“Probably not. The room is ventilated.”
“Look, do you want to spend the next year sitting by a miniature hospital bed because one of the kids opened the cabinet and swallowed a bottle of lye? Do you want to learn how to clean a little tiny trach tube? Do you want to pick out a miniature casket?”
“Do we even have lye in the house? Why would we keep lye in the house?”
“Peter!”
“Okay, okay.” He put his arm around me. “We’ll figure out how to use the latches.”
I rested my head against his chest. “I can’t believe it. What am I going to tell Sandy when she comes to pick Jackson up? Thank God it wasn’t one of those other moms. They’d never let their kids come over ever again.”
Peter kissed the top of my head. “Honey?” he said.
“What?”
“Why do we have lye in the house?”
“We don’t have lye in the house,” I said, pressing my face into the soft cotton of his shirt. “Who would keep lye in the house? I don’t think I even know what lye is.”
Eleven
ROBYN called the next afternoon. “I’ve got about eleven possible cases,” she said.
“Eleven?” I replied, aghast.
“I only went back to 1998, and I limited myself to unsolved rape-murders of African-American women. As near as I can tell, all these bodies were discovered in the thirty-block Figueroa Street corridor. I can’t be sure I got them all, because that area’s pretty much the most violent part of the city. The murder rate went way down in the nineties, but there were still lots of files for the computer to sift through. These eleven stuck out for me, though, because they’re all African-American women, all most likely prostitutes or at least women who the investigating officers assumed were prostitutes. There’s only one thing that bothers me.”
“What’s that?”
“Your victim was bludgeoned, right? A blow to the head?”
“Yes.”
“Well, most of these others are strangulation cases—eight to be exact. The other three of the victims died from other causes; there’s one other woman who was beaten to death, like your victim. Two others were stabbed.”
I leaned back against the kitchen counter. I was holding a large knife in my hand, my biggest and sharpest blade. Ruby, Isaac, and I were making cookies, and we were just getting ready to cut up a tube of premade dough into little triangles. I looked at the sharp steel.
“Hey guys,” I said. “Go ahead and use your fingers.”
I carefully put the knife back in the drawer and closed it. The latch clicked into place. I moved to the other side of the kitchen, away from the children’s prying ears.
“So, Robyn, does this mean the cases are connected or they’re not?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, perpetrators are known to change methods. I’d like to turn all this information over to the NCAVC team.”
“Please do,” I said. “Maybe they’ll light a fire under the cops’ behinds.”
“The LAPD isn’t going to be happy, and I’m not sure the NCAVC team will think it’s worth pursuing, but I think it’s worth a look. Something feels wrong to me here.”
“Thanks, Robyn.”
“I’m happy to help. Oh, Juliet. There’s one other thing.”
“What?”
“I found three cases in the late nineties that look a lot like the others. You know, African-American prostitutes who worked Figueroa Street. These were strangulation cases, too.”
“So why didn’t you include them in the list?”
“They’re not unsolved cases. One man pled guilty to all three murders. Vernon Smith. He’s been in jail since 1998.”
“Oh.” I know that the logical conclusion from Robyn’s statement is that those three crimes are different, the work of that incarcerated man, and that the ones since then were done by other people, or one other person. But, I had spent years as a criminal defense attorney, and I still think like one.
“What was the basis for the conviction?” I said.
“There was a guilty plea, but I can’t tell more than that. I don’t know if there was a confession or if there was other evidence. The cases were closed out after the defendant was apprehended.” She paused. “They sure do look just like all the others, though. At least like those eight other strangulations. They look just the same.”
* * *
THE next morning I took Robyn’s list of names and went to look up Detective Steve Sherman, formerly of the Robbery and Homicide Division, currently of the cold case unit. A man less like Detective Jarin I could not have found.
Detective Sherman was a big man, bald but for a circlet of grizzled hair running around the back of his head from temple to temple. He wore a pinstripe suit with wide lapels and slightly flared pants, a suit that looked exactly like the latest in men’s fashion. I couldn’t see Detective Sherman combing through the racks at Barney’s or Fred Segal, however. He’d been wearing that suit since the last time it was in style, circa 1977.
Before we sat down Detective Sherman wiped out a mug with a paper towel and poured me a cup of coffee. I thanked him and took a sip. I couldn’t keep from grimacing.
“Sorry,” he said. “The other guys all go to Starbucks, so I’m the only one who drinks it. I forget that other people don’t like it so bitter.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “I need the caffeine.” I pulled Robyn’s e-mail with the list of victims out of my bag. When Detective Sherman had returned my call he’d been eager to see me. Surprisingly eager, in fact.
I pointed out the three solved cases. “I know you’ve got these listed as solved, but I left them on because they’re so similar to the others on my list.”
He shook his head. “I know those cases. There was a confession.”
“Confessions can be coerced.”
He sighed and scanned the rest of the names on the list. He tapped a name with his finger. “This was mine,” he said.
I looked at the name. Lanelle Walcott, murdered on February 11, 1999.
