Cooper By The Gross (All 144 Cooper Stories In One Volume)

by Bill Bernico

  The phone on Eric’s desk rang.

  “Excuse me,” he said, picking up the phone. He listened for a moment and then said, “When? Do we have someone on the scene? Well, tell them not to disturb anything. I’m on my way.” Eric turned to Dean. “Let’s take a ride. I think we just found victim number four.”

  “So soon?” Dean said. “Less than a day after the third victim?”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “And that’s not following any pattern, either. Come on, let’s go have a look.”

  Dean and I rode with Eric to an apartment building on Mariposa, just south of Santa Monica. There in the underground garage we found two uniformed patrolmen standing guard over a body that was lying just inside the overhead door.

  The two officers straightened visibly when Lieutenant Anderson approached. “What have we got here?” Eric said.

  The first patrolman, a young man by the name of Bullard pulled a notepad from his pocket and began reciting from it. “Victim’s name is Patrick Kilgallen, thirty-nine of this address.”

  “He lived in this building?” Eric said.

  “Third floor,” Officer Bullard said. “It looks like someone surprised him when he came for his car.” Bullard pointed to a Chevy sedan in the first parking spot near the door. “Single shot to the back of the head. No one else in the building reported hearing anything so we figured he must have used a suppressor. The superintendant found Kilgallen thirty-five minutes ago when he came to check on why the garage door had been left open for so long.”

  “Did you call for the coroner and an ambulance?” Eric said.

  “Yes, sir,” Bullard said. “They’re on their way.”

  “Have you questioned anyone here in the building?” Eric said.

  “No sir,” Bullard said. “You told us to guard the body and that’s what we did.”

  Eric clapped his hand on Bullard’s shoulder. “Good man. You did the right thing. Stay here with the body. I’ll check with some of the residents.”

  “Yes, sir,” Bullard said.

  Eric turned to Dean. “I could use some help with this part,” he said. “Suppose we split up? I’ll take the ground floor. You and Cooper can take the second and third floors.”

  “Got it,” Dean said, as he and I headed for the elevator. Dean turned to me. “What’ll it be, two or three?”

  “I’ll take the third floor,” I said. “I’ll meet you back in the garage unless one of us turns something up.”

  Dean nodded and got off the elevator when it stopped on the second floor. I rode up one more floor and stepped out. The elevator was situated at the end of the hall and there were six door in this hall, three on each side. I knocked on the first door and waited. No one answered and once I took a look at the name plate above the doorbell button, I knew why. This was Kilgallen’s apartment. I continued down the hall, staying on the north side of the building. The middle door had the name ‘Bobby Fredericks’ posted above the doorbell button. Let’s just see what he had to say.

  He turned out to be a she. Bobby Fredericks was a tall, shapely brunette in her mid twenties with skin tight slacks and a striped form-fitting, sleeveless shirt. My mind went blank for a moment when she opened the door. She got tired of waiting for me to say something.

  “Yes?” she said. “Can I help you?”

  “Bobby Fredericks?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said a bit impatiently. “What do you want?”

  “I’m checking into your next door neighbor, Mr. Kilgallen,” I said.

  “Pat?” she said. “What did you want to know?”

  I still carried my badge and I.D. card and fished them out of my pocket for her to examine. “When did you last see him?” I said.

  She thought for a moment. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe an hour, hour and a quarter. Why?”

  “Did you hear or see anything unusual at that time?” I said.

  “Like what?” she said.

  “Anything,” I said. “Suppose you just tell me what you remember.”

  “Not much to tell, really,” she said. “He was going out just as I was coming in. We passed in the hall and he said ‘hi’ or something like that. I think I returned the greeting and then went inside. That’s it, nothing special. Just like every other day. Is Mr. Kilgallen in some sort of trouble?”

  “He’s dead,” I said, and let the sentence hang in the air.

  “Dead?” she said. “How? Why? Who’d want to hurt Mr. Kilgallen? He was such a nice guy. Kept to himself most of the time, but he was always friendly when we’d bump into each other.”

