Good Morning, Killer

by April Smith

“Depends if Devon can renegotiate release terms and conditions.”

  We were silent. There had been a moment, when his marriage went bad, I had thought it would be Mexico. Lobsters and tequila and an endless beach.

  “I can’t tell you how sorry I am. I’ve been up thinking about it,” he said.

  “Family is family,” I replied on cue. “I love your kids, I don’t want them exposed to this crap.”

  Suddenly Mike stood and ripped down Ray Brennan’s picture.

  “Hey!” I said.

  “This is crap! I don’t want it in my house!”

  “You’re right,” I said, taking the crumpled photo from his hand. “This is bad, bad, toxic stuff. We can’t let it contaminate your family.”

  He gestured helplessly.

  “The problem is, this guy kills girls. I know he did the one who was found in the park.”

  Mike rubbed his hair. “Which one who was found in the park?”

  His ignorance of the latest murder confirmed what Jason said: the Bureau had dropped the case.

  “Another victim, named Arlene Harounian. She was asphyxiated, possibly during the sex act. Ray Brennan took her picture, just like Hugh Akron takes pictures of girls, promises them modeling careers—”

  “You have to give this up.”

  “I know Brennan photographed both victims. The question is, where? How does he find them? How does he get them to pose? Because, I’m telling you, he’s going to take another girl.”

  “Jesus Christ,” said Mike suddenly. “I have to be up in three hours.”

  I told him I would be out by the weekend.

  The next day Mike called from the office.

  “Hugh Akron says there’s a thing called photo swap meets. They have them every two weeks, at different locations around southern California. They’re like swap meets, where photographers and models get together. It’s supposed to be legit. He says that’s where he goes to meet models, and he’d be pleased to take me along.”

  “You declined.”

  “There’s an organization.”

  Mike gave me the website.

  I understood that it was a parting gift.

  Subj: RE: PHOTO DAY

  From:moose@sunshinephotoclub

  To: 70Barracuda@hotmail.com

  Dear Ana,

  Don’t call it a “swap meet,” we are not a “swap meet,” since “swap meets” are places where photographers trade and sell camera equipment. No shooting is done at a “swap meet.” Our club sponsors Photo Days, which are actual photo shoots, for photographers and models. Are you interested in modeling? The female models are admitted free. All of our models are female, as men don’t like to take pictures of other men. Our next Photo Day is this Sunday. Click on the link. It’s a lot of fun. I would like to welcome you personally. Please provide a physical description of yourself.

  This would be one of those subcultures where you’d want to put on rubber gloves before typing a reply.

  I downloaded the Sunshine Photo Club’s calendar of events. Counting back every Sunday for two months, I got to the week of Juliana’s abduction. There was a Photo Day scheduled that Sunday in Veterans Park. Juliana had been taken the following Tuesday. She had never mentioned a photo shoot. She did not say she wanted to be a model. If the theory was that Brennan stalked these shoots, why had he been trolling the Promenade?

  I flipped back through my personal calendar and noted that was the weekend when Andrew and I were supposed to ride his Harley in a police fund-raiser. But we did not ride the Harley because it had rained. It was raining all weekend. It had rained the weekend before.

  I had gone swimming in the pool in the rain.

  The police fund-raiser had been canceled.

  The photo shoot was undoubtedly canceled, too.

  Ray Brennan was hungry. His pattern had been disrupted and he had to look outside his comfort zone.

  The Promenade was not his hunting field. We had been misled by our own assumptions. Juliana had not been the pattern. She had been the exception to the pattern.

  I dug out the crumpled program for Arlene Harounian’s memorial service, which was still inside my jacket pocket. The two girls who had spoken about Arlene wanting to be a model were listed in the order of events as Remembering Arlene by Jane Latsky and Muriel Fletcher. Directory assistance gave me four Latskys in the area. I told young Jane I was a reporter for a local paper and wanted to know if her friend Arlene had ever attended a photo day.