He said, “I’ve been thinking about Lanelle for a long time. Sometimes, you know, they just stick around in your head.” He passed his finger along her name, gently, almost a caress. “She had twin baby boys. Same age as my grandson.”
“What happened to them?”
He shrugged. “The grandmother was sick with diabetes; she’d lost her leg and wasn’t in any shape to take care of them. They went into foster care. I hope they were adopted.”
He knew as well as I did that the fate of a pair of African-American twin boys in foster care was not likely to include adoption.
“Did you have any physical evidence in that case? Anything for a DNA test?”
“We had a autopsy. Real complete,” he said. “We had semen, blood. The works.”
“Did you do DNA testing?”
“Back then? No.”
“And now?”
He motioned at the pile of folders on his desk. “You know how many cases we’ve got in this unit?”
I shook my head.
“Nine thousand. Nine thousand unsolved homicides, going back to the 1960s. And the crime lab has a two-hundred-case backlog. We can’t do DNA testing on every case.”
“Why not?” I said. “We can afford to incarcerate two million people in this country, most of them on nonviolent drug offenses. Why can’t we afford to do DNA testing on all the unsolved murders if we’ve got something to test?”
He just shook his head. “They’re doing their best over at the lab. We’re all doing our best.”
I leaned forward, my elbows on his desk. “I know you are. I know you’re all doing your best. But it’s not good enough, Detective Sherman. Not when all these women are dead. Not when the ones who are alive face the possibility of being raped and murdered every time they set foot on Figueroa Street.”
He picked up Robyn’s e-mail and scanned the list again. “Can I keep this?” he said.
“Yes. I’ve got a copy at home.”
IT was a week before I became frustrated enough to come up with a plan. A week in which I wrote up a case report to Heavenly that contained only my own suspicions and the fears of the prostitutes. A week in which I under-billed my hours. (One more piece of paperwork to hide from Jeanelle.) A week in which I tried to get two different newspaper reporters to write an article about the murders. One man wouldn’t even return my call. The other, a young metro section reporter, took all the women’s names and told me he would look into it once he finished the long series he was doing on illegal gambling among teenagers.
Over the course of that week I found our last Arthur Fanswatler, the assistant manager of a Club Med in the Caribbean. Our movie studio client was happy, and we would get paid.
At the end of the week, over an Ethiopian lunch at a place called Café Blue Nile—a restaurant that Al and I were sampling in order to determine if the beg wat melted in our mouths and the doro tibs fell off the bone like at our old favorite, the Jewel of the Nile, recently closed by the health department—I leaned back in my basket chair, my fingers covered in lentils and my mouth burning from a dozen kinds of hot peppers, and said, “This is driving me out of my mind.”
“I know,” Al said. “I think the sauces are better here, but the meat is too tough. It’s a hard call.”
“Not this.” I waved at the platter covered in dollops of mushy stew, which we were eating with our fingers and with the help of pieces torn from the huge soft pancake on which the food sat. “This is great, although you’re right about the lamb. It’s too stringy, or something. I’m talking about the Spees case. It’s been over six months since she was murdered.”
Al licked his fingers clean and drank half his water in one gulp. “Man that’s hot. Yeah, it’s been six months.”
“The women I talked to said he hits every year, sometimes every six months.”
“You’re worried he’s going to kill someone?” Finally, by dint of sheer tenacity and repetition, I’d won Al over to my point of view. He was at least willing to accept the possibility that there was a killer out there. Especially since it appeared that Robyn agreed with me.
“Yes, I’m worried that he’s going to kill someone. I’m also thinking it’s a perfect time to try to find him.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Look, what would the homicide cops be doing right about now if they were actually investigating the case?”
Around a mouthful of food, Al said, “DNA testing the samples.”
“I mean in addition to that.”
“Why don’t you tell me, since you’re suddenly such an expert on police procedure.”
“They would do a stakeout! They would send a plainclothes officer onto Figueroa Street dressed as a hooker, to try to lure the killer out of hiding.”
Al sighed and wiped his face with his napkin. “Maybe on Starsky & Hutch they’d send out a decoy, but not at the LAPD. You think they’d risk a cop’s life?”
“Sure, I mean, don’t they do that kind of stuff all the time?”
“You’ve been watching too much television, my dear.”
“Al,” I said. “We’ve got to help these women. What if while we’re sitting around waiting for Robyn to convince someone at the FBI to look at this, or for the LAPD crime lab to get through its backlog, the guy decides to strike again?”
“What are you suggesting, that we dress you up as a hooker and send you on the street? You’ve got three kids, Juliet. Don’t be an idiot.”
“I could never do it.”
“Well thank goodness for that.”
“He doesn’t like white women.”
Al pushed his basket chair out from the table. It creaked and snapped under his weight. “What are you planning? Please tell me you’re not planning on calling Robyn and asking her to be your decoy.”
“I thought of that, but she’d never go for it. Even if we found him she’d lose her job.”
“I wouldn’t let her, anyway.”
I ignored his blustering. “There’s a much simpler way. You and I can stake it out. We give the hookers my cell phone number, and if they see him they call us. We’ll call the cops and, you know, pin the guy down until they get there.”
