by Ivy Pochoda
Orphelia gives her an address ten blocks south on Western. Then she gives Essie a look like Essie might have sold her a bum product. “You sending someone for real? You’re taking me serious?”
“I listened to your story, didn’t I?”
She can see it now.
Perry, you really sent patrol down Western because some ex-hooker thinks a white lady’s stalking her?
Perry, you think this is the way to use departmental time?
Perry, I got a bridge. You got the cash?
Essie sticks out her hand. “I’ll take a look.” She can feel her mind peeling back to the story on NPR that morning. The activist from Power Through Protest who’d been hiding something. A puzzle that won’t let Essie rest. What was her name? What was she up to? Something, Essie’s sure. There’s some reason she agreed to be on the show, some reason she lied about her location, opened herself up to exposure.
She wheels around so she’s facing her monitor. She calls up the website for Morning Edition, finds the story. She reads the transcript.
When she looks up, Orphelia is gone.
She clicks through, finds the woman’s name. Morgan Tillett. She gets several social media hits and a few newspaper interviews. Essie scrolls through two different social media sites, her mind logging likes and loves and recent comments. A few names pop out. She cross-references these, looking for people who might live near elevated trains. Finds one: a Chris Jackson in Brooklyn, active in the Gowanus Superfund Site near the aboveground F train. Doesn’t have a girlfriend it seems. Liked two of Morgan’s last posts. Looks like they also overlapped in Seattle last spring.
Essie clicks back to Morgan Tillett. Engaged.
The lie. Brooklyn not Los Angeles. Tomorrow she will have forgotten Morgan Tillett’s and Chris Jackson’s names.
Everyone’s hiding something. Her. Orphelia. Half the squad room lies on a regular basis—small, seemingly immaterial things. Pointless fibs. Easy to disprove, which Essie does in a few clicks on the computer, then immediately disregards. Just another puzzle to be solved and put aside.
3.
A CATHOLIC GIRLS’ SCHOOL AT RECESS. ESSIE TIMES HER lunch break to coincide with the bell that sends the kids outdoors to the grubby playground that she worries is too close to the street. This is her therapy. Better than the mandatory sessions with the counselor ordered by her old captain—the sessions that insist she either had too much empathy or too little.
They assign you to one pole or the other and tear you down. Faking the psych eval was easy. Like everything else: a puzzle with a solution. A game. Pay attention and you’ll learn exactly what they want to hear.
The girls wear uniforms, maroon skirts, white polos, blue sweaters. The materials are cheap and pill easily. The younger ones fly down the steps into the playground, racing toward the climbing structures. The upperclassmen take their time, sauntering and performing for one another.
It took a week for Essie to determine the hierarchy—who ruled the roost, who was trying to climb. A couple of overheard conversations gave her enough information that a mindlessly executed social media search—fake names notwithstanding—told her who had a boyfriend from the brother school a few blocks away and which girls were getting involved in stuff out of their league, the kind of stuff that might bring them across Essie’s desk in a few years if they’re not careful. None of this matters to her. She forgets half of it less than five hours after she uncovers it.
She watches the climbing structure, where the twelve-year-old girls are swinging wildly, daring each other to backflip and catapult from the rungs to the concrete. As they fly through the air—a moment that always seems to occur in slow motion, as if there’s a possibility of stopping it, rewinding, pulling back—Essie’s nerves spark, a prickle like she’s licked a battery that radiates from her stomach to her extremities in anticipation of impact. Boom. They land. A buckle of knees. A moment of silence.
Essie’s breath catches.
Then a cheer.
And over again.
As a teenager, Essie was in the hospital when her older sister went into premature labor and Essie watched the complications pile up—internal bleeding, cardiac arrest. She stood by as the doctors held up Gladys’s organs, checking them like bruised produce, to see which one was to blame, before tucking them back into place. They sewed Gladys up. She healed. It had given Essie the false sense of security in practical resolutions.
