Текст книги "Mulholland Dive"
Автор книги: Michael Connelly
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Криминальные детективы
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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 6 страниц)
It was a bright orange LAPD press pass. Bosch had seen many of them over the years. This one looked new. Its lamination sleeve was still clear and unscratched. It had a mug shot–style photo of a woman with blond hair on it. Beneath it was her name and the media entity she worked for.
Anneke Jespersen
Berlingske Tidende
“She’s foreign press,” Bosch said. “Anneke Jespersen.”
“From where?” Edgar asked.
“I don’t know. Germany, maybe. It says Berlin…Berlin-something. I can’t pronounce it.”
“Why would they send somebody all the way over from Germany for this? Can’t they mind their own business over there?”
“I don’t know for sure if she’s from Germany. I can’t tell.”
Bosch tuned out Edgar’s chatter and studied the photograph on the press pass. The woman depicted was attractive even in a mug shot. No smile, no makeup, all business, her hair hooked behind her ears, her skin so pale as to be almost translucent. Her eyes had distance in them. Like the cops and soldiers Bosch had known who had seen too much too soon.
Bosch turned the press pass over. It looked legit to him. He knew press passes were updated yearly and a validation sticker was needed for any member of the media to enter department news briefings or pass through media checkpoints at crime scenes. This pass had a 1992 sticker on it. It meant that the victim received it sometime in the last 120 days, but noting the pristine condition of the pass, Bosch believed it had been recent.
Harry went back to studying the body. The victim was wearing blue jeans and a vest over a white shirt. It was an equipment vest with bulging pockets. This told Bosch that it was likely that the woman had been a photographer. But there were no cameras on her body or nearby. They had been taken, and possibly had even been the motive for the murder. Most news photographers he had seen carried multiple high-quality cameras and related equipment.
Harry reached to the vest and opened one of the breast pockets. Normally this would be something he would ask a coroner’s investigator to do, as jurisdiction of the body belonged to the County Medical Examiner’s Office. But Bosch had no idea if a coroner’s crew would even show at the crime scene and he wasn’t going to wait to find out.
The pocket held four black film canisters. He didn’t know if this was film that had been shot or was unused. He rebuttoned the pocket and in doing so felt a hard surface beneath it. He knew rigor mortis comes and goes in a day, leaving the body soft and movable. He pulled back the equipment vest and knocked a fist on the chest. It was a hard surface and the sound confirmed this. The victim was wearing a bulletproof vest.
“Hey, check out the hit list,” Edgar said.
Bosch looked up from the body. Edgar’s flashlight was now aimed at the wall above. The graffiti directly over the victim was a 187 count or hit list with the names of several bangers who had gone down in street battles. Ken Dog, G-Dog, OG Nasty, Neckbone, and so on. The crime scene was in the Rolling 60s territory. The 60s were a subset of the massive Crips gang. They were at endless war with the nearby 7-Treys, another Crips subset.
The general public was largely under the impression that the gang wars that gripped most of South L.A. and claimed victims every night of the week came down to a Bloods versus Crips battle for supremacy and control of the streets. But the reality was that the rivalries between subsets of the same gang were some of the most violent in the city and largely responsible for the weekly body counts. The Rolling 60s and 7-Treys were at the top of that list. Both Crips sets operated under kill-on-sight protocols and the score was routinely noted in the neighborhood graffiti. An RIP list was used to memorialize homies lost in the endless battle, while a lineup of names under a 187 heading was a hit list, a record of kills.
“Looks like what we’ve got here is Snow White and the Seven-Trey Crips,” Edgar added.
Bosch shook his head, annoyed. The city had come off its hinges and here in front of them was the result—a woman put up against a wall and executed—and his partner didn’t seem to be able to take it seriously.
Edgar must have read Bosch’s body language.
“It’s just a joke, Harry,” he said quickly. “Lighten up. We need some gallows humor around here.”
“Okay,” Bosch said. “I’ll lighten up while you go get on the radio. Tell them what we’ve got here, make sure they know it’s a member of the out-of-town media and see if they’ll give us a full team. If not that, at least a photographer and some lights. Tell them we really could use some time and some help on this one.”
“Why? ’Cause she’s white?”
Bosch took a moment before responding. It was a careless thing for Edgar to have said. He was hitting back because Bosch had not responded well to the Snow White quip.
