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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2020 by Joseph Schneider

  Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by The Book Designers

  Cover image © J Dennis/Shutterstock

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  www.sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is on file with the publisher.

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For my folks, Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, my first and greatest teachers.

  Chapter 1

  Hollywood was at its worst in early morning. The gray light hit in all the wrong places, deepening the cracks in the facades and making the black, fossilized stains of chewing gum dotting the sidewalk stand out like leeches. Dawn made Hollywood into an after-hours club at closing time—the party over, the revelers departed or collapsed where they stood, the magic gone.

  As the first pale hues spread across the desert sky, a coyote ventured down from Griffith Park. The wildfires that had torn through the hills that summer had scattered the rabbits and scrawny deer she depended on for food, and the coyote had been reduced to competing with raccoons over the contents of trash bins. But she wasn’t strong enough to fight them—had already lost an eye—so now she was across Los Feliz and passing Pink Elephant Liquors, suddenly alive to the scent of meat, picking up speed, down Western Avenue and then left onto the boulevard, faster, until her instincts took over fully and sent her streaking along the sidewalk toward her claim.

  A block east, Dustin Sparks—whom Fangoria magazine had once called the “Godfather of Gore”—stared in amazement at the human-shaped thing lying at his feet. Back in ’87, he’d worked on a movie about a gym that had been built over an old prison graveyard. When the local power plant melted down, the radiation cloud woke up the corpses, which broke through the gym’s floor and began attacking the members. An aerobics instructor had tried hiding in the sauna, but the murderous dead had jammed the door and cranked the heat up all the way, roasting her in her spandex suit. It was a stupid idea—no way a sauna could get that hot—but he’d been happy to build the dummy of the burned woman. It hadn’t been a tough job, technically speaking; he’d begun with a wire frame, wrapped it in foam, then covered the whole thing in strips of latex. Over the barbecue paint job, Sparks had finished with a coat of glossy sealant, which left it all with a wet, organic look.

  What lay in front of him now so closely resembled that long-ago prop that, at first, he thought his brain must have finally started to misfire. It was only a matter of time, he knew, considering how many years he’d spent frying it. His arm began throbbing again—invisible, hot bands of iron cinching into his flesh. He gripped the limb, trying to massage the scrambled nerves back into dormancy, and glanced up at the sound of someone approaching.

  But it wasn’t a person. A coyote—eyes wide, tongue lolling—flashed across the cement and clamped its jaws onto the leg of the Halloween dummy. Sparks stumbled back, but the animal didn’t seem to notice him.

  At least I know I’m not seeing things, he thought. Coyotes don’t eat hallucinations.

  As Sparks watched, the coyote whipped its head from side to side until it separated a fist-sized chunk from the thigh, then lifted its nose skyward and snapped it down. It lunged forward again, burying its snout into the wound it had made, and repeated the process, trembling with what Sparks could only suppose was primal ecstasy.

  The thing on the ground wasn’t a dummy. It was too real—the way it lay, the proportions, the viscera, the detail. The smell, which was of roasted meat, not of rubber and paint. Sparks understood these things, but dimly.

  Coyotes don’t eat hallucinations, he thought again, but they also don’t eat Halloween props.

  The animal licked its chops and looked around. It noticed Sparks, lowered its head, and growled. Sparks backed away, stepping off the sidewalk and turning his ankle in the gutter. The pain was bright and urgent, but there was enough adrenaline kicking into his system to keep his attention on the ragged predator. Holding his palms out in a placating gesture, he shuffled in the direction of his apartment. He realized he was staring into the coyote’s eyes and dropped his gaze. You aren’t supposed to look in their eyes, right? Or are you? Do they respect you more if you do? He couldn’t remember, just kept moving.

  The coyote waited until Sparks was halfway down the block before returning to its meal. Sparks broke into a limping run, casting anxious glances over his shoulder until he turned onto his street.

  * * *

  The arrival of lights and siren scared off the coyote, and the responding officers, both veterans, had gaped thunderstruck at the remains for a full minute before radioing detectives and blocking off the scene. Paramedics arrived, even though the body was unquestionably that—a body—along with a truck from Fire Station 82, which was just down the street. They were soon joined by more police units and parking enforcement officers, and together, they extended and reinforced the barricade, which now stretched from Western to Harvard. The resulting snarl of traffic pressed against the surge of rush hour commuters filing onto the nearby 101 on-ramp. Like a clog in an artery, the crime scene caused other vital systems to fail. Los Feliz, Sunset, and even Santa Monica Boulevard began to slow. Franklin was at a dead stop in both directions, and Hollywood was a sea of stopped cars from La Brea to Hillhurst.


