She pulled back the sheet to expose the woman’s face, Emily’s face. She washed the dried vomit from the woman’s lips. Then she washed the hair, too, combing out the tangles with her gloved fingers.
“You did nothing wrong,” she told Emily, while she strung out her wet hair on the stainless-steel table. “You did not deserve this.”
It was nearly 3:00 A.M., the coffee had worn off, and she could use herself as a cautionary tale in her classes. Don’t get attached; keep the heart for the outside world. Draw lines between work and home. Don’t lose your husband to an aerobic-dancing account executive. “It freaks me out,” he’d said to her once. “Spending all your time with dead people. It’s like you bring them home with you.”
She pulled the sheet over Emily’s face and was presented with only the body. She looked at the neck again and noticed something. After finding a tape measure, Natasha counted the span of the fingernail cuts. From bloodied crescent to bloodied crescent: 172 mm. She set the tape down and spread her hand across the body’s neck, her fingers shadowing the marks left by the killer.
She peeled off her gloves and found the phone on her desk.
“Wade,” Ben said when he picked up.
“You sleeping?” she said.
“You kidding?”
“Out in the barn?” she said.
“Can’t think at the station.”
“You should come over here,” she said. “It’s dead quiet.”
He chuckled, but she could tell he was troubled by the night, too, and sometimes black humor didn’t work no matter how much you needed it to.
“Small hands,” she said.
“What?”
“Whoever killed this woman has small hands,” she said. “No bigger than mine.”
“The killer’s a woman?”
“That’s your job,” she said. “But they’re woman-sized hands.”
—
BEN GOT OFF the phone with Natasha and put a call in to Rafferty to tell him what Natasha had discovered about the killer’s hands. He got the detective’s station voicemail. Probably at home asleep in bed with his wife. Rafferty was one of the few cops he knew who was still married, despite his taking liberties while working vice in L.A. Delia, his wife, had found out; that’s what prompted the move south, though Ben knew once a man started craving anonymous sex, no clean streets or nice parks or evenings by the pool with the kids would satiate that urge. The boredom of it all most likely fed the impulse. He left a message telling Rafferty to call him in the morning and turned on the scanner.
Soon after he and Rachel had moved into the house from L.A., Ben had rigged up a den for himself in one of the unused stables in the barn. Desk, police scanner, boom-box stereo, a mouse nest in the corner behind the old empty feed trough. He had fastened a combo-locker to the wall where he kept his .40 caliber, empty of bullets, safety on. There was a 12 gauge, too, and his father’s Browning bolt-action, all of them under lock and key. He didn’t like bringing the ugly side of the job into the house—the gun, the handcuffs, the photographs; he wanted the illusion for his daughter and his wife that nothing ugly happened here. It was the illusion that all happy childhoods were built upon. To be happy in this world, you had to ignore some things.
It was the usual stuff on the L.A. County scanner tonight—drive-by on Whittier Boulevard in East L.A.; robbery in progress at Las Palmas gas station, both suspects “black and short,” according to the dispatch; DUI in West Hollywood, Ferrari, “a person of note,” the uniform said over the radio with a bit of glee: an actor, of course.
Ben had left the barn door open, the dry air blowing through the gabled rooftop. He watched the eucalyptus bow in the Santa Anas; gusts to sixty tonight, the forecast said, maybe seventy—a dry hurricane. The barn frame creaked; blasts of dry air puffed through gaps in the wooden slats.
Ben had a topo map of the basin, from Oxnard to Oceanside, hanging on the wall—the bowl of land terraced downward toward the beach, the shoved-together cities like detritus washed down the ravines of the San Gabriel Mountains. He found the Mission Viejo scene on the map and penciled a mark on the street: 1431 Mar Vista, just off the 5 Freeway.
The scanner went quiet, a white hush of static in the room, and he switched it over to the Orange County wire. He pushed a file on his desk aside—surveillance photos of a suspected cocaine dealer in Santa Elena. The man ran an RV dealership he’d taken over from his father in the seventies. He had three kids, a wife—a very thin, young, Mercedes-driving wife, who often suffered nosebleeds at the gym, according to one of the detectives. Ben had an informant, a frightened ad executive picked up for possession in the bathroom of a Bennigan’s out by the airport. Tell us your supplier and there’ll be no charges. Simple stuff. He’d been out to interview the dealer at Traveland, tailed him going in and out of restaurants, but had nothing yet to hang a search warrant on. He could ignore the guy, honestly, just let him keep snorting the stuff and selling the stuff to be snorted by his buddies. No one was fighting for market share, for territory; these weren’t people terrorizing a neighborhood to build an empire. They were wealthy and bored and wanted to get high. Polite criminals, the type Santa Elena could tolerate.
The scanner squawked: a woman on the number 54 bus in Orange threatening to shoot the driver for not pulling over at her stop.
A wash of static again, electricity humming the wires.
He ran his index finger up the Santa Ana Freeway and rode the interchange to the 405 up to the Seal Beach crime scene, the last place the serial killer hit.
Fullerton clicked in. 242. Frat-party fight.
A gust shook the rafters of the barn, and Annie Oakley—Rachel’s horse—kicked the boards next door. “Shh,” he said. “It’s all right, girl. Just the wind.”
He slid his finger back onto the 405, traced the freeway past the industrial stench of Carson and the civil war that was Compton. A murder felt like a disruption in the atmosphere, but it wasn’t. You got used to it, mostly. Most of the time the killings made twisted sense—a dealer crowding in on another’s territory, revenge for stolen money, a man losing his mind when he discovers his wife’s lover. A serial killer, though, that was something different. The serial killed for the sole purpose of killing; that was like a hole opening up in the sky and letting out the oxygen.
He pushed his finger south onto the 110 toward the harbor, until he came to the estates of Palos Verdes. The third house the killer hit was right there, a few blocks off the highway. He’d already pinned it with a red wall tack.
The box squawked again. 503. Stolen car. Huntington Beach.
He ran the basin with his finger, cruising the freeways, trying to find a thread, a connection, a symbol etched into the map between red pins—La Ca?ada, Santa Monica, Palos Verdes, Seal Beach, Diamond Bar, Yorba Linda, and now Mission Viejo. Nothing. Just freeways, off-ramps, seven houses and seven murders spread over 1,200 square miles.