by Jacob Stone
Brick spoke first. The audio faded in and out, and the killer had to turn the volume up and replay it before he could understand what Brick had said.
Brick: I rolled the dice and came up snake eyes. Fred found nothing. This sicko wasn’t across the street like I had hoped.
Fred, the killer thought. Fred Lemmon. I knew it was something like that. He chided himself once again for how he had overreacted. He should’ve known Brick and the rest of those cops weren’t bright enough to have figured out that he had been there. Yeah, they might’ve gotten lucky and discovered that Lopez had called him yesterday, and they might even have the number for the untraceable phone he had dumped, but a whole lot of good it was going to do them.
Tough Lady Cop (ignoring Brick): You find anything that can help us?
Medical Examiner: The body was sexually violated. Vaginally and anally. This occurred postmortem.
Brick: So we’re dealing with a sexual deviant.
Medical Examiner: Yes. To say the least.
At first the killer couldn’t make sense of what was being said. As the meaning of the ME’s words seeped in, the killer found himself trembling. None of what was being said was true! Not a single word! Was the ME that incompetent? A thought jolted him. Was it possible his victim had sex before he grabbed her? Maybe even rough sex? Could the ME be mistaking when the sex had occurred?
Brick: This deviant cut up Heather Brandley’s body so he could hide that he engages in necrophilia.
Tough Lady Cop: Sick bastard.
Medical Examiner: True on both counts.
Brick (showing a pained grimace): We’ll have to give this to the media. Let them know what kind of sicko we’re dealing with.
Tough Lady Cop: What (garbled) do you think they’ll give him?
Brick: Something simple. My bet, the Pervert.
The killer at first felt sick to his stomach. Soon he could barely see straight he was so enraged. He couldn’t watch another second of the travesty unfolding on the video. The last thing he had expected was this level of incompetence. It damn well bordered on malpractice!
Damn it, this wasn’t what he had counted on. Because that ME couldn’t do his job right, they were going to muddy up his name and try to sully what he was accomplishing? Instead of his work being held in the awe that it deserved, they were going to make it look like the work of a psychologically unhinged deviant. Someone who engaged in sex with dead bodies!
The killer at first sat stewing, but then a simple thought occurred to him. The medical examiner was only talking about a preliminary examination made at the crime scene.
He’ll be changing his conclusion once he brings the remains back to his lab for a more thorough examination, the killer told himself. He can’t be this incompetent!
But what if he is?
The killer decided that couldn’t be the case. The guy had reached the level of medical examiner for a major US city. He’ll recognize his mistake. He’ll have to. The killer was sure of it…but the thought still nagged at him that there was a one in a million chance they could end up spreading those outrageous lies about him. He decided it wouldn’t matter if that happened. As more dominos fell the true nature of what he was doing would become apparent to everyone. Brick, the ME, and the rest of them could malign him now all they want, but in a few short days all the dominos will have fallen, and the city of Los Angeles will recognize what he had done. The true meaning of it.
Forget Los Angeles, the world will see it.
A ping from his cell phone broke him out of his trance. He checked his phone to see that the alarm he had set earlier had gone off. It was time for him to have his second date with Faye Riverstone. His last one as well.
The killer checked himself in the driver’s side vanity mirror. The blond wig and mustache looked fine, and there were no clear signs of his recent agitation. He got out of the car and took a deep breath. Let them spread their lies. It didn’t matter. Brick and the rest of them would be the ones looking like fools once his masterpiece was fully revealed.
Slowly, the killer found himself relaxing, his shakiness from a few minutes earlier mostly gone. He practiced the devil-may-care smile that his research showed Faye Riverstone was a sucker for—the same smile he had used on her when they met three days earlier. The killer had done extensive research on her, reading every available interview in print and watching clips of her talk show appearances on YouTube. He knew where she liked to hang out, and that she was attracted to men with dirty blond hair tied into a ponytail. Bushy mustaches, too, just like the one he had glued on earlier. He also knew how to dress for her, and what to say.
The poor woman never had a chance.
That thought brought a smile to the killer’s face. A genuine one. The distress he had felt was forgotten. He headed into the bar where he knew Riverstone would be waiting.
Chapter 22
Charlie Bogle was the last one to arrive, which made sense since he had the longest drive coming from Long Beach. He didn’t look happy.
Morris gave him a sympathetic look. “Sorry I had to pull you off your missing persons case.”
Bogle shrugged diplomatically. “This has to take priority. Besides, it shouldn’t matter if I put the case down for a week or longer. I doubt Karl Crawford’s going anywhere.”
“You think he’s dead?”
“I haven’t found anything to make me think otherwise.”
Morris waited until Bogle squeezed into the last empty chair at the table before asking Greg Malevich to start things off by reporting what he had found regarding the hipster clothing store.
“Sure thing.” Malevich struggled for a moment to work a notepad out of his back pants pocket. He squinted at it as if he were deciphering a foreign language he wasn’t fluent in, and then cleared his throat and began.