A decade and a half on the force and the human body isn’t the kind of puzzle Essie likes. It doesn’t have obvious solutions or even solutions at all. From a distance, it looks easy to reassemble. The neck crooked at a horrible angle? Gently put it back. Untwist, realign. Straighten what was bent. Undo the damage.
There’s a girl on top of the climbing structure. She stands, balancing on two thin rungs of the jungle gym. She wobbles, pinwheeling her arms to stay upright. The game is to execute the most elaborate jump—the most daring—with a flip or a twist or a straddle or a kick.
The girl is bending her knees deep. She’s going to push off hard and soar. Essie watches her close her eyes like she’s going to fly blind. The electric jolt hits her stomach again, the anticipation of impact, of a collision and an aftermath that won’t have a solution.
She holds her breath.
Her phone rings—her partner’s ringtone.
The girl flies. Backward.
Clue: Overstate. Answer: Fly.
It’s not the girl on the jungle gym who soars through the air, but the other on Plymouth, the one who flew south, with a grace that seems unlikely in death.
As always, time slows before landing, making room for an avalanche of thoughts.
There’s a meeting at two P.M., a task force on human trafficking in Los Angeles that overlaps with Essie’s beat. She wants to sit in. Get more intel on what’s behind the scene on the streets.
Three days ago on Jefferson, just off Arlington, she answered a call about a message graffitied on a low wall outside the small library. My name is Jessina Rivera and I’m being held against my will here in Los Angeles. I come from Honduras. Please someone help me.
The English was good. Too good, Essie thought. But you don’t want to write the real thing off as a prank.
She takes the call. “Perry.”
The girl lands. Her waist bends. Her chest hits her knees. She sprawls forward.
“Essie, it’s Spera.”
This formal exchange of names after two years of working together.
“I’m late,” Essie says.
The girl lies on the ground for a moment, not moving.
“Not yet,” Spera says. He’s smoking but hiding it. Essie can tell by how he’s not talking into the microphone.
Essie is aware of Spera talking. But the girl hasn’t moved.
She hadn’t been thinking when she got out of the car on Plymouth. She’d touched the first body imagining she could just put it back the way it was, no sharp angles, bones all in their proper places.
In a daze the girl gets up and staggers to her friends. She high-fives them.
“You got the address, Perry? You want to repeat it to me?”
It’s how Spera keeps her in check. Repeat it to me.
“You wandered off before I began, didn’t you?”
Essie turns her back to the playground. “One more time,” she says.
“Western at Thirty-Eighth,” Spera says. “Twentysomething female. They say she might have been our beat.”
Our beat. Spera is too well trained, too fresh, to use the old code NHI—no human involved.
“Dead?”
“Didn’t I just say that?”
“Not when I was listening.”
“Dead.”
“Shouldn’t this be on Homicide?” Essie knows better than to step on another unit’s toes. Although that’s exactly what she was doing when she paid that call to Julianna about Kathy. When she brought Kathy up with Shelly and Orphelia.
“They want you down there,” Spe
ra says. “I’m on my way.”
“They trust me to see a dead body?” Essie asks.
“How’s that?”
She lets Spera’s question hang and disconnects.
4.
THERE’S MORE TO MORGAN TILLETT’S STORY. IT HITS ESSIE AS she bikes down St. Andrews—safer on the side streets—to Thirty-Eighth. Something about the affair solve doesn’t sit right. Search for the simple answer, but don’t get tricked by the easy one. She called in to the show. Why draw fire? Did she want to be discovered? Was she confident she wouldn’t be? There’s a game here.
She fumbles for her phone in her pocket. She’s about to pull over to the sidewalk, checking databases and travel logs, when Spera’s name starts flashing on the screen. Essie tucks the phone away and rides faster.
She turns on Thirty-Eighth. She can see the yellow tape from the end of the block, cordoning off a vacant lot where a bungalow burned a few years back.
A handful of cops are keeping back the locals. The detectives from Southwest are standing around like a still from a TV procedural.
