“What do you mean, you think he’s in Dublin? Dublin, Ireland?”
“Yes, Dublin, Ireland.”
“You’re kidding me. You sure? You got a profile of the guy?”
“It’s one of four people. I haven’t narrowed it down yet. But I’m getting more and more sure all the time.”
“What’s the connection between Dublin and here? Jack Donovan?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Because yesterday when I spoke to you, you told me you were working for Jack Donovan.”
“Well remembered. It’s a bit more complicated than Jack Donovan. Look, meet me for breakfast and I’ll tell you.”
“Very funny. Breakfast in Dublin? I’m kind of busy here, in case you hadn’t noticed—”
“I’m in Burbank Airport.”
“You’re in Burbank right now?”
“That’s right. I flew out here to speak to you.”
“Well, speak, Ed, I’m listening.”
“I need a face-to-face.”
“Ed, I’ve barely been to bed, do you have any idea how big this case is—”
“I haven’t been to bed in two days. And I’m saying I can help you to crack it. And you can help me. Because you can’t get your photo taken arresting the Three-in-One Killer in Dublin, Ireland. And the FBI must be on their way—Malibu? Tahoe? No way are the LAPD hanging on to this. Now, where do you want to meet? I can be in Parker Center in maybe an hour if I take the 101 before the traffic builds.”
There’s a silence. I can hear Coover’s breath. I press my case.
“Come on, Don. You know none of this would have happened if I hadn’t knocked on your door fifteen years ago, you said as much yourself. And now look at you. You the man. You got any leads?”
“No. No ID on any of the bodies but the Point Dume three and they’re not confirmed. Yes, the FBI is coming in to steal my case, I mean, offer their assistance, I mean, steal my case. Strictly speaking, all I have today is a press conference in the afternoon. More like another photo op. Not to mention sit and play brief the feds until we all go crazy. Meanwhile we wait for the phones to ring and sift through what people tell us until some of it, any of it, makes sense.”
“So what do you say?”
“I say let’s steer clear of police HQ for a start. Doesn’t matter that we’re not releasing any more information until the afternoon, and I doubt if we’ll have anything to say then either, the press and the cameras are in ‘rolling news’ mode, they’re just waiting for anyone they recognize so they can stick a mike in their face and fill some airspace. All right. I imagine you want to head over to Point Dume yourself, since that’s where it started for you.”
“That would be the plan.”
Coover names a diner called Patrick’s Roadhouse just above Pacific Coast Highway at San Vicente Boulevard. It’s one of those places that’s hard to forget: with an exterior painted garish bright green and covered with shamrocks, it looks like the owners have forgotten to take the St. Patrick’s Day decorations down. I get on the road, and instantly regret not taking Ben and Todd up on their offer; there are things in your life that you push to the back of your mind and hope will never again intrude on your consciousness, and the infernal machine of torture by heat, light, sound and physical agitation that the L.A. freeway system constitutes is one of those things, even this early in the morning. I take the Hollywood Freeway by force of habit, but I’m in plenty of time; I’m not meeting Don Coover until nine.
I get off and onto Cahuenga, then hook northwest onto winding Mulholland Drive. I want to ride Mulholland for the great views it affords, of L.A. west to the ocean, and back across the San Fernando Valley to the San Gabriel Mountains, but also because two of the burial sites are in the vicinity. The first is at a Spanish Colonial mansion just after the turn down into Laurel Canyon. I can’t see the site. I can only barely see the house. But I know I’m approaching a mile before I hit it on account of the melee of photographers, press helicopters, cops and other interested parties. Many of the latter have assembled already with sandwiches and sodas, ready for a day of hanging out at the scene of a mass grave. I don’t know what they think or hope might happen—a resurrection? Or simply the chance to appear on TV, flaunting their empathy with people they don’t know? That’s my first reaction, and I almost immediately regret it; on closer inspection, many people are holding up banners and placards with the names and photographs of people they once knew; each sign carries a date, and the word missing. Never lost, which has the ruthless air of finality about it; always missing, which leaves room for that great faithless friend, hope. I feel ashamed of myself for having been so quick to judge them, and pity for them, and as I ride on, the great expansive grid that is Los Angeles stretching out on either side, I feel desolation, in the bright morning light, that so many should have lost so much in this sunlit, dark city; in the Santa Ana heat, I feel the chill of fear.
