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RUSH HOUR ENDED at 8:00 P.M., so it doesn't take us long to get to the address in Woodland Hills. It is a small, single-level condo, not dripping with prestige, but nice. It fits the neighborhood. I park and we all get out of the car, heading to the front door, where Alan waits.
"Where's Barry?" I ask.
He jerks a thumb toward the door. "Still inside."
"Have you taken a look?" I ask.
"No. I knew you'd want to see it first."
He knows. Years of working together creates this kind of symbiosis. I poke my head in and call for Barry. He appears from inside another room, and he walks toward me, moving out of the house onto the porch.
"Thank God," he says, reaching into his coat. "I needed an excuse to come out and have a cigarette." He pulls out a pack and lights up, inhaling and then exhaling with a blissful expression on his face. "You want one?"
"No, thanks." I'm surprised to find that I mean it. The desire to smoke evaporated somewhere between finding out about Alexa and picking up my gun again.
I feel gratified and lucky that Barry is the primary on this case from the LAPD. I've known him for almost a decade. He's short, pudgy, and balding. Wears glasses and has one of the more homely faces I've ever seen. Somehow, despite these shortcomings, Barry is always dating pretty, younger women. There's something about him; you get the sense that he is larger than the body he wears, and he has a supreme confidence without being arrogant. A lot of women find that combination of self-assurance and a good heart to be irresistible. He's also a brilliant homicide detective. Very, very talented. If he were in the Bureau, he'd be on my team.
"You itching to see the scene?" he asks.
"Tell me the basics first. Before I go inside."
He nods and begins to recount. He doesn't refer to any notes. He doesn't need to--Barry has a photographic memory. "Victim is Charlotte Ross, twenty-four years old. Found tied to her bed, already deceased. She was cut from sternum to pelvis. Internal organs appear to have been removed, bagged, and placed by the body. Tremendous bruising to arms at the elbows, legs at the knees. They look broken. Contusions look like he beat her with something."
"He did. With a bat."
He raises his eyebrows. "How do you know that?"
"He sent me a video of it. This is the second woman--that we know of--that he's done this to."
"There's no official time of death, but I'd guess it has to be at least three days. She's pretty ripe."
"That fits with the general timeline."
He draws in another lungful. Gives me a look of thoughtful regard.
"So what's this about, Smoky?"
"What's it always about, Barry? A psycho who thrives on pain and terror." I rub my eyes. I'm tired. "This unsub targets women who run personal adult sites on the Internet. He . . ." I hesitate. "This all has to stay between us for now, Barry. I'm not ready to release anything to the press."
"No problem."
"First of all, 'he' is a 'they.' There's two of them. We think one is primary, dominant. And they're obsessing on me and my team. The first victim was a friend of mine from high school. My best friend. Something they knew."
Barry's face falls in dismay. "Ah, shit, Smoky."
"What you've described looks to be their MO. They killed my friend by cutting her throat--that's different from here--but the removal of the organs, that's their signature. The one we think is dominant says he's a descendant of Jack the Ripper."
A look of distaste flicks across Barry's face. "Bullshit."
I nod. "It is. We even have proof of it."
"So how do you want to work this?"
"I want to see the scene alone. And then I want Gene and Callie to give it an initial forensic once-over. Then your crime lab can process it in depth. I just need it done fast, and I need a copy of the results."
"Got it." He walks the cigarette out to the street to put out. So as not to contaminate the crime scene. He walks back up to me and indicates the doorway. "You want to see her now?"
"Yeah." I look at Alan, Callie, and Gene. "Alan, go home to your wife. There's no reason for you to be here right now."
He seems to hesitate, but ends up nodding. "Thanks." He turns and leaves.
"Callie, I'll probably be twenty, thirty minutes. After I'm done, you guys can go inside."
"No problem here, honey-love. Do your thing."
