by Thomas Perry
5
Till dialed the phone in his office and looked out on Ventura Boulevard while he waited. Sometimes this part of LA reminded him of a children’s book he used to read with Holly, about “Busytown.” There were always a million things happening on each page—cars, trucks, airplanes, bikes, heavy machinery. The phone line came alive. “Vice, Sergeant McCann.”
“Hi, Ted. This is Jack Till.”
“Hey, Jack. It’s good to hear your voice. How are things going?”
“My daughter says, ‘How are things in the gumshoe business?’ She’s a believer in plain talk.”
“How is she, anyway?”
“Just great. I’ll tell you why I’m calling. I just took on the case of a young woman who was an escort. She was killed in an apartment in Encino.”
“Catherine Hamilton. I suppose her parents are getting desperate.” He paused. “No offense. You know what I mean.”
“It’s pretty accurate. Nobody pays for a private investigator until they’re desperate. I’m starting to look at the paperwork, and something occurred to me. Is this part of an epidemic or something? Have there been other girls in that line of work who have been shot and robbed lately?”
“No,” said McCann. “Not here.”
“Somewhere else?”
“Well, yeah. There have been a few over the past year or two in other cities that seem a lot like what happened to her. It’s been in the NCIC. I think the way you do. When there’s a crime like this, I try to figure out how to get a handle on it. I look to see if there’s some kind of a pattern. We’re not Homicide, of course.”
“I get the hint,” said Till. “I just don’t know anything about the two Homicide guys who are handling this case—Anthony and Sellers. I don’t want to step on any toes or bruise any egos. The parents seem to think they’ve done everything they can, but it wasn’t much, and I knew you’d know what was going on.”
“I’ll tell you what. I’ll e-mail you what I’ve got on those murders. There are five of them, all young and pretty, all killed in their residences in different cities.”
“Not streetwalkers?”
“No. All independent, mostly in-call.”
“Thanks, Ted. I’ll be watching for it. I’m still walking in a circle around this. Catherine’s parents were here yesterday. Anything that I can learn about the landscape is likely to help.”
“Just let me know if there’s anything useful.”
“I will.”
“Like if you find Jack the Ripper is now living in the Valley, I’ll be the first one you call.”
“You will.”
Till sat in front of his laptop in his office on the second floor of the building on Ventura. He had once thought he would have a partner in this business, and he’d seen a used desk that was cheap and matched the first one, so he’d bought it. There never was a partner, but the second desk was a good one for the computer because there was no window behind it.
The advertisements on the Web sites were mannered, a testament to the way human beings saw and stole things they liked. The girls were all “hot,” even “hotties.” One asked, “Is there anything I can help you with?” So fifty others said that too. Generally the women referred to themselves as “providers” when they needed a word. It was a draw to say, “New” or “New in Town” or “Last Day in LA.”
The Asian women all wrote about health. They wanted to get rid of the harmful stress for men who worked too hard. They would “re-life” a customer if he gave them a chance. Black women liked jokes and puns. Most of the women included disclaimers to ward off the police: “By calling me, you guarantee that you are not a law enforcement official.” When they named a price, it was either in “roses” or in some idiosyncratic version—lilies, diamonds, hugs, kisses. Many weren’t good spellers.
There were apparently regulations on the site about what the photographs could show, but almost all the women appeared to have been eager to show everything. Many of them had been photographed in the same studios. Others posted snapshots taken in their own apartments. Just as many were shot with a cell phone by the girl herself in a bathroom or bedroom mirror.
He was taken aback by the range of ages and races and body types. But his biggest impression was that the high-end girls were beautiful. In Los Angeles for two hundred dollars an hour a man could have a twenty-two-year-old who looked like a movie star, and wanted to do things most married women wouldn’t. Or maybe they all would, but their husbands didn’t ask them to.
Two hundred dollars wasn’t very much money for risking disease, being naked and alone with scary strangers, and maybe being arrested. There were a very few who charged three hundred an hour, or five hundred. They tended to be stunningly beautiful, were typically about twenty-six, and claimed to know arts and sciences that couldn’t even be comprehensibly alluded to in an ad.
The variety of looks astonished him. There were blonds with blue eyes, Hawaiians, Russians, English, and Australians. There were girls from the Caribbean and from every South American or African country. There were Canadians. There were Chinese, Japanese, German, Italian, Irish, and every possible combination, all described with the frankness of an animal’s pedigree and raised in the United States or elsewhere. All of them promised pampering, treating a customer “like the king he is.”
Till sensed that enough time had passed for him to expect the information McCann had promised to send. He went to his e-mails. The first one said simply, “This is something you might want to look into.” It had several attachments. Till downloaded them, plugged in his printer, and printed all of them before he came back to look at them. Printing without looking was a way of signifying to the universe that he wasn’t rejecting any information at this stage.
