If You Really Loved Me Read online

  Back at the house on Ocean Breeze Drive, Bill Morrissey continued to take pictures, gather evidence, and supervise the measurement of each room of the house. If, as Cinnamon Brown had now admitted, she had shot Linda, he needed the evidence that would substantiate her confession. More of the body of the crime, as it were.

  McLean had reported to Morrissey that Cinnamon said she had shot the gun three times—twice at Linda, and once in Patti Bailey's room. And Patti herself said she had been awakened by gunfire. Morrissey moved to the front bedroom. Patti's room.

  Morrissey's photographs showed that, like the rest of the house, Patti Bailey's room was crammed with new furniture. It seemed a room any teenage girl would love. The walls were papered in beige, yellow, and brown, and there were crisply starched white sheers over the window, topped with lacy valances. Patti's furniture was heavy maple with brass drawer pulls, and her bed was a smaller version of the white iron bed where her sister had died. The covers were turned back, as if someone had leapt out in a hurry.

  There was a trundle bed in the room, pulled from beneath Patti's bed; it had not been slept in.

  Patti had her own stereo, her own television set. And she had a profusion of dolls and teddy bears and stuffed animals. The dolls were "collector's items," the kind offered to viewers of television shopping networks. Any one of them would cost a hundred dollars or more. There were books— the only books in the house beyond a Reader's Digest condensed-book series and the Bible on one of David Brown's chests. Patti's books were teen romance novels. Innocent puppy love books, much beloved by pubescent girls, the precursors to Harlequin romances—without the sex scenes.

  David Brown had not only taken his wife's sister into his home, he had given her a room that any girl would envy. And she kept it in immaculate condition, with all of her treasures neatly arranged and all her furnishings polished.

  Morrissey scanned the walls, looking for some sign that a bullet might have pierced them. He gazed around the room, taking it in in segments, his camera dispassionately recording everything. The mirrors, TV, stereo, window, were all intact. The dolls and teddy bears sat undisturbed, as did Patti's large jewelry case, and the gold and crystal display case above it. There were golden chains tumbling out of the crammed drawers.

  Just over the head of Patti's bed there was a little sconce holding teddy bears and a framed picture, an etching in pale silvery tones. Morrissey bent closer. It was a bird of some sort taking flight. He had seen similar birds in David Brown's office. Eagles or—what were they?—phoenix birds. Like in that old movie with Jimmy Stewart and his crew who crashed in the desert and rebuilt their shattered plane, The Flight of the Phoenix.

  Morrissey was a no-nonsense man, not given to musing over the deeper meaning of mythical birds. His eyes were grainy from lack of sleep, and he had hours to go as he methodically preserved the olive-green bungalow and its contents with photographs and measurements. But at the moment, he wanted most to find the single missing bullet that would validate Patricia Bailey's firm belief that Cinnamon had stood in the door of her room and deliberately fired a gun at her.

  And then he saw it. He had been staring right at it without registering what he saw. There was a large wall hanging over Patti Bailey's bed—about three feet by five feet. It was the kind of tapestry often sold at roadside stands, along with cement lawn statues, birdbaths, and wooden whirligigs. This was a familiar staple in the tapestry medium—tigers playing with their cubs against the bright yellow earth, green palm trees, and a red sky.

  One tiger had taken a bullet right through its plush heart.

  Morrissey figured the slug had to be embedded deep in the wall behind the hanging. That meant the tapestry would come down, and if the bullet was not resting just behind it, the wall was coming down too. As luck would have it, the wall had to be carefully sawed in a large rectangle, removed, and there, between the studs, Morrissey found one battered .38 slug.

  Beyond that slug, Bill Morrissey's roster of evidence removed from the Ocean Breeze Drive house the morning of March 19 included:

  Gunshot-residue evidence kit with swabs from two tests—David Arnold Brown and Patricia Bailey.

  One Smith & Wesson .38 revolver, serial #R304915 (initialed by officer), from floor of. . . master bedroom.

