But even more telling, if Cobb’s case was as rock solid as it appeared in the murder book, why wasn’t he willing to help? If Cobb had connected all the dots, why the psycho drama? Why all the insanity? Why didn’t he just brief her on the case and wish her luck?
Lena slipped on a pair of gloves and grabbed her face shield. But just as she reached for the door, her cell phone started vibrating in her pocket. The phone shook five times before she was able to dig it out from beneath her scrubs and see Barrera’s name blinking on the display.
“I just got a call from Jack Peltre,” he said. “You know him, Lena?”
From the sound of Barrera’s voice-the low rattle-it didn’t take much to put it together. Jack Peltre was a lieutenant working out of the Pacific Station. More to the point, Peltre was Cobb’s supervisor.
“I’ve heard of him,” she said.
“Then I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that it was a friendly call. It was friendly because we’ve known each other for twenty years and that’s what friends do. They take care of each other. And from time to time, they make friendly calls. You know what I’m saying?”
Barrera was seething. The shit was hitting the fan.
“I think so,” she said.
“You think so? Well, they do, Lena. Friendly people like to stay in touch, otherwise they don’t consider themselves friendly. By the way, Peltre mentioned that you stopped by this afternoon. He told me that when you left the building, you took something with you.”
She glanced across the changing room at the murder book stuffed in her briefcase. There was no point in denying it.
“I did,” she said. “I took something.”
Several moments passed. She could hear Barrera grinding his teeth and working a cigar.
“Bring it to me,” he said finally. “I want to see you in my office. And that’s an order, Detective. I want to see you right now.”
The line went dead. He’d hung up on her.
Lena stared at the phone, weighing her options. She was already suited up and figured that she had five, maybe ten minutes-plus the short drive over to Parker Center before Barrera would start looking for her. Lowering her face shield, she gritted her teeth and entered the operating room. There were seven autopsies in progress tonight. Even better, the jar of Vicks VapoRub wasn’t in its usual place in the changing room. She had nothing to block out the abhorrent smell of decomposing flesh and human waste. Nothing to filter away the dense, oppressive odor that permeated every inch of the room.
The experience was more than overwhelming-something her former partner once told her didn’t get any easier after twenty years.
But tonight she welcomed it like a wake-up call.
Without looking too closely, she scanned the room and spotted Sid Kosinski working in the far corner. The two corpses were laid out side by side on stainless steel operating trays. Even from a distance neither Bosco nor Gant looked as if they were resting or had found much peace.
Mindful of the wet floor, Lena worked her way deeper into the room. Kosinski glanced up at her as she approached. He had begun with Bosco, and appeared to be more than halfway through. As he jotted something down on a clipboard, she turned to Gant and eyed his dead body. She took the shock with her game face on, thinking about how difficult it must have been for his father to stand here and identify his son.
Without clothing, she could see that the bruises Gant had received were significantly more extensive than what she’d seen on his neck and arms at the crime scene. The wounds from the beatings he had endured stretched across his shoulders, his chest and stomach, then circled around his lower back. His upper thighs were marred as well-almost as if he’d blocked a series of kicks to the groin.
She had no reason to doubt Gant’s brother on this. No reason to doubt that the number of people standing in line to throw a punch Gant’s way after the NOT GUILTY verdict would have extended across the entire city.
An image surfaced. She could see Cobb sitting before her with his eyes concealed by those strange glasses. She could remember how still the room became when she asked the detective if he’d hit Gant, if he had hurt him. She wondered what their interviews had been like before Gant signed up with Paladino. She hadn’t seen any transcripts in the murder book. If they were there, she hadn’t found them.
She pushed the thought away and looked back at what was left of Gant’s face. The two rounds that had blown out his eyes carried more meaning now. The killer’s personal rage for his victim remained all too clear. Yet the possibility that Gant had been murdered for what he’d seen-what he’d discovered-seemed just as clear.
Kosinski moved in beside her. “Some of these bruises have to be more than ten days old, Lena. Look at the change in color.”
She nodded. “I can’t stay, Sid. How come you started with Bosco?”
Kosinski met her eyes, then tipped his head toward the double doors that opened from the hallway behind them. Lena peeked over his shoulder. District Attorney Jimmy J. Higgins was watching them from the other side of the glass and seemed more than a little edgy. But at least she knew what had happened to that jar of Vicks VapoRub. She could see Higgins smearing the gel all over his handkerchief and pressing the cloth against his mouth and nose. He had a wild look in his eyes like a man huffing glue.
Kosinski lowered his voice. “He said he’s got a meeting tonight. He wants whatever I can give him before he goes.”
“Why doesn’t he come in?”
“Because he’s a chicken shit. I don’t even know why he’s here. I could have given him a call.”
“It’s Bosco,” she said. “They were friends.”
“What kind of friends?”
She shrugged.
“Well, Higgins asked me to do something I could never do, Lena.”
“Clean the report,” she said. “Don’t mention what you found in Bosco’s nose.”
Kosinski gave her a long look and then nodded. “What kind of a DA would ask for something like that?”
She wished that Higgins’s request would have surprised her, but it didn’t. If the DA could press the deputy chief of police, he would have had no problem trying to corrupt a medical examiner. She turned and took another peek at him. He had stepped away from the window and was shouting at someone on his cell phone. She wondered if it was Vaughan taking the verbal beating on the other end of that phone. She wondered if Cobb’s supervisor had made another call on the “friends network”-this time to the DA because that’s what friends do.
But Lena had her own reasons to be troubled by the cocaine found at Club 3 AM.
She still didn’t understand why Dante Escabar had left it at the crime scene. And his explanation that somehow he had overlooked it-that he’d rushed to inform the owners about the murders and protect their clients by shutting the place down-didn’t ring true. The quantity alone raised serious doubt. In the end, finding that much coke would jeopardize the club’s place as an oasis for the A-list just as much as Bosco being seen with Jacob Gant after the trial. Escabar had both the time and opportunity to clean things up, but hadn’t. Lena felt certain that he’d had a reason. Something she couldn’t see yet.
Kosinski pointed to the worktable. Bosco’s stomach had been removed and set on a plastic tray.
“I was just about to pull the slug,” he said. “That’s what you came to see, right?”
She nodded and followed the medical examiner over to the worktable, then watched as he selected a clean scalpel.
20
Unable to reach Vaughan on her cell, Lena hustled through the basement to the elevator at the end of the hall. She had taken the shortcut from the garage and entered Parker Center using the rear doors. It was after-hours-dark and still with just the sound of two guys talking in the distance. As she passed the men’s locker room, she could hear them through the door. They were laughing about something, and she envied them for their apparent lack of worry and concern, for what sounded like a carefree moment between friends.