Though he intended to strike from behind, he’d taken precautions to ensure that she would not glimpse his face. He wore a black wool hat, pulled down over his forehead, and a black scarf, raised to cover his nose and mouth.
In the pockets of his coat he carried the roll of tape for her wrists and ankles, the wadded rag that would serve as a gag, and the strip of black velvet he would use as a blindfold.
He was ready.
One thought beat in his brain: It’s real this time.
Without warning the door creaked open and clanged shut, and there she was, a yard from him, her slim body tucked into a fur-collar coat, her feet clad in squishy rubber boots.
Don’t think. Do it. Now.
He sprang up behind her and brought the blackjack down on the back of her head. She staggered, lurching away from him, but didn’t fall.
No. That was wrong, all wrong. She was supposed to crumple on the ground at the first blow; that was how he’d always pictured it when he ran this scene over and over in his mind.
He tried to hit her again, but she spun out of his grasp and whirled on him, the first warbling note of a scream rising in her throat.
He smacked her in the mouth with the padded pipe. She went down. He fell on her. Her hands flew at his face, stripping off the scarf, and suddenly she was looking at him with recognition in her eyes.
She sees me, he thought in escalating terror. She can identify me now. It won’t do any good to blindfold her—
Sharp nails raked his cheeks. Blood, his blood, spattered the snow.
Fury seized him. She wasn’t supposed to fight back. In all his hundreds of fantasies, never once had she fought back. God damn her, she was ruining
everything
.
He slammed the blackjack down on her face. Bone cracked. The sound made him shiver. He remembered the kitten he’d put in the vise, the snap of its leg.
No, don’t think of that. Not the animals. This isn’t supposed to be like the animals.
But why shouldn’t he think of it? What made her better than an animal anyway? What gave her any greater right to live, after the way she’d treated him? The strays he’d collected and taken to the old factory—they’d never done anything to him at all, while this bitch had humiliated him and hurt him and made him bleed. And if he let her go, she would send him to jail.
She clawed him again. The pipe rose and fell. Her nose crunched wetly, like a snail. She writhed on her back, a child making a snow angel.
She didn’t look so smugly superior now, did she? She wasn’t laughing at him now. And she would never laugh again.
He delivered blow after blow with the pipe while she struggled under him, her head rolling, her back arching, her fingers moving blindly over his body. It felt like sex, like those secret things people did in the dark. Dimly he knew he was being intimate with her in a way he’d never expected.
Finally she lay still. He scrambled off her body, looking down at the crumpled shape on the ground. He almost fled, then hesitated. Slowly he unbuttoned her blouse and cupped her breast with a gloved hand. He squeezed, his fingers kneading the soft flesh still warm as if with life. He had never felt a woman’s body before, except in dreams.
“Sweet,” he breathed. “So sweet.”
He brushed a stray hair from her bloodied face. His mouth found hers. He planted a light kiss on her lips, then shyly pulled away.
“I love you, Kathy. Love you. Love you.”
It occurred to him that he could do whatever he liked with her, and she couldn’t stop him. He wanted to; he really did. But he was afraid to linger. At any moment someone else might enter the parking lot.
Reluctantly he abandoned her body and ran to his car. He pulled out of the lot and drove aimlessly till he was sure nobody was following him. Then he parked on a side street and sat behind the wheel, letting out long slow breaths till the windshield was filmed with fog.
He’d killed a woman. Not a fantasy creation, and not one of the animals either, but an actual human being. She’d been named Kathy, and she’d worked at a restaurant, and she’d had a sister named Eleanor, and she’d misquoted Edgar Allan Poe. Now she was a huddle of bloodied meat. And
he
had done it with his own hands.
Yes. He’d done it, all right.
And it had felt good.
Slowly he smiled. A year ago he’d been afraid of that woman. He’d been terrified to ask her out on a date, terrified that she would reject him, as indeed she had. He’d thought she had some sort of power over him.
