Mallick smiled. “Spoken like a true diplomat. Anyhow, you don’t have to justify yourself to me. I get it. It’s natural.”
Jacob wondered if he’d been picked for some sort of experimental psychobabbly program; a puppet to trot out for the press, help dispel LAPD’s well-earned reputation as an orgy of paramilitary machismo. And we gave him a bag of kittens, too! “Yes, sir.”
“I hope you don’t plan on making a career of it,” Mallick said. “Traffic.”
“Could do worse,” Jacob said.
“Actually, you couldn’t. Let’s not kid ourselves, okay? I talked to your superiors. I know who you are.”
“Who am I, sir?”
Mallick sighed. “Turn it off, would you? I’m here to do you a favor. You’ve been temporarily reassigned.”
“Where?”
“Wrong question. Not where, who. You’ll report directly to me.”
“I’m flattered, sir.”
“Don’t be. It’s got nothing to do with your skills. It’s your background I’m interested in.”
“Which part of it, sir? I’m a pretty complex guy.”
“Think tribal.”
Jacob said, “I’m assigned because I’m Jewish.”
“Not officially. Officially, the Los Angeles Police Department actively and enthusiastically promotes diversity. In matters of case assignment, we maintain a strict policy of race blindness, gender blindness, ethnicity blindness, religion blindness.”
“Reality blindness,” Jacob said.
Mallick smiled and offered a scrap of paper.
Jacob read an address with a Hollywood zip code. “What am I going to find there?”
“Homicide. As I said, you’ll report to me. This is a sensitive matter.”
“The Jewish angle,” Jacob said.
“Call it that.”
“The vic?”
“I’ll let you form your own impressions.”
“Can I ask what’s so special about Special Projects?”
“Everybody’s special,” Mallick said. “Or hadn’t you heard.”
“I have,” Jacob said. “I haven’t heard of you.”
“As a unit, we don’t feel it’s appropriate for us to get overly involved in the day-to-day,” Mallick said. “It enables us to move faster when we’re really needed.”
“What do I tell Traffic?”
“Let me handle them.” Mallick walked to the glass door, held it open. The sun turned his white shirt to a mirror. “Enjoy the view.”
Jacob’s GPS put 446 Castle Court at the northernmost reaches of Hollywood Division — north of the reservoir, west of the Sign — and estimated a travel time of fifteen minutes.
It had lied. Half an hour in, he was still climbing, the temperature gauge on the Honda spasming as he pushed past mid-century boxes, some remodeled, others flaking. Cross streets appeared in thematic spurts, Astra and Andromeda and Ion, followed by Eagle’s Point and Falconrock, then Cloudtop and Skylook and Heavencrest. Evidence of multiple real estate developers, or a single one with ADD.
The road writhed and forked, civilization thinning along with the oxygen, until the asphalt petered out and the GPS announced that he’d arrived.
Another lie. No crime scene in sight. Nothing but a continuing ribbon of rocky soil.
He drove on.
“Recalculating,” the GPS said.
“Shut up.”
Pebbles spat against the undercarriage, and the Honda rattled over buckling earth on rotten shocks. It felt like he was being punched in the kidney by an angry, relentless toddler. He had to take it down to five miles an hour to avoid a blowout. The surrounding land was weedy, desolate, cratered, scrubby; devoid of human structure because there was no place level enough to accommodate any; devoid of life, seemingly, until he spotted a pair of horny squirrels flaunting their sexuality beneath a spiky thicket.
He wasn’t the only one to notice: in an instant, a bird was circling overhead. Large one, probably a raptor. Ready to turn the amorous couple into brunch.
The eagle of Eagle’s Point? The falcon come down from its Rock?
The bird began to bank, and Jacob craned to watch the drama unfolding, his attention drifting. Then a crest raised him up and slammed him down and he beheld a shallow mountaintop depression, a couple of wind-whipped acres of dirt and stone, bounded to the south and east by a steep, curving canyon.
A stark gray cube cantilevered out over the city like a faceless gargoyle.
He’d arrived.
Total travel time: fifty-one minutes.
“Recalculating,” the GPS said.
“Eat me,” Jacob said, and turned it off.
There was none of the postmortem party that took place when agencies converged. No black-and-whites or unmarkeds, no Coroner’s van, no tech crew. Just a necktie of yellow tape fluttering from the doorknob, and a silver Toyota askew on a concrete parking pad. Crypt card on the dash. Woman perched lightly on the hood.
Mid- to late thirties, she was slim, graceful, nice-looking despite — or perhaps because of — a toucan-beak nose. Wide charcoal eyes shone; long, lush hair the same color; skin like freshly ground nutmeg. She wore jeans and sneakers, a white coat over a flame-orange sweater.
She stood up when he got out of the car, spoke his name when he was three feet away.
“In the flesh,” he said.
Her hand was warm and dry.
The badge clipped to her breast pocket said DIVYA V. DAS, M.D., PH.D.
He said it was nice to meet her. She yawed her head skeptically.
“You might want to reserve judgment,” she said.
Indian English in her voice: musical, coy.
“Nasty?” he asked.
“When aren’t they?” She paused. “You’ve never seen anything like this, though.”
Like the garage on Odyssey Avenue, the house showed signs of long abandonment: water stains, rodent droppings, close air saturated with filth.
The light was nice, at least. He could appreciate that. The architect had exploited it to its utmost with sweeping glass panels, at present crying out for a washing, yet clean enough to offer a 270-degree panorama of hills and sky.
Beneath a veil of smog, the city winked and snickered.
Jacob had long believed that every last square inch of Los Angeles had been fought for and claimed. Not here.
Perfect place to kill someone.
Perfect place to leave a body.
Or, in this case, a head.
It was in the living room, lying on its side, centered precisely on a faded oak floor.
Exactly two feet away — a measuring tape had been left in place — was a greenish-beige mound of what looked like a jumbo portion of spoiled oatmeal.
He looked at Divya Das. She nodded permission, and he came forward slowly, his own head filling with white noise. Some guys could stand around in the aftermath of a massacre, cracking jokes and popping Cheetos. Jacob had seen plenty of bodies, plenty of body parts, and still, the first sight always knocked him sideways. His underarms felt clammy, and his breathing had grown shallow, and he suppressed his rising gorge. Suppressed the thought that a nice Jewish boy with an Ivy League education (or part of one, anyway) lacked the stomach to work homicide. He reduced the scene to shapes, colors, impressions, questions.
Male, anywhere from thirty to forty-five, ethnicity unclear; dark-haired, beetle-browed, snub-nosed; an inch-long nub of scar tissue on his chin.
Decapitation had taken place where the throat would have met the shoulders. Aside from the vomit, the floorboards were spotless. No blood, no leaking brain matter; no dangling blood vessels, tendons, or muscle meat. As Jacob made a circuit on his haunches, he saw why: the bottom of the neck had been sealed. Rather than ending in a ragged tube, it pinched together, as though pulled tight with a drawstring. The surrounding tissue was smooth and plasticky, bulging with the pressure of fluid and death-bloat, the domain of higher thought turned to a gore-bag.