“No, not because she’s white,” Bosch said evenly. “Because she’s not a looter and she’s not a gangbanger and because they better believe that the media is going to jump all over a case involving one of their own. Okay? Is that good enough?”
“Got it.”
“Good.”
Edgar went back to the car to use the radio and Bosch returned to his crime scene. The first thing he did was delineate the perimeter. He backed several of the guardsmen down the alley so he could create a zone that extended twenty feet on either side of the body. The third and fourth sides of the box were the wall of the appliance shop on one side and the wall of the rims store on the other.
As he marked it off Bosch noted that the alley cut through a residential block that was directly behind the row of retail businesses that fronted Crenshaw. There was no uniformity in the containment of the backyards that lined the alley. Some of the homes had concrete walls, while others had wood-slat or chain-link fences.
Bosch knew that in a perfect world he would search all those yards and knock on all those doors, but that would have to come later, if at all. His attention at the moment had to be focused on the immediate crime scene. If he got the chance to canvas the neighborhood, he would consider himself lucky.
Bosch noticed that Robleto and Delwyn had taken positions with their shotguns at the mouth of the alley. They were standing next to each other and talking, probably sharing a complaint about something. Back in Bosch’s Vietnam days, that would have been called a sniper’s two-for-one sale.
There were eight guardsmen posted inside the alley on the interior perimeter. Bosch noticed that a group of people were beginning to congregate and watch from the far end. He waved over the guardsman who had led them into the alley.
“What’s your name, soldier?”
“Drummond, but everyone calls me Drummer.”
“Okay, Drummer, I’m Detective Bosch. Tell me who found her.”
“The body? That was Dowler. He came back here to take a leak and he found her. He said he could smell her first. He knew the smell.”
“Where’s Dowler now?”
“I think he’s on post at the southern barricade.”
“I need to talk to him. Will you get him for me?”
“Yes, sir.”
Drummond started to move toward the entrance of the alley.
“Hold on, Drummer, I’m not done.”
Drummond turned around.
“When did you deploy to this location?”
“We’ve been here since eighteen hundred yesterday, sir.”
“So you’ve had control of this area since then? This alley?”
“Not exactly, sir. We started at Crenshaw and Florence last night and we’ve worked east on Florence and north on Crenshaw. It’s been block by block.”
“So when did you get to this alley?”
“I’m not sure. I think we had it covered by dawn today.”
“And all the looting and burning in this immediate area, that was already over?”
“Yes, sir, happened first night from what I’ve been told.”
“Okay, Drummer, one last thing. We need more light here. Can you bring back here one of those trucks you have with all the lights on top?”
“It’s called a Humvee, sir.”
“Yeah, well, bring one back here from that end of the alley. Come in past those people and point the lights right at my crime scene. You got it?”
“Got it, sir.”
Bosch pointed to the end opposite the patrol car.
“Good. I want to create a cross-hatching of light here, okay? It’s probably going to be the best we can do.”
“Yes, sir.”
He started to trot away.
“Hey, Drummer.”
Drummond turned around once more and came back.
“Yes, sir.”
Bosch whispered now.
“All your guys are watching me. Shouldn’t they be turned around, eyes out?”
Drummond stepped back and twirled his finger over his head.
“Hey! Turn it around, eyes out. We’ve got a job here. Keep the watch.”
He pointed down the alley toward the gathering of onlookers.
“And make sure we keep those people back.”
The guardsmen did as they were told and Drummond headed out of the alley to radio Dowler and get the light truck.
Bosch’s pager buzzed on his hip. He reached to his belt and snapped the device out of its holder. The number on the screen was the command post and he knew he and Edgar were about to be given another call. They hadn’t even started here and they were going to be yanked. He didn’t want that. He put the pager back on his belt.
Bosch walked over to the first fence that started from the back corner of the appliance shop. It was a wood-slat barrier that was too tall for him to look over. But he noticed it had been freshly painted. There was no graffiti, not even on the alley side of it. He noted this because it indicated that there was a homeowner on the other side who cared enough to whitewash the graffiti. Maybe it was the kind of person who kept their own watch and might have heard or even seen something.
