Costas broke up.
Jake looked at the plastic bag in his colleague’s hand. “From the mall?”
“Point forty-five ACP.”
Jake knew it well. “Did Ballistics say what it came from?”
“From the marks, they guess a MAC-10.”
“When I joined the Marines, I got my ass kicked for calling it a MAC. Old school say M10, then they go all historian and tell you it’s a Military Armament Corporation Model 10 developed by Gordon B. Ingram back in 1964. Know your history, your weapon, know your enemy.”
“It help at all?”
“Some. You’ve fired one of these, right?”
“Sure. Not my choice, though. Like you, I prefer the H&K.”
Jake turned on his computer. “Gangbangers love them. Some go raw, some pimp them up with Uzi conversion kits. Noise is suppressed, they’re compact, there’s not too much kickback and these days they’re easier to find than a politician with a conscience.”
“M11’s more the fashion now. I was thinking that maybe the 10 used at the mall has history. Perhaps someone sold it off cheap because they guessed rifling marks might bring some grief their way.”
“Be great if we get that lucky.”
“I have one of the team running the records.”
Ruis held up the baggie. “The slug is Blazer Brass. Walmart used to knock out a box for less than ten dollars. I’ve seen people buying twenty or more boxes of this stuff when promotions have been run.”
“Any luck with fingerprints?”
“Not that I’ve heard.”
The computer was still loading programs. “This thing really is junk.” He slapped the side, then picked up a charger cable off the desk and plugged his phone in—its battery had all but run out at Angie’s. “Check for DNA, too—you’d be amazed how many punks play with the rounds, kiss the tips as part of some ritual.”
“I’ll tell the labs.”
“Forensics find anything else at the scene?”
“They’re still picking their way through stuff. The floor was soaked in more than a dozen-and-a-half intermingled pools of blood. On top of all that jam came dropped dollars, purses, wallets, credit cards, receipts, you name it. You wouldn’t believe what shit got kicked in from outside when people were running for the exit.”
“Have someone do overview checks on the crime scene stills and video while Forensics gets granular. We’re up against the clock.”
There was a knock at the door.
Both men swung their heads.
A young dark-haired man with a camera around his neck stepped in. “I’m trying to find a Special Agent Mottram.”
“You found him,” said Ruis, pointing at his boss.
The youngster smiled. “I’m here to take your photographs, sir. Bureau Media Office says it needs new stills of you. Shouldn’t take more than half an hour.”
“How old are you?” Jake asked.
“Twenty-three, sir.”
“You’re a little young to recognize a bad moment, so I’ll help you. If you want to make twenty-four, get the fuck out of here while you still can.”
30
Hawthorne, LA
The front room of the run-down town house smelled of dead flowers, boiled food and old cats.
Angie sat alongside Cal O’Brien on twin wing chairs covered in a faded floral fabric. Opposite them, squashed together on a matching two-seater, were Hannah Vander and her seventy-two-year-old mother Sally Mesche.
Vander was what Angie called a suicide blonde—hair dyed by her own hand. She was early fifties, fighting the lines with a little too much makeup, and had given up on her waistline. She ran a local grocery franchise and her cheap cotton skirt and blouse said she tried hard and worked hard. Her bitten fingernails said she worried a lot, mostly about her mom.
Sally Mesche was a smaller, thinner, older version of her daughter, only her blue eyes were clouded with cataracts and her spine curved in a way she’d never imagined when she’d won the dancing trophies that stood on the back windowsill overlooking the yard where she’d been raped.
“The doctor’s changed my medication,” the old lady confided. A ginger tom appeared from beneath the sofa and wound its way around her ankles. “Things have started coming back to me. Things about that night.”
“She’s on painkillers and still waiting for hip surgery,” added Vander. “The attack’s made the replacement all the more urgent.”
Her mom waved her down. “They don’t need to know about that. They’re not interested in my hip, Hannah.”
Vander gave them a see-what-I-have to-put-up-with look.
