Last Breath

by Michael Prescott

  “There’s supposed to be six degrees of separation between any two people on earth,” Gary Boyle added, “but not here.”

  Walsh shook his head. “Donna and Len, give me some good news.”

  Len Sotheby simply threw up his hands and said, “Nada.”

  Donna Cellini was more forthcoming. “There are unsolved stranglings all over the map, obviously. But we didn’t find any parallel with the tattoos anywhere. Either our guy is new at this, or the tats are a new twist. I’m guessing the latter.”

  Lopez asked why.

  “Didn’t you read the profile?” Cellini sounded irritated. “It said the unsub was experienced.”

  “Unsub,” Stark echoed with a smirk. The term was FBI jargon for Unknown Suspect. “Maybe you’ll be enrolling in Quantico before long, huh, Cellini?”

  “At least I’d associate with a better class of people.”

  “Any of the unsolved cases look promising?” Walsh asked.

  Cellini consulted her notes. “There’s a bunch of stuff that has possibilities. Serial strangulations of prostitutes in Portland, Oregon, 1996 to 1998. A coyote—you know, a guy who smuggles illegals across the border—suspected of strangling female clients in the southern Arizona desert near Nogales, circa 1995. Never caught. Guy named Charles William Baron, real estate broker in Philadelphia, strangled his wife and his mistress in the same night and disappeared. Still at large. That happened in 1993.”

  “He’s probably in South America by now,” Sotheby interjected. “He had a passport and overseas bank accounts.”

  “Anything else?” Walsh pressed.

  “Janitor who strangled three female students at a junior college in Nebraska, 1989 and 1990. Still on the loose. Strangler of children who roamed the Mojave Desert, 1985 and ’86—never apprehended. In 1982—”

  “Okay.” Walsh raised his hand. “We don’t have to go back that far. Bottom line is ...”

  “Nada,” Sotheby said again with stubborn pessimism.

  “Any clue how he got access to the strip mall so he could dump the body there?” Boyle asked Walsh.

  “We’re still working on that,” Walsh said, aware that everyone present knew this answer meant no.

  “Security guard check out okay?”

  “He looks clean. West LA is handling that angle. Checking out the building’s owners, the guard—anybody who had a key.”

  Merriwether asked if there was any hope on the hair-and-fiber front.

  “Nothing new,” Walsh said. “Martha Eversol was covered with some of the same gray rayon fibers we got off Nikki Carter, but they’re too generic to help nab this guy. They’ll help convict him when he’s caught, at least.”

  “If he’s caught,” Sotheby said.

  “When,” Walsh repeated.

  No one disputed him this time. But no one met his gaze either.

  Time to wrap up. Walsh leaned forward.

  “All right, everybody. We know what today’s date is. We know what it means.”

  There were a few unnecessary glances at the calendar on the wall, where Wednesday, January 31, was circled in red.

  Nikki Carter had been abducted on November 30th. Martha Eversol, on December 31. Always the last day of the month.

  “Tonight’s his night to howl,” Walsh said. “We don’t know where he’ll strike, but we know it’ll be within the next eight hours. There are extra squad cars on the streets, extra plainclothes officers working bars and nightclubs. Stark and Merriwether, I want you covering the club where Nikki Carter disappeared. Lopez and Boyle, you cruise the neighborhood where Martha Eversol was rear-ended.”

  “He won’t return to the scene,” Stark said. “He’s too smart,”

  “You’re probably right. But we’ll do it anyway. Maybe we’ll catch a break. Christ knows, we need one.”

  Nobody could argue with that.

  12

  C.J. noticed the white van on Western Avenue as she headed north into the mid-Wilshire district. It was two car lengths behind her, visible in her rear-view mirror.

  There was nothing unusual about the van, except that she recalled seeing a similar vehicle pull away from the curb outside the Newton Station parking lot when she left.

  Probably a coincidence. No reason to think the van was following her or anything.

