Instantly the air clears; instantly it refills with movement. A white cloud hovers over her, leaps over her, circles her; it snarls and lunges at her attackers, driving them back, laughing, into the grass, until the last of them is gone and she is alive.
Their cackles fade.
Quiet panting.
She uncurls.
Aside from the two she killed, a third beast lies savaged, its head nearly torn off.
Beyond it, a familiar shape stands watching her.
Abel’s sheepdog, its mouth smeared with gore.
She reaches for it with a trembling hand.
It trots forward and licks her bloody palm clean. Stands back.
She struggles to her feet, steadies herself on the spear.
The dog crosses the clearing, pausing to make sure she follows.
—
THE DISTANCE THEY TRAVEL ought to take no more than half a day. In her current state, it takes two. Her thirst never seems to abate, and she stops frequently to rebind her wounds. The smallest have already scabbed. Others sting in the open air but are dry.
It’s the gash on her leg that worries her. It continues to ooze blood as well as a greenish slime that reeks of rot. The pain roots into her flesh, knotting up close to the bone, an ache that expands and contracts in time with her heartbeat. Her skin burns, tender to the touch, and the swelling has climbed to swallow her knee, slowing her further.
Sensing that she is not well, the dog keeps its distance, walking far enough ahead to urge her on, close enough to ward off danger. It’s limping, too; one of the beasts must have bitten it. She tries to show how sorry she is for having dragged it into a fight. She apologizes, aloud.
It never betrays impatience. It never seems to tire, patrolling as she sleeps.
On the second day, it leads her to the rim of a new valley, a smaller, drier version of the place she grew up.
What it cradles transfixes her.
A massive complex of clay buildings stretches on and on and on, a rough tan rash cut at regular intervals by open passages allowing free transit from one place to the next.
Transit for the hundreds of people therein.
The dog barks and begins its descent.
The slope is severe and rocky and Asham is light-headed. Her wounded leg can bear weight for only a moment before agony shoots up through her groin and into her torso. She balances with her hands, reaching the valley floor with palms scraped raw.
The dog knows where it’s going. Otherwise, she would be instantly lost in the maze of buildings. Ranging from modest to grand, they reflect their inhabitants, who are young and old, fat and thin, diversely dressed, with skins milk-white or tar-black and every shade in between.
Their reactions to her are identical: they drop what they’re doing to gawk. What a spectacle she must present, filthy and half dead. As she limps along, a crowd collects behind her, their whispers a gathering storm of mistrust.
A man steps out to bar her way.
“Who are you?”
She says, “My name is Asham.”
More men appear beside him, each armed with a bone spear, similar to hers but made longer by the addition of a wooden handle.
“What crime have you committed?” the man asks.
“None.”
“Then why have you come here?”
“I don’t know where here is,” she says.
The people murmur.
“This is the city of Enoch,” the man says.
“What’s a city?”
Laughter. Asham’s leg pulses with pain. Her throat sticks to itself. She has not drunk in hours—a mistake.
“I was attacked by beasts,” she says. “The dog saved me and brought me here.”
“And why would it do that?”
“It knows me,” she says. “It belongs to my brother.”
Silence.
Then the crowd erupts, shouting at one another, at the man, at her. They surge forward to take hold of her, but the dog rushes to her side, barking and snapping, just as it did before.
The crowd withdraws, quieting to a resentful simmer.
“You speak truly,” the man says.
“Of course I do,” Asham says.
A smile plays at the man’s lips. He bows and stands aside.
The crowd parts.
The dog leads her on.
Nobody touches her, but she can feel them following at a distance.
The dog turns to a clay building of surpassing size and perfection. It is magnificent to behold, as are the two bare-chested men guarding its stepped entrance. The dog skips up the stairs, pausing to bark at her before disappearing through the doorway.
Leg throbbing, she limps forward. The guards cross their spears, blocking her.
The crowd that followed her is murmuring again.
“Please let me pass,” she says.
The guards do not bat an eye. They do not move a muscle, and there are a lot of muscles to move. She tries to peer around them, but they are broad as oxen and they shift to obstruct her view.
The dog comes wriggling out through the guards’ legs, barking.
A voice from behind them says, “Open, please.”
The guards slide apart to reveal a young boy dressed in clean skins. A bright yellow band encircles his head. A yellow flower hangs on a thong around his neck. His eyes are dark and curious.
The dog runs to Asham, wagging its tail and barking impatiently.
“Hello,” the boy says. “I’m Enoch. Who’re you?”
“Asham.”
“Hello, Asham.”
“Is this your dog?”
The boy nods.
“He’s very nice,” she says.
The boy nods again. “What happened to your leg?”
A clammy wave breaks over her. “I hurt it.”
“I’m sorry,” Enoch says. “Would you like to come inside?”
—
THE INTERIOR TEMPERATURE COMES as a shock. She begins to shiver. The room is cavernous, littered with carved wooden stools and broken up by doorways that open onto darkness. Torches along the wall partially relieve the dim.