  One Smith & Wesson, Model 19-4, .357 magnum revolver, serial #6F8K783, with six live rounds, in holster in plastic bag, from master bedroom.

  One box Winchester .38 Special silvertip ammunition—from beneath bed in master bedroom.

  One box Winchester .357 magnum silvertip ammunition—from beneath bed in master bedroom.

  Bloodstained bed sheet, multifloral pattern, pillows and cases, blanket.

  One black leather "Liberty" holster for .38 Smith & Wesson, with chrome metal belt clip, in drawer in master bedroom.

  Drinking glass with Star Trek character.

  Sample of clear liquid in glass.

  Three empty prescription vials.

  One 56½" by 38½" tiger wall tapestry.

  In combination, or separately, these items might make salient physical evidence in a murder case. Certainly, the murder gun would. But what about the rest of it?

  The crime scene investigators stayed at the house hours after David Brown and Patricia Bailey left at seven A.M. The grieving family fled to Arthur and Manuela's home with only a suitcase filled with items for the baby. They could not bear to stay in the house—not yet. The investigators found it difficult to work around them and were relieved to see them go.

  Alan Day suggested that David Brown return in an hour; he would be able to give him a better idea then of how long it might be before they could occupy the house. When David and Patti Bailey returned, Day told them it would be several hours more, maybe even a few days. They were allowed in to collect toys and diapers, which they loaded into David's van.

  David was concerned about some jewelry that he had left in the master bedroom and asked if he could retrieve it. Day said that wouldn't be possible, but he offered to get it if Brown could describe what he wanted.

  "My wristwatch—a Rolex—and my cross, on a chain. I took them off last night and put them on my chest of drawers."

  Day located the items in a jewelry box and brought them to Brown. Once again, David and Patti drove off.

  When the investigators were finished, Morrissey would oversee the locking of the residence with a police lock; he had obtained the code for the security alarm system from David Brown. They had not yet begun to search the Terry travel trailer, and they would need to come back to the house itself.

  The investigators left at the shooting scene on Ocean Breeze Drive worked through the morning, their night's sleep lost forever. By 12:22, the house was empty. The yellow ribbons whipping in the March wind cordoned off the crime search area and told passersby that something unusual had happened there. Neighbors gathered in knots to stare, and to try to remember something—anything—that might have forewarned them that things were not well in the Brown household.

  But they were hard put to come up with anything. Nobody had really known David and Linda Brown, and the teenagers who lived with them. They were the only renters on the street, and the Browns had seemed an extremely close-knit family who had little time to talk with neighbors. With their extended family visiting so often, they appeared sufficient unto themselves. Later, upon reflection, neighbors would have more to say to reporters from the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times. Encouraged— entreated—to search their minds for something, anything, that might be important, they came forth with blurry remembrances.

  Within hours of Linda Brown's murder, police investigators believed that they knew who had done the shooting; they even had a motive that seemed plausible, if simplistic. Still, they suspected they might never know the real reasons Cinnamon Brown had killed her stepmother. The designated shooter had lapsed into a comatose state from which she might never awaken.

  6

  When Garden Grove homicide investigator Fre
d McLean's steel-blue eyes first met the warm brown eyes of Orange County coroner's deputy Bernice Mazuca, the ambiance was hardly idyllic for romance. "Bernie," the more talkative of the pair, smiled as she recalled their meeting. "We were in Little Saigon at a triple murder scene, and Fred and I were trying to identify shoe impressions in blood. I said, 'Nike,' and he said, 'New Balance,' and we looked at each other and suddenly realized we had more in common than a mutual interest in death investigation. We were both runners." The initial attraction long outlasted that murder. They got married.

  Fred McLean, compactly muscled at fifty-three, a ruddy-cheeked blend of Scotch and German ancestry, was the one obsessed with running. He began each day by traversing a brisk five- to seven-mile course. He was what you might expect if you took a career Marine and turned him into a street cop, tough and taciturn at first glance, a softie when his veneer was peeled away. He did not peel easily.