  I pulled my notepad from my pocket and jotted down Bobby’s name and address. “Thank you, Miss Fredericks,” I said. “If we need anything else from you, someone will be in touch.”

  “I hope you find the person who did this,” Bobby said before closing her door.

  “So do I,” I said and moved down the hall to the next door.

  Half an hour later I was back in the garage and the body was gone. The place where Pat Kilgallen had died had been cordoned off with yellow police tape. Lieutenant Anderson was standing nearby, talking to Dean when I approached the two of them.

  “Anything?” Eric said as I got closer.

  “Nothing useful,” I said. “I talked to most of the residents on the third floor. None of them had any information that’ll help. They all agreed he was a nice guy and that was about it. What about you two?”

  “Pretty much the same,” Dean said. “Folks on the second floor saw him coming and going, but no one was what you’d call a friend.”

  “I got almost the same reactions from the first floor,” Eric said. “No one had a bad thing to say about the guy. I can’t find anyone who wished him any harm.”

  “This can’t be totally random,” I said. “There has to be a connection to the first three killings. It might be obscure, but it’s there. I can feel it.”

  Dean and I rode back to Eric’s office in his cruiser. Back in Eric’s office I stood looking at the map again. Eric picked up another magnetic button and placed it on the approximate area where Patrick Kilgallen’s body was found little more than an hour ago. He stood back and looked at the map.

  “Looks like a lop-sided box,” Dean said, studying the placement of the magnets.

  “Or an N, if you connect the dots,” I said.

  “The one near the Hollywood sign and the one next to the Golden State Freeway almost make a perfect triangle with this latest one,” Eric observed. “But then there’s the leftover one on Highland and Hollywood. He picked up a grease pencil and drew a big circle around all four magnets. “There has to be some common ground here somewhere.”

  I looked at the map again. Now all I saw was a lop-sided box with a circle around it. If there was a pattern there, I just didn’t see it.

  “Sorry we weren’t more help,” I told Eric. “Is there anything you need from us today?”

  Eric shook his head. “I guess not,” he said. “But thanks for coming down here.”

  “Any time,” Dean said and then turned to me. “I think we should probably get going, don’t you?”

  I nodded and turned to Eric. “If anything breaks on this case, give me a call, will you?” I said.

  “I will,” Eric said. “And thanks again, both of you.”

  It’s these kinds of cases,” Dean said, “that make me glad I retired. You’ve got your work cut out for you on this one, Eric.”

  Dean and I drove back to the office and found Gloria sitting at her desk when we walked in. Her right cheek looked a bit puffy and she was sitting there with her palm rubbing it softly.

  “How’d it go at the dentist?” I said.

  She didn’t answer. She just slowly shook her head and moaned.

  “Did they pull it?” Dean said.

  Gloria nodded and winced. “Uh huh,” she mumbled.

  “Poor thing,” I said, patting her on the head.

  Just then Elliott came back from seeing his client and found me with my hand on
Gloria’s head. I looked at him. “Your wife lost a little weight,” I said. “What does one tooth weigh, anyway?”

  Elliott gave Gloria a concerned look and stood by her side. She looked up at him with her puffy cheek, rolled her eyes and shook her head.

  “You’d better go on home,” Elliott said to her. “I can handle it here for the rest of the day.”

  Gloria nodded and rose from her desk. She looked at me.

  “Don’t worry, Gloria,” I said. “I’ll stick around and keep Elliott company for a while. You go on home and soak a towel in hot water and hold it on your cheek. That should make it feel a little better.”

  Without trying to utter any more painful words, Gloria left the office and closed the door. Elliott took a seat behind his desk and loosened his tie.

  “Anything happen here while I was out?” he said, looking at me.

  I shook my head. “Nah,” I said. “It’s been pretty quiet around here.”

  Elliott glanced at his answering machine and noticed the red light blinking. “Who called?” he said.

  “Did someone call?” I said.

