Without a Doubt - [12]

“Vannatter called me,” I told him. “I just came from Rockingham. Any chance I can get in there?”

“Sorry, no one’s allowed,” he told me apologetically.

I suppressed my irritation. I hadn’t been formally assigned to this case, so I was in no position to pull rank.

“Okay if I look from here?” I asked him.

“Sure,” he said. “But watch out for the press.”

No shit. Pretty soon they were going to need riot police to keep this bunch in line.

Relegated to the status of a spectator, I stretched my neck to get a look past the front gate at what was left of the killing ground. From outside the yellow tape, I could see the stain that covered the landing of a set of cement steps. Someone had bled rivers here.

At every crime scene there’s some detail that catches your eye. It’s not necessarily the most significant in terms of its importance to the investigation, but it’s the thing that stimulates your first visceral connection to the case. This time-for me-it was the bloody paw prints of some animal, probably a large dog, that had tracked through the pool of blood on the landing, leaving a cockeyed trail down the walkway toward the street. Had the animal belonged to the victim? The killer? What had happened here?

I couldn’t see the members of the search team; they were too deep into the property. (Later, I would see many, many photos of the two criminalists, Dennis Fung and Andrea Mazzola, in their latex gloves and shower caps, combing the grounds for evidence.) What I could see was a police photographer standing at the top of the steps, his camera set on a tripod. He was taking careful perpendicular aim at something on the lower landing. I couldn’t make out what it was, but I guessed he was documenting the blood trail that Phil had described to me earlier that morning: the shoe prints leading away from the bodies to a gate at the rear of the property-and the drops of blood running parallel to the shoe prints.

It’s almost impossible for a criminal to get away from a crime scene without leaving something of himself there or taking something away. Usually, these things are traces, often invisible to the naked eye. In law enforcement circles this is known as the Locard exchange principle. It holds that when you enter an environment, the environment affects you, and you affect it. In this case, the killer had practically left his calling card.

This one could get interesting, I told myself. I couldn’t wait to tell David.

David Conn was my boss; he was also my good friend. Head of the Special Trials Unit, David was witty, temperate, and an excellent judge of character. He was a forceful trial attorney and a cunning tactician. But he didn’t have the screw-them-over mentality of so many aggressive prosecutors. I admired that. David had real strength.

When I got back to the CCB, I went directly to David’s office and dropped into one of his armchairs.

“You’re not going to believe this,” I told him. I laid out the details. The glove, the hangings on the wall. The blood on the walkway. The blood in O. J. Simpson’s foyer.

“Where’s he now?” David asked.

“Phil and Tom took him downtown. He’s at Parker Center.”

David was intrigued, I could tell.

“Sounds good,” he said. And a second later, “Do you want to take it?”

I have this superstition about running hard to get a case. Nothing good comes of it. Sometimes trouble will find you when you’re just running in place, so why go looking for it? But I’d been hoping for something bigger to fill out my caseload. And if I was going to catch this case eventually, better to be in on it from day one.

“Sure,” I told him. “I’m free. I mean, if you think it’s okay.”

“You’ve got it, as far as I’m concerned.”

“You think Gil’s gonna care about this one?”

Technically speaking, it was up to David to make this assignment. But, of course, his choice was subject to approval by the D.A. Frankly, I didn’t know if Gil Garcetti would warm to the idea of my taking this case. During my year in management, I’d been assistant to Bill Hodgman, the director of Central Operations. It had been my job to sit in on meetings with the D.A. when Bill couldn’t make it. I enjoyed a good working relationship with Gil, but I spoke my mind freely, sometimes a little too freely for the comfort of the brass.

Garcetti couldn’t fail to see my qualifications in terms of handling the DNA stuff. I had a strong record of convictions. I was willing to put in long hours. But it was also no secret around the D.A.‘s office that I had just filed for divorce, and consequently had incurred all the single-parenting complications that went along with it. I had also bailed out of a management position, which might cause him to doubt my political fealty.

I also knew that Gil had felt burned over assignments he’d made in recent years. The deputies he’d chosen to prosecute certain cases were tough but, from Gil’s perspective, too independent. They’d cut him out of the decision-making, and then it was Gil who’d taken the rap for a series of high-profile acquittals. I could see why he might worry about me. I’m no one’s idea of a lapdog. It wasn’t that Gil couldn’t tolerate assertive women; in fact, he went out of his way to promote them. But I could see how he might look at me and think,