The cat jumped and settled on the old lady’s knee. “Anyways, I think clearer now. Sleep longer, too. And I remembered something about that man who attacked me.” She picked the tom up and dropped him back to the floor. “Just a minute.” She tried in vain to reach one of the drinks her daughter had brought in on a tray with a plate of ginger cookies.
Angie passed a coffee to her and watched the cat cross a mat and disappear into the kitchen. “Here you go, Mrs. Mesche.”
“Thank you, honey.” She leaned back and her face said she hurt in multiple places. Her bony hand shook as she raised the white mug to her lips and sipped. “My, that’s hot,” she said with disappointment. “You made it too hot, Hannah. You’ll be scalding me with drinks like that.” She rested the mug on the arm of the couch.
Her daughter intervened. “You’ll leave a ring, Mom. Let me put it down on the tray so it can cool down.”
“Leave me alone. I can cope.” She moved the drink out of Vander’s reach.
Angie fought back a smile and waited patiently. Old folks needed time. She was sure Sally Mesche would get to the point soon enough.
The grandmother cleared her throat with a raspy cough and began. “The policewoman who came and interviewed me after I was attacked said I was to call if I remembered anything. Said it didn’t matter how unimportant I thought it was, I had to call.”
O’Brien jumped in. “She was right, Mrs. Mesche. We’re happy to hear whatever you have to say, and we appreciate you going through all this again.”
She looked at Angie. “Could you pass me a cookie, honey?”
“They look good, don’t they?” Angie lifted the plate for her.
“From my store,” said Vander proudly. “One of our best promotions.”
“She means they’re past their sell-by.” The old lady took three and stacked two like casino chips. “I went out with a boy from Louisiana. He lived with his poppa. Name was Charlton Brazer. He had a chest as big as Texas—and other parts of him weren’t so small either.”
“Momma!”
Angie and O’Brien laughed.
“Charlton’s pa did all the cooking and I ate round there a lot. Time was when I practically lived with them. That was before I found Charlton with Lizzy Smithson; then I never went near the hound again.” She bit some of her biscuit and chewed slow. “Charlton’s old man cooked real well, but there was only one meal he could make. At first you thought, hell, this is a good dinner. Then when you’d been a few times you got mighty sick of it. The smell started to turn your stomach. It was a stink that didn’t come and go. It just stayed.” For a moment the old lady seemed to wander back to another time and place. One when her body didn’t ache everywhere and Charlton Brazer had only had eyes for her.
She put the remains of her cookie down. “It was a smell that wouldn’t stay in a kitchen either. It climbed out onto the porch, crept its way upstairs into your bedroom, got in the bath with you and lived in your clothes and your hair.”
She tried her coffee again.
It had cooled enough for two sips.
Angie watched a brown spill slide down the outside of the mug and stain the fabric below it.
Sally Mesche knew they were waiting for her. Hanging on every word. She gave them three.
“Southern fried chicken.” She squinted through cloudy eyes at the two investigators. “The man who attacked
me never said a word. I never so much as saw him. But I’d know him if he was standing behind me now. He smelled of cooking oil, spices and fried chicken. It was in his skin like he bathed in it first thing every day and last thing at night.”
31
Hawthorne, LA
They found a Subway a few blocks east of Sally Mesche’s house and grabbed what passed as lunch.
O’Brien had a bucket of coffee to go with his twelve-inch steak, egg and cheese. Angie took a decaf Diet Coke with ham and salad.
Between mouthfuls, the cop called his office and ordered fresh interviews of all the victims, with a view to their describing—“unprompted,” he stressed—what the UNSUB had smelled of.
“How’s your sub?” he asked Angie.
She tried not to think of the lunch she should have been sharing with Suzie Janner. “It’s next to tasteless, but at least it’s filling a hole.”
“You want some of this?” He waggled the half-eaten stick in her direction. “I could happily give you a good four inches.”
