by Jacob Stone
Malevich mumbled something under his breath indicating that he still wasn’t convinced. Morris asked Finston, “Assuming you’re right and this is what it looks like, what happens if I don’t get involved?”
“He’ll make you get involved.”
“How?”
“He’ll start targeting people close to you.”
That was the answer Morris both expected and dreaded. Before he could say anything else, Walsh’s cell phone vibrated as it sat on the conference table. After a quick glance at the phone, Walsh informed the room that it was Roger Smichen. She answered the call, putting the phone on speaker. Walsh told the ME who was in the room.
Finston spoke up. “Hi Roger,” she said. “It’s me, Gloria Finston from the FBI. We worked together six months ago. Was the victim drugged?”
“Yes. There was enough pentobarbital in her system to have induced a coma. It might even have been the cause of death.”
“So in your opinion she was unconscious when she was killed?”
“Yes, without a doubt.”
“How easy is it to obtain pentobarbital?” Morris asked.
“It’s a schedule two drug. The FBI can answer that better than I can.”
“Anything else you can tell us?” Walsh asked.
“The best I can do is a three-hour window for time of death, putting it between five p.m. and eight p.m. yesterday. I started having thoughts after all of you left that a guillotine-type device might’ve been used, but on closer examination I was right the first time. A circular saw was used. Twenty-four-inch blade. No other indications of trauma or injury. I was unable to find a needle mark, so she was injected on a part of her body that we don’t possess.” Smichen’s voice dropped off before he added almost apologetically, “Her stomach was shorn open by the saw, and the contents must’ve been lost then, so I can’t tell you what she ate last. That’s about it, other than the plastic sheeting glued to her body. This was done meticulously. Almost surgically. I found no other foreign substance on her.”
Walsh said, “The perp must’ve cleaned her off after killing her.”
“Most likely. Look folks, I’ve got other bodies piling up here, so I’ve got to beg off this call.”
A click could be heard as Smichen disconnected the call from his end. Finston showed Morris another of her v smiles and asked what it was that was weighing so heavily on him.
“I can’t fool a profiler, can I?” Morris said.
“None that I know who work for the FBI.”
“I’ll take your word on it. I’m also guessing you already know what I want to ask you.”
“I think I do. Whether we have a better chance of catching the killer if you join the investigation and keep him on script, or if you don’t so that he attempts to improvise other murders to draw you in.”
“Very good,” Morris said.
Finston looked pleased with herself. “Even if we ignore the value that you and your team would bring to the investigation, we would be better keeping him on script. He would be more predictable that way, and I’m sure the other murders he has planned are as complex and risky as this one, which makes it more likely that he’ll make a mistake and give himself away. Also, no matter what we might say in a press release, he’s going to want to verify for himself that you’re involved, which means he’ll be watching for you at one of his future murder sites.”
“We need to have someone shadowing me and looking for him.”
“Exactly.”
Morris mulled this over. He wasn’t sure whether Finston was leveling with him or telling him only what he wanted to hear as a way to ease his conscience. If he forced this killer off script by refusing to play his game, and the killer chose someone close to Morris to force his hand, the police could be watching for that and would have a reasonably good chance of trapping this psycho. After the Malibu Butcher case, Morris had promised Natalie that MBI wouldn’t take on any more murder investigations, and for his own well-being he didn’t want to get near another serial killer, but he wasn’t going to allow his wife or his daughter Rachel to be used as staked goats no matter how much police protection they were given. He knew the moment he read Gilman’s text message that he was going to have to take this assignment no matter how much he had tried kidding himself otherwise.
His voice flat, Morris asked, “Let’s say MBI gets involved and we keep this killer on script. Couldn’t he still target someone close to me?”
“I don’t believe so. If he were planning to do that, I think he would’ve done it with his first murder. He has a specific story he wants to tell with these murders, and I’m confident that as long as you cooperate and play nice, he’ll stick to only telling his story.”
Morris took a deep, long breath through his nose and told Doug Gilman, “MBI’s available if you want to hire us.”
Chapter 10
The meeting lasted another half hour as Morris and the rest of the team worked out a game plan. The LAPD would continue to pull whatever traffic and surveillance video recordings they could locate within a five-mile radius of Star Wax in the hopes of finding vehicle license plates that were captured between three and three fifteen a.m. While no one thought it was likely that the killer was named R. G. Berg, that lead still had to be investigated, and Polk, with help from several LAPD detectives, would take that on. Morris agreed with Malevich that it was worth investigating the crime as a murder that was dressed up to look like something else, and so Malevich would go after it from that angle and would look for suspects who might’ve had a motive for killing Heather Brandley. The FBI would attempt to identify stores that sold the scaffolding materials the killer used to support Brandley’s body. Finally, Morris and Walsh would try to piece together Brandley’s movements from the day before in an attempt to discover where and how Brandley met her killer.
As the meeting was breaking up, Morris found himself drumming his fingers against the conference room table as he thought more about the name the killer had chosen. R. G. Berg. Something about it was tickling the back of his mind.
“Why’d he pick that name?” he asked Finston.