“Pin him down?”
“Not physically. You’ll pull your gun on him.”
“And if he’s got a gun?”
“He doesn’t. If he had a gun he’d have used it by now. He strangles them or he beats them over the head. This guy likes to use his hands.”
Al rubbed his face, and in the dim light of the restaurant I saw the back of his hands, gnarled and scarred, with gray hairs sprouting from the knuckles. The hands of an old man. Al was so vigorous, so tough and strong, that I often forgot that he was not a young man. My first year at the federal defender’s office we celebrated his fiftieth birthday with cake and a stripper, that bit of inappropriate conduct courtesy of his fellow investigators. I counted on my fingers. He was fifty-eight.
“There’s a big flaw in your plan,” Al said.
“I know. How would we know when he’s going to hit? It could be tonight, it could be six months from now. We can’t sit out there every single night, and it won’t do the girls any good if we’re not right there when it happens. He and his victim would be long gone by the time we showed up.”
“Yeah, that’s a flaw, although I was thinking of another one.”
“What?”
“I was thinking that it’s an insane idea and you’re a friggin’ lunatic.”
* * *
I wish I could say that it worked, that Al and I did a stakeout, one of our usuals, complete with In-N-Out burgers, Krispy Kremes, and not too much to drink. (When you’re on a stakeout, you can’t leave the car to go to the bathroom and, while Al swears that adult diapers are a tried-and-true technique of investigators the world over, peeing in my pants just doesn’t appeal to me.) I wish we had been the ones who busted the guy. But a stakeout was a ridiculous idea. It was doomed to failure. Anyone could see that.
Which is why we only went out once, that following Wednesday. I chose that night because Violetta was murdered on a Wednesday, as were four of the victims on the list. And because it took me that long to browbeat Al into coming along and to convince Peter that I wasn’t going to get killed.
We pulled up at the taco stand at 9 P.M., long before I expected that anything would happen. The girls knew me by now, and they came right over.
“You buying tonight, girl?” The woman who had been wearing the purple dress the other night now had on a little sequined number, silver. Over her hips and breasts where the fabric tugged the sequins had popped off, leaving dangling white threads.
I pulled out some cash and bought a round of coffees for everyone. I got played a little—half the girls wanted some Mexican pastries, the others put their burritos on my tab—but I didn’t mind. Once the young couple in the truck had served us, the woman replying to my buenas noches with a shy smile tucked behind her palm, I told the girls my plan.
“How we going to call you?”
“Do any of you have cell phones?”
Mary Margaret and two of the other girls had them.
“How we going to know it’s him?”
I said, “M&M, can you describe him?”
She shrugged. “He’s just, you know, a guy. Real short hair. He’s good looking, you know? Not like you’d think.” She considered her shoes. “Um, he’s a black guy, did I say that?”
I don’t know why I was surprised. I guess I had always just assumed he was white. The classic serial killer is almost always a white man. “Are you sure?” I asked her.
“The guy I seen Teeny with was black,” she said. “No doubt. And we’d know a white guy right away, you know? He’d stick out driving up and down Figueroa.”
“You don’t get white tricks?”
“Sure we do,” she said. “Just, you know, we notice them.”
Not for the first time I wondered how it was th
at Mary Margaret had found herself working this corner. What in her life had led her here? Was it drugs that precipitated the fall, or did drugs just make it easier to bear once it happened?
I gave the women my number and pointed to Al’s Suburban. “I’ll be in that car, okay?” I said. “We’re going to drive the corridor, park on a side street. If anything happens you just call. Or flag us down.”
The woman in the sequined dress said, “Don’t go getting yourself shot, okay? Watch where you’re parking that car, and if anyone bothers you, you just tell them that Baby Richard’s girls said you could be there.”
“Thanks,” I said.
For the next five hours Al and I drove the corridor slowly, always keeping the blocks between Eighty-fourth and Figueroa and the taco truck no more than a couple of minutes away. We parked on side streets, we pulled into parking lots. We stayed on one dark block with a good line of sight for over an hour, until the porch light of the house we were parked in front of went on, and an angry woman wearing a head full of pink curlers pushed aside her curtain and glared at us. We watched the girls get in and out of cars, drive away, come back. They were never gone for very long. Finally, at two A.M. I said, “This is stupid. He could come out any night. Any night of the year.”
“No kidding.”
“Let’s go home.”
Al pulled the car up to the corner and I jumped out. Mary Margaret was just coming out from behind a car. She had a compact mirror open and was putting on lipstick.
“We’re going to call it a night,” I said. “You’ve got my number. Use it if you need to. Call me if anything happens, if you see the guy, anything.”
“Yeah, okay,” she said, but I didn’t have much confidence that she’d call. As far as she was concerned I was just one more impotent person, one more person who had failed to protect the girls on Figueroa Street.
Thirteen
EARLY the next week, Detective Steve Sherman called me. I was in my kitchen, trying to pry open a drawer. A measuring cup had rolled up under the baby latch and jammed it.
“Can I trust you?” the detective said.
Bye-Bye, Black Sheep Page 7