I move to the doorway and stand there for a moment, listening with my mind's ear. After a second, I hear it: chug-a-chug-a-chug-a-chug-a. I feel the coldness moving over me and the distance around me widen to a windless, open field. I can hear the dark train, and I'm ready to see it. Now I just need to find it again. Trace how it rode through this place. I step inside. The condo isn't elegant, but it is simple and clean. It has the feel of someone who used to try too hard but had decided to drop the pretense. A faint, sad feeling. Disappointment wasn't a way of life yet, but that day was coming.
That day had arrived, I think.
The smell of death permeates the place. It is a veneer of decay that's settled like neglect on the condo. No perfume here. The odor of murder, raw and real. If souls had a scent, this is how Jack Jr.'s would smell. I look to the right of the living room and see the kitchen. A sliding glass door leads out onto the backyard patio and a cool night. I walk over and examine the latch. It's standard, cheap. But unbroken. "You just knocked again, didn't you?" I murmur to myself. "You and your buddy. Did he hide to one side while you stood in front? Ready to rush her when she least expected it?"
It occurs to me that their choice of timing with Annie, 7:00 P.M., might have been based on more than just bravado. It is a time when people are either coming home or have just arrived home, or are settling in from having arrived not long before. When they are in flux and don't want to know about the world outside.
"Is that what you did here too? Did you just stroll up in the early evening, all smiles, and knock on the door? Did one of you have your hands in your pockets, not a care in the world?"
Because this is something I sense about them. It's a strong feeling. Chug-a-chug-a-chug-a-chug-a.
Their arrogance.
It's early evening, and they park right in front of the whore's house. Why not?
Nothing strange about parking at the curb, after all. They get out of the car, look around. Things are quiet without being silent, empty without being still. It's dusk in the suburbs, and you can feel life and motion, hidden behind the walls of the other homes. Ants in their hills.
They walk up to her door. They know she's home. They know everything about her. One glance around to ensure no one is outside and watching, and he knocks. A moment passes, and she opens the door . . . Then what? I look around in the entryway. I see no dropped mail here, no signs of a struggle. But I can feel it again, that arrogance. They did the simplest thing they could do--they walked inside, pushing her backward, and closed the door. They knew she wouldn't stop them. It isn't in most of us to push back as a first response. Instead, we look for reasons, try to under- stand why something is happening. And in that moment of hesitation and won- der, the hunter seizes the initiative.
Perhaps she was fast, though. Perhaps she opened her mouth to scream even as the door closed. But they would have been prepared for that. With what? A knife. No. No child to hold hostage this time. They'd need a more imminent threat. A gun? Yes. Nothing like the dark tunnel of a gun barrel to keep you quiet.
"Shut up or you die," one of them had said. His voice would have been calm, factual. This would have made it even scarier. More believable. She'd have sensed that here was someone who could shoot you and yawn about it. I move toward the bedroom. The stench is stronger here. I recognize this place from the video. The motif is pink and soft and tasteful. It speaks of youth. Careless happiness.
In the middle of this softness, the hardest thing there is. Her. Dead and already decaying, still tied to her bed. She died with her eyes open. Her legs are spread. They left her that way on purpose, I know. To bra
g to us; I had her, they are saying, and she's no one. A worthless whore. She was OURS.
I see the bags arrayed next to the bed. While her body is a scene of violence, chaos, and depravity, the bags are a diametric contrast. They appear to have been placed next to each other in a nearly exact straight line. Neat and tidy. They are bragging to us here too. See how neat and skillful we are, it seems to say. Or perhaps they are speaking a language only they understand, writing in bloody pictographs we can't decipher. It screams of careful ritual. This is what Jack the Ripper would have done, they think, and so this is what they do. I'm intrigued as well by the intensity of focus here. They were interested in her, and only her. Nothing else in the room has been touched or damaged. Their need to own did not extend to her environment. She was enough. I move into the room and look around. Lots of books. They are dogeared and haphazard in arrangement. Not just filling space--she was a reader. I lean forward to glance at the titles and am hit with a mixed pang of sorrow, irony, and bitter humor. True-crime novels, many focusing on serial killers.