The scene is not dissimilar when I cut down into Coldwater Canyon. The helicopters alert me to the location, and as I approach, I see the same placards, the same faces, the same desperate hope. Between thirty-five and forty thousand people in California go missing every year; here is a chance that their daughter’s or sister’s body is buried in one of these graves—and many hold signs with men’s, with boy’s, faces, for the sex of all the bodies found has still not been determined, or announced. Of course, not everyone is distinguished by the dignity of their grief; there’s a fair sprinkling of T-shirt and trinket sellers, ice-cream vendors, and assorted cranks seeing an opportunity to push their arcane worldview or conspiracy theory of choice. And plenty of cops and private security to keep them all in line, especially in an expensive neighborhood like this.
I come out on Beverly Drive, hang a right onto Santa Monica, and ride straight down through Beverly Hills, Century City and Westwood, cutting onto San Vicente at Sawtelle and riding around and down, down to the blue of the ocean.
Patrick’s Roadhouse looms above PCH like a chemical dream in an azure world. I can’t face it yet, and feel badly in need of fresh air and exercise, so I park in the lot across the street and cross the highway and walk along the bike path and climb up onto a patch of scrub and find a spot to sit and stare out at the ocean, the ocean I haven’t seen or smelled for five years. I stare out at Santa Monica Bay, where we scattered the ashes of my daughter, Lily, who would have been eight years old had she lived, the same age as Anne’s younger daughter, Ciara. I stare and stare, and I think my thoughts and I say my prayers, and at nine o’clock I walk back across Pacific Coast Highway and into Patrick’s Roadhouse to meet Detective Donald Coover of the Cold Case Unit of the LAPD.
Coover sits in a darkened corner of the roadhouse near the back exit. Not only can you not see the ocean from here, you can barely see the bar. There are pictures of famous actors who are allegedly regulars hung up all around, but this is no balm to Coover, the most famous man in L.A. as of this morning. He has a haunted look on his face, and from his furtive sidelong glances, I can tell he has already been recognized.
“In hiding?” I say. “This is your moment, Don. Step up.”
“I reserve the right to eat breakfast first,” Coover said. He is a tall, lean, sinewy man with a tanned face and lank, side-parted hair which was California blond when I saw him last.
“Ed Loy,” he says, standing up and shaking my hand and making a big deal of scrutinizing me closely. “A gray hair?”
“A gray head wins,” I say. “It suits you. Distinguished.”
“Distinguished. That’s liar for ‘old.’”
“Well. We’re all headed in the one direction.”
A blond waitress comes and takes our order. She doesn’t look Irish and she doesn’t sound Irish, and right now that suits me fine. I order lox, eggs and onions, because that’s what I like to have for breakfast, along with whole wheat toast, orange juice and coffee. Coover has granola, yogurt and decaf, which I guess is how he stays lean and sinewy.
On
ce we’ve ordered, he looks at me.
“Jack Donovan?”
I suppose I’ve been harboring some vague notion that I can keep secret the possibility that my friend might be involved in the case, might in fact be the Three-in-One Killer, until I have a clearer idea myself. The logical corollary to this, however, is that I might consider showing mercy, or seeking mitigation, for a man who has killed eighteen people and counting. Sitting across the table from Don Coover, I understand enough about who I am and who I am not to realize that just isn’t going to happen.
“All right. First thing. I have…I think I have a link.”
“For the murders? The burial sites?”
“Yeah.”
“And the link is Jack Donovan?”
“Keep your voice down. There’s always an actor or two hanging out in here, or at least there used to be.”
“Nah. You can be sure, once they put the photos on the walls, the only people who come here anymore are the actors who wait tables for a living. And tourists, like you, of course,” Coover says with a guarded smile.
