* * *
—
Several interviews with Andrea Bauer in glossy throwaway magazines repeated the gist of what she’d just told us. Precisely the goal of interviews in glossy throwaways.
She owned nine facilities: three in California, four in Arizona, two in Idaho. No serious complaints had been lodged against any of them. No mechanics’ liens for unpaid bills, bankruptcy filings, or other evidence of financial weakness.
The extent of Bauer’s involvement in the legal system was three civil suits in just as many years, two in San Diego County and one in Tempe. What appeared to be routine slip-and-falls, everything settled by her insurers. Online ratings skewed toward positive but that was meaningless; praise can be purchased and, in general, the internet’s a compulsive liar’s dream. But the lack of criticism was noteworthy and it made Milo’s shoulders droop.
“Sued three times,” he said. “Considering how many lawyers are lurking around that’s just about saintly. Too bad.”
He swiveled away from the screen. “Time to move on. Agreed?”
I nodded.
“Now tell me—scratch that, therapeutically suggest to me where exactly we relocate.”
As I thought about that, he checked his email and deleted anything administrative.
I said, “The killer knew the property would be accessible. How about a closer look at the party hosts?”
“Rental agency finally coughed up the names,” he said. “Coupla rich kids, seniors at Beverly Hills High. Meaning the partyers were probably kids, too. You see a teenager setting something like this up?”
“There was a sixteen-year-old in Florida, murdered his parents before throwing a house party.”
He pulled up the Beverly Hills High School website. “The academic day ends just before four. Let’s try to catch them as they wheel their little roadsters off campus. Anything else, meanwhile?”
“You get the cause of death for Gurnsey and the woman?”
“Crypt’s been giving me radio silence, not even a text from Basia, which isn’t like her. I’d take the time to drive over but with the big decomp case I’m not gonna be a welcome presence. Not to mention my nasal passages being ruined for a month.”
“Why’s the decomp high-priority?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out, it’s not even a murder,” he said. “Three floaters bob up in Wilmington Harbor a week after a fancy fishing boat goes down five miles out. Big Coast Guard search, nothing until what’s left of two anglers and a hired captain make an appearance. Lots of shark and crab damage but from what I’ve heard so far, not even a hint of human transgression. What the hell, I’ll try Basia again.”
He punched a preset on his cell. Sat up straighter when Dr. Basia Lopatinski, formerly of Warsaw, Poland, said, “I was just about to call you.”
Basia had offered crucial info on his last case, a murder at a wedding, and was his new favorite at the crypt. Petite, blond, graced with a mile-wide smile and natural ebullience, she sounded weary.
Milo said, “Tell me you’re assigned to the limo case and my faith will be restored. Tell me you’ve already got scientific factoids and I might even go to midnight Mass.”
She laughed. “Another lapsed Catholic? You are so kind. I have been assigned one of your victims, the woman. It’s rather frantic here so we’re splitting up the splitting up.”
“What’s the big deal with the boat, Basia?”
A beat. “Keep this to yourself, okay? The owner of the charter is a friend of the governor and there could be serious liability issues.”
“Sealed lips, kid. How much longer before things settle down?”
“I hope a few days—we’re talking extreme putrescence, Milo. Shreds and globs. We know who these people are but actual scientific identification is necessary for insurance purposes and it’s a nightmare. We’ve stopped answering the phone because attorneys are calling so frequently. On top of that, even with a gas mask the smell is unbelievable. Okay, on to more pleasant things: I completed the autopsy on your female victim but put that aside for now, something very interesting came up before I began cutting. The copious blood ranging from her knees to the floor of the car isn’t human. It’s canine. And turns out the same applies to all four victims.”
“Dog blood?”
“Theoretically, at this point, it could be any type of canid—coyote, wolf, hybrid of either. But domestic dog would obviously be the most probable.”
“Jesus,” he said. “Any human blood mixed in with it?”
“That I’m not able to answer yet. I requested that the crime lab keep the limousine in their auto bay and exhaustively sample seats and carpeting. We’ll be doing the same for clothing. That’s a lot of analysis, a definitive answer will take days.”
“How’d you discover it?”
“No precipitin had been done at the scene, which isn’t breach of procedure, with a multiple the obvious assumption is going to be human blood, why wouldn’t it be? But the pattern was off. Too much contrast between the relatively sparse amounts of low-caliber gunshot blood near Mr. Alvarez’s and Mr. Roget’s wounds and the volume below. Making it even odder, the woman had no obvious wounds at all but was still drenched in blood at the lower extremities and the same went for Mr. Gurnsey. I ran an ABO to see if we had admixtures among the victims and it came back no ABO, just DEA—that’s a canine grouping. I was shocked so I repeated and got the same result. Followed up with a precipitin, again not human. I then took a look under the microscope and sure enough, there were a few scattered nucleated erythrocytes. That can happen in canids but not humans, our red blood cells never have nuclei. I went to my colleagues and they tested their victims. Same results. Everyone’s astonished.”
“Someone murdered four people then threw pooch blood on them.”
“I wouldn’t describe it as a lusty throw, Milo. That would have created more spatter. This appears to be more of a careful pouring. By the amount of blood, perhaps from a sizable receptacle.”
“Bucket of blood.”
“The phrase did come to mind,” she said. “As to what it means, perhaps you’ve got something psychopathological that Alex could help you with.”
“Alex is right here.”
Basia said, “Oh. Hello. Anything come to mind?”
I said, “First for me, too, Basia.”
“This is a strange one, guys. Including variety in cause of death. The driver and Mr. Alvarez were shot by the same .22 but turns out Mr. Gurnsey was stabbed three times in the upper torso with a thin, double-edged bladed instrument. It wasn’t spotted until we disrobed him because there were no defects in his clothing. So he was cut either while wearing something else or while naked. Either way, he was re-dressed postmortem.”