A Darkness More Than Night (2000) Page 4

  He left Buddy to sulk and went back down to the office. He closed the door again, loudly, and locked it.

  4

  After turning to a fresh page in his notebook, McCaleb opened the murder book. He snapped open the rings and pulled the documents out and stacked them neatly on the desk. It was a little quirk but he never liked reviewing cases by turning pages in a book. He liked to hold the individual reports in his hands. He liked squaring off the corners of the whole stack. He put the binder aside and began carefully reading through the investigative summaries in chronological order. Soon he was fully immersed in the investigation.

  The homicide report had come in anonymously to the front desk of the West Hollywood substation of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department at noon on Monday, January 1 . The male caller said there was a man dead in apartment 2 B

  in the Grand Royale Apartments on Sweetzer near Melrose. The caller hung up without giving his name or any other message. Because the call came in on one of the nonemergency lines at the front desk it was not recorded, and there was no caller ID function on the phone.

  A pair of patrol deputies were dispatched to the apartment and found the front door slightly ajar. After receiving no answer to their knocks and calls, the deputies entered the apartment and quickly determined that the anonymous caller had given correct information. A man was dead inside. The deputies backed out of the apartment and the homicide squad was called. The case was assigned to partners Jaye Winston and Kurt Mintz, with Winston as lead detective.

  The victim was identified in the reports as Edward Gunn, a forty-four-year-old itinerant house painter. He had lived alone in the Sweetzer Avenue

  apartment for nine years.

  A computer search for criminal records or known criminal activity determined that Gunn had a history of convictions for small-time crimes ranging from soliciting for prostitution and loitering to repeated arrests for public intoxication and drunk driving. He had been arrested twice for drunk driving in the three months prior to his death, including the night of December 30 . He posted bail on the 31 st and was released. Less than twenty-four hours later he was dead. The records also showed an arrest for a serious crime without subsequent conviction. Six years earlier Gunn had been taken into custody by the Los Angeles Police Department and questioned in a homicide. He was later released and no charges were ever filed.

  According to the investigative reports Winston and her partner had put into the murder book, there was no apparent robbery of Gunn or his apartment, leaving the motive for his slaying unknown. Other residents in the eight-unit apartment building said that they had heard no disturbances in Gunn’s apartment on New Year’s Eve. Any sounds that might have emanated from the apartment during the murder were likely camouflaged by the sounds of a party being held by a tenant in the apartment directly below Gunn’s. The party had lasted well into the morning of January 1 . Gunn, according to several partygoers who were interviewed, had not attended the party or been invited.

  A canvass of the neighborhood, which was primarily lined with small apartment buildings similar to the Grand Royale, found no witnesses who remembered seeing Gunn in the days leading up to his death.

  All indications were that the murderer had come to Gunn. The lack of damage to doors and windows of the apartment indicated that there had been no break-in and that Gunn might very well have known his killer. To that end, Winston and Mintz interviewed all known coworkers and associates, as well as every tenant and every person who had attended the party at the complex, in an effort to draw out a suspect. They got nothing for their effort.

  They also checked all of the victim’s financial records for a clue to a possible monetary motivation and found nothing. Gunn had no steady employment. He mostly loitered around a paint and design store on Beverly Boulevard

  and offered his services to customers on a day-work basis. He lived a hand-to-mouth existence, making just enough to pay for and maintain his apartment and a small pickup truck in which he carried his painting equipment.

  Gunn had one living relative, a sister who lived in Long Beach. At the time of his death, he had not seen her in more than a year, though he happened to call her the night before his death from the holding tank of the LAPD’s Hollywood Division station. He was being held there following his DUI arrest. The sister reported that she’d told her brother she could no longer keep helping him and bailing him out. She’d hung up. And she could not offer the investigators any useful information in regard to his murder.

  The incident in which Gunn had been arrested six years before was fully reviewed. Gunn had killed a prostitute in a Sunset Boulevard motel room. He had stabbed her with her own knife when she attempted to stab and rob him, according to his statement in the report forwarded by the LAPD’s Hollywood Division. There were minor inconsistencies between Gunn’s original statement to responding patrol officers and the physical evidence but not enough for the district attorney’s office to seek charges against him. Ultimately, the case was reluctantly written off as self-defense and dropped.

  McCaleb noticed that the lead investigator on the case had been Detective Harry Bosch. Years earlier McCaleb had worked with Bosch on a case, an investigation he still often thought about. Bosch had been abrasive and secretive at times, but still a good cop with excellent investigative skills, intuition and instincts. They had actually bonded in some way over the emotional turmoil the case had caused them both. McCaleb wrote Bosch’s name down in the notebook as a reminder to call the detective to see if he had any thoughts on the Gunn case.

  He went back to reading the summaries. With Gunn’s record of prior engagement with a prostitute in mind, Winston’s and Mintz’s next step was to comb through the murder victim’s phone records as well as check and credit card purchases for indications that he might have continued to use prostitutes. There was nothing. They cruised Sunset Boulevard with an LAPD vice crew for three nights, stopping and interviewing street prostitutes. But none admitted knowing the man in the photos the detectives had borrowed from Gunn’s sister.

