Unpaid Dues A Munch Mancini Crime Novel

Chapter One The sixty-two-year-old groundskeeper of the exclusive Riviera Country Club spotted the bodies at first light. The corpses huddled against each other at the bottom of the concrete storm channel just before it disappeared downstream beneath the golf course. Wide enough to drive through, the storm channel had offered many surprises in the past -- hubcaps, beach chairs, the broken shafts of misbehaving seven-irons -- but never anything so horrific. Hector Granados had been hoping for treasure this Monday morning, especially after the heavy winter rain the previous weekend. Golf games had been canceled and the typically barren storm drain that ran beneath the course had turned into a raging torrent. This amount of water, he knew, was capable of carrying and then depositing a vast range of large, sometimes valuable refuse.At first he thought it was a bundle of clothing, then he saw the hands. The larger body, the female, clutched a baby to her bosom. He looked for a long time, and the baby never moved. Its little hand reached out stiffly from beneath a blanket. The slow-moving current carried a branch. It tangled with the woman's hair, causing her head to pull back. The gaping wound in her throat opened into a grotesque and silent scream. Her eyelids were purple and protruded from her face like two medallions of raw liver, and a small stream of foamy pink bubbles trickled from her lifeless mouth."Oh my God," he said first in English, then several more times in his native Spanish. He used his two-way radio to contact the clubhouse. "The police," he told Pat, the starter. "We need the police.""What's wrong?" Pat asked."It's terrible," he sobbed. "Dios mio.""What?""Bodies, two of them," Hector said, his breath short as if he had been running. "In the canal. Ay, pobrecito bebe.""Oh, shit," Pat said, "I just let the first foursome tee off ten minutes ago."Mace St. John, the newly promoted homicide detective-three of LAPD's West Los Angeles Division, arrived to supervise the investigation. The groundskeeper opened the maintenance yard gate at the end of Longworth Drive and allowed the police to set up a command post on the blacktop next to the country club's tennis courts. The other cops on the scene, including St. John's partner, Tony "the Tiger" Cassiletti, busied themselves studying the surrounding houses and their yards, glancing only briefly below."C'mon, ladies," St. John said, feeling angry, wanting a live target to harangue. A lot of the officers with families had problems dealing with dead children. Hey, he didn't love it either, but the poor little kid was already dead and someone needed to figure out the who, how, and why of it.The bodies were slumped against the south vertical wall of the large cement trough. At first glance they appeared to be embracing, but that tender impression was shattered when, after a moment's concentration, St. John made out the rope binding them together. It didn't seem likely that they had been dropped the twenty feet from the bank above. The woman's red shirt was scooted up her back, and her shoulder-length brown hair pointed downstream. They must have been dragged. Another ten yards and they would have been lost forever under the golf course.Getting them out of there was going to be a trick. The storm channel was bordered by double rows of chain-link fence. There were narrow dirt easement roads in between the eight-foot chain-link fences, running parallel to the channel until it reached the perimeter of the country club. The entrances to those roads were off Allenford, across the street from Paul Revere Junior High School. The gates to the easements were padlocked, and signs posted by the Metropolitan Water District warned off trespassers. But St. John could see by the cigarette butts crushed into the dirt that the warning signs were regularly ignored, probably by students out sneakingSeranella, Barbara is the author of 'Unpaid Dues A Munch Mancini Crime Novel' with ISBN 9780743466370 and ISBN 0743466373.