If You Really Loved Me Page 2

  She seemed young, and so vulnerable.

  Halligan had time to take only two. Two Polaroid shots of a pretty young woman with her eyes half open, her face bloodied but eerily serene. Her left hand was still flung up next to her ear as it must have been while she slept. The officers estimated her age as late teens to early twenties.

  Paramedics Chris Esser and Ruben Ruvalcaba from the Garden Grove Fire Department Engine 4-1 rushed into the southwest bedroom. They thought they heard the woman gasp for air. It was hard to tell. A death rattle sounds almost the same. They lifted the comatose victim from the bed and carried her to the closest hard surface where they could administer cardiopulmonary resuscitation—the den/office floor. She wore a knit shortie nightgown—black and white and red with laughing penguins in top hats parading across the front until they disappeared into the solid red of blood. They placed her on the tan carpet and quickly cut away the silly little nightie, leaving her nude except for a pair of fuzzy blue nightsocks.

  As the paramedics worked, inserting an airway, and then an intravenous line with a solution of D5W, they compressed the young woman's chest rhythmically, urging her heart to start beating effectively.

  The walls of this room were covered with family pictures. A huge studio portrait of a man and a woman, smiling and obviously in love, hung over the red-brick fireplace. They seemed to gaze down at the activity on the floor. It was difficult to tell if the woman in the picture and the woman on the floor were the same person. There was a definite similarity, but then the sobbing woman in the living room also resembled the portrait. And a shooting victim, in extremis, would look nothing at all like herself. Her skin was pallid, her eyes unfocused. The paramedics' LifePak heart monitor showed erratic response to their CPR, but no normal sinus rhythm. She would need surgery to have any chance of survival, but they dared not move her until she was stabilized.

  So many people were now coming and going that Farley placed Jauch at the front door to maintain scene control. A log marked the arrival and departure times of all personnel. Davis and Day were instructed to separate the man and girl in the living room—and to begin preliminary interviewing.

  Halligan finally had time to glance around the bedroom where the injured woman had been found. A revolver with a two-inch barrel lay on the carpet between the door to the hall and the bed, but no one knew yet if that was the murder weapon. He left it there, waiting for the primary investigators to arrive. Only now did he notice a small bathroom just off the bedroom, the door closed. Cautiously, he pushed the door open, half-expecting to see someone hiding there.

  There was no one.

  For any policeman, anywhere, there is a clearly defined list of priorities, and the first item on that list is that life must be preserved. On down the roster are things such as keeping the peace and arresting the guilty. Time hung frozen in the den as the paramedics tried to help the victim live. Finally, she was carried out to a Southland ambulance and rushed with sirens screaming toward the Fountain Valley Community Hospital trauma unit. The ambulance was packed with medical personnel; there was no room for Halligan, so Farley instructed him to follow behind in his squad car and stay with the victim as she was treated in the emergency room.

  Dr. Michael Safavian was working the early-morning shift in the emergency room. When the ambulance pulled up, he needed just a glance to see that only heroic measures might bring the victim back.

  It was five minutes after four in the morning when Safavian and the ER crew began to work on the young woman. No air could reach her right lung; clotted blood blocked the way. Safavian inserted a trocar into that lung to release blood, hoping the organ would reinflate. At the same time, he ordered three units of blood to be transfused into the patient.

  No response.

  Halligan watched as the emergency room surgeon tried one final, heroic measure. Without anesthetic—she needed none—Safavian cut into the young woman's left chest and reached in so that he could massage her heart, but it lay leaden and still in his hands.

  At twenty-six minutes past four, she was pronounced dead. Cause of death, or rather manner of death, was apparent. There were two bullet wounds of entry in her chest.

  Joe Luckey, an Orange County deputy coroner, arrived at Fountain Valley Community Hospital at five A.M. Luckey found a perfectly formed body still warm to the touch; there was no rigor, no lividity.

  Luckey began to list the hospital appliances: the IV points, a right chest tube, a sutured left chest incision, an airway, and EKG monitor pads. He collected the bloodied nightie and the pair of blue bootie socks, a wedding-engagement ring set, and a gold bracelet, placing them in paper bags. He bagged the victim's hands in case there was some trace evidence caught there.