  The detectives scanned the sex want ads in the local alternative papers for an advertisement Gunn might have placed. One more time their efforts hit a wall.

  Finally, the detectives took the long shot of tracking the family and associates of the dead prostitute of six years before. Although Gunn had never been charged with the killing, there was still a chance someone believed he had not acted in self-defense — someone who might have sought retribution.

  But this, too, was a dead end. The woman’s family was from Philadelphia. They had lost contact years before. No family member had even come out to claim the body before it was cremated at county taxpayers’ expense. There was no reason for them to seek vengeance for a killing six years old when they had not cared much about the killing in the first place.

  The case had hit one investigative dead end after another. A case not solved in the first forty-eight hours had a less than 50 percent chance of being cleared. A case unsolved after two weeks was like an unclaimed body in the morgue — it was going to sit there in the cold and the dark for a long, long time.

  And that was why Winston had finally come to McCaleb. He was the last resort on a hopeless case.

  Finished with the summaries, McCaleb decided to take a break. He checked his watch and saw it was now almost two. He opened the cabin door and went up to the salon. The lights were off. Buddy had apparently gone to bed in the master cabin without making any noise. McCaleb opened the cold box and looked in. There was a six-pack of beer left over from the charter but he didn’t want that. There was a carton of orange juice and some bottled water. He took the water and went out through the salon door to the cockpit. It was always cool on the water but this night seemed crisper than usual. He folded his arms across his chest and looked across the harbor and up the hill to the house where he knew his family slept. A single light shone from the back deck.

  A momentary pang of guilt passed through him. He knew that despite
his deep love for the woman and two children behind that light, he would rather be on the boat with the murder book than up there in the sleeping house. He tried to push away these thoughts and the questions they raised but could not completely blind himself to the essential conclusion that there was something wrong with him, something missing. It was something that prevented him from fully embracing that which most men seemed to long for.

  He went back inside the boat. He knew that immersing himself in the case reports would shut out the guilt.

  • • •

  The autopsy report contained no surprises. The cause of death was as McCaleb had guessed from the video: cerebral hypoxia due to compression of the carotid arteries by ligature strangulation. The time of death was estimated to have been between midnight and three A.M. on January 1 .

  The deputy medical examiner who conducted the autopsy noted that interior damage to the neck was minimal. Neither the hyoid bone nor the thyroid cartilage was broken. This aspect, coupled with multiple ligature furrows on the skin, led the examiner to conclude that Gunn suffocated slowly while desperately struggling to keep his feet behind his torso so that the wire noose was not pulled tight around his neck. The autopsy summation suggested that the victim could have struggled in this position for as long as two hours.

  McCaleb thought about this and wondered if the killer had been there in the apartment the whole time, watching the dying man struggle. Or had he set the ligature and left before his victim was dead, possibly to set some kind of alibi scheme into motion — perhaps appearing at a New Year’s Eve party so that there would be multiple witnesses able to account for him at the time of the victim’s death.

  He then remembered the bucket and decided that the killer had stayed. The covering of the victim’s face was a frequent occurrence in sexually motivated and rage killings, the attacker covering his victim’s face as a means of dehumanizing the victim and avoiding eye contact. McCaleb had worked dozens of cases where he had noted this phenomenon, women who had been raped and murdered with nightgowns or pillowcases covering their faces, children with their heads wrapped in towels. He could write a list of examples that would fill the entire notebook. Instead he wrote one line on the page under Bosch’s name.

  UNSUB was there the whole time. He watched.

  The unknown subject, McCaleb thought. So we meet again.

  • • •

  Before moving on, McCaleb looked through the autopsy report for two other pieces of information. First was the head wound. He found a description of the wound in the examiner’s comments. The perimortem laceration was circular and superficial. Its damage was minimal and it was possibly a defensive wound.

  McCaleb dismissed the possibility of it being a defensive wound. The only blood on the rug at the crime scene was that spilled from the bucket after it was placed over the victim’s head. Plus, the flow of blood from the wound at the point of the crown was forward and over the victim’s face. This indicated the head was bowed forward. McCaleb took all of this to mean that Gunn was already bound and on the floor when the blow had been struck to his head and then the bucket placed over it. His instinct told him this might have been a blow delivered with the intention of hurrying the victim’s demise; an impact to the head that would weaken the victim and shorten his struggle against the ligature.

  He wrote these thoughts down in the notebook and then went back into the autopsy report. He located the findings on the examination of the anus and penis. Swabs indicated no sexual activity had occurred in the time prior to death. McCaleb wrote down No Sex in the notebook. Beneath this he wrote the word Rage and circled it.

