10. Three empty prescription vials.

11. One 56'/2" by 38 W tiger wall tapestry.

In combination, or separately, these items might make salient physical evidence in a murder case. Certainly, the murder gun would. But what about the rest of it?

The crime scene investigators stayed at the house hours after David Brown and Patricia Bailey left at seven A.M. The grieving family fled to Arthur and Manuela's home with only a suitcase filled with items for the baby. They could not bear to stay in the housea"not yet. The investigators found it difficult to work around them and were relieved to see them go.

Alan Day suggested that David Brown return in an hour; he would be able to give him a better idea then of how long it might be before they could occupy the house. When David and Patti Bailey returned, Day told them it would be several hours more, maybe even a few days. They were allowed in to collect toys and diapers, which they loaded into David's van.

David was concerned about some jewelry that he had left in the master bedroom and asked if he could retrieve it. Day said that wouldn't be possible, but he offered to get it if Brown could describe what he wanted.

"My wrist.w.a.tcha"a Rolexa"and my cross, on a chain. I took them off last night and put them on my chest of drawers."

Day located the items in a jewelry box and brought them to Brown. Once again, David and Patti drove off.

When the investigators were finished, Morrissey would oversee the locking of the residence with a police lock; he had obtained the code for the security alarm system from David Brown. They had not yet begun to search the Terry travel trailer, and they would need to come back to the house itself.

The investigators left at the shooting scene on Ocean Breeze Drive worked through the morning, their night's sleep lost forever. By 12:22, the house was empty. The yellow ribbons whipping in the March wind cordoned off the crime search area and told pa.s.sersby that something unusual had happened there. Neighbors gathered in knots to stare, and to try to remember somethinga"anythinga"that might have forewarned them that things were not well in the Brown household.

But they were hard put to come up with anything. n.o.body had really known David and Linda Brown, and the teenagers who lived with them. They were the only renters on the street, and the Browns had seemed an extremely close-knit family who had little time to talk with neighbors. With their extended family visiting so often, they appeared sufficient unto themselves. Later, upon reflection, neighbors would have more to say to reporters from the Orange County Register and the Los Angeles Times. Encourageda" entreateda"to search their minds for something, anything, that might be important, they came forth with blurry remembrances.

Within hours of Linda Brown's murder, police investigators believed that they knew who had done the shooting; they even had a motive that seemed plausible, if simplistic. Still, they suspected they might never know the real reasons Cinnamon Brown had killed her stepmother. The designated shooter had lapsed into a comatose state from which she might never awaken.

When Garden Grove homicide investigator Fred McLean's steel-blue eyes first met the warm brown eyes of Orange County coroner's deputy Bernice Mazuca, the ambiance was hardly idyllic for romance. "Bernie," the more talkative of the pair, smiled as she recalled their meeting. "We were in Little Saigon at a triple murder scene, and Fred and I were trying to identify shoe impressions in blood. I said, 'Nike,' and he said, 'New Balance,' and we looked at each other and suddenly realized we had more in common than a mutual interest in death investigation. We were both runners." The initial attraction long outlasted that murder. They got married.

Fred McLean, compactly muscled at fifty-three, a ruddy-cheeked blend of Scotch and German ancestry, was the one obsessed with running. He began each day by traversing a brisk five- to seven-mile course. He was what you might expect if you took a career Marine and turned him into a street cop, tough and taciturn at first glance, a softie when his veneer was peeled away. He did not peel easily.

"My folks came to L.A. from Kansas in the thirties to find gold; they found the Depression instead, and I was born in the Salvation Army hospital in Los Angeles. Back in Wellington, Kansas, my grandfather owned half the businesses in town and had a verbal contract with the Santa Fe Railroad to ice their produce cars. The Santa Fe built a spur to Wellington right up to Heinrich Wilhelm Glamann and his enterprises. The old man gave my dad a job when L.A. fizzled on him, paid him eighty-five cents a daya"good wages in 1937."

