“Where’d Tucker and his family move to?”
“Dana Point, I think.”
Natasha closed the yearbook, sealing Ben’s seventeen-year-old face inside, and handed it back to Helen.
“I don’t know about these other boys,” Helen said. “I’m not sure how to think of it, but Lucero was gay—or at least he had a boyfriend.”
“Gay has nothing to do with it,” Natasha said, shaking her head. “This, what Wakeland does, is something else.”
“I don’t know,” Helen said. “But I don’t understand it, I really don’t. You should have to take an oath to become a teacher—the Hippocratic oath or something.”
“An oath is just words,” Natasha said. “They don’t mean much.”
—
“HE’S USING THE hills,” Ben said at the Tuesday-morning investigations meeting. “That’s where we’re not looking.”
After calling in the scene last night, after cordoning it off and bagging the paper clips to send off to forensics, after taking pictures of the scrawled words, after fending off reporters pushed back beyond the NO TRESPASSING sign, Ben had stayed up late in the barn, looking at the map, trying to piece together a symbol that would reveal something. He drew lines between scenes, erased them, and drew lines again. He tried to make pentagrams out of the points, letters that created a message, shapes that would reveal the killer’s next move. It wasn’t until sunrise, moted light slipping through the slats in the wall, that he saw it. The dark spaces of open territory—the hills of the coast joined to the Santa Ana Mountain foothills in the east by a tendon of undeveloped groves. He had remembered, suddenly, like pieces fitting into place, the man sleeping in his car a week ago. He had been small, Ben remembered, a teenager or early twenties. His eyes were rimmed bruise-blue, as though he hadn’t slept in a long time. His girlfriend had kicked him out, the young man had said, and Ben had bought it, given the guy his fresh coffee even, but he didn’t look like the kind of guy who had a girlfriend. He looked like the kind of guy who stood on corners and watched people, the kind of guy who called in bomb threats to schools, the kind of guy who was invisible until he exploded into visibility. Ben remembered the ride with Emma the other day, the man coming out of the Bommer Canyon camp and walking down to the golf course. He had been small, too, lean and wiry, his limbs awkward, as though parts of him were unhinged. Surrounding the horseshoe of open space, the developed basin was a grid of steel and lights, but that horseshoe was a dark zone, a shadow cast by city light, lined with foot trails and dotted with rotting cowboy camps.
“The hills are off the grid,” Ben said now. “Old cowboy cabins in Bommer and Loma Canyons. Another up near the Sinks in Santiago Canyon.”
“Just deer and coyote up there,” Carolina said.
All of them had been on scene until after 2:00 A.M., and probably none of them had slept. Hernandez called them in at 8:30 this morning, after Westminster found a print on a water glass at their crime scene. Marco, working the night shift, cross-referenced the prints with the numbers and letters Ben had gotten off the plate, and they had their man: Ricardo Martinez, twenty-three years old. By 8:00 A.M. there was an inter-department BOLO for all of the Southern California basin; they’d sent out the killer’s mug shot to the press, uniformed officers were canvassing neighborhoods—but the hills were it, the hills were ground zero.
“The Santa Ana Freeway,” Marco said, running a finger up the map that covered the east wall, “and the 405 both run the edge of the hills. Six on-ramps. In and out, disappear.”
“He was down in Chino,” Lieutenant Hernandez said, passing out the folders. CIM. California Institute for Men.
“Something’s off in his face,” Carolina said.
“It’s him,” Ben said, looking at the mug shot. The killer’s face seemed misaligned, not obviously so, but enough to throw off the eyes. “It’s the guy I found sleeping in the Toyota last week.”
“He spent time in Reception Center East for assaulting a prostitute.”
Reception Center East was for inmates with mental-health problems. Ben had been there a few times, back when he was in L.A., questioning low-level drug pushers who worked the system to get time off for emotional instability. The place was unsecured; inmates started pickup games in the courtyard. Therapists were on hand to hold inmates’ hands and help them talk out their problems. A place for coddling, if you asked him, though he had seen the genuine article there, too: Men breaking down like little girls, recalling traumatic events from childhood. Men smearing feces in “quiet room” pens, their eyes dense and occluded, the brain closed off to the present world.
“According to the prostitute’s formal statement,” Hernandez said, “he started choking her during sex.”
“Erotic strangulation?” Carolina asked.
“No,” Hernandez said. “Not according to her. Choked her until she passed out. She woke up and he was gone; the money in her purse was gone, too.” Ben looked at the pictures of the woman’s throat, the finger bruises, the scratches on her chin where her nails had dug into her skin. “Turned himself in,” Hernandez said, “but then wouldn’t admit to anything.”
“He scared himself,” Ben said. “But found it exciting, too. That’s probably when he got hooked.”
“Any priors?” Marco asked.
“No,” Hernandez said, “but he’s got a long case history.”
Ben read the file: mother in and out of rehab before overdosing, father a junk dealer who locked the kid up in the basement, perhaps for as long as five to six years. Signs of sexual abuse, suffering severe malnutrition when found, stunted growth. The small hands, Ben thought. Three foster families. First assault at twelve, a desk lamp cracked over the head of a foster mother. Placed in a group home and school for troubled kids. Restrained for trying to stab a pencil into his own eye. Restrained for banging his head against a cement wall. Restrained for carving words into his arm with a paper clip. Back in another foster home at thirteen. Claims to a therapist that foster mother “touches” him at night when the other kids are asleep. Ben highlighted this in orange. Placed back in group home while investigation takes place. Second assault at group home, punches female teacher in the neck. Briefly incarcerated at the California Youth Authority after the incident, in with the teenage heavies. Who knew what happened to him there, a thirteen-year-old in with violent sixteen-and seventeen-year-olds biding their time for the big house. Sent back to foster care, with the same woman who touches him at night; there was an opening and no evidence to prove she’d done anything wrong. He highlighted this, too. Spent three years there, complaining three times about the foster mother to a therapist who wrote his complaints off as “a regressive behavior” brought on by traumatic family memories.