  "My folks came to L.A. from Kansas in the thirties to find gold; they found the Depression instead, and I was born in the Salvation Army hospital in Los Angeles. Back in Wellington, Kansas, my grandfather owned half the businesses in town and had a verbal contract with the Santa Fe Railroad to ice their produce cars. The Santa Fe built a spur to Wellington right up to Heinrich Wilhelm Glamann and his enterprises. The old man gave my dad a job when L.À. fizzled on him, paid him eighty-five cents a day—good wages in 1937."

  And so began McLean's sporadic "commute" between Kansas and California. His love of sports stemmed from the glory years of football in Kansas when his team was first in the state. He joined the Marine Corps in 1956 where he played guard and blocking back on the football team in the single-wing formation. Young McLean soared high and fast in the Marine Corps. He became a first lieutenant when he was barely twenty-one, flying 119s, Panther jets, and any aircraft the Marine Corps used. He wasn't thirty when he was one of the "old guys" who shepherded five thousand young Marines to stand by off the Bay of Pigs during the Cuban missile crisis. "They never got to fight. They were too young to appreciate that; they were so revved up they damn near tore up a town."

  McLean learned a lot about human behavior, and a great deal about discipline and commitment, in the Corps. He loved it all. When he said, "The Marine Corps was my life," you know he meant it and could sense what it cost him to walk away. But McLean's first wife gave him an ultimatum after he had been with the Corps for a decade. He seldom had stateside duty; his son rarely saw his father. The choice was simple. The Marine Corps or the marriage.

  McLean chose the marriage.

  Police work was the only civilian career that appealed to him, and it began as a grudging second choice. McLean's wife was dubious about it, suspecting—correctly—that it might be as dangerous and as time-consuming as being in the Marine Corps. She agreed only after he promised he would stay away from Los Angeles County and sign on with some sleepy Orange County department.

  Garden Grove fitted that description when McLean joined the force on August 26, 1966.

  But not for long.

  The marriage foundered, but McLean's fascination with police work bloomed. To counteract the fine edge of tension that walks with a policeman always, McLean ran and played football. He was forty-eight when he hung up his shoulder pads for the last time. He was out in the field on training maneuvers with his Marine Corps reserve unit until he was fifty. And to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, he ran fifty miles. Over the years, McLean survived shoot-outs and dicey encounters, and his skill with people moved him steadily up through the ranks from patrol into the detective unit.

  He had found his niche.

  As the primary investigator into Linda Marie Brown's murder, McLean was present at her autopsy. The postmortem examination began at nine-thirty A.M., five hours after the young mother had been pronounced dead.

  From the "cold room," in the Orange County Forensic Center, the gurney carrying Linda's body turned right and trundled perhaps twenty feet down the hallway to the entrance of the autopsy room. It was L-shaped, bright with overhead lights, as clean as constant scrubbing with floral-scented disinfectant could make it, and equipped with a half dozen stainless steel tables. Depending on the weather, the phase of the moon, or any number of conditions that seemed to serve as catalysts for violent death, the tables might all be occupied or there might be only a single postmortem in progress.

  Sly irreverence, the black humor that makes constant exposure to tragedy bearable to those who must deal with it every day, revealed itself impishly in the Orange County coroner's autopsy room. The light-switch plates bore likenesses of tiny, naked cartoon men. When the switches were on, the little men had erections. The switch plates had been there so long that only a visitor noticed anymore.

  Dr. Richard I. Fukomoto performed the autopsy, witnessed by McLean and his fellow investigator Steve Sanders; Joe Luckey and Bill Lystrup of the Orange County Coroner's Office; Rob Keister, a criminalist with the Orange County Sheriffs Office; and Mary De Guelle, a forensic specialist with the Sheriffs Office. All had attended numerous postmortems, and they gathered around the table with interest, but with a dispassion achieved over long time. Experience had taught them to suspend emotion in this room.

  But sometimes this removal from what was before them was difficult to maintain. Linda Brown had been a beautiful young woman with a perfect figure. Her skin was pale as snow now and marred with two bullet wounds of entry between her full breasts.