  Yes, said the girl, all the time. Once in a park in Manhattan Beach.

  The next upcoming photo day, according to the website, would take place in a Japanese tea garden in Glendale.

  They couldn’t bust me for going to a park on a sunny day.

  Twenty-four.

  The Japanese tea garden was located in a recreation center in Glendale, at the end of a palm-lined street in a neighborhood of nicely landscaped older cottages. The park was tucked up against the Verdugo Mountains, in a shady oasis that included a public library. A table had been set up, blocking the Shinto gate. You had to sign in.

  “I’m looking for Moose,” I told the wiry fellow on guard.

  “Who’s Moose?”

  “One of the organizers.”

  “I’m the organizer,” he claimed. He was about fifty, rugged, too-tanned features and shoulder-length hair, wearing a water bottle belt and short shorts to show off his developed legs—one of those deeply California characters whose past would probably read like a parody of West Coast fads: hot tub installer, dope dealer, surfer, yoga teacher.

  “Moose said he’d be here.”

  There was a beat of numbskull silence, and then a mountainous person who had been standing nearby said in a deep announcer’s voice, “I’m Moose.”

  “Great!” shaking his hand enthusiastically. “Just as great as you said it would be.”

  So was he. About six foot four, three hundred pounds.

  “See, we’re fenced in here,” said Moose, indicating the manicured garden. “No looky-loos.”

  “Are all these photographers full-time professionals?”

  “Amateurs. The word for this is amateurs,” he admitted reluctantly and sighed.

  “They all have other jobs?”

  “Like me. I have another job.”

  “What’s your line of work?”

  “Cleaning supplies.”

  “Ahh. So, Moose, how do you become a member?”

  “The models get in free. The photographers pay twenty dollars at the door.”

  I had seen them in the parking lot unpacking their equipment, overweight middle-aged men wearing fishing hats and elaborate vests with dozens of pockets. Some were sporting lenses the size of the Mount Palomar telescope, others had tiny digitals. Half were white, half Asian, and they all seemed to know one another in the forgiving, easygoing way of hobbyists.

  “Anybody can walk in here with twenty dollars and a camera?”

  “We are totally legal,” interjected Mr. California. “We have never had an incident. Who are you?”

  “She just wants to look around,” mumbled Moose.

  Mr. California became distracted by trouble with a barbeque and I took the opportunity to lose myself in the strangely peaceful garden. I had already picked up flyers for other photo days from other clubs and saw there was a circuit. You could find one of these shoots every weekend at some public location somewhere in the Southland. Although that expanded Brennan’s hunting field considerably, it brought the comfort of a plan: I would go to every single shoot. I would show Brennan’s picture to everybody there. If someone turned up a credible lead, I would pursue whomever I had to pursue, at the Bureau or the local level, I didn’t care, in order to set up surveillance for the next time Brennan showed. I would do this meticulously, until my trial was over, until the last appeals were spent, until they put me in jail.

  The photographers lumbered slowly and with prerogative along the winding paths, while the female models—young made-up faces bright as
flowers—waited under the ginkgo trees, with their mothers, to be picked. They were all picked. This was a dance where everybody danced. Someone would position a girl and half a dozen men would shoot over his shoulder, paparazzo-style.

  “Give me that laugh again!”

  “Would you guys mind if I moved her into the shade?”

  For twenty bucks you could get a sixteen-year-old to bend over a pagoda and stick out her butt.

  It was supposed to be clean family fun. A young lady with seductive eyebrows, wearing a cheap strapless evening dress, was wrapping and unwrapping a shawl around her body, liking the attention, while a bunch of sad sacks stood around snapping. One of them, who wore a dirty baseball cap and a big bushy beard, slipped her a pair of mirrored sunglasses and shyly asked that she put them on.

  I could picture Hugh Akron, all right. He would ace these geezers, a pro amongst the clueless. Ray Brennan? He’d do just fine, sidewinding through the innocent façade. And Arlene Harounian thought she could handle anything.