The FBI profiler made a who knows gesture. “Impossible to say right now other than it fits the narrative that he wants to tell. But the name might still lead us somewhere.”
“Bull,” Polk groused. “He picked that name only to send us on a wild-goose chase. Or me, anyway, since I’m the unlucky putz who’ll be chasing after that wild goose.”
Morris didn’t argue with Polk. But still, there was something vaguely familiar about R. G. Berg, although he was sure that he had never met anyone by that name. Something else gnawing at him were those two drops of blood left on the business card. He asked Finston about that also. “What was the point of that? Could it be this psycho’s own blood? A way to taunt us?”
She showed another of her tiny v smiles, this one apologetic. “I wish I could tell you, but all I can say is it wasn’t an accident.”
Morris pulled his cell phone out from his suit jacket pocket and called Roger Smichen.
“Ah, Morris,” the ME said on answering the call, his voice sounding sincerely disappointed. “So you decided to break your pledge. I was rooting for you not to, and am sorry to hear that you’re letting yourself get mired in the mud with yet another serial killer.”
“I could just be calling to say hello.”
“But you’re not.”
“You’re right. But Roger, what choice did I have? You saw the card he left for me.”
“True, but just because this unhinged individual is dangling bait in front of your nose doesn’t mean you have to take it.”
“In this case it does. I’ll explain why at a later time. I wanted to ask whether the blood on the business card matches the victim.”
“I don’t know yet. The victim’s blood and both drops left on the card are A-positive.”
“That’s a
common one,” Morris noted.
“The second most. Thirty-four percent of the population has it. I’ve sent samples to the lab for a DNA test, which I’ve marked as urgent, and I’ll let you know as soon as I hear back.”
“Okay, thanks.”
Morris got off the phone, and told Walsh, Malevich, and Polk what Smichen had told him about the blood. Walsh and Malevich were going to head over to the dead woman’s condo, and Morris told them he’d meet them there, that he had an errand he needed to run beforehand. As he left MBI’s offices, he found himself distracted. Once again, the name R. G. Berg nagged at the back of his mind. This continued as he left the building and headed to his car. He stopped and squinted off into the distance, trying to dredge out from his subconscious whatever it was about the name that seemed familiar. After several minutes of standing as still as one of those wax figures in the Star Wax museum, he gave up. Whatever it was he thought he knew, the only way it was going to rise to the surface was if he stopped thinking about it completely.
Morris first drove to the Hollywood station on Wilcox Ave. Doug Gilman had called ahead for him, so they had what he needed waiting at the front desk. After that he called Rachel, swung over to UCLA’s campus, and met his daughter as she sat waiting for him on the front steps of the law library. He handed her one of the GPS tracking bracelets he’d picked up from the Wilcox Avenue station house. Rachel stared at it with disdain.
“I need you to wear this, honey,” Morris said, his voice choking seeing Rachel’s face mottling with anger. “If anyone suspicious threatens you, press the button, and the police will find you within minutes.”
“I thought you weren’t going to take on any more investigations that would put me or mom at risk,” she stated in a low, icy tone.
“It wasn’t so much that I took it on as I had it thrust upon me.”
Morris explained the situation to his daughter as she stared at him, her face becoming an inscrutable mask. Rachel fortunately took after Natalie instead of himself, and was a slender, dark-haired beautiful twenty-three-year-old. The one thing that she inherited from Morris, besides his stubbornness, were his flinty gray eyes, and they remained unmoved as she listened to him. At the end, she relented and promised him she’d be careful and would wear the bracelet until he told her otherwise.
“Did you tell mom yet?”
“Not yet. I need to give her one of these bracelets, and I figured it would be better if I told her in person.”
Rachel agreed that made sense. “If I can, I’ll stop by for dinner either tonight or tomorrow. Maybe even sleep over.”
“That would be nice.” He cleared his throat and added, “It would give your mom more peace of mind if you did that.”
Rachel’s eyes softened more as she smiled at him, knowing full well that he was speaking as much for himself as for Natalie. She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, and then turned and headed back into the library. Morris watched as she disappeared into the building.
Chapter 11
Charlie Bogle dropped a fifty-dollar bill on the table. Sitting across from him in the dimly lit and mostly empty Koreatown restaurant was Lionel Simmons, who had been one of Bogle’s confidential informants when Bogle was on the force. Simmons, who had been rail thin the last time Bogle had seen him three years earlier, looked like he had lost even more weight, and from the nervous way he grabbed the fifty dollars from the table, had to still be smoking meth.
“If you were a car thief, and you were going to steal a 2004 Chevy Tahoe with a GPS recovery system installed, how’d you make the car disappear?”
Even though Simmons looked like he was trying hard to maintain a badass, empty stare, he broke out grinning from the question, revealing brownish, ruined teeth. Bogle knew that his former CI had at times worked as a car thief.
“What type of system?” Simmons asked.
Bogle told him.
