“Not sure, Reza,” he’d said. “Lock your doors.”
Now Lieutenant Hernandez skimmed the article himself. “Dammit,” he said. “Call this Miss Marsh and let her know the medical examiner suspects it’s self-inflicted.” He dropped the paper on the table, pulled his glasses off, and massaged the bridge of his nose. “Anonymous tip on this Mexican kid, right?”
“Yeah,” Ben said. “Shooting, though. Nothing else fits this guy.”
“You never know,” Marco said, turning a page in the file to photos of another victim. “This serial may be branching out.”
Ben flipped the page and saw what Marco saw. He had to glance away for a moment, out across the courtyard to the field beyond, where a man with a chain saw was quartering trunks of eucalyptus felled the week before. They were going to build a strip mall there, a Lucky grocery, a car wash, a wine store.
“Bludgeoned,” Hernandez said.
“Got more than he expected with this one,” Marco said, no joking in his voice.
“Used a Remington bronze,” Hernandez said.
“Sculpture?” Carolina said, briefly stopping her pacing. “God.”
Ben returned to the shot. The left side of the man’s skull had been bashed in. Bruises again on the neck, but the killer had crushed the larynx—the picture showed the sinkhole in the neck. The victim had been a big man, and he must have fought and fought.
“He’s not branching out,” Carolina said. “This one was back in August. It’s all women since then.”
“ME says the killer’s got small hands,” Ben said. “Woman-sized hands.”
“Doubtful it’s a woman,” Carolina said. “A woman would use a ligature, especially if she was going to overpower a man bigger than herself.”
“He wasn’t strong enough to strangle this one,” Ben said.
“So he used the sculpture,” Hernandez said.
“Then it’s all women after that,” Marco repeated, nodding.
The next shot was of a woman’s face, her head yanked to the side, her neck mottled with bruises. Petechiae on the eyes and cheeks, a cluster of purple dots pinpricking the skin.
“The place last night was gated,” Ben said. “A playground behind the house, a greenbelt leading out of the playground.”
“Unlocked doors,” Carolina said. “Playground deserted at night, so no witnesses.”
Ben turned the pages to find more photos, this time an elderly man, back in July. The refrigerator door behind him was swung open; a gallon of orange juice and a forty-ounce bottle of malt liquor sat on the shelves. Bruises again on the body, finger-pad marks circling the throat. Strangled. The most intimate of crimes. Face-to-face, watching the terror and recognition there—either terribly personal or completely impersonal. A serial. Had to be impersonal.
“Rafferty’s case in Mission Viejo wasn’t gated,” Ben said. “But it was master-planned. A greenbelt running behind it.”
“The Palos Verdes place,” Carolina said, “is master-planned, too. I dated a guy near there for a while.”
“If he’s got a thing for master-planned,” Ben said, “Santa Elena’s the place.”
“All we got is in the file in front of you,” Lieutenant Hernandez said. “Maybe an ID from last night in Westminster: Five six or five seven. Dark clothes. A woman was walking her dog in the park around one A.M. when she saw him come out from the backyard. She was halfway down the block, though, and that’s all she’s got.”
“He stayed on foot?” Carolina asked.
“Turned the corner.”
“Car parked on the next block probably,” Ben said. “All killings are less than a half mile from a freeway.”
“Narrows it down”—Marco smiled—“to about five million possible future victims.”
Using the freeways. Master-planned communities. Vans shoes. Open windows.
“One more thing,” Hernandez said. “They found something scratched into the bedroom wall last night.” He glanced through the file. “Swear something or other—it’s jumbled and cut off. Westminster thinks the husband nearly stumbled in on the killer. Just back from a business trip in New York.”
Ben flipped the pages and found the photocopy of the Polaroid. The image was grainy, and the words scratched into the plaster were clumsy and poorly drawn—letters backward, some of the lines squiggly and indistinct.
“It’s like kid writing,” Marco said.
“A cipher?” Carolina said.
“Something about Swear you’re going,” Ben said, trying to decipher it.
“Swear you’re going what?” Carolina said.
“Pretty obvious, isn’t it?” Marco said, holding up a shot of the last victim.
—
“CAN I SEE you a moment?” Lieutenant Hernandez said.
They stepped into Hernandez’s office, a rectangle of floor-to-ceiling windows. “The hamster cage,” the detectives called it, since you could watch every single thing the lieutenant did behind the glass. If the man picked his nose, the whole station knew. Once, when Hernandez had an argument with his wife, some of the guys thought it hilarious to tie a fake ball and chain to the front door.
“Moonlighting it, huh?” Hernandez said.
“Just trying to connect the dots,” Ben said.
The glass office was supposed to reflect the new transparency of an organization built on trust and coordination. The windows, cleaned every night by a “rehabilitated” felon, were streakless; if you didn’t know they were there, you’d think you were sitting out among the crowd of cubicles and metal desks.
“Did you sleep in the cruiser last night?”
Ben shrugged, not sure what to say. He got twenty minutes in the station parking lot before the meeting.
“Maybe you should talk to some—”
“No one’s shrinking my head,” Ben said.
“The first divorce is tough,” Hernandez said. “I know.” He smiled and slapped his big hand on Ben’s shoulder. “The second one’s a little easier.”
Ben laughed sarcastically.
“You put me in a tough spot with Westminster, crashing their scene,” Hernandez said, serious again.
“I know.”
“It’s not professional.” Hernandez waited a moment. “Usually people offer an apology right about now.”
“They wouldn’t have found the print,” Ben said.
Hernandez nodded. The lieutenant knew the cops had never found the driver of the Chevelle, the one that hit Ben’s father that night years ago and killed him. He and Ben had talked about it one night over beers soon after he’d joined the force. Whoever hit-and-ran his dad was probably still out there, living his life. The cops had probably never even tried to find the driver; they had murders to deal with, robberies. Who cared about some old cowboy thrown from his horse? “Ghosts,” Hernandez had said then. “The ones that get away.” Hernandez meant that Ben had to let it go; some perps got away, that’s just the harsh fact of the matter. Hernandez was right, but Ben couldn’t stand shitty police work—or no police work—that let a criminal dissolve into thin air.
“What dots’re you trying to connect?”
“Maybe I’m still looking for them.”