There were five ads that could have come from the collection he had been viewing. The five were so similar that they could have been posted by the same person. One was from Miami, the others from New York, Minneapolis, Charlotte, and Washington. Always there were one to four photographs of a girl arranged along the right side of the ad. There would be one with a flirtatious expression, with breasts partially showing, one lounging on a bed or chair in lingerie, and one on knees and elbows facing away from the camera.
Judging by price, age, and looks, the women were all at the upper end of their profession. They all said they were “independent providers” or just independent. Some added, “No agency, no driver, no bodyguard,” or “I come alone.” Reading the words and knowing that these girls were all dead gave him a sick feeling. They had advertised that they were defenseless. He knew that pimps and bodyguards made customers uncomfortable enough to choose another girl, but these girls were dead.
His mind began generating unwelcome scenarios that would account for these five murders. It was too early to make guesses, and he hadn’t even read what McCann had sent him with the ads, but he couldn’t help running through the possibilities. The girls looked very similar. Maybe this guy had a fixation on fair-skinned strawberry blonds—either hatred or unrequited love. Maybe he was one of the thousand other kinds of nutcase—the ones who heard voices telling them to do bad things, the ones who killed one girl and then got hooked on the rush. This could even be a series of hits, done because all of the girls fit the description of somebody in particular. And whenever prostitutes were killed, there was always the chance it was a religious compulsion to punish temptresses.
He went through the brief dossiers McCann had compiled about each of the women, looking at everything he had included. Each of them had been shot. Till laid the dossiers out side by side. Each had been shot twice. The second shot was always in the head. Each had been an active solicitor, available for at least some period of each day. Each asked for more money than the average escort in her city. Each had been pretty enough in his opinion to be very popular. Till gathered from their surnames and brief résumés that they were of
Irish, English, German, or Scandinavian descent. But visually they could all just as easily be grouped with the girls brought in from the Ukraine, Poland, Belarus, or Russia.
He couldn’t ignore what their resemblance suggested. Many of the Eastern European girls had been brought into the country by Russian gangsters. As a group, these men hadn’t mellowed much since they had first appeared in the 1990s. The few he had met professionally would not have hesitated to kill the competition to increase profits. They usually made an agreement with a girl while she was still in Europe: she would work for two years to pay for being brought here with the proper papers. But at times, the agreement came as a surprise after the girl was here. Either way, the gangsters tried to get as much money out of a girl as possible, because in two short years she would be free.
Till kept the idea in mind, but concentrated on the dossiers. He was puzzled by the fact that each advertisement looked so similar to the others, even though the girls had been killed in different cities.
He finished reading about all of the girls’ cases, then drove to the gym up the street. During the day a lot of executives would come in for a half hour or so, but it was empty after business hours. He kept himself lean and toned at all times, but now that he was about to go after a killer, the habit was raised to a level of urgency.
For the next two weeks he trained like an athlete, working for four hours a day lifting weights; working the heavy bag; running on a treadmill; and doing martial arts kamais, practicing set series of blows and kicks until he could do them without thinking. Each day he drove to a firing range in Burbank to keep his shooting skills as perfectly tuned as possible. Now, while he was preparing himself, he thought about the opponent.
He was persuaded that the five girls had all been killed by one man. There had been five strawberry blonds killed this way, but no girl of any other description. He had double-checked with Ted McCann, and all of the other murdered escorts he could find on the NCIC lists were killed in very different ways, usually with more battering and physical abuse. Streetwalkers disappeared and then were found in ditches or empty lots or Dumpsters. Others were beaten or stabbed by pimps. There were a few robberies, mainly on the street late at night, and two drive-by shootings.
Till followed the logic of the killings to learn about the killer. The man killed only girls who looked like Catherine Hamilton. He never killed two in one city. After a killing there was a lull, maybe two to six months. If Till assumed the man was doing it out of some psychological need, then the doses of adrenaline were very irregular. They weren’t growing more frequent. If he assumed the man was not crazy, what was he killing for?
Since he always killed only one girl in each city, maybe after each murder he moved on to a new city. Till charted the dates of death and the cities. If the man killed and moved on, then he was not now in any of the five cities where these girls had been murdered. Till made a list of other major cities, then turned on his computer, went on Backpage.com and began to check the ads for his list of cities. He began with Denver. It took hours to look at every ad. Then he went on to Chicago.
He could feel the hopelessness that the police had expressed to the Hamiltons. There were thousands of ads, and he wasn’t even sure what he was looking for, but his mind noted everything. He printed the ads of the girls who bore a close resemblance to the five murdered strawberry blonds. He looked at the furniture and wallpaper behind the girls in their photographs, the wording of their ads, the prices, the locations.
There were patterns, but they were all of unknown value. There were parts of each city that housed a great many escorts. There were boundaries and patterns of movement that were as complicated and invisible as the paths of cats. Some did in-calls at an address near the local airport and out-calls to hotels. Others staked out clusters of nearby districts—some wealthy and others not. Some of the patterns were obvious and predictable. Latinas often worked out of Hispanic neighborhoods. The Asians, nearly all of whom said they had just arrived from Japan, China, or Korea, often worked in large massage parlors, probably because their English and urban survival skills weren’t yet good enough to allow them to work alone. In every category there were girls who said they were nineteen or twenty but looked thirteen or fourteen. There were girls who said they were eighteen but looked thirty. A woman who said she was forty might easily be sixty.
