“Convenience store?” they said together as if it was the lowest job possible.
“Where?” her mother asked.
“Down on Venice Beach, by –”
“Venice Beach?” they said in shocked unison.
“What’s wrong with Venice Beach?” I asked, trying to keep my voice even.
“Full of gangs, tramps, drug addicts and psychopaths,” said her father.
“Cain’t argue with that,” said Elvis.
Her mother’s face said it all. “Convenience store? Venice Beach?”
Her father flicked away an imaginary piece of fluff from his pant leg. “Well, as I said we’ve already bailed her out for the last time.”
“She doesn’t need bail,” I said, hating him more than ever.
“Why are you so hostile towards her?” Mia asked directly.
“She’s been nothing but trouble, a thorough disappointment,” said her father. He stood and straightened the photos on his desk.
Her mother explained. “She had a head full of silly dreams, fanciful ideas of being in the movies.”
“She was adopted,” Doctor Willis said in a tone that suggested that this admission explained everything.
“She had just landed a major role in a movie,” I said, hoping they would be impressed. “She was really proud.”
“As my wife already told you, we don’t speak,” said Doctor Willis. “And we don’t know where she is. So if you wouldn’t mind leaving,” he said, making a movement towards the door.
“Oh, I know where she is.” I gave him my best smile. “On a slab in the morgue.”
Mia shot me a glance.
“What?” I asked as Mia glowered at me.
“People skills,” Sheldon reminded me. “People skills.”
Her mother gasped in shock. “What happened?” she asked.
Mia took over. “She’d been murdered. A victim of the Hangman.”
The mother trembled. “We’ve read about him in the papers, what he does to the victims. Oh my God.”
Too late for tears, I thought to myself. “I see you’re not crying, Jimbo?”
“I don’t believe in airing my feelings in public and I’ll be reporting you for impertinence.”
“Yah, ya can do that when you come down to the morgue and try and identify her,” I said with anger in my voice.
“What do you mean, try?” her mother asked, her voice trembling.
“The Hangman sliced her face off.”
Lookout point, Coldwater Canyon Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90000 – 12:30.
As we weren’t far away, I had popped into Mary Thompson’s to feed her cat as I had promised and who knows, I might be lucky enough for it to have rabies. The big, fat ginger tom eyed me suspiciously; until I opened a couple of cans of cat food, then I was his new best friend. Or so I thought when I went in to stroke him: the no-good pest had a fit and clawed me, practically lacerated my arm down to the bone, just as Mary had warned me he would, so I only had myself to blame. When I came out Mia saw the damage to my arm and laughed. As I pulled away from the curb, we got a call up to the canyon: hikers have stumbled upon some human remains. Blood dripped onto my shirt. I could feel Mia staring at me with a strange smile on her face. “You knew her, didn’t you? Sharron – the victim,” she said eventually.
I thought about lying, then went defensive instead, “How did ya know?”
“You were very passionate about their lack of interest and you knew of the movie job – and that wasn’t in the police report.”
“Well done, Sherlock, ya gonna be one hell of a detective, keep it up.” I smirked at her and hoped that I had deflected the subject away.
I hadn’t. “You didn’t report it,” she said. “If you know the murder victim, you’re meant to declare it.”
“It was very casual, just a one-night stand, well, two-night stand, to be accurate – well, three if ya count the time in the storage closet where she worked.”
“That’s more than I needed to know,” she said, holding up a hand to stop me divulging any more details. “But you have a vested interest.”
“I can’t be taken off this case. It’s too important to me.”
“I know that you led the Hangman case last time, but –”
“I’m not declaring it, no one knows, it won’t affect my judgment. Can I trust ya to keep this our secret?”
She smiled and nodded. “Roger that, partner.”
* * *
It was hot, dry, and hazy when we arrived. I took the chance to have a cigarette before we started. We saw the patrol cars and their flashing lights. Two uniforms directed the traffic. Others recognized me and waved me through. “Where are they?” I asked the cop at the barricade used to keep the media and looky-loos at bay.
