by Steve Gannon
I looked over at Barrello. He lifted his shoulders in a noncommittal shrug.
Lieutenant Huff moved to the chart on the front wall. Another sheet had been added since the previous afternoon. “First,” said Huff, referring to the chart, “a recanvass of the Pratt neighborhood elicited nothing new. No luck finding the white van. Tracing the candles, pipe, and Ace bandages didn’t pan out, either. Too common. What else? Oh, the sign on the truck. Shanelec, that was yours.”
“Right,” answered Collins’ partner. “Negative with paint shops and magnetic sign companies in Los Angeles and Orange County. I’m working my way farther out, as well as hitting the internet.”
“That leaves our attempt to establish a link between the families,” Hall continued. “Fuentes and…?”
“Me,” said Liman, raising his hand.
“Anything?”
“Nope,” Liman answered regretfully. “We’re almost done with the phone books and financial records. Next we’ll try friends, neighbors, coworkers-anybody who could’ve known them both.”
“How about the car repair angle?” I asked. “Any record of the Pratts’ filing an insurance claim?”
“No insurance claim,” Fuentes answered, referring to his notes. “But there was a check made out to Mission Viejo Bodyworks. Dated October eighth.”
“A week before they were murdered,” I mused. “If the Pratts-”
“We’re all well aware of the repair shop connection,” interrupted Snead dismissively. “Let’s move on. To sum things up on the LAPD’s end: All aspects of the Larson investigation mirror Orange County results, with one exception. Yesterday Kane and Deluca visited the Santa Monica body shop where we located the Larsons’ missing car. You want to go over that, Kane?”
“There’s not much to tell,” I said. “There was no house key on the Larsons’ key ring, but it’s possible the guy could have taken it and not put it back. The only prints on the door opener were Mrs. Larson’s. The Infiniti doesn’t leak oil or radiator coolant, but there were drips of both fluids in the Larsons’ garage, and they had to come from somewhere. We might consider interviewing anyone who could have parked in there, see if we can find a match. By the way, the SID analysis came back on the drips. The oil was a mix of thirty-weight Pennzoil and ten-forty Quaker State. The coolant turned out to be Zerex. If we want a more detailed breakdown, we can send samples over to the Standard Oil refining lab in El Segundo.”
“What’s this about oil drips?” demanded Snead. “There wasn’t anything about that in your report.”
“At the time I wasn’t sure they were significant,” I said. “The Jeep in the garage didn’t leak, but until I examined the Larsons’ Infiniti, I couldn’t tell whether-”
“Damn it, Kane. In the future you will include everything in your reports,” Snead snapped. “ I’ll decide what’s significant. This is the last time I want to have to mention your shoddy paperwork. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “In that case, I would like to add that the Larsons’ lawn needed mowing, the birdbath was empty except for dead leaves, and I detected what I assumed to be bunny crap under the living room couch.”
“Move on to the employee list,” ordered Snead, scowling at a spate of chuckles from the back.
“Right, Lieutenant,” I continued. “The owner of the Santa Monica body shop supplied us with a list of everybody who’s worked there over the past two years. Deluca ran the names through DOJ. A lot of them came back dirty. For instance, Alonzo Domingos, the guy who did the bodywork on the Infiniti, was busted four years ago for rape. The charges were dismissed.”
“Which brings us to Detective Barrello’s discovery,” said Snead. “Lou?”
Obviously uncomfortable under the scrutiny of everyone present, Barrello cleared his throat. “I stayed late last night cross-comparing Kane’s list with an employee roster from Mission Viejo Bodyworks-the garage where the Pratts had their repair done,” he said. “No correlations turned up at first, but among others, the Pratts’ body shop has a sister location in Laguna Niguel. I checked that one and came up with a hit. Alonzo Domingos worked there three years ago. I’m not sure how important this is,” he added. “According to the owner, most door-and-fender guys change jobs all the time.”
“It’s the best lead we’ve got,” said Collins. “And the only one that might tie the two families together. I say we bring this Domingos guy in.”
