She sat on the pile of clothes and took his hand. “It’s not why I came over. I just had some free time. Got something going tonight, but I’d rather be Audrey Hepburn, as usual.”
“Audrey Hepburn?”
“Wait Until Dark. Get it?”
“I’m embarrassed to admit that I do. So you’ve got a couple of hours to kill. Naturally, you came here.”
“You’re putting the most negative possible spin on this.”
“I’m a cop. Cynicism comes with the territory.”
She released his hand and stood. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.”
“Maybe not.”
“Guess I’ll be going, then.”
He let her get as far as the door before he said, “Not without asking me what you need to know.”
“No, thanks. I wouldn’t want to use you.”
“Drop the attitude and ask.”
She almost refused, then decided she was being childish. “Peter Faust,” she said simply.
“What about him?”
“I need to know if he’s done anything to get the LAPD’s attention.”
“You mean, besides get away with murder?”
“That was ten years ago, in Germany. I’m talking about since then.”
Wyatt shrugged. “Faust doesn’t live in my division. He’s in Los Feliz. That’s part of Northeast.”
Abby knew this, but Wyatt had worked out of Hollywood for the past decade, and Hollywood was directly adjacent to Northeast.
“So you can’t answer my question?” she said a little peevishly.
“Oh, I can answer it. If anything was going on with Peter Faust, I’m sure I’d hear about it.”
“And nothing is?”
“Nothing recent. Of course, there was that whole mess three years ago.”
“What mess?”
“You haven’t heard? Then you haven’t done your homework. He was the focus of an investigation. It didn’t lead anywhere.”
She wasn’t too thrilled with the homework crack, but she let it pass. “I’m surprised I didn’t hear about it in the news.”
“You may have been out of town. You do that a lot.”
“Excuse me for having a life.”
“A young woman went missing and turned up dead, dumped in Griffith Park. Roberta Kessler, nineteen. Last seen in a bar on Sunset Strip, chatting up a man who could have been Faust. LAPD got a warrant, searched his house. Didn’t come up with anything.” He shook his head. “Whole thing was kind of an embarrassment, actually.”
“What’s so embarrassing about suspecting a murderer of another crime?”
“He’s a celebrity, in a way. We wanted to keep a lid on the investigation, but it leaked. You know how the damn department is. Can’t keep a secret, at least where the rich and famous are concerned. The tabloids were all over us. You sure you never heard about this?”
“I don’t read the tabloids. Well, except for the Weekly World News. I love that. Did you hear about the Venusians’ secret plan to clone JFK?”
“Fascinating.”
“Seriously, the Faust story never came across my radar screen. I was probably working a case at the time. You know how I am when I’m on the job. I get kind of a narrow focus.”
“You get downright obsessive. Even more so than usual.”
Another shot. She tried to ignore it, but she was starting to get seriously pissed off. “Griffith Park is fairly close to Faust’s home.”
“True, but that didn’t prove anything. A lot of bodies get dumped there.”
“Was the MO consistent with Faust’s history?”
“The body had been decapitated, and the hands had been severed at the wrists. It’s the same way Faust’s victim in Germany was found. That’s what got investigators thinking about Faust. But of course, it’s not the first time a body has turned up without a head or hands. That kind of postmortem mutilation is standard procedure if you’re trying to prevent the victim from being identified.”
“Yeah, I guess dental records and fingerprint comparisons were pretty much out of the question. How did you identify her? DNA?”
“Anatomical abnormality. She was born without a uterus. Coroner compared the body’s reproductive system with Roberta’s MRI. Obviously, it’s something Faust didn’t know about.”
“So you do think Faust did it?”
“Faust—or whoever. As I said, there was nothing to tie him to the crime.”
“There was the eyewitness at the bar.”
“Her testimony wasn’t too helpful. Sure, the man she saw could have been Faust. Could’ve been a thousand other guys, too.”
“Still, I’m surprised LAPD didn’t pursue it further.”