  If I had my credentials, I could have worked the situation in fifteen minutes. As it was, all I could do was saunter around smiling and engaging folks in casual conversation, asking if they’d seen the man in the photo, using the ruse that Ray Brennan owed me some prints, occasionally taking a picture with my Ricoh to look authentic, but I was the only woman with a camera and kept getting apprehensive looks from the moms. I was not liking civilian status one bit.

  “Photo day is a handy place to test out your technique,” a retired engineer named George told me.

  “Great to test your equipment,” added his friend, who had an automatic camera with no settings.

  “Do the models and photographers get to know each other?” I asked dully.

  “Oh no, not at all,” insisted George. “This is a very safe place. There’s no direct contact. We only go by first names. We e-mail their pictures to them, but usually to a friend’s computer. You have to be careful.”

  “In this day and age,” intoned his pal.

  They were gray in the face with thin sloping shoulders, wearing closely related plaid shirts.

  “I’m looking for Ray,” showing the picture once again. “Met him out in Riverside,” another location on the circuit. “Ray Brennan? Or he could be using another name.”

  Like everybody else, they shook their heads. By now there were maybe fifty hobbyists and half as many models clustered in little groups near flowering trees and stone shrines. It was becoming sultry and humid in the tea garden. Maybe that is why the photographers were moving so languorously. Or perhaps they were all about to drop dead.

  No, wait, there was some excitement by the pond, where a narrow girl in a red cowboy hat, short denim jacket and low-riding jeans was placing one red high heel on the lower rung of a bridge, causing a reaction amongst the photographers like goldfish to crumbs.

  “Smile, honey! Pose!” shouted a strained woman’s voice.

  “Are you the mom?”

  Of course she was the mom, who else would have laid out a blanket piled with head shots?

  She looked not much older than her daughter, ruddy face, wide at the hips, an infant over one shoulder, a toddler wearing a butterfly costume prancing along the path.

  Like they said: family.

  “I’m Sonoma’s mother,” she said self-importantly. “Sonoma has her own website.”

  She gave me a card. Her nails were long and white and sparkled. The only sparkly thing about her.

  “I tell my girls, use your looks while you have them. You won’t have them forever.”

  The butterfly had scrambled onto a rock, hands clasped to her chin, flashing a demented smile at a guy with a mustache and a tripod.

  “You don’t mean the little one,” I couldn’t help saying. “Losing your looks at three?”

  “Oh no,” said the mother, “Sonoma and Bridget. That’s what I say to them.”

  She pointed with the toe of her running shoe at the glossies on the blanket. Sonoma was blonde. Bridget had long dark hair, like Juliana’s. There were dozens of shots of them in halters and short skirts. It made you appreciate actual models.

  “Bridget is Sonoma’s sister?”

  “Eighteen months apart. I have to be careful they don’t get competitive. They like to dress the same, but I tell them, you should each develop your own look.”

  “The cowgirl look.”

  “They do it different every time. They love it,” she assured me. “We all the time go on a shopping spree before we come to one of these.”

  It turned out they lived in the desert, three hours away. The drive was no problem. This was, according to her, how the actress Heather Locklear got started.

  “Last week Bridget earned a hundred fifty dollars.”

  “Really?”

  “Through an agency on the Internet. They get paid twenty-five dollars an hour, two hours minimum. I make sure I’m always at the photo shoot,” she said firmly. “And it has to be nonglamour, not lingerie.”

  “Is Bridget here?”

  “No, she’s working with one of the gentlemen.”

  I looked around for another doll in a cowboy hat.

  “Where?”

  “She went with him for a little while,” the mom explained, shifting the infant to the other shoulder.

  “Where did they go?”

  “To his studio.”

  “You said you’re always present at a photo shoot.”

  My heartbeat had kicked up to a hundred thirty.

  “I am,” she said haughtily, “but I have the babies.”

