Blood on the Moon (16 page)

With trembling hands Lloyd read through the folders, partaking of death's communion served up by strangulation, gunshot, decapitation, forced ingestion of caustic fluids, bludgeoning, gas, drug overdose, poisoning, and suicide. Disparate methods that would eliminate police awareness of mass murder. The one common denominator: no clues. No physical evidence. Women chosen for slaughter because of the way they looked. Julia Niemeyer killed sixteen times over, and how many more in different places? Innocence was the epidemic of youth.

Lloyd read through the folders again, coming out of his trance with the realization that he had been sitting on the floor for three hours and that he was drenched in sweat. As he got to his feet and stretched his painfully cramped legs, he felt the
big
horror overtake him: The killer's genius was unfathomable. There were no clues. The Niemeyer trail was dead cold. The other trails were colder. There was
nothing
he could do.

There was
always
something he could do.

Lloyd got a roll of masking tape from his desk and began taping the photographs along the walls of his office. When the smiling faces of dead women stared down at him from all directions he said to himself, “
Finis. Morte. Cold City. Muerto. Dead.”

Then he closed his eyes and read the vital statistics page in each folder, forcing himself to think only
region.
This accomplished, he got out his notebook and pen and wrote:

Central Los Angeles:

1.  Elaine Marburg, D.O.D. 11/24/69

2.  Patricia Petrelli, D.O.D. 5/20/75

3.  Karlen LaPelley, D.O.D. 2/14/71

4.  Caroline Werner, D.O.D. 11/9/79

5.  Cynthia Gilroy, D.O.D. 12/5/71

Valley and Foothill Communities:

1.  Elaine Fullmer, D.O.D. 3/9/68

2.  Jeanette Willkie, D.O.D. 4/15/73

3.  Mary Wardell, D.O.D. 1/6/74

Hollywood - West Hollywood:

1.  Laurette Powell, D.O.D. 6/10/78

2.  Carla Castleberry, D.O.D. 6/10/80

3.  Trudy Miller, D.O.D. 12/12/68

4.  Angela Stimka, D.O.D. 6/10/77

5.  Marcia Renwick, D.O.D. 6/10/81

Bev Hills - Santa Monica - Beach Communities:

1.  Monica Martin, D.O.D. 9/21/74

2.  Jennifer Szabo, D.O.D. 9/3/72

3.  Linda Deverson, D.O.D. 6/14/82

Willing himself to think only
modus operandi,
Lloyd read through the Vital Statistics page a second time, coming away with three bludgeonings, two dismemberments, one horseback riding accident that was seriously considered as a homicide, two deaths by gunshot, two stabbings, four suicides attributed to different means, one poisoning, and one drug overdose-gassing that was labeled “murder-suicide?” by a baffled records clerk.

Turning to
chronology,
Lloyd read over the dates of death that he had written next to his list of victims, gaining his first make on the killer's methodology. With the exception of a twenty-five month hiatus between Patricia Petrelli, D.O.D. 5/20/75 and Angela Stimka, D.O.D. 6/10/77, and a seventeen-month gap between Laurette Powell, D.O.D. 6/10/78 and Caroline Werner, D.O.D. 11/9/79, his killer performed his executions at intervals of between six months to fifteen months which, Lloyd concluded, was why he was able to elude capture for so long. The murders were undoubtedly brilliantly executed and based on intimate knowledge gleaned from long-term surveillance. And, he reasoned further, those longer hiatuses probably contained victims that could be attributed to lost files and computer errors–every police agency was susceptible to a large paperwork margin of error.

Lloyd closed his eyes and imagined time warps within time warps within time warps; wondering how far back the killings went–all police departments in Los Angeles County threw out their unsolved files after fifteen years, giving him
zero
access to information predating January, 1968.

It was then that his mind pulsated into perfect focus, and as he whispered “The forest for the trees,” Lloyd looked at his list of Hollywood–West Hollywood homicides and felt his skin start to tingle. Four “suicide” killings had taken place on the identical date of June 10th; in 1977, '78, '80 and '81. It was the one indicator that pointed to obsessive, pathological behavior out of his killer's ice-water restraint norm.

Lloyd grabbed the four folders and read them from cover to cover, once, then twice. When he finished, he turned off the light in his cubicle and sat back and
flew
with what he had learned.