  As she guided her Dodge Neon onto Pico Boulevard, she watched her rearview mirror to see if the van duplicated the maneuver. It did not.

  “Getting paranoid, Killer,” she admonished herself. In private she sometimes used the nickname her fellow cops had bestowed on her, even though she disliked it.

  She cruised west on Pico, planning her evening. Quick shower, bite to eat, some reps on her exercise machine, then the twenty-minute drive to Foshay Junior High School at Exposition and Western, a bad neighborhood. She was always mildly amazed when she emerged from the school and found that her car had not been stolen. Of course, it was only a matter of time until the little Dodge became another Grand Theft Auto statistic.

  Oh, well. The risk was worth it. She really believed she was making a difference in the kids’ lives. Some of them anyway.

  Take Andrew Washington, a small, wiry teen with smoldering eyes and fidgety hands. He glared at her nonstop during her first few visits as she sat amid a circle of kids and talked about the dangers they faced every day—the drug dealers trying to get them hooked, the gangbangers urging them to wear the colors, the petty temptations of shoplifting and vandalism.

  Most of these kids had yielded to such temptations and influences already. Some had done time in juvenile camps. But they weren’t altogether lost. If they had been, they wouldn’t have been showing up three nights a week, talking with C.J. on Wednesdays and with two other off-duty cops on Mondays and Fridays. The talks were the price they paid for use of the gym afterward—basketball games, played indoors, safely out of range of drive-by shootings and the other insanities of the city.

  Andrew looked too small to be good at hoops, but she learned later that he had a mean jump shot and quick hands. She was sure she wasn’t getting through to him. His angry stare seemed to say. Talk all you want, you white bitch. It don’t mean shit to me. Then one night another kid asked her what was the most scared she had ever been. Her audience expected her to talk about some experience on patrol, but instead she told them about the boogeyman. They listened silently, and even Andrew’s eyes regarded her with a flicker of interest.

  When they were leaving for the gym, Andrew stayed behind. “That shit you told us about when you was a kid—that for real?” She assured him it was. He looked away. “Something sorta like that happened to me,” he said. “Came home from school one afternoon, and there was a guy in the house. Fucking psycho off the streets, busted in through a window, stealing our stuff. Could see he was crazy. Had that look, you know? His face was all one big beard and fuzzy hair with eyes stuck in it. I hid in the closet, curled up real small, but he hears a noise and comes looking. I throw some dirty clothes over me. He looks in, don’t see me. Shit, if he’d done seen me, he woulda fucking wasted me, I know it.”

  “What happened?”

  “Guess hearing the noise spooked him. He booked out of there. Didn’t take nothing.”

  “What did your mom say?” She knew he lived alone with his mother.

  “Never told her.”

  “You didn’t want her to worry?”

  “Nah, that ain’t it. She wouldn’t never have believed me, is the thing. Just like your folks didn’t believe you.”

  “People don’t take kids seriously,” C.J. said in a low voice.

  Andrew nodded gravely. “That’s how it is.”

  He had not glared at her after that.

  So yes, she was helping. She was reaching a few of them.

  At La Brea she turned north, stopping a few blocks from her house to pick up a few items at a market run by a Korean man who had been a dentist in his own country. She moved quickly through the familiar aisles, dropping fresh vegetables into her basket,
paying at the checkout stand.

  She was putting her groceries into her car when a glint of reflected light from down the street caught her attention.

  A white van was parked at the corner.

  She studied it. The driver’s window was rolled down. The light she’d seen must have come from inside the van.

  Reflected light. Binoculars, maybe, or a camera’s telephoto lens?

  She steadied herself. There were a lot of white vans in the city. This might not be the one she’d seen behind her on Western.

  The van bore no commercial markings, but it had the windowless rear compartment typical of commercial vehicles. The kind of van a delivery person might drive.

  So why was it sitting there at 4:45 on a weekday afternoon, with the window open, and a lens—if it had been a lens—trained in her direction?

