The Golem of Hollywood

by Jonathan Kellerman

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The first detective he reached was Tyler Volpe, from Brooklyn’s 60th Precinct. He sounded friendly enough, if somewhat guarded. His interest jumped when Jacob mentioned the Creeper.

  “That was what, eighty-five? Eighty-six?”

  “Eighty-eight. You were around then?”

  “Me?” Volpe laughed. “Shit. I was nine.”

  “It made an impression on you,” Jacob said, thinking of himself at that age.

  “My dad was on the job, and I remember him discussing it with my mom, like, ‘Thank God it ain’t mine.’”

  “It’s mine now.”

  “Huh. All this time, still nothing?”

  “For the most part. You mind telling me about your vic?”

  “I mean, it was like my second homicide. I almost shit my pants.”

  “That sounds about right.”

  “The brutality read like a mob thing, which made sense, cause she danced at one of those nightclubs in Brighton Beach where the Russian guys in leather jackets hang out. Also did some stripping on the side. She was studying to be a dental hygienist. Nice girl, but a cocaine vacuum, so we figured she ran up a bill she couldn’t pay, or jilted the wrong guy.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “We looked at that, dead end, ex-boyfriends, dead end. We always had it as an isolated incident. Still is, far as I’m concerned, until proven otherwise.”

  “What about the semen?”

  “CODIS came back negative to prior offenders. Why? You have DNA?”

  “Yeah. It didn’t hit yours, though.”

  “Well, that should be the end of it,” Volpe said. “Yours ain’t ours.”

  “Did you ever consider more than two offenders?”

  There was a pause. “Why?”

  “That’s what I’m dealing with.”

  “Nothing we saw said it was anything more than a single guy.” Volpe sounded irritated. “Two guys?”

  “Lemme ask you something else,” Jacob said. “How well do you remember the scene?”

  “Pretty freakin well. You see something like that, you don’t forget it.”

  “She was on her stomach, throat cut from behind.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Facing . . . ?”

  “What?”

  “Did it look like she was facing anything?”

  “The floor.”

  Jacob said, “Anything interesting about the way she was laid out?”

  “Well, she had rope burns, but her hands and feet were loose. I remember thinking that was pretty weird. We never recovered the rope, but we matched fibers to a national brand.”

  “Meaning, useless.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Okay,” Jacob said, “but what I’m asking is, if you’re the bad guy, kneeling on her back, and you look up, what are you looking at?”

  A silence; Jacob heard Volpe’s breathing slow.

  “I got no fuckin idea,” he finally admitted.

  “Can you do me a favor and check the photos for me?”

  “Yeah, fine. Why’s it matter, though?”

  “My vics were arranged with their heads pointing to an east-facing window.”

  “What’s that about?”

  “Wish I knew.”

  “Look, tell you what. I’ll go past the building, next couple of days.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Sure thing. How’d you get stuck with this, anyway? You piss someone off?”

  Jacob told him about the head.

  “Holy shit,” Volpe said. “And you think this guy is one of your killers?”

  “I know so. He was at seven of the nine scenes.”

  “That is bananas.”

  “I’ll send you a picture of him, if you want. Maybe you’ll know him.”

  “Yeah, do that. Sorry I don’t have more for you. A partial or something.”

  “The direction’ll help.”

  “I don’t see how, but sure,” Volpe said. “I always thought of mine as a one-off, but talking to you kind of makes me wonder if my perp got around.”

  “I can save you some work there. New Orleans last year, Miami the year before that, Vegas oh-five.”

  Volpe whistled. “For real?”

  “No samples, but the same trademarks. Gonna call the other Ds to see if anything else turns up. It does, you’re the first I tell.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  “Sure. One more thing. Vegas said their vic’s fingernails were cut extremely short, like bloody short. Does that match?”

  “I can check the autopsy report.”

  “Thanks again.”

  “Yeah, no problem. You know what, Lev, you’re not bad for LAPD.”

  “The hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Here I was thinking you guys were all about beating the shit out of innocent folks.”

  “Yeah, and you guys shove a broomstick up everybody’s asses.”

  Volpe laughed. “Send me that picture, all right?”

  “Don’t look at it before you eat, unless you want to lose your appetite. Or after, unless you want to lose your lunch.”

  “The fuck’m I supposed to look at it, then?”

  “Have a drink first,” Jacob said. “I find that helps.”

  —

  LESTER HOLTZ, the New Orleans D, was AWOL. Nobody had heard from him in months, and the bulk of his caseload had been dumped on a rookie named Matt Grandmaison who began to stutter when Jacob asked about body positioning.

  “Uh, I b’lieve,” Grandmaison said, his accent nearly identical to Volpe’s Brooklyn honk, “whad I b’lieve is dat, uh . . .”

  What Jacob believed is that Grandmaison’s cubicle looked like a hoarder’s basement. He could hear papers shuffling; could hear the poor guy accidentally knocking crap off his desk and grunting as he bent to retrieve it. Jacob managed to extract a promise to revisit the crime scene, although he assumed Grandmaison would forget as soon as he’d hung up.