“Just follow the footpath down, they’ve rigged up privacy screens and you’ll see the tech guys soon enough, they’re gonna be there all day processing that lot.”
“You mean there’s more than one body?” asked Mia.
“Oh yeah,” he said with a smug grin. He cocked his head to his shoulder and pressed transmit on his radio and announced our impending arrival. He checked out Mia’s rear as she climbed over the scratched and dented crash barrier and I felt a blood rush and an overwhelming urge to karate-chop him across his throat.
We helped each other down the winding footpath, Mia more sure-footed than me. The footpath looked well-worn and I figured it was popular with ramblers. We would have to canvass them. We passed various willows and Californian sycamores and I could smell the bluegum eucalyptus, or gasoline trees as firefighters liked to call them, as they don’t burn and their natural oils cause them to explode. As we made it to the bottom of the canyon we could see the field tents in the distance and headed swiftly to them, showed our credentials to the young deputy who was green around the gills and looked like he was going to vomit and by the smell of him already had. He waved us under the crime scene tape and we joined the hubbub. Tents, screens, and strong lights had been set up. I recognized a couple of the detectives and they seemed relieved to see me. I guessed they thought they could pass it over to me and could wash their hands of it. “Hey, Spooky,” Ferdy said. “This is right up your street.”
“How many?” I asked Ferdy.
“We’re still counting,” he said. “The bodyparts have been scattered by the coyotes and other scavengers.”
“Roughly?”
“Double figures.”
“Jesus.”
“How long have they been there?”
“We’re still trying to determine that.”
“Roughly?”
“Maybe the oldest three years, the newest several months.”
“How did they get here, surely not all dragged from a car down that path?”
“We don’t know yet, but we’re figuring there’s a drop point further around the canyon, where the sides are steeper. Somewhere one can pull up nice and close, toss the body over the edge and it would roll down here out of sight.”
“Are Uniform checking?”
“They’re doing it now, but don’t hold your breath, most of the view spots are also popular with the kids, for necking and whatnot. They’ll be too many tire prints to check.”
“How did the hikers find it?” I asked him.
“One of them went off to take a leak and literally stumbled over a torso.”
“Maaan.”
“We think a coyote had dragged it away from the main dumping ground, probably to feed its family. But this is the bit you’ll be interested in,” Ferdy said. “In each case, the C3 or C4 vertebrae had been severed.”
“Meaning?”
“Each victim has been hanged before being discarded.”
I glanced at the corpse and saw that the head and limbs were missing. “Did the killer do this to them?”
“We think so.”
“Not the coyotes?” asked Mia.
“No, the cuts are sharp, not bite marks.”
“Hopefully do
ne post-mortem,” Mia said and shuddered.
“Not all of them,” Ferdy said. “We think it would make the bodies easier to dump and fit into the trunk of a car. Have you ever tried to get a dead body into a trunk?”
“Hell, no,” I said, too quickly. I had, as a matter of fact, but I wasn’t about to tell them that.
CHAPTER 13
We drove back down the canyon as the sun was beginning to set. Mia looked deep in thought, or maybe she was just tired. It’d been a long day and we eventually established there were twenty bodies although not all complete. I broke the silence. “How did so many people disappear without being noticed?”
“It’ll be a mispers.”
“Come again?”
“Missing persons. I was in the unit before transferring to Child Protection. You’d be astounded by the numbers.”
I downshifted a gear as we squealed down the s-bends of the Coldwater Canyon Boulevard. The Camaro loved it and cornered as if on rails. “Go on, astound me.”
“Two thousand three hundred Americans are reported missing every single day. That’s over eight hundred thousand a year, that’s like a city the size of San Francisco.”
“Maaan.”
“Oddly, the number of mispers has increased sixfold over the last twenty-five years.”
“What’s the reason for the increase?” I asked.
“No one knows. However, it has gone from one hundred and fifty thousand reported missing persons per year to now over eight hundred thousand Americans just disappearing off the face of the earth. Here in LA there are over eighty thousand homeless on any given night. That’s equivalent to an average crowd at a Super Bowl final; can you visualize that many people aimlessly wandering the streets of our city?”