  And then the dead woman, tentatively identified as Linda Marie Brown, twenty-three, was taken to the sally port entry behind the Orange County coroner's office in Santa Ana. The gurney-scale in the floor just inside the door showed her weight to be 127 pounds.

  Less than two hours after the first call for help came in to 911, Linda Brown rested on a shelf in the cold room, awaiting postmortem examination.

  It had begun—as it does with all homicide investigations. A human being who had been alive only hours before was now dead, deliberately dead by someone else's hand. It was more difficult to deal with somehow when the victim had died in her own home where she had every reason to feel safe. At that point, Garden Grove police investigators had just a peephole into the wall that surrounded the private lives of the people who lived at 12551 Ocean Breeze Drive. There were questions to be answered, and with luck, the truth would emerge. In this case, however, the truth would be a long time coming.

  A long, long time.

  2

  Garden Grove homicide investigator Fred McLean was sound asleep shortly before 4:30 A.M. on the morning of March 19, 1985. But after eighteen and a half years with the department, a phone shrilling in the night was far from unusual. As always, McLean woke instantly alert. It was second nature. His career demanded that he deal with the aftermath of the human emotions, aberrations, and bad judgment that often lead to violent death. An uninterrupted night's sleep was a luxury.

  Lt. Larry Hodges, the Garden Grove watch commander, was on the phone. He instructed McLean to respond to 12551 Ocean Breeze Drive to take over as the primary investigator into the gunshot murder of a young woman who had just been pronounced dead at the Fountain Valley trauma facility. Patrol officers had been called to the house within the past hour, had done preliminary interviews of the occupants, and cordoned off the crime scene.

  McLean stopped at Garden Grove Police Headquarters on Acacia Parkway to pick up Det. Steve Sanders and a homicide kit. He saw that Sgt. John Woods and Det. Bill "Bugs" Morrissey had been rousted out of bed too and were preparing to go to the homicide scene. It was still dark as they pulled up in front of the green stucco and brick bungalow on Ocean Breeze Drive. The street was alive with police cars now. Andy Jauch listed their names and arrival time as Sanders and McLean passed into the brightly lit living room.

  The room was jam-packed with furniture, and it all looked new. In fact, it looked as if someone had gone to a mall and overdosed at Levitz, K Mart, Toys-R-Us, and Video-Land. There were two Early American-style couches upholstered with beige and brown bursts of flowers, two matching brown velour recliners, two rocking chairs—one a child's—two maple end tables, a playpen full of toys, a baby's walker, a gun case with six rifles neatly in place, a coffee table, a number of lamps with their shades still wrapped in plastic, a large console television set, a VCR, and remote controls within arm's reach in every corner of the room. The furnishings were all good, solid, unimaginative stuff, expensive but uninspired, and far too much for this smallish living room.

  Beyond that, every flat surface was covered with knick-knacks. Some were tasteful—a brass clock, a small cut-crystal vase—but some of it looked like carnival prizes. The lamp-clock in a hard plastic case with vibrating metal fronds and constantly changing co
lors, and the bouquets of feathers and artificial ferns, could have been won in a three-pitch-for-a-dollar booth on the midway.

  The walls and tabletops were covered with family pictures and otherworldly paintings featuring unicorns. Knickknack shelves held dozens of ceramic unicorns. The living room was crowded, but it was neat, the thick brown carpet vacuumed, the furniture dusted, and the walls freshly painted. Whoever had decorated this room had worked carefully to keep a brown, beige, white, and yellow color scheme.

  It was a homey-looking room. Whatever had happened to summon police here in the middle of the night had not touched this area of the home. McLean glanced around and saw a pair of man's scuff slippers in front of one of the recliners, a woman's blue Reeboks in the middle of the floor, a zigzagged afghan over the larger rocking chair. A baby's bottle, two-thirds empty, still rested on a lampstand.