  The corpse lay at the base of a pagoda in Thailand Plaza, a restaurant-market complex west of Little Armenia. The pagoda was tiled in mirrored glass and housed the statue of a deity. The serene, gilded god sat on a throne under an elaborate canopy. It was a local landmark and a sacred site for Thai immigrants, who decorated it daily with garlands of fresh flowers. A rickety table at the foot of the pagoda allowed devotees to leave offerings—mostly food and incense. And at some point in the dark, early morning hours, someone had violently upturned the table and dumped the body of the murdered man.

  By the time Tully Jarsdel arrived, he had to navigate between vans from KTLA, FOX, and ABC7. Word of the homicide had reached local anchors, and anyone enjoying the morning news with a cup of coffee would get a rare treat to start their day.

  Lieutenant Gavin met him at the perimeter, briefed him on what little they knew, and told him his partner was already on scene. “Been here a half hour already.”

  “Sorry,” said Jarsdel. “Traffic from my direction was—”

  Gavin waved him away. Jarsdel signed the perimeter log and stepped under the tape. He didn’t need to ask where the body was. Against a backdrop of dingy sidewalk and the sun-faded peach walls of Thailand Plaza, the privacy tent was a stark white anomaly of clean, ordered lines, as conspicuous as an alien craft. Jarsdel headed toward it and the body inside, his heart rate kicking up. It was always that way with him—like those dreams where you’re helplessly drawn toward a door you don’t want to open.

  He stopped, distracted by the sound of shouting. An argument had broken out in front of the barricade where Serrano met Hollywood Boulevard. A man with a camera had tried to duck under the tape, and a patrol officer was threatening him with arrest. Jarsdel recognized the cop as Will Haarmann. He’d recently transferred from Valley Bureau, where he’d been picked as the face of a Los Angeles magazine article titled “Yes, We Have the Hottest Cops in America.” Jarsdel wouldn’t have known about the piece or about Haarmann, except for some anonymous station comedian who’d cut it out and left it on his desk. It’d been accompanied by a Post-it reading Tough break—maybe next time!

  Jarsdel watched, fascinated, as the man became more combative. He shouted something to Haarmann about rights of the press, then stepped forward, lifting his camera to take a picture of the officer. Haarmann put his hand out to stop him, and the civilian swatted it aside. The cop went on autopilot then, quickly spinning the man around and bracing him against the squad car. The camera, which looked expensive, sailed a few feet and smashed into the curb with the sound of a champagne glass breaking. Within seconds, the citizen was shoved into the back seat of the car, his loud protests snuffed by the door closing behind him.

  Jarsdel thought Haarmann had made a mistake. He hadn’t used excessive force, but anyone with a phone could’ve caught the whole thing, and petty shit like that could antagonize potential witnesses. He made a mental note to avoid working with Haarmann on any sensitive assignments, then reluctantly crossed the last dozen yards to the tent.

  The first thing he noticed was the smell. It wasn’t the sour-sweet uppercut of putrefaction, nor was it the sickening copper of congealing blood. The smell emanating from the tent was so unusual under the circumstances that Jarsdel thought for a moment his mind was playing tricks on him.

  He hadn’t yet had breakfast, and the unmistakable odor of cooked meat gave his stomach a twinge. He pushed open the tent flaps and stepped inside.

  * * *

  It didn’t look like any body he’d seen before, and in his five years on the force, Jarsdel had lost count of how many times he’d looked upon death.

  The corpse was naked. Even its hair was gone, with only a few patches of ash to mark where it had once been. Heat had contorted the body so that it was more or less in a fetal position, what pathologists called the “pugilistic attitude”—elbows flexed, knees bent toward the chest, genitals tucked between the thighs. Patrol had radioed that they’d chased off a coyote, but to Jarsdel, it looked more like a shark had been at work. The right leg was ravaged.

  Though the body lay on its side, the head was twisted upward, giving the investigators a clear view of the face, something Jarsdel found at once horrifying yet irresistible to look upon.

  The lips had been cooked to nearly nothing, stretching back to expose a set of yellowed teeth, and gave the impression that the man was grinning up at them. The eyes were gone, either having popped in the heat or dried up like raisins and disappeared into the ocular cavities.

  Jarsdel wanted to bend down so he could touch it and saw that Ipgreve, the medical examiner, had been smart enough to bring a gardener’s pad to cushion his knees.

  “Can I borrow that a sec?”

  “Sure,” said the ME, straightening up.

  Jarsdel knelt and ran a gloved hand lightly along the cadaver’s thigh. “Still warm. Like a cooked turkey.”

  “Yup.”

  “Evenly, though. No charring. Like it was baked slow in an oven.”