  Elliott pointed at the blinking light. “Uh, yeah. Didn’t you notice?” he said. He took a closer look at the readout. “Three messages? Why didn’t one of you pick up the phone?”

  “Uh, I’d better head out,” Dean said. “I’ll see you later, Clay.”

  “Where do you think you’re going?” I said. “You rode here with me.”

  “All right,” Elliott said. “What’s going on here with you two?”

  “Lieutenant Anderson called earlier and asked for our help,” I said. “Dean and I went with him on a murder investigation.”

  “What about our investigations?” Elliott said. “Don’t they count for anything?”

  “Sure,” I said. “We were going to return those calls when we got back, but you came in before we had a chance to.”

  Elliott sighed and closed his eyes. He silently counted to ten, moving his lips as he did. When he opened his eyes again, he didn’t say a word. He just picked up the phone and dialed the first number on the history screen. He got a recording, made a note of the caller and dialed the second number.

  “Elliott,” Gloria’s voice said. “I’ll be a little later than I figured. The doc has to pull one of my molars. It’s impacted, I guess. I’ll see you later.”

  Elliott hung up and dialed the third number. “Anderson,” the voice on the other end said.

  “Eric?” Elliott said into the phone.

  “Elliott,” Eric said. “Thanks for returning my call. Is Clay still there?”

  Elliott said, “Sure,” and handed the phone to me.

  “You’re not going to believe this,” Eric said. “Our boy has struck again. Is Dean still there with you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Can I pick you two up on my way to it?” Eric said.

  “We’ll be waiting in the parking lot,” I said, and hung up. I looked at Elliott. He was staring at me with a look I’d never seen before.

  “What?” I said.

  “What’s going on here,” Elliott said.

  “I’ll fill you in later,” I said. “Eric is swinging by here in a few minutes to pick Dean and me up. It’s a long story. Looks like a serial killer, though.”

  Elliott’s face softened when he realized that Dean and I hadn’t just abandoned the office duties to goof off. “Go ahead,” Elliott said. “We’ll talk later.”

  Dean and I hurried downstairs to the parking lot just as Eric pulled up in his cruiser.

  “Get in,” Eric said. “I’ll fill you in on the way.”

  Dean and I climbed in as Eric sped away, lights and siren cutting through the traffic. “This guy has really stepped up his game,” Eric said. “They just found another body on Allesandro Street where it dead ends at the Los Angeles River. Either he’s getting impatient and needs to finish some sort of goal, or he’s gone completely insane and he’s out of control.”

  As Eric headed toward the scene of the most recent murder, I flipped open the glove box door and withdrew a fold map of the Los Angeles area. I turned to Eric. “Do you have a black felt-tipped pen in here somewhere?”

  “Should be one in the glove box,” Eric said. “Probably down beneath all that other stuff.”

  I shoved aside a pack of tissue, the car’s registration and owner’s manual and found the black marker. “All right if I mark up this map?” I said.

  “Sure, go ahead,” Eric said with a dismissive wave of his hand.

  I drew a small black circle near the corner of Hollywood and Highland, the sight of one of the murders. I drew another small circle directly below the hills that houses the Hollywood sign. My third small circle identified the area where Patrick Kilgallen’s body was found near Mariposa and Santa Monica. I made on last small black circle at the end of Allesandro Street, where it met the L.A. River; the murder scene that we were headed to now. I turned to Eric. “Pull over for a second, Eric. This is important.”

  Eric pulled to the curb and turned to me. “What do you have, Clay?” he said.

  I turned the map toward Eric. Dean leaned over the back seat to have a look himself. “On that wall map back in your office,” I said. “You only had the four magnet buttons noting the murder scenes. Do you remember circling the entire area to emphasize the radius of this guy’s kill zone?”

  “Yeah,” Eric said. “What about it?”

  “It didn’t dawn on me then,” I said, “because the only pattern those magnets made looked like a lop-sided box in a circle, remember?”

  Eric nodded but said nothing.

  I took the black marker pen and circled the same approximate area on this map, circling five murder locations this time. “Now what does it look like?” I said, holding the map up in front of me.