And so began McLean's sporadic "commute" between Kansas and California. His love of sports stemmed from the glory years of football in Kansas when his team was first in the state. He joined the Marine Corps in 1956 where he played guard and blocking back on the football team in the single-wing formation. Young McLean soared high and fast in the Marine Corps. He became a first lieutenant when he was barely twenty-one, flying 119s, Panther jets, and any aircraft the Marine Corps used. He wasn't thirty when he was one of the "old guys" who shepherded five thousand young Marines to stand by off the Bay of Pigs during the Cuban missile crisis. "They never got to fight. They were too young to appreciate that; they were so revved up they d.a.m.n near tore up a town."

McLean learned a lot about human behavior, and a great deal about discipline and commitment, in the Corps. He loved it all. When he said, "The Marine Corps was my life," you know he meant it and could sense what it cost him to walk away. But McLean's first wife gave him an ultimatum after he had been with the Corps for a decade. He seldom had stateside duty; his son rarely saw his father. The choice was simple. The Marine Corps or the marriage.

McLean chose the marriage.

Police work was the only civilian career that appealed to him, and it began as a grudging second choice. McLean's wife was dubious about it, suspectinga"correctlya"that it might be as dangerous and as time-consuming as being in the Marine Corps. She agreed only after he promised he would stay away from Los Angeles County and sign on with some sleepy Orange County department.

Garden Grove fitted that description when McLean joined the force on August 26, 1966.

But not for long.

The marriage foundered, but McLean's fascination with police work bloomed. To counteract the fine edge of tension that walks with a policeman always, McLean ran and played football. He was forty-eight when he hung up his shoulder pads for the last time. He was out in the field on training maneuvers with his Marine Corps reserve unit until he was fifty. And to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, he ran fifty miles. Over the years, McLean survived shoot-outs and dicey encounters, and his skill with people moved him steadily up through the ranks from patrol into the detective unit.

He had found his niche.

As the primary investigator into Linda Marie Brown's murder, McLean was present at her autopsy. The postmortem examination began at nine-thirty A.M., five hours after the young mother had been p.r.o.nounced dead.

From the "cold room," in the Orange County Forensic Center, the gurney carrying Linda's body turned right and trundled perhaps twenty feet down the hallway to the entrance of the autopsy room. It was L-shaped, bright with overhead lights, as clean as constant scrubbing with floral-scented disinfectant could make it, and equipped with a half dozen stainless steel tables. Depending on the weather, the phase of the moon, or any number of conditions that seemed to serve as catalysts for violent death, the tables might all be occupied or there might be only a single postmortem in progress.

Sly irreverence, the black humor that makes constant exposure to tragedy bearable to those who must deal with it every day, revealed itself impishly in the Orange County coroner's autopsy room. The light-switch plates bore likenesses of tiny, naked cartoon men. When the switches were on, the little men had erections. The switch plates had been there so long that only a visitor noticed anymore.

Dr. Richard I. f.u.komoto performed the autopsy, witnessed by McLean and his fellow investigator Steve Sanders; Joe Luckey and Bill Lystrup of the Orange County Coroner's Office; Rob Keister, a criminalist with the Orange County Sheriff's Office; and Mary De Guelle, a forensic specialist with the Sheriff's Office. All had attended numerous postmortems, and they gathered around the table with interest, but with a dispa.s.sion achieved over long time. Experience had taught them to suspend emotion in this room.

But sometimes this removal from what was before them was difficult to maintain. Linda Brown had been a beautiful young woman with a perfect figure. Her skin was pale as snow now and marred with two bullet wounds of entry between her full b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

Rob Keister began the procedure by retrieving evidence on the body. The Orange County criminalist placed a sheet of clear acetate over the stippling pattern on Linda Brown's chest, then marked the pattern of the gun-barrel debris. He plucked three unburned kernels from her breast and retained them for evidence.