She tried not to smile.
“Go on,” he urged. “You could cut me a little slack and laugh.”
“It’s not that funny, just juvenile.”
“I know, but you’re one icy lady and I’m just trying to make a bit of a connection.”
“No need. Truth is, I respect the job you’re doing. I just don’t like your view on the race angle.”
“Still that?” He put his sandwich down and wiped his hand. “You get why, though? You understand how in our racially tense tinderbox part of the world the idea of a black man raping white women out of hate might stir up a whole hornets’ nest of trouble?”
“Yeah, I get the why. But that doesn’t make withholding the details from your team and the public right. My observation isn’t prejudiced or racist; it’s just factual.”
“And inflammatory. It gets leaked to the press and there’ll be no shelter from the shitstorm.”
“I’d rather a shitstorm than another rape.”
“And what if you’re wrong?”
“I’m not. All the victims are white and elderly. All have been violated in the most aggressive and personal ways. These are hate crimes—”
He held up a hand to stop her. “I know your argument and I’m starting to see it that way. But can we just get this round of new interviews out of the way before we disclose the twentieth point on your profile?”
She shot him a withering look.
“This afternoon we’re going to start a sweep of all fast-food workers in the locale. Kentucky Fried, Southern Fried, Dixie Fried, Chicken Fried—we’re going to pull in each and every one of them and work your profile against all males on the books. I’ll personally serve you with a suspect list and I’ll personally look out for the factor that you’ve shared with me, but I’m begging you, Doc, just give me time on this one.”
“You mean more time.”
“Yeah, I do.” He picked up his coffee and watched her for a response.
Angie could see how the new info that Sally Mesche had given them needed to be processed. If it threw up suspects, then maybe there was no need to apply an extra filter at too early a stage. “Okay, you got it.”
“Bless you. You are an angel.”
“Far from it,” conceded Angie, “but I see sense in what you’re saying. Can I ask you something?”
“Of course you can. Your gesture of goodwill wins you the right to one question completely of your own choosing.”
“I was going over the geographic profiling and I wondered whether there had been any attempted rapes in Lawndale?”
“Lawndale?” He frowned. “None of our victims were from Lawndale.”
“I know. I didn’t ask that. I asked if there had been any attempted rapes there.”
He took a second to think about it. “No, not to my knowledge.”
“Or maybe violent but nonsexual attacks on elderly women?”
“To be honest, I wouldn’t know.” He played with his sub and wondered if he should eat any more or leave it. “There’d most probably be a bag snatch or break-in linked to a senior, but I only get detailed rape and homicide, so I don’t have details. I can check for you. Why?”
“I thought I’d worked out a pattern to the offender’s attacks, but then it fell apart because there had been no incidents in Lawndale.”
“I don’t follow.” He wrapped the food and pushed it away so he wouldn’t try to finish it.
“Hang on.” She slid a small, lined notebook out of her purse and pulled the cap off a felt-tip pen with her teeth. Quickly, she divided the page vertically with the 110 and horizontally with the 105.
“From what we know, the UNSUB committed five offenses in five different places. Inglewood, Huntington Park, Hawthorne, Lynwood and of course Compton, the Lindsey Knapp homicide.”
“Right.”
Angie marked them on her sketch. “So what do you think?”
“I think what I always thought. The sick fuck runs up and down the 110 and back and forth along the 105.”
“Maybe. But there’s more to it than that.” She scribbled again. “Look what happens when I put in the order in which he attacked the victims.”
O’Brien began to see what she was driving at. “You think he alternates? Started left of the 110 at Inglewood, then went right to Huntington, then left to Hawthorne…”
“Well, that kinda makes sense until he gets to Lynwood. Then from Lynwood he doesn’t cross the freeway but goes straight down to Compton.” She marked it up for him.
O’Brien tapped the bottom left of her sketch. “This why you asked about Lawndale and put a big question mark over it?”