“You might want to hold off on that,” I cautioned.
“Why?”
“For starters, Domingos is in Mexico visiting relatives.”
“So?” said Snead. “We arrest him down there.”
“He’ll be back next week. If we sit tight and have the Mexican locals keep an eye on him, we can pick him up when he crosses the border,” I reasoned. “That way we avoid a pain-in-the-ass extradition if he decides to fight us. And although I hate to cloud things with the facts, Lieutenant, we don’t have anything solid on Domingos. Even when he does get back, it’d make a lot more sense to keep him under surveillance and see what develops.”
Snead glanced at Huff, then shook his head. “That call will come from higher up. In the meantime-”
“I really think we ought to hold off on popping the champagne,” I persisted. “For one thing-”
“Sorry, Detective, did it sound like I was finished?” said Snead.
“For one thing, Domingos doesn’t even come close to matching Berns’s profile,” I continued stubbornly.
“Now you want to go by that? You were the one who complained the loudest about bringing in a shrink. And linking the murders to the car repairs was your idea.”
“I’m not doing a one-eighty here, but I think we should move slowly. The door opener was still in the Larsons’ Infiniti, and-”
“So Domingos took it, used it, and replaced it. Or maybe he just went down to the hardware store, bought a replacement, and cloned the code. Or maybe he stole the house keys from the key ring. No prints? He wore gloves.”
I shook my head. “If we nail Domingos and it turns out he’s the wrong guy, the media will bury us.”
“Your objection is noted,” Snead said icily. “From now on, if I want your opinion I’ll ask for it. I’ll tell you one more time, Kane. We’re running a joint effort here. You are not personally calling the shots. If you can’t remember that, there’s no room for you on this unit.” Snead’s gaze swept the room. “And that goes for everyone here as well. Now, if there are no further objections, let’s get on with the briefing.”
18
On a residential street high above the Newport peninsula, a white van sat at the end of a tree-lined cul-de-sac. A sign on the side read “Bill’s Pest Control.” Hunched over the steering wheel, Victor Carns squinted through a pair of binoculars, studying a two-story house partway up the street.
The woman’s husband had left at seven-thirty that morning, right on schedule. Carns had delayed entering the development until he’d seen Wes Welsh’s green Mercedes heading down San Joaquin Hills road. As usual, the woman had departed fifty minutes later, shuttling her children to school. After dropping them at Lincoln Elementary, she would drive to the health club for her nine o’clock aerobics class, shower at the gym, and possibly spend the remainder of the morning shopping at Fashion Island, where she occasionally met a girlfriend for lunch. Even if she didn’t decide to shop, he had at least an hour.
Carns inspected the house through his binoculars one last time. Satisfied, he reached into the glove compartment and withdrew one of his untraceable cellular phones. He punched in the woman’s number. Three rings, four… Finally an answering machine picked up.
“Hi. You’ve reached the Welsh residence,” a young girl’s voice announced. “We can’t come to the phone right now, but please leave a message for Wes, Julie, Heather, or Brian, and we’ll return your call. Wait for the beep.”
Carns closed the phone and started the van. He proceeded down the street, slowing as he approached the Welsh residence to
activate the opener remote he had purchased and programmed the previous day. With a lurch, the Welshes’ garage door levered open, revealing two empty parking spaces. Carns drove in. He depressed the remote button again. The door creaked shut behind him.
He was in.
Smiling, he stepped from the van and moved to a door leading into the house. After pulling on a pair of latex gloves, he turned the knob. The door was unlocked, as expected-not that the cheap lock present would have slowed him appreciably. He stepped inside and glanced around.
No security system. Good.
Quickly, he surveyed the ground floor, committing the layout to memory. He found the electrical panel in a service alcove beside a downstairs bedroom. After examining the panel, he ducked into the adjacent bedroom, noting model planes, cars, a skateboard.
The boy’s room. Too close to the breaker panel. The outside meter, then.
