A/N: I hope the following is not too dry or information overload. The story demanded that I include facts of the investigation. However, for those that want more dry facts, see the chronology of events in Excerpt from Police Report at the end of this chapter. Happy reading and thanks for sticking with me. We will hear Enos' voice again very soon!
Also, thanks to WENN9366 for the great plug for this story and adding to the Enos Strate Appreciation Association Community page! Much appreciated.
Chapter Thirty Five:
Saturday, November 1, 1997 – Los Angeles, CA – Cedars-Sinai
Angela Kim had just finished documenting the chain of custody log on what she had taken from Soonie and Daisy when Inez re-entered the room. The two other women were busy writing down what they could remember of the events since each had first made any contact with Enos Strate the previous afternoon.
Inez let them finish up while she asked Angela to get them all something to drink.
"Coffee, tea, something carbonated?" Angela asked.
Soonie asked for coffee, black. Daisy asked for iced tea if the vending machine had it.
"Dr. Pepper for me, Angie," Inez said. It didn't pack as much of a punch, but cold caffeine was preferable to hot at the moment.
When Angela left the room, Inez said, "When Detective Kim comes back, she's going to turn on a recorder. Just want to let you know before we begin. Standard procedure."
Daisy was getting more than a little tired of being reminded about 'standard procedure.' She wondered why Kay, or Soonie, or whatever her name was, was being so conciliatory about it. Maybe people in L.A. think this is something routine. She felt like a fish out of water. No, that wasn't it. She felt like an alien visitor to another planet.
Her education had not sufficiently prepared her for understanding the excruciatingly laborious, at least from her point of view, inner workings of mega city law enforcement. PhD or no PhD, back home she and Bo and Luke, not to mention Sheriff Rosco, would be out hunting down the snake in the grass.
That's when she noticed that Kay was wiping tears off her cheeks. Daisy was too furious at whoever hurt Enos to cry.
"I'm sorry. I'm afraid I made the ink run," Soonie said, softly, as she handed the legal pad over to Inez.
Inez scanned what Soonie had written and about a third of the way through it she touched her fingers to her mouth in a gesture of sad acknowledgment about why the pad was tear stained.
She was collecting Daisy's pad when Angela came back with the drinks, accompanied by Doctor Reubens. Inez, Soonie and Daisy all stood up, expectantly, at the same time.
"Detective De Pina," he said, "I just wanted to let you know about the results of the CAT scan." He looked over at the two other women he had not met earlier.
"It's all right, Doctor. This is Kay Mun and Daisy Duke. They both have an interest in Detective Strate's condition."
"As we suspected, his lateral nasal cartilage has several fractures, but we found none to the maxilla or the ethmoid," he looked at Soonie and Daisy, "that's the cheekbone and the bone beneath the nasal cavity in the upper roof of the nose. They're bruised but not broken. The nasal fractures should heal on their own over two to three weeks."
Even though that news was met with a collective sigh of relief, Inez asked, "And the head trauma?"
"We're doing the MRI next. He had to be sedated again. They're waiting for it to kick in before doing the MRI. He needs to be completely still to get good imaging and the tube is a pretty tight space. Even someone who is not normally claustrophobic tends to get antsy."
"Add to that the fact that he hates losing control, ever," Inez quipped, "I imagine he's been a handful."
Doctor Reubens smiled. "Well, it isn't the first time we've had him in here this week is it? I'll let you know when the MRI comes back."
"Thanks, Doc."
After the doctor left, Inez addressed Kay before she had Angela turn on the recorder.
"I'm sorry about your brother. No hope of survivors?"
Soonie took in a deep breath to stay any more tears. According to the phone call she got from her uncle while she and Enos were at the Halloween Ball, the plane had nose-dived into a ravine. The search plane had spotted five bodies, accounting for all those aboard.
"No," was all she said.
"Do you need to contact your uncle in San Francisco?"
"I would like to call him after we finish here. I can do nothing to help Jae-sung or his daughter at the moment. The important thing is what I can do for Enos."
Daisy, who would normally have tried to comfort anyone suffering the loss of a brother, was too dumbstruck to offer sympathy due to the growing frustration that she was out of the loop of whatever it was that everyone else seemed to be privy to.
Would the onslaught of revelations never end?
"Can either of you think of anyone in your lives that would want to do harm to Detective Strate? Ex-husband," Inez knew they both had one, "ex-boyfriend, stalker, anyone who has seemed a little off lately, co-workers, unsatisfied clients - possibly one of the Ukrainian clients unhappy with your delving into cases of the missing girls…?" The last part was directed at Soonie.
For the life of them, neither could come up with anyone in their lives that would have a reason to do harm to Enos.
Owing to the coincidence that Enos had been attacked on the night she arrived in L.A., Daisy hesitated in her response only because Enos had made a few of her suitors jealous in the past. Not because she and Enos were a couple but because she spent a lot of time with him. Along with admitting to herself that she had been punishing him for being able to leave her for years, she also had to admit that it had taken the form of dangling the carrot in front of him, just out of reach. But it had been so many years that they had been apart, she discounted any notion that someone from her past or from Hazzard would have it in for Enos, or her. And L.D.? He was neither jealous nor interested enough in her anymore to go to the trouble.
Soonie's ex-husband was still in South Korea, not that either of them was interested in rekindling a relationship that never really existed except on paper, and she'd had no long or short term suitors in the past ten years that were of any significance. As for clients of the accounting firm, she came up with a blank there as well, including the Ukrainian clients who had all seemed eager to help.
