Unnatural Murder by Connie Dial

Author:Connie Dial
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781579624064
Publisher: The Permanent Press
Published: 2014-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

TEN

The Ocean Park Motel on Sepulveda Boulevard in El Segundo was five minutes from the Los Angeles International Airport but an hour or more from Hollywood in rush hour traffic. Richards managed to get them there in less than thirty minutes. After years of working surveillance assignments, he’d accumulated invaluable knowledge of every shortcut and alley in southern California. He drove through places Josie guessed rarely saw vehicular traffic and stayed off the busy streets and freeways.

The motel was a one-story ugly orange stucco building with all its doors facing the gravel parking lot. There were security bars and closed curtains on every window. A plastic swimming pool under a torn beach umbrella was on a patch of grass near the lobby door at the other end of the building. A garden hose was on the ground and the running water had created a mudhole near the pool where a couple of three- or four-year-old boys in their underwear were standing ankle deep in the gooey mess watching the activity. An older dark-skinned woman in a bright green strapless sundress sat in a lawn chair nearby drinking something out of a paper bag. Not the sort of place Josie expected to find the nervous LAPD sergeant, dead or alive.

Behan in his shirtsleeves with his tie loosened was waiting by an open door at the other end of the building. He was leaning against the wall drinking a bottle of cola and watching Richards’s car kick up a dust storm in the lot. Massive perspiration stains under both arms were proof he’d tried to keep his jacket on as long as possible.

“Looks like suicide or accidental,” Behan said, when Josie got close enough to the doorway to get a whiff of the unforgettable stench of putrefying flesh on a very hot day.

She felt bad because her first thought was, “I hope that’s just cola Red’s drinking.”

“What do you mean looks like?” she asked, stepping around Behan and into the room. She’d gotten close but didn’t detect any odor of alcohol on him.

“Look for yourself,” he said, flinging the empty plastic bottle into his open car window.

Although a ceiling fan had been turned up to the highest speed, it was barely moving and air in the room was still muggy, hot and smelly. Josie and Richards stood over the bed where Sergeant John Castro lay dressed only in his white briefs with his hands by his sides, a picture of serenity if he didn’t have that belt strapped around his skinny inner thigh and a syringe stuck in his vein.

Josie had been a narcotics detective for years and immediately recognized the track marks of a dedicated heroin addict on Castro’s leg, hardened veins from hundreds of intravenous injections left his skin looking as if someone had drawn erratic silver lines from his groin to his knee. There was a little white residue left in the spoon he’d used to prepare the drug. Most of the heroin she’d seen lately had been tar or the brown stuff referred to as Mexican mud.

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