“Just wait until you hear, then you can decide what kind of tourist I am. All right, on the Ocean Falls set at Point Dume, there were four people who have worked together now fifteen years, half a dozen movies: Jack Donovan; his producer, Maurice Faye; cinematographer Mark Cassidy; and first AD Conor Rowan.”
“And what? Each of these locations…is a location? Was used as a movie set? For a Jack Donovan picture, that each of these four guys worked on?”
“Hey. You must be one of those shit-hot LAPD detectives we see on TV.”
A black Moleskine notebook appears beneath Coover’s slender hand and snaps open, a steel ballpoint poised above it.
“What have you got?”
“Okay, 1997: The Dain Curse. Ended in the San Gabriel Mountains, but started out in Venice, along the canals?”
“Okay. Were you in that movie?”
“I was.”
“I thought so.”
“But do you see me on the wall here? I think not. All right, next: Twenty Grand. 1999. Shot in the Sierras, near Lake Tahoe.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“I shit thee not. Next, The Man in the High Castle. 2002.”
Coover looks up from his notebook.
“Mulholland Drive? A Spanish Colonial castle, it was, I remember. Great movie. Fuck, this is amazing. You won’t be wanting a credit here, Ed, will you?”
“Where do you think we are, L.A.? The Last Anniversary. 2005.”
“I left halfway through. I’m guessing Coldwater Canyon.”
“A lot of it was shot in the studio, which is down in the Valley, but there were two long sequences shot in period houses in the Canyon, where the eternal lovers were a silent-era Hollywood couple and then a pair of Joni Mitchell/David Crosby–type rock stars.”
“And the fifth?”
“The fifth. Now, I don’t know about the fifth. The only other movie Jack made here was The Armageddon Factor, but I’m pretty sure that was all shot on location up in San Francisco. 1995.”
“Where Ventura meets the 101, by the Los Angeles River there, it’s close to Studio City, too.”
“Right. Because I know they did postproduction on A Terrible Beauty somewhere there, would have been ’92. That was their first time in L.A.”
“Did they all come over?”
“Good question. Obviously Jack would have, and I think he used to have Mark Cassidy in the edit suite back then. And Maurice would have been there at least some of the time, taking care of business.”
“No need for a First AD once you’re finished the shoot, though.”
“I wouldn’t have thought so. But they were very much one for all, all for one at the time, so there’s a fair chance Conor would have come as part of the gang. The Gang of Four, they called themselves.”
“Okay. Who can we ask? Not any of them.”
“Well. Three out of four, but which three? And that’s the thing about The Armageddon Factor, Mark Cassidy did not work on that picture at all. So if the Ventura/Hollywood Freeway site is linked to Armageddon, that’s Mark out.”
The waitress brings our breakfast, and we eat for a while in ruminative silence. Coover makes a few notes.
“Okay, well, on A Terrible Beauty, we can check studio records, expense sheets for the production, if…Conor Rowan came, he’d’ve been on the clock. And then find out which movie used that Ventura 101 site.”
“You sound excited.”
“It’s good, Ed, even if the fifth doesn’t hang in there. By which I mean, the sixth, counting the Point Dume three.”
“Is there a crucifix in every site?”
Coover nods, his mouth full of granola.
“Three bodies in each. That’s eighteen. All female, we weren’t certain, but they’re pretty sure as of this morning, they worked through the night.”
“That’s the job for me. Jesus Christ, eighteen.”
“Tell me about these guys. Some kind of profile of each? Biographies?”
My phone rings; it’s a withheld number, but I answer anyway: Tommy.
“I have to take this,” I say, walking out of Patrick’s and climbing up onto the side of the highway.
“Tommy? Whose phone are you ringing from?”
“A throwaway. I was rightly done, Ed, someone cracked me on the back of the nut, just after you’d gone to the airport. Woke up in Vincent’s with a nappy on my head, concussion, ten past three this afternoon. Fuck, they even had Paula in there, and Naomi. I’m lying back, feeling all out of whack, not so much what is wrong with this picture as what is this fucking picture, know I mean? And Paula, you can see, now I’m alive, she’s getting her scowl on, ready to give out, and Naomi, all tearstained, and the first thing I say, Ed, the first thing out of my mouth, is: ‘Where’s Jenny Noble?’”