“That’s a staggering amount.”
“You’re not kidding. Many of them are kids who head straight for the bright lights of Hollywood, so we have more than our fair share. The National Center in Phoenix track approximately forty thousand cases a year but it’s just a drop in the ocean,” she said. “Approximately a sixth of the missing have psychiatric problems.”
“I’ve seen ’em down Venice – on the beach. Do ya reckon the bodies in the canyon were runaways snatched by a pedo?” I asked.
“Contrary to what the media would have you believe, only one in a hundred children fit the profile of being abducted and sexually assaulted by a stranger.”
“One in a hundred is one too many,” I said.
“Affirmative, but statistically speaking the chances of being abducted by a stranger are infinitesimal. Another unreported statistic is that one in ten of the abductors are female,” she told me.
“Wow. I didn’t know. That’s incredible. Why is it unreported? I can’t think of an abduction case involving a female.” I clicked my fingers. “There was the serial killer in Florida, Aileen Wuornos, but she only killed adults.”
“You can bet those twenty corpses would’ve been newly arrived in Hollywood, dreaming of a better life. Some would be runaways fleeing some terrible home life, but all of them with a dream to be a star, to become famous and show the world they were wrong.”
“Yet they end up at the bottom of the canyon with no one even noticing they’re missing,” I said with a shrug.
“What do you make of the hangings?” she asked me.
“I guess it’s the Hangman practicing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t ya think he would have practiced? Honed his skills somewhere. The way that he can keep a victim alive, strangling them unconscious and then reviving them. That takes skill and practice.”
She gave me a funny look. I said, “What?”
“The way your mind works.”
I shrugged; I didn’t know what to say. She continued. “No one else’s mind works like that, you know?”
“I know, believe me, I know. I can’t explain why. It’s just the way I am. For as long as I remember, I can get inside the serial killer’s mind. I know what makes them tick. While I’m on a case, I live it. I see what they see, feel what they feel, sometimes, why they’re doing it. Why they’re compelled to maim and slaughter.”
“Jesus, Spooky, that’s horrible.”
“Tell me about it,” whined Sheldon.
She broke into a smile. “I’ve got it! We’re looking for a surgeon.”
“Say again?” I asked.
“It’s just hit me like a lightning bolt. A surgeon would know how to dissect, what to remove, or how to peel skin.”
“I think ya are onto something. Ya don’t think Sharron’s father . . .?”
* * *
We stopped to get something to eat at a taco stand, it didn’t look too appealing, but I was starving. Just as I thought – it was disgusting, but it filled us up which was the point. We sat on an unbalanced plastic table at the side of the street provided by the vendor while we ate. A child belonging to the family on the table next to us pointed at my waist. I realized that my shirt had ridden up and that he could see my Glock. “Hey, mister!” he hollered, “can I see your gun?”
“Get the hell outta here!” I yelled.
Mia stopped mid-bite; her eyebrows shot up as she stared at me in shock.
I said, “What?”
“Remember what we were saying about your people skills?”
I heard a sound like a bleating goat and then realized it was the kid crying. I glanced over and noticed the family staring at me with open hostility. My first thought was to shoot him in the head to stop the big baby boohooing like a little sissy, but it passed.
Maybe I should work on my people skills.
A bit.
My duplex, Driftwood Street, Venice Beach, CA 90292 – 20:05.
The rope ladder banged against my balcony, interrupting my thoughts of the case; the dudes had gotten themselves a live one. They had lowered their enticing sign reading, ‘girls this way’ with a giant arrow pointing up and below it read, ‘free booze and drugs.’ The dudes had seen the rope ladder moving and whooped and the folks in the alley down below clapped and whistled their approval; I must admit I was intrigued to see the young lady brave enough to climb the rope ladder into the unknown. Therefore, I was quite disappointed to see a large, drunk teenage boy clambering onto my balcony. He staggered drunkenly towards me and walked smack bang into the glass sliding door out to my balcony. He didn’t seem to feel it, opened the door and yelled, “Hey, dude? Where’s the party?”