  McCaleb realized that many, if not all, of the suspicions and conclusions he was coming up with had probably already been reached by Jaye Winston. But this had always been his routine in analyzing murder scenes. He made his own judgments first, then looked to see how they stacked up next to the primary investigator’s conclusions afterward.

  After the autopsy he went to the evidence analysis reports. He first looked at the recovered evidence list and noticed that the plastic owl he had seen on the videotape had not been bagged and tagged. He felt sure that it should have been and made a note of it. Also missing from the list was any mention of a weapon recovery. It appeared that whatever had been used to open up the wound on Gunn’s scalp had been taken away from the scene by the killer. McCaleb made a note of this as well because it was another piece of information supportive of a profile of the killer as organized, thorough and cautious.

  The report on the analysis of the tape used to gag the victim was folded into a separate envelope that McCaleb found in one of the binder’s pockets. In addition to a computer printout and an addendum there were several photographs that showed the full length of the tape after it had been cut and peeled away from the victim’s face and head. The first set of photos documented the tape front and back as it was found, with a significant amount of coagulated blood obscuring the message written on it. The next set of photos showed the tape front and back after the blood had been removed with a solution of soapy water. McCaleb stared at the message for a long moment even though he knew he would never be able to decipher it on his own.

  Cave Cave Dus Videt He finally put the photos aside and picked up the accompanying reports. The tape was found to be clear of fingerprints but several hairs and microscopic fibers were collected from the underside adhesive. The hair was determined to have belonged to the victim. The fibers were held pending further orders for analysis. McCaleb knew this meant there was a time and cost constraint. The fibers would not be analyzed until the investigation reached a point where there were fibers from a suspect’s possessions that also could be analyzed and compared. Otherwise, the costly and time-consuming analysis of the collected fibers would be for nothing. McCaleb had seen this sort of investigative prioritizing before. It was a routine in local law enforcement not to take expensive steps until necessary. But he was a bit surprised that it had not been deemed necessary in this case. He concluded that Gunn’s background as a one-time murder suspect might have dropped him into a lower class of victim, one for which the extra step is not taken. Maybe, McCaleb thought, this was why Jaye Winston had come to him. She hadn’t said anything about paying him for his time — not that he could accept a monetary payment anyway.

  He moved on to an addendum report that had been filed by Winston. She had taken a photograph of the tape and the message to a linguistics professor at UCLA who had identified the words as Latin. She was then referred to a retired Catholic priest who lived in the rectory at St. Catherine’s in Hollywood and had taught Latin at the church’s school for two decades until it was dropped from the curriculum in the early seventies. He easily translated the message for Winston.

  As McCaleb read the translation he felt the feathery run of adrenaline rise up his spine to his neck. His skin tightened and he felt a sensation that came close to lightheadedness.

  Cave Cave Dus Videt Cave Cave D(omin)us Videt Beware Beware God Sees “Holy shit,” McCaleb said quietly to himself.

  It was not said as an exclamation. Rather, it was the phrase he and fellow bureau profilers had used to informally classify cases in which religious overtures were part of the evidence. When God was discovered to be part of the probable motivation for a crime, it became a “holy shit” case when spoken of in casual conversation. It also changed things significantly, for God’s work was never done. When a killer was out there using His name as part of the imprint of a crime, it often meant there would be more crimes. It was said in the bureau profiling offices that God’s killers never stopped of their own volition. They had to be stopped. McCaleb now understood Jaye Winston’s apprehension about letting this case gather dust. If Edward Gunn was the first known victim, then somebody else was likely in the sights of the killer right now.

  McCaleb scribbled down a translation of the killer’s message and some other thoughts. He wrote Victim Acquisition and underlined it twice.

  He looked back at Winston�
��s report and noticed that at the bottom of the page containing the translation there was a paragraph marked with an asterisk.

  *Father Ryan stated that the word “Dus” as seen on the duct tape was a short form of “Deus” or “Dominus” primarily found in medieval Bibles as well as church carvings and other artwork.

  McCaleb leaned back in his chair and drank from the water bottle. He found this final paragraph the most interesting of the whole package. The information it contained could be a means by which the killer might be isolated in a small group and then found. Initially the pool of potential suspects was huge — it would essentially include anyone who had had access to Edward Gunn on New Year’s Eve. But the information from Father Ryan narrowed it significantly to those who had knowledge of medieval Latin, or someone who had gotten the word Dus and possibly the whole message from something he had seen.

  Perhaps something in a church.

  5

  McCaleb was too jazzed by what he had read and seen to think about sleep. It was four-thirty and he knew he would complete this night awake and in the office. It was probably too early in Quantico, Virginia, for anyone to be in the Behavioral Sciences Unit but he decided to make the call anyway. He went up to the salon, got the cell phone out of the charger and punched in the number from memory. When the general operator answered he asked to be transferred to Special Agent Brasilia Doran’s desk. There were a lot of people he could have asked for but he had decided on Doran because they had worked well together — and often from long distances — when he had been in the bureau. Doran also specialized in icon identification and symbology.