Carns returned to the family room, where a pair of French doors led to a bricked patio on the side of the house. A brass key protruded from a deadbolt in one of the doors. He turned the key and stepped outside. Vine-covered fencing shielded the patio on two sides. The rear of the lot dropped off to the next street thirty feet below. Making his way along the side of the house, he located the electrical meter and master cutoff switch-easily accessible from the driveway past a six-foot-high wooden gate.
Perfect.
Carns returned to the family room, relocked the door, and pocketed the key.
Better and better.
Upstairs, on either side of a bathroom and a small linen closet, were three more bedrooms. One had been converted to an office, another was the girl’s room. He glanced into each, then entered the last. Her room.
The bed there was an antique four-poster, solidly built, with plenty of room. Carns pictured how it would be-the woman in the center of the mattress, her husband by the closet, well away from the window but in full view of the bed. The candles here, and here. Camera and tape recorder on the bedside stand. Implements on top of the dresser. And the knife…
Reluctantly, Carns forced his thoughts back to the business at hand. He still had one thing left to do. After crossing the room, he entered a walk-in closet. Ignoring the husband’s wardrobe, he moved to a clothes rack in the back and began flipping through a number of the woman’s coats, skirts, dresses. He found what he was looking for in a wicker hamper. Often over the past months, he had seen her wearing the brightly hued garment. Now it was his.
He returned to the bedroom, running the woman’s leotard through his fingers as though it were the pelt of some exotic animal. Feeling himself growing erect, he moved to a dresser mirror and pressed the silky fabric to his chest, draping the straps over his shoulders and smoothing the elastic apparel against his abdomen, turning to view himself from various angles.
Try it on? She’s tall. The fabric will stretch…
Not now. Later.
Slowly, Carns lowered his treasure. Though his body ached for release, he knew he couldn’t risk it. There would be time enough for that later. As he glanced again at his image in the mirror, his thoughts traveled back, revisiting the days he had first begun exploring his secret passion. In retrospect, he could see now that it had all been inevitable. All of it, from the very beginning.
Two weeks following his third birthday, after stints with various foster families and brief stays at the Auburn Children’s Center as a ward of the State of New York, he had been adopted by a family living on a dairy farm north of Albany. It was there he’d spent his next twelve years. His earliest memories of his adoptive mother, a raw-boned immigrant who had taken the name Adelia upon entering the country, were of onions, cigarette smoke, and whiskey. Her tongue was lacerating, her temper vile, her discipline severe. Her husband, Nicholas, a diminutive man in both stature and spirit, accepted her iron-fisted domination, suffering her humiliations in silence.
He had never met his true birth mother. According to records he later uncovered, she had been an unmarried, alcoholic teenager who’d died in a state mental institution. After learning that unsettling fact, he hadn’t touched alcohol for years, fearing the possibility of a genetic link. Adelia harbored no such compunctions, however, and Nicholas, rather than crossing his strong-willed wife, routinely joined her in an evening ritual of argument, Southern Comfort, and sex. Over the years, as he lay awake listening to their grunts in the next room, knowing that the following morning he would have to do their chores as well as his own, he had grown to despise them both.
Five years earlier, Adelia’s and Nicholas’s union had produced a daughter, Paula. Following a difficult delivery, Adelia had undergone a complete hysterectomy, a loss she blamed on her husband. Often, in the presence of anyone who would listen, she complained bitterly that if it hadn’t been for the operation, she wouldn’t have had to bring an outsider into their house. Granted, adopting was cheaper than paying a handyman, but if she’d been able to have another real child of her own…
Like her mother, Paula never accepted the three-year-old boy who had been thrust so unexpectedly into her life. For one thing, he seemed… odd. For instance, he had those peculiar white patches of hair. “And his hands are so icky!” he had heard her snicker to a classmate one day. She’d been sitting a half dozen seats behind him on the school bus, but he had heard her clearly. Staring at the drab farmland rolling past, he had made a solemn promise to himself. Someday Paula would pay.
And in the end, she had.
