Mike grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair.
“What is it?” I asked, following close on his heels.
“Someone has come to the morgue to claim the kid’s body.”
“Who?”
“Get to steppin’ and we’ll find out.”
Officially, Mike’s city car was on a salvage list. When it reached ninety-six thousand miles or so, it was supposed to be scrapped. But because there was no budget for a replacement, he had never turned it over. Most of the cars in the police lot were on the same list.
Even though on that day Mike’s heap was forty thousand miles beyond the city’s definition of junk, Mike made it move. We blasted out of the Civic Center with all eight geriatric cylinders pinging, and roared down Mission Road toward the county morgue in Lincoln Heights.
I rolled down my window and took in all the fresh air I could, wishing I could save it up somehow. This would be my second trip to the morgue with Mike. What I remembered most vividly was the smell. Once you have been there, you never forget the smell.
Mike bounced through the potholes in the asphalt drive of the massive County – USC Medical Center campus and jerked to a stop in a no-parking zone right beside the front steps of the morgue. He bounded out of the car, his jacket flying out, his holstered automatic bouncing on his hip. I was right beside him.
To my great relief, we were headed for the front door. Last time I had gone in through the back way, through guest reception. That had been surreal, a charnel house. The front was mauve marble and mahogany office doors. The only stiff was a bureaucrat snoring at his desk.
Inside one of the offices that opened off the lobby, I could see a man and a woman sitting together. He was grim-faced and pale, she wept softly against his chest. They were in their early forties, I guessed. Except for their grief, there was nothing remarkable about them, a couple in ordinary Saturday clothes: jeans, sneakers, windbreakers. The woman was thin and blond, probably pretty under better circumstances. The man had a fair-sized sports-fan gut; a big man who worked with his hands.
They looked like nice, careful people. Not the sort who might mislay a daughter.
“Mike?” A small Oriental woman came out of the office where the couple sat. She wore business attire, a lightweight wool suit and low-heeled shoes. Clipped to her lapel was a coroner’s investigator badge.
As we walked to meet her, Mike whispered in my ear. “Act like a cop. You’re probably not supposed to be here.”
“How does a cop act?” I asked.
“You know.” He grinned. “Pushy, like you own the place. Just let me do the talking.”
He offered his hand to the investigator.
“Sharon Yamasaki,” he said, “this is MacGowen.”
She smiled at me and reached for my hand. Her eyes lit up, as if a light bulb had come on inside. “You’re Maggie MacGowen.”
“Guilty,” I said, and nudged Mike with my toe.
“I’m very pleased to meet you,” she said. “I saw you interviewed on PBS last week. Program about reporting from a war zone. It was very interesting.”
“It’s nice to meet you,” I said.
“Is Mike helping you with research for a project?”
“In a way,” I said, and smiled at him.
“When you two are finished?” Mike tugged on my arm.
I pulled away from him and moved closer to Sharon Yamasaki. “Who are those people?”
She glanced at the couple inside. “Mr. and Mrs. Metrano. They say that someone called and told them that our young Jane Doe is their missing daughter.”
“Did you call them?”
“No.”
“Have they viewed the body?” Mike asked.
“Yes. On video.”
“They ID her?”
Yamasaki held up her hands. “People sometimes see what they want to see. Why don’t you talk to them. I promise you, it’s a puzzler.”
We walked into the office, and Yamasaki did introductions all around. “George and Leslie Metrano, Detective Flint, Maggie MacGowen.”
I rolled their names over in my mental Rolodex a couple of times. Nothing came up right away, but I knew the card was there.
Then I looked at them both closely, rudely I guess, trying to match their features to Pisces. I saw no obvious likeness, but they seemed to be within the range of possibility.
“How long has your daughter been missing?” Mike asked them.
“Ten years, five months, twelve days,” Leslie Metrano said, her voice breaking.
“Ten years is a long time,” Mike said. “Kids change pretty fast when they’re growing up. What makes you think this girl is your daughter?”
“A mother knows.”
“Possibly.” Mike looked very uncomfortable. “But we’ll need something more concrete before we can release the body to you. Do you have dental records?”
“She was only four years old when she was taken from us,” George Metrano said. “She had never been to the dentist.”
Mike nodded. “We can draw samples from you and run a DNA match. The results from that are damned near hundred-percent. Problem is, results will take anywhere from a couple of weeks to a couple of months. Is there anything you can offer in the meantime, fingerprints we might match with Jane Doe?”
“She has a name,” Leslie cried out. “Amy Elizabeth Metrano.”
“Jesus Christ.” Mike sat down on the closest chair and stared at them. “Amy Elizabeth Metrano.”
I remembered the little blond with big brown eyes. There had been-posters with her pretty round face everywhere for over a year. As I recalled the story, little Amy had disappeared during a family picnic in the mountains around Lake Arrowhead. I couldn’t remember all of the details. She had been playing hide and seek in the woods with older siblings and various other children. She hid and they never found her again.
There had been a lot of speculation about what had happened to her, from kidnapping to consumption by the local wildlife. Other than a pink sweater hanging on a bush, she had vanished without a trace.
“I have pictures,” Mrs. Metrano said. She laid out the familiar poster snapshot, and then a series of computer-generated sketches that projected what Amy might have looked like at various ages, had she lived. I picked up two of the sketches, one labeled age twelve, the second age sixteen. The artist had assumed that she remained healthy and well-fed, and round-faced. Pisces’ features had been gaunt.
I put the sketches down and looked over at Mike.
“What do you think?” he said.
“She was a pretty little girl.” I shrugged.
He nodded. “When we get your videotape down, we’ll get a forensic anthropologist to make a bone-structure comparison.”
“What videotape?” Mr. Metrano asked.
“I filmed part of my conversation with the girl who called herself Pisces. I’m sure you’ll have a chance to see it. Just remember, she was lying to me. She was a little scam artist, but she wasn’t a hooker.”
Mrs. Metrano began to weep, “My baby, my baby.”
I thought poor Mike would have to leave the room. I have watched Mike follow an autopsy from Y cut to final suturing without flinching – unphased even when the skull popped open like a champagne cork. But this weeping woman was another matter.
Mr. Metrano held his wife against him and patted her back rather hard.
“Mr. Metrano,” I said, “if this girl is your daughter, where do you think she’s been for the last ten years?”
He had turned a sickly pale. “Right at the beginning, we got a report from this private investigator that Amy Elizabeth had been sold into a sort of white slavery ring. He told us they were always looking for little blond-haired girls. We went up to Montana where this ranch was supposed to be, where they took these girls. But we never found it. I took out a second mortgage on the house, and we kept on looking until the money ran out.”
“You believed in this PI?” I asked.