On Thursday evening, June 10th, 1977, residents of the apartment building at 1167 Larrabee Avenue, West Hollywood, smelled gas coming from the upstairs unit rented by Angela Marie Stimka, a twenty-seven year old cocktail waitress. Said residents summoned a deputy sheriff who lived in the building, and the deputy kicked in Angela Stimka's door, turned off the wall heater from which the gas was emanating and discovered Angela Stimka, dead and bloated on her bedroom floor. He carried her body outside and called the West Hollywood Sheriffs substation, and within minutes a team of detectives had combed the apartment and had come up with a suicide note that cited the breakup of a long-term love affair as Angela Stimka's reason for wanting to die. Handwriting experts examined Angela Stimka's diary
and
the suicide note, and decided that both were written by the same person. The death was labeled a suicide, and the case was closed.

On June 10th of the following year, a sheriff's patrol car was summoned to a small house on Westbourne Drive in West Hollywood. Neighbors had complained of uncharacteristically loud stereo noise coming from the dwelling, and one old lady told the deputies that she was certain that something was “drastically wrong.” When no one answered the officers' persistent knocking, they climbed in through a half opened window and discovered the owner of the house, thirty-one year old Laurette Powell, dead in a large wicker chair, the arms of the chair, her bathrobe, and the floor in front of her soaked with blood that had exploded out of the artery-deep gashes on both of her wrists. An empty prescription bottle of Nembutal lay on a nightstand a few feet away, and a razor-sharp kitchen cleaver was resting in the dead woman's lap. There was no suicide note, but homicide detectives, noting the hesitation marks on both wrists and the fact that Laurette Powell was a long time holder of several Nembutal prescriptions, quickly classified her death as a suicide. Case closed.

Lloyd's wheel turned silently. He knew that the Westbourne Drive and Larrabee Avenue addresses were a scant two blocks apart, and that the Tropicana Motel gun-in-mouth “suicide” of Carla Castleberry on 6/10/80 was less than a half mile from the first two crime scenes. He shook his head in disgust; any cop with half a brain and ten cents worth of experience should know that women
never
kill themselves with guns–the statistics on female gunshot suicides were nonexistant.

The fourth “suicide,” Marcia Renwick, 818 North Sycamore, was the non sequitur, Lloyd surmised; the most recent June 10th murder, four miles east of the first three, in the L.A.P.D.'s Hollywood Division. Occurring a full year after the Carla Castleberry homicide, the Renwick pill overdose had the feel of an unimaginative impulse killing.

Lloyd turned his attention to the file of the most recent victim before Julia Niemeyer. He winced as he read the Coroner's report on Linda Deverson, D.O.D. 6/14/82; chopped to pieces with a two-edged fire axe. Blinding memories of Julia swaying from her bedroom ceiling beam combined with his new knowledge to convince him that somehow, for some god-awful, hellish reason, his killer's insanity was peaking.

Lloyd lowered his head and sent up a prayer to his seldom-sought lip-service God. “Please let me get him. Please let me get him before he hurts anyone else.”

Thoughts of God were paramount in Lloyd's mind as he walked down the hall and knocked on the door of his immediate superior, Lieutenant Fred Gaffaney. Knowing that the lieutenant was a hard-ass, born-again Christian who held grandstanding, maverick cops in pious contempt, he decided to invoke the diety heavily in his plea for investigatory power. Gaffaney grudgingly had given him a free rein on his caseload, with the implicit proviso that he not beg favors; since he was about to plead for men, money, and media play, he wanted to pitch the lieutenant from a standpoint of mutual religiosity.

“Enter!” Gaffaney called out in answer to the knock.

Lloyd walked in the open door and sat down in a folding chair in front of the lieutenant's desk. Gaffaney looked up from the papers he was shuffling and fingered his cross-and-flag lapel pin.

“Yes, Sergeant?”

Lloyd cleared his throat and tried to affect a humble look. “Sir, as you know, I've been working full time on the Niemeyer killing.”

“Yes. And?”

“And, sir, it's a stone cold washout.”

“Then stick with it. I have faith in you.”

“Thank you, sir. It's funny that you mentioned faith.” Lloyd waited for Gaffaney to tell him to continue. When all he got was a silent deadpan, he went on. “This case has been a testing of my own faith, sir. I've never been much of a believer in God, but the way that I've been stumbling into evidence has me questioning my beliefs. I—”

The lieutenant cut him off with a chopped hand gesture. “I go to church on Sunday and to prayer meetings three times a week. I put God out of my mind when I clip on my holster. You want something. Tell me what it is, and we'll discuss it.”

