That wasn’t true for me if the victim was a kid. I still couldn’t handle the kids. You kept thinking that they had a whole life ahead of them and some asshole had stolen that away from them. And if it was a woman, well, I guess there is a double standard. It still bothered me more if it was a woman and, especially, if it was a woman who had been raped.
For a while, I had been in charge of sexual assault crimes and crimes against children. I couldn’t handle it. Sometimes, you get to the point where you start to hate the “perps.” When you get to that spot, you don’t have any objectivity. You can’t step back. I just couldn’t handle those middle-of-the-night talks to women spitting blood out of holes where their teeth used to be, or trying to get some little kid to tell me what some pervert had done to him. No, homicide was the right fit for me. For some reason, murder never became as personal with me as did sex crimes. I guess it had something to do with the fact that I never got to really know the victim. Maybe that says something about me, maybe not.
Bill was moving fast. There was a red light that we could put on top of the car, but it wasn’t an emergency and we didn’t need it. Even in an unmarked car, a cop will always take liberty with the traffic laws. If you don’t get stopped, no problem. If you do get stopped, the traffic officer will see our exempt license plate and know it is another cop.
It was almost 9:30 P.M. when we got to the scene. I hadn’t been to Fran’s Market for over three years, not since the earlier homicide investigation. The long, rectangular cement block building looked the same, a quasi-country market, painted paper signs in the window advertising whatever was on sale, a beer sign glowing. Fran’s wasn’t far enough outside the city to be in the “country.” In fact, its location was just right—if you were a robber. Sheriff’s officers’ cars filled the lot, and the obligatory yellow crime scene tape was already up. People had gathered around to look. Sure, some were there out of concern, but most just came to gawk. Blood and death always draw people who want to see it and then tell everybody how awful the scene was. That’s why traffic always slows down as people drive by an accident. Everybody wants to see the horror and then shudder when they describe to their friends just how terrible it was.
Some news media reps were already there and the cameras turned on me as I got out of the car. There was a time when I would pay attention. Now, I just moved past them to get to the deputy trying to control the crime scene and keep people out of the area. At the other side of the parking lot, I saw Ray and Fran. I didn’t go over. I was relieved to see them outside the store. But their son, Bryon, also worked there on some nights. As I said, I had a bad feeling.
Kenny was waiting outside the back door to the storage room. I had been in it before when I worked the first homicide, a burglary that turned out a lot worse. There was a certain degree of irony in going into a place on a 187—that’s the California penal code for murder—when you’d been there before on another murder case. There were some places where it seemed like every year we were making a visit, usually a liquor store or the local “stop and rob,” where some poor soul trying to make some extra money was working the night shift and got stuck up. You’d just shake your head every time because the clerk would be dead on the floor, usually with a gun in his hand that he didn’t know how to use. I doubted that was going to be the case this night.
The door was partially closed and a beam of light cut across the parking area. Kenny didn’t wait for me or Bill to say anything. He just got right to it. That was Kenny. All business, but it always seemed like he had too much coffee in his system.
“Jim, Bill, how ya doing? This is bad. We got two kids down just inside the door. A third one is over on the other side of the storage room. There was a fourth victim who the shooter left for dead in the bathroom. He ran out after he thought the shooter was gone. How that kid made it, I got no idea. He was hit pretty bad—shotgun blast almost took his arm off.”
“So who got here first?” Bill asked as he looked around the area.
“Deputy Humann was dispatched....” Kenny looked at his notebook, “at 8:15 in response to a shots fired call. He said he was here within five minutes. There was one man down by the corner over there.” He pointed to a lawn area near the northwest corner of the market. “He says the guy down was a Jack Abbott, a neighbor. I’ll say this for him, the guy’s got guts. He yelled at the first guy he saw and then he saw the second one. He fired a shot and thinks he hit the second guy. But the guy turned toward him and Abbot saw he had a gun, so he started to run for cover, but the shooter got him in the ass. When Humann got here, that’s where he found Abbott, down on the ground. He went inside and found the other victims, a white female and two males.”
Bill was already looking around. “Any description?”
“Not much. Just a white male adult, maybe six feet tall.”
“What about the kid that got out? Anything from him?”
“Yeah, Deputy Mendosa talked to him before the ambulance got here. He ran to a house where he knew the people. He told Mendosa that a white male, about six feet, 170–175, wearing a bandanna on his head, and a white female adult, approximately five feet, five inches, 125 pounds, brown hair, also wearing a bandanna, robbed them. He says the male was the shooter and the female was armed as well.”
“So you think the woman that they found in the bathroom could be involved?” I asked as my eyes were panning the scene, taking it all in.
Kenny shrugged. “Maybe. Who knows. She had blood all over her and she was in the bathroom in hysterics. We won’t know until we talk to her. We’ve asked for the hospital to do a drug screen.” He looked over at me. “Like you asked.”
So Bill had told him that I asked. That’s it, the way it always was; dump it on the lawyer. Cops always stick together. No matter what you do, they never forgive you for being a lawyer. At least I had reached the point where they were willing to overlook it most of the time.
Bill and I headed to the door. “Let’s take a look.”
Kenny slowed me down. “Take it easy. There’s a lot of blood.”
I was used to blood, more used to it than I ever wanted to be, but I wasn’t prepared for this. Just inside the door there were two people, a young man, maybe nineteen or twenty, and a young girl, maybe sixteen or seventeen. There were only a few dry spots on the cement floor. Blood was everywhere, thickening as it began to congeal. On television and in the movies, the blood is always bright red. I guess that’s so you will know it’s supposed to be blood. But in the real world, that isn’t how it looks. It doesn’t take very long before it starts to turn dark red, and by the time it dries it is a dark reddish-brown. Sometimes it is almost black, especially when the sun has dried it. So, when a television program shows the bright-red puddle on the floor, or the guy they find out in the woods three or four hours or even days after the homicide has a crimson stain on his chest—that isn’t what it really looks like.
Right now, less than two hours after the incident, it was just pooled blood that spread out into a dark red stain across the floor, only it was thick and the edges were dark where it had begun to dry. Bill and I moved carefully around the blood. Bright light flooded the storeroom, and we had no problem seeing. The problem came when we had to actually look at what was there to be seen.
The girl was lying on her back, with her head propped against the wall next to what I guessed was the bathroom door. A plastic plug from a shotgun shell and shotgun wadding lay near her head. The boy was lying near her feet. If you didn’t know better, you would think that it was the way two kids would look lying on the grass at a picnic. If you didn’t know better.
Nobody