“Wrong floor, man,” I told him and pointed to the apartment above.
“Dude!” he said in disappointment and looked up as if another floor to free booze and drugs was almost too much trouble.
He took a hold of the rope ladder and heaved himself upward.
“I think I should warn ya. . .”
“Dude?”
“I don’t think they’ll take too kindly to a dude, dude.”
He flicked me a wave and almost lost his grip.
I rolled my eyes and returned to my notes as the guys in the alley clapped in time to their cheering, willing him up to the next apartment. I couldn’t help thinking how disappointed the dudes were gonna be to see the fat, sweaty, pimply youth instead of some vision of beauty they’d conjured up in their minds. I thought more about the medical angle of the Hangman and was about to phone the captain when I heard the commotion from above as the hefty youth was chased around the apartment accompanied by smashed bottles. I saw the rope ladder swinging frantically and saw the youth go past upside down. I didn’t even know you could climb down a rope ladder headfirst. You learn something new every day. He appeared to have lost his pants or more likely been stripped of them by the surfer dudes. I heard a crash and imagined the teenager had fallen the last ten feet into the trash cans, not a comfortable landing for a semi-naked youth, but just another fairly normal day down on Venice Beach, we take random nakedness in our stride. Venice Beach has a somewhat bohemian feel to it, a shabby chic, fashionable style and a live and let live attitude. A relaxed, laid-back atmo
sphere. It has had a long line of celebrities, past and present choosing to live in the neighborhood of the beach rather than Beverly Hills, such as Julia Roberts, Robert Downey Junior and Nicolas Cage. Along with musicians Eric Clapton, Jim Morrison of The Doors and Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols fame, to name but a few who had rubbed shoulders with the down-and-outs feeling more akin to the surfer, beach vibe than living amongst their elite counterparts up in the Hills.
Venice was once run-down and notorious for crime; one of the earliest known Crips gangs formed there, for instance, but Venice cleaned up its act long ago. It was now on the must-see list of most tourists who flock annually in their millions to the Boardwalk, the two-and-a-half-mile strip of pedestrianized sidewalk that skirted the beach. It was host to many street performers, contortionists, buskers, musicians, mime artists and the extremely annoying live statues, to the more outrageous fire-eaters, sword-swallowers, nude stilt walkers and one guy’s act based entirely on jumping from a chair onto broken glass and, not forgetting, the infamous chainsaw juggler. One more reason I loved living here was the Boardwalk, which was a magnet, too, for the body beautiful, with a constant stream of bikini-clad, model-like girls passing by, jogging, rollerblading, or just strolling along. Some no doubt drawn to Muscle Beach – a gym on the beach, with bleachers for onlookers to gawp at the overblown muscle-men going through their paces, those guys were the champion bodybuilders and even seven-times Mr. Olympia and former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger once frequented the area.
I heard wolf-whistling from above and their catcalling trying to lure another babe up into their lair. I saw the rope ladder start to joggle and knew they’d baited the trap, a girl was going to take on the challenge, I smiled to myself and returned to my studies when a polite cough spun me around to my balcony to see Mia standing there. I was blown away.
“Hi,” she said. “I was just passing.”
What a woman!
I heard groaning from the dudes above and I was lost for words for a moment: she looked gorgeous in a skintight black leotard/pantyhose combination, with a rucksack tied to her back, she’d been working out or exercising somewhere nearby. “Come in, come in,” I finally managed to say and immediately wished I had tidied up earlier, the duplex: like me, could do with refurbishment. I moved a pile of books from the couch and indicated for her to sit. She smiled, dropped the rucksack to the floor, undid her hair and shook it out. She was stunning. Her leotard showed her lithe body and I’d always known she was pretty, but with her hair down and tousled it was a knockout combination and once again I was speechless – well, I say speechless, apparently, I said, “Wow!”
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