“Yes, he had an early meeting, but my call time isn’t until ten-thirty today, which is why I am here puttering around,” Carmen replied, “accidentally” dropping a piece of sausage in front of Max.
“Mamá, you know if you feed him like that, he’s going to expect to get scraps all the time.”
“That’s why I make it look like an accident,” she said, as though Jesse might be a little dim-witted. He smiled. Her face became very serious. “I saw on the news about the murders in La Brea Park. That is in your district, yes?”
“Yes. I’m assigned to the case. Just a grunt, though.”
Carmen made her guilt-inducing clucking sound. “Oh, hijo, why you must do this work I will never understand. Your brother said the television show he is working on is looking for a new police consultant. Maybe—”
“Mom,” Jesse cut in, “I don’t want to have this discussion again. I’m a cop. It’s what I do.” She sighed theatrically, sliding the finished omelet across the counter toward him and grabbing a fork out of the drawer to accompany it. “I know, I know. It’s just that your father and I worry so much. We should never have let you watch so much Matlock.”
Ordinarily, Jesse would have laughed and reassured her by emphasizing his low status on any case, but he was suddenly playing on a different level, and there were more risks. The thought was sobering.
His mother cleaned up the kitchen and played with Max while Jesse finished eating. He looked around the sunny room, with its Mexican paintings and vases of flowers, and felt a great swell of gratitude for his family. He thought about Scarlett Bernard, who had such a sadness about her.
“Hijo, you have a dreamy look on your face,” Carmen said, with mock reproach. Then her eyes lit up. “Is there, perhaps, a girl?”
He rolled his eyes. “Jeez, Mamá, you’re terrible.”
“That is a yes!” she crowed, raising her hands triumphantly.
He couldn’t help but smile at her. “It’s not like that. I did meet a girl yesterday, a witness, but there isn’t anything between us.”
His mother waited, raising her dark eyebrows.
“Okay, there is something about her,” he admitted. “I’ve met a lot of women in LA, and she’s...different.”
“I see,” she said, her voice mischievous.
Jesse ignored this. “Thank you for breakfast, Mamá,” he said, wiping his mouth and rising to hug her. “I gotta get to the station and catch some bad guys.”
“Sí, but take care, mijo, okay? Be careful with my little boy.”
Jesse rolled his eyes good-naturedly and left his parents’ house feeling like he’d just gotten eight hours of sleep.
An hour later, however, he was back at the precinct and fading quickly. Despite the coffee he’d had earlier, Jesse was chugging Coke like there was no tomorrow, the acidy taste churning in his empty stomach. He tried to remember the last time he’d pulled an all-nighter, but it had been years ago. Ages.
Jesse spent the morning making phone calls, trying to identify the three victims. Now that the bodies had been reassembled, it was easier to identify them as a female in her late twenties, a Caucasian male in his early thirties, and an African American male in his midforties. Their clothing, when it was pieced together, had been unremarkable: T-shirts and jeans from the mall, a blazer from Brooks Brothers, a pair of Nikes. The Caucasian male had painted his fingernails black and ripped his designer jeans, but that wasn’t a particularly helpful identifier in Los Angeles. To Jesse’s surprise, none of them had been carrying any kind of ID, not to mention a purse or briefcase. The victims’ fingerprints weren’t on record anywhere, and no one had reported them missing.
The coroner’s report had been released, but it left more questions than answers. All three victims had been shot first, one by one, in both legs. The shots themselves weren’t fatal, but the injuries would have incapacitated the victims so that the killer could take his time with them. Cause of death was technically blood loss: the two main arteries—femoral and jugular—had been severed on all three bodies, and the victims had bled out. The blood work analyst theorized that each of them had belly-crawled away from one side of the clearing, as if to escape their attacker. Postmortem, the bodies had been dismembered and eviscerated, the blood shaken out of the limbs and the intestines spread around the clearing. It was grisly and horrifying, and Jesse was grateful that at least that part had been done postmortem.
The details were important but didn’t really help to point in any particular direction. As it stood, the investigators were spinning their wheels. Who were the victims? Why were all three missing their identification? Did they go to the park willingly, or were they forced there from somewhere else? And how had they gotten to the park in the first place? LA was a driving city; everyone used a car to go anywhere. But no abandoned cars were found in the vicinity of the park, so Jesse had called cab companies and bus depots, trying to find anyone who remembered driving the three victims. No one had seen three people like that together, but there were plenty of young women and middle-aged men in cabs that night. One of the uniforms would be going around later with retouched photos of the victims’ faces.
At noon, Jesse went to see his supervisor, Captain Miranda Williams. A thick-waisted woman in her early fifties with a large hooked nose, Williams was the opposite of every police captain in the movies his family made. She was maternal, concerned, determined, and loyal. Jesse liked her a lot and was happy that he’d been assigned to her division—even if she didn’t seem that happy about it herself. Williams, like the other detectives in the unit, still seemed skeptical that Jesse had anything going on between the ears. Yesterday that had weighed on his mind, but a lot had changed since then. He had other concerns.