Scenes of Crime

Book 0: A Vic Varallo Mystery

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

The bodies of three young children, abandoned on a bleak hillside, are discovered by Lieutenant O'Connor's Afghan hound, and so begins another long and tough investigation for the Glendale Police Department. Vic Varallo, O'Connor and team are also tasked with a serial rapist, the murder of a respectable accountant, and a baby kidnapped during an armed robbery gone wrong. With both their wives expecting a baby soon, it's a wonder Varallo and O'Connor have any time for murder. 'My favourite American crime-writer' New York Herald Tribune

Release date: July 28, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

O’Connor toiled up the steep slope, panting. He reflected ruefully that he’d been known in former days as a chaser of females, but he’d never expected to be
chasing this kind of female over such terrain. He stopped to get his breath and shouted after her. “Maisie, girl, not so fast!”

She galloped back and, rising up at him lovingly, nearly knocked him over. “I had to fall for one like you,” said O’Connor exasperatedly, and she waved her feather-duster tail
at him pleasedly. She was outsize even for an Afghan hound, and her silver-blue coat shone in the warm June sun. Officially she was registered as Nefer-Mayet-Yti of Sakkara, but even at fifteen
months she was not a dignified dog, and for some time had answered to the nickname. Well, Katy had warned him, thought O’Connor, getting out a cigarette. Running up mountains after his blue
girl, seeing she got enough exercise; but he wasn’t going to run any farther today. The usual June heat wave was building up, and already a faint haze obscured the view over the city from
this thickly brushed hill above Glendale College.

O’Connor sat down on a convenient flat boulder and relaxed; it had been a pull up the hill, from the nearest street nearly a mile below. It was past ten o’clock; let Maisie have
another good run up here, and get on home to take Katy out to the late Sunday brunch at Pike’s Verdugo Oaks. O’Connor sat thinking fondly and fatuously of Katy and the baby due in
November, finished the cigarette and lit another, and looked around for his blue girl. She had vanished.

With those long legs she could be over the county line when his back was turned. Resignedly O’Connor got up and started up the hill through wild sumac and thick-growing yellow mustard.
“Maisie!” Somewhere ahead of him she barked sharply. He called again and spotted the tip of an agitated tail off to his right, where a lone scrub-oak stood. “Maisie,
girl—time to go home. Come on.” Her second bark was urgent; she was nosing at something there. O’Connor got tangled in a tall sumac bush and swore. “What’ve you found
now? Come on—” Apt to be anything from an empty bird’s nest to beer cans—but after a careless glance O’Connor halted and stared. “Heel!” he said
roughly, and recognizing that he meant it for once, Maisie backed up and sat down meekly.

“My good God in Heaven!” said O’Connor, and made the instant transition from dog owner to lieutenant of police. And the nearest phone was a mile down the hill—but at
least there wasn’t going to be a crowd around to disturb the evidence. He wheeled and started back down, with Maisie following reluctantly.

A hundred yards from where he’d left the Ford was a house, one of the few new homes yet built in this newest subdivision. O’Connor snapped Maisie’s leash on and marched up to
push the bell. By the time the door was opened he had the badge out. “Sorry to disturb you, but I’d like to use your phone. Lieutenant O’Connor, Glendale Police.”

The householder was a burly, big fellow evidently just out of bed, a bathrobe over striped pajamas; he stared at O’Connor uncomprehendingly. “Police? What’s wrong?”

“I just want to use your phone, please, sir.”

“Well, sure, but what’s going on?” He peered out to the empty street. “Oh, sure—it’s in the den, right here—my wife’s not up yet—is anything
wrong?”

“Thanks very much, sir,” said O’Connor, and firmly shut the door on him. Dialing automatically, he got Sergeant Duff at the desk and said tersely, “Me. Who’s
in?”

“Everybody but John and Fred, why? We just had a heist. It’s your day off.”

“Like hell,” said O’Connor. “Varallo there? Gimme . . . Vic? I just found a thing, that is Maisie did. Bodies. Looks like the hell of a thing, whatever. You’d
better get up here with Burt and Thomsen—and get hold of Goulding if you can. I think he’d better have a look before we move ’em. And an ambulance.”

“Bodies?” said Varallo incredulously. “Plural? Where, for God’s sake?”

“About a mile above Parkmount Drive—up the hill. Plural is right. They’re kids, Vic—little kids, looks like three. And they’ve been here awhile.”

“Dio!” said Varallo. “All right, we’ll be there.”

O’Connor put the phone down and then picked it up again and dialed the house on Virginia Avenue. Better tell Katy he wouldn’t be home to take her to lunch. But no details—not a
good idea to tell her horror stories . . .

“For heaven’s sake, Charles,” said Katharine, “I’m not about to have a miscarriage because you tell me there’s a new homicide. So you found a body and you
won’t be home for a while. I’ll be seeing it in the paper, I suppose, whether you tell me the details or not.”

“Now, Katy—it’s just that you can’t be too careful—”

“Honestly, men. All right, darling, I’ll see if Laura wants to go with me.”

