Carpenter stepped over to look at it. She reached a hand out to pick it up.
“No, don’t touch it,” Ballard said.
“Sorry,” Carpenter said. “It might be. I can’t really tell. All of this stuff, the tools, were left by Reggie.”
“Your ex.”
“Yes. Do you think they used it to get in? Then how did they get in the garage?”
There was a shrill note in her voice.
“I don’t know the answer to either question,” Ballard said. “Let’s see what Forensics finds.”
Ballard checked her phone and said Forensics was now due in forty-five minutes. While she was looking at her screen, a call came in. It was Harry Bosch.
“I need to take this,” she said to Cindy. “Why don’t you go back to the living room for now.”
Ballard headed out of the garage to the street and answered the phone. But then she turned quickly to stop Carpenter from touching the knob of the kitchen door.
“Cindy, no,” she called. “I’m sorry, can you come out this way and go in through the front door?”
Carpenter did as instructed and Ballard returned to the call.
“Harry, hi.”
“Renée, sounds like you’re in the middle of something. I was just checking in. You get anything out of the chrono that helps?”
It took Ballard a moment to remember what case and what chrono he was talking about.
“Uh, no,” she said. “I got sidetracked, called out on a case.”
“Another murder?”
“No, serial rapists we’ve been looking for.”
“Plural? MOSA?”
“Yeah, weird,” she said. “It’s a tag team. Last night we got a third victim but she didn’t call it in till after I’d been by your place.”
There was a silence.
“Harry, you there?”
“Yeah, I was just thinking. A tag team. That’s pretty rare. MOSAs are usually gang rapes. Not two guys with the same psychopathy.”
“Yeah. So, I’ve been running with that all afternoon. We’re calling them the Midnight Men.”
“When you get two guys like that … you know, who think the same way …”
He went silent.
“Yeah, what about it?” Ballard asked.
“It’s just that one and one doesn’t make two, you know?” Bosch said. “They feed off each other. One and one makes three … they escalate, get more violent. Eventually the rape is not enough. They kill. You have to get them now, Renée.”
“I know. Don’t you think I know that?”
“I’m sorry. I know you’re on top of it. Anyway, I’ve got a book here somewhere that you should read.”
“What book?”
“It’s about the Hillside Strangler case way back. Bob Grogan — he was a legend in RHD. But on that one, it turned out it was two stranglers, not one. Grogan caught them and there’s a book about it. I have it here somewhere. It’s called Two of a Kind.”
“Well, if you find it, let me know. I could come up and get it. Maybe it will help me understand these two creeps.”
“So then, if you’re going to be running with the rape case, how about I do a little work on the other thing? The shooting last night.”
“I have a feeling that it’s going to be taken off my plate. We now have three connected rape cases. They’ll keep me on this and kick the homicide to West Bureau.”
“Well, until then I could be working. I’d need to see what you’ve got, though.”
Ballard paused for a moment to think. Bringing in an outsider on a live case — even if it was someone with the experience of Harry Bosch — could put her into the shit. Especially after Bosch had worked with the defense lawyer Mickey Haller the year before on a highly publicized murder. No one in command staff would approve of that. No one in the whole department would.
It would have to be extracurricular.
“What do you think?” Bosch prompted.
“I think, if you find that book, we might be able to trade,” Ballard said. “But this is dangerous — department-wise — for me.”
“I know. Think about it. If I see you, I see you.”
11
While waiting for Forensics to show up, Ballard took a walk around the neighborhood and started thinking in terms of what made this assault different from the first two. She had no doubt that it was the same perpetrators. There were too many similarities. But there were also things about this latest occurrence that were unique.
Ballard started listing these in her head as she walked. The primary difference was geographic location. The first two cases occurred down in the flats in gridded neighborhoods that afforded the rapists multiple escape routes should something go wrong. Not so with Deep Dell Terrace. It was a road that led to a dead end. It was also a winding, narrow mountain road in a neighborhood that ultimately had only two or three ways up and back down. There was no route in this neighborhood that led over the mountains. This was an important distinction. It was riskier to pick a victim in this neighborhood. If things had gone wrong for the rapists and a help call had gone out, the escape routes could easily have been covered by a police response. At the same time that she mentally marked this difference in pattern she also acknowledged that patterns evolved. The success of the first two rapes could have emboldened the rapists, leading them to new, riskier hunting grounds.
The second aspect that was notably different from the first two cases was topography. Ballard, as well as Lisa Moore, had been operating according to the theory that the assaults were carefully planned. Once a victim was targeted, the rapists watched her routines and prepped for the break-in and assault. This most likely meant walking into the neighborhood from outside. Each of the prior victims lived a few blocks from main east-west thoroughfares — Melrose Avenue in the first case and Sunset Boulevard in the second. It was theorized that the rapists walked in and then stealthily moved about, casing the victim, her home, and the routines of the area. Therefore, a gridded, flat neighborhood allowed better access to the prey and escape after the crime. But as Ballard walked down Deep Dell Terrace, it was immediately clear that this sort of prep and exit strategy would be difficult here, if not impossible. Access to the back of Cindy Carpenter’s house was severely restricted by the steep mountainside. The houses backing it on the next street up the hill were cantilevered out over an almost sheer rock facing. There was no moving between and behind houses here. These homes didn’t even need fences and gates; the natural topography provided security.
All of this told Ballard that they had been looking in the wrong direction. They had been looking for a pair of wanderers, voyeurs, who came into the neighborhood off a busy commercial street, moved between and behind houses, and discovered their prey while looking through windows, possibly to strike then or to come back later. This was backed up when interviews of the victims and the limited cross-matching of their habits and movements in the prior days found no nexus that linked the two women. They moved in different circles with no overlap.
By all indications, the third case changed all that. The third case indicated that the victim had been targeted as prey somewhere else and followed to her home. This changed things about the investigation and Ballard silently scolded herself for time wasted looking the other way.