"Your report said his clothes were burned away."
"Yes, ma'am. Looked like it."
"But not his flesh. Wasn't that weird to you?"
Officer Hayes flipped his hands up but wasn't flippant. He tried to be respectful with the gesture. Added a look that said: "Didn't think about it." He would have said as much himself but was afraid Soledad'd pick up the crack in his voice. He was nervous. Soledad was the kind of cop who could, down the road, have sway over his getting into G Platoon. And the way she was asking questions: How come he didn't do this, didn't do that… He shouldn't be nervous, Hayes told himself. Maybe he should have been more observant, but wasn't like he'd fucked up. Right? He hadn't. Had he?
Hayes said: "He looked like a vag to me. He looked like he had on, you know, bum wear. Half the time stuff that's burned or torn is the best they've got. I thought he died of exposure or drink. He was stiff as hell. Thought it was rigor at the time."
Soledad felt stares. She'd always been sensitive to other people's eyes. The locked looks she was getting now didn't, they didn't feel like the ones she was usually most attuned to. The "it's a black woman!?" ogles she got when she had the audacity to slick herself right where somebody thought a black woman didn't belong. Still, she felt eyes rolling over her. Probably 'cause in the open and out of uniform she was having a chat with a uniformed cop. Some of the cops staring maybe thought Soledad was just a friend. A chick friend who'd come around for some palaver with Hayes which he'd get some good-natured shit about later. But some probably considered Soledad was official in some sense. Admin or IA.
That made every other cop in the joint instantly, reflexively reassess their relationship with the blue who was having a sit-down.
Hayes didn't hardly seem to care. To Soledad he came off a little nervous, but other than that, his head was level all around. Soledad figured if he ever had his shot, he'd make a good MTac. A real solid one. His odds of surviving serving a warrant on a freak were probably 60/40 in favor. Better than the 70/30 most MTacs rated.
"Anything," Soledad asked, "at the scene that'd make you think it was foul play?"
"Nothing. But LA River, if there was anything, it might have gotten washed away. I imagine DMI gave a look once they found out it was a mutie."
"They didn't find anything."
"What about at one of the other incident sites?"
Soledad looked right at Hayes. She didn't answer the question. The question didn't make sense.
She asked: "What incident sites?"
"One of the other… well, you know, where he was hit by the train. It was in my report. You read it, right?"
Soledad went back to just giving a stare to Hayes. The question didn't make…
"Just walk me through everything," she said. "Take me through it."
Officer Hayes didn't bother with any orientating. Soledad had questions, he gave her what he knew to be fact. "Got the call on the John Doe. Went over, spotted the body, called it in. Right?"
Right, meaning: We on the same page so far? "Right."
"Previous to that, the station had taken a report from the MTA, Something got struck on the Gold Line. Engineer thought maybe he'd hit somebody, but couldn't find a vie. No blood or flesh on the car. Way the train was tore up, engineer thought some joker might've put a store mannequin on the track or something. It's LA. Wouldn't be the craziest thing somebody ever did. I found out later the John Doe was a mutie. Did the math. The mutie must've been the one that got clipped by the train. I know DMI handles investigating freaks. But it's my beat. I know the neighborhood. Thought it couldn't hurt to do some talking to people, see if anybody saw anything, heard anything. If they did, maybe they were more likely to talk to a cop they knew than one they didn't."
And it was a good way for a beat cop to score some points too, Soledad thought. And she thought: Hayes was all about the ambition. Forget MTac. He was going to be brass.
Prompting him to go on: "So you talked around, talked to some people."
"One witness said he saw someone running through the area on foot. Another guy thought he saw someone fall off a building. Fall or jump. Thought he did, but the guy got up and ran off." "Our John Doe."
Hayes nodded. "Way I see it, our freak was going crazy. Tearing up buildings, walls… looks like he slagged part of a mailbox on one street. I don't know. He was drunk, I guess. Maybe high. Lucky the only thing that happened was he ended up dead. Anyway, that was all in the report I gave to DMI. Should have been."
Yeah. Soledad thought. Should have been. But not a word of it was.
Jealousy. That was the thought for Soledad's drive home. Jealousy was the logical reason she'd come up with for Hayes's report getting redacted. DMI officers were resentful that a beat cop'd done a better job investigating things than they had. So left out what he'd said- removed what he'd written-from their report.
But the jealousy theory required some serious denial. There wasn't a cop in the PD who wasn't territorial about his or her department. But you'd have to believe that DMI cops-grown men- would get bitch jealous of a flatfoot doing some flatfooting in the first place. And say they were, whatever, jealous or resentful of the work Hayes'd done. No reason they couldn't just stick his work in their report, claim it as their own, and that would be that about that.
Irrelevance. That was another possibility. What Hayes had come up with, those additional incident sites didn't merit inclusion. But to not at least reference them was sloppy police work. In her short time at DMI sloppy wasn't something she found the cops there to be.
Reality: What Officer Hayes had offered up had been purged from the DMI report.
Why?
Did Soledad have to ask herself why? Yeah.
Because she didn't care for the obvious answer. The freak had died a questionable death. Probably, it was murder. So the obvious, the unsettling answer to the question why was that the people who purged the report were conspirators after the fact. Or worse. They're the killers.
East LA was a fairly shitty place. Drugs tree-flowed up and down the streets. A bromide against the better life that wasn't so much better for the people who'd risked everything- everything being their wives, their lives, their well-being-to get to America so they could clean toilets or clean pools, stroller around rich people's babies or hang out on street comers hoping some shifty contractor would roll by offering work at cut-rate pay before the INS came around offering an all-expense-paid trip back to their country of origin. A few weeks, a few months, a few years of that and, yeah, you'd be a hophead too. So, in East LA, there were drugs. There was everything that came with drugs: guns and gangs and stealing to get drug money and whoring to get drug money and the shooting of people because they got in the way of drug money being exchanged. It was shit cops should've handled. But in East LA the cops worked out of Rampart. Comparing the two, Rampart cops made East LA gangs look like castrati.
Soledad was a cop. But no matter her badge and gun, or maybe because they were of principal significance, her current proximity to East LA — looking at it on a map in her office — was as close as she cared to get to that part of town. But in her head, at least, she had to get close to it. She had some concepts to calculate.
Soledad was a cop, but she wasn't a detective. She didn't have years of know-how when it came to asking questions. She had instinct. She had a nurtured ability to look at things a couple of times in a couple of different ways asking each go-round: What's wrong with this deal? Under the circumstances that'd have to pass for being a detective.
Soledad backtracked the final hours and last minutes of the mutie John Doe. His place of dying, or at least where the body was found, got an X on Soledad's map. The action made physical her thoughts, gave her focus. Made it feel like she was doing something besides waiting for answers to come. The Gold Line.