Lloyd went red and forced a stammer. “Sir, I… I…”

Gaffaney leaned back in his chair and ran his hands over his iron grey crew-cut. “Hopkins, you haven't called a superior officer ‘Sir' since you were a rookie. You're the most notorious pussy hound in Robbery-Homicide, and you don't give a rat's ass about God. What do you
want
?”

Lloyd laughed. “Shall I cut the shit?”

“Please do.”

“All right. In the course of my investigation into the Niemeyer killing I've come across solid, instinctive evidence that points to at least sixteen other murders of young women, dating back fifteen years. The M.O.s varied, but the victims were all of a certain physical type. I've gotten complete case files on these homicides, and chronological consistencies and other factors have convinced me that all sixteen women were killed by the same man, the man who killed Julia Niemeyer. The last two killings have been particularly brutal. I think we're dealing with a brilliant psychopathic intellect, and unless we direct a massive effort toward his capture he'll kill with impunity until the day he dies. I want a dozen experienced homicide dicks full time; I want liasions set up with every department in the county; I want permission to recruit uniformed officers for the shit work, and authority to grant them unlimited overtime. I want a full-scale media blitz–I've got a feeling that this animal is close to exploding, and I want to push him a little. I—”

Gaffaney raised both hands in interruption. “Do you have any
hard
physical evidence,” he asked, “any
witnesses,
any notations from detectives within the L.A.P.D. or other department that lend credence to your mass murder theory?”

“No.” Lloyd said.

“How many of these sixteen investigations are still open?”

“None.”

“Are there any other officers within the L.A.P.D. who corroborate your hypothesis?”

“No.”

“Other departments?”

“No.”

Gaffaney slammed his desk top with two flattened palms, then fingered his lapel pin. “No. I won't trust you on this. It's too old, too vague, too costly, and too potentially embarrassing to the department. I trust you as a troubleshooter, as a very fine detective with a superb record—”

“With the best fucking arrest record in the department!” Lloyd shouted.

Gaffaney shouted back, “I trust your record, but I don't trust you! You're a showboat glory-hound womanizer, and you've got a wild hair up your ass about murdered women!” Lowering his voice, he added, “If you really care about God, ask him for help with your personal life. God will answer your prayers, and you won't be so disturbed by things out of your control. Look at how you're shaking. Forget this thing, Hopkins. Spend some time with your family; I'm sure they'd appreciate it.”

Lloyd got to his feet, trembling, and walked to the door. His peripheral vision throbbed with red. He turned to look at Gaffaney, who smiled and said, “If you go to the media, I'll crucify you. I'll have you back in uniform rousting piss bums on skid row.”

Lloyd smiled back and felt a strangely serene bravado course through him. “I'm going to get this animal, and I'm going to stick your words up your ass,” he said.

Lloyd packed the sixteen homicide files into the trunk of his car and drove to the Hollywood Station, hoping to catch Dutch Peltz before he went off duty. He was in luck; Dutch was changing back into civilian clothes in the senior officers' locker room, knotting his necktie and staring at himself abstractedly in a full-length wall mirror.

Lloyd walked over, clearing his throat. Without taking his eyes from the mirror, Dutch said, “Fred Gaffaney called me. He told me that he figured you'd be coming my way. I saved your ass; he was going to blow the whistle on you to one of his born-again high brass buddies, but I told him not to. He owes me favors, so he agreed. You're a sergeant, Lloyd. That means you can only act like an asshole with sergeants and below. Lieutenants and up are
verboten. Comprende,
brain-boy?”

Dutch turned around, and Lloyd saw that his abstracted look was glazed over with fear. “Did Gaffaney tell you all of it?” Lloyd asked.

Dutch nodded. “How sure are you?”

“All the way.”

“Sixteen women?”

“At least that many.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Flush him out, somehow. Probably by myself. The department will never authorize an investigation; it makes them look too inept. I was stupid to go to Gaffaney in the first place. If I go over his head and make a stink, I'll get yanked off the Niemeyer case and detached to some bumfuck robbery assignment. You know what this feels like, Dutchman?”