back on, held the pager against the light, and flashed the readout of the caller’s number. “Coroner,” he said, frowning. “Wonder what, huh?” He reached for the telephone and dialed.
“Mike Flint returning your call,” he said. He listened, gave me a look of absolute puzzlement. “Thanks for alerting me. I’ll be right there.”