  Vegas PD was used to calls from L.A., and vice versa: bad guys from one city often fled to the other. Jacob phoned a contact from a previous case. Reintroductions were made, and he ended up on the phone with a D named Aaron Flores, who corroborated the particulars of Volpe’s account and was remarkably quick to confirm that his own vic, a thirty-year-old casino hostess at the Venetian, had been found with her head pointing east.

  “You’re sure,” Jacob said.

  “Sure I’m sure,” Flores said. “I walked in there at five a.m. and the goddamned sun punched me in the face.”

  He went on to explain that Dani Forrester had had money problems.

  “She’s making thirty grand and she’s got four mortgages, one condo for herself and three she can’t rent out cause of the slump. Her sister told us she’d also run up her credit cards, and turned out she’d been making visits to a loan shark. We picked him up, worked him over good, never got anything we could pin on him.”

  He agreed to send Jacob a copy of the file by the end of the week.

  Miami PD put him on hold, midway through a Muzak version of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Jacob thought Kurt Cobain would kill himself all over again if he heard it.

  The doorbell rang.

  Through the peephole, Subach and Schott.

  He put the chain on before cracking the door.

  “Morning,” Subach said. “How’s your neck?”

  Schott said, “Mel told me about your mishap.”

  “We wanted to make sure you’re okay,” Subach said. “Can we come in?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Come on, Jake,” Subach said. “We come in peace.”

  The hold music had switched to a jazzy “Born to Be Wild.”

  Jacob hung up the call, took the chai
n off, and let them in.

  “Thanks,” Schott said. He strolled around the living room, stopped before the disconnected television. “You didn’t hook it back up.”

  “I’ve been busy,” Jacob said.

  “You want us to do it for you?” Subach said.

  “What’s the deal? You’re not here cause you care about my neck.”

  “Hey now,” Schott said. “Always there for a brother in blue.”

  “You sounded pretty upset the other night,” Subach said.

  “So?” Schott said. “How are you?”

  “Fine,” Jacob said.

  “What the heck happened, anyway?” Schott said.

  “Ask him,” Jacob said, chinning at Subach. “He was there.”

  “All right, Mel,” Schott said. “What the heck happened?”

  “I don’t know,” Subach said. “There I am, trying to buy a buddy a drink, and all of a sudden he’s running away, yodeling his head off.”

  Jacob said, “That’s not what happened.”

  They looked at him.

  “That’s not what happened,” he said again, “and you know it.”

  Schott said, “Tell us what happened, then.”

  “You saw her,” Jacob said. “The girl.”

  He was talking to Subach, but Schott responded: “That’s what you saw? A girl?”

  “I told you,” Subach said.

  “You saw a girl,” Schott said.

  “Yeah, I saw a girl. Mel saw her, too, unless he’s blind.”

  A silence.

  “The important thing’s you’re okay,” Schott said.

  “Sleeping well?” Subach asked. “Eating?”

  Jacob said, “Last time I’m gonna ask: what do you want from me?”

  “We want you to do your job,” Schott said. “Best way you can.”

  “Then get me a new computer,” Jacob said.

  “The one we gave you’s brand-new,” Schott said.

  “It keeps freezing.”

  “They all do that, eventually,” Subach said. “You probably got a virus or spyware.”

  “It only happens when I try to search for certain things.”

  “What things,” Schott asked.

  “A tag. Some other stuff.”

  “Other stuff, like?”

  “Can you run it for me?”

  “Sure,” Subach said. “Give it to me, I’ll give you a ring back.”

  “Why don’t you run it on your MDC?” Jacob said. “I can wait.”

  Schott said, “You know, funniest thing, we’re having problems with ours, too.”

  A silence.

  Jacob said, “Must be a department-wide issue.”

  “Yeah,” Subach said. “These days, everything’s connected.”

  “I’ve left Mallick three voicemails and he hasn’t called back.”

  “Try e-mailing him,” Schott said.

  “I did. Like ten times. I need to get hold of a copy of the 911 call.”

  “We’ll pass it along,” Subach said.

  “Will you?”

  “Of course we will,” Schott said

  Subach said, “We’re on your side, Jake.”

  Jacob remained silent.

  Subach wished him a good day and the men exited, shutting the door without a sound.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Tyler Volpe said, “How awesome am I?”

  Any detective coped with a certain amount of tedium; just the same, after spinning his wheels for several days, Jacob felt especially grateful for the interruption. Grandmaison from New Orleans had neglected to get back to him, Flores’s file from Vegas hadn’t yet arrived, and the Miami PD kept putting him on hold, subjecting him to a thousand different pop songs rendered in cheesy saxophone and synth bass.

  Meanwhile, Subach and Schott had gone dark, Divya Das was buried in bodies, and Mallick continued to ignore him. Jacob didn’t know who they were shielding by giving him the runaround, but it pissed him off, in part because it implied that they expected him to give up at the first sign of pushback.

  Let’s not kid ourselves, okay?

  I talked to your superiors.

  I know who you are.

  No, you don’t.

  Fed up, he’d dialed Marcia, his old pal from Valley Traffic.