“That’s right.” She reached into her purse for a different pen. “Offenders are like sports stars. When they’re on a running streak, they don’t change the basics of what they’ve been doing.”
“If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.”
“Exactly.” She ran a red pen over her notebook. “After Lynwood, it really should have been Lawndale and then Compton.”
Angie took a belt of Coke to help banish the taste of bland ham. She bent over her sketch and drew all the mileages in, marking the distances between the sequence of offenses. She pushed the book back to O’Brien. “Look at this and you’ll see his attacks are evenly spaced. There are twelve miles between Inglewood and Huntington. Nine point four between Hawthorne and Lynwood and ten point six between Lawndale and Compton.”
He took it all in. Looked a little defensive. “We kept a map of early attacks on the wall in the incident room. But we didn’t interpret the offending in the way you have. We saw it more as his strike area, his comfort zone. We certainly didn’t see the zigzag pattern that you have marked out.”
“Don’t blame yourself. It’s not always possible to see the emerging behavior.”
He tapped her notebook. “From what you’ve got there, where do you think our sick friend is most likely to live?”
Angie planted her index finger high above the top of the notebook. “He’s living north and working south. Few offenders actually kill their way toward their own front porch, so I have him in the opposite direction, living north of Huntington and Inglewood.”
“Wonderful,” said O’Brien dryly. “Out of the twenty million people housed in Greater LA’s four hundred square miles, we’ve narrowed things down to a mere eight or so million.”
“It’s a start,” said Angie. “At least it’s a start.”
32
California
Shooter had slept well.
He did these days. Now that it had begun. Now that it was out of his head and had become reality.
Bed was nothing more than a mattress on the floor and a sheet to cover himself with. He didn’t need anything else. Didn’t crave comforts. There was no natural light inside his sanctuary and more than anything he liked the dark. He made his way to the bathroom in the blackness. Like a blind man, he’d learned every inch of the place. He could sprint in the dark
and never touch a wall. He could find a switch or a gun in a split second without falling or faltering.
In his control room, he diligently checked the security cameras. They were all fine. None broken or interfered with.
It was already baking hot outside. Shadows on the ground told him the sun was high and it was just after midday. He stood for a moment and hit superfast rewind on a digital recorder. It was slaved to cameras showing split feeds north, south, east and west of the property. Watching the overnight footage always took fifteen minutes. Time he used to perform basic yoga stretching exercises for his spine, legs and arms. Fitness of body equaled fitness of mind. It was part of his discipline. His focus.
The recording revealed nothing alarming. Nor had he expected it to. The old unit was ringed with high metal fencing and padlocked. He’d strung rusty razor wire along the top and thrown all manner of trash around the outside of the place. For months he’d tossed food there to encourage rats. Even street bums stayed away from vermin.
One of the inner rooms he had created was a large closet jammed with old clothes. Rich people had dumped them outside shelters, soup kitchens and charity stores. He’d taken what he wanted. Everything from denims to suits, workers’ overalls, shirts, sweats, Ts, long and short coats and all manner of footwear.
Today he dressed blue. Low-riding jeans, old Converse trainers and a sleeveless T with a white Gold’s Gym logo on it—a muscular bodybuilder lifting a weights bar so heavy it bent in the middle.
Shooter put on fake Oakley shades and grabbed cash, a bottle of water and a rucksack.
By one of the exit doors he picked up his push-bike, checked the video monitor to make sure his route was clear and then pushed his way into the dazzling sun.
It was half an hour before he stopped cycling. He didn’t buy more than one newspaper at a time, but by the time he was done he had finished the water and jammed the rucksack.
He rode back slowly and spent the time people-watching. Most of them were robots. They glided from cars to buildings as though they were on rails in an automated assembly plant. Their brain-chips were programmed—HOME, WORK, HOME, SPEND SOMETHING SOMEWHERE, HOME, WORK, HOME, SPEND. Living was wasted on them. No wonder they made such bad decisions. Did such bad things.
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