Nine
BOSCH TOOK LOS ANGELES STREET TO SECOND and then up to the Red Wind. In front of St. Vibiana's he saw an entourage of bedraggled, homeless men leaving the church. They had spent the day sleeping in the pews and were now heading to the Union Street mission for dinner. As he passed the Times building he looked up at the clock and saw it was exactly six. He turned on KFWB for the news. The Moore autopsy was the second story, after a report on how the mayor had become the latest victim in a wave of kamikazi AIDS protests. He was hit with a balloon full of pig blood on the white stone steps of City Hall. A group called Cool AIDS took credit.
"In other news, an autopsy on the body of Police Sergeant Calexico Moore was inconclusive in confirming that the narcotics officer took his own life, according to the Los Angeles County coroner's office. Meanwhile, police have officially classified the death as suicide. The thirty-eight-year-old officer's body was found Christmas Day in a Hollywood motel room. He had been dead of a shotgun blast for about a week, authorities said. A suicide note was found at the scene but the contents have not been released. Moore will be buried Monday."
Bosch turned the radio off. The news report had obviously come from a press release. He wondered what was meant by the autopsy results being inconclusive. That was the only grain of real news in the whole report.
After parking at the curb in front of the Red Wind he went inside but did not see Teresa Corazón. He went into the restroom and splashed water on his face. He needed a shave. He dried himself with a paper towel and tried to smooth his mustache and curly hair with his hand. He loosened his tie, then stood there a long moment staring at his reflection. He saw the kind of man not many people approached unless they had to.
He got a package of cigarettes from the machine by the restroom door and looked around again but still didn't see her. He went to the bar and ordered an Anchor and then took it to an empty table by the front door. The Wind was becoming crowded with the after-work crowd. People in business suits and dresses. There were a lot of combinations of older men with younger women. Harry recognized several reporters from the Times. He began to think Teresa had picked a bad place to meet, if she intended to show up at all. With today's autopsy story, she might be noticed by the reporters. He drained the beer bottle and left the bar.
He was standing in the chilled evening air on the front sidewalk, looking down the street into the Second Street tunnel, when he heard a horn honk and a car pulled to a stop in front of him. The electric window glided down. It was Teresa.
"Harry, wait inside. I'll just find a place to park. Sorry I'm late."
Bosch leaned into the window.
"I don't know. Lot of reporters in there. I heard on the radio about the Moore autopsy. I don't know if you want to risk getting hassled."
He could see reasons for it and against it. Getting her name in the paper improved her chances of changing acting chief ME to permanent chief. But the wrong thing said or a misquote could just as easily change acting to interim or, worse yet, former.
"Where can we go?" she asked.
Harry opened the door and got in.
"Are you hungry? We can go down to Gorky's or the Pantry."
"Yeah. Is Gorky's still open? I want some soup."
It took them fifteen minutes to wend their way through eight blocks of downtown traffic and to find a parking space. Inside Gorky's they ordered mugs of home-brewed Russian beer and Teresa had the chicken-rice soup.
"Long day, huh?" he offered.
"Oh, yeah. No lunch. Was in the suite for five hours." Bosch needed to hear about the Moore autopsy but knew he could not just blurt out a question. He would have to make her want to tell it.
"How was Christmas? You and your husband get together?"
"Not even close. It just didn't work. He never could deal with what I do and now that I have a shot at chief ME, he resents it even more. He left Christmas Eve. I spent Christmas alone. I was going to call my lawyer today to tell her to resume filing but I was too busy."
"Should've called me. I spent Christmas with a coyote."
"Ahh. Is Timido still around?"
"Yeah, he still comes around every now and then.
There was a fire across the pass. I think it spooked him."
"Yeah, I read about that. You were lucky."
Bosch nodded. He and Teresa Corazón had had an on-and-off relationship for four months, each meeting sparked with this kind of surface intimacy. But it was a relationship of convenience, firmly grounded on physical, not emotional, needs and never igniting into deep passion for either of them. She had separated earlier in the year from her husband, a UCLA Medical School professor, and had apparently singled Harry out for her affections. But Bosch knew he was a secondary diversion. Their liaisons were sporadic, usually weeks apart, and Harry was content to allow Teresa to initiate each one.