“There were no signs of a break-in. The store has a low-end keypad security system, and the damn thing doesn’t record when it’s used. No surveillance camera either, and none in the general vicinity. Right now we need to assume the killer was given access to a key and the security code. When we’re done here, I’ll be interviewing store personnel to find out who gave it to him.”
“What about the woman working there when the remains were found?”
Malevich consulted his notepad. “A young college kid by the name of Hannah Welker. We talked already. She’s clean.”
Morris took a long drink of his eighth cup of coffee that day as he tried to combat the weariness weighing on him. MBI’s lone conference room was as full as he had ever seen it and they’d had to bring in extra chairs to accommodate everyone. In addition to himself, Malevich, and Bogle, also sitting at the table were Gloria Finston, Doug Gilman, Walsh, Polk, Lemmon, MBI computer and hacking specialist Adam Felger, LA Police Commissioner Martin Hadley, and four other police detectives who’d been assigned to the investigation. Lying under the table by Morris’s feet was Parker, who was snoring in starts and stops, exhausted from the day’s activity.
“So no progress then,” Hadley grumbled as he gave Morris an accusatory stare, his arms folded across his chest, his face locked into a frown that would make any bulldog proud. Hadley and Morris were like oil and water. They hadn’t mixed well when Morris was on the force, and their relationship only became more strained once Morris founded MBI and took three LAPD detectives with him. Morris knew it killed Hadley to involve him and MBI in the investigation, and even more so that he had to let Morris take the lead on it. But Hadley, first and foremost, was a political animal, and he was smart enough to realize that he needed the public relations cover MBI would bring. Fortunately, Hadley still didn’t know about Morris’s earlier gambit of calling the killer’s phone. If he had, he would’ve gone ballistic.
“We have a police sketch of the suspect,” Morris said.
“Yeah? What makes you so sure about that?” Hadley’s thick, rubbery lips
clamped shut as his frown deepened, then in a disgusted tone, he complained, “The sketch doesn’t look anything like the suspect in the videotape. Which you claim is useless because he disguised himself. Even if that’s our perp, what makes you think the drawing is worth a damn? If it’s him, he’s still in disguise.”
“I’m sure that’s true,” Morris said, his voice reflecting every bit of the weariness he was feeling. “No doubt he’s wearing a wig and a fake mustache. We’ll be giving the media two sketches. The one showing how the witness described him, another with him bald and clean shaven.”
“Not on my watch you won’t!”
Doug Gilman spoke up then, suggesting to the police commissioner that they talk privately. Hadley looked like he wanted to offer the mayor’s deputy assistant a few choice expletives, but he acquiesced and followed Gilman out of the room, closing the door behind him.
“The man’s holding a significant amount of resentment toward you,” Gloria Finston noted, her thin lips curved into a smile to reflect her curiosity.
“It goes back a ways,” Morris said.
“All the way back to when he was born a pain-in-the-ass,” Polk deadpanned.
“Hadley’s always been the life of the party,” Bogle added.
Annie Walsh bit her tongue to keep from laughing.
The conference room was soundproofed, but whatever conversation Gilman and Hadley had was brief since the mayor’s deputy assistant quickly returned. He announced that Hadley had been called away on other urgent matters and wouldn’t be joining them any further. “Martin did want me to tell you that he’s in full agreement with the mayor’s decision that you are to run this investigation as you see fit, and with the full support of the LAPD,” Gilman added with a straight face.
“What a mensch,” Polk said.
Morris’s cell phone rang.
Chapter 23
Roger Smichen was calling about his findings. Morris put the phone on speaker.
“Quite a day so far,” the medical examiner said.
“Quite an understatement,” Morris corrected.
“Yes it is, and I’m about to make your day even more interesting. We’ve got a third victim. The remains found in that hipster clothing store are not from Heather Brandley.”
What Smichen said didn’t surprise Morris. Although this other victim and Brandley had nearly identical body types and the killer painstakingly severed both of them at the same anatomical point so they’d appear to be two pieces of the same whole, Morris had suspected that the killer was playing some sort of game with them.
“A couple of jigsaw pieces that don’t quite fit, huh?” Polk asked.
“Our killer tried hard to make it look like they did,” Smichen said. “The same blood types, the body lividities identical—”
Morris asked, “Are you saying they were both killed around the same time?”
“Within an hour of each other. My guess less than that. As I was saying before being so rudely interrupted—”
“Which is usually my job,” Polk interrupted without noticeably showing his tongue in his cheek.
“Is that Dennis Polk?” Smichen asked.
“None other.”
“Of course it would be,” Smichen said. “Let me try one more time. Given the damage that the explosive device caused, our killer might’ve fooled me into thinking this was the missing lower part of Ms. Brandley, at least until the DNA results came back. But I was able to test the bone densities, and they don’t match.”
“Interesting,” Finston said as she nibbled on her small thumbnail, her dark eyes bright with thought.
Walsh asked, “Anything that can help us identify this new victim?”
Smichen said, “As with Heather Brandley, she was blond, between five feet five and five feet eight, and from calluses on her feet and her muscle tone, most likely a runner. Age, between thirty-five and forty. Something else. She has a tattoo below her right ankle. The Chinese symbols for “unbreakable.’”
