by Chris Carter
‘Not that we know of.’
‘Was she involved with anyone else, maybe one of D-King’s competitors?’
‘Nah-ah,’ the reply came with a shake of the head. ‘She was a good girl, probably his best girl. She had no reason to run away.’ He had another sip of his root beer.
‘The good ones are usually the worst.’ Culhane’s comment failed to amuse Jerome. ‘How long has she been with D-King?’
‘Almost three years.’
‘Maybe she’d had enough and she wanted out.’
‘You know the boss doesn’t mind if any of his girls want out. If she’d had enough all she had to do was say it. Plus as I’ve said, she didn’t take any of her stuff with her.’
‘OK, give me twenty-four hours and I’ll see if I can come up with anything.’ Culhane got up ready to leave.
‘Culhane.’
‘Yeah,’ he said turning to face Jerome.
‘D-King wants to keep this quiet, so don’t go flashing her picture around like a pair of tits.’
Culhane nodded and made his way to the door while Jerome reopened the menu on the desserts page.
Sitting inside his car, Culhane had another look at the picture Jerome had given him. The girl was stunning, the sort of girl he’d have to pay a lot of money to sleep with. He tapped the other envelope inside his pocket. Hello, new car, he thought with a wide smile.
Culhane guessed the girl in the photograph was in trouble. D-King was good to his girls, the nice apartments, the expensive clothes, the free drugs, the superstar lifestyle. He’d never heard of any of them running away.
He could start with a hospital search, but that would take way too long. After thinking about it for a few seconds he reached for his cell phone and dialed Peter Talep, a good friend of his who worked for the missing person’s department of the LAPD.
‘Pete, it’s Mark from Narcotics, how’re you doing? I need a small favor . . .’
*
The LAPD Missing Persons Unit was established in 1972. The unit has citywide responsibility for the investigation of adult missing persons with over twenty-five investigative detectives. Peter Talep was one of them.
Peter met Culhane at the lobby of the South Bureau Police Department in 77th Street. Culhane needed a good story to get Peter to search the missing person’s database without raising any eyebrows or putting in an official request. He claimed Jenny was one of his major narcotic informers and sometime in the past seventy-two hours she’d gone missing. Culhane wanted Peter to use his department’s access to check the hospital files.
‘So, do you have a picture of this girl we’re looking for?’ Peter asked.
‘Unfortunately I don’t, that’s why I have to go through the records with you, keeping pictures of informers can lead to a lot of trouble,’ Culhane lied. If D-King wanted to keep this quiet, handing Jenny’s picture to Peter wasn’t a great idea.
‘OK, so what am I looking for?’
‘Caucasian female, around twenty-three, twenty-four, blond hair, blue eyes, stunning looking, if you see her picture you’d probably know,’ Culhane said with a malicious smile.
‘When was the last time you had contact with her?’
‘Last Friday.’
‘Do you know if she has any family around, someone that might’ve reported her missing?’
‘No, I don’t think so, she lived alone. Family are from out of town.’
‘Boyfriend, husband?’
‘No.’
‘So nobody would’ve reported her missing? You’re the first one?’
‘Yep,’ Culhane agreed.
‘So if she went missing on Friday, it’ll be too soon,’ Peter said, shaking his head.
‘What do you mean? What’ll be too soon?’
Peter rolled his chair away from his computer. ‘All the records we have in our database are from missing persons that have been reported in by someone – family, boyfriend, whatever. People will usually bring in a picture and fill in a missing person’s report, you know the protocol. Anyway, that record is then fed into the Missing and Unidentified Persons Unit database. If no one’s reported her missing, there will be no record.’
‘Yes, but how about hospital patients, you know, Jane Doe’s?’
‘Well, those are quite rare.’
‘Yeah, but they do happen?’
‘Yes, but she needs to be either unconscious or have lost her memory. If that’s the case the hospital would usually wait anywhere between seven to fifteen days before considering the patient a proper Jane or John Doe and reporting them to us. We then compare the picture the hospital sends us with what we have in our database and check for a match. If there isn’t one the patient is then inserted into the MUPU database as unidentified. If she went missing on Friday and no one has reported her missing, that’s way too soon. If she is unconscious in a hospital somewhere or has lost her memory, you’ll have to wait until she regains consciousness, check hospital by hospital for a Jane Doe or wait up to two weeks and check back here with me.’
‘Shit!’
‘Sorry, Mark, there isn’t much I can do for you.’
‘That’s OK, thanks anyway.’
Outside the South Bureau Police Department, Culhane sat in his car pondering his options. He sure as hell wasn’t about to go on a hospital tour of LA just to find some hooker for D-King. The past weekend arrests’ report he’d requested had just been sent to his car fax machine. Six girls matched the description. Three had already made bail. He had a hunch none of the remaining girls would be the one he was looking for, but he had to check them.
It took around five minutes for the pictures to come through. As he’d suspected none of them was Jenny. There was one more thing left to do – check for a dead body.
He could try and ask for information from the Homicide Division, but there has always been animosity between Homicide and Narcotics detectives. More often than not one type of investigation would lead into the other. In LA, drugs and murder walked side by side.