Tommy says something else, but I don’t hear it; the sound of an LAPD helicopter overhead drowns out even the sound of the cars on the highway. It’s headed north toward Malibu, where through the haze I can see another two or three choppers hovering like hungry insects, I guess marking the spot at Point Dume where the lost girls’ bodies were discovered. I tune Tommy in again.
“…Naomi said Jenny texted her to say Nora and Kate were back, and that she was going to her flat. But there was no sign of her there, I checked myself out of Vincent’s, got Jenny’s address from your man Geoff Keegan—was looking for Madeline but I can’t find her either. No sign of Jenny on the set. She’s gone, Ed. All three of them are gone.”
Those girls are gone.
“It’s time to get the Guards involved.”
“Maurice Faye has done that, Store Street Garda are on it. But what are they gonna do?”
I tell Tommy to take care of himself, that I’ll get back to him soon, and end the call. When I get back into Patrick’s, Don Coover is on a call himself.
“Yeah, 1992. No, that was when the movie was released, you want to go back to probably ’91 for the production. Yes. Thank you. And then The Armageddon Factor…yes, that would probably be ’94. Just, if there were any studio pickups, and, and where postproduction was done. Yes. Thank you. The first number is my cell, call me anytime, I mean anytime. I appreciate it.”
Coover closes the call and meets my eye.
“You look all shook up.”
“The other reason I made the connection: two girls had disappeared off the set of Nighttown, the movie Jack is shooting in Dublin. One on Wednesday afternoon, one Thursday morning. It’s not enough time for anyone over the age of eighteen to be considered missing, but these girls were a trio in scenes that had already been shot, so for the movie, it was an emergency. I thought of Point Dume immediately. So I got an associate of mine to keep the third girl, Jenny Noble, in a safe house. Our guy put my associate in the hospital, tricked Jenny into thinking her friends were back and there was a night shoot, sent a car for her. Now she’s gone.”
“Three-in-one. Man. You think it’s him?”
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“On the negative side, why would one of those guys do that when it would mean jeopardizing his own movie? They may not have the budget to shoot those scenes again. It’s against his interests. But maybe there’s a reason for that. Maybe he just doesn’t care anymore. All right, say I think it’s him. What do we do? They’ve reported the girls missing. That’s the scenario I came to you with, all those years ago. Just three missing girls. Nothing to see here.”
Coover flinches, maybe bridles a little.
“There was no way I could have known—”
“I wasn’t saying there was, Don. You did what you could. What do we do now?”
“I think you have enough legitimately to request a police investigation. House searches, questioning of suspects. Lay it out for them. If you have good Irish police connections. If you like, I’ll do it, maybe take it up the food chain a bit. No offense.”
I think about it, and then shake my head.
“If this is our guy, his work is done. Three-in-one, every movie, the end. Maybe he’s taking more risks than he used to, but I can’t see how the Guards are going to catch him out. And if we alert him, we could lose him.”
“There is that. All right then, profile. Give me a sense of these guys, who we’re dealing with. Could I get some nondecaf, please?” (This last to the passing waitress.)
“In the olden days, we used to call it coffee.”
“The olden days. Wasn’t this a tar pit?”
“You have a few years on me. Okay, profile. Well, if you want a serial killer with built-in motivation flashing like a neon sign, Jack Donovan’s your man.”
The waitress refills both our cups, and I take Coover on a ride along the roller coaster that is Jack Donovan: the strong possibility that he had an incestuous relationship with his elder sister that resulted in the termination of a pregnancy, his disastrous relationship with women, culminating—for me—with his physical abuse of Amanda Cole, his bizarre marriage and refusal to acknowledge his own children, and the anonymous letters he allegedly received, apocalyptic in tone, that seem to refer to the three-in-one motif used by the killer. Coover looks at me in amazement.
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