Alejandro Rios lay on a gurney in a brightly lit basement alcove at the Medical Examiner's Office. A white shroud covered the body. Thru a gap in the drapes behind the gurney Adela could see a bank of morgue refrigerators. She felt cold. The morgue attendant asked her if she was ready. When she nodded “yes” he pulled back the shroud. “That’s my father,” Adela said through taut lips. Sam raised her hand to signal that the proceedings were completed. The morgue attendant replaced the shroud.
Adela followed Sam down the corridor and into the elevator. When the elevator doors opened onto the main floor Sam guided Adela to an empty conference room and sat down with her at a long table. “When you’re ready, I can take you to the car,” Sam said when she judged that Adela had sufficiently regained her composure.
“Thank you,” Adela said. “Seeing him was harder than I expected.” She retrieved some tissue from her handbag and dabbed at her eyes. “What happens next?” she asked.
“There will be an autopsy in the morning,” Sam explained. “I plan to attend. I’ll call you afterwards to let you know the findings. Later in the day the Medical Examiner will release the body to whatever funeral home you chose.”
Adela sighed. “Funeral home,” she said. “I suppose I’ll use the one that took care of my husband.”
“You’ve had a trying day,” Sam said. “Let’s get you home.” Sam walked Adela to the waiting patrol car.
This had not been Adela’s first visit to the Medical Examiner’s Office. Two years earlier she had been there to identify the body of her husband, Carlos Navarette. Carlos had been killed when the single-engine aircraft that he was piloting crashed shortly after taking off from a local airfield in bad weather. Adela’s anguish at seeing Carlos’s battered body came back to her now. She tried to conjure up an image of her husband from another time, one that brought her joy instead of sorrow, but none appeared. Her thoughts drifted to what she had just seen—her father lying on the gurney, motionless. She wondered whether she would miss him.
Adela felt no real affection for her father. All his life he had demanded whatever he wanted from the people around him, while giving as little as possible in return. As a child Adela had tried to please him but, as she grew older, she realized that trying to connect with him on anything other than a superficial level was futile. After she met Carlos she had consciously undertaken to detach from her father. Over the years of her marriage she had focused her needs for emotional intimacy on Carlos and her daughters. Carlos’ unexpected death had opened up a void in Adela's life that was still unfilled. But this circumstance had not caused her to reach out to her father for support. Adela had known Alejandro Rios far too well for that.
“Don’t you dare let this guy shop his company around,” Millie said. “You have to keep up the pressure on him. Mark will lose confidence in you if you let this deal slip away.”
“How do I tell Mark what he said?” Georgina asked. “Do I soft-pedal it by saying that Carmichael may want to look at other options and then change the subject?”
“He would pick up on that dodge right away,” Millie said. “You don’t want Mark to think that you’re hiding something from him. He trusts you for a reason, and that’s because you’ve been forthright with him in the past. You need to keep on being that dutiful informant. Remember, it’s not the substance of what you say; it’s the style. It’s your manner of speaking and the expectations that you set. You need to tell Mark everything, but tell it in a way that says—what’s happened here is only what would be expected. Then express a lot of confidence in your own ability. Leave Mark thinking that you’re on top of the situation and not at all concerned about the outcome, which you believe is assured.”
“Millie, you missed your calling,” Georgina said. “You spin like a politician.”
“If you don’t think business is political, you haven’t been paying attention,” Millie said. “So, you’re actually going to sleep in a room full of strangers tonight?”
“Surrounded by a hundred people that I don’t know, plus a handful from the Rios estate that I don’t trust.”
“Why don’t you trust them?” Millie asked. Georgina confided her concerns about the circumstances surrounding Rios’ death. Millie did not dismiss the possibility of foul play as readily as Mark had done earlier. “Keep your wits about you,” she cautioned her friend. “Rios made enemies. Someone could have seized the opportunity to kill him, thinking that his body would be burned and all the evidence destroyed.”
“I know, I know,” Georgina agreed. “That’s exactly what I’ve been stewing about.”
“Keep your distance from the whole lot of them, Georgina," Millie counseled. "If one of them is a killer, you don’t want to become any more involved than you already are.”
“No sign of that audit yet,” Detective Agostino said into the telephone.
“Keep looking,” Sam said. She had left the Medical Examiner’s Office immediately after Adela had departed; she was now on the freeway, heading to the Rios estate. “Adela said that Rios had it with him when he went up to his office this morning. It must be in there somewhere.”
“I found a safe behind a picture," Agostino said. "How badly do you want me to open it?”
“Call Lindstrom and Spencer before you do any permanent damage,” Sam replied. “There’s a good chance Rios left the code with them.”
“All right,” Agostino said, sounding slightly disappointed. “I’ll do that.”
As she approached Rancho Secreto Sam saw a line of fire climbing up a ridge to the east; she could not tell whether it was the wildfire or a firebreak set by firefighters. She turned on the radio and learned that the fire was newly resurgent. At the roadblock at the entrance to the Ranch a National Guardsman checked her identification and waved her in, cautioning her to keep a close eye out and to turn back if she spotted any active fire. Sam saw nothing but the occasional fire truck as she drove to Casa Feliz. She found Agostino and two Forensics technicians busy packing up the contents of Rios’ office.