From there he crossed the alley and dropped to a squatting position at the far corner of the crime scene. Like a fighter in his corner, waiting to come out. He started playing the beam of his flashlight across the broken concrete and dirt surface of the alley. At the oblique angle, the light refracted off the myriad surface planes, giving him a unique view. Soon enough he saw the glint of something shiny and held the beam on it. He moved in on the spot and found a brass bullet casing lying in the gravel.
He got down on his hands and knees so he could look closely at the casing without moving it. He moved the light in close and saw that it was a 9mm brass casing with the familiar Remington brand mark stamped on the flat base. There was an indentation from the firing pin on the primer. Bosch also noted that the casing was lying on top of the gravel bed. It had not been stepped on or run over in what he assumed was a busy alleyway. That told him that the casing had not been there long.
Bosch was looking around for something to mark the casing’s location with when Edgar stepped back into the crime scene. He was carrying a toolbox and that told Bosch that they weren’t going to get any help.
“Harry, what’d you find?”
“Nine-millimeter Remington. Looks fresh.”
“Well, at least we found something useful.”
“Maybe. You get the CP?”
Edgar put down the toolbox. It was heavy. It contained the equipment they had quickly gathered in the kit room at Hollywood Station once they heard they could not count on any forensic backup in the field.
“Yeah, I got through but it’s no-can-do from the command post. Everybody’s otherwise engaged. We’re on our own out here, brother.”
“No coroner, either?”
“No coroner. The National Guard’s coming with a truck for her. A troop transporter.”
“You gotta be kidding me. They’re going to move her in a fucking flatbed?”
“Not only that, we got our next call already. A crispy critter. Fire Department found him in a burned-out taco shop on MLK.”
“Goddamnit, we just got here.”
“Yeah, well, we’re up again and we’re closest to MLK. So they want us to clear and steer.”
“Yeah, well, we’re not done here. Not by a long shot.”
“Nothing we can do about it, Harry.”
Bosch was obstinate.
“I’m not leaving yet. There’s too much to do here and if we leave it till next week or whenever, then we’ve lost the crime scene. We can’t do that.”
“We don’t have a choice, partner. We don’t make the rules.”
“Bullshit.”
“Okay, tell you what. We give it fifteen minutes. We take a few pictures, bag the casing, put the body on the truck, and then we shuffle on down the road. Come Monday, or whenever this is over, it isn’t even going to be our case anymore. We go back to Hollywood after everything calms down and this thing stays right here. Somebody else’s case then. This is Seventy-seventh’s turf. It’ll be their problem.”
It didn’t matter to Bosch what came later, whether the case went to detectives at 77th Street Division or not. What mattered was what was in front of him. A woman named Anneke from someplace far away lay dead in front of him and he wanted to know who did it and why.
“Doesn’t matter that it’s not going to be our case,” he said. “That’s not the point.”
“Harry, there is no point,” Edgar said. “Not now, not with complete chaos all around us. Nothing matters right now, man. The city is out of control. You can’t expect—”
The sudden rip of automatic gunfire split the air. Edgar dove to the ground and Bosch instinctively threw himself toward the wall of the appliance shop. His helmet went flying off. Bursts of gunfire from several of the guardsmen followed until finally the shooting was quelled by shouting.
“Hold your fire! Hold your fire! Hold your fire!”
The gunshots ended and Burstin, the sergeant from the barricade, came running up the alley. Bosch saw Edgar slowly getting up. He looked like he was unharmed but he was looking at Bosch with an odd expression.
“Who opened first?” the sergeant yelled. “Who fired?”
“Me,” said one of the men in the alley. “I thought I saw a weapon on the roofline.”
“Where, soldier? What roofline? Where was the sniper?”
“Over there.”
The shooter pointed to the roofline of the rims store.
“Goddamnit!” the sergeant yelled. “Hold your fucking fire. We cleared that roof. There’s nobody up there but us! Our people!”
“Sorry, sir. I saw the—”
“Son, I don’t give a flying fuck what you saw. You get any of my people killed and I will personally frag your ass myself.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Bosch stood up. His ears were ringing and his nerves jangling. The sudden spit of automatic fire wasn’t new to him. But it had been almost twenty-five years since it was a routine part of his life. He went over and picked up his helmet and put it back on.
Sergeant Burstin walked up to him.
