Bleeding Out (13 page)

“This must be very frustrating for you, not having any answers or resolution. I promise we’ll keep you advised one way or another.”

Mr. Menendez was grateful, and so were the detectives once they were in their car and on the highway.

“Jesus, that was
fun,”
Noah said bitterly.

“Want me to drive?” Frank offered.

“No!” he snapped. Pointing through the windshield to an economy tire store decorated with tinsel and Christmas greetings, he ranted, “Look at all this shit! Can you believe it? It’s not even Thanksgiving yet and everybody’s got their fucking Christmas stuff up already. Jesus! Whatever happened to the pilgrims and turkeys and fall leaves?”

Frank started to return her beeper calls but thought better of it. Noah was letting off steam, and she decided to humor him even though all she wanted right now was to go home, box for an hour, slam a six-pack, and slip into a torpor.

“Well, let’s see. First off, this is L.A. There aren’t any fall leaves and it’s been a long time since I saw pilgrims around here. More importantly, though, there’s no money in Thanksgiving. Even Halloween’s a bigger moneymaker than Thanksgiving.”

“That’s my whole goddamn point!” Noah banged on the steering wheel. “Fucking prick. I swear to you, Frank, if anybody ever so much as touches a hair on one of my daughters I’m gonna kill him.”

Frank nodded solemnly. “I’ll help you.”

They drove in silence for a while, both processing the interview with Claudia Menendez. Neither would come right out and say it had been hard to watch her, and harder for Noah to ask the questions. There was a code of silence about seeing pain or feeling it. Pain was part of being a cop and it was expected to be borne stoically and without complaint. This was the LAPD—whiners were not allowed.

Frank sighed quietly, then punched a number into the cell phone. She cut a glance at Noah, who seemed somewhere else.

She poked him in the arm.

“Five bucks says you can’t eat two Big Macs and a large fries.”

“Five bucks says how can you be that dumb and still be a lieutenant?”

Frank introduced herself to Heidi Troupe’s mother on the cell phone. She reluctantly agreed to let them come over after dinner. The second number was busy. Noah picked up on his Christmas tirade again. Just before they reached Alissa Aguilar’s apartment Frank redialed and received permission for another interview.

“Two more after this,” she said to Noah, handing him the phone. Want to call Tracey?”

“Goddamn this job,” he bitched, entering his number.

The halls of the building where Alissa Aguilar lived were filled with the smells of dinner, making Frank salivate and Noah whine some more.

“Man, I can’t wait to get to those Big Macs.”

Frank smiled to herself. If Noah was hungry, he was alright.

“Maybe if you’re nice, Mrs. Aguilar’ll give you a bowl of
menudo.”

“Hey, I’m so freakin’ hungry I could even eat that brain shit at this point. Let’s get this over with quick, huh?”

But the interview with Alissa Aguilar didn’t go smoothly. Mr. Aguilar paced around the living room, frequently interrupting the questioning, or answering for Alissa so that Noah had to get her back on track and have her answer in her own words. The interview took longer than it should have, with both Alissa and Mrs. Aguilar ending up in tears and Mr. Aguilar bellowing at the detectives. They let him. They’d heard what they wanted.

Alissa’s story mirrored Claudia’s, except she’d struggled when he caught her and ceased as the towel grew tighter around her windpipe. She clearly remembered the man pulling her pants up after he’d raped her and thinking that was really crazy. And no, he hadn’t touched her anywhere else, which she thought was kind of crazy, too, ‘cause she knew guys liked “girls’ other parts.” More importantly, and this was a bonus neither detective expected, her perp hadn’t said anything to her except, “Shut up or I’ll kill you.”

“Are you sure that’s what he said?”

“Do you think my daughter’s lyin’ to you?”

“Mr. Aguilar,” Frank explained, “we have to know if he said something like that or exactly that.”

She looked at Alissa.

“No. It was exactly that. I was so scared ‘cause I thought he would, too.”

The detectives thanked Mr. Aguilar, and Frank handed him a card, asking him to call if they had any questions or if Alissa remembered something else. Mr. Aguilar ripped the card into tiny pieces and threw them in Frank’s face.

They drove on to the next interview, but at least this time they both had Mr. Aguilar to use as a whipping boy.

He was tall and strong and fast. He was an outstanding tight end. His father wanted him to get a scholarship, but his grades were mediocre at best. So he just got better and better at football, hoping that would be enough to get him into a good college. He never thought beyond playing football. It was all he knew.

Now as the defense took the field he pulled his helmet off and rested on one knee apart from the other players. The cheerleaders caught his eye, and he watched them jumping up and down inside their little outfits, trying not to think about that now, trying to watch the opposing team, to concentrate on the game. There’d be plenty of time for the other later, when he was home tonight, alone in his bed. He felt himself stirring and frowned, forcing himself to focus on the other team’s receivers. Waiting.

Foubarelle was fifteen minutes late for his meeting with Frank. When he finally showed, he kept his lieutenant