14

NICK SAT IN Assistant Sheriff Gorman Harloff’s office arranging his notes before he spoke. Monday morning. Clear and warm. Five days since the packinghouse.

Harloff was dark-lipped, silver-haired, and humorless. Sometimes referred to as Boris Karloff but never to his face. He had Crimes Against Persons and narcotics under him. CAP included homicide. He had a pen in hand and a legal pad on the desk.

Lobdell sat beside Nick staring down at his small, shiny shoes.

“Shoot,” said Harloff.

“Yes, sir,” said Nick. “Janelle Vonn died of strangulation last Tuesday the first, sometime between noon and midnight. It looks like she was killed somewhere else but decapitated in the packinghouse. This, from the amount of blood we found. Our witness, Terry Neemal, says he saw a man go into the packinghouse late the night of the first. Neemal said the man was regular-sized and had something bulky over his shoulders.”

“Like a body?”

“That’s possible, sir.”

“Strong guy. She weighed what?”

“One hundred and twelve pounds.”

“Pretty strong,” said Lobdell, lighting a cigarette. “If he’s wearing her like a mink stole.”

“But not a big man,” said Harloff.

Nick waited while Harloff wrote. “Even with the tearing and trauma to her neck, Gershon found constriction marks. They’re consistent with the shape of fingers and thumbs. None of the postmortem mutilation would account for them.”

“The sawing,” said Harloff.

“Correct. She was raped by a type A secretor. Gershon found semen inside her, genital bruising and abrasions. But here’s a twist, sir-there was semen on her underwear also-type A non-secretor.”

“Two guys might have killed her?” asked Harloff.

“Maybe.”

“This Neemal, then?” asked Harloff. “What’s his ABO?”

“He’s type A also,” said Lobdell.

Harloff made a note. “Between the O and the A, that would include what, about eighty-five percent of the population?”

“Correct,” said Nick. “We’d have better odds if neither was a secretor at all.”

“But don’t forget,” said Lobdell, “that Neemal is certifiably insane.”

“What does that mean?” asked Harloff. “That he’s more likely or less likely to have raped a woman and chopped her head off?”

“More, I’d say,” answered Lobdell. He blew one good ring, then a plume of Tareyton smoke toward the ceiling. “Look, he’s creeping around that night, says he saw this, says he saw that. Oh yeah? I think we should sweat him. See what comes out.”

Harloff looked at Nick. “Any of Neemal’s fingerprints at the scene?”

“None,” said Nick. “He says he walked into the packinghouse, saw her, turned around, and walked back out. This was the next morning.”

Harloff wrote again. “The building wasn’t locked?”

“Neemal said he saw the guy slide open the main door. We found a padlock in the grove. Partial print on the lock. Not Neemal’s.”

“Who does security?”

“Talon,” said Nick. “They only patrol the SunBlesst site Thursday through Sunday. So their last check would have been two days earlier.”

Harloff wrote.

“Something’s interesting, though,” said Lobdell. “One of the Talon guards told us the older padlocks get hard to open. Rain and sun and they corrode. Won’t take the key. Said you can line up the Schlage to look locked when it really isn’t. You just get the links up inside the shackle and it looks locked. Then, you’re making the rounds you just pull down and twist it open, pull it off, and you’re done. Don’t have to wrestle with a difficult lock and key. He wasn’t the SunBlesst guard. Maybe just a blowhard, but that could have been what happened.”

Harloff considered. “But none of the SunBlesst guards said the lock and key were bad?”

“Nope,” said Lobdell. “Not that they would.”

Harloff wrote, frowned. Wrote some more. “Go on.”

“She was approximately eight weeks pregnant,” said Nick. “The zygote was apparently healthy at the time of her death.”

“Wish it could talk,” said Lobdell.

“I do, too,” said Nick. “No drugs in her system. We believe she was an LSD user but there’s no test for that. Blood alcohol was point-zero-eight, so she was drinking moderately. Except for the decapitation, she wasn’t mutilated or tortured.”

“Pretty big exception,” said Lobdell.

“She defended herself. We got flesh and blood scrapings from under a thumbnail and three fingernails on her right hand. Type O. I had three fingers and a thumb amputated and frozen along with the scrapings.”

Nick saw the rise of Harloff’s eyebrow but the assistant sheriff said nothing.

“She’d eaten Mexican food approximately four hours before she died,” said Nick. “Gershon found it in her large intestine. I corroborated this with some take-out containers and a receipt in a wastebasket in her kitchen. Apparently she ate at home that night, with two men-‘Red’ and ‘Ho.’ Obviously they’re key, but I haven’t come up with them. Yet.”

“She have a date book?” asked Harloff.

“Yes, sir. It had the Red and Ho date, and lots more. And I found plenty of phone numbers and notes and scribbles in her house. Several pages torn from pay phone books, with names and numbers circled. Matchbooks. Business cards. She knew a lot of people. She had a wide range of friends and acquaintances.”

“Boyfriends?”

“At least one,” said Nick. “A singer. Says he was up in Los Angeles that night. The names and numbers he gave me checked out. I’ll talk to him again.”

Harloff nodded. “I guess a fallen beauty queen might have as many boyfriends as she wanted.”

“We found some of her clothes thrown off toward one corner of the packinghouse,” Nick said. “A black miniskirt and boots. No blood on them. No physiological fluids at all. So, he-or they-must have taken off those clothes before they used the saw.”

“What about that saw?” asked Harloff.

“A folding pruning saw with a ten-inch blade-‘Trim-Quick.’ It’s made by Garden Forge. Wooden handle, sells for around four dollars. It appears to be either new or very lightly used. The blade was ripped off where the bolt goes into the wood and we haven’t come up with it. Yet. Maybe he took it with him. No prints on the handle but lots of blood. All samples we took off it were type B-Janelle’s type. We’re checking Tustin area nurseries and hardware stores that might carry them.”

“How long would it take?”

“What, sir?”

“To saw off her head.”

“Gershon said that depended on how hard he worked at it. Strong man, going fast, two or three minutes.”

Harloff made a note of this, too. “Seems slow to me. Neemal see a car that night?”

“A large light-colored four-door,” said Nick. “He didn’t see it real well. He said maybe a Cadillac or a Lincoln or one of the big Chryslers. Late model.”

“His arm really have that much hair on it? The paper made him look like an ape.”

“There’s a patch of it that thick, sir. A dermatologist in Santa Ana told me it’s a type of birthmark. Rare. You see them on dark-skinned people. Neemal’s mom was Haitian.”

“Find any of those hairs on Janelle?”

“No.”

“Wouldn’t the papers love that?” Lobdell asked. “Your brother could write Wolfman stories for weeks. Then a book and a movie.”

“My brother’s story was good,” said Nick. “He played down the Wolfman stuff.”

Lobdell shrugged. “I had a birthmark like that, I might go crazy, too.”

“Neemal tried to kill his brother when he was just a child?” asked Harloff.

“Yes, sir. Set him on fire. The record is sealed but Neemal’s old juvenile investigator works Burg-Theft here.”

“But the brother lived?”

“Third-degree burns over forty percent of his body. He died of cancer at twenty-five.”

Harloff wrote again. “We’ve charged Neemal with the small stuff, so we can keep him?”

“Yes, sir,” said Nick. “Vagrancy and trespassing. We could bump it to destruction of property and indecent exposure because he was crapping in the orange grove. Judge Miller came in high, as we asked. And Neemal has no money for a bond, anyway. So he’s not going anywhere.”