Varallo, Burt, and Thomsen got up there to park behind O’Connor’s Ford half an hour later, and Dr. Goulding’s old Caddy was a minute behind them; Varallo had
got him at home. O’Connor was waiting up beyond the house to point the way. The householders were peering interestedly out the front door. “What the hell, Lieutenant—kids?”
said Burt. “Dead?”

“But very. You’d better save your breath for the climb.” By the time they were fifty yards up the hill, laden with the lab kit and camera, Burt and Thomsen were puffing. The
cadaverous Goulding stalked behind silently. O’Connor had left Maisie tied to the car, and she called after them as long as she could see them.

“I thought you’d better have a look before we did any poking around, Doctor,” O’Connor said as they came up to the scrub-oak. “Give us some idea about the
time—ages—whatever.” The others exclaimed, looking at the horrid, pathetic tangle at the foot of the tree, and Burt set the lab kit down with a little thud. “Jesus,”
he said. Varallo just took a long breath. Goulding offered no immediate comment.

The two uppermost bodies lay one half on top of the other: shrunken, wizened little bodies, the ugly staining of death on bare arms and legs: a few shreds of clothes. There was a much smaller
body almost hidden beneath those, one tiny arm looking like a wooden doll’s arm thrust out stiffly. “Cristo,” said Varallo softly. “Why haven’t they been
found before, Charles? Right out in the open, and not all that far from civilization.”

“Far enough,” said O’Connor. “No hiking trails or bike trails up here. Not very convenient for neckers or picnics. I was up here with the dog for the first time last
week, but further over toward the college. What about it, Doctor?”

Goulding grunted and went to kneel beside the little heap. His bald head shone nakedly in the sun. There wasn’t any real need, on a force the size of Glendale’s, for a full-time
police surgeon; but Goulding, coming into some money a few years before, had gratefully resigned from private practice with all its red tape and paperwork, and retired to his cubbyhole of an office
in the jail, pottering around the lab when there wasn’t any medical work to do. Police work had always fascinated him; one of his axioms was that doctors and detectives had a lot in
common.

“I’d only be guessing,” he said now. “Poor little bastards. Couple of months maybe—maybe not that long. But it’s been dry and warm, it could be longer. Just
luck the coyotes don’t range down this far in summer. Whatever we find out ’ll be in the lab, Charles. You’ll want pictures before we move them.” He stood up and Burt got
out the camera.

“But, my God, just kids!” said Thomsen. “Can’t tell if they’re boys or girls, but they can’t be over three or four—my God, what’s happening to
people these days?”

It was a question cops asked lately. It did make you wonder, thought Varallo. Kids, any kids, ought to have people to love and cherish them: be concerned about them. “There hasn’t
been anything like this on the missing list—three kids all together.”

“Not on ours,” said O’Connor. “We’ll be asking around.” Burt had got pictures from several angles, and the doctor was gently moving the bodies now, separating
them, straightening them out on the ground. “We’d better have a good look around here for any scrap of evidence. Christ, what a thing.” Some of the mess and dirt and blood cops
got used to, after a fashion; but this kind of thing, never. And Varallo was thinking inevitably of his darling Ginevra at home, plump and blond and cosseted—and the new one to come in
November; as he supposed O’Connor was thinking of his Katy and the baby. And he thought what he’d just said: not so far from civilization? This was about as far from that as you could
get.

“Get them down to the morgue and I’ll have a better look,” said Goulding. “Provisionally, I’ll say two boys, about four and two, and a baby—probably under a
year. Hard to say whether any of the staining is ante mortem or not. There’s been some cutting.”

Varallo ran a hand through his tawny crest of hair and said absently, “Quiet Sunday until this showed up. We had a funny sort of heist just before you called in, Charles. A pair of
females. With a baby.”

“You don’t say,” said O’Connor. “World going to hell, Vic. Something happening to people. Aughh! I don’t know, maybe we’re a pair of damned fools,
bringing more innocent kids into it.”

“Well, the girls don’t think so. There come the ambulance boys.”

And— “Oh, hell!” said O’Connor—Maisie had chewed herself loose from the car and came galloping after them joyously up the hill, ears and topknot flying. “You
mean the heisters were female? With a baby? On Sunday morning?”

“At a discount market out on Glenoaks,” said Varallo.

“Listen, I was so surprised,” said the market checker, “who was noticing the color eyes they had or what they had on, I ask you? With a gun on me,
I’m noticing clothes?” Her name was Marion Nealy, she was fat and forthright and indignant, and she chewed gum faster and faster as she talked, telling Poor and Wayne all about it for
the third time. “They came up to the counter together with a basket, and I’m starting to check the stuff out, and all of a sudden one of them pulls a gun out of her purse and says to
hand over the money—and who notices what customers look like, up to then they were just customers, mister—”

“Sergeant,” said Wayne. “Could you give us any idea of their ages?”

“Gee, I don’t know—kind of young, I guess.”