“I’ve never seen you before,” Enoch says. It’s an observation made without malice. “Where do you come from?”
“Far away.”
“That’s interesting,” he says.
She smiles despite her discomfort. “Do you have any water, please?”
Enoch takes the yellow flower around his neck and shakes it, producing a sharp sound.
A bare-chested man silently materializes in one of the doorways.
“Water, please,” Enoch says.
The man disappears.
Asham is still staring at the flower. “What is that?”
“A bell, silly.”
“I’ve never seen one before.”
“Why not?”
“I just—I haven’t. They don’t have bells where I come from.”
“Far away.”
“Yes, far away.”
“That’s interesting,” the boy says.
“Can I try?”
Enoch removes the thong and hands it to her. She shakes the bell, but the sound she produces is muted, nothing like the clear, piercing ring.
“No, no,” he says. “Like this.” He grasps the bell by its top and rings. “See?”
A new bare-chested man steps through a different door.
The boy giggles and hands the bell back to Asham. “Now you.”
She rings.
A third bare-chested man appears.
“Does that happen every time?” she asks.
“Oh, yes. Try it and see.”
Asham summons two more men, one of whom jostles the first man, hurrying in with a shining vessel that c
oughs water onto the floor. The three other men run to wipe it up, while the boy giggles and claps his hands and says, “Again, again,” and Asham complies, ringing the bell, bringing yet more men and resulting in confusion and dancing and more spilled water, and then footsteps approach and all the men withdraw rapidly to the wall, standing at attention as a new voice, tight with exasperation, cuts through the commotion.
“I’ve warned you: if you can’t stop that nonsense, I’m going to take it away.”
He emerges wearing a cape of skin, and carrying a flaming staff, and immediately she sees how the years have changed him. He is harder and leaner, and though he wears his hair long, it has receded at the front, so that the cord of scar tissue bisecting his forehead stands out. The sight of it causes Asham to swoon.
“It wasn’t me,” Enoch says. “She asked to try it.”
Cain does not reply.
“He’s right,” Asham says. Another wave of light-headedness overtakes her, more powerful than the last. She digs her fingernails into the flesh of her palm. “Don’t blame him.”
“Leave us,” Cain says.
The bare-chested men disperse.
“You, too.”
“Why?” Enoch asks.
“Go.”
The boy frowns but obeys.
Save the memory of the bell and the hiss of flames, the room is perfectly still.
Asham says, “You stole his dog, too.”
Cain smiles. “You must be tired.” He draws out a wooden stool. “Why don’t you sit down?”
She cannot move. Her body tingles unaccountably. Her knees knock together.
The torches shrink. The room shrinks and spins.
She has so much to say.
She faints.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Creeper’s paper trail reflected the case’s long and complicated history, as well as the march of technology and the passage of time.
There were black-and-white photographs, color photographs, photographs that had been digitally scanned and reprinted. Interview transcripts and autopsy reports and forensic reports, enough documentation to reconstitute a medium-sized forest.
The earliest reports were typewritten or stippled by a dot-matrix; then smudged, the result of being whipped too quickly from the mouth of an inkjet. Most recently, the laser print was faint, as department-wide cutbacks had turned the wait for a new toner cartridge into a Soviet bread-line.
He counted forty-three different handwritings, some a single margin scrawl, a couple that filled page upon page—the key players on the LAPD end.
Howie O’Connor wrote in a blocky script that mirrored his no-nonsense approach. He was a grinder, a list maker, plotting the locations of the murders on a map to rule out a geographical pattern.
He was also bit of a bully in the interrogation room, cutting people off in mid-sentence when they strayed from answering his questions.
In Jacob’s mind, this was a cardinal sin for a detective. The idea was to get the other guy talking, and to do that, you had to shut up, let the mind wobble where it wanted. The best interviewers were like therapists, silence their sharpest tool.
Google offered a couple of pictures that might or might not have been O’Connor. It wasn’t an uncommon name. Nothing about a sexual harassment scandal. Hushed up or never publicized. These days they’d be blogging about it in Uzbekistan before the guy had time to zip up his pants.
Ludwig had called O’Connor a good cop; maybe the Creeper wasn’t his finest hour.
Maybe the impatience and witness groping were both signs of the same malaise, a decent man anesthetized by horror and buried in bureaucracy.
Maybe the case itself had driven him over the edge.
Jacob put the brakes on that train of thought. An atlas of Howard O’Connor’s psyche would tell him nothing about nine murders.
Aside from their youth and clean looks, the victims had little in common. They did not run in the same social circles. Cathy Wanzer and Laura Lesser both patronized a bar on Wilshire and Twenty-sixth, but everyone from boyfriends to bartenders swore up and down that the women didn’t know each other, and after keeping an eyeball on the place for months, O’Connor had chalked it up to coincidence.
MO was another story. That was consistent.
All nine lived alone, in unalarmed one-level houses or ground-floor apartments with a larger-than-average amount of space separating them from neighboring buildings.