  She decided to walk over and find out.

  But before she could, the motor rumbled to life, and the van pulled into traffic.

  She stared after it, hoping to catch the plate number. The plate was blue on white, a California tag, but she had no chance to read it. The van had already disappeared into a stream of vehicles.

  If she were still in the midst of divorce proceedings, she might have thought that Adam had hired a private eye to follow her and dig up dirt. But the divorce was finalized months ago. Anyway, there was no dirt, and Adam knew it.

  She shrugged. “Maybe the paparazzi have finally gotten around to discovering me.”

  As jokes went, it wasn’t much, but it allowed her to pretend she wasn’t worried. She kept a smile on her face as she drove the rest of the way home.

  Her house was a bungalow with a detached one-car garage, where she parked her Neon. She lugged her groceries to the front door, and after some fumbling with keys, got the door open and stepped inside.

  In her cramped little kitchen she put away her purchases. She thought of the van again. Here in her home, she found it ridiculous to imagine that anyone could have been following her, spying on her. She must be still worked up from the Sanchez incident. A hot shower was what she needed.

  Nevertheless, before heading into her bedroom, she checked and double-checked the locks on the front, rear, and side doors. A sensible precaution, she told herself, though ordinarily she was not so wary in daytime.

  Finally she was satisfied that the house was secure.

  “You’re all alone, Killer,” she said aloud, chiding herself. “Nobody is watching you? Got that? Nobody.”

  13

  Treat arrived home just in time for the 5:00 P.M. news. He had expected to be the top story, and he wasn’t disappointed.

  He stood in front of the Sony Trinitron in his living room, his windows shuttered, the lights off. The phosphorescence of the picture tube painted the room in bright colors at first, as the newscast began with its two comely anchorpersons at their desk.

  Then the taped report began, and the screen dimmed with a shot of a strip mall in the predawn darkness.

  The mall, closed pending renovation, was on Sepulveda Boulevard south of Pico. Every morning for the past month. Treat had driven past the mall on his way to work. Today he saw a crowd of squad cars parked outside, and he knew his latest work had been discovered at last.

  LAPD cruisers, roof lights cycling, threw scintillant stripes of blue and red across the camera lens. In the background was the sad little mall, where his most recent victim lay undisturbed until today. Treat wondered who found her. A night watchman alerted by the odor? The smell must be fairly noxious by now. Or perhaps some wandering street person seeking shelter—they were always finding their way into sealed buildings, as resourceful as Treat himself.

  It hardly mattered. He had known that she would be found eventually. By now, enough time had passed to ensure that her remains would yield no clues to the task force hunting him.

  Now the news camera was moving forward, drifting, restless as a shark, among the squad cars, its lens focused on the strip mall wrapped in crime-scene ribbon.

  At the time of Treat’s reconnaissance this morning, the authorities had not yet brought out the body. It would have taken a good long while, he knew, for the criminalistics team to take the photographs and make the measurements, collect the raw data that would be filed away in a report in the cold steel drawer of a file cabinet, just as the subject of that report would be filed away in another drawer in another cabinet, this one in the morgue.

  The report cut to later footage, recorded after sunrise—the body’s emergence from its tomb. It had been stuffed inside a bag, and he saw nothing but its outline. Still, he was glad the shot was included in the report. Seeing it on TV made it more real.

  Odd how nothing was real these days unless it was a picture on a screen, how life itself had become only a succession of pictures on a succession of screens, and relationships had become transmissions of electronic data, people reaching across a void. Sad, in a way.

  The shape inside the bag seemed unaccountably small. Treat had not realized that Martha Eversol was so petite. It seemed wrong of him to pick on someone who was not his size. He wasn’t playing fair.

  The camera followed the body until it disappeared inside the coroner’s van. When the van drove away, the newscast cut to a standup of a babbling reporter at the scene, and Treat lost interest. He clicked the TV off. He was in darkness again, alone in the silence and privacy of his bedroom.

