by C. Gockel
She snorted.
“He doesn’t give a rat’s tit for us or his victims,” Baxter said.
“Obviously.”
“Not so obvious as all that. Why does he bother taunting you with the messages he leaves behind if he doesn’t care what you think of him? Is it ego, a power trip of some kind? What did the profile say about his mental state?”
“That’s one thing the FBI is good for,” she said with grudging admiration. “Their Behavioural Analysis Unit came through with a profile for us. He has an above average IQ, thoughtful, deliberate, a planner. He has a college education and they think he might have gone to a Catholic school previous to that. Some of the writing he left behind has a religious significance, so they think he sees himself as a religious person. Maybe he does, but I’m not so sure on that part. What he writes doesn’t feel right to me, like back at the Sutton Hotel. It has links to religion, but not...” she shook her head feeling puzzled all over again. “Physically he’s big and imposing. We have that from Karen. He’s over six feet in height and strong with it. Very muscular, maybe that means his work involves heavy lifting, or maybe it did before he was turned if he’s a vamp. Karen had no doubt that he’s an albino. He chooses young blond women, pretty but not stunning; all of them working girls. He lacks confidence in his ability to attract women, probably the albino thing again. He has an inferiority complex and will probably seem awkward to a woman who meets him socially despite his size.”
Baxter nodded. “Okay, so we have an intelligent guy who is shy and awkward around women; a guy who probably can’t get a date so he has to pay for what he needs. That doesn’t sound like any vamp I’ve ever heard of, Chris. Vamps have that mental mojo that makes them attractive to anyone they want. I’m just thinking aloud here, so don’t bite my head off, but have you talked with the usual crowd about their customers?”
“Of course we did. That’s one thing that really pisses me off about all this. This guy can’t get laid without paying for it, so why doesn’t anyone recognise the description when I ask around?”
“104th Street?”
“I asked them myself. All of them.”
“Vermont?” Baxter offered.
“Yep.”
“Ashdown and Boulevard… both shifts?”
“All of them, Dave! We went through every hooker in town! No one knows him.”
Baxter shook his head. “He could be new in town then… from out of state even. You figure Barrows knows he’s from over the state line? Maybe that’s the connection.”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure Barrows isn’t really after Ghost. If he’s done this in other places—”
“That I don’t believe. We would’ve had a bulletin to keep an eye out for him. Besides, your case is big news. Someone would have called us by now.”
He was right. Someone would have made the connection and called with the information. It didn’t make sense that someone so recognisable could move about unseen.
“You’re right. Let’s check out some of the other locations.”
Baxter nodded and together they made their way back to the car.
Patsy Jordan had been murdered near derelict buildings, but she wasn’t found inside the buildings themselves. Instead, she was discovered on waste ground adjoining the sites by a couple of kids who said they were just scoping out the construction site. They didn’t want to get in trouble and would Chris please not tell their moms? Apparently, both had been warned to stay out of the site because the buildings were being demolished and it was dangerous. Like all kids everywhere, they had taken no notice and found a way inside through a hole in the chain link fence surrounding the site.
Sheryl Adams was also found on waste ground. Not the same construction site where Patsy Jordan was found, but still in the same general area. A security firm had been employed to keep an eye on the place and one of its employees had found the body.
Baxter eyed the construction site with a vaguely puzzled look that she was coming to expect from everyone that came into contact with the case. “Is it just me, or does it seem really weird that a woman, hooker or not, would willingly come in here with a guy?”
“It’s just you,” Chris said dryly.
“Really?”
“No. I’m kidding.”
“I’m not laughing,” Baxter said with a glare.
“Who is these days? Patsy did fight, so maybe she didn’t come along willingly, but Sheryl didn’t. She just walked on in here happy as can be. There was no sign of a struggle.”
“I don’t get it then. What woman in her right mind would step through a chain link fence at night with a stranger? If the profile is right, he’s shy and awkward around women. He would never be able to persuade them to come in here.”
“But he did.”
“Yeah,” Baxter said looking around in puzzlement. “That’s what I can’t figure out. If he’s a vamp, he could make them do it, but then why did they struggle? If he glamoured them, they would have just stood there for him. If he had such control over them, why waste the blood? While we’re asking questions, why kill them at all? Vamps don’t usually kill, it brings unwanted attention. If he was super hungry, why not just snack and then again with another hooker?”
Chris had the same sort of questions rattling around in her head and no answers. Everyone knew there was a serial killer loose. Everyone knew from the description circulated via the media what he looked like, yet women were still going into questionable situations with him seemingly of their own volition, hence the vamp theory.
She waved a hand at the construction site. “Sheryl walked in here, she wasn’t carried. She was conscious… we think she was at least. The other victims definitely were. There were no drugs in any of their systems, no sexual assault, no DNA linking any of the victims together—even though the coroner swears all of them were bitten by the same perp. No saliva in the wounds, nothing, and that’s just wrong. Even vamps have saliva in their mouths. It’s different to ours; they use it to heal the bites they leave on their donors.”
Baxter snorted. “Donors, right. We’re missing something big here, something weird.”
“Tell me about it,” she said sourly.
