I am so sorry this has taken so long to post! I blame the following:
1. This story giving me fits.
2. My crazy family becoming crazier.
3. The charity I work with having its big toy giveaway this week.
I hope to do better in the future!
I'm also sorry there was some confusion about why Johnny didn't turn the watch over to the police when he found it. The way I pictured it was this: There is a trail near where I live. If you park at the trailhead, you can look up to where the trail ends at the top of a very big hill that in actuality is a good two miles away. So, if the engines are parked below and the police are at the top, Johnny wouldn't necessarily put two and two together to think the watch had anything to do with the fire. And the police weren't down in the parking lot, so that is why he didn't turn it over to them.
Anyway…sorry for any confusion or interruption in your suspension of belief that may have caused. Now back to our regularly scheduled reading.
•
•
Johnny was zipping up his jeans when Roy entered the locker room.
"Two days off!" John smiled. "I can sure use it."
Roy grimaced as he caught a glance into Johnny's locker and the pile of papers that threatened to spill out onto the floor. "Have you ever considered cleaning that up?"
"Why?"
Roy rolled his eyes. "It could be classified as a disaster area."
"I know where everything is," John said defensively.
"The only thing you keep neat is that." Roy gestured to the simple string of beads hanging on a hook. John didn't respond, but Roy hadn't expected him to. John rarely talked about his necklace, but Roy knew it had something to do with his partner's parents. When Roy had first seen it, he did ask about it. John had simply said, "It means everything to me."
"So what are all these index cards for?" Roy changed the subject, reaching over to pick a blue three-by-five card off the tilting stack on the messy locker shelf.
"Learning, Roy." John tapped his forehead. "Medicine is always changing, and there's a lot I don't know. So I wrote out a bunch of terms on these cards to memorize."
Roy read the back of the card. "What does 'AVNRT' mean?"
"Let me think…let me think…A Very Nice Rapid Ticker," John said and pulled his black T-shirt over his head. "Arioventricular nodal reentrant tachycardia. It's a type of tachycardia that is more common in women than men."
Roy unbuttoned his uniform shirt. "Wow! But why 'A Very Nice Rapid Ticker'?"
John shrugged. "It's just a way to help me remember."
"Junior, you amaze me sometimes."
John gave him a lopsided grin. "I know."
Roy finished changing and slapped his partner on the shoulder. "All right, then. Will we see you for dinner tonight?"
"You bet!"
•
•
Order and method. Order and method.
That's what his grandfather had always preached. But today the man added a third term: repetition. Whatever was worth doing was worth doing well over and over again.
He knew how to get information on people. So he used the same techniques he had employed in the past to acquire a list of all the fire department captains in L.A. County. He then applied the same methodology to finding the names of the crew members on the different shifts. He determined which shift had been on duty at Station 51 the night in question, then through a process of elimination figured out which two men were the paramedics that worked the A shift: Roy DeSoto and John Gage.
He circled their names in red ink, then rifled through his folder and pulled out their home addresses. All he needed to do was identify which one was the slender, dark-haired one.
Popping a cough drop in his mouth, the man dialed the phone on his desk. "Gary? It's me. I'm not feeling well again. I need to take a few sick hours this afternoon. Yes, everything is caught up. Thanks, I'll be in early tomorrow."
Slipping the folder into his leather attache case, the man smiled. "As easy as pie."
He spent the rest of the afternoon parked two houses down from the DeSotos' suburban home with its neat green lawn and well-trimmed trees. Around three o'clock, an attractive woman wearing a blue peasant skirt and a white eyelet top left the house and drove off in a Buick station wagon. She returned an hour later with an armload of paper grocery bags.
An hour after that, a white Land Rover pulled into the driveway. The man drummed his fingers slowly on the steering wheel—the person driving it was the paramedic who took his watch! He watched as the man locked his car and walked to the front door. The handsome, slender man rang the bell.
The killer smiled. If the man who took his watch was ringing the doorbell of the DeSoto home, he obviously didn't live there. He wasn't Roy DeSoto. He had to be John Gage.
A boy and a little girl greeted Gage at the door, each child grabbing one of his hands and dragging him inside. Unwrapping another cough drop, the man circled John's name on his list several times.
The killer put his truck in gear and pulled away from the curb.
•
•
Sonny felt extremely irritable when he drank coffee without the comfort of a cigarette, especially when it was the lousy brew they made at the station. He particularly resented the lack of nicotine in his system when he had to make a death notification.
Trying to be healthy was hell.
That morning the detective got a hit on the fingerprints the medical examiner was able to obtain. Jane Doe from the park was Bonita Williams, age 28, single. After doing some digging, he found out she had an older brother, Brent, who lived in Michigan. Sonny hung up the phone after talking to the man and really wanted to take a drag of a Marlboro. Instead, he tossed his Styrofoam cup in the trash and grabbed his keys.
"Sonny! Gotta sec?"
"Sure, boss."
Sonny went into the office of Captain Peter Phillips, a long-time veteran of the San Diego Police Department who had transferred in last year and quickly earned the respect and trust of his men. Sonny lowered himself into the too-small visitor's chair across from the captain's beat-up wooden desk.
"Listen, I'm getting some heat about that Emerson Canyon murder. Any leads?"
"Don't they know a murder investigation takes time?" Sonny asked incredulously. "It's only been a week."
"No, they expect it to be instantaneous, like on 'Kojak.'" Phillips unconsciously rubbed his balding head.
Sonny suppressed a smile. "Well, I did get an ID on the vic this morning: Bonita Williams. She lived in Carson. Her prints were in the system for a shoplifting arrest nine years ago." Sonny flipped through a few pages in his notebook. "I just got done making the notification to her brother. He told me Bonita got her act together after the arrest, went to school, and became a physical therapist."
"Cause of death?" Phillips asked.
"Small caliber gun shot wound to the head. We didn't recover the bullet in the body or at the park. That, plus no apparent blood evidence at the scene, leads me to think it's not the primary location; the park was where the killer had hoped to destroy the body."
The captain steepled his fingers. "I can see burning the body at the scene of the crime to destroy evidence, but to do it in a public park? That's a lot of effort and planning on the part of this perp—transporting the body, gathering wood. Not to mention the risk. It seems to me burning the body was more symbolic than anything else."
Sonny considered this option thoughtfully. "He must have really wanted to see every trace of her gone."
"He particularly knew about that rock formation. Why burn her there?"
"I dunno, Cap. But I'll find out."