“Faust is a wealthy man. He has a certain amount of influence. I guess when you’re a star, you have clout, no matter what you’re famous for. His lawyers let it be known that if their client was subjected to any more harassment, there would be legal consequences.”
“And since then?”
“Since then, he’s never been a suspect.”
“How about a person of interest?”
“That’s a term we only use on TV when we’re trying to be cute.”
“So he’s clean, you think?”
“I would hardly say clean.”
“I mean as far as his recent activities are concerned.”
“I have no evidence to the contrary.”
“That’s really all I had to ask. Wasn’t so difficult, was it?”
She was sorry she’d brought it up. The information would have been readily available on the Internet, without all the Sturm und Drang. Whatever the hell Sturm and Drang were; she’d never been quite sure.
Wyatt was looking at her with a worried expression. “This client you met with—is he saying Faust is after him?”
“No, it’s nothing like that.”
“Look, if you’ve met someone who thinks Faust is a threat—”
“I haven’t.”
“Then why would this subject even come up?”
She didn’t want to tell him, but she had to. And to be honest, part of her actually did want to, if only because she knew it would make him mad.
“The client I met wasn’t worried about Faust. The client I met with was Faust.”
He got up slowly and stood very still, like a man posing for a picture. “Say that again.”
“Peter Faust hired me. He and his girlfriend are being stalked.”
“And you took the job?”
“Yeah. That’s what I do, you know. I stalk the stalkers. I’d have it printed on my business cards—if I had business cards.”
She said this with a smile, but Wyatt wasn’t in the mood.
“Faust”—his voice was unnaturally low—“is a goddamned killer.”
“I know very well what he is.”
“He murdered one woman that we know of. He may have murdered others. How can you possibly offer him your services?”
“What he did in his past is not the issue.”
“And what he may be doing right now?”
“You just told me you have no evidence of any recent crimes.”
“I still wouldn’t exactly give him the benefit of the doubt.”
“I don’t have to give the benefit of the doubt. I just have to protect him, the same way you would. If he placed a nine-one-one call, are you telling me LAPD wouldn’t dispatch a squad car?”
“That’s different. We’re a public service. We can’t deny help to anyone. You pick and choose your clients. You could have turned him down.”
“Why should I?”
“If you don’t know the answer to that question, I doubt I can explain it to you.”
“You know, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell me how to do my job. I’ve been doing it long enough to make my own decisions.”
“I’m disappointed in you, Abby.”
“Oh, come on. You’re not trying to guilt-trip me about this?”
“There was a time when you
would never have had anything to do with a man like Faust. You would have spit in his face before you worked for him.”
“Maybe I’ve evolved to a higher level of awareness. Maybe I’m more tolerant and accepting.”
He took a moment to answer. When he did, his voice was low, almost mournful. “Or maybe it’s not about good and evil anymore.”
“What does that mean?”
“Lately you seem to be less concerned about the moral issues.”
He was really pushing her buttons now. “Then what am I concerned about?”
“The professional challenge. It used to be about justice for you. Street justice—but justice. Now I think it’s more of a sport. A game. You enjoy playing, and I’m not sure you care which side you’re playing on.”
“Bullshit.”
“Nice comeback.”
“That’s the second time today someone said that to me. I must be losing my gift for repartee.”
“Who was the first to say it? Faust?”
“Actually he used the term riposte, but the meaning was the same.” She crossed her arms over her chest, aware that this was defensive body language, but feeling the need to protect herself. “Not that I have to justify my actions to you, but I took the case because Faust’s girlfriend is the probable target. She must be pretty messed up to be hanging with a creep like him, but as far as I know, she’s not a criminal, and she doesn’t deserve to die just because she’s become the focus of some deviant’s obsession.”
“Not so long ago you would have said that any grown woman stupid and self-destructive enough to hook up with Peter Faust deserved whatever she got.”