They spent maybe twenty minutes wandering the construction site until the irate manager asked them to leave. They were distracting his men, he said, and if they didn’t go he would call his boss. Ordinarily she would have argued on general principles, but they hadn’t learned anything new and wouldn’t now that the site was being worked. Too many people coming and going for one thing; the earth movers and wreckers had messed up the ground already.
Chris drove them to each of the murder scenes and watched Baxter go through the motions that she and the rest of the team had gone through. All of them had the same basic training, all of them had graduated from the LA School of the Streets and the police academy before that, but each of them had their own unique brand of experience gained through hard work on a myriad of cases. Each had their strengths and weaknesses, but none of it was any use. Baxter struck out just as the rest of them had.
“He started like a mugger—grabbed them off the streets and dragged them into an alley,” Baxter said as he read some of the crap painted in blood on the walls of Jenny Lovett’s hotel room. The room had been sealed to preserve the evidence. Joseph was really pissed about that and Chris was glad. “Sykes thought he was a mugger.”
“Well, he could have been. If not for Patsy and Sheryl turning up dead, I doubt we would have connected her story to the Ghost.”
“How did you find her?”
“She came to us,” she said and nodded at Baxter’s surprise. “Yeah. She didn’t report the mugging until after she heard about Patsy. You know how it is. They get hit for the cash they’re carrying and don’t come to us for fear of losing a night of work. They can’t afford to come up short when their managers come by to do the accounts.”
Baxter grimaced. “It’s the pimps that disgust me more than anything. I can at least understan
d a hooker’s reasoning. They’ve got something someone is willing to pay for and they have to eat, but the bastards who protect them are just parasites.”
Chris agreed, but she had less sympathy for the women than Baxter did. So okay, some of them deserved more than they got out of life, but that didn’t absolve them. They were accomplices in their own debasement. She could understand them intellectually, but emotionally was another matter. She couldn’t understand how any woman could have so little self-respect.
“So Karen and victim number one were friends?” Baxter said as he copied something into his comp.
“Not friends, but they knew each other.”
“Professionally?”
She grimaced at the thought of the two women working a customer together. “Something like that.”
“You think maybe Karen and Patsy turned him down and he went after them for revenge… no, she would have said if she’d recognised him wouldn’t she?”
“You’d think so.”
“Scratch that then. It doesn’t explain the others anyway.”
She pointed out some of the graffiti above the headboard of the bed. “I don’t think there’s any way for us to anticipate his choice of victim, not when he writes crazy stuff like that. He’s not on the same planet as the rest of us.”
“I hope you’re wrong, because if you’re not we’ll never catch him. What do you make of that?” Baxter said pointing to a patch of wall with a hastily scrawled message on it. “He was in a hurry it looks like.”
I feel him watching me,
Satan, dead man walking.
No one sees, but I see,
I’m scared.
Chris shivered as she read that passage again. Crazy stuff and Baxter was right. It did look hastily written, not that any of them were neat. It must be hard to write in blood.
“It’s just more of his nut bunny ravings. John has a friend of his looking into all this Armageddon stuff. I don’t know if it will do any good, but we have to try.”
Baxter copied it into his comp with the other ramblings of Ghost’s delusional mind. “Where did Jenny Lovett usually hang out, Vermont Avenue?”
“No, around the corner on 104th Street.”
Baxter checked his watch. “Let’s go see if anyone remembers seeing her.”
“Okay, but we did that already.”
“We might get lucky. Besides, you promised we could roust some hookers.”
She grinned and waved him out the door ahead of her. “You’ve got a one track mind.”
14
Closing In
Chris winced and held her head as someone slammed a door. She took a big swallow of her coffee and shuddered. John had made it extra strong for the entire squad room. They all needed it after the barbecue at Baxter’s place. The booze had flowed a little too freely and all of them were feeling it now. John was sitting opposite her staring at his computer screen with bloodshot eyes.
“Good party,” she croaked.
“Yeah…” John coughed. “Yeah it was. Baxter stiffed me for a hundred bucks.”
“I’ve warned you before about playing poker with him.”
John ignored her.
“Yes!” Baxter shouted from across the room and Chris groaned. “I’ve got the bastard!”
She watched Baxter talking excitedly on the link with someone and wondered how he could be so energetic after a day like the one they’d had yesterday. It was indecent, that’s what it was.
“We’ve got him, Chris!” Baxter yelled as he hurried toward her. “John O’Neal. We’ve got him!”
“Not so loud,” she croaked holding her head. “Who the hell is John O’Neal?”
Baxter dragged a chair up to her desk and she shuddered again at the noise it made. He sat and slapped a sheet of paper covered in notes down in front of her. “I just got off the link with forensics. They double and triple checked it for me. They found a latent print. John O’Neal’s right index finger on the razor and on the bean can it was found in.”
“Razor… Oh, okay. I got it. The razor from the alley. I remember.”
Baxter peered into her eyes. “Are you okay? You don’t look so hot.”
She blinked slowly at him. “I don’t think so.”
“This will get your juices flowing. O’Neal was born with a hereditary medical condition. Want to guess which one?”
“Not albinism?”
“You got it.”