No sign of forced entry.
Looking back, Jacob could understand the intensity of the public panic.
A monster waltzing into your home, slaughtering you, vanishing.
Hard as it was to imagine by today’s standards, prior to the fifth murder, nobody had thought to check the semen samples against each other. Hence there was no hint that O’Connor had considered the possibility of two killers until frustratingly late in the game.
Jacob tried to bear in mind the constraints of the era. In 1988, DNA testing was new, fancy, expensive. Its admissibility in court was subject to debate; the decision to spend the time and money would have been far from automatic.
In 1988, the watchword was end gang violence.
The collective computing power of LAPD, circa 1988, could fit on Jacob’s smartphone.
O’Connor deserved credit for requesting a test in the first place, more credit still for connecting the murders as quickly as he had.
It was evident in the files when Ludwig had taken over: Jacob recognized his neat handwriting from the monarch butterfly shadowbox. His touch was lighter than O’Connor’s. He asked the right questions—which was to say, the questions Jacob would’ve asked—gathering up loose ends and snipping them off.
Whatever his advantages as an investigator, however, they were more than canceled out by the intervening decade. Memories had weakened, details blurred. People had died, or left town, or grown rigid with resentment at being asked to revisit the worst moment of their lives yet again. Some were outright hostile, refusing to talk until they saw evidence of progress.
His master list of interviewees ran to thirty-six pages. A handful of names were starred. Jacob didn’t know if that meant they deserved special attention or could be ruled out.
Denise Stein was not among them.
The floor of the apartment was quilted with paper, bottles of Beam placed at strategic points, enabling Jacob to reach out and grab one without looking. He took a swallow and began crawling around, hunting for Howie O’Connor’s file on the Stein murder.
O’Connor’s remarks about Denise were brief. She’d been the one to find her sister’s body. The detective considered her too ill to be a suspect.
Jacob guessed no one had taken the time to interview her at length.
No reason to. They wanted the Creeper, not the Creeper Avenger.
He sat at his desk, waved the mouse to clear away the screen saver.
Denise Stein was off the grid. No known address. No criminal record. The phone number Ludwig listed for her went to somebody else’s machine.
Was she institutionalized? Jacob doubted a doctor or administrator would confirm that over the phone. He’d have to show up in person to plead his case, hoping he wouldn’t be forced to jump through legal hoops.
He rummaged in the kitchen for anything within three months of its expiration date, returned to the living room with Lev’s Special Shish Kabab: seven martini olives impaled on a bamboo skewer. He pulled them off slowly, chewed slowly, concentrating on their meaty texture to avoid looking at the crime scene photos stacked atop the coffee table.
He’d been saving those for last, wanting to first explore both Ds’ perspectives thoroughly. Only then could he objectively assimilate the raw visuals.
A lie. He didn’t want to assimilate them.
He stalled some more, tossing the skewer into the sink, wiping his hands on his p
ants, pouring himself another drink. Easing over sideways; using his peripheral vision to make an abstraction of the first corpse; and then he looked unsparingly at Helen Girard, seeing her as her boyfriend had encountered her on the afternoon of March 9, 1988.
Nude, legs spread, facedown, the bed pushed aside to make room for her on the floor.
The autopsy report noted friction abrasions at wrists and ankles, though she’d been unbound at the time of discovery. Diffuse bruising on her lower back suggested the killer had been kneeling atop her, yanking her head up to slit her throat down to the spine.
Arterial spray striped the baseboards, the bed-skirt, formed an oblong stain in the carpet that stretched toward a windowpane hazy with daylight.
The bulk of the blood had pooled around her, soaking into the pile, drying black, suspending her over a depthless chasm.
To forestall nausea, Jacob asked himself questions.
Why tie her up, then free her? Afraid of leaving evidence? A little fight to heighten the excitement?
Cheapskates unwilling to spring for more than one piece of rope?
He moved on to Cathy Wanzer.
Likewise prone on her bedroom floor, likewise tied and subsequently freed, throat cut.
Similar spatter pattern, a long arm of lifeblood growing from a matte black hole.
Another point of similarity: the rest of her apartment was pristine. She hadn’t put up a fight. Maybe they’d told her they didn’t intend to harm her, as long as she complied.
That changed with Christa Knox. Signs of a major struggle in the bedroom—a toppled nightstand, a closet door listing on a broken hinge—spilled into the living room, where her body was laid out, blood spreading erratically on the Spanish tiles, sending out tributaries and plugging gaps in the grout.
She’d awoken and seen them.
Known what was coming.
Tried to run.
Further proof of her will to live: her knees and forearms were severely bruised, a chunk of hair missing at the base of her skull.
She’d wrenched and kicked and died all the same.
No semen recovered.
They got spooked—too much noise?
Patty Holt was a wisp of a woman, but like Christa she had fought back, making it to her kitchen for her last stand. The nonvictim blood Divya had mentioned showed up along the broken edge of a ceramic plate.
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