Body Copy - Michael Craven [64]
Tremaine thought, more than one a day. So, every day, somebody in L.A. wakes up for the last time . . .
Tremaine focused on the sixteen murders. Miraculously, 201
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most of them had been solved. Closed cases. Four of them hadn’t been, one of those being Gale’s. Of the three other people who had been killed during this time, two of them had been killed on the same day as Roger Gale. The other person had been killed two days before Gale was.
The two people who had been killed on the same day as Gale were named Juanita Hernandez and Kelly Burch. The person killed two days prior to Gale was named Theodore Epps.
Tremaine studied these three murders. First, he looked at the information on Theodore Epps. Black, twenty-five years old. Murder took place in Compton, California. Shot to death, gang-related, drive-by.
Juanita Hernandez was stabbed to death in a crack house in Englewood, California. Tremaine didn’t need to look much further to know that this case probably wasn’t the most heavily investigated in LAPD history. The police report didn’t list a single possible suspect. It just described the scene. Abandoned crack house, one local relative who refused to do a body identification. Dental records confirmed the woman’s identity.
Tremaine looked at the third murder, Kelly Burch. This killing certainly didn’t scream of a connection to Roger Gale, but this wasn’t a gang murder and it didn’t take place in a crack house, so, to Tremaine’s eye, there was at least a little mystery to it, a little hope.
Burch was shot in her studio apartment in Hollywood.
She was listed as twenty-eight, Caucasian, addicted to cocaine, no living parents, no job. Her sister, Angela Coyle, who lived in Indio, California, had come out to bury her.
Tremaine looked at the report. According to police offi-202
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cers, this was probably a case of someone either not paying or betraying her dealers and getting killed for it. The cops, however, never found out for sure. Probably had to move on to another case, Tremaine thought.
Tremaine looked at the photo of Kelly Burch. Dead on her own kitchen floor, shot in the face. Tremaine tended to agree with the cops—probably a drug crime. Often those were macho killings. You fucked me, I’m going to blow your face off.
Tremaine never really got used to looking at crime pho-tography. You could become desensitized, to be sure, but that was a trick the brain played. Because if you allowed yourself to stop and think about what you were looking at, it got you every time.
Tremaine, up on his roof in the sun, enjoying another beautiful day, but looking at a horrifying sight. Kelly Burch’s picture. Whatever that girl had going, whatever hope she had, even if it was absolutely minute, it was gone now for good. Anyone she’d ever affected, a family member, a friend, a clerk at a grocery store, would never see her again. Ever. Looking at this picture in some perverse way made Tremaine realize why he’d taken the Roger Gale case in the first place, why he took any murder case.
Because someone was dead.
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Kelly Burch had lived on North Harper, in Hollywood.
Tremaine took the Ten to La Cienega, then headed north for a couple miles into the flatlands of Hollywood.
This wasn’t the Hollywood of movie stars. It wasn’t bad, it was okay, pretty nice even, but it was a far cry from the Hollywood people dreamed about. Not too many million-aire actresses walking designer Chihuahuas and driving electric cars that they didn’t even like. No, this was the Hollywood where you lived before you made it. If you made it.
Apartment living. And shops and modest restaurants and a sizable amount of angst in the air. Intensity. Lots of people walking around with heads full of dreams and ideas. And lots of traffic, too. Tremaine sat at the light