Essie unwraps a piece of gum.
She has a feeling about what she’s about to see before she gets there—the fourth in the series of dead women discarded off Western. At the station they’ve been calling them prostitutes, but there’s more to it than that. Some of them are adjacent to the life. Cocktail waitresses, B-girls, as well as streetwalkers. They are linked more closely by location than occupation.
She hadn’t seen Katherine Sims’s body in person, nor the two that came before that. Homicide had only shown her photos after the fact in case she knew the women, their beat, their clients.
Serial? she’d asked.
Probably not. Just bad luck. Come in threes.
It’s serial, Essie had said.
Or three different dissatisfied customers had been Homicide’s rationalization.
And that had been the end of it.
At the tape a bald man named Bourke from Homicide hands her a card—her card. “Friend of yours,” he says, jerking his head toward the body. “Spera said he booked her the other day. Not sure why she had your card.”
Essie ducks under the tape. The detectives tower over her as she peers at the body.
Throat slit. Bag over her head.
This one’s not dressed for the stroll or the club. In fact, it looks more like she was dressed for a night in, in shorts and an oversized Lakers hoodie.
“Julianna,” Essie says.
“One of your girls?” Bourke asks, like she owns the prostitutes on Western. Like they are people who require ownership.
“Just a contact from the Fast Rabbit. Around the life, not exactly in it.” She squats down.
“Around the life,” Bourke says, like it’s a black-white issue and Essie is complicating things. “The card was in her pocket.” He points at the pouch of the sweatshirt where the waterfall of blood from Julianna’s neck stopped.
Her orange hair has tumbled out of the bottom of the plastic bag. Some of her curls are matted and clumped in her blood, others are fanned over the weeds and dirt. Her eyes are closed, face turned to the side, like she’s looking away from this crap, like she’s through.
There’s no putting her back together. There’s no solution. There isn’t even a puzzle.
“I booked her the other day,” Spera says. “After a raid on Miss Crystal’s on Crenshaw.”
Essie takes a glove from one of the techs and puts it on. She reaches out and wraps her hand around Julianna’s foot. Her toes are stiff. Through the latex they feel like dried clay.
“She was juiced up on something,” Spera continues. “I didn’t figure her for a street girl. Too clean. Guess it didn’t really matter how she worked. It’s all connected, right?”
“It’s all something,” Bourke says.
There’s an eruption overhead, an explosion of birdsong. Essie looks up and sees a flock of green parrots swarm into a nearby palm tree. Their color is a shock. Like the hummingbirds in Dorian’s boxes.
Why are people always asking the wrong questions? Who killed the birds? Was she a street girl, a stripper, or a taxi dancer? Just take Dorian and those boxes of birds—all of them nestled in cotton balls like their death was somehow better for it. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why she saves them.
It had only taken a few minutes on the computer to figure out who Dorian was. And a few more to realize that her daughter’s death matched the deaths of the three women found just off Western in the last eight months. Two things interested Essie. The murders had stopped after Lecia’s, and a name she came across in her quick scan of the file: Julianna Vargas, last person to see Lecia alive. The same Julianna who had been swept up in the raid at Miss Crystal’s. The same Julianna who’d been sitting at Spera’s desk, half sassy, half worn when Essie was talking to Dorian. The same Julianna whose foot is now in her hand, rigid and clammy against the latex.
After she’d put two and two together, Essie had visited the address on Julianna’s booking sheet and her roommate, a woman named Coco on the wrong side of an all-nighter, told her that Julianna had fucked off, pissed about that “street bitch Kathy’s death.”
A circle. Drawn neat. Dorian—Julianna—Kathy and now back to Julianna.
“It’s serial now,” Essie says.
There’s no response from Bourke or his partner, Mattis.
“It’s serial,” Essie repeats.
Bourke turns. “How’s that?”
“This is number four. When Katherine Sims was murdered, Kenter and Polk showed me two similar vics from a few months back.”