She had, however provided a description of the male in his late thirties or early forties who had stopped Enos outside his apartment building when he and Soonie arrived at 9:45 p.m. on October 31.
"Did Detective Strate know the man?" Inez asked.
"Yes, but he did not identify him. He said he needed to talk to the man and asked me to take his keys and let myself into his apartment saying that he would be up shortly."
"Did anything else unusual happen this evening, either at the Halloween Ball or the airport – strangers who might seem suspicious or make you or Detective Strate uncomfortable?"
They both answered in the negative.
"Ms. Duke, you told Detective Thompson that Detective Strate put the receipt for the plane ticket in his wallet. Did you notice anything else unusual or out of the ordinary in the wallet when he did that?"
Daisy fell silent for a few seconds and began fidgeting with her hands. Her nervous activity did not go unnoticed by Detective De Pina. The situation was already embarrassing enough, what she needed to say would just make it more so. "My engagement ring. The one he gave me," she hesitated again, bent her head and closed her eyes, "when he proposed. I gave it back to him at the airport and he put it in his wallet." Her hand went automatically to the now empty chain around her neck.
"Do you have any idea of the value of the ring, Ms. Duke?" Inez asked, trying to keep any hard feelings toward Daisy out of her voice.
"Other than to me," Daisy said, opening her eyes, "No."
Inez was as relieved to be done with the interview as Kay and Daisy. She had avoided asking them questions that would require a rehashing of the interpersonal relationships that had brought them all together at E's apartment, if for nothing else than respect for E's privacy. She reasoned that delving too deeply into that territory would do little to further the investigation and more to fuel an already uncomfortable situation into a really messy one.
About the time she decided that her motives in bringing Mrs. Huang into the hospital may have been more personal than professional, Thompson walked in with the sweet old lady. Asking Mrs. Huang to sit down while she talked to Detective Thompson, she indicated for him to meet her in the hallway.
"If you want to know everything that goes on in Echo Park," he said, "she's the woman to talk to, but from what I could get out of her on the way in about what happened tonight at Strate's apartment," he rubbed the back of his neck with his uncast hand and rolled his eyes, "would make a good script for a soap but do little to point to what happened to him after he dropped Ms. Duke off at the airport. I only brought her in because you were expecting her and because she insisted."
Inez sighed. She had met Mrs. Huang several times over the past years and berated herself for letting her concern for E guide her professional judgement. "You're probably right. However, we did get a couple of things out of the interview with Kay and Ms. Duke. Get with Angela and follow up…and keep me updated."
"I heard about the CAT results. Any news on the MRI?"
"You worried about him?" she said, with a smile.
"Not at all, just don't want to have to break in a new team member to replace him, that's all."
"It's okay, Thompson, we all fall a little bit in love with him. You'll live."
She didn't give him time to lodge a dispute to that little psyche evaluation and ducked back into the waiting room.
A/N: Excerpts from preliminary Detective's Report filed November 1, 1997:
Relevant points that were contained in the written chronologies and interview:
On October 31, 1997, Ms. Kyung-soon Mun, aka Kay, aka Soonie, and Detective Enos Strate were attending a formal charity event when Ms. Mun received a phone call from her uncle (Yoo, Sang-jun of Y & Y, Inc., currently residing in San Francisco) at 9:15 p.m. with distressing news about the demise of Ms. Mun's half-brother in a plane crash in Central Africa. She and Det. Strate left the venue immediately thereafter with the intention of swinging by his apartment to pick up some warmer clothes than he normally keeps in his go-bag. They then intended to travel to her apartment to pick up her overnight bag and head to San Francisco by midnight Oct. 31. Ms. Mun also noted that this was a change to their original plans. Before the phone call they had planned to leave for SF at approximately 7 a.m. Saturday morning, November 1, 1997.
They arrived at his apartment at approximately 9:45 p.m. at which time Detective Strate was approached by a neighbor who wanted to talk to him about someone suspicious loitering in the area.
At request of Det. Strate, Ms. Mun proceeded to his apartment and unlocked the door using his keys. At this time she encountered Ms. Daisy Duke in the hallway at approximately 9:50 p.m.
On October 31, 1997, Ms. Daisy Duke, of Hazzard, GA, arrived at LAX on flight from Denver, CO, originating Raleigh-Durham, NC – see ticket in evidence - and proceeded by taxi to Detective Strate's apt. Arrived approximately 7:30 p.m. At that time, Det. Strate was not present at his apartment. With intention of waiting for Det. Strate to return, Ms. Duke spent approximately two hours with Det. Strate's neighbor, Mrs. Li Mei Huang until approx. 9:50 p.m. when she encountered Ms. Mun entering Det. Strate's apartment.
Det. Strate arrived at his apartment 10 to 12 minutes later
After some discussion, Ms. Mun left Det. Strate's apartment and Det. Strate and Ms. Duke remained. Ms. Duke and Ms. Mun declined to discuss details of the encounter at this time. Ms. Mun traveled to her apartment, picked up bag already packed and left in her car (Audi) – see forensic report – for SF. Ms. Duke stated that Det. Strate drove her to the airport at approximately 11:55 or midnight, purchased a ticket in her name, non-stop to Atlanta – see unused ticket in evidence. Ms. Duke returned an engagement ring, which he put in his wallet (missing at time of this report) and stated that the last time she saw Det. Strate was when he left the airport with the intention of driving to San Francisco.