Screw the Homicide division, Culhane thought. If Jenny was dead, there was only one place she’d be – the morgue.
Thirteen
The technicians at the County Department of Coroner had used a software program specially developed to reconstruct full images from partial ones. The program is similar to the ones used by film studios on the latest computer-animated motion pictures. The basics are simple – in the animation process, the designer first creates a wire frame of the character as a base and then covers it with a ‘skin’ layer. The process used by the Coroner’s technicians followed the same steps, although no wire frame was needed. Their base was the victim’s skinless face image.
This process is mostly used to re-create an image out of bone structure – a body that has been discovered in a very advanced or complete state of decomposition. In the case of last night’s victim, the process was made easier because the muscle tissue around her face was almost intact. The computer didn’t have to calculate the fullness of her cheeks or the shape of her chin and nose. It only needed to apply a skin layer over the already existing lean tissue, calculate skin age and pigmentation and Hunter and Garcia had a face.
Hunter was right, she’d been a beautiful-looking woman. Even though the computerized image made her look like a character out of the Final Fantasy video game series, Hunter could easily see the soft lines, the model-like features that made up her face.
From his car, on the way back from the Coroner’s office Hunter called Captain Bolter.
‘Hunter. Tell me something good.’
‘Well, the computer guys at the Coroner’s office managed to re-create the victim’s face using some fancy computer program, that should help us identify her.’
‘That’s good news, what else?’
‘That’s about as far as the good news go,’ he paused to take a deep breath. ‘According to Doctor Winston, it’s more than probable that we’re dealing with the same killer as before.’
Silence followed.
Captain Bolter had expected this since finding the double-crucifix on the back of the victim’s neck.
‘Captain?’
‘Yeah, I’m here. This is like the fucking twilight zone.’
Hunter agreed but said nothing.
‘I’m setting you and Garcia up in a separate office, away from the main floor. I don’t even want the rest of the RHD detectives to get involved in this.’
‘That’s fine by me.’
‘The last thing I need in my hands right now is widespread panic around this city because some shitty reporter got hold of this story.’
‘Sooner or later some shitty reporter will get hold of this story, Captain.’
‘So let’s try and make it a lot later than sooner shall we?’
‘You know we’ll be doing our best, Captain.’
‘I need more than your best this time, Hunter. I want this killer caught, and I mean the REAL one.’ The anger in his voice was undeniable as he slammed the receiver down.
Fourteen
The office Captain Bolter supplied for Hunter and Garcia was located on the top floor of the RHD building. It was a medium-sized room, thirty-five feet wide by twenty-five with two desks facing each other in the center of it. A computer, a telephone and a fax machine had been set up on each desk. The room was well lit, courtesy of two windows on the east wall and several fifty-watt halogen dichroic light bulbs on the office ceiling. They were surprised to see that all the original files from the Crucifix Killer’s case had already been gathered and placed over their desks making two enormous piles. A corkboard had been mounted onto the south wall. The photographs of all seven of the original Crucifix Killer’s victims, together with the new faceless one, had been pinned onto it.
‘What, no air con, Captain?’
Captain Bolter took no notice of Hunter’s sarcasm. ‘Have you been brought up to speed with the situation yet?’ his question was directed at Garcia.
‘Yes, Captain.’
‘So you understand what we might be dealing with here?’
‘Yes,’ Garcia answered with a hint of trepidation in his voice.
‘OK, over the desks you’ll find everything we had on the old case,’ the captain continued. ‘Hunter, you should be familiar with those. The computers on your desks have a T1 internet connection and each of you have a separate telephone and fax line.’ He walked towards the photographs on the corkboard. ‘This case is to be discussed with no one inside or outside the RHD. We need to try and keep this as quiet as possible for as long as possible.’ He paused and looked at both detectives with a hawk-sharp glare. ‘When this case goes public I don’t want anyone to know that we might be dealing with the same psychopath that did this,’ he said pointing to the victims’ photographs. ‘So, I don’t want anybody referring to this case as the Crucifix Killer. For all purposes, the Crucifix Killer is dead, executed about a year ago. This is a brand-new case, is that understood?’
Both detectives looked like school kids being reprimanded by their principal. They nodded and looked at the floor.
‘You guys are exclusively on this, nothing else. You better live, breathe and shit this case. I wanna report of the previous day’s events on my desk every day by 10:00 a.m. until this killer is caught, starting from tomorrow,’ Captain Bolter said, walking towards the door. ‘I wanna know everything that’s going on in this case, good or bad. And do me a favor, keep this fucking door locked, I don’t want any leaks.’ He slammed the door behind him, the loud sound reverberating inside the room.
Garcia walked over to the photographs and stared at them in a macabre silence. This was the first time he’d been presented with the Crucifix Killer’s police evidence. This was the first time he’d ever seen any of the killer’s original evil. He studied them feeling faintly ill. His eyes taking everything in, his mind trying to reject it. How could anyone be capable of this?