Now he knew what true power was and who had it.
And he knew that he need never be afraid again.
1
Sebastián Delgado put down the psychological profile from the Behavioral Science Unit and massaged his burning eyes with his fingertips. He’d read the paper at least a hundred times, and it had told him nothing. He wondered if the experts knew any more about this case than he did, or if any rational person could be considered an expert in such matters.
He checked his watch. Five-thirty A.M. His gaze drifted to the cot in the corner of his office, where he’d been stealing rare, restless cat naps for the past four weeks, ever since the investigation had shifted into high gear. The cot was inviting, but he was too tired for sleep, and he didn’t want to dream again.
Abruptly he stood up, scraping his chair away from his desk. He needed air. As much air as he could find in the windowless labyrinth of the Butler Avenue station.
He left his office and wandered the hallways. Drunken shouts rose like the wails of alley cats from the lock-up area in the rear of the building. Phones rang and went unanswered.
He entered the Detective Unit squad room, the walls covered with collages of mug shots and departmental memoranda, and crossed to the basin in the corner. He splashed cold water on his face, then dried himself with a paper towel from a dispenser.
On the way back to his office, he saw Detective Tony Sachetti standing outside the closed door of an interrogation room, pouring himself a cup of coffee and muttering irritably.
“Something wrong, Tony?”
Sachetti looked up, startled. His heavy eyebrows lifted in mild surprise. “Don’t you ever go home?”
“Not recently. What have you got?”
The smaller man released a grandiloquent sigh. “Real piece-of-shit case. The thing of it is, it should be open and shut, but it’s not. Something’s screwy.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Haven’t you got enough to worry about?”
Delgado chuckled. “More than enough. Let’s hear it anyway.”
“Guy named Ruiz is coming out of a bar in Mar Vista, near Palms and Centinela, about four hours ago, at one-fifteen. His car is parked on the street. He’s fumbling with the keys when somebody decides it’s payday. Either Ruiz puts up resistance or the robber gets nervous; one way or the other, Ruiz winds up being knifed in the neck. Just then, a black-and-white swings by. Suspect takes off on foot and ducks into an alley. Another unit cuts him off at the opposite end. He’s collared. Paramedics declare Ruiz dead at the scene, so it’s a homicide, and we’ve got our man. Nice and neat, huh?”
“Sounds like it.”
“Except for one problem. The knife. He didn’t leave it in the body, so he must’ve still been carrying it when he started running. But when he got nabbed, he didn’t have it on him. Only place he could have ditched it was the alley. But I’ve got ten guys pawing through garbage and looking under parked cars, and they can’t find diddly. That knife has done some kind of disappearing act.”
“Can’t you make him anyway?”
“We can make him, yeah. But without the murder weapon, I don’t know if the D.A. will file.”
Delgado frowned. “Let me talk to him. What’s his name?”
“Leon Crowell.”
Delgado pushed open the door and entered the interrogation room. A young black man, his head shaved bald, sat in a straight-backed chair, his left wrist handcuffed to a steel ring bolted to the wall. He wore a leather jacket emblazoned with the silver and black logo of the Los Angeles Raiders, an outfit favored by youthful offenders in L.A. Delgado had never been sure whether it was the team’s rebel image or simply the bold color scheme that attracted the interest of streetwise criminals; but he’d caught himself thinking, at times, that the city’s crime rate might not be rising quite so fast if the Raiders had stayed in Oakland.
“Hello, Leon,” he said, making no effort to sound friendly.
Leon pursed his lips like a pouting child. “I got nothing to say.”
“My friend here”—Delgado indicated Sachetti—“seems to think you killed a man tonight. Want to tell me why he’s wrong?”
A shrug. “Man, I don’t know nothing about that. I was just out for a walk, you know?”
“At one-fifteen in the morning?”
“I get sort of restless sometimes.”
“Why were you running?”
“I like to run, is all. Exercise.”