Later he learned that the thickening of his palms and soles, his ridged nails, and the white patches in his otherwise coal-black hair were the result of a developmental abnormality falling under the catchall diagnosis of ectodermal dysplasia. He was lucky, the examining physician had told him. A wide spectrum of manifestations were possible, ranging from neurological and cardiac malformations to the partial or even complete absence of hair, teeth, nails, even sweat glands. For years he had used black shoe polish to conceal his hoary patches of hair. It proved less than satisfactory, but better than nothing. Unfortunately, he could do little to conceal his disfigured nails or the thick, fissured tissue of his palms.
Weasel.
Paula had bestowed that name upon him following his tenth birthday, likening his patchy hair to that of a weasel’s going into molt, still showing its winter white through the emerging brown fur of summer. Somehow, her nickname pleased him. He remembered seeing the aftermath of a weasel attack on a neighbor’s henhouse. Several birds had been partially eaten, the rest senselessly slaughtered. Gazing at the carnage, he had been excited in a way he’d never felt before. Later, after everyone had left, he’d returned and sat inside the bloody enclosure, trying to imagine what must have taken place.
The sleeping chickens. The weasel appearing out of the darkness, slipping under the gate…
He wished he could have been inside when it happened.
Shortly after the henhouse attack, he began his game with the mice. Many farms in the area, including his, used a gully on the far side of the highway as a trash dump. It was there that he first started to hunt. Each day after school he amused himself by trapping small rodents in the rusty oil cans they made their homes. Smashing down his boot, he trapped them inside, then impaled them with a blunted stick as they tried to escape. He enjoyed their panic, and the slippery popping squeaks they made when he shoved in the stick, and the way they quivered at the end-their eyes bulging uncomprehendingly in death.
His diversion with the rodents reminded him of the fascination he felt while watching Paula through a crack in her bedroom wall. At fourteen, Paula’s body had begun to change, her breasts budding, a dark triangle adorning the secret place between her legs. One night she caught him watching, and again months later upon entering her bedroom she found him trying on some of her clothes. On each occasion she reported the incident to her mother. Both times Adelia’s punishment was swift and harsh, from which he learned a painful lesson, although not the one his mother intended.
He swore he would never be ca
ught again.
On his thirteenth birthday, his foster father gave him a single-shot, bolt action. 22-caliber rifle. The timing of the gift proved perfect, as his excursions to the dump were becoming boring. He needed to play with something bigger.
Rifle in hand, he spent every free hour that summer in the woods. He learned to avoid killing with his initial shot, finding it more enjoyable to prolong the moment of death. Although birds died with disappointing rapidity, squirrels lasted longer, many surviving a remarkable time under the explorations of his pocket knife. Rabbits, his favorite target, didn’t cling to life as tenaciously as the squirrels but compensated for their lack of hardiness with a particularly piercing squeal under the blade. Learning from his mistakes, he took to wearing heavy gloves to avoid bites and scratches during his experiments, discovering that even smaller prey could prove dangerous when facing death.
Soon he graduated to larger game. With mystifying regularity, neighborhood dogs and cats started disappearing from bordering farms and woodlands. Always, he buried his victims deep in the woods.
In bed he often fantasized about his kills, savoring his secrets like treasures. One night, after a particularly satisfying encounter with a mongrel dog that had eluded him for weeks, he discovered there were things he could do with the roll of flesh between his legs besides urinate. In the months that followed he spent many quiet hours masturbating in the darkness, reliving his adventures and wondering what it would feel like to kill something larger.
It didn’t take long to find out.
During the summer of his fifteenth year, he had an experience by which he came to define himself. It began innocently enough, but it opened his eyes to a world of possibilities he had barely suspected. While stalking a stray cat one drizzly, overcast afternoon, he saw his sister returning from a weekend visit with a girlfriend in Utica. Paula had exited the bus at the crossroads and was making her way home, taking a shortcut through the woods. Adelia and Nicholas had driven the family truck to town that morning to do the weekly shopping, and it was over a mile to the nearest farmhouse. No one could hear. Rifle resting in the crook of his arm, he watched his sister from hiding, staying well back in the trees.