  He stood still, conscious of nothing but the expansion of his belly with each slow intake of air.

  He was in a contemplative mood, as was often the case shortly before a kill. There was something about the taking of a life that made him philosophical. He supposed it was the awareness of being so near the great and final mystery of death.

  In darkness he went down the hall to his bedroom, where his notebook computer rested in its docking station on the bureau. When he raised the lid, the machine flickered out of suspend mode, and the screen—another of the many screens in his life—lit up.

  His fingers, long and supple like a pianist’s, prowled over the keyboard and the touchpad, initiating an Internet connection, then navigating to a bookmarked Web page.

  And there she was—his next chosen one, or her electronic simulacrum. Undressing in her bedroom. Entering the lavatory. Disappearing behind the translucent shower curtain.

  Treat inhaled, exhaled. Watched.

  He was glad she was taking a shower.

  He liked his ladies to be clean.

  14

  It took Rawls more than an hour to track down the network’s system administrator at home. When he finally had the man on the line, the sysadmin admitted having given the Web site only a cursory inspection. Yes, part of his job was to survey the block of IP addresses assigned by his network and ensure that no unacceptable content was being displayed, but he concerned himself mainly with content stored on the network’s servers. The Web site in question was stored on a private server; its owner used the network simply to connect his computer with the rest of the Web.

  “So what’s his name?” Brand asked after Rawls had concluded the conversation.

  “Mr. Steven Gader,” Rawls said. “At least that’s the name on the billing account.”

  “He’s local?”

  “Sure is. Got his address and his phone number. But I don’t plan on making a phone call.” Rawls smiled. “A face-to-face meeting is what I have in mind.”

  “Let’s hope he’s home.” Brand shrugged on his overcoat. “Still seems like a lot of trouble to go to for a video stream of an empty room—”

  “Hold on.” Rawls leaned closer to his monitor. “It’s not empty anymore.”

  He had returned to the site for a last look before heading out, just in time to see a female figure enter the frame. Her image was small but reasonably sharp, her movements rendered fairly smooth by the video stream’s fast refresh rate.

  Brand circled behind him and looked over his shoulder. He whistled. “Miss January is a looker. No wonder she got the most votes.”<
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  The woman was slender and fit, her smooth brown hair falling across her shoulders. She wore a blue jumpsuit and carried a handbag, which she tossed on the nightstand. With her back to the camera she began to undress.

  Rawls reached for the button that turned off his monitor. “Maybe I should—”

  Brand stopped him. “Don’t you dare. This is evidence of a possible felony we’re looking at. Major privacy violation, and we are on the case.”

  Rawls sighed. He didn’t want to participate in some Internet peep show, but if he put a stop to it, he would catch hell from Brand. And he needed Brand with him on this.

  The woman unhooked her bra and dropped it on the bed. She sat down and kicked off her shoes, then stood and began wriggling out of the bottom half of the jumpsuit.

  “Here comes the good part,” Brand whispered.

  “You’re a pervert,” Rawls observed dryly.

  “Can I help it if I know how to have fun on the job?”

  She discarded the slacks and then her underpants. She stood naked, stretching her legs. Lean, limber legs, the legs of a dancer, an athlete.

  Brand let out another low whistle and tried out his streetwise patois. “Man, she do look fine.”

  Rawls cast a cold stare over his shoulder. “Notice that? She just turned on the bedside lamp. That means it’s getting dark out.” He checked his watch: 8:15. “It’s been dark here since shortly after five P.M. I’m betting there’s a three hour time difference.”

  “Pacific time zone. She’s three thousand miles away.” Brand smirked. “Think she’s a California girl?”

  “I couldn’t say,” Rawls answered tonelessly.

  The woman stretched her arms over her head, her back still turned to the camera. Rawls could see the faint shadows of her trapezius muscles and latissimi dorsi. She was fit, strong.