A waitress came over to take their lunch order. Bogle ordered the bibimbap with chicken and Simmons told her he was just going to have tea. During the seven minutes they’d been there, Simmons had drunk three cups of the stuff, each loaded with three sugar packets. The waitress picked up the pile of torn empty packets that Simmons had left on the table before walking off. Once she was out of earshot, Simmons asked how long it took to report the Tahoe missing.
“Around twelve hours.”
Simmons made several twitchy movements as he adjusted the way he was sitting and crossed his legs.
“Twelve hours?” Simmons made a noise somewhere between a whistle and an exhalation to express his incredulity. “That gives someone who knows what they’re doing all the time they need to rip apart that Tahoe’s dashboard and find the device, then smash it to pieces. Or drop it into a garbage disposal. Or hell, you have that much time, you can drive that Tahoe deep into Mexico. Ain’t no tracking done there. How long ago did it disappear?”
“Four months.”
“You got an exact date? Color and VIN?”
Bogle checked through his notepad, ripped out a blank sheet, and copied the information for Simmons.
“Two bills I’ll ask around at chop shops I’m friendly with, and see if they helped make this car disappear.”
Bogle gave Simmons a hard look and tried to decide if he would only be throwing two hundred dollars away since there was no telling if Simmons would actually do anything for that money. Karl Crawford’s Tahoe could’ve ended up in a chop shop in Los Angeles, but it could’ve also ended up in a chop shop somewhere else. Other things also could’ve been done with it once the GPS recovery device was removed, including shipping it out of the country. Bogle wouldn’t put it past Simmons to be playing him for a quick two hundred dollars, but he made up his mind and took a hundred out of his wallet and held it within reach. When Simmons reached for it, Bogle was faster as he pulled it back.
“I’m going to want names of who you talk to at these shops. Dates also. Lionel, I’ll be checking up on you, and if you deliver you get the other hundred. If you don’t put in the effort, we’ll have words later. We understand each other, right?”
Bogle moved the bill closer so that his former CI could take it out of his grasp.
“We understand each other,” Simmons agreed. “But that don’t mean the Tahoe ended up at any chop shop. As I said, it could be in Mexico, or even all the way down to Chile by now. She-it, these signals ain’t that strong. No more than eight miles. You find a remote enough spot, you park the car and cover it with a tarp, and police ain’t going to find it. But I’ll earn this bill, and the other, even if I turn up nothin’.” He sat back, and tried to act nonchalant as he asked, “Why’s this one Tahoe so important?”
“The guy who was driving it disappeared the same day.”
“This guy’s who you’re really trying to find?”
“That’s right.”
“A bad dude?”
“Not that I can tell.”
Simmons considered that. “I’ll see what I can dig up,” he promised.
Chapter 12
Nice building, Morris thought as he parked in front of the West Hollywood condo complex where Heather Brandley had lived. “Nice neighborhood, too,” he told Parker.
The reason Morris had Parker in the car with him was because Natalie had insisted when they met at her office that he take the bull terrier. “You’re the one this killer is obsessed with, not me,” she had said. “Besides, I’ve now got this shiny new bracelet to protect me.”
Morris had tried arguing with her about which of them needed Parker’s protection more, but Natalie was adamant. She’d also put on a brave face over the fact that he was being sucked into yet another serial killer investigation. “Sometimes the stars just align a certain way,” she said, her large, brown eyes melting into Morris’s. “This maniac’s not leaving you any choice. You’re only doing what you have to do.”
Morris felt a lu
mp in his throat as he pictured the way Natalie had looked at him. No matter what else was going on in his life, he was a lucky man, no doubt about it.
He got out of the car, and made sure to hold tightly onto Parker’s leash as the dog scooted out past him. Instead of heading to the condo complex, Morris walked across the street to the small park that was outlined with bushes, flowering coral trees, and another variety of flowering tree that Morris didn’t recognize, this one having paper-thin yellow flowers. Morris used his phone to take a photo of one of the trees. He texted this to Natalie and asked if she knew what type it was. After that, he walked Parker around the park, letting the dog sniff at each bush.
Once the loop was completed, Morris sat on the lone bench in the park. Parker contentedly plopped down by his feet. Five minutes later Walsh emerged from where she’d been hiding across the street and headed toward him. Minutes before Morris had arrived at the condo complex, he called Walsh and they came up with this plan in case the killer was watching for Morris’s arrival. It made sense that the killer might be doing so if he wanted to make sure Morris was involved with the investigation, but Morris hadn’t spotted anyone suspicious while he did his loop of the park, and if anyone had been hiding in the bushes the bull terrier would’ve alerted him.
Walsh approached the bench and first greeted Parker, who made his excited pig grunts as he wagged his tail, and then sat next to Morris. “I didn’t see anyone waiting here watching for you,” she said.
“It was worth the shot,” Morris said.
From Walsh’s expression, she didn’t seem to agree, but she didn’t belabor the point. “According to the doorman, Brandley came back from a run around two-thirty yesterday, then an hour later she left by herself with her face made up, hair done, wearing a sexy green dress and black stiletto pumps. Quoting him, she was dressed to kill.”
“He had that backwards.” Morris peered toward the building’s entrance. “How come I don’t see him?”
