Otto Penzler: Dangerous Women

The scene was clean. No clothes, no ID, no physical evidence, no clues but the dead woman. We didn’t even find any fibers that were going to be useful. This was unusual for a homicide.

I studied the victim closely and realized she was barely a woman-probably still a teenager. Mexican, or of Mexican descent, she had brown hair, brown eyes and a dark complexion. I could tell that in life she had been beautiful to look at. In death she was heartbreaking. My partner always said the most dangerous women were the ones like her. Beautiful in life, heartbreaking in death. They could haunt you, stick with you even if you found the monster that took everything from her.

She had been strangled, the indentations of her killer’s thumbs clear on her neck, the petechial hemorrhaging putting a murderous rouge around her eyes. Rigor mortis had come and gone. She was loose. That told us she had been dead more than twenty-four hours.

The guess was that she had been dumped the night before, under cover of darkness. That meant she had been lying dead somewhere else for twelve hours or more. That other place was the true crime scene. It was the place we needed to find.

When I turned the car inland toward the bay the air finally began to cool. I skirted the east side of the bay up to Oakland and then went across the bridge into San Francisco. Before crossing the Golden Gate I stopped for a hamburger at the Balboa Bar & Grill. I get to San Francisco two or three times a year on cases. I always eat at the Balboa. This time I ate at the bar, glancing occasionally up at the television to see the Giants playing in Chicago. They were losing.

But mostly I rolled the old case back and forth in my head. It was a closed case now and Seguin would never hurt another person again. Except himself. His last victim would be himself. But still the case stuck with me. A killer was caught, tried and convicted, and now stood to be executed for his crimes. But there was still an unanswered question that stuck with me. It was what put me on the road to San Quentin on my day off.

We didn’t know her name. Fingerprints from the body matched no prints contained in computerized records. Her description matched no description on an active missing persons case anywhere in Los Angeles County or on national crime computer systems. An artist’s rendering of her face put on the TV news and in the papers brought no calls from a loved one or an acquaintance. Sketches faxed to five hundred police agencies across the southwest and to the State Judicial Police in Mexico drew no responses. The victim remained unclaimed and unidentified, her body reposing in the refrigerator at the coroner’s office while Sheehan and I worked the case.

It was tough. Most cases start with the victim. Who that person was and where she lived becomes the center of the wheel, the grounding point. Everything comes from the center. But we didn’t have that and we didn’t have the true crime scene. We had nothing and we were going nowhere.

All that changed with Teresa Corazon. She was the deputy coroner assigned to the case officially known as Jane Doe # 90-91. While preparing the body for an autopsy she came across the lead that would take us first to McCaleb and then to Seguin.

Corazon found that the victim’s body had apparently been washed with an industrial strength cleaner before being discarded on the hillside. It was an attempt by the killer to destroy trace evidence. This in itself, however, was both a solid clue and trace evidence. The cleaning agent could help lead to the killer’s identity or help tie him to the crime.

However, it was another discovery made by Corazon that turned the case for us. While photographing the body the deputy coroner noticed an impression in the skin on the rear left hip. Post-mortem lividity indicated the blood in the body had settled on the left half, meaning the body had been lying on its left side in the time between the stilling of the heart and the dropping of the body down the hillside off of Mulholland. The evidence indicated that during the time that the blood settled the body had been lying on top of the object that left the impression on the hip.

Using angled light to study the impression, Corazon found that she could clearly see the number 1, the letter J and part of a third letter that could have been the upper left stem of an H, a K or an L.

“A license plate,” I said when she called me to the autopsy suite to view the discovery. “He put her down on a license plate.”

“Exactly, Detective Bosch,” said Corazon.

Sheehan and I quickly formed the theory that whoever had killed the woman with no name had hidden the body in the trunk of a car until it was nighttime and safe to take it up to Mulholland and dump it. After carefully cleaning the body the killer put it into the trunk of his car, mistakenly putting it down on part of a license plate that had been taken off the car and also placed in the trunk. That part of the theory was that the license plate had been removed and possibly replaced with a stolen plate as one more safety measure that would help the killer avoid detection if his car happened to be spotted by a suspicious passerby at the Mulholland overlook.

The skin impression gave no indication of what state issued the license plate. But the use of the Mulholland outlook gave us the idea that we were looking for someone familiar with the area, a local. We began with the California Department of Motor Vehicles and obtained a list of every car registered in Los Angeles County that carried a plate beginning 1JH, 1JK and 1JL.

The list contained over one thousand names of car owners. We then cut forty percent of those names by discounting the female owners. The remaining names were slowly fed into the National Crime Index computer and we came up with a list of thirty-six men with criminal records ranging from minor to the extreme.

The first time I studied the list of thirty-six I knew. I felt certain that one of the names on it belonged to the killer of the woman with no name.

The Golden Gate lived up to its name in the afternoon sun. It was packed with cars going both ways and the tourist turnoff on the north side had the lot full sign up. I kept moving, into the rainbow-painted tunnel and through the mountain. Soon enough I could see San Quentin up on the right. A foreboding-looking place in an idyllic spot, it housed the worst criminals California had to offer. And I was going to see the worst of the worst.

“Harry Bosch?”

I turned from the window where I had been looking down at the white stones of the veterans cemetery across Wilshire. A man in a white shirt and maroon tie stood holding open the door to the FBI offices. He looked like he was in his mid-thirties with a lean build and healthy look about him. He was smiling.

“Terry McCaleb?”

“That’s me.”

We shook hands and he invited me back, leading me through a warren of wood-paneled hallways and offices until we came to his. It looked like it might have been a janitor’s closet at one time. It was smaller than a solitary confinement cell and had just enough room for a desk and two chairs.

“Guess it’s a good thing my partner didn’t want to come,” I said, squeezing into the room.

Frankie Sheehan alternately referred to criminal profiling as “bur-oh bullshit” and “ Quantico quackery.” When I had chosen a week earlier to contact McCaleb, the resident profiler in the bureau’s L.A. office, there had been an argument about it. But I was lead on the case; I made the call.

“Yeah, things are kind of tight here,” McCaleb said. “But at least I get a private space.”

“Most cops I know like being in a squad room. They like the camaraderie, I guess.”