Suicide Run

unclaimed and unidentified, her body reposing in the refrigerator at the coroner’s office while Sheehan and I worked the case.
    It was tough. Most cases start with the victim. Who that person was and where she lived become the center of the wheel, the grounding point. Everything comes from the center. But we didn’t have that and we didn’t have the true crime scene. We had nothing and we were going nowhere fast.
    All that changed with Teresa Corazon. She was the deputy coroner assigned to the case officially known as Jane Doe #90–91. While preparing the body for an autopsy she came across the lead that would take us first to McCaleb and then to Seguin.
    Corazon found that the victim’s body had apparently been washed with an industrial-strength cleaner before being discarded on the hillside. It was an attempt by the killer to destroy trace evidence. This in itself, however, was both a clue and trace evidence. The cleaning agent could help lead to the killer’s identity or help tie him to the crime.
    However, it was another discovery made by Corazon that turned the case for us. While photographing the body the deputy coroner noticed an impression in the skin on the rear left hip. Postmortem lividity indicated the blood in the body had settled on the left half, meaning the body had been lying on its left side in the time between the stilling of the heart and the dropping of the body down the hillside off Mulholland. The evidence indicated that during the time that the blood settled, the body had been lying on top of the object that left the impression on the hip.
    Using angled light to study the impression, Corazon found that she could clearly see the number 1, the letter J and part of a third letter that could have been the upper left stem of an H, a K or an L.
    “A license plate,” I said when she called me to the autopsy suite to view the discovery. “He put her down on a license plate.”
    “Exactly,” said Corazon.
    We formed the theory that whoever had killed the girl with no name had hidden the body in the trunk of a car until it was nighttime and safe to dump it. After carefully cleaning the body, the killer put it into the trunk of his car, mistakenly putting it down on part of a license plate that had been taken off the car and also placed in the trunk. That part of the theory was that the license plate had been removed and possibly replaced with a stolen plate as one more safety measure that would help the killer avoid detection if his car happened to be spotted by a suspicious passerby at the Mulholland overlook.
    Though the skin impression gave no indication of what state issued the license plate, we decided to go with the percentages. From the state Department of Motor Vehicles we obtained a list of every car registered in Los Angeles County that carried a plate beginning 1JH, 1JK and 1JL.
    The list contained over three thousand names of car owners. We then cut forty percent of those names by discounting the female owners. The remaining names were slowly fed into the National Crime Index computer and we came up with a list of forty-six men with criminal records ranging from minor to the extreme.
    The first time I studied the list of forty-six, I knew. I felt certain that one of the names on it belonged to the killer of the girl with no name.

    The Golden Gate lived up to its name in the afternoon sun. It was packed with cars going both ways and the tourist turnoff on the north side had the LOT FULL sign up. I kept moving, into the rainbow-painted tunnel and through the mountain. Soon enough I could see San Quentin up on the right. A foreboding-looking place in an idyllic spot, it housed the worst criminals California had to offer. And I was going to see the worst of the worst.

    “Detective Bosch?”
    I turned from the window where I had been looking down at the white stones of the veterans cemetery across Wilshire. A man in a white shirt and maroon tie stood holding open the door to the FBI offices. He looked like he was in his midthirties, with a lean build and healthy look about him. He was smiling.
    “Terry McCaleb?”
    “That’s me.”
    We shook hands and he invited me back, leading me through a warren of wood-paneled hallways and offices until we came to his. It looked like it might have been a janitor’s closet at one time. It was smaller than a solitary-confinement cell and had just enough room for a desk and two chairs.
    “Guess it’s a good thing my partner didn’t want to