“A bit ironic,” Bogle noted.
Morris told the ME that they needed to see if this new victim’s DNA matched the blood found on the first business card.
“We’re thinking along the same lines. A sample has been sent to the lab, marked urgent. One other thing I have is there are no signs of additional trauma, and the body was scrubbed clean. I’ve ordered a full toxicology report, and I’ll let you know the results when I get them. Odds are we’ll find pentobarbital, as with the other victim.”
“Sounds likely,” Morris agreed.
“I’ve got nothing else to report, so let me bid adieu. Even to you, Polk.”
Smichen disconnected from his end before Polk could offer a comment. The ME’s news that the killer had so far taken three lives, and not two as some in the room might’ve assumed, had its effect, and the conference room became eerily quiet. Even Parker’s snoring had subsided. Morris broke the silence by tasking two of the LAPD detectives who had joined the investigation, Ray Vestra and Franklin Strong, with identifying the new victim. “While it’s likely he picked her because she physically resembled Heather Brandley, I’d like you to follow through with all missing person reports. Cast a wide net. There’s no telling how long ago he grabbed our Jane Doe.”
Vesta and Strong left the room to start their search. Morris picked up the plastic evidence bag that held the killer’s latest message to him. Scrawled on the business card was ‘Having fun yet?’ It was juvenile, but still a taunt. Morris put the evidence bag back on the table.
“Are you still convinced the killer has a personal grudge against me?” he asked Finston.
“Yes. Most certainly. He could’ve watched the video feed from anywhere, but he needed the satisfaction of being there and seeing you enter the store. He needed the physical proximity to you.”
“Any chance the guy sitting outside the bakery isn’t our perp?”
“None.”
Morris had come to that same conclusion. Even with the disguises the killer had worn, he could see the similarities between the man in the video and the police sketch, especially the shape of the eyes.
“Fred, I need you to dig into my old cases and see if I put anyone away with a son or nephew or what have you who could be this psycho.” Morris turned to one of the remaining LAPD detectives, a large redheaded man who looked like he could stand to lose forty pounds. “Gunderson, you’ll work with Fred and provide whatever assistance is needed.”
Morris next asked Walsh what she had found out about Heather Brandley. He knew what she was going to say since they had already privately discussed it, but he wanted the rest of the room to hear it also.
“A worker at a juice store called Grassy Knoll served her around two thirty yesterday afternoon. He stated she was wearing a running outfit and was shiny wet with perspiration. He also claimed she went running nearly every day, always stopping at the store, and that they kept a tab for her.” Her expression soured as she commented that what the killer told her when he was disguised as the doorman was probably true. “Sweat-stained tank top, sports bra, and running shorts were found at the top of her hamper. The lobby surveillance tapes confirmed that she left the building at two o’clock dressed in that same running outfit, returned at two forty-three, and left again at three forty-one dressed the way the killer had described. In each instance, she was alone. This also fits with the doorman, Javier Lopez, calling the killer at two minutes past two to let him know that Brandley was going on her run.”
“So he could arrange to meet her.”
“Presumably. I haven’t found anyone who saw Brandley after she left the juice shop, but I’ll keep canvassing. It will help if I can find a witness who saw her getting into a car.”
“She probably met him on the same bench we sat on,” Morris said. “That must’ve been a ritual of hers. Go running, get a juice, sit on the bench and enjoy her drink.”
“The guy must be a smooth operator,” Lemmon observed. “He meets a semi-famous actress on a bench, and minutes later has her running back to her apartment so she can get dressed up and go on a date with him.”
“It could be that he was able to offer Ms. Brandley something she wanted,” Finston said.
“Like what?”
Another of her tiny v smiles, this one with a sharpness to it. “She was an actress. I’m guessing he offered her a starring role in a movie.”
A dull throbbing once again started in the back of Morris’s skull. It was as if his hangover from earlier that morning wouldn’t go away. Or maybe it was all the coffee he drank that day. In any case, he knew what the FBI profiler said made sense.
He told Bogle, “Charlie, I need you to look into movie producers.”
Bogle showed his best poker face as he said, “There are a lot of them. Probably more producers in this town than baristas. Or at least more people who call themselves producers.”
“I know. Adam, help Charlie get a list together, and screen out the ones you can.”
“Will do,” Felger acknowledged.
“That leaves the search for R. G. Berg,” Morris said, glancing over at Polk.
“This joker’s not named R. G. Berg,” Polk argued.
“Most likely not, but the search will still lead somewhere,” Finston said. “This killer has been meticulous in his planning, even if he at times has shown a certain rashness. He didn’t choose the name randomly. He chose it because it fits into the narrative he’s telling us.”
Polk didn’t look convinced. “If you say so. Me, I think he’s having us run around like idiots because it’s how he gets his jollies.” He turned to Morris. “To answer your question, computer nerd over there”—a nod to Felger—“came up with a list of five hundred and twenty-eight R. G. Bergs, with nine in the Los Angeles area.”