For a moment Jesse thought Runa’s text was a prank. Leaving a dead body—or in this case, two—at a graveyard seemed too much like the beginning of a joke. Something about cutting out the middleman. But she wouldn’t do that, and so ten minutes after the phone call had ended Jesse found himself driving toward Evergreen Cemetery.
Jesse had been there once as a kid, for the funeral of one of his mother’s cousins. It was enormous, nearly seventy acres, but, although it was the oldest graveyard in LA, it lacked the star power that drove tourists to Hollywood Forever or Forest Lawn. There were some historical heavyweights among the three hundred thousand graves, but what was local history compared to global celebrity, especially in Los Angeles?
He followed his phone’s GPS instructions to the ornate concrete pillars that marked the entrance to Evergreen, showing his badge to one of the two uniformed officers guarding the gates. Passing through, he headed toward the island of bright lights and activity he saw in the south end of the graveyard, winding past row after row of silent graves.
At last, Jesse arrived at the end of a long trail of department vehicles parked on the right side of the road. All of the police activity was on his left, marked by crime scene tape circling enormous metal spotlights on tripods. The bulk of the cemetery that Jesse had just driven through lay beyond the bodies. He pulled the sedan over as far as he could behind a patrol car that was still flashing its red and blues, probably to discourage curious onlookers who might otherwise wonder if the bright spotlights indicated a film shoot.
As he approached the closest uniformed officer, Jesse registered the unusual size of the cordoned-off area. It was enormous, more than twice as big as what Jesse was accustomed to. He could hardly see the bodies themselves, fifty yards away behind a throng of technicians in overalls and booties. But there were definitely two of them, which was all Runa had mentioned. Why cordon off so much area if the bodies were way over there?
He reached the first cop outside the caution tape, a pear-shaped African American woman with Waters stenciled across her right breast. “Sir—” she began, but he showed her his badge. She didn’t move to lift the tape, shaking her head slightly.
“Detective Cruz from Southwest robbery-homicide,” he said, in case she was having trouble making out the words. The spotlights weren’t doing much at this distance. “You from Hollenbeck?” he asked, naming the nearest division station.
“Yes, sir. But they want as few people within the tape as possible,” she explained, with professional pity in her voice. Jesse had used the same tone many times. It’s not my rule, sir, the boss just makes me enforce it. Lowering her voice, Waters added, “There’s blood all over the place.”
That explained why the technicians had cordoned off so much of the cemetery. They would want to collect samples of all the blood. Jesse nodded, hoping Runa had done whatever she needed to do to get him in. “I’m looking for Runa Vore, the photographer. She asked me to come.”
Waters nodded, no expression on her face, and automatically turned her head away to speak into her microphone in a low inaudible voice. Jesse had done that plenty of times too and wasn’t offended. She listened for a moment and said to Jesse, “She’s coming to get you.”
Jesse nodded and took a few steps back and to the side, giving Waters room to see her assigned area. While he waited, he studied the area behind the tape. The whole scene almost looked like a blast radius, like a bomb had gone off in the cemetery. He’d never seen anything like it. Blood pebbled on the gravestones, saturated the grass in wide swaths, dripped down the sides of shrubbery. The blood splatter experts were going to be here for days.
“Who found the bodies?” he asked Waters.
Her eyes flicked back toward him with benign interest, like she’d forgotten all about him. “Neighbors, sir. They reported strange noises two hours ago.”
Jesse nodded and went back to surveying the crime scene. He realized that it wasn’t actually a blast site, but almost an optical illusion: the center of the taped-off area hadn’t been leveled by an explosion; it was just a wide, flat clearing created by four rows of in-ground placard markers, the kind that everyone said were easier for the cemetery groundskeepers. It had just been hard to see them at first because of all the blood.
The boundary dividing the rows of placards and the skewed rows of gravestones was an enormous monument, a great rectangle that would have reached Jesse’s chest, topped with a stone tiger the size of a beagle. When he looked closely Jesse saw the red blood streaking down the side of the monument, splattering the tiger’s back like so many stripes. His eyes moved down to the bodies just in front of the tiger’s perch, and beyond them to scan the in-ground grave markers more carefully.
Many of them had been cracked in half. Most of them were splattered with blood. There were little numbered evidence cards scattered over the markers and the ground around them. Marking more blood.
What the hell could crack in-ground grave markers?
One of the technicians in coveralls and paper booties hurried over, and Jesse saw that it was Runa, a black camera strap around her neck, her corn silk pigtails backlit by the spotlights. Jesse’s heart ached for a moment. She was so beautiful, even in the stupid coveralls: lithe and poised, stepping with her feet turned out slightly like a dancer. “Jesse, hi,” she said, speaking fast. Tension saturated the air between them for a moment, and Jesse struggled to push through it. Runa solved the problem by reaching across the caution tape to hand him a pair of booties. “Put these on and come with me.” To Waters, she added, “Bine wants him to look at the bodies close up.”