  I was angry enough to nail her to a tree. She never went on shoots. And you know Bridget never got the hundred fifty bucks; it’s how mom kept the girls tied up inside her own spandex dreams.

  “Is this the photographer?”

  The lady peered at Ray Brennan’s picture.

  “That kind of looks like him, but this man’s name is Jack.”

  “Kind of, or is it? He might have changed his hair color, or his facial hair. He’s six feet tall, weighs about two hundred, in good shape.”

  I might not have the creds, but I had the attitude, and it was rattling her.

  “Let me ask Sonoma.”

  I stood there, knowing. It was like suddenly being encased in ice.

  Sonoma minced over, walking on toes to keep the high heels from sinking into the sweating grass. She was the older one, not so pretty close up.

  “What is the problem, Mom?” she snapped, looking at the picture. “That’s Jack. Who else would it be?”

  “Don’t use that mouth,” the mother whined. “I just wasn’t sure.”

  “It’s chill,” the girl told me. “My sister knows him really well.”

  “How well?”

  “He’s come here before.” Then, less certain, “I know she’s talked to him …”

  I realized why the other photographers claimed not to have seen the hard face of Ray Brennan in their garden. They had not wanted to see him. He was forty years younger, stronger, pumped with male vitality, capable of getting real girls to do the real thing.

  “Bridget left with this man? How long ago?”

  “Half an hour. Forty minutes.”

  “They’ll be right back,” the mother assured me.

  “Where is the studio?”

  They looked at each other.

  “—Somewhere close.”

  “—Five minutes away.”

  “—He said it was at his mother’s house.”

  It was not supposed to be this way. Not without an arrest plan, or a warrant, for God’s sake. Not without backup. I sped down the 134 Freeway while punching the address book on my personal cell phone.

  Donnato.

  Jason.

  Barbara.

  Galloway.

  Vernon.

  Eunice.

  Voice mail. Voice mail. Voice mail. Voice mail.

  Donnato was at a wedding with his Nextel turned off, but where the hell was everybody else? What did they do
on Sunday afternoons? Damn, they were probably all at the ceremony—it was Vicki Shawn and Ed Brewster, the firearms instructors who had posed for Hugh Akron in their wedding clothes. I roared out loud with frustration. It would take too long to go through the rigmarole with some rookie on the switchboard. I needed to connect in the next two minutes with somebody who knew the Brennan case.

  Fingertips on the wheel, I reached back with my other hand and felt around the rear seat for the envelope of files concerning the preliminary hearing. The files were in folders, which took the finesse of a bomb squad expert to extract from the envelope at eighty-five miles per hour in a convertible. Glancing from the gyrating road to the pages flapping in the open air, I located the list of witnesses, and there was Kelsey Owen’s home phone number.

  I guess she was not invited to the wedding, either, because she picked up on the first ring.

  I explained as concisely as I could: Ray Brennan had taken a teenage Juliana look-alike from a photo shoot less than an hour before.

  “Where are you?” she shouted.

  “Almost to the Ventura Freeway. They said he took her to a studio in his mother’s house. I’m guessing his mother’s house is somewhere around Culver City or the park—”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “I didn’t mean for it to go down like this—” I was yelling.

  “It’s okay, Ana. Calm down. You’re doing good. I’m here and I’m going to help you. Tell me, clearly and slowly, what you want me to do.”

  “Go to Rapid Start. Either on his military record, or on one of the three-oh-twos, it’s going to say his mother’s maiden name. You’ll need it when you run the title search because the parents were divorced—”

  “I can’t go to Rapid Start from here!” she interrupted, trying to stay calm. “I’m home, remember? You called me at home!”

  “—He’s got this girl, and he’s at the killing house. He has to finish the ritual—” The cell was cutting out. “How fast can you get to the office?”

  Her reply was garbled.

  “What?” I said. “What did you say?”

  “—West. Keep going west.”