Authors: Thomas Perry
The boyfriend must have begun searching the house before Kyra returned from her night at the hotel, Till thought. The rooms that Kyra could be expected not to enter on her way to bed had probably been thoroughly searched before she got home. The boyfriend had undoubtedly left her bedroom untouched until after she was dead, and then scoured it. Her purse had been dumped out onto the floor, the drawers pulled out of the dresser, the closet opened and clothes thrown around.
Till looked down at Kyra. He had seen many dead people in his life. It was always a terrible thing, the utter, irreversible destruction of a hopeful, busy, eager, selfish, sensitive, thoughtful, gregarious, lonely creature, already decomposing as soon as the heart stopped. An hour ago this corpse on the bed had been a lively, beautiful, generous young woman.
Till studied the room, but touched nothing. There was no point in making things hopeless for the crime scene people. He knew that the boyfriend had done at least a fair job of staging a meaningless crime scene already. He could see that there were no visible signs that anyone other than Kyra had ever slept here, let alone lived here on her generosity. The boyfriend had proceeded this way before, and the results this time would be the same. The cops would make nothing of it, build no leads, get nowhere.
Till saw the jewelry box lying open and on its side on the dresser. He looked inside and around it for the distinctive necklace and anklet, then on the floor and behind the dresser, but they were not there. He turned and went down the hall to the kitchen. He reminded himself that he shouldn’t wait too long with Kyra. He stopped, picked up a dish towel to keep his prints off the kitchen telephone, and then called 911.
“Your name, please.”
“Jack Till,” he said. “I’m at the home of a young woman who has been shot to death.”
“Did you shoot her?”
“No, ma’am. I did not. I just came to speak with her, looked in, and found her dead. I believe the person who shot her is a young male Caucasian driving a white Toyota Camry, about one year old. He is probably heading out of town. He drives fast.” He said, “I’m at 9344 North Murietta Terrace.”
“I’m dispatching officers. Are you at the residence now?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Please remain there, because the officers will need to speak with you.”
“I will.”
“Are you positive that she’s dead?”
“Yes, I am. I’ve seen a number of bodies, because I was a homicide detective for many years. She has a bullet fired through her left temple. She was right-handed.”
“The officers should be reaching you shortly, Mr. Till. Are there any other people in the house?”
“No. The only one I know of who was here this morning was the gentleman I saw leaving. Presumably he shot her.”
“I’m getting word that the officers have reached your location. Do you see them?”
“They’re parking in front of the house now. That’s incredibly quick. They must have been nearby.”
The two cops who emerged from the car were both adjusting their utility belts as they came to the door. Till opened it and stepped aside so they could enter.
“Are you Mr. Till?” 1 am.
The first cop put a strong arm on his forearm. “Could you please put your hands on the wall and let me check your pockets?”
Till leaned against the wall, spread his arms and legs while the cops verified that he was not armed. The cop said, “Thank you.”
Till said, “I know this is a little tricky for you, but if you could call in a bulletin right away on a male Caucasian about twenty-five years old driving a year-old white Toyota Camry you might get him before he goes too far. He speeds, so that might help him stand out a little.” One cop walked deeper into the house while his partner spoke to Till.
“I assume you think he’s the shooter?”
“Yes.”
“Does he have a name?”
“Not yet,” Till said. “I think he was a live-in boyfriend. I saw him leaving when I arrived. His hair was dark, cut short and neat, and he was wearing wraparound sunglasses. He drove the girl’s new silver Jag a few miles, parked in front of Tio Fernandito restaurant, walked through the place, got into the white Camry, and drove off.”
“So if we go to this restaurant, the silver Jag will be there, but the Camry won’t?”
“That’s right. I think this girl also had an apartment somewhere, and he could be on his way there now, or heading out of town.”
“Why two places?”
“She was an escort. This doesn’t look like the sort of in-call place she would use for business. She would have problems with the neighborhood. I think the guy searched this place for money and valuables. He might wonder if she had money or jewelry hidden in the other place too. He has a history of killing girls like this and then robbing them.”
