6
Tami Jacobs was originally from Iowa. Her parents were both custodians; one in high school and the other grammar school. Her mother committed suicide when she was nine years old and her father died eight years later, on Tami’s graduation night from high school. He was driving drunk and had careened into oncoming traffic. He survived for six days in the hospital with massive brain swelling before the family decided they needed to cut life support.
She had two siblings somewhere, brothers. Stanton wondered if they felt the tug of guilt in their bellies from not being able to save her. Brothers are often the de facto protectors of the only female in the family.
There was a photo of her with her family when she was in her teens. She wore a University of Iowa sweatshirt and was hugging someone Stanton guessed was her grandfather. Short blond hair and deep blue eyes set in a thin face. Her legs were long and she had slim hips. Stanton knew instantly why she had come to California.
He didn’t need to look at her bio to know she was an aspiring actress, waiting tables until her big break. At some point, the cold detachment of reality fell on her and she realized that even if she made it, it was still failure. Hollywood was a zero sum game.
She was an “A” student in high school but moved to West Hollywood after her father’s death. There were no college transcripts.
Tami volunteered on the weekends at a senior center. There were printouts of emails in the box she had written to her grandfather in Iowa and from some of the patients she had befriended at the center. Stanton pulled one of the emails out. He hesitated before looking at it, like he needed to ask permission first.
i hope you are doing good Poppy! i am great here. The beach is next to my house and i surf all the time! I miss you guys. i wish i could come home and visit but its pretty crazy with auditions and everything:(
But i’ll come as soon as i can. i have a audition tomorrow for a commercial for lotion. its not much money but it would be my first commercial!!!
wish me luck Poppy! Tell everyone hi for me!
Loves and Kisses
After a year in West Hollywood, she moved to a cheap apartment in La Jolla. That’s where the monster found her.
He checked her criminal record. There were twelve arrests in a three year period. Three for Driving While Intoxicated, six for public intoxication, and three for disorderly conduct in a public place. Stanton knew from his uniform days and a stint on the DWI squad that for every DWI there were at least seventy drunken nights driving a vehicle that she wasn’t caught. With three on her record, she was likely a bonafide alcoholic.
She had a boyfriend: James Christopher Arnold. Stanton called the two phone numbers they had for him and got an error message letting him know the numbers were disconnected. There was a brief official statement taken on the day she was discovered, but it was less than three paragraphs and didn’t give any specific details about her life.
He flipped through some of her bills: credit card statements, bank statements, utility bills; he came to a copy of her work schedule printed from an online calendar. He looked to the day of her death: she was scheduled to work that morning, but the rest of the week were all evening shifts. Alcoholics were notoriously bad at morning shifts and waitress’ schedules were usually flexible; if she was working that morning it meant she had to be somewhere that evening.
The homicide report was twelve pages with a fifteen page supplemental report. The case had been worked by two detectives, both under thirty years old. The necessary information in the report made up about two pages. The other ten were filler. An attempt to cover up the fact that they had nothing to go on. There was no mention that Tami was to work the morning shift the day she was killed.
Stanton pulled out the first photo from forensics and it sent a shock through his body. He dropped it and looked away. It had been too long and he hadn’t prepared properly. There was a taxi waiting on the curb outside and he watched it a few moments before turning back to the photo. He stared at it and then took out the coroner’s report and placed them side-by-side.
The brutality of it made him think of an animal attack and one line in the coroner’s report stuck out to him: Feces found in the subject’s esophagus matched the feces found over the bed sheets.
He pushed the coroner’s report away and stared at the photograph a long while before putting it back in the box.
*****
Stanton went outside and decided on walking around the block. The sun was hot and sweat began to form on his forehead. There was a little café nearby and he walked there and sat down in a booth by himself and ordered a turkey sandwich with soup.
There was a couple sitting near him. They were older and weren’t speaking to each other. The man was missing a finger on his right hand and his nails had grit underneath them. His dentures were placed on a napkin and he gummed some soup as his wife ate a thick hamburger. She looked at Stanton and then away.
“I forgot to ask if you want anything to drink?” the waitress said as she placed the sandwich and soup on the table.
“No, water’s fine.”
He stared absently out to the street, watching people walk by, enveloped in their own lives and oblivious to those around them. Tami had been that way.
Stanton paid for his food without eating and left the café.
7
Stanton drove to Interstate 8 and headed northwest to La Jolla. It was evening but the sun was still out and the freeways were not as packed as they would have been an hour ago.
He had read everything in the box and looked at most of the photographs forensics had taken. There was a video too, but he couldn’t watch it yet. The coroner’s report was detailed, even to a fault. Stanton knew the pathologist that had performed the autopsy; he had a daughter Tami’s age.
There was still daylight left when Stanton pulled to a stop in front of the Ocean Vista Apartments. The coroner placed her death at around one in the morning, at least four days before she was discovered by her boyfriend. Maggots had been found at the scene and they were excellent for determining time of death for a corpse as the incubation period in the egg and the hatching process were the same length of time from one specimen to the next.
It would have been better if he had come here at one in the morning and seen the apartment as he had seen it that night. But it was currently rented and he didn’t want to impose that on the tenants.
There was mention of a manager finding the body with the boyfriend, but when he knocked at the leasing office, which was just one of the apartments, a woman answered and said the previous manager had moved out. Stanton walked upstairs to 2-F and knocked on the door. A slim male in cut off shorts with a cigarette dangling from his mouth answered.
“Yeah?”
“I’m Detective Stanton with the San Diego Police Department. I think we spoke on the phone.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said, lighting the cigarette. Stanton guessed it was an attempt to cover the strong odor of marijuana pouring out of the apartment. “So you just like wanna look around, right?”
“Yeah.”
He opened the door. “All right, cool.”
Stanton had called ahead and made sure the tenants understood that the police were coming. They would be more at ease when they had the opportunity to hide anything they might not have wanted him to see.
There was a young girl on the couch, maybe eighteen. Her eyes were rimmed red and she had a piercing through her nose. She stared absently at Stanton but didn’t say anything.