Free L.A. Rotten by Jeff Klima Page B

database. She’s an interesting girl, seeming totally without guile or social awkwardness from what little I’ve seen of her in action. While she stares at the computer screen, I sneak a quick glance at her sheath of tattoos. It takes me a moment to realize that among all the color and foliage of her arm ink—all the long tendrils of vines that snake and curl off into tight spirals, some sprouting flowers and lush, green leaves—there are spiders. Inked up and down her arm, several of them, all realistic, all deadly looking. I glance up to see she is staring down at me, and I shift back to the computer.
    Working quickly, I enter “Offramp,” “236,” and “homicide” into the logline. Of the 678 jobs Trauma-Gone has done since Harold started the database, 301 of them contain one of those tags. I eliminate “homicide” and the number drops to 148.
    “Just use ‘236,’ ” Ivy attempts.
    “I can’t. I only recently started tagging the room numbers a couple of jobs ago. Before then, there was no point. Same with the exterior photos of the room number.”
    “How many pictures are in each file?”
    “Usually between thirty and sixty.”
    “There’s got to be a way to narrow this down. When did you start to notice the rooms were the same?”
    “About two months ago I began to notice the room numbers. The Bibles have been more recent.”
    “You knew something was strange for two months and you didn’t do anything? Jesus, you’re bent.” I want to say something in my defense, but she is probably right. “Alright, can we narrow it down to just the last three months then?” she asks.
    I add the dates to the logline. “Nineteen jobs.”
    “That’s a start at least.”
    “Not all of these are going to be from 236s…but several of them will.”
    One by one we begin to cycle through the images, me taking a short trip down memory lane, her getting a gruesome education in the unchanging decor of motel rooms. “Wow, these places really suck,” she decides after the third set has clicked by with nothing standing out.
    —
    An hour and a half later, and my eyes have glazed over, unflinching now as image after image crawls by, some horrendously bloody, most the clean, staid “after” photos, where I’d reduced the rooms to a gutted shell: concrete and bare walls. “Wait! Go back!” Ivy commands, apparently still engaged, her expressive eyes broadening in the glow of the computer screen. “There!” she says, pointing at a photo of an end table with miscellaneous possessions on it, the property of some dead former owner. “The cigarettes.” She taps the screen where indeed there is a jumble of cigarettes dumped from their package in a seemingly haphazard collective. “Do you see it?”
    “I see the cigarettes,” I confirm, my patience wearing out.
    “No, look closer.” She drags her finger around the screen, highlighting whatever it is she thinks she sees. Allowing my eyes to focus in and out, I swat her finger away so that I can look for myself, and it hits me: “I see a face.” Indeed, the cigarettes have casually been arranged in such a way as to appear natural in their positions, but upon closer scrutiny, what appears as a rudimentary “happy face” appears. “So what?”
    “So what?” Ivy fairly shrieks at me. “So this!”
    Putting her hand on top of mine, she impels me to drag the mouse along, shuttling back till we reach an array of photos from an Offramp Inn in Granada Hills. She stops scanning abruptly and has to backtrack one, but when she points to an open pizza box with two slices missing abandoned on the floor, I can see why she’s excited. “The pepperonis—someone rearranged them.” Indeed, someone had sorted the remaining pieces of pepperoni on the six remaining slices into a greasy, leering happy face.
    “How did I not notice that when I cleaned up the room?”
    “Well, now that we maybe know what we’re looking for, we get to start all over again,” she says,