by Jacob Stone
Hadley glared at his watch and then at Morris. “Why the blazes haven’t you started yet?” he demanded.
“Charlie Bogle should be here any minute.”
Hadley didn’t look happy about being kept waiting. He grumbled, “I thought he quit this Mickey Mouse company.”
“I told you we should’ve named ourselves MMC,” Polk said.
That got a laugh out of Lemmon and caused Hadley to stare bullets both his and Polk’s way. Morris had to bite his tongue to keep from joining in. He winked at Annie Walsh when he caught her doing the same.
“Charlie’s been helping with the investigation,” Morris explained as he drew Hadley’s glare back to himself. “We spoke this morning, and he wants to see this through to its conclusion. We’re lucky to have him joining us.”
“I wholeheartedly agree,” Gloria Finston said, her thin lips pressing into a tiny v smile. “Even if we’re kept waiting another minute or two.”
Finston had worked with MBI on their last two serial killer investigations. A small, dark-haired woman in her forties. Morris liked her and respected her abilities and insight.
There was a rap on the door. Without waiting for an invitation, Bogle walked in and closed the door behind him. He scanned the room, exchanged quick nods with Morris, Polk, and Lemmon, then took the empty chair left near the door.
“Sorry, no room at the big boys’ table,” Polk remarked.
“I’ll survive,” Bogle said.
Hadley was rapidly losing patience. “Are you clowns done yet? For Chrissakes, we’ve got a madman out there!”
Morris was going on three hours of sleep. That morning he woke up at five thirty, skipped showering and shaving, and headed straight to MBI where he’d been since ten past six so he could learn what he could about Ed Blount and prepare for the meeting. Lemmon, Polk, and Felger had all been in the office since seven doing the same. He swallowed back the crack he wanted to make about how nice it was that Hadley finally understood the urgency of the situation, and instead asked Felger to get things started. As good as it might’ve felt to tell Hadley off, it wouldn’t have done him any good.
Felger did whatever magic he needed to project the screen from his laptop onto a blank wall. On the same wall was a map of Los Angeles County in which the locations of the Nightmare Man murders had been marked off with colored thumbtacks—blue for 1984, red for 2001, and a lone yellow tack for Lori Fletcher’s West Hollywood address. Morris waited for several of the participants to move their chairs so they could see Ed Blount’s mugshot photo from 1984 before telling them what Big Joe Penza had told him last night. He had expected resistance from Hadley and was surprised that the police commissioner sat quietly rubbing his jaw, his thick lips pulled into a scowl.
Morris told them Blount had died in prison in 1992.
Walsh asked, “Of what?”
“Liver cancer.”
“You really think he was the Nightmare Man back in 1984?” Gilman asked.
“I don’t know,” Morris admitted. “What Joe Penza said only makes sense if Donald Trilling hired a contract killer to murder his wife, and the only way that makes sense is if this same killer invented the Nightmare Man to hide Marjorie Trilling’s murder among the other victims. I trust that Penza believes it was Ed Blount, and I’d like to attack this in two ways: see if we can tie Blount to the 1984 murders, and at the same time find out who he trained to be the next Nightmare Man.”
Gilman looked confused, his brow deeply furrowed. He asked, “Why would he do that?”
“He could’ve been bragging,” Bogle offered.
“Or he could’ve been a fucked-in-the-head psycho who wanted to see his work continue,” Walsh said angrily.
“Both are of course possibilities,” Finston acknowledged, her small dark eyes contemplative as she rubbed her nearly nonexistent chin with a bone-thin thumb. “He could’ve also been unburdening himself. Liver cancer is an especially painful way to die, and even a coldblooded contract killer could’ve grown remorseful over taking on such a cruel job. Assuming he turns out to be the first Nightmare Man.”
“I hope this bastard died a rotten, miserable death,” Walsh said. “Assuming he was the Nightmare Man.”
Morris asked Felger to move to the next screen, which showed the relevant information they’d been able to find about Blount: where he had lived in Irvine, the name of the auto repair garage he supposedly had worked at as a mechanic, and details about his capital murder arrest and conviction. Morris waited until everyone had a chance to absorb what was on the screen, then signaled Felger to move to the next one, which showed names and addresses for three men named Blount. Two of them were within an hour of Los Angeles; the third lived in Ohio.
“Blount had three sons,” Morris explained. “Fred, Polk, Annie, each of you take one and see what you can get out of them.”
Fred piped in, “Dibs on the one in Irvine.”
“I’ll take Anaheim,” Walsh said.
“Which leaves me Toledo,” Polk said. “That’s fine with me. I hear it’s beautiful this time of year.”
“That’s only because you need your hearing checked,” Fred said with a straight face. Then to Morris, “Do we let them know this is about the Nightmare Man?”
“You won’t have a choice. You’ll need to show them the 1984 sketch. If Blount was using a mask like Penza thinks, one of them could’ve seen it. Maybe one of them also saw their dad collecting rats. Since you’re going to Irvine, talk to the owner of the garage where he worked and drop by his old home. The current owner bought it from his wife, since deceased. Maybe they found something in it.”