The sex marketplace was huge and chaotic. The girls used many aliases—some ridiculous, some sweet, some crudely obscene. They often posted multiple ads on the same site with different sets of photographs, as though they were doing market research to see what appealed most to their customers. On every site were many ads that offered “specials” that were very cheap for various reasons—because it was Tuesday, or to celebrate a girl’s return to town, her birthday, or the nearest holiday that was coming or had passed.
As Till read, his familiarity with what prostitution was like was brought up to date. There were sites where customers posted reviews of each girl and commented on which acts they performed for their advertised fees, and whether they were cheerful, were polite, and gave fair value. He looked up the five girls and Catherine Hamilton on some of the sites, and found the reviews were still posted, even a year after some of them were dead. They were all highly rated. Could the killer have chosen his victims from these rating services? The company claimed to have no way to identify its customers.
Finally, after weeks of staring at the computer screen for many hours a day, trying to follow every lead, Till found a girl who caused chills to move down the back of his neck.
She said her name was Kyra. She had straight strawberry blond hair that hung down to the center of her back, and showed redder against her paper-white skin. The ad showed her standing in profile, giving a flirtatious sidelong glance at the camera; lying on a bed; and sitting in a chair, wearing a lace bra, staring forthrightly into the camera. She was wearing Catherine Hamilton’s necklace.
6
Till went to his apartment and began to pack. He selected two .45-caliber Glock 21 pistols, each with two spare fourteen-round magazines, and a thin razor-sharp folding knife with a blue-black blade. His clothes were the same as always—a black summer-weight blazer and a navy blue one, some wrinkle-free blue oxford shirts, a pair of gray wool pants and some khaki ones, two pairs of leather shoes with thick rubber soles. Anything else he needed he could buy anywhere.
He brought his laptop computer, his phone, and a night vision scope. The last item was a packet containing five thousand dollars in cash and four credit cards that he used only for business. He looked around the apartment to be sure he hadn’t forgotten to put something in his suitcase.
He’d had a house in the Valley once, when Holly was small. The yard had given her a place to play, and he had believed it made her feel secure. He had kept it until a few months after Holly had moved into the group house with her friends, and then it had seemed empty and sad, so he’d sold it. When he’d been paid for it he remembered that he had originally saved the money for the down payment because his wife had wanted a place to live and raise children and grow old. He supposed the life everyone lived was a life nobody had foreseen.
Till had invested the money from the sale of the house so Holly would have enough to keep paying for her upkeep after he was gone. He was perfectly comfortable living in his apartment a few blocks from his office. He took a last look around, set the silent alarm, turned off the lights, and closed the door.
He put his suitcase in the trunk of his working car, which was a gray Honda Acura with tinted windows. He had made a few minor modifications, notably a quarter-inch steel plate in the two front door panels. He also kept in the trunk a .308 rifle with a ten-power scope and a twelve-gauge shotgun in a case covered by a second piece of carpet that looked like the one covering the spare tire.
He got into his car, drove out of the parking garage beneath his apartment building, and headed east on Inters
tate 10. He had no idea how long he might be away, but he had gone off on hunts a few times before.
Till still knew very little about Catherine Hamilton’s killer. This killer was drawn, for some reason, to women who looked like her. It was not a completely unfamiliar pattern for certain types of psychotics, and it wasn’t incompatible with a different aberration, the habit of preying on solitary, defenseless women. But it had occurred to Till that this man might be a thief trying to give the impression that he was a psychosexual maniac.
Maniacs weren’t likely to commit robbery-murders and then give the next woman jewelry stolen from the last. The jewelry meant the killer was making romantic overtures toward these women. If he was doing that, then he wasn’t like the usual psycho. Seduction wasn’t part of the nightmare fantasy that these men carried in their heads.
Till had been hunting killers for a long time, and he had learned patience. People didn’t understand patience. It was very close to humility. It was the capacity to admit to himself that he didn’t know enough to act yet. He was prepared to travel and wait and watch and listen, possibly for a long time, before he made a move.
Till had an instinctive sense that this man was something he hadn’t seen before. He seemed to be trying to make his killings look like what the cops expected to see, and this suggested to Till that they were something else. If he was a simple armed robber or a psycho, there was no easy way the necklace and ankle bracelet would have ended up on another nearly identical working girl. The man was doing the same thing over and over, but Till didn’t recognize it. He was eager to get to Phoenix and get a look at this new girl.
As he drove toward the east the weather was clear and the traffic was moving fast, so he knew he would make the trip in about six hours. He took Interstate 10 all the way, through dry, hot desert with small prickly pear cactus and colored dust. He liked the landscape. It was immense. The eye focused on sights forty miles away and then the hands steered toward them, and there was a restful, unsurprised feeling that helped him to think clearly.