  Jarsdel wiped a sleeve across his forehead. It was getting hot inside the privacy tent, due in no small part to the hundred-fifty-pound slab of cooked human they were sharing the cramped space with. He shook his head as if to clear it. “What are we even looking at here?”

  “It gets weirder,” Ipgreve said. “Check out his fingers.”

  Jarsdel did. The hands were curled into fists, but the fingernails he could see were badly damaged—split or melted, others missing entirely. He could tell by their odd cant that a few of the fingers were broken. The victim had tried desperately to claw and beat his way out of whatever had held him prisoner.

  The ME squatted beside Jarsdel. “And c’mere. Take a closer look at his face. See?”

  Jarsdel had been trying his best not to—thought he might be seeing those gaping black eye sockets and that lipless, grinning mouth in his dreams. Steeling himself, he forced his attention to where Ipgreve was pointing. The burns had turned most of the cadaver’s flesh a deep chestnut brown, but the skin on the forehead was splotchy with bruising.

  “What do you make of it?” Jarsdel asked. “Knocked unconscious before…before whatever happened to him?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’ll show you why.” Ipgreve lifted the cadaver’s head. “If he’d been struck from the front, then we’d also likely have contrecoup bruising on the back or sides of his head, where he fell. But thanks to all the hair being burned off, we can see it’s clean. No bruises.” Ipgreve gently lowered the head back down. Using a pen, he indicated the discolorations. “We’ve got several major blows—at least four, probably five. We might even have a skull fracture with this one here. I think these injuries were sustained as he struggled to escape. Either that, or…”

  “What?”

  The ME made a face. “Might’ve done it on purpose—tried to knock himself out. Had to’ve hurt like hell, going out that way.”

  “Then that’s your finding? He was baked alive?”

  “You know it’s too early for me to say conclusively, but considering the nature and extent of the perimortem trauma, I’d put it at the top of my list.” Ipgreve shook his head, marveling at the thing in front of them. “Can’t wait to get this guy on my table.”

  “I admire your enthusiasm.”

  “You have any idea just how odd this is?” Ipgreve went on. “Yes, it was an oven, but not an ordinary oven. Something big enough to hold a man, but with no element or open flame. The heat was immense but indirect. Not even a rack, else we’d have grill marks on the body. Rules out anything you’d have in a restaurant, even an industrial baking facility. And it’s gonna play hell on your timeline. Won’t see any of the usual determining factors, like putrefaction or rigor, and obviously, he won’t cool like a normal body.” As he spoke, Ipgreve inserted a probe below the sternum. He removed it, then fed a thermometer into the hole. The digital readout blinked.

  “I’d say our f
ella here was exposed to temperatures in excess of four hundred fifty degrees. While it won’t be any help with time of death, a liver spike’ll at least give you an idea of when he got here.”

  The thermometer beeped, and Jarsdel leaned closer for a better look.

  “138.3,” said Ipgreve, writing down the temperature. “What’d it get down to last night? Upper fifties? So…” He made some calculations.

  Jarsdel knew whatever Ipgreve came up with would be very rough. Time of death using body temperature was usually calculated by an algorithm based on Newton’s law of cooling, and ideally incorporated two measurements taken hours apart. The fact that this body was outside, in an unstable temperature, further complicated the estimate.

  “What time’s it? Almost nine? Then he hasn’t been here more than about three hours, give or take.” Ipgreve concluded. “If it were much longer, he’d be at more like 120, maybe 110. Air temp has only risen to 66 degrees, which is still on the chilly side, and you also gotta figure the sidewalk would’ve acted as an effective cooling agent. But the body’s still warm. This guy’s bigger, of course, but what you said about it being like a turkey wasn’t far off. Just imagine taking your bird out of the oven on Thanksgiving and putting it on the patio. Won’t stay hot for long.”

  That wasn’t good news. Jarsdel had checked: Thai Pavilion, the restaurant located above the market in Thailand Plaza, closed at midnight, with the last employees leaving around one thirty. That meant that not only would no one at the restaurant have seen anything, but foot traffic would’ve been practically nonexistent when the body had been dumped that morning.

  Ipgreve was right—calculating a timeline would be next to impossible. There was no telling how long the body had been kept in its original location before being moved. They’d have to link it with a name before they’d be able to reconstruct the victim’s final hours, and getting an ID was going to be tough. They couldn’t exactly put a picture of him on television, and considering the damage to the hands, fingerprints would likely be useless. Forensic dentistry could confirm a victim’s identity, but it didn’t do any good unless you already had someone in mind. Their best bet was to coordinate with Missing Persons, then arrange for DNA matching once a likely subject emerged.