  The television was on, but muted. McLean noted idly that it was tuned to MTV; as he glanced over, The Cars were singing "Why Can't I Have You?" Then he looked at the stereotypical print of a clipper ship coursing through rough waves in its frame over the cold fireplace and subconsciously summed up the room. The people who lived here either had enough money to buy whatever they liked, or the credit to charge it. At the same time McLean wondered why everything was brand-new. It was as if this were a home without a history, as if it had just sprung up overnight. How many families can afford to replace every piece of furniture, every gewgaw and lamp, at the same time?

  The rest of the house was the same. A cursory look showed McLean that the family living here denied themselves nothing material. Every single room of the three-bedroom, two-bathroom house was crowded with new furniture. Where one dresser would have served, there were two—or three. Furniture and toys and things were everywhere. It was as if teenagers had been given permission to buy whatever they wanted.

  McLean strolled through the kitchen into the little back hall that doubled as a laundry room. On the dryer, he saw an empty glass and three empty prescription pill bottles. The pill vials lay on their sides, their caps off. He read the labels as he carefully slipped the bottles into evidence bags and initialed them. The first one had held Darvocet-N, 100 mg, #60, issued 11-28-84; the second one Dyazide #100, issued 6-29-82; and the third container—Darvocet-N too, also #100, number 2S, issued 11-24-83.

  McLean wasn't an expert on pharmaceutical matters, but whatever this stuff was meant to do—if the vials had been full to begin with—it looked as if someone had taken an awful lot of it. Beyond that, empty pill bottles seemed out of place in a laundry room.

  McLean lifted the drinking glass cautiously from the dryer, preparing to slip it into a bag and label it. The glass had a trace of clear liquid in the bottom, probably water. It was one of those premiums that fast-food restaurants give away, a Star Trek III glass with a picture of one of the series' villains on the side—Lord Kruge. He examined the glass, curious. The face embossed on the side was that of a glowering man, balding with straight dark hair, a mustache, and a pock-marked face. It was probably only a weird coincidence, but Lord Kruge looked startingly like the man he had just seen sitting on the couch in the living room, chain-smoking.

  Back in the living room, Sergeant Farley briefed Fred McLean and Steve Sanders on what he knew so far. It wasn't much. The woman who had just died was Linda Marie Brown, the twenty-three-year-old wife of the man who sat on the brown-and-beige-flowered couch. She had apparently been shot sometime after midnight while she lay in her bed in the master bedroom. The most likely weapon still lay on the floor in that bedroom.

  "Who was here?" McLean asked.

  Farley gestured toward the nervous man on the couch. "The husband was out someplace and got back here after the shooting occurred. He's the reporting party. The blond girl with the baby is Patricia Bailey. She's seventeen."

  "The baby's hers?"

  Farley shook his head. "No, the child is his—David Brown's—and the dead woman's—Linda Brown's."

  "Anyone else live here?"

  "Cinnamon."

  "Cinnamon?"

  "Cinnamon Brown. She's fourteen, Brown's daughter by an earlier marriage. They think she did it."

  McLean stared at the patrol sergeant. "Who thinks?"

  Farley inclined his head in David Brown's direction. "Him—and Bailey. Cinnamon's gone."

  Farley said that Patricia Bailey had told Officer Scott Davis that she thought she had seen Cinnamon after hearing gunshots, and that someone who looked like Cinnamon went out the back door after the shooting. Davis and Farley had searched the house, and the backyard and a small travel trailer that was pulled up next to the house, for any sign of a suspect or suspects.

  "We didn't find anyone."

  Farley said he had checked the yard thoroughly for the missing teenager, gone through the detached garage, and shone his flashlight into the dog pen behind the garage. There had been no sign of Cinnamon Brown.

  McLean walked to the southwest bedroom, pondering the information he had just received about a likely suspect. He had been a homicide detective long enough to know that anything was possible. Still. Fourteen-year-old girls rarely used guns to get their way. If the kid—Cinnamon—had killed Linda Brown, what had gone on to lead up to it? Temper tantrums and teenage girls went together. But not this.

  What kind of a violent kid were they looking for?

  Or had Patricia Bailey been mistaken? She seemed on the edge of hysteria now; it was quite possible that she didn't know whom she had seen as a gun roared in the dark house.