Rios’ law firm had provided the code to the safe; Agostino had already gone thru its contents. He handed Sam a large clasp envelope. She sat down at Rios’ desk and opened it. Inside, she found a folder containing three sheets of paper. “CONFIDENTIAL” was stamped in large red letters at the top of each sheet, but there was no letterhead. The format did not conform to that of a typical audit; instead, each page consisted of a list of what appeared to be ledger entries. There was no signature.
Sam was still trying to grasp what the document meant when a National Guardsman appeared at the office door. He said that fire was once again threatening the property and ordered them to evacuate immediately. Reluctantly, Sam put the folder back inside the envelope and handed it to Agostino, who placed it into an evidence box. While Agostino and the technicians stayed behind to load the boxes into the Crime Scene Investigation van, Sam set out alone, planning to retrace her route where she had seen the emergency vehicles.
A reddish glow from the renascent fire broadly illuminated the eastern sky. By the time Sam reached the main road leading to the Ranch village, burning embers had begun to shower down on her car. She saw no other vehicles on the road; the fire trucks had disappeared. As she neared the outskirts of the village she saw first one house burning, then another and then another. She sped up. Trees burst into flame as she drove past; a fiery branch dislodged by the wind fell onto the roadway right in front of her, forcing her into a dangerous evasive maneuver; she swerved across the median and onto the bicycle path along the other side of the road. Regaining control of her car, Sam willed her heart rate to drop while she held the steering wheel in a tense grip.
At the edge of the village she saw what appeared to be an entire battalion of firefighters massed together with their trucks. Lined up in tight formation, the firefighters had raised their hoses straight up into the air to create a massive wall of water that reached thirty feet into the air. Sam grasped the steering wheel even more tightly and drove straigh
t through the torrent. Her head bounced backwards and forwards as falling water rocked the car.
Once on the other side of the wall of water Sam saw that the village was in complete darkness and largely deserted. The only people on the street were a few National Guardsmen. She encountered no other vehicles until she got on the freeway.
She decided to spend the night in her office in the Detective Division. Among the emergency supplies kept in the basement she located an air mattress and a coarse wool blanket that smelled of mothballs. When she was sure that her colleagues who had also decided to spend the night were all asleep, she went to the women’s restroom and washed up. As a precaution against being seen without her makeup, she held a paper towel to her face as she walked back to her office. She spent a restless night on the floor.
She awakened early the next morning. Dressing in the same clothes that she had worn the day before was distasteful but unavoidable. Since the downtown area had not been evacuated, the stores would be open for business later in the morning; she decided that she would visit a department store to resupply as soon as Rios’ autopsy was over. The prospect of a shopping expedition momentarily lifted her spirits. The terror that she had felt the night before, when she had witnessed the full force of the fire bearing down on the Ranch village, began to recede. And today’s news was encouraging. The wall of water had worked. The village had been spared, and firefighters were beginning to get the upper hand.
When Sam arrived at the Medical Examiner’s Office the autopsy was already in progress. A pungent chemical smell filled the white tiled room, and the cold, humid air made Sam shiver. The pathologist who was performing the autopsy, Dr. Fay Dugan, greeted her cordially. Dr. Dugan introduced the burly autopsy assistant simply as Gus.
Alejandro Rios’ unclad body lay face down on the autopsy table. Dr. Dugan explained that she had completed the examination of the surface of the body and had taken photographs. The only notable finding so far, she said, was a wound on the back of the head. Sam watched Dr. Dugan as she took tissue samples from the wound and placed them in formalin for the microscopic analysis that she said would determine the timing of the wounding relative to the time of death.
Gus warned Sam that he was going to make some noise. Using a power handsaw he made a clean, circular cut around Rios’ head. He lifted off the upper part of the skull in a single piece. Dr. Dugan removed the brain from the skull, placed it on a green towel on a stainless steel side table and examined its exterior. Noting nothing remarkable, she lowered the brain into a large-mouthed, formalin-filled jar. Any internal bleeding or other brain pathology that contributed to the death would not be discovered until later, Dr. Dugan explained, because brain tissue needed to fix in formalin for several weeks until it was firm enough to be sliced. Gus repositioned the body face up for the dissection of the internal organs. Dr. Dugan used a scalpel to open the chest. She pointed out that the lungs showed no signs of smoke inhalation. Rios had already died by the time the barn filled with smoke.
As Dr. Dugan began her examination of the heart, Sam looked dispassionately at Rios’ body. When she sat before her altar, at home in the teahouse, and contemplated the people whom she had lost, Sam was comforted by her belief in an afterlife when she would be reunited with them. But in this autopsy room, she had a very different experience of the finality of death. She was confident that she would never see Rios again. She looked at his open skull. How ironic, she thought, that Rios would be buried without his brain. The clever maestro of the deal, the man who outsmarted everyone, was destined to lay in his grave for all eternity, completely empty-headed.
Chapter Thirteen