He watched her bring her head down to blow onto a spoonful of soup and then sip it. He saw slices of carrot floating in the bowl. She had brown ringlets that fell to her shoulders. She held some of the tresses back with her hand as she blew on another spoonful and then sipped. Her skin was a deep natural brown and there was an exotic, elliptical shape to her face accentuated by high cheekbones. She wore red lipstick on full lips and there was just a whisper of fine white peach fuzz on her cheeks. He knew she was in her mid-thirties but he had never asked exactly how old. Lastly, he noticed her fingernails. Unpolished and clipped short, so as not to puncture the rubber gloves that were the tools of her trade.
As he drank the heavy beer from its heavy stein, he wondered if this was the start of another liaison or whether she really had come to tell him of something significant in the autopsy results of Juan Doe #67.
"So now I need a date for New Year's Eve," she said, looking up from the soup. "What are you staring at?"
"Just watching you. You need a date, you got one. I read in the paper that Frank Morgan's playing at the Catalina."
"Who's he and what does he play?"
"You'll see. You'll like him."
"It was a dumb question anyway. If he's someone you like, then he plays the saxophone."
Harry smiled, more to himself than her. He was happy to know he had a date. Being alone on New Year's Eve bothered him more than Christmas, Thanksgiving, any of the other days. New Year's Eve was a night for jazz, and the saxophone could cut you in half if you were alone.
She smiled and said, "Harry, you're so easy when it comes to lonely women."
He thought of Sylvia Moore, remembering her sad smile. "So," Teresa said, seeming to sense that he was drifting away. "I bet you want to know about the bugs inside Juan Doe #67."
"Finish your soup first."
"Nope, that's okay. It doesn't bother me. I always get hungry, in fact, after a long day chopping up bodies."
She smiled. She said things like that often, as if daring him not to like what she did for a living. He knew she was still hooked by her husband. It didn't matter what she said. He understood.
"Well, I hope you don't miss the knives when they make you permanent chief. You'll be cutting budgets then."
"No, I'd be a hands-on chief. I'd handle the specials. Like today. But after today, I don't know if they'll ever make me permanent."
Harry sensed that now he was the one who had shaken a bad feeling loose and sent her traveling with it. Now might be the right time.
"You want to talk about it?"
"No. I mean I do, but I can't. I trust you, Harry, but I think I have to keep this close for the time being."
He nodded and let it go, but he intended to come back to it later and find out what had gone wrong on the Moore autopsy. He took his notebook out of his coat pocket and put it on the table.
"Okay, then, tell me about Juan Doe #67."
She pushed the soup bowl to the side of the table and pulled a leather briefcase onto her lap. She pulled out a thin manila file and opened it in front of her.
"Okay. This is a copy so you can keep it when I'm done explaining. I went over the notes and everything else Salazar had on this. I guess you know, cause of death was multiple blunt-force trauma to the head. Crushing blows to the frontal, parietal, sphenoid and supraorbital."
As she described these injuries she touched the top of her forehead, the back of her head, her left temple and rim of her left eye. She did not look up from the paperwork.
"Any one of these was fatal. There were other defensive wounds which you can look at later. Um, he extracted wood splinters from two of the head injuries. Looks like you are talking about something like a baseball bat, but not as wide, I think. Tremendous crushing blows, so I think we are talking about something with some leverage. Not a stick. Bigger. A pick handle, shovel, something like—possibly a pool cue. But most likely something unfinished. Like I said, Sally pulled splinters out of the wounds. I'm not sure a pool cue with a sanded and lacquered finish would leave splinters."
She studied the notes a moment.
"The other thing—I don't know if Porter told you this, but this body most likely was dumped in that location. Time of death is at least six hours before discovery. Judging by the traffic in that alley and to the rear door of the restaurant, that body could not have gone unnoticed there for six hours. It had to have been dumped."