  The gun was there where the shooter had apparently dropped it. A chrome-plated, .38-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver with a two-inch barrel. Without moving it, McLean could see that it appeared to be loaded with silver-tip bullets, and that two or three of those bullets had been fired.

  Bill Morrissey would work the case as the crime scene investigator. McLean would do the "people part." Morrissey would look for tangible support for the developing case. He would collect physical evidence and photograph everything within the yellow cordon ribbons. If the shooter proved to be Cinnamon—or any other member of the family or regular visitor to this house—Morrissey's job would be more difficult. Trace evidence is more meaningful in a stranger-to-stranger homicide. Everybody who lived here could be expected to leave fingerprints, hairs, fibers, body secretions. Nevertheless, Morrissey would retrieve what might be meaningful later.

  McLean asked Alan Day and Andy Jauch to diagram the scene. Darrow Halligan, back from observing the fruitless efforts to save the victim at Fountain Valley Hospital, was assigned to heel-and-toe it up and down Ocean Breeze Drive—to canvass the neighbors to see if anyone had heard or seen anything unusual during the night.

  Where there had been chaos, there was now a sense of order, stunned and disbelieving as the survivors might be. Each member of the Garden Grove investigative team was painstakingly carrying out his assigned task.

  There was no need to hurry any longer.

  The investigators knew now that two adults, two teenagers, and a baby girl had lived in this house up to the wee hours of the morning, apparently in a family unit of some kind, although their connections to one another were not clear. Linda Brown was dead. Cinnamon Brown was missing. Patricia Bailey sobbed as she sat in the dining room with Linda's baby in her arms. David Brown chain-smoked, visited the bathroom frequently, and paced, his face a study of worry and pain.

  Officer Scott Davis radioed the Dispatch Center with a description for Cinnamon Brown. Patricia thought she had been wearing a sweatshirt and pants. Brown hair, brown eyes. A little over five feet, maybe 120 pounds.

  David Brown, trembling with stress, inhaled deeply and then snubbed out a half-smoked cigarette as he waited in his living room to talk to Fred McLean. Brown's family had evaporated. He had lost his wife; his daughter was somewhere out there in the night.

  What had gone wrong?

  McLean observed David Brown. The man looked forty-five or fifty, but Day, who had done an initial interview with
him, said that he was only thirty-two. McLean asked him his birthdate—just to be sure.

  "November sixteenth, 1952."

  That made him only thirty-two, all right. He was short, not more than five feet seven or so, and thick in the middle, his skin and muscle tone that of a man who rarely went out in the sun and seldom exercised. Brown's hair was dark brown and lank, thinning, and his eyes an oddly variegated mixture of colors. Scars from teenage acne marred his skin. There was a sheen of perspiration on his face, and his hands shook as he lit yet another cigarette.

  Well, hell, the man's world had just exploded. How was he supposed to look? The picture of health and vigor?

  At first glance, David Arnold Brown seemed a man without power, a man who had lost his grip on the reins of his existence. His very posture was limp, his narrow shoulders dragged down by the impact of his wife's violent death. But when he spoke, in response to McLean's questions, his voice was startling. He could have been a radio or television announcer. David Brown had a deep baritone speaking voice, and he answered McLean's questions easily and with authority. He was not vague about what had happened. Painful as it was, he had apparently accepted the fact that his daughter was the shooter. He repeated to Fred McLean the sequence of events he had given to Day, adding a bit of information here and a speculation there.

  He did not seem surprised that Cinnamon had done something so inexplicably cruel. Not at all. It was almost as if he had seen disaster coming and yet been incapable of heading it off. Now, he was trying determinedly to arrange the frayed ends of his life, and the strain was profound.

  "My head aches," Brown murmured to McLean,

  "Do you need some aspirin?"

  "No . . . never mind."

  Fred McLean led David Brown through the twenty-four hours that had just passed. It was apparent that Brown was a man who had spent most of his time working and the rest of it with his extended family, a family in which he seemed to function as the head. He explained that he lived with Linda, their eight-month-old baby, Krystal, and with Linda's sister, Patricia Bailey, seventeen. He added that Patti's mother was ' a "chronic alcoholic," so he and Linda had taken her sister in.