Linda's hands also had several unburned powder kernels, and these were removed before GSR tests were done. Routinea"the position of the wounds and the gun made it well nigh impossible for Linda to have shot herself, but she might have held her hands up in a vain gesture of protection. More likely, the shooter had simply been very close to her as the gun was fired.

Fingernail sc.r.a.pings were collected, and the victim's pubic hair was combed for alien hairs or fibers. None were collected.

Dr. f.u.komoto began dictating as he approached his subject. Pathologists measure precisely, and f.u.komoto adhered to that as he described the first wound as "upper midchest wall, located forty-nine and a half inches from the sole of the foot, and thirteen inches from the top of the head, slightly to the right of the midlinea"approximately one-half inch."

This wound just inside the right breast measured 1.1 centimeters and was circled with a concentrated "tattooing" of gunpowder and barrel debris with a diameter of one inch. There was less tattooing extending over another two inches. f.u.komoto detected no burning of the tissues and found the angle of fire was from below, traveling slightly upward and leii to right. The fact that the tissue was not actually burned ruled out a contact wound, but the gun would have had to be six inches or less from the victim when fired.

The second wound was located forty-seven and a half inches from the sole of the foot and fifteen inches from the top of the head. The wound itself was the same size as the first, but the tattooing affect sprayed over a much wider radiusa"up to nine inchesa"with debris from the gun apparent all the way up to the chin and left side of the face. To the layman, the tattooing of gun-barrel debris means little; to the criminalist, it can pinpoint the distance the shooter stood from the victim. The second of Linda's wounds had resulted from a bullet fired from twelve to twenty inches away.

There was no way to determine which had come first; they had been sustained within minutes of each other.

f.u.komoto turned the body over and saw an area of hemorrhaging on the back. With the flick of a scalpel, he removed a slightly deformed large-caliber slug from just beneath the skin near the midline of the back. A second, similar slug was removed near the upper right shoulder. Rob Keister took possession of the two battered slugs and bagged them, noting that no trace evidence was found on either.

f.u.komoto executed the usual Y-shaped incisiona"down obliquely from each shoulder, meeting at midline. Autopsy means "to see for one's self," and the procedure can give up unfathomable secrets. There is irony in the study of the dead. So many postmortems reveal ravaged organs, hardened arteries, systems that should have long since shut down and still have worked remarkably well for decades. Only misadventure or violence ended the lives of the subjects.

And in the young, as in the examination of Linda Brown, the body so recently an efficient machine, the heart's arteries pink and glistening with no deposits of fatty plaque, the lungs light pink despite Linda's continual worry that she could not seem to quit smoking, the kidneys healthy. Everything healthy.

But she was dead.

One bullet had merely grazed her right lung, but had pierced the superior vena cava; the other had entered the right lung. The superior vena cava is a large vein that returns blood to the right atrium of the heart. Vital. Linda Bailey Brown could not have survived more than fifteen minutesa" on the outsidea"with a hole in the vena cava, unless she had immediate medical care. She might have lived for some time with the wound to the right lung alone.

Linda Brown had bled to death. She was only very tenuously alive when Officer Darrow Halligan bent over her to see if she breathed, and she was still clinically alive when she reached the hospital. At this point, it was too late to be sure how long she might have been alive and bleeding internally in gushing freshets of blood from her vena cava and her lung before help was summoned.

Her husband had been afraid to check on her. He had been terrified about what he should do, and in his panic, he had called his father for advice before he called 911. Would the sequence of his calls have made any difference? Probably not. Linda had been so terribly injured.

Still, it made Fred McLean wonder. He himself was a man of action. He could not fathom the thought that a man would not rush to check on a wife he loved, how he could wait until a policeman got there to find out if she was dead or alive.

Cinnamon had admitted to the shootinga"to "hurting Linda." It was difficult to disbelieve her. And McLean could see the destruction the bullets had wrought. h.e.l.l, it probably wouldn't have made any difference if Brown had rushed in and carried Linda out and driven her to the hospital the minute Patti Bailey told him she had heard shots in the house while he was away. People bleed to death in hospitals with a team of surgeons standing by.