Excitement swept through her obliterating her tiredness in seconds. “Holy shit you found him!”
Baxter grinned. “We found him. You and me. We’ve got the bastard!”
“Goddess please be right,” she whispered snatching up Baxter’s notes. “It says here he was on medication for schizophrenia and depression. How the hell did you get this?”
“I called in some favours. O’Neal tried to off his wife and kid fifteen years ago, but she testified in his defence at the trial. I don’t get that part. I mean he tried to kill her kid and she helps him?”
“Love I guess.”
Baxter shrugged. “Right, anyway, he gets two years in a mental institution instead of prison—big difference there huh? When he gets out, his wife has divorced him, shacked up with some stud who used to be his best friend, and filed an injunction to stop him coming near the kid. O’Neal goes apeshit. He beats the living crap out of the wife’s lover and disappears. He’s turned up in the system a couple of times since then. Nothing heavy. Drunk and disorderly, petty theft, vagrancy… you know the sort of thing. He’s just a bum now. If we showed the artist drawing of Ghost to those bums you spoke to down that alley, I bet, I just bet they would identify him.”
“There must be a picture of him in the files too.”
Baxter scowled. “Well yeah there is, but…”
“But?”
“You’ve got to remember that it’s fifteen years old. People can change a lot in that time.”
“Okay, what aren’t you telling me?”
Rather than tell her he showed her by pulling up O’Neal’s file on her comp. Chris studied it for a minute then pulled out the artist’s sketch of Ghost. They looked similar but that’s as far as it went. She really wanted Baxter to be right. If not for that, she would have said that both men were related but that they weren’t the same guy. The artist’s sketch was drawn from Karen Sykes’ description, which portrayed O’Neal as lean but muscular with high cheekbones and Hollywood style good looks despite his albinism. The computer showed a man that looked considerably older and heavier. His features were blunted with heavy jowls and he was obviously overweight.
John stood behind her comparing the two images. “I don’t know, call me crazy but I think there’s something there.”
She pulled at her lower lip thoughtfully and looked at the artist’s sketch again in silence.
“I’ve got his ex-wife’s address,” Baxter said slyly. “You could take John for a ride and talk to her. He looks like he could use the fresh air.”
“Hmmm.”
“Come on Chris, it’s him I know it!” Baxter burst out.
She nodded slowly still frowning at the computer screen. A fierce grin slowly spread across her face and she tapped the image with a finger. “I’ve got you.”
She called the team into the incident room to give them the news. Cappy noted the excitement and wandered inside to listen. Chris held up a picture she had printed out and swept her eyes over the assembly, but then she frowned.
“Baxter!” she roared at the top of her voice making everyone jump.
Baxter popped his head around the door. “What?”
“Get your butt in here. When I said I wanted to brief the team I meant everybody.”
“But I’m not part of the task force.”
Chris glanced at Cappy who nodded almost imperceptibly. “You are now. Sit!”
“Yes ma’am!” Baxter said and grinned at the laughter his eagerness caused.
She waited for him to take his seat and held up the picture again. “Th
anks to Baxter we finally have a suspect. This guy’s name is John O’Neal. He’s a schizophrenic and manic-depressive that tried to off his wife and kid fifteen years ago. This picture is a little out of date. He was heavier back when it was taken, but the similarities between it and Karen Sykes’ description are too great to ignore. I don’t have to remind you not to talk about this to anyone outside this room. O’Neal is our best lead and only suspect, but that’s all he is at the moment. A suspect. Clear?”
She made eye contact with each of the team and nodded. “Okay. Raz, I want you to take one of these pictures and go see Sykes. See if she’ll give it the nod. Take Matt with you. When you’re done, see if you can track down those two bums we talked to and get them to look at it. I want to know if O’Neal is their missing friend or not and if they’ve seen him lately. After that, we need to start painting a picture of this guy. Things like where he used to hang out, what he liked to do, where did he eat, where did he sleep. Who were his contacts, his friends… anything we can dig up might lead us to him.”
“Sykes then Teddy and Morris,” Raz said. “Gotcha.”
“John is going to continue working with Radthorne and Lockstone for now.” John made to protest but she raised a hand. “Sorry John, but you’ve spent more time on those writings than the rest of us—not even Raz knows as much about them as you do now. O’Neal might not be the one we’re after. We can’t ignore the possibility that Lockstone’s work will lead us to someone else. I’ll take Baxter with me when I talk to O’Neal’s wife.”
John scowled. “Okay, but we are going to have a talk about this later.”
Chris winced.
Carol O’Neal was now Carol Bridges. She had married John O’Neal’s best friend and subsequent punching bag shortly before he got out of hospital. James Bridges was a lowlife—a lawyer, but he was an up and coming, well-paid, highly respected lowlife lawyer. Chris had never fallen foul of his tactics in a courtroom, but upon further investigation she had learned that the same could not be said for some of the others in the squad. When they learned which Bridges she was going to see, they came forward one at a time to offer her some advice. Advice like: aim low, squeeze the trigger don’t jerk it, and kick him while he’s down. All good advice for any lawyer, she thought, but she wasn’t here to talk to James. It was Carol she wanted to see.