“What about the rest of us?” Greg Malevich asked, referring also to the other two LAPD detectives at the meeting, Ray Vestra and Franklin Strong.
“The warden at the state prison in Ashfield will be sending over prisoner records for anyone who could’ve had contact with Blount and was released before October 2001. I need you to get Gloria their police files, and she’ll be doing triage on them. I’d like you, Ray, and Franklin to investigate them, tackling first the ones Gloria thinks are most likely to be our new Nightmare Man. The rest of us will join you as we free up.”
Hadley asked bluntly in a tone implying Morris planned to be loafing, “Handing out all the heavy lifting, eh, Brick? What about yourself?”
Morris understood Hadley, which didn’t necessarily make his petulance any easier to take. He had a guilty conscience about stopping Morris from more aggressively pursuing the hitman angle back in 2001, and he was trying to hide it under bluster. Showing far more patience than Hadley deserved, he explained that the warden who was on the job back in ’92 had since retired but was still living in Ashfield. “Charlie and I will be driving up to the prison to pick up Blount’s records, and while we’re up there we’ll be talking with the former warden. If you want, you can join us.”
Hadley’s round, jowly face reddened with indignation. He cleared his throat, then announced that he had more important things to do.
Morris was done giving Hadley any benefit of the doubt. He ignored him to turn to the ME. “Roger, your findings?”
Smichen had been sitting quietly until then, looking almost as if he were meditating. A tall and bony version of Buddha. He consulted his notes.
“From the victim’s blood loss and the amount of clotting that had occurred, I was able to determine that her injuries were sustained over a one- to two-hour period and, as with past victims, elevated liver enzymes were found. In other words, she was tortured for up to two hours, and the killer used smelling salts to keep her conscious. The only differences I was able to find between this murder and the others were what I’d already mentioned to you, namely the rat was more gently prodded into her throat and her mouth was sewn shut afterward with a common household thread sold at dozens of stores in the Los Angeles area. Death was from asphyxiation caused by a forei
gn object blocking her air passage. The same as with the other victims.”
Polk said, “The foreign object being a rat.”
Smichen gave him a sideways glance. “I thought that would be obvious.”
“It was,” Morris agreed. “Roger, could you examine the 1984 and 2001 medical examiner reports, see if you can find any indications that different perpetrators committed the murders?”
“To support your theory that a new Nightmare Man took over in 2001?”
“Exactly.”
“Will do,” the ME said.
Morris was planning to give a speech about how they were up against a ticking clock. That unless they stopped this maniac, he would be brutally killing four more women over the next sixteen days. As he looked at how tightly wound everyone appeared to be—even Polk—he realized a pep talk wasn’t necessary. Far from it. Everyone in the room, even Hadley, was chomping at the bit to see this psycho caught.
“All right, then,” he said.
Chapter 43
Joplin Cole found the guy on the elliptical machine next to her creepy. She was thirty-five minutes into her program when she spotted him walking into the gym. At first glance he appeared normal enough, and there were likely women who’d find him attractive. Short blond hair, bronze tan, blue eyes, a gymnast body. But something about him gave her the shivers. She at first tried to be kind about it, blaming it on how anxious she’d been feeling over the last few weeks, but then he made a beeline toward the neighboring elliptical machine, and since then her internal creep meter had been buzzing off the charts. She only had another six minutes to go or she would’ve moved to another machine.
He asked her, “Do you come here often?”
She kept her stare focused straight ahead and forced out between breaths, “Not…interested.”
The machine had her working hard, the speed ratcheting up so that she was pumping her legs at a four-minute-mile pace and a steep incline level. The last thing she wanted was to deal with this creep, and she wished he’d take the hint and find a different machine, or at the very least, leave her alone. But it didn’t seem like that would be the case, and before too long she could feel his presence once again intruding on her.
“I wasn’t hitting on you,” he said, as if he were insulted. “I was only trying to be friendly.”
Joplin was nearing the home stretch and only had four minutes and twenty seconds to go. Just ignore the creep, she thought. Except it was easier said than done. She could see enough out of her peripheral vision to know he was still watching her, and there was something darkly oppressive about it, almost as if she could feel the weight of it pressing against her chest.
A minute went by in which she tried to focus only on her breathing and the burning in her leg and chest muscles. You can do it. The rest of the world doesn’t exist right now. Mr. Creepy doesn’t exist. It’s just you and the machine. Three minutes to go. You can do it—
“My name’s Dale.”
Joplin looked over to see him smiling as he held out his hand to her, actually expecting her to take it. There was something about the look in his eyes and the unnaturalness of his smile that made her feel like she was an insect he was studying under a piece of glass. She abruptly stopped her machine and jumped off, moving fast to get away from him.
“Wow, the rudeness of some people.”
She turned back to see the condescending look he gave her as if she were the one who had something wrong with her. She almost headed back to him so she could tell him off, but a cruelty shining in his eyes stopped her. The guy was more than just a creep. There was something dangerous about him. She was sure of it.