The other cop came out of the hallway. “Beautiful girl.”
“Yes,” said Till. “She was.”
“Tell me about you. What are you?”
“I’m a private investigator out of LA.”
“You on a case?”
“The parents of a girl named Catherine Hamilton hired me to find out who killed her. She was working as an escort too. This guy seems to form a relationship with a working girl for a while, then kill and rob her, and move on.” Till paused. “I don’t want to get irritating, but I can prove all of this, and I really think it would be worthwhile to try to have this guy pulled over right away.”
The younger cop looked at his partner.
The older cop said, “Mr. Till. Haven’t you heard a radio, or seen a paper yet today? When I came on duty, there had been a call that two city councilmen had been murdered last night in their beds. All morning there have been dozens of tips and leads that have had to be followed up on. We’re not a huge police force. There’s not much extra manpower to look for a car—the most common model in the country, by the way—when we don’t know more than this. Give us a chance to find out more.”
Till was looking at the floor. Suddenly he looked up. “Why do you think the councilmen were killed?”
“It could be a lot of things. We’re in southern Arizona. There are a lot of people with guns and opinions. There are people who smuggle drugs. We’ll sort all that out, but it’s making everything else drag. Right now, I think we’ve got to get you to the station and let you give your statement there. We’ll pull some crime scene people off the councilmen, so they can get started here.”
“All right,” Till said.
“I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you to tolerate wearing handcuffs, Mr. Till. My partner is going to transport you alone.”
He turned around and let the cop cuff his wrists behind him. When they were in the car, the younger cop said, “Were you close to her?”
“No. I hired her last night so I could get her to tell me about her boyfriend, but she took her personal life off the list of topics. She didn’t tell me his name, or give me any details. So here we are.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean all I accomplished was to arrive the day before she was going to be killed. The next time I get close I’ll concentrate on going for him instead of trying to be cagey and learning everything from the girl.”
At the station Till gave his statement, then waited in an interrogation room drinking coffee while the cops made a few telephone calls. He knew that they had hoped he might be the one who had killed the two city councilmen. When they realized Till was what he said he was, the detective who had been assigned the case came in and told him he was free to go.
He got a ride back to Kyra’s house, where technicians were still going over the whole property. He didn’t talk to any of them. He knew they wouldn’t tell him anything, and even if they did, what they found would not be of interest to him. He had missed his best chance at this man, and all he could do was start again at the beginning and give the boyfriend time to surface again. He stopped beside his car and watched the coroner’s people moving Kyra’s body out on a gurney. Then he got into his car and drove.
Till began his drive back to Los Angeles after the sun went down, staying on Interstate 10 all the way, hoping the boyfriend was aware of him and ready to come after him. He wanted to be easy to find. Till stopped occasionally at diners and truck stops for coffee. He always sat facing a window so he could watch his car in the parking lot. Even as he watched, he kept hoping the killer was out there thinking about going to the car to ambush Till.
After he arrived at his office on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, he went back to work gathering information about the murders. He searched jewelry outlets and manufacturers’ catalogs for the distinctive necklace and anklet. The gold disks had not been circles. They had been ovals. The little diamonds around the edge hadn’t been unusual, but the big diamond on each had been off center. He spent days looking, but he couldn’t find anything like them. He drew a picture of them with approximate sizes and descriptions, and drove downtown to the jewelry district. He walked from building to building, entering every store, every design and manufacturer’s workshop, and asked if anyone could identify the maker or the meaning. When he got home he scanned an enlarged and cropped photograph of the jewelry into his computer and sent it to dealers in estate jewelry and designers of custom jewelry all over the country. Then he kept looking.
He went back to study the information Sergeant McCann had sent him about the five girls who had been murdered before Catherine Hamilton. He was struck even more, now that he had spent a night with Kyra, by how similar all seven girls looked. It was as though the boyfriend kept browsing the escort ads until he found the same girl, and then he killed her again, over and over.
