Frank Zafiro - Some Degree of Murder

“Damn,” I muttered at the squiggly lines and question marks.

I was still staring at them when the phone rang fifteen minutes later.

The antiseptic odor of the autopsy room hung in the air, though I couldn’t tell if it was drifting down the hall to Cameron’s office or if the stench was coming off of his clothing.

I ignored the smell and leaned forward.

“You’re a hundred percent sure?”

Cameron half-shrugged. “No, not a hundred percent. Say ninety-eight. The fingerprint is definitely a match. I’ll try to locate her dental records eventually to shore it up. If it becomes a sticking point, we’ll have to pull DNA from the parents.”

I looked down at the printout he’d handed me, identifying my unknown victim.

Serena Gonzalez. Nineteen years old. I had her date of birth and a flag for a misdemeanor arrest in California. That was probably where she was printed. That was it, but it was a hell of a lot more than I had before Cameron called.

“Good work, Cam.”

Cameron leaned back in his chair, holding the arm rests and tapping all of his fingers at once in a rolling rhythm.

I watched him for a moment. Then, “What?”

He let out a long breath and looked around quickly, as if anyone else could have been hiding in his tiny office. Then he leaned forward. “I don’t like it, John.”

“Like what?”

“Doing shit behind the M.E.’s back. If he finds out, I could get fired.”

“You’re civil service. They can’t fire you.”

“They can with just cause.”

I gave him a look. “You found something, didn’t you?”

Cameron looked away.

“What is it? What’d you find?”

He looked back at me. “I can’t get fired over this. I mean it. I’ve got a baby coming.” His voice raised in pitch as he spoke. “I’ve got a wife. Responsibilities.”

“I know.”

Cameron let out another long breath and motioned toward the door. “Close it.”

I stood to push the door closed.

“What did you find, Cam? What are we talking about here?”

He removed his glasses and set them on the desk. “I found hairs.”

“Where? On who?”

He held up his hands to slow me down.

“I finished going over the clothing from the Gonzalez case. I found a single hair on her shirt. At the navel or so. I’d have to put the shirt back on her to be any more exact, but definitely near the midriff.”

“What kind of hair?”

“Head hair. From a white male.”

“Can you get DNA?”

He shook his head. “Not likely. It was broken, not plucked. No mitochondria tissue.”

“The root, you mean?”

He looked at me as if he were considering chastising me for using such an unscientific term. “I can’t say for sure how the hair got there, but it’s the only piece of human or animal foreign matter I could find when I processed her clothing.”

“So, if it belongs to her killer,” I said, “then we’ve narrowed the field down to a white male which gets rid of about seven percent of the city’s population. Leaving me only ninety-three percent to wade through.”

“Forty-six,” Cameron said. “Roughly.”

“What?”

“Forty-six percent. The hair belongs to a white male. You can eliminate all non-whites and all females. That leaves forty-six percent. Roughly.”

“Forty-six percent of four hundred and eighty thousand only leaves, what? A couple hundred thousand suspects?”

Cameron smiled slightly. “Roughly.”

“Well, then I guess we’re making progress. Did you find any carpet fibers at all?”

“None. But there’s more on the hair.”

I motioned for him to continue.

“After I found the head hair on Gonzalez, I went back to the hair samples on the Taylor case. I checked over the clothing again, but didn’t find anything. But when I re-examined the pubic hairs from the combing and checked every single one, I found a foreign hair.”

I sat up straight. “From Fawn Taylor?”

“Yeah. It was broken off, too, so no mitochondria. But it was definitely an adult pubic hair belonging to a white male.”

“Same guy?”

Cameron shrugged. “No way to tell without DNA. Like you said, there’s a couple hundred thousand of them living in the area. And I don’t even know if we can get sufficient DNA material from either sample to test. The FBI has more sophisticated equipment, so I could send the samples to Quantico for analysis…”

“But…?”

“But that costs money.”

“So? It’s a murder case. The department will pay for it.”

“And it requires the M.E. to sign off.”

“So?” I asked, but I knew what he was driving at.

“So that means he’ll know I double-checked him. He’ll get pissed off. He’ll — “

I held up my hand to stop him. “You just tell him what you told me. You found the hair. Then you called me to tell me about it. I asked you to do a second pass over the clothing and samples from the Taylor case. Everyone is so serial killer happy around here, anyway, so that’ll make sense to him. Just tell him ‘that’s the way you do it here.’”

Cameron chewed his lip.

“He can’t touch you, Cam. He’s a contracted employee. You’re civil service. He can make your life less than perfect for a while. But if he steps too far, he’ll be the one in trouble, not you. And, either way, his contract will be up at some point. But you’ll still be here. Because you’re a civil service employee. Get it? When he’s gone, you don’t want look back and realize that we could have done a better job.”

“Okay,” Cameron said. “I’ll play it the way you said. He’ll probably buy it.”

I stood, said “Thanks” and left the antiseptic smell of the dead behind.

Serena Gonzalez was in the local computer system. She only had one entry and it was a month old. Patrol Officer Westboard stopped her at Sprague/Madelia for suspicion of prostitution and did a field contact report. I waded through the menus and got to his narrative. It was brief, but I read it anyway.

Subject was walking down Sprague Avenue dressed in provocative clothing. Claimed to be staying at the Palms Motel at Sprague and Ivory. Said she was walking home from the Club Tip Top, where she worked as a stripper. California driver’s license provided. No wants. Released her with a warning.

I was grateful that a patrol officer took the time to document a field contact. That five minutes of work he did a month ago probably saved me from tramping around the East Sprague corridor, showing her picture and trying to put together some idea of where she stayed and where she worked.

I needed to go to the motel and verify she still lived there prior to the murder. If she did, I’d have to execute a search warrant on her room. Then go to the Tip Top and interview people there.

I hit the Print button, sending Westboard’s field contact to the printer so I could put it in my case file.

I could do the Tip Top interviews on my own. That was no problem. But I had to update Crawford if I was going to do a search warrant and by department policy, I couldn’t execute it alone. That meant help. Which meant Lindsay.

I backed out of the Field Contact menu and went to the Main Menu. I typed in Gonzalez’s name and date of birth and sent it to California Department of Licensing. Less than three seconds later, the computer beeped at me. I pulled up the response. There were seven listings for a Serena Gonzalez, but the one with the matching date of birth was on top and highlighted. I selected it.

Serena Gonzalez showed an address in Salinas, California. I had no idea where that was, but there was an atlas at the reference desk. Her license had been issued three years ago. That would’ve been her first license, I realized. And her last.