She continued on to the front desk and told the woman working there that she wanted to complain about one of the other gym members. “Mr. Creepy on elliptical number eighteen wouldn’t stop harassing me.”
“What exactly did he do?”
Joplin stood tongue-tied as she thought about what the guy had actually done. He introduced himself and told her his name. He held out his hand to her. He complained that she had been rude. Such unpardonable crimes. But she wasn’t crazy. She knew what she had recognized in his expression, and she trusted the vibe she picked up. Still, she’d sound unhinged if she made those complaints out loud.
Blushing with embarrassment, she said, “He wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
The woman laughed, and her voice was soft and oddly sensual as she said, “I don’t think there are many guys here who’d willingly take no from you. Not too many gals either. You’re gorgeous.”
Joplin’s blush deepened. The woman was in her early thirties, maybe six or seven years older than herself. She vaguely remembered seeing her on other occasions at the front desk but had never really paid attention to her before. Now that she was, what she thought had been a plain, unremarkable face with a slightly upturned nose was actually quite pretty, especially with the sly smile she was showing.
She held out her hand. “Joplin,” she said.
“Rosalyn.”
The woman’s smile grew bold as they shook hands, and calling it a handshake wouldn’t do it justice. There was some heavy duty flirting going on, no question about it. Joplin had never been interested in a sexual relationship with a woman before, but it wasn’t as if she’d been having such great luck with guys. She’d broken up with her last boyfriend a month ago when she caught the jerk in bed with a coworker he used to insist was a platonic friend and nothing more. God, she’d been so blind. She’d wasted two years with the jerk, and almost three years with the guy before him, and that one turned out to be an even bigger jerk. Maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to try something different. There was something appealing about Rosalyn. A delicateness. And it would be nice to have company while this crazy Nightmare Man stuff was going on. Maybe she’d sleep better.
She’d give it a night to think about. If she was feeling this way tomorrow morning, she’d come back to the gym, and she and Rosalyn could continue their flirting.
“It was wonderful meeting you, Rosalyn.”
“Joplin is such an interesting name,” Rosalyn said with a curious smile. “Were your parents from Missouri?”
Joplin rolled her eyes, because she had told this story too many times during her twenty-six years. “No, they were fans of Janis Joplin, and I guess they figured it would be hipper to name me Joplin than Janis.”
“It suits you. I so much enjoyed meeting you also and hope to see you again, the sooner the better.”
“Me too.”
Chapter 44
Charlie Bogle told Morris to put away his car keys, that he’d drive them to Ashfield. Morris fished inside his pants pocket for a quarter so they could flip for it, but when he found himself too bleary-eyed to make out whether it was heads or tails, he asked Bogle how much sleep he’d gotten the night before.
“A good six hours. I feel as fresh as a daisy.”
“That’s double what I got. Must be nice working for a big movie studio and living the soft life.”
Bogle got a chuckle from that. “So I’m driving.”
“Looks that way.”
They piled into Bogle’s car, and once they were underway Morris asked how his boss at Starlight Pictures took it when he asked for a leave of absence to work on this investigation.
“Not thrilled, but he understood.”
“Did Benjamin Chandler show up on set?”
“He did. I dropped by at eight to check on him. A little bruised, but he seemed to be doing okay.”
“No complaints about Parker knocking him down?”
“You’re worried about being sued?”
“A little,” Morris admitted.
“Don’t be. If anything, I think he’s embarrassed by the incident. It wouldn’t help his macho image if word of that got out.” Bogle scratched lazily at his jaw, his eyes taking on a faraway
look as if he were deep in thought. “I didn’t know you’d trained Parker to do something like that.”
“I didn’t. To be honest I wasn’t sure what he would do. The little guy probably thought he was playing a game.”
“He sure rocketed up that mountain path,” Bogle said, chuckling under his breath. “I’m not saying Parker’s a lightweight, but the only reason he knocked Chandler down was because he was in a panic. Chandler, not Parker.”
“Probably true.”
Morris lowered the back of his seat, closed his eyes, and soon drifted off. His ringing phone woke him. He worked the phone out of his pocket and saw it was Gloria Finston.
“Ashfield State Prison sent over a list of inmates who were released by October 2001 and whose incarcerations overlapped with Blount’s,” she said. “Three hundred and seventeen names. We’ll start collecting their police records and see where their residences were when the 2001 murders took place, but I’d like to focus on the ones who had contact with Blount after he was diagnosed with cancer.”
“Sounds like a smart plan.”
“Morris, did I wake you? Your voice sounds froggy.”
“I was dozing.”
“I apologize. You looked tired at the meeting. I should’ve waited to call you, but when you get Blount’s prison records, please call me back with the date of his cancer diagnosis.”
Morris checked his watch. They’d only been on the road twenty minutes and still had almost two more hours of driving before they’d be in Ashfield.
“I’ll call the warden now and see if he can get you that date.”
“Also check whether he was housed in a different section of the prison once he became ill. It would be helpful to get a list of prisoners who had exposure to him at that time. It’s possible he confided in another prisoner who repeated the story to someone else.”