James Conway - In Cold Blonde

Syd looked at the victim. “Ok, that’s gross.” The victim lay slumped against the back of the driver’s seat. His eyes were open and so was his mouth. Sticking out of his mouth, like a cheap cigar, was a penis.

“His junk, I presume,” Ryan said, glancing down. The victim’s pants were at his knees, blood soaked the exposed thighs and pubic hair and the ragged end of a once proud penis.

“Is that what killed him?” Syd asked.

“No,” Ryan said. “Not enough blood. Isn’t that right, Liz?”

Liz was Ryan’s favorite coroner. She had the body of a linebacker and the mouth of a marine. In her early fifties, thrice divorced, Liz was on the handsome side of attractive. She wore her salt and pepper hair pulled back and the only make-up she wore was a touch of eyeliner to frame her piercing blue eyes. Liz had no patience for laziness or stupidity and her sharp tongue scared the shit out of almost everyone. Everyone but Ryan. But Ryan knew Liz better than most other cops — she was his stepmother. Well, one of them, anyway. Ryan’s mother died when he was just two years old and his dad married four more times. Liz had been wife number three. She lasted six years, six of the most important years for Ryan, age eight through fourteen. So Ryan was used to the bluster; in fact, he cherished it. She’d been his favorite stepmom.

“Oh, there’s plenty of blood, but not enough to indicate he bled out. Something stopped his heart, which stopped the blood flow. Move your fat ass, Hanrahan,” she snapped. “You’re blocking the light.”

Hanrahan shifted to his right as Liz plucked the penis out of the victim’s mouth then held it up to the light.

“How humiliating,” Hanrahan mumbled.

“Sort of puts everything into perspective if you ask me,” Liz said. “All the murder and mayhem created because you Neanderthals are always trying to prove who has the bigger dick. Well, here it is, fellas, in all its flaccid glory. Four and a half inches of shriveled meat…” Liz’s voice trailed off as she noticed something. “Huh, look at that, there are no hesitation cuts before the actual amputation.”

“So the killer had medical training?” Ryan ventured.

“Or was used to handling knives,” Liz said.

“Or has done it before,” Syd said.

“Grizzly thought but possible,” Hanrahan said, unwrapping a grape Tootsie Roll Pop. He’d taken to sucking the Pops when he quit smoking his beloved Marlboros. He turned to Ryan, “Be sure and run the specifics through VICAP.” The FBI’s Violent Crime Apprehension Program was an online database used by the county’s law enforcement agency to collect and compare violent crimes.

“The bartender said the victim met a woman inside the club, they flirted for a few minutes then left. About twenty minutes later a couple noticed the body when they got to their car.”

Ryan asked, “Could the bartender tell if they knew each other?”

Hanrahan shook his head. “She sat down next to him and he started talking. Could have been a prearranged date, could have been an old friend, could have been two strangers in the night.”

“The woman’s the doer?” Syd asked.

“Or she was working with someone who was waiting out here,” Hanrahan said.

“Robbery?” Syd asked.

Tony Ramirez, the lead SID tech, held up an evidence bag. Ramirez was one of the department’s best. A chess champion as a kid, Ramirez was brilliant if a bit anal compulsive, which actually came in handy in his line of work. Forensics was all about the details.

Inside the evidence bag was a wallet. “Found it in his front left pocket,” Tony said. “It’s got three hundred eleven dollars in cash but here’s where it gets interesting; there are credit cards in all the slots except one.”

“She left his money but took a credit card?” Syd asked.

“Which cards did he carry?” Ryan asked.

Tony checked his inventory. “Master Card, Visa, Nordstrom and Barney’s.”

“No American Express?” Ryan asked.

“Nope.”

“Then that’s what she took,” Ryan said. “Everybody who drives a Porsche carries American Express; they are all about status.”

Syd made a note. “I’ll contact American Express. If she uses it, we can trace her.”

“I don’t think she took the card to use it,” Tony said. “This wasn’t about money. Besides the cash in his wallet, there is a nine-hundred-dollar Patik Phillip watch on his wrist and a gold signet on the pinkie of his left hand.”

Syd was confused. “Then why take the credit card?”

“Souvenir?” Liz asked.

“Maybe he just left it somewhere the last time he used it,” Hanrahan said.

“We’ll check,” Ryan said.

“His name was Colin Wood,” Ramirez said. “Registration in the glove box confirms it’s his car.” He ripped a page out of his notebook, held it out. “I wrote down his address for you.”

“Thanks,” Syd said then turned to Ryan. “It should be easier to find a premeditated murderer than a random robbery.”

“Right,” Ryan said. “Though it is a little troubling the killer didn’t even try to pretend it was a robbery. It would have been so easy to take the wallet and watch. It’s like the killer wants us to know it was murder…”

“I think the dick in the mouth is message enough,” Liz said. “Sounds very personal to me.”

“Old girlfriend?” Syd asked.

“Sounds like a great place to start,” Hanrahan said.

“What about a cell phone,” Ryan asked. “Did you find a cell phone?”

Tony held up another evidence bag. “iPhone. I’ve already dusted it, so if you want to check it, it’s yours.”

“If it was an old girlfriend, her number or picture could be in that phone,” Syd said. Cell phones were a treasure trove of evidence, from the phone directory to the picture and video files. And the cell phone cameras came in handy, too. There were a number of cases when victims have taken pictures of their attackers as they fled.

Ryan took the iPhone, turned to Liz. “Do you know what killed him?”

Liz dropped the penis in an evidence bag. “Not until I get him on the table.” Liz glanced at Ramirez, “How long before you’re finished, Tony?”

“We’re done,” Ramirez said.

“First impressions?” Ryan asked.

“We’ve got a little bit to work with. The killer wiped off any fingerprints, but we did find a long strand of blonde hair caught under aforementioned Patik Phillip.”

“The woman in the bar was a blonde,” Hanrahan said.

“And there was a smudge of lipstick at the corner of his mouth, bright red. We swabbed a sample.”

“Can you get DNA?” Hanrahan asked.

“Only if there is any saliva which, sorry to say, is rare. But we’ll check. Otherwise, we didn’t find much else.”

“Check out where they were sitting at the bar,” Ryan said. “Maybe she left a print there.”

“We’re on it,” Tony said. The SID techs left as Liz waved over the two morgue attendants waiting by a gurney at the morgue van.

“I stopped by and saw your dad yesterday,” Liz said to Ryan.

“Really,” Ryan said, surprised. His dad had been dead for three years.

“My Uncle Elwood died; remember Elwood, he was the dentist.”

“Right,” Ryan said. “He had twin boys, and they both became dentists, too.” Ryan remembered because Ryan’s father had been a lawyer, as had his grandfather. And the expectation had been that Ryan would follow in the family’s footsteps. But life got in the way.

Ryan fell in love his junior year at UCLA. Her name was Anne Reich, a pretty brunette who grew up dirt poor in a Riverside trailer park. Ryan flipped for Anne; they had similar tastes in books, movies, food. She was smart, funny, attentive, and ambitious. They were the perfect couple, everyone said so, and they were soon daydreaming about getting married. Ryan wanted to wait until after law school, once their careers were safely on their way. But Anne got pregnant, and taking it as a sign, the happy couple got married the summer before their senior year.