“Continue your work, Detectives. If you need me I’ll be on the north perimeter. We have a truck coming in for the remains. I understand that we are to provide a team to escort your car to another location and another body.”
He then charged out of the alley.
“Jesus Christ, you believe that?” Edgar asked. “Like Desert Storm or something. Vietnam. What the hell are we doing here, man?”
“Let’s just go to work,” Bosch said. “You draw the crime scene, I’ll work the body, take pictures. Let’s move.”
Bosch squatted down and opened up the toolbox. He wanted to get a photograph of the bullet casing in place before he bagged it as evidence. Edgar kept talking. The adrenaline rush from the shooting was not dissipating. He talked a lot when he was hyper. Sometimes too much.
“Harry, did you see what you did when that yahoo opened up with the gun?”
“Yeah, I ducked like everybody else.”
“No, Harry, you covered the body. I saw it. You shielded Snow White over there like she was still alive or something.”
Bosch didn’t respond. He lifted the top tray out of the toolbox and reached in for the Polaroid camera. He noted that they only had two packs of film left. Sixteen shots plus whatever was left in the camera. Maybe twenty shots total, and they had this scene and the one waiting on MLK. It was not enough. His frustration was peaking.
“What was that about, Harry?” Edgar persisted.
Bosch finally lost it and barked at his partner.
“I don’t know! Okay? I don’t know. So let’s just go to work now and try to do something for her, so maybe, just maybe, somebody sometime will be able to make a case.”
His outburst had drawn the attention of most of the guardsmen in the alley. The soldier who had started the shooting earlier stared hard at him, happy to pass the mantle of unwanted attention.
“Okay, Harry,” Edgar said quietly. “Let’s go to work. We do what we can. Fifteen minutes and then we’re on to the next one.”
Bosch nodded as he looked down at the dead woman. Fifteen minutes, he thought. He was resigned. He knew the case was lost before it had even started.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
The Gun Walk
2012
1
They made him wait. The explanation was that Coleman was at chow and pulling him out would create a problem because after the interview they would have to reinsert him into the second meal block, where he might have enemies unknown to the guard staff. Someone could make a move against him and the guards wouldn’t see it coming. They didn’t want that, so they told Bosch to hang loose for forty minutes while Coleman finished his Salisbury steak and green beans, sitting at a picnic table in D yard in the comfort and safety of numbers. All the Rolling 60s at San Quentin shared the same food and rec blocks.
Bosch passed the time by studying his props and rehearsing his play. It was all on him. No help from a partner. He was by himself. Cutbacks in the department’s travel budget had turned almost all prison visits into solo missions.
Bosch had taken the first flight up that morning and hadn’t thought about the timing of his arrival. The delay wouldn’t matter in the long run. He wasn’t flying back till 6 P.M. and the interview with Rufus Coleman probably wouldn’t take long. Coleman would either go for the offer or not. Either way, Bosch wouldn’t be long with him.
The interview room was a steel cubicle with a built-in table dividing it. Bosch sat on one side, a door directly behind him. Across the table from him was an equal-size space with a matching door. They would bring Coleman through there, he knew.
Bosch was working the twenty-year-old murder of Anneke Jespersen, a photographer and journalist shot to death during the 1992 riots. Harry had worked the case and the crime scene for less than an hour back then before being pulled away to work other murders in a crazy night of violence that had him moving from case to case.
After the riots ended, the department formed the Riot Crimes Task Force, and the investigation of the Jespersen murder was taken over by that unit. It was never solved and after ten years of being classified as open and active, the investigation and what little evidence had been gathered was quietly boxed up and placed in archives. It wasn’t until the twentieth anniversary of the riots was approaching that the media-savvy chief of police sent a directive to the lieutenant in charge of the Open-Unsolved Unit ordering a fresh look at all unsolved murders that occurred during the unrest in 1992. The chief wanted to be ready when the media started their inquiries in regard to their twenty-years-later stories. The department might have been caught flat-footed back in ’92, but not in 2012. The chief wanted to be able to say that all unsolved murders from the riots were still under active investigation.