"Helter Skelter," I murmur.
I turn to the bed. My eyes narrow as I notice her clothing in a pile on the floor. I walk over and bend down, examining without touching. Her bra strap is torn, as are her panties. She had not taken these off herself. They had been removed by force.
I stand up and look down at her dead face, caught in an eternal scream. "Did you fight them, Charlotte?" I ask her. "When they told you to take off your bra and panties, did you tell them to get stuffed?"
She is standing next to her bed, wearing only her underthings, shivering with the adrenaline of fear.
One of them points the gun. "All of it," he says. "Take it all off, now."
She looks at him, and the other one. Unlike Annie, she understands before they have tied her down.
Those empty eyes.
She knows.
"FUCK YOU!" she screams, and runs toward him, flailing and kicking.
"HELP! HELP!"
I look down at her body again. I see bruising on her face, around her eyes. Caused after she was tied to the bed, or before? I'll never know for sure. I decide it was before. It doesn't really matter if it's true or not. But it makes me feel better to look at it that way.
He's enraged that this sow has put her whore hands on him. And he is afraid, for just a moment. The screaming has to stop. He punches her in the stomach, driving her breath out of her lungs and making her bend over.
"Hold her arms behind her back," he says to the other one, voice taut with rage.
She is gagging and gasping as the other grabs her arms by the elbows, pinning them back.
"You need to learn to obey, whore," the one with the gun says. His hand loops up, open palmed, cracking into the side of her face. Once. Twice. Again. Snapping her head back and forth. He reaches over and tears the bra from her with the kind of brutal strength only the insane have. Follows this by ripping her panties from her thighs. She tries to scream again, but he punches her solar plexus and follows it up with a few more devastating backhands to her face. She is naked, dazed, her eyes tearing and her ears ringing, and her head in a red haze. Her knees buckle as she tries to stay balanced.
Easy to control again.
This calms him.
He would have gagged her at that point. I look at her hands and feet, note the handcuffs. Her left hand catches my eye. I move to the head of the bed and lean forward. Charlotte had fake nails. But the nail on her right index finger is gone. I take a quick look at her other fingers. All the other nails are there. I bite my lip, thinking.
Something occurs to me, and I go back out to the front porch. "Do you have a flashlight?" I ask Barry.
"Sure," he says, handing me a small Maglite.
I grab it and go back into Charlotte's bedroom. I kneel next to the bed, shining my light underneath.
I see it.
The lone nail, lying on the carpet near the head of the bed. I squint and see what looks like blood on its tip.
I stand back up, looking down at Charlotte, feeling sorrowful. It has crept up on me, a strong wave of hurting. All because of that lone nail. A last defiance, a fuck-you from the grave.
Others could argue that it was an accident, but I choose not to see it that way. I think of the books on serial killers she loved to read, the fascination with mystery and forensics and murder. And I see a young girl who was a fighter and knew she was going to die.
"Handcuff the whore to the bed," the one with the gun says. The other manhandles her down in her dazed state, grabbing her wrists and--
"Ow! Fucking CUNT!" he yells. "Cow scratched me!"
"Then cuff her, for fuck's sake!"
He smashes her stomach again and forces one wrist to the bed, cuffing it. Then the next.
Perhaps she did it while he cuffed her legs. Perhaps it took her longer, something she concentrated on through her terror and torture and rape. I can see it.
Everything is pain and fear and a red haze. They're going to kill her. She knows it. She's read about it. But because she's read, she knows about DNA. Knows what she has under her fingernail.
She pushes against the nail with her thumb, pushes, hard, hard, harder, pray- ing they won't notice, until--
Snap. It breaks off, painless. She can't hear it fall to the rug. But some part of her mourns as it leaves her. It will live on after this, in a way. She won't. She turns her gaze to the one with the gun, and he smiles. She closes her eyes, and begins to weep, and thinks about the fingernail. She knows she'll never see it again.
I stand up, feeling like a cold wind just blew through me. I look down at Charlotte.