One of the victims, male, twenty-five years old, had his eyes compressed into his skull until they’d burst from the pressure. Both of his hands had also been crushed to the point of pulverization of the bones. Another victim, this time female, forty years old, had her abdomen sliced open and disemboweled. A third victim, another male, African American, fifty-five years old, had a laceration that ran the length of his neck; his hands had been nailed together as in a prayer position. The other pictures were even more gruesome. All that pain had been inflicted on the victims while they were still alive.
Garcia remembered the first time he’d heard about the Crucifix killings. It had been over three years ago and he hadn’t made detective. Research has shown that there are around five hundred serial killers active at any one time in the United States, claiming something in the region of five thousand lives every year. Only a very small number of them get media recognition, and the Crucifix Killer had gotten more than his share of it. At the time, Garcia had wondered what it would be like to be a detective in such a high-profile investigation. To follow the evidence, analyze the clues, interrogate the suspects and then put everything together to solve the case. If only it was that simple.
Garcia became a detective shortly after the first victim was found and he followed the case as closely as he could. When Mike Farloe was arrested and presented to the media as the Crucifix Killer, Garcia had wondered how could someone that didn’t seem to be intelligent had managed to evade the law for such a long time. He remembered thinking that the detectives assigned to the case couldn’t have been very good.
Looking at the pictures on the corkboard, Garcia’s feelings were a mixture of excitement and fear. Not only was he now a lead detective in a serial-killer investigation, he was one of the lead detectives in the Crucifix Killer’s case. Ironic he thought.
Hunter fired up his computer and watched the screen come alive. ‘Are you gonna be OK with all this, rookie?’ he asked, sensing Garcia’s uneasiness at the pictures.
‘What? Yeah, I’m good,’ Garcia turned and faced Hunter. ‘This is some different kind of evil.’
‘Yes, I guess you can say that.’
‘What would motivate a person to commit crimes like these?’
‘Well, if you go by the textbook definition of why someone would commit murder, then we have: jealousy, revenge, to profit, hatred, fear, compassion, desperation, to conceal another crime, to avoid shame and disgrace or to obtain power . . .’ Hunter paused. ‘The basic motivators for serial crimes are manipulation, domination, control, sexual gratification, or plain simple homicidal-mania.’
‘This killer seems to enjoy it.’
‘I agree. Gratification, but not of the sexual kind. I’d say he loves watching people suffer.’
‘He?’ Garcia questioned.
‘Judging by the nature of the crimes, the logical conclusion is that the killer is male.’
‘How so?’
‘To start with, the overwhelming majority of serial killers are male,’ Hunter explained. ‘Female serial killers have a tendency to kill for monetary profit. While that can also be true their male counterparts, it’s very unlikely. Sexual reasons top the list for male serial killers. Case studies have also shown that female killers generally kill people close to them, such as husbands, family members, or people dependent on them. Males kill strangers more often. Female serial killers also tend to kill more quietly, with poison or other less violent methods, like suffocation. Male serial killers, on the other hand, show a greater tendency to include torture or mutilation as part of the process of killing. When women are implicated in sadistic homicides, they’ve usually acted in partnership with a man.’
‘Our killer works alone,’ Garcia concluded.
‘Nothing indicates otherwise.’
Both detectives fell silent for a while. Garcia turned around and faced the photographs once again. ‘So what do we have on all the old victims, what sort of connection?’ he asked, eager to get started.
‘None that we’ve found.’
‘What? I don’t believe that,’ Garcia said, shaking his head. ‘You’r
e not trying to tell me that you guys spent two years investigating this case and you haven’t come up with a connection between the victims?’
‘Well, believe it.’ Hunter got up and joined Garcia in front of the corkboard. ‘Look at them and tell me this – what would you say the age bracket of the victims was?’
Garcia’s eyes moved from picture to picture, pausing on each one for only a couple of seconds. ‘I’m not sure, early twenties to mid-sixties I guess.’
‘Kind of broad, don’t you think?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘And what would you say is the main type of victim, old, young, male, female, black, white, blond, brunette or what?’
Garcia’s eyes were still studying the pictures. ‘All of those judging by these.’
‘Again, kind of broad, isn’t it?’
Garcia shrugged.
‘Now, there’s something else you can’t get from these pictures, and that’s their social class. These people came from all different walks of life – poor, rich, middle class, religious and non-religious, employed and unemployed . . .’
‘Yes, what’s your point, Robert?’
‘My point is that the killer doesn’t go for a specific type of victim. With every new victim, we spent days, weeks, months trying to establish some sort of link between any of them. Work place, social clubs, nightclubs, bars, universities, lower and high school, place of birth, acquaintances, hobbies, family trees, you name it, we’ve tried it and we came up with a big fat zero. We’d find something that would link two of the victims together but not the others, nothing would stick. If we managed to start a chain with two victims, the link would be broken on the third and fourth one sending us back to square one. From what we know these people could’ve been chosen completely at random. The killer might as well have flipped through a phone book. In fact, if the killer hadn’t carved his symbol on the back of their necks these could’ve been seven different victims from seven different killers – eight with our new one. Nothing is the same, except the level of pain and torture he puts them through. This killer is a new breed of serial killer. He’s unique.’