"Yeah, that was in his notes."
"Good."
She started turning through the pages. Briefly looking at the autopsy photos and putting them to the side.
"Okay, here it is. Tox results aren't back yet but the colors of the blood and liver indicate there will be nothing there. I'm just guessing—or, rather, Sally is just guessing, so don't hold us to that."
Harry nodded. He hadn't taken any notes yet. He lit a cigarette and she didn't seem to mind. She had never protested before, though once when he was attending an autopsy she walked in from the adjoining suite and showed him a lung from a forty-year-old, three-pack-a-day man. It looked like an old black loafer that had been run over by a truck.
"But as you know is routine," she continued, "we took swabs and did the analysis on the stomach contents. First, in the earwax we found a kind of brown dust. We combed some of it out of the hair, and got some from the fingernails, too."
Bosch thought of tar heroin, an ingredient in black ice.
"Heroin?"
"Good guess, but no."
"Just brown dust."
Bosch was writing in his notebook now.
"Yeah, we put it on some slides and blew it up and as near as we can tell it's wheat. Wheat dust. It's—it apparently is pulverized wheat."
"Like cereal? He had cereal in his ears and hair?"
A waiter in a white shirt and black tie with a brush mustache and his best dour Russian look came to the table to ask if they wanted anything else. He looked at the stack of photos next to Teresa. On top was one of Juan Doe #67 naked on a stainless steel table. Teresa quickly covered it with the file and Harry ordered two more beers. The man walked slowly away from the table.
"You mean some kind of wheat cereal?" Bosch asked again. "Like the dust at the bottom of the box or something?"
"Not exactly. Keep that thought, though, and let me move on. It will all tie up."
He waved her on.
"On the nasal swabs and stomach content, two things came up that are very interesting. It's kind of why I like what I do, despite other people not liking it for me." She looked up from the file and smiled at him. "Anyway, in the stomach contents, Salazar identified coffee and masticated rice, chicken, bell pepper, various spices and pig intestine. To make a long story short, it was chorizo— Mexican sausage. The intestine used as sausage casing leads me to believe it was some kind of homemade sausage, not manufactured product. He had eaten this shortly before death. There had been almost no breakdown in the stomach yet. He may've even been eating when he was assaulted. I mean, the throat and mouth were clear but there was still debris in the teeth.
"And by the way, they were all original teeth. No dental work at all—ever. You getting the picture that this man was not from around here?"
Bosch nodded, remembering Porter's notes said all of Juan Doe #67's clothing was made in Mexico. He was writing in the notebook.
She said, "There was also this in the stomach."
She slid a Polaroid photograph across the table. It was of a pinkish insect with one wing missing and the other broken. It looked wet, as indeed it would be, considering where it had been found. It lay on a glass culture dish next to a dime. The dime was about ten times the size of the bug.
Harry noticed the waiter standing about ten feet away with two mugs of beer. The man held the mugs up and raised his eyebrows. Bosch signaled that it was safe to approach. The waiter put the glasses down, stole a glance at the bug photo and then moved quickly away. Harry slid the photo back to Teresa.
"So what is it?"
"Trypetid," she said, and she smiled.
"Shoot, I was about to guess that," he said.
She laughed at the lame joke.
"It's a fruit fly, Harry. Mediterranean variety. The little bug that lays big waste to the California citrus industry. Salazar came to me to send it out on referral because we had no idea what it was. I had an investigator take it over to UCLA to an entomologist Gary suggested. He identified it for us."
Gary, Bosch knew, was her estranged, soon to be ex-husband. He nodded at what she was telling him but was not seeing the significance of the find.
She said, "We go on to the nasal swabs. Okay, there was more wheat dust and then we found this."
She slid another photo across the table. This was also a photo of a culture dish with a dime in it. There was also a small pinkish-brown line near the dime. This was much smaller than the fly in the first photo, but Bosch could tell it was also some kind of insect.
"And this?" he asked.
