Garcia’s stare returned to the printout and he paused. ‘Hold on a second.’ He reread the paragraph just to be sure.
‘What?’ Hunter asked, once again craning his neck to look at the printout.
‘According to the police report,’ Garcia explained. ‘There were two witnesses to Mr. Wilford’s jumping suicide.’
‘Witnesses?’ Hunter’s widened eyes searched the page.
‘Right here,’ Garcia indicated. ‘It says that Luis Toledo and Randy Douglas, both employees of the Sanitation and Environment Division, actuallywitnessedMr. Wilford jump from the 7th Street Bridge.’ Garcia blinked at the page. ‘How is this even possible when, according to Dr. Hove, Terry Wilford was dead way before he got to that bridge? How could they have seen him jump?’
‘I guess we better go ask them.’
‘No doubt,’ Garcia agreed, flipping back and forth on the printout one last time, searching for anything else that theymight’ve missed. There was nothing else. ‘That’s pretty much all we have.’
Hunter nodded.
Garcia turned to face the board again. ‘So where do you want to start?’
Hunter checked his watch. ‘Too early to drop by The Varnish or go talk to the two employees from the S&E Division.’
‘Yeah, but Missing Persons should be alive and kicking by now.’
‘Yep,’ Hunter agreed. ‘Let’s go talk to Detective Cohen and see how far his investigation has taken him. We’ll move on from there.’
‘I’m right behind you.’
Twenty-One
The LAPD Missing Persons Unit, located on the seventh floor of the Police Administration Building, looked nothing like the Robbery Homicide floor, despite covering a pretty similar-sized area. Classic floor screen partitions separated the investigators’ desks in a confusing and chaotic way, creating a crazy labyrinth of uneven corridors that few outside the MP Unit could successfully navigate. The entire north wall was one huge photo board, displaying portraits of at least three hundred individuals whose investigation was still ongoing. The board had been split into two – children and adults. The children’s side clearly overwhelmed the adults’ one.
The large number of ongoing investigations did not surprise either Hunter or Garcia. Out of the fifty American states, California topped the charts with the largest number of reported missing person cases per year – over three thousand. In California, Los Angeles took the second spot on the list of counties with the highest ratios of people going missing, never to be found – behind only Humboldt County, a densely forested, mountainous and rural county, with about 110 miles of coastline. Their reported number of missing persons who were never found was so staggering that it had been dubbed ‘the black hole county’.
Hunter and Garcia didn’t visit the Missing Persons Unit’s floor very often, but every time they did they were mesmerized by thefact that every single person on that floor always seemed to be either navigating through the chaotic labyrinth of desks, or on their phones. And the conversations weren’t exactly hushed. The place sounded and looked like a distressed beehive.
Just a couple of paces in front of both detectives, a short and slender man ended the phone conversation that he was having, reached for the empty mug by his computer screen, and quickly got up from his desk. Garcia seized the opportunity before he could step away.
‘Excuse me, could you please direct us to Detective Cohen?’
The man barely lost a beat, turning to face the rest of the floor. ‘Cohen,’ he shouted. ‘Where you at?’
Hunter’s and Garcia’s eyes widened at him.
‘I could’ve done that myself,’ Garcia whispered through the edge of his mouth.
About halfway down the detective’s floor, just by the large photo board, Detective Graham Cohen stood up and craned his neck to look over his desk partition. ‘I’m at my desk. What’s up?’
‘Right over there,’ the short and slender man indicated before veering left and disappearing into the labyrinth.
Hunter and Garcia began zigzagging their way toward Detective Cohen.
‘If someone gets to the Robbery Homicide floor,’ Garcia said, in a hushed voice, ‘and just shouts a name from the door like he did, he’d probably get shot.’
‘Several times,’ Hunter agreed.
‘Detective Hunter… Detective Garcia,’ Cohen said, extending his hand as the UVC detectives got to his desk.
‘Have we met before?’ Garcia asked, as he shook Cohen’s hand.
Hunter had remembered correctly: Detective Cohen really was a stumpy man. He looked to be in his mid-forties, with two graying islands of hair just above each ear. The rest of his smooth head glimmered under the strong halogen lights that lined theceiling. His dark, beady eyes sat behind thick glasses, his teeth were lightly stained from years of smoking, and his blue suit was ill-fitting, mainly because his stomach protruded forward just enough to make his trousers slip down below the pouch of his belly.