He scratched his nose with his right hand. Delgado studied that hand. A ring of dirt, a perfect circle an inch and a half in diameter, was printed faintly on the palm.
“It’s a public street, man,” Leon was saying. “Public property. I can run on it if I want to. Says so in the Constitution.”
Delgado smiled. “You’re a smart fellow, aren’t you, Leon?”
“Smart enough.”
“I’ll bet. But I’m smart too. Do you want to see how smart I am?”
“I don’t want to see nothing.”
Delgado turned to Sachetti. “You said there are cars in that alley?”
“Yeah. It’s right behind the bar, and some of the staff park there. But we searched the cars, Seb. Nothing underneath, and nothing inside.”
“No,” Delgado said. “Leon’s too smart for that. Leon, show Detective Sachetti your hand. Your right hand.”
“Say what?”
“Do it.”
Slowly, suspiciously, Leon raised his hand. Delgado twisted his wrist, angling the dirty palm at the overhead fluorescents.
“Hey, man,” Leon whined, “let go of me.”
Delgado ignored him. “See that, Tony?”
Sachetti leaned closed. “I see it. Now tell me what it means.”
“It means Mr. Crowell is a quick thinker. He sprinted into that alley, and he knew he had no more than two or three seconds to dispose of the knife.”
“There never was no knife,” Leon said, his voice reedy with the first piping note of desperation.
“So he ran to the nearest available hiding place,” Delgado continued. “One of those cars. He crouched down and shoved the knife into the exhaust pipe. When he did so, his palm made contact with the end of the pipe, which left the circle of dirt marked there.”
“I’ll be damned,” Sachetti muttered.
Delgado released Leon’s hand. “Tell your people to check the exhaust pipes, Tony. One of them will contain a surprise. A surprise with Mr. Crowell’s fingerprints on it, not to mention Mr. Ruiz’s blood.”
Leon shifted in his seat and knocked his sneakers together. “Shit.”
“I’ll tell you something, Seb,” Sachetti said with a smile. “That fucking birdman you’re looking for doesn’t stand a chance.”
Delgado sighed. “I hope you’re right.”
As he returned to his office, Delgado found himself envying Tony Sachetti. The man was out there working the streets, hauling in punks like Leon Crowell, accomplishing something. Yes, that must be nice.
He remembered the quiet excitement he’d felt when he’d been assigned to lead the task force a month ago, after the second victim was found. He hadn’t even minded seeing the rest of his caseload transferred to other officers. He was intoxicated with the luxury of devoting twenty-four hours a day to a single case, supervising seventy-five detectives, uniformed cops, and plainclothes officers all working with equal single-mindedness.
It was the kind of massive, resource-intensive investigation that could be launched only when a case was sizzling with media heat, heat that had made it the top priority of the political heavy-hitters downtown.
But after four weeks spent killing himself with work and worry, his excitement had faded, replaced by frustration. He was no closer to a solution than he’d been at the beginning.
Out-thinking Leon Crowell was easy. But the man Delgado was hunting, the man who held the city in the cold clutch of fear, was no small-time street punk. That man would not make the easy, obvious mistakes.
Delgado closed the door of his office and sat at his desk. He picked up the BSU profile and, for no particular reason, began reading it again. He was still on the first page when the telephone rang.
Slowly he lowered the report, looking at the phone, while a chill fluttered briefly in his gut.
He knew. Even before he lifted the handset from the cradle, he knew.
Four minutes later he was guiding his unmarked Chevrolet Caprice south on Sawtelle Boulevard, then east on Pico. He drove fast, whipping around slower traffic, grateful that the streets were still largely empty; rush hour would not begin till seven.
From the crosstalk crackling over the radio, Delgado gathered that Detectives Nason and Gray were already on the scene. Apparently they’d been heading home after a nightlong stakeout when the 187 came in; although not part of the task force, they’d volunteered to secure the crime scene and supervise the uniforms until Delgado arrived.