"Same thing, my entomologist tells me. Only this is a youngun. This is a larva."
She folded her fingers together and pointed her elbows out. She smiled and waited.
"You love this, don't you?" he said. He drafted off a quarter of his beer. "Okay, you got me. What's it all mean?"
"Well, you have a basic understanding of the fruit fly right? It chews up the citrus crop, can bring the entire industry to its knees, umpty-ump millions lost, no orange juice in the morning, et cetera, et cetera, the decline of civilization as we know it. Right?"
He nodded and she went on, talking very quickly. "Okay, we seem to have an annual medfly infestation here. I'm sure you've seen the quarantine signs on the freeways or heard the helicopters spraying malathion at night."
"They make me dream of Vietnam," Harry said.
"You must have also seen or read about the movement against malathion spraying. Some people say it poisons people as well as these bugs. They want it stopped. So, what's a Department of Agriculture to do? Well, one thing is step up the other procedure they use to get these bugs.
"The USDA and state Medfly Eradication Project release billions of sterile medflies all across southern California. Millions every week. See, the idea is that when the ones that are already out there mate, they'll do it with sterile partners and eventually the infestation will die out because less and less are reproduced. It's mathematical, Harry. End of problem—if they can saturate the region with enough sterile flies."
She stopped there but Bosch still didn't get it.
"Geez, this is all really fantastic, Teresa. But does it get to a point eventually or are we just—"
"I'm getting there. I'm getting there. Just listen. You are a detective. Detectives are supposed to listen. You once told me that solving murders was getting people to talk and just listening to them. Well, I'm telling it."
He held his hands up. She went on.
"The flies released by the USDA are dyed when they are in the larval stage. Dyed pink, so they can keep track of them or quickly separate the sterile ones from the nonsterile ones when they check those little traps they have in orange trees all over the place. After the larvae are dyed pink, they are irradiated to make them sterile. Then they get released."
Harry nodded. It was beginning to sound interesting.
"My entomologist examined the two samples taken from Juan Doe #67 and this is what he found." She referred to some notes in the file. "The adult fly obtained from the deceased's stomach was both dyed and sterilized, female. Okay, nothing unusual about that. Like I said, they release something like three hundred million of these a week—billions over the year—and so it would seem probable that one might be accidentally swallowed by our man if he was anywhere in, say, southern California."
"That narrows it down," Bosch said. "What about the other sample?"
"The larva is different." She smiled again. "Dr. Braxton, that's the bug doctor, said the larval specimen was dyed pink as to USDA specifications. But it had not yet been irradiated—sterilized—when it went up our Juan Doe's nose."
She unfolded her hands and put them down at her sides. Her factual report was concluded. Now it was time to speculate and she was giving him the first shot.
"So inside his body he has two dyed flies; one sterilized and one not sterilized," Bosch said. "That would lead me to conclude that shortly before his death, our boy was at the location where these flies are sterilized. Millions of flies around. One or two could have gotten in his food. He could have breathed one in through the nose. Anything like that."
She nodded.
"What about the wheat dust? In the ears and hair."
"The wheat dust is the food, Harry. Braxton said that is the food used in the breeding process."
He said, "So I need to find where they make, where they breed, these sterile flies. They might have a line on Juan Doe. Sounds like he was a breeder or something."
She smiled and said, "Why don't you ask me where they breed them."
"Where do they do it, Teresa?"
"Well, the trick is to breed them where they are already a part of the natural insect population or environment and therefore not a problem in case some happen to slip out the door before getting their dose of radiation.
"And, so, the USDA contracts with breeders in only two places; Hawaii and Mexico. In Hawaii there are three breeding contractors on Oahu. In Mexico there is a breeder down near Zihuatenejo and the largest of all five is located near—"
"Mexicali."
"Harry! How did you know? Did you already know all of this and let me—"
"It was just a guess. It fits with something else I've been working on."
She looked at him oddly and for a moment he was sorry he had spoiled her fun. He drained his beer mug and looked around for the squeamish waiter.