The rats had left it alone.
He dragged his attention from the head to examine the fetid heap twenty-four inches to the left. It glistened surreally, like a gag item fished from the ninety-nine-cent bin at a novelty shop.
“The green means bile, indicative of rather severe emesis, explosive. I took samples for analysis and I’ll scoop up all of it when you’re through. But I wanted you to see it as it appeared.”
He said, “Explosive vomit in one neat pile.”
She nodded. “You’d expect spatter, speckling, clumps.”
Jacob stood up and backed away, pulling in air. He looked out the window again.
Sky and hills, for miles.
“Where’s the rest of him?”
“Excellent question.”
“This is it?”
“Show a little gratitude,” she said. “It could be a foot.”
“How’d he vomit without a stomach?”
“Another excellent question. Given the lack of spatter, I assume that the actual vomiting took place elsewhere, and that it was brought here, along with the head.”
“For decoration,” Jacob said.
“Personally, I prefer carpet,” she said. “But that’s me.”
“How’d they close the neck up?”
“Three for three, Detective Lev.”
“So I didn’t miss any tiny stitches.”
“Not that I can see. I’ll want a better look at it, of course.”
“Blood?”
“Only what you see.”
“I don’t see any,” he said.
She shook her head.
“No drips leading from the door.”
“No.”
“Nothing outside.”
She shook her head again.
“It happened somewhere else,” he said.
“I would call that a reasonable conclusion.”
He nodded. Looked again at the head. He wished it would shut its eyes and close its mouth. “How long’s he been here?”
“Hours, not days. I arrived at one-fifty a.m. A uniform handed it off to me and was quick to excuse himself.”
“Did you get his name?”
“Chris. Something with an H. Hammett.”
“Did he say who called it in?”
She shook her head. “They don’t tell me that.”
“And who else has been by since?”
“Just me.”
Jacob wasn’t a stickler for procedure, but this was rapidly going from weird to troubling.
He checked his watch: it was close to ten. Divya Das looked trim and bright-eyed. She certainly didn’t look like a woman who’d been toiling solo over a crime scene for eight hours.
He noticed that she was on the tall side, as well.
“Let me guess,” he said. “You’re Special Projects.”
“I’m whatever the Commander needs me to be,” she said.
“That’s nice of you,” he said.
“I try,” she said.
“They really want to keep this quiet, don’t they?” he said.
“Yes, Jacob. They really do.”
“Mallick said I’m here because of my background,” he said. “What’s Jewish about this?”
She said, “In here.”
The kitchen dated from the fifties. Functionless, no appliances, cheap frames for the cabinets, counters cut from the same budget wood, warped and splintering at the edges. The suggestion of water damage, but no smell of mold. To the contrary: the room felt bone-dry.
In the center of the longest counter was a burn mark.
Black shapes, etched in charcoal.
Divya Das said, “This means something to you.”
A statement, not a question.
He said, “Tzedek.”
“Meaning.”
“Meaning,” he said, “‘justice.’”
Chapter five
Not having planned to spend his day off this way, Jacob resorted to using his cell phone to photograph the scene.
“I took my own before you arrived,” Divya Das said. “I’m happy to share if yours don’t come out.”
“Appreciate it.”
He photographed the head and the vomit and the lettering in the kitchen. The house’s isolation had made it seem larger from the outside; aside from the kitchen and the living space, there was a medium-sized bedroom, an adjoining bathroom with a composting toilet, and a small studio with a shelving unit and a crude wooden desk jutting from the wall, picture window overlooking the eastern slope.
“Anything else?” she asked.
“No, go for it.”
She went to her car and came back with what looked like two oversized vinyl bowling bags, one teenybopper pink and the other lime green, as though she’d raided wardrobe at Nickelodeon. She donned gloves, carefully placing the head inside a plastic bag, double-wrapping it, and transferring the bundle to the pink bag. She scooped the vomit into a snap-top container using a plastic spatula. Stomach juice had burned a matte amoeboid patch in the varnish. She nudged loose the few dried flecks using a smaller, thin-bladed spatula, and placed the lot of it into the green bag.
“Remind me never to have pancakes at your place,” he said.
“Your loss,” she said.
Swabbing the remaining stain with a clear liquid, she transferred the green-stained cotton into an evidence bag.
A few more swabs produced clean cotton. She collected those as well. They went into the green bowling bag.
“You don’t seem very grossed out,” Jacob said.
“I hide it well,” she said. Then she grinned. “Confession time. The vomit’s mine.”
He laughed.
“Next,” she said.
In the kitchen, she dabbed delicately at the wood-burned message. “Good to go.”
“Nothing in the rest of the house?”
“Two rooms,” she said. “Bedroom, bathroom, no furniture, no movables. I went over it thoroughly.”
He asked about the toilet and she shook her head.
“You’re positive,” he said.
“Quite,” she said. “And to be frank, it’s an experience I would prefer not to relive in the retelling.”
She hefted her hideous luggage and he walked her to the door.
“It’s been somewhat of a pleasure spending the morning with you, Detective Lev. Let’s do it again, what say?”
Jacob searched the surrounding hilltop.
No footprints, tire tracks, or other signs of human intrusion. Hostile soil and bleached stone and ground-hugging, drought-tolerant plants.
He crab-walked around the back end of the house, moving south and east as far as he could before the slope got too severe. He estimated the drop into the canyon at four or five hundred feet. The upper third of that was bare dirt, nothing to grab on to if you fell. You’d build up one hell of a head of steam before you hit bottom, an impenetrable pubic tangle of chaparral and scrub oak. He doubted the hardiest K-9 could manage the descent without breaking a leg. It was terrain custom-made for disposaclass="underline" set a body tumbling and go to bed that night feeling easy.
He made a note to check a map of the area for other access points. The western edge of Griffith Park, perhaps. Still, he had to figure that any corpse thrown down there would be picked clean long before some unlucky hiker got lost enough to stumble across it.
Justice.
He scrambled back up to the house, the sun baking his hangover, the pain bringing the irregularities of the situation out in bold relief. It wasn’t impossible to conceive of a skeleton crew being sent to handle a murder, even an atypical one. LAPD, like every city agency, was understaffed, underfunded, overworked. Someone — Officer Chris Hammett or Divya Das; someone further up the chain — had recognized the etched characters as Hebrew, known enough to get antsy.
Jewish victim?