"I found it," I whisper to her. "Right where you left it for me."
"Some sorry, sick stuff," Barry mutters. "I never seem to get used to it."
I glance at him. "That's probably a good thing, Barry."
He starts, looks at me. Then smiles a faint smile. "Yeah."
Callie and Gene are getting ready to go inside. I had told everyone about the fingernail.
"They won't take long, so go ahead and get your CSU guys over here, Barry. Kick their ass, and get me that report. Please. I'll make sure there's a quid pro quo. I'm pretty sure these guys are local. If it's at all possible, I'll have you there when we take them down."
He shakes his head. "Appreciate the thought, Smoky, but don't worry about it. This is one of those kinds of cases. Where you don't care who catches them, as long as they get caught."
"How about we just agree to keep each other in the loop and leave it at that?"
"That works for me."
"So what exactly do you want us to do here?"
Gene has a mixed look of exasperation on his face as he asks this--
excitement and annoyance. He's excited to be out in the field for the first time in a long while, but he is annoyed that it is not "his scene" in its entirety. He cannot own it.
"I want anything immediate that will give me an edge on catching this guy. LAPD CSU is competent. They'll do the heavy lifting. I want you guys to skim the surface and see if there's anything here that will help us now."
"You want us to collect the fingernail?" Callie asks. I balk at this. "Will we get faster DNA results?"
"Yes."
"Then take it. But you'll have to stay here until CSU arrives and log it in. Let's not screw up a conviction later because we messed up the chain of evidence."
Gene looks over at Callie. "You want the camera or the UV light?"
"I'll take the camera."
Callie will be photographing the scene--in particular, anything they touch or remove, before they do so. Gene is going to be using a small, handheld UV emitter. It is a smaller version of the UV scope that Callie used in Annie's apartment, and it will help show evidence of blood, semen, hair, and other fluids.
"Let's go."
They walk in and I follow. It's my turn to be ignored, as they move in a dance that reminds me of James and me.
Callie sniffs the air. "What do you th
ink, honey-love? Three days dead?"
"That would be my approximation."
Callie snaps some wide shots of the body, including the bagged organs. Gene moves toward the Baggies and waves the UV wand over and around them. "No signs of prints." He glances at me. "Though that's cursory, not conclusive."
They turn toward the body. Callie takes more photos. Gene leans over to inspect Charlotte's right hand. "See the missing-nail area?" he says to Callie.
She responds by shooting a series of photos.
"The nail is on the carpet, between the bed and the wall," I say. Callie squats down and takes some photos of the nail. "It looks like there may be some blood and tissue on it, Gene." She takes a few more photos.
He kneels and passes the wand under the bed. "There is a lot of particulate under here," he says. "I don't really want to disturb anything other than the nail . . ." He hands Callie the wand and reaches into a pocket, pulling out a pair of tweezers and a small evidence Baggie. I watch as he stretches, trying to contact as little of the carpet as possible while retrieving the nail. After a moment, he straightens back up, holding the evidence Baggie. "There could be DNA here."
"How long?" I ask.
Gene shrugs. "Twenty-four hours." I start to protest, and he waves me off. "That's superrush, Smoky. Twenty-four hours, period."
I sigh. "Fine."
He takes the wand back from Callie and passes it over Charlotte, starting at her head, moving down to her neck, the open chest cavity, her legs. He stands up. "I don't see immediate evidence of seminal fluid on the body. Blood is everywhere, of course. No way to draw any conclusions on that with the naked eye."
Callie takes some more photos.
"I think your best, most immediate lead is going to be any DNA on the fingernail," he says to me. "And as there appears to have been a struggle, I'll tell LAPD CSU to take extra care on collecting trace, especially with the bra and panties."
"That's it?"
"For now, honey-love," Callie answers. "But the nail has potential, don't you think?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I do." I look at my watch. It's almost 11:00 P.M. "I have to go and meet that security specialist at my house, Callie. You guys stay here and wait for CSU. Gene-- please--get right onto the DNA."
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