Bosch specifically asked for the Anneke Jespersen case and after twenty years returned to it. Not without misgivings. He knew that most cases were solved within the first forty-eight hours and after that the chances of clearance dropped markedly. This case had barely been worked for even one of those forty-eight hours. It had been neglected because of circumstances, and Bosch had always felt guilty about it, as though he had abandoned Anneke Jespersen. No homicide detective likes leaving a case behind unsolved, but in this situation Bosch was given no choice. The case was taken from him. He could easily blame the investigators that followed him on it, but Bosch had to count himself among those responsible. The investigation started with him at the crime scene. He couldn’t help but feel that no matter how short a time he was there, he must have missed something.
Now, twenty years later, he got another shot at it. And it was a very long shot at that. He believed that every case had a black box. A piece of evidence, a person, a positioning of facts that brought a certain understanding and helped explain what had happened and why. But with Anneke Jespersen, there was no black box. Just a pair of musty cardboard boxes retrieved from archives that gave Bosch little direction or hope. The boxes included the victim’s clothing and bulletproof vest, her passport, and other personal items, as well as a backpack and the photographic equipment retrieved from her hotel room after the riots. There was also the single 9mm shell casing found at the crime scene, and the thin investigative file put together by the Riot Crimes Task Force. The so-called murder book.
The murder book was largely a record of inactivity on the case on the part of the RCTF. The task force had operated for a year and had had hundreds of crimes, including dozens of murders, to investigate. It was almost as overwhelmed as investigators like Bosch had been during the actual riots.
The RCTF had put up billboards in South L.A. that advertised a telephone tip line and rewards for information leading to arrests and convictions for riot-related crimes. Different billboards carried different photos of suspects or crime scenes or victims. Three of them carried a photo of Anneke Jespersen and asked for any information on her movements and murder.
The unit largely worked off what came in from the billboards and other public outreach programs and pursued cases where there was solid information. But nothing of high value ever came in on Jespersen and so nothing ever came of the investigation. The case was a dead end. Even the one piece of evidence from the crime scene—the bullet casing—wasn’t of value without a gun to match it to.
In his survey of the archived records and case effects, Bosch found that the most noteworthy information gathered from the first investigation was about the victim. Jespersen was thirty-two years old and from Denmark, not Germany as Bosch had thought for twenty years. She worked for a Copenhagen newspaper called Berlingske Tidende, where she was a photojournalist in the truest sense of the word. She wrote stories and shot film. She had been a war correspondent who documented the world’s skirmishes with both words and pictures.
She had arrived in Los Angeles the morning after the riots had started. And she was dead by the end of that first night. In the following weeks, the Los Angeles Times ran short profiles of all those killed during the violence. The story on Jespersen quoted her editor and her brother back in Copenhagen and depicted the journalist as a risk taker who was always quick to volunteer for assignments in the world’s danger zones. In the four years prior to her death, she had covered conflicts in Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Senegal, and El Salvador.
The unrest in Los Angeles was hardly on the level of war or some of the other armed conflicts she had photographed and reported on, but according to the Times, she happened to be traveling across the United States on vacation when rioting in the City of Angels broke out. She promptly called the photo desk at the BT, as the newspaper in Copenhagen was more commonly known, and left a message with her editor saying that she was heading to L.A. from San Francisco. But she was dead before she had filed any photos or a story with the newspaper. Her editor had never spoken to her after getting the message.
After the RCTF was disbanded, the unsolved Jespersen case was assigned to the homicide squad at 77th Street Division, the geographical policing area where the murder occurred. Given to new detectives with their own backup of open cases, the investigation was shelved. The notations in the investigative chronology were few and far between and largely just a record of the outside interest in the case. The LAPD wasn’t working the case with anything approaching fervor, but her family and those who knew Jespersen in the international journalism community did not give up hope. The chronology included records of their frequent inquiries about the case. These marked the record right up until the case files and effects were sent to archives. After that, those who inquired about Anneke Jespersen were most likely ignored, as was the case they were calling about.
Curiously, the victim’s personal belongings were never returned to her family. The archive boxes contained the backpack and property that was turned over to the police several days after the murder, when the manager of the Travelodge on Santa Monica Boulevard matched the unusual name on a riot victim list printed in the Times to the guest registry. It had been thought that Anneke Jespersen had skipped out on her room. Her belongings were pushed into a backpack found in her room and then put in a locked storage closet at the motel. Once the manager determined that Jespersen wasn’t coming back because she was dead, the backpack was delivered to the RCTF, which was working out of temporary offices at Central Division in downtown.