The necklace and anklet didn’t appear in pictures of either of the first two victims. They seemed to have originated with the third, three murders before Catherine Hamilton. He spent more time trying to concentrate his efforts on jewelry sellers in the Miami area, where that girl had died. She was Jenny McLaughlan from Savannah, Georgia. She had appeared in Miami at the age of twenty-two last June, and had found an apartment near the ocean. She had apparently taken to the beach life and then catered mainly to tourists who checked into the big hotels. It was almost impossible to guess where the jewelry had come from. No custom jeweler he could find had any knowledge or opinion.
He studied each girl’s murder. The police reports varied in their detail and in the intensity of the inquiries that they reflected. Some of the investigators seemed to see the murder of a prostitute as a simple cause-and-effect matter. Young women, usually small and thin, who were doing something illegal, for which they collected money in cash, were going to be in exceptional jeopardy. Any customer could see the opportunity, and sometimes one took it.
There were hundreds of fingerprints belonging to unknown males in each of the first few girls’ apartments. Nobody had found any set twice. There were also complicated mixtures of DNA. If there were relationships, rivalries, resentments, they remained unknown because the girls would stay in a city for a few months at a time and then move on to the next city, like migrating birds. If the victim was foreign-born, the police would try to find out if she had been trafficked, but in these cases they’d had no success. They wrote the report, signed it, dated it, and filed it.
Dated it. He looked again at each of the police reports and noted the time and date of death and the city where it had happened. Then he went back to the Web sites of the local newspapers to find out what else had happened in each of those cities in the day or two before those murders.
It took Till three days to be sure he had picked out the right events to correlate with the deaths of the five women. On April 17 of last year a strawberry blond who called herself Lily Serene was shot in the back of the head in her Minneapolis apartment, and the place was ransacked. The night before, William Rossi, the owner of three restaurants in the Twin Cities area, had disappeared. Rossi was found four days later in his car, which had sunk to the bottom of a lake. He had been shot to death.
A girl named Wendy Steffens was found dead in her apartment in Washington, D.C., on the night when a retired assistant district attorney had been shot in his home. He had been a successful prosecutor for thirty-two years, a man with a great many enemies.
On September 27, a woman named Jenny McLaughlan was found dead in a condominium in a desirable area of Miami near the beach. Two nights earlier, the president of a regional bank and his wife had been killed as they walked to their car after attending a play.
On December 29, Terri Hanford, a strawberry blond, died of two gunshot wounds in her apartment in New York. The same evening a wealthy man who owned a large number of Manhattan rental properties and a horse breeding farm upstate was murdered in the art gallery he owned.
On January 25 a contractor in Charlotte, North Carolina, was killed on the way home after a meeting with potential lenders. A strawberry blond named Karen Polenko was murdered in her apartment early the next morning, apparently while she was asleep.
Jack Till called the Los Angeles Police Department, introduced himself, and asked to speak with Detective Anthony or Detective Sellers. He called the number he was given, expecting to leave a message that would be returned when one of them got around to it, but instead, the phone was answered by a male voice that sounded calm and businesslike. “Detective Sellers.”
“Hello, Detective. My name is Jack Till. I was a homicide detective with the LAPD for twenty-three years, and now I’m working as a private investigator.”
“Nice to hear from you. What are you working on?”
“Catherine Hamilton. I wondered if you or Detective Anthony could spare me about fifteen minutes anytime today?”
“I think so. Can you be here around two-thirty today?”
“Sure. I’ll see you then.”
He drove to the Burbank Boulevard station in North Hollywood, where they worked; parked on the street three blocks away; walked in; and went to the front counter to identify himself. Then he sat down to wait. At four o’clock he went to the counter again to let the officer know that he wasn’t leaving, just going to the men’s room. At four-thirty, the two detectives appeared in the lobby.