Stephen Cannell - White sister

Under most circumstances, the morgue is a crowded place full of sheet-covered corpses waiting for their final desecration. Every time I'm up here, I wonder if one day my own precious remains will be parked in these over-wide corridors, waiting for this last indignity. Strange chemical smells mixed with some disinfectant pine scent wafted through the halls. I'd been up here when there were over twenty bodies parked on metal gurneys, most of them too young to be dead, each tray with its own special tale of woe and unfulfilled ambitions. Tonight, for some reason, the corridor was almost empty. Two lonely corpses under green sheets haunted the hallway. The building was unusually quiet. I saw a lighted doorway halfway down the hall and headed toward it.

Ray Tsu was leaning over the dead Crip when I entered. He had just finished rolling a ten card, imprinting all of the man's fingerprints. He looked up as I entered.

"You aren't supposed to be here."

"How the hell can I not be here?"

Ray was a good guy, even though it was always slightly annoying that he rarely spoke above a whisper.

"You1 re gonna get your ass cooked unless you get out now," he warned.

"1 need to know who this guy is."

"Not from me tonight. Get it from Figueroa and Sepulveda tomorrow."

"Ray, I won't burn you. Please, help me."

He shook his head.

"She's my wife. She's the only person who ever gave "

I stopped, because there were suddenly tears in my eyes.

"Shane, look at you," he said softly. "You're a mess. How're you gonna do anybody any good like this? Go home. Let Tommy and Rafie handle this."

"We could put that print card through AFIS instead of NCIC," I said. AFIS was the Automatic Fingerprint Identification System, which we'd just installed downstairs. It had a much bigger and faster database than the National Crime Identification Computer. "If this gangster's prints are in the system, AFIS will spit an ID back on a ten-finger roll in less than two minutes."

"Come on, Shane. Really. Let those guys handle it."

"I've seen this vie before," I lied. "His name's right on the tip of my tongue, but I can't quite get it. If AFIS gives us an ID, I know I can remember what his connection to Alexa is. That's gonna be a huge help here."

I watched as Ray processed this nonsense and rejected it with a frown. "Wait for Tommy and Rafie," he said. "It's their call."

So I just reached over and snatched the drying card out of his delicate fingers.

"This could end your career, Shane!" he said, as I walked out of the room with it.

I didn't wait for him to follow. I was already sprinting toward a bank of freight-size elevators, each one large enough to carry three gurneys. I took the first one down to the basement where the electronic identification unit was housed. I exited just as the phone started ringing at reception. Had to be Ray. There was no one at this desk either. My luck was holding. For the first time since the cutbacks happened, I applauded the city's budget crisis. I jumped over the vacant counter and picked up the receiver hitting the Hold button. Then I put all of the remaining five lines on hold as well. When I left, the desk telephone was blinking like a Vegas slot.

I found the AFIS machine in a small room at the end of a long corridor. A young bored-looking blond girl was running a stack of print cards.

"Hi. I need this run immediately," I said, offering her the ten card.

"ID number?"

I pulled out my CREDS and showed her. After she wrote down the number, she took the print card from me and scanned it into the machine.

"If it's in the system, this should only take a few minutes," she said.

I tried to make small talk, but frankly, I couldn't think of anything to say. I was an emotional wreck. Suddenly, her eyes went down to the flashing phone on the table across from us.

"I wonder why the lines are all on hold," she said. "There's almost nobody down here."

"There was a phone guy out front. Maybe he's working on the system." Total B. S., but it must have worked because she nodded her head and smiled.

Then I heard Ray coming down the hall. "Shane! Dammit, Shane! You down here?!" It was the first time I could remember hearing him shout.

"He's with me, Mr. Tsu," the girl called out.

Seconds later Ray Tsu planted his skinny body in the doorway, acting as if he could actually use his pipe-cleaner build to physically restrain me from leaving with his print card.

"Shane, come on," he said. "Don't make this any worse."

Then the AFIS machine started buzzing and a printout shot into the catch tray. We had a match. Ray made a move toward the tray, but I beat him to it and grabbed the printout along with the ten card and folded them both in half. I knew, of course, that he would just run it again, but he'd have to reprint the body first. That would buy me at least a ten-minute head start.

"I'm reporting this, Shane."

"I know." I turned and ran out the door, taking the stairs two at a time, exploding back into the rear lobby. The security guard had returned from the toilet, or wherever he'd been when I first arrived, but they aren't there to stop you from leaving, only from getting in.

"Have a good night," the guard called, as I speed-walked past him out the door and into the parking lot. I pushed the button to open the parking gate from the inside, then sprinted out of the lot and across the street to my car. I jumped in and powered away.

I still hadn't looked at the printout. My heart was slamming inside my chest. My hands were shaking as I gripped the wheel tightly with sweating palms. When I was ten blocks away and felt safe, I pulled over, turned on the dome light, and unfolded the AFIS printout.

The DMV photo I was looking at was of a clean-cut man with short hair. But despite the different haircut, I recognized him as the dead guy from Alexa's car. He was handsome in a rakish way. A slightly skewed smile said he knew he was hot. His driver's license identified him as David Morris Slade, six-one, one hundred ninety-five pounds. He lived at 42 °Cypress Street, Compton. Following that, the AFIS printout had added other pertinent information, and that was the surprise.

There was a police identification number, with a notation. David M. Slade was a member of the LAPD Academy class of 1982. He was currently a sergeant assigned to a special gang intel unit. I folded the paper and looked at the empty street in front of me while I tried to process all this. Of course, it was the missing piece.

The reason he was in Alexa's car.

Compton is bordered on the south by Long Beach and on the north by Watts. The city has a bloody gang history.

In the late sixties a new form of Jamaican music caught hold in New York, then quickly spread to Compton. Rap music was fueled by rock cocaine and violent street gangs. In the late eighties, N. W. A cut their first incendiary rap album, titled Straight Outta Compton, which featured the hit single "F Tha Police." With that album, gangsta rap was born. While Crips and Bloods competed for drug turf around Piru Street in Compton, rap impresarios with serious gang affiliations were recording street artists and making millions. But there were downsides. The average lifespan of a Compton drug dealer was twenty-five years and gang violence at hip-hop awards shows had become common.

Rappers like Easy-E, Dr. Dre, and DJ Quik were just kids growing up in Compton in the eighties. Snoop Dogg was a few miles away in Long Beach. Rap and crack made stars and millionaires out of some and corpses out of others. In recent years the black gangs in Compton were in a struggle to control their turf, losing street corners one by one to the new, violent Hispanic gangs like the Ninos Surenos and Mara Salvatruchas.