  “The prodigal son returns,” she said.

  “I need you to have someone run a plate for me, please.”

  “What’s the matter, you’re stationed on the moon? Thought you left us for bigger and better things.”

  “Smaller and worse,” he said. “I also need a recording of a 911 call.”

  She took down the information. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Last thing: check an address for me?”

  She sighed.

  “Pretty please,” he said. “I need a physical location for a division called Special Projects. Mailing address, PO box, anything.”

  “Special Projects? What is that?”

  “My new home.”

  “You don’t know where you are?”

  “I’m not there. I’m here.”

  “Where’s here?”

  “My apartment.”

  Marcia said, “This is getting a wee bit abstract for a simple Valley girl like me.”

  He returned to tracking down the people on Ludwig’s interview list, eliminating those Ludwig had starred because they turned out to be deceased. He’d covered around a quarter of the list, no one warranting further investigation, when Volpe phoned back, sounding revved up.

  “How awesome am I?”

  “I’ll tell you in a minute,” Jacob said.

  “Okay. First thing, you were right on about the body. Her head was definitely facing the east, toward the bathroom window.”

  “Killed there or moved?”

  “Originally, I thought she was trying to climb out the window when he took her down. But now I’m thinking he—or they, if it was two guys—jumped her while she was sleeping. The bedroom was a fuckin mess, so she probably struggled there. Whatever, she faced east. I went back to the apartment and checked it myself.”

  “Excellent,” Jacob said.

  “So?”

  “You’re awesome.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You said the first thing,” Jacob said. “What’s the second?”

  “I showed your head around,” Volpe said. “You were right about that, too: nasty shit.”

  “Tell me someone recognized him.”

  “Not him. The MO.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Head, no body, sealed neck, puke.” Volpe paused. “Stop me if I’m getting it wrong.”

  “No, that’s it. That’s it, exactly. Who’s the D? What’s his number?”

  “Well, here’s the kicker,” Volpe said. “I have this buddy, Dougie Freeman, I was telling him about your thing, and he’s like, ‘Holy shit, that sounds like this other thing that guy told me about.’ And I’m like, ‘What guy?’ And he tells me back in May last year, he goes upstate for a seminar on human trafficking, and they got this group of cops flown in from around the globe, some sort of DOJ initiative, establish goodwill, mutual trust, cooperation, blah blah . . . Anyhow, one night they’re hanging out, getting shitfaced—universal language—and this one guy starts going on about this crazy case he’s caught, head but no body. So when I mentioned to Dougie about your guy, he’s like, ‘Show me the picture.’ I showed it to him. He’s like, ‘That’s what the guy described to me, with the neck and the puke and everything.’ And so I’m like, ‘Great, I’ll tell Lev, what’s the guy’s name?’ And Dougie’s like, ‘I don’t know, I don’t remember.’ And I’m like, ‘You remember the case but you can’t remember his name?’ And he’s like, ‘Course I remember, it was a fuckin
cut-off head.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, think, motherfucker.’ And he’s like, ‘I dunno, it had a lot of consonants.’” Volpe made a sad noise. “I love Dougie, but for the betterment of the species I oughta disengage his nutsack.”

  “He say where the guy’s from?”

  “Prague,” Volpe said. “Anyway, he and Dougie swapped badges. I got the guy’s right here. You want me read it to you?”

  Jacob didn’t answer him. He was thinking: Prague.

  Eastern Europe.

  East.

  “Lev? You there?”

  “Yeah,” Jacob said, picking up a pen. “Go ahead.”

  “Policy . . . che—cesk . . . Fuck me. I’m gonna spell it out.”

  Jacob copied down Policie Ceske Republiky.

  “The c in ceske’s got a thing on it, like a upside-down hat. And the second e’s got an accent mark.”

  “Number, department?”

  “That’s what I have. Badge isn’t his, just a souvenir he brought to swap. You want to talk to Dougie, I can give you his cell.” Volpe read it to him. “Talk slow. No big words.”

  “Thanks, man. I really appreciate it.”

  “Yeah, sure thing. You know, since I talked to you, I’m thinkin about having another crack at Shevchuk, see if I missed something else.”

  “Good luck. I’ll let you know what I come up with.”

  “Same here. Take it easy, Lev.”

  Clicking on the link for the Policie Republiky home page brought up an imposing wall of Czech. Jacob pasted the URL into Google Translate and it rebooted in pseudo-English, allowing him to locate the main switchboard number.

  As soon as the operator grasped that he was American, she transferred him to another woman, who began by asking where Jacob had been walking when his wallet was stolen.

  “No,” Jacob said, “I’m looking for a homicide detective. Can you please—”

  A series of beeps; a blast of Czech.

  “Hello?” Jacob said. “English?”

  “Emergency?”

  “No emergency. Homicide department. Murder.”

  “Where, please?”

  “No, not—I need—”

  “Ambulance?”

  “No. No. No. I—”

  More beeps.

  “Ahoj,” a man said.

  Jacob’s mind instantly conjured a sea captain on the other end of the line. “Ahoy. Is this Homicide?” He nearly added matey.