‘Yep, reads like any other detective’s résumé I’ve ever read. Nashorn was born in El Granada, San Mateo County in Northern California, where he lived until he was twelve or thirteen or something like that. His parents moved to Los Angeles then. His father was an accountant, and got offered a better job down here. His mother was a church-going housewife.’
They came up to a red traffic light. Hunter leaned over and grabbed the file from the backseat.
‘Nashorn was a regular school kid,’ Garcia continued. ‘Not the best student, but not the worst either. Though he lived in Maywood, he attended high school in Bell. He never went to college. Worked several odd jobs for a few years after high school before deciding to join the force. It took him a while to make detective.’
‘Twelve years,’ Hunter said, reading from the file. ‘Failed the exam four times.’
‘He’s a widower. No kids.’
Hunter nodded. ‘Got married when he was twenty-six,’ he said, reading from the file. ‘His wife died less than three years later.’
‘Yeah, I read that. Some odd heart condition they never even knew she had.’
‘Cardiomyopathy,’ Hunter confirmed. ‘Heart-muscle disease. He never remarried.’
‘From what I gathered he was a good cop,’ Garcia said, shifting his car into gear and turning left into North Mission Road. ‘Put plenty of dirtbags away during his detective years. And then what every cop dreads happened. He got shot on the job, pursuing some lowlife street mugger down in Inglewood.’ Garcia shook his head. ‘Poor guy. In Brazil they’d say he was born with his butt facing the sun covered in chili powder.’
Carlos Garcia was born in São Paulo, Brazil. The son of a Brazilian federal agent and an American history teacher, he and his mother moved to Los Angeles when Garcia was only ten years old, after his parents’ marriage collapsed. Even though he’d lived in America most of his life, Garcia could speak Portuguese like a true Brazilian, and he still visited the country every few years.
Hunter looked at his partner and screwed up his face. ‘What? What the hell does that mean?’
‘It means he was born unlucky, and in Nashorn’s case, I think it applies.’
‘Really? So what do Brazilians say if they think someone was born lucky? “He was born with his butt facing the moon covered in sugar”?’
‘Precisely.’ Garcia looked impressed.
‘You’re kidding?’
‘Nope, that’d be pretty much the exact translation.’
‘Interesting analogy,’ was all Hunter could say. The next couple of pages in Nashorn’s file were a brief of the latest investigations Nashorn had been involved with.
‘His captain said that he was a man of habits,’ Garcia offered. ‘Always took his vacation at the same exact time of year – first few days of summer. Always two weeks by himself out in the sea, fishing. He used all his savings to buy that boat. According to his captain, that boat
‘No girlfriend, no partner.’ Hunter was still reading from the file. ‘Next of kin are an uncle and aunt who still live in El Granada.’
‘Yep, his captain is getting in touch with them.’
Hunter checked the file for Nashorn’s home address – an apartment in East LA. A forensic team had already been dispatched there this morning. Last night, they’d found no cellphone, computer, address book, diary, or anything of that sort in Nashorn’s boat, and according to his captain there was nothing at his desk either. No personal files in his hard drive. They were checking his work emails. Hunter was hoping something would turn up from Nashorn’s apartment search. He closed the file and returned it to the backseat as Garcia pulled into the County Coroner’s parking lot.
Forty
Alice Beaumont printed out another document page and placed it on the floor next to the tens of pages that were already there. With Hunter and Garcia out of the office, she had temporarily turned the place into her own private research haven.
She had a quick stab at finding out what the shadow image created by the second sculpture could mean, but after three quarters of an hour searching the net, she had nothing that even remotely excited her. Unlike the first shadow puppets, she found no mythological meaning that could be attached to the entire image. If she broke the image down, then it was easy to link the distorted head with horns to any devil figure she liked, but that didn’t explain the four smaller shadow figures created by Nashorn’s severed fingers.
Alice wanted to carry on searching, but she knew that, for now, the investigation’s priority was to work on the lists of perpetrators Derek Nicholson had put away over the years. If she could find some sort of link to any case Andrew Nashorn had worked on, either as a detective or as a Support Division officer, that could give them the starting point they were so desperately looking for.
Alice sat on the floor with all the printouts surrounding her and started rereading and regrouping them in lots of two, three, four and sometimes five pages.