  Dean traced the circle with his finger. “If you’d connect the bottom three locations, it would look like one of those smiley faces you see everywhere.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “And what’s missing from this smiley face?”

  Eric pointed to an area between two of the black circles at the bottom. “There should be another dot right about here,” he said, pointing to a residential area just west of the Silver Lake Reservoir. I made a small mark on the map and connected the bottom four locations. Now it looked exactly like a smiley face. “Are you thinking that this guy is planning another murder in that last area?”

  “It’s the only thing that makes any sense,” I said. “Listen, Eric, can you get me the exact GPS coordinates of all five murder locations?”

  “I think I can,” Eric said. “It might take me ten or fifteen minutes. We’re less than a mile from the fifth murder scene. When we get there, I’ll get those coordinates for you. Where are you going with this, Clay?”

  “If this guy’s got a screw loose, he might also be pretty sharp in other areas, like mapping coordinates. And if my guess is right, an overlay of a smiley face on top of a map with the exact coordinates of each murder scene will reveal a precise pattern. And I’m guessing that the mouth of the smiley face will intersect with the exact location of his next murder. Don’t you see? The victims are totally random. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s the locations that are pre-planned.”

  Dean tapped me on the shoulder. “Remember when we were walking home from the bar and we saw that billboard with the smiley face on it?” he said. “One of us remarked about it and wondered who benefited from a sign like that. It didn’t seem to be selling anything so how could someone make any money by putting it there?”

  “I do remember that billboard,” I said. “Are you thinking there’s some kind of connection between it and the murders?”

  “That would be too easy,” Dean said. “But what if that sign was the catalyst that got our guy started killing in the first place?”

  “Can we find out if there are any other billboards just like that one anyplace else in town?” I said.

  “Shouldn’t
be too difficult,” Dean said. “The name of the advertising agency will be on that billboard and we can give them a call.”

  I turned to Eric. “Can you send a patrol car over to my house?” I said. “Just down the block, between my house and the bar on the corner, there’s a billboard with a big, yellow smiley face on it. Just have the officer take a closer look at it and get the name of the advertising company who put it up. They can tell us if there are any more like it and who put that one up.”

  Eric picked up the mic and called the dispatcher. He told her to send a car to that area and get the information from the bottom of the billboard and radio back with the answer. He returned the mic to the holder on the dash just as we pulled up to the fifth murder scene. Eric killed the engine and got out to examine the fifth victim and its surroundings.

  Eric started to walk toward the body when I grabbed his arm. “Eric,” I said. “This guy will be dead for a long time, but we still might be able to prevent a sixth murder if I can get those coordinates.”

  “I almost forgot,” Eric said. “I guess I’m a little preoccupied.” He grabbed his lapel mic and called the dispatcher again. He instructed her to get on her computer and punch in the addresses of the five murder locations and radio him back with the GPS coordinates. She told him she’d call him back in a few minutes.

  Eric went through the same procedures with this murder scene that he’d done with the first four, asking his questions and delegating assignments. When the coroner’s wagon pulled up a few minutes later Eric could finally relax a bit. He let out a deep breath and looked at me.

  “I wonder what’s keeping that dispatcher with my coordinates,” he said. The words were no sooner out of his mouth than his radio squawked. It was the dispatcher.

  “Do you have your pencil handy,” she said over the radio.

  “Go ahead,” Eric told her.

  Eric wrote down the five sets of numbers, right down to the latitudes, longitudes, and minutes of degree for each. He thanked her and signed off, handing the sets of numbers to me.

  I made newer marks on the map, this time basing them on the GPS coordinates Eric had just gotten. Once all five dots had been marked, I drew a perfect arc, connecting the bottom three areas. As it turned out, the two locations furthest left were spaced exactly half the distance that the second and fourth locations were. That could only mean that the third dot of the pattern, and the sixth murder location had to be exactly halfway between dots two and four. Once I had those coordinates I could pinpoint where the killer would strike next. We just didn’t know when.