“You’re not Homicide, Perry,” Bourke says.
“I was.”
“I don’t need your guessing games.”
“I’m right,” Essie says. “And you know it.” She can hear it in his voice. She’s not sure whether she broke the news or confirmed it. “The two last year. Then Katherine Sims and now Julianna. You know, don’t you.”
“Don’t work me,” Bourke says.
“This is number four,” Essie repeats. “Maybe even number seventeen.”
“Seventeen?” Bourke’s face relaxes. She knows the look. Essie’s not ahead of him. She’s off the reservation. He doesn’t have to worry about her. He doesn’t even have to listen to her. “I must have been asleep on the job to have missed all those bodies. Mattis, you seen seventeen of these?” He edges his toes toward Julianna.
“Do you know who this is?” Essie asks, pointing at the ground.
“Julianna Vargas,” Bourke says.
But nothing beyond that, Essie thinks. No idea that this woman was the girl Lecia Williams had been babysitting the night she was murdered the same way. No idea that soon too many coincidences are going to yield a pattern.
“She had your card. Why?” Bourke asks.
Essie looks up, snaps her gum. One of the Homicide guys is looming over her. If they can’t see it, she’s not going to give it to them yet. “She worked the Fast Rabbit,” Essie says. “I was hoping she’d keep me up to date on their back rooms. Or you guys still pretending it’s just a nice little dance club?”
“You know her address?” Bourke asks.
Spera’s like a puppy bounding back with a ball. “It’s on the booking sheet.”
“She doesn’t live there anymore,” Essie says. “She’s with her folks.”
“You want to do the honors? You got that compassion thing down.” Bourke sounds like he’s doing her a favor, but he’s needling.
Essie turns her back to the crime scene. Over her shoulder she can hear Bourke and Mattis laughing. Seventeen.
After the accident there had been no need to notify. The girls had been playing outside their house. The impact—Essie can’t think about the sound—brought their parents out. There had been no need for the long approach to the door, the death march during which you can’t help thinking that until you knock, whoever answers’ kin is still alive, that things remain suspended in time.
Out o
n Plymouth was a different story.
No sense that you held someone else’s fate in your fist as you raised it to the door.
Anyway, who the hell lets kids play hopscotch at midnight on the sidewalk in Hancock Park?
5.
IT’S THREE P.M. ESSIE GIVES IT UNTIL THE EVENING NEWS AT best before the word serial goes wide. No matter how hard Bourke shut her down, he knew she was right. And it didn’t matter that she was right—it’s his case, his story to tell, him and Deb, the head of RHD, side by side. All that matters now is once serial is uttered by a cop, a neighbor, an activist, a relative, it’s going to spread like the wildfire on the hills.
She knows why the department resists the word—the horror and excitement it summons from the public. The crackpots. The tips, the theories. The press conferences. The psychics. The talk shows. The candy-colored news programs, all cartoon outrage and glossy drama. All the things that distract from the business of police work. The tabloid horror on a constant loop.
She also knows what the word does to the department, how it changes the detectives, the way it raises their hackles, draws out their insecurities and frustrations. Because someone is operating on their turf—someone blatantly and brutally breaking the law, but even worse, someone who is one, two, or even more steps ahead, flaunting his trespasses, taunting the force, maybe even leaving clues, convinced that they won’t find him. It becomes a behind-the-scenes pissing contest of deduction and wits. And soon the team assigned to the case will have created their foe in their image, made him into their intellectual equal, a mastermind. Because how else could he be eluding them?
Criminals often escape notice not because they’re smart, but because they’re too dumb or too damaged to worry. It’s not about being clever, it’s about being numb.
But now it’s undeniable. Four women. Two of them found several days apart. More similarities than differences. Serial for sure.
Essie wheels her bike away. She passes the usual crowd of onlookers, wide eyed, excited, hoping to see something, busy making this tragedy into their own story.
There will be meetings tonight. A task force.