“If I’d said that, I would’ve been wrong. And if that’s what you think, then you’re wrong, Vic. Speaking of judgments—maybe I’ve misjudged you.”
She left, retaining enough presence of mind not to slam his door. It was a rule of hers never to let anyone see how badly she’d been wounded.
People could hurt her. Over the years, she’d learned there was nothing she could do about that. But she could at least deny them the satisfaction of ever seeing her pain.
6
It took Abby a good half hour to cool off after her encounter with Wyatt. Probably he did have a legitimate beef about her casual attitude toward their relationship. On the other hand, she’d never promised him a rose garden, in the immortal words of Lynn Anderson. He’d known what he was getting into.
And his reaction to Faust—it had been over the top. At least, she thought so. Unless he was right, and her judgment was faulty. More likely he was just itching for a fight, and Faust was a convenient excuse. That was how Wyatt had been lately—edgy, moody, resentful. A man preoccupied. A man with something on his mind.
She was still agitated when she parked the Miata in the underground garage beneath the Wilshire Royal, the condominium high-rise in Westwood where she’d lived for the past ten years.
Near her reserved parking space was a second slot where she kept a beat-up old Hyundai Excel, the latest in a series of used cars she’d bought for undercover work. The Miata was too flashy to be a good surveillance vehicle, and its registration was in her real name, making it a poor choice of wheels when she was on assignment. The Hyundai was junky enough to pass unnoticed in most environments, and it was registered to a dummy corporation with the safely meaningless name of Consolidated Commercial Exchange.
From the Miata, she removed her purse and Faust’s memoir, which she’d checked out of the library after discovering, to her surprise, that she actually had a library card that was still valid. It wasn’t exactly the sort of book she liked to curl up with at bedtime, but she found herself wanting to know more about her latest client. No particular reason, just that Boy Scout motto again: Be prepared.
In the lobby, she waved hello to Vince and Gerry, the two guards who had manned the big mahogany desk roughly since the La Brea Tar Pits had been sucking down saber-toothed tigers. The doorman. Alec, was chatting with them. Unlike the guards, he was a new arrival, on the job for only three months. Abby hadn’t warmed up to him. She didn’t like the way he looked at her whenever she passed by. There was a reptilian quality to his gaze, a kind of cold, patient hunger, which wasn’t masked by his artificial smile and cheerful bonhomie.
That smile and that stare were both on display as he turned to her.
“Hey, Ms. Sinclair. Got some reading matter, I see.”
This was embarrassingly close to the winner of the World’s Lamest Pickup Line Contest: Whatcha readin’? She wedged the book more tightly under her arm. The cover was hidden from anyone’s view—a precaution she’d taken without conscious thought.
“Alec,” she said coolly. She greeted Vince and Gerry in a warmer voice. “How are you guys doing?”
“Hanging in there,” Vince said.
“Not that we have a choice,” Gerry added.
Variations on this exchange had been played out almost daily over the last decade. The rote predictability of it pleased Abby. She liked to have some things in her life that were utterly dependable. There would always be traffic on the 405, there would always be Law & Order reruns on cable, and Vince and Gerry would always be stationed at their desk.
And Wyatt would always be there for her when she needed him—and only when she needed him.
Damn. That subject again. Her frown returned as she rode the elevator to the tenth floor and unlocked the door to unit 1015, the extravagantly overpriced one-bedroom cubbyhole she called home.
She opened the curtain over the glass door to the balcony, exposing her view of Wilshire Boulevard and letting in a cascade of afternoon sun. Then she sat in her overstuffed armchair and took another look at Faust’s memoirs. The slim hardcover volume had Faust’s face on the cover, below the title in jagged red italics: Tasting Blood. As far as she knew, Faust had not actually tasted Emily Wallace’s blood; the title no doubt had been chosen to reinforce his image as the Werewolf, the nickname bestowed on him after his arrest.
According to the cover, Tasting Blood had been “Newly Updated, with a New Chapter by the Author.” She glanced at the copyright page and found that the updated edition had been issued just last year.