The backpack was in one of the archive boxes that Bosch had retrieved from case storage. It contained two pairs of jeans, four white cotton shirts, and assorted underwear and socks. Jespersen obviously traveled light, packing like a war correspondent even for a vacation. This was probably because she was heading straight back to war following her vacation in the United States. Her editor had told the Times that the newspaper was sending Jespersen directly from the States to Sarajevo in the former Yugoslavia, where war had broken out just a few weeks earlier. Reports of mass rapes and ethnic cleansing were breaking in the media, and Jespersen was heading to the center of the war, due to leave the Monday after the riots erupted in Los Angeles. She probably considered the quick stop by L.A. to snap shots of rioters just a warm-up for what awaited in Bosnia.
Also in the pockets of the backpack were Jespersen’s Danish passport along with several packages of unused 35mm film.
Jespersen’s passport showed an INS entry stamp at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York six days before her death. According to the investigative records and the newspaper accounts, she had been traveling by herself and had made it to San Francisco when the verdicts came down in Los Angeles and the violence began.
None of the records or news stories accounted for where in the United States Jespersen had been during the five days leading up to the riots. It apparently wasn’t seen as germane to the investigation of her death.
What did seem clear was that the breakout of violence in Los Angeles was a strong pull to Jespersen and she immediately diverted, apparently driving through the night to Los Angeles in a rental car she had picked up two days earlier at San Francisco International. On Thursday morning, April 30, she presented her passport and Danish press credentials at the LAPD media office in order to get a press pass.
Bosch had spent most of 1969 and 1970 in Vietnam. He had encountered many journalists and photographers in the base camps and out in fire zones as well. In all of them, he had seen a unique form of fearlessness. Not a warrior’s fearlessness but almost a naive belief in one’s ultimate survival. It was as though they believed that their cameras and press passes were shields that would save them, no matter the circumstance.
He had known one photographer particularly well. His name was Hank Zinn and he worked for the Associated Press. He had once followed Bosch into a tunnel in Cu Chi. Zinn was the kind of guy who never turned down an opportunity to go out into Indian country and get what he called “the real thing.” He died in early 1970 when a Huey he had jumped on for transport to the front was shot down. One of his cameras was recovered intact in the debris field and somebody at base developed the film. It turned out Zinn was shooting frames the whole time the chopper was taking fire and then going down. Whether he was valiantly documenting his own death or thinking he was going to have great shots to file when he got back to base camp could never be known. But knowing Zinn, Bosch believed he thought he was invincible and the chopper crash would not be the end of the line.
As Bosch took up the Jespersen case after so many years, he wondered if Anneke Jespersen had been like Zinn. Sure of her invincibility, sure that her camera and press pass would lead her through the fire. There was no doubt that she had put herself in harm’s way. He wondered what her last thought was when her killer pointed the gun at her eye. Was she like Zinn? Had she taken his picture?
According to a list provided by her editor in Copenhagen and contained in the RCTF investigation file, Jespersen carried a pair of Nikon 4s and a variety of lenses. Of course, her field equipment was taken and never recovered. Whatever filmed clues might have been in her cameras were long gone.
The RCTF investigators developed the canisters of film found in the pockets of her vest. Some of these black-and-white 8 x 10 prints, along with four proof sheets showing miniatures of all ninety-six shots, were in the murder book, but they offered very little in the way of evidence or investigative leads. They were simply shots of the California National Guard mustering at the Coliseum after being called into the fray in Los Angeles. Other shots were of guardsmen manning barricades at intersections in the riot zone. There were no shots of violence or burning and looting, though there were several of guardsman on post outside businesses that had been looted or burned. The photos were apparently taken on the day of her arrival, after she had gotten her press pass from the LAPD.
Beyond their historic value as documentation of the riots, the photos were deemed useless to the murder investigation in 1992, and Bosch couldn’t disagree with that assessment twenty years later.
The RCTF file also contained a property report dated May 11, 1992, and detailing the recovery of the Avis rental car that Jespersen had picked up at San Francisco International before the riots. The car had been found abandoned on Crenshaw Boulevard seven blocks from the alley where her body was found. In the ten days it had been sitting there, it had been broken into and its interior stripped. The report stated that the car and its contents, or lack thereof, had no investigative value.