The market manager came bustling up with another female. The market had only just opened when the heisters had appeared, and the first squad car had got here before any other customers came in;
a little knot of them was waiting now outside the locked doors, but in here were only three checkers and the manager, Al Lorenzo. “Margie thinks she can describe them, Sergeant—I was in
the office like I said, but Margie saw them—this is Margie Hogan, Sergeant—”

“I sure did,” said Margie, who was small and redheaded and excited. “And what’s more, I think I’d seen one of them before. The one with the baby. I waited on her
once, I’m positive. They were here when we opened up—when Mr. Lorenzo unlocked the doors at ten-thirty. They came right in, there wasn’t another customer in, and I was checking my
change and they went past my counter up past table three like they were after cigarettes or candy along there—”

“So all right,” said Poor. “What did they look like?”

“One of ’em’s got dark brown hair, she’s about, oh, couple of inches taller than me, maybe twenty-six, twenty-seven, and she’s thin. The other one—the one
with the baby—she’s younger and blond and a little bit taller. They both had jeans and blouses on, light-colored, I think, but that’s all I could say—”

“And nobody saw them get into a car outside?”

They all shook their heads. “I didn’t see any of it, I was in the office,” said Lorenzo.

“Listen, I was so shook,” said Marion Nealy, “they coulda took off in a balloon, mister! I handed over the money—look, all the prices now and all the big bills
around, we get two hundred fifty in paper and fifty in change, just to start out. That’s what they got, see—most of the change was still in rolls, I hadn’t put it in the register
yet, and one of ’em just grabbed it and stuck it in her bag and they went out the nearest door—that one there—and then I sort of came to and yelled for Mr. Lorenzo, and Margie
came over—”

Poor looked at Wayne and sighed. As usual, the market was on a corner and had a huge parking lot in front. The two heisters could have walked quietly around the corner of the building, climbed
into a car parked on the street, and mingled with traffic out there on Glenoaks Boulevard in two minutes. “Could you tell us anything about the gun?” asked Poor. “Big,
little—revolver, automatic?”

Marion just shrugged. “It was a gun, that’s all. Black, and I guess not very big. But am I gonna ask questions, with a gun on me?”

“Oh, the baby,” said Margie. “It’s crazy, isn’t it, holding up a place with a baby?” She was eying Fred Wayne with frank admiration, his size and evident
muscles. “I think it’s a girl, Sergeant—an awfully cute baby, with a lot of curly blond hair, and it had on a little blue knit jumpsuit. I mean, they looked ordinary—just a
couple of women with a baby—it’s crazy, isn’t it?”

“Crazy is not the word,” said Lorenzo gloomily. “A liquor store I used to have, my own store—and I get fed up with all the paperwork and taxes and keeping decent help,
but mostly I get fed up with the heists—six times I got heisted in the last year, and I get fed up, I take this nice quiet job here, no sweat, so now I’m getting heisted by females! Not
to mention all the shoplifting. I tell you, I’ve got a mind to get out of the big town and go back to Marysville. Out of the rat race. My God, female heisters.”

There wasn’t anything Poor and Wayne could do about it; one thing Marion was sure of, neither of the women had touched the counter, so it’d be no use dusting for possible prints.
They asked the two girls to come in and make statements, and drove back to headquarters. Joe Katz was typing a report at his desk; Jeff Forbes’s lanky length was sprawled at his as he read a
paperback. He looked up as they came in.

“Something new gone down, boys. The lieutenant called in just after you went out—he’s found some bodies up in the wilds when he was walking that dog.”

“Bodies—plural? Business picking up,” said Wayne. “What a way to make a living.”

Laura had left Ginevra under the grandmotherly eye of Mrs. Anderson next door and met Katharine up at Pike’s Verdugo Oaks. They lingered over a rather lavish lunch; after
all, as Katharine said, helping herself to shrimp Louis, they were eating for two. And perhaps it wasn’t such a funny coincidence, both babies due in November, seeing that they were both
married to the dedicated cops.

“But Charles is maddening—you’d think I was made of glass, and I never felt better in my life. I’m dying to hear all about the body up there, and I don’t suppose
he’ll tell me a thing, so mind you get it all out of Vic.”

“Men,” said Laura, munching cheese toast, “are always fairly maddening. It’s only fair I should name this one, and Vic’s raising an awful fuss about it.
Because—well, I think backgrounds are important. You know? You ought to be proud of what you are, of your name, whether it’s Italian or French or Irish or whatever—and it
wouldn’t matter so much about a girl, but if it’s a boy he’ll stay Varallo all his life and I think he ought to have a name to match. I’d like to name him for Vic—but
he’s absolutely put his foot down and says he wouldn’t saddle a dog with a name like Lodovico Giovanni—”

“Yes, well, it is rather a mouthful,” said Katharine, buttering another roll.

“So I said what about Stevano and we could call him Steve—or Arturo and we’d call him Art—though I would really love to name him Lodovico and call him
Lodo—it’d be cute,” said Laura, “But Vic said over his dead body and if it’s a boy it’ll be John. Period. And it’s so tame.”

“Charles doesn’t care, luckily. Whatever I decide, except not a junior. But you know the funny thought I had, Laura—”

“I know.” Laura nodded her bright brown head, surveying Katharine and again absently envying her tall, dark elegance. “I had it too. Wouldn’t it be funny if one of us had
a girl and the other a boy and they grew . . .