Idly she flipped through the book and came across a photo section in the middle. Black-and-white photos—apparently the publisher hadn’t wanted to spring for color. Or maybe the somber monochrome was more appropriate to Faust’s subject matter.
The first photos were of Peter Faust as a baby, looking as innocent as any infant, then as a young boy and a teenager. By the time his picture had been snapped on the streets of Hamburg, he was playing the role of an itinerant artist, dressed for the part in a joyless black ensemble. His face, no longer boyish, had hardened into a cold mask. That face aged slightly in subsequent photos, taken during his arrest, at his trial, and upon his release from the psychiatric hospital, but in its fundamental quality of icy ruthlessness, it had not changed.
There was a photo of Emily Wallace, too, lifted from her high school yearbook when she was a graduating senior. That would have been only one year before Faust killed her. She was blond and pretty and looked impossibly young. Juxtaposed with the yearbook picture was a shot of Wiesbaden Army Airfield, where she had worked as a civilian employee. Abby didn’t know how or why the girl had ended up in Germany, and she doubted Faust would explain it in his book. To him, Emily Wallace was not a person, but only an item to be used and disposed of.
She turned the page, and the next photo, shocking in its abruptness, was Emily’s dead body on an autopsy table. No head, no hands—but those items had been found in Faust’s apartment and were displayed on the facing page. Emily’s eyes were open, her face purplish and bloated. The back of her left hand bore the mark of Faust’s branding iron—a backward Z with a short horizontal line slashed through the middle. A caption identified the symbol as a wolfsangel, meaning “wolf’s hook.”
Abby put down the book, switched her desktop PC out of suspend mode, and Googled wolfsangel. The mark, she di
scovered, was sometimes said to be an ancient rune, though actually it was first described in 1902 by a German mystic who saw it in a vision. The basic design was similar to that of a medieval snare used against wolves. The iron snare’s top hook, corresponding to the upper arm of the backward Z, was pounded into a tree trunk, and a hunk of meat was pinned on the lower hook. Any wolf that leaped up to take the bait would be impaled.
The Nazis adopted the symbol as part of their arsenal of neopagan lore. Members of certain SS units wore it on their collars. It was also associated with Hitler’s “werewolves,” a guerrilla force assembled in the closing days of the war.
She returned to her armchair and Faust’s book. At least now she understood his nickname.
Police evidence photos showed the leather strap that had strangled Emily, and the branding iron that had seared the back of her left hand. Abby wondered where Faust had obtained a brand like that, or if he’d made it himself, perhaps in a metalworking shop. The book might tell her. It was the kind of detail he would be happy to relate.
After photos of Faust’s trial came a shot of the hospital in Berlin where he had been institutionalized for less than three years. The sentence seemed preposterously short, but the German penal system was notorious for its lenience. The man who’d stabbed Monica Seles on a German tennis court had received only a two-year suspended sentence. More recently a German cannibal who killed and ate a houseguest was convicted only of manslaughter. With good behavior he would serve no more time than Faust had.
Faust had been a celebrity ever since his arrest, and his fame had only increased as a result of his flamboyant behavior at his trial. He was defiant and unapologetic, and on the witness stand he delivered contemptuous, haranguing monologues in response to the simplest questions. He styled himself as a rebel, a man who despised and flouted all social rules, who cared nothing for morality, who refused even to distinguish between good and evil—“those twin chimeras, those modern myths,” as one caption quoted him.
For all this he won a following. A wide-angle photo of one of his public appearances gave a fair idea of what kind of following it was. Almost all his fans were young. Males outnumbered females, but not by as large a margin as Abby might have expected. Roughly half the crowd wore the black outfits and heavy mascara typical of the Goth movement. Many of the rest had chosen Nazi-like garb—knee-high boots, pseudomilitary jackets, runic symbols worn like insignia of rank. It was a merging of Goths and skinheads, and it gave Abby a cold feeling in her gut.
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