Read White Sister for Free Online

this get sideways. Wherever she is, I'll find her."
    "What if . . . what if . . ."
    "She's not dead, son. She can't be. I won't allow it."
    After that, we didn't know what to say to each other.
    "I'll call you in the morning," I said.
    "Okay."
    "Love you," I said. There was silence. "Say it back, Chooch. I need to hear it."
    "I love you, too, Dad." He sounded devastated.
    I hung up the phone and looked out the window again at the North Mission Road building. It was a new, plain-looking structure that housed the morgue and all of our forensic science units. Like most municipal buildings, budget considerations had deprived it of any architectural extras. It was a shoebox with windows.
    I'd worked enough homicides to know pretty much how the next hour would play out. Ray Tsu would bring the corpse here, and do the preliminary death photos, prints, and dental work. Sepulveda and Figueroa would finish up at the crime scene, impound the car, and then head back to stand over the body while Ray, or the chief ME did the autopsy. Because Alexa was missing, it was an APE case and ticking PR bomb. For that reason, there wouldn't be the standard two-week wait for an autopsy, which had been a growing problem for homicide cops in L . A . They would do the cut tonight. That meant if I moved fast, I might have half an hour to forty minutes alone to work on Ray Tsu before Tommy and Rafie arrived. I had to make that forty minutes count, and find out who did this dead Crip was. Then I had to work that angle fast. It was the best thread in the case.
    I sat in the front seat of the Acura, running the other permutations. I couldn't come up with a theory that accommodated what appeared to have happened. If you took Alexa out of the equation, it was easier to understand. A dead banger in cuffs, executed up on Mulholland, could fit a lot of scenarios. He could have been kidnapped, driven up to that lonely spot, popped, and left there for somebody to find in the morning. Handcuffs were easy to get. I'd seen dozens of hits that more or less went down like that.
    It was adding Alexa to the picture that skewed everything. What series of events, what missing facts, made Alexa's involvement and subsequent disappearance add up? I couldn't think of anything.
    Half an hour later, the coroner's van swept into the lot. I waited while Ray Tsu and the driver pulled the gurney out of the back. They popped the wheels down and rolled the dead Crip inside. On their way, they hit a button to close the electric parking lot gate.
    I jumped out of the Acura, locked it with a chirp, and sprinted across the street, making it through the gates just as they were closing. I rang the bell at the back door of the building, held up my badge for the security camera, and was buzzed in.
    Nobody was sitting behind the downstairs admitting desk. The midnight-to-six shift had been pared in half during the last round of budget cuts. Usually there were two guards back here a lucky breach of security because I had no business to conduct. There was a camera in the entry hall taping the room, so I crossed to the security desk and signed in for the benefit of the guard up on three, writing Samik Mampuna on the entry log. Then I took the elevator to the fourth floor where autopsies and body preps were done.
    Under most circumstances, the morgue is a crowded place full of sheet-covered corpses waiting for their final desecration. Every time I'm up here, I wonder if one day my own precious remains will be parked in these over-wide corridors, waiting for this last indignity. Strange chemical smells mixed with some disinfectant pine scent wafted through the halls. I'd been up here when there were over twenty bodies parked on metal gurneys, most of them too young to be dead, each tray with its own special tale of woe and unfulfilled ambitions. Tonight, for some reason, the corridor was almost empty. Two lonely corpses under green sheets haunted the hallway. The building was unusually quiet. I saw a