  Rob Keister began the procedure by retrieving evidence on the body. The Orange County criminalist placed a sheet of clear acetate over the stippling pattern on Linda Brown's chest, then marked the pattern of the gun-barrel debris. He plucked three unburned kernels from her breast and retained them for evidence.

  Linda's hands also had several unburned powder kernels, and these were removed before GSR tests were done. Routine—the position of the wounds and the gun made it well nigh impossible for Linda to have shot herself, but she might have held her hands up in a vain gesture of protection. More likely, the shooter had simply been very close to her as the gun was fired.

  Fingernail scrapings were collected, and the victim's pubic hair was combed for alien hairs or fibers. None were collected.

  Dr. Fukomoto began dictating as he approached his subject. Pathologists measure precisely, and Fukomoto adhered to that as he described the first wound as "upper midchest wall, located forty-nine and a half inches from the sole of the foot, and thirteen inches from the top of the head, slightly to the right of the midline—approximately one-half inch."

  This wound just inside the right breast measured 1.1 centimeters and was circled with a concentrated "tattooing" of gunpowder and barrel debris with a diameter of one inch. There was less tattooing extending over another two inches. Fukomoto detected no burning of the tissues and found the angle of fire was from below, traveling slightly upward and left to right. The fact that the tissue was not actually burned ruled out a contact wound, but the gun would have had to be six inches or less from the victim when fired.

  The second wound was located forty-seven and a half inches from the sole of the foot and fifteen inches from the top of the head. The wound itself was the same size as the first, but the tattooing affect sprayed over a much wider radius—up to nine inches—with debris from the gun apparent all the way up to the chin and left side of the face. To the layman, the tattooing of gun-barrel debris means little; to the criminalist, it can pinpoint the distance the shooter stood from the victim. The second of Linda's wounds had resulted from a bullet fired from twelve to twenty inches away.

  There was no way to determine which had come first; they had been sustained within minutes of each other.

  Fukomoto turned the body over and saw an area of hemorrhaging on the back. With the flick of a scalpel, he removed a slightly deformed large-caliber slug from just beneath the skin near the midline of the back. A second, similar slug was removed near the upper right shoulder. Rob Keister took possession of the two battered slugs and bagged them, noting that no
trace evidence was found on either.

  Fukomoto executed the usual Y-shaped incision—down obliquely from each shoulder, meeting at midline. Autopsy means "to see for one's self," and the procedure can give up unfathomable secrets. There is irony in the study of the dead. So many postmortems reveal ravaged organs, hardened arteries, systems that should have long since shut down and still have worked remarkably well for decades. Only misadventure or violence ended the lives of the subjects.

  And in the young, as in the examination of Linda Brown, the body so recently an efficient machine, the heart's arteries pink and glistening with no deposits of fatty plaque, the lungs light pink despite Linda's continual worry that she could not seem to quit smoking, the kidneys healthy. Everything healthy.

  But she was dead.

  One bullet had merely grazed her right lung, but had pierced the superior vena cava; the other had entered the right lung. The superior vena cava is a large vein that returns blood to the right atrium of the heart. Vital. Linda Bailey Brown could not have survived more than fifteen minutes— on the outside—with a hole in the vena cava, unless she had immediate medical care. She might have lived for some time with the wound to the right lung alone.

  Linda Brown had bled to death. She was only very tenuously alive when Officer Darrow Halligan bent over her to see if she breathed, and she was still clinically alive when she reached the hospital. At this point, it was too late to be sure how long she might have been alive and bleeding internally in gushing freshets of blood from her vena cava and her lung before help was summoned.

  Her husband had been afraid to check on her. He had been terrified about what he should do, and in his panic, he had called his father for advice before he called 911. Would the sequence of his calls have made any difference? Probably not. Linda had been so terribly injured.

  Still, it made Fred McLean wonder. He himself was a man of action. He could not fathom the thought that a man would not rush to check on a wife he loved, how he could wait until a policeman got there to find out if she was dead or alive.