But still. . .

Even after the postmortem, tests would be done on blood and tissue samples, on body fluids and stained clothing. Blood from the right pleural cavity, stomach contents, liver tissue, urinary bladder tissue, brain tissue, vitreous fluid from the eyes. Heart blood was retained, along with the pretransfusion blood retained by Joe Luckey, muscle and marrow samples, v.a.g.i.n.al, a.n.a.l, and oral swabs and slides, and the bloodstained nightshirt with the dancing penguins.

All of it neatly packaged and labeled.

And then Linda's body was released to the Dimond and Sons Mettler Mortuary for burial arrangements. She was cremated at the Coastal Crematory in Pasadena on March 25, 1985.

Her ashes were not immediately inurned; her widower wanted everything to be "as perfect for her as I could make it."

A long time later, David Brown recalled that he had agonized over what to do with Linda's ashes. "Linda and I both believed in cremation. We agreed that whichever one of us was left behind would scatter the other's ashes off of Diamond Head in Hawaiia"because we were so happy there. But that was before Linda was a mother. I couldn't do that to our child. I couldn't deny Krystal a place to go where she could be close to her mother. I instructed the cemetery in Newport Beach to allow Krystal to take Linda's ashes to Diamond Head if that's what Krystal chose to do when she was old enough to decide.

"Linda's in a fountain, right in the base of the fountain, where she can hear the water cascading down twenty-four hours a day. She's way up where she can see the oceana"if it isn't a smoggy day. I loved her enough that I wanted her to have everything the way we discussed it."

Employees at the memorial park recalled David Brown. He bought two niches, and two dark verdigris antique-bronze plaques. He was not satisfied with the first chiseling of an inscription and ordered the job redone. His manner was so unyielding and arrogant that he was not remembered fondly.

For his own reasons, he had that first plaque removed and destroyed.

The Garden Grove investigators spread out in a half dozen directions, racing their own arbitrary twenty-four-hour deadline, aware that the most vital and pertinent information and evidence can only be retrieved during the first day and night following any murder. Just as physical trauma victims must be treated within that first "golden hour" to forestall deadly shock, homicide detectives have a "golden twenty-four hours." After that, people and things evaporate. Witnesses can rethink their stories, alter their perceptions, all unaware. Witnesses can be deliberately contaminated. Inexorable, invisible mutations of fact occur. The chances of an arrest's being made lessen.

A homicide investigation is, always, a race against time and change.

Fred McLean would begin with interviews of those who knew and/or were related to the David Brown family. He had heard only from David Brown and Patricia Bailey at this point, and they were in complete agreement about the dangerousness of Cinnamon Brown. With the confession from Cinnamon herself, the follow-up investigation did not seem to be a matter of finding a suspect.

Cinnamon Darlene Brown, fourteen, was the suspect.

Steve Sanders headed to the Manchester Building, the Juvenile Court building on The City Drive in Orange, part of an aging complex that housed the district attorney's juvenile offices in 1985a"along with the Juvenile Court, Public Defender's Office, and the Department of Probation. The DA's Juvenile Division occupied offices on the third floor of the Manchester Building. Within a few hundred yards on either side of the building are the University of California (Irvine) Medical Center and the Sitton-Orangewood Children's Home.

Juvenile Hall loomed behind the Juvenile Court building, outdated as were all the juvenile facilities in the mid-eighties. There was then, and is today, an irony in the cl.u.s.ter of buildings. Abused children shout and laugh in the play yard of the Sitton-Orangewood Children's Home, so close to the Juvenile Hall where teenagers peer through bars. Too late, perhaps, to save the older kidsa"possibly too late for some of the babies.

Sanders knew it was time to confer with Deputy DA d.i.c.k Fredrickson, give him a synopsis of the case so far and see if charges could be filed against Cinnamon Brown for the murder of her stepmother.

From all the investigators could discern, Cinnamon's crime was murder without extenuating circ.u.mstances. The code in California was PC-187. The admitted shooter was only fourteen, but she had confessed to pulling the trigger three times. She was a juvenile, but her crime was adult.

d.i.c.k Fredrickson was no neophyte when it came to juvenile homicide suspects. Without intending to, Fredrickson had become the resident expert on teenage killersa"a phenomenon that was becoming disturbingly commonplace in Orange County. Although Fredrickson usually served as an administrator, he had recently prosecuted two particularly ugly murders involving teenagers.

Kathy Sloane* was fourteen and her boyfriend, Sean Conley*, sixteen when they beat and stabbed Kathy's mother, Debbie Newton, thirty-six, to death on February 16, 1984. Ironically, the victim was a former chairwoman of the Orange County Coalition Against Domestic Violence and ran a shelter for female incest victims. She had allowed Sean Conley to live in the garage of her Fullerton residencea" until she became alarmed over the s.e.xual intensity of her fourteen-year-old daughter's romance and attempted to break the couple up.

The teenage lovers killed her for interfering.

Fredrickson had prosecuted Kathy and Sean for the murder as violent as any he had seen an adult commit. Physical evidence verified that each of them had used the weapon in the murder. Kathy was convicted of first-degree murder in an Orange County Superior Court in September of 1984 and sentenced to twenty-six years to life. Sean received the same sentence when he was convicted two months later.

Fredrickson had also prosecuted Alan Coates*, sixteen, for the s.a.d.i.s.tic murder of his mother, a woman he despised. His writings, found in school papers in his desk, revealed the depth of his hatred.

It was a growing problem for law enforcement all over America; when is a kid not a kida"at least in the eyes of the law? What is the cutoff point where a teenager should be prosecuted in adult court? Can such arbitrary decisions ever be made when one is dealing with human beings?

Now, Fredrickson studied the Linda Brown case synopsis Sanders handed him, then silently pa.s.sed it over to the man sitting across the desk from him. a.s.sistant district attorneys and investigators are paired off in twos. And on the morning of March 19, 1985, d.i.c.k Fredrickson was lucky enough to draw Jay Newell as his investigator.

Newell, thirty-nine, was a big, broad-shouldered man who looked like an athlete. In fact, he was a grudginga"but habituala"runner. He was also a scuba diver because he reveled in the beauty and mystery far beneath the water's surface. He didn't play golf; he didn't bowl. Nevertheless, he ran in the Challenge Cup, a 120-mile relay from Baker, California, to Las Vegas each year to earn pledges for the policemen's widows and orphans fund. "I always run my ten K in the dark," he said. "When it's cooler."

Athletics came to Jay Newell with no encouragement from him; he would far rather sit on a stakeout. He coached and managed a Youth Soccer League team for nine years, but only because of his kids. One daughter was a volleyball star, and he was extremely proud of that. He was proud of both his daughters, and of his wife, Betty Jo, a highly successful businesswoman. Newell was totally disinterested in watching sports on television. The outcome of the Super Bowl or the World Series meant little to him, but the outcome of a homicide case walked with him constantly.

Newell was a detective with fourteen years of law enforcement behind him. This was what he did. This was what interested him. He was immensely talented at reading people, at judging their veracity by the way they shifted their bodies, averted their eyes, cleared their throats, breathed, smelled, gulped, smoked, drank.

A craggily attractive man with dark hair, soft eyes, and a strong chin, Newell could look like a country preacher, a slick real estate salesman, a biker, or a tough cop. He was an interrogator with a deceptively easy manner who lay in wait for one misstep.

He was a dogged pursuer. He never quit.

He was a dangerous enemy for a felon to have.

At eleven in the morning on that Tuesday in March, Jay Newell heard the name Cinnamon Brown for the first time. He read over the synopsis, noted the address on Ocean Breeze Drive, and headed out the door. "The first thing I do is to go to the scene. I'm not looking for anything in particulara"I just want to get a feel, a sense of the place. It's a jumping-off point for me."

And so Newell drove to the Brown's rented bungalow. Morrissey and his crew were still picking up evidence as he approached the strangely quiet house.

Newell walked around the property first, noting the three vehicles still parked in the driveway after the Browns had left. There was an older, cla.s.sic MG, a Ford Mustang, and a Chevy Monte Carlo. He ducked under the huge old maple tree, its trunk entwined with ivy. Even with the sun out, the backyard was dark, dappled with shadows. He saw the dog pen back of the garage and stared at the two red doghouses. The family had left the four little dogs behind, and they yapped hysterically.

Newell turned away, wondering what it must have been like for a fourteen-year-old girl, sick from a ma.s.sive overdose, to wait the night out in a doghouse in the pitch-black chill. His oldest daughter wasn't much younger than Cinnamon Brown, and he had always tried to protect his girls from anything hurtful or frightening. It was hard not to compare.

The little trailer, its aqua and white paint rusting, dented here and there, was backed in so that it nudged the double gla.s.s doors between the two rear wings of the house, only a few steps from the back door that led to a utility porch. The hitch was propped on a brick and a slab of wood. Newell peered in the door and stepped back quickly to get away from the odor. The floor was dotted with dog feces.

The Terry trailer was a compact unit, maybe fourteen feet long with a built-in stove, refrigerator, and bunks. It would have been fun for kids to camp out in on a summer night, but it seemed a bit bleak in Marcha"when the rest of the Brown family lived inside the house. Cinnamon had been provided with a portable television, a radio, and a heater. A large, well-worn teddy bear occupied the top bunk, and there was a Cabbage Patch doll on the bottom bunk.

Newell stepped into the house, nodding to Bill Morrissey and his crew. He padded down the hallways, memorizing the location of the rooms. The place looked normal, as if a family had just scattered to go to work and school. The kitchen was sunny, and someonea"probably the victima" had had a green thumb. Vines and houseplants bloomed on shelves and tables. It was a "Donna Reed" kind of kitchen, cozy, immaculate, and welcoming.

Like the other investigators, Newell noted the proliferation of new, expensive furniture. The middle room along the south hallway was the most startling study in excessa" especially when Newell contrasted it with the shabby trailer he had just seen.

It was a nurserya"but what a nursery. The furniture was top of the line, just as in the rest of the house. There were enough toys for a dozen babies. Newell stopped counting at three dozen teddy bears, most of them Care-Bears in every color of the rainbow. There were a half dozen mobiles, toy chests, Sesame Street characters on the wall, an automated baby swing, a car seat, and a small herd of porcelain unicorns. Krystal's name was spelled out on one wall in giant letters.

Krystal Brown had obviously been a much-wanted baby, if you could judge by earthly possessions.

And now she had no mother.

Newell turned away.

The motive given in the police synopsis made sense. Fourteen-year-old child of a first marriage in the way. Stepmothera"and maybe fathera"favor new baby. Teenager relegated to crummy trailer.

But something niggled. Newell paused to watch Morrissey sawing away at the wall in Patricia Bailey's room. Bailey had a lovely room too. His mind registered a question.

Where did Patti Bailey fit in, and why was she apparently held in more favor than David Brown's own older daughter?

Jay Newell talked to Patti Bailey the next day. She was a quiet, almost phlegmatic, girl. Her lack of animation made her more plain than pretty. She had obviously been crying, and her face was blank as she explained to the DA's investigator why she had come to live with her sister and brother-in-law.

Things had been tough at home, she said, without elaborating. "I visited every weekend, and then Linda said, 'If you're really having trouble, I don't mind if you come and live with me until you and Mom straighten things out, or until you're eighteen. I'd love to have you.' I said, 'Fine.'"

Whatever problems she might have saddled him with before, David Brown was fighting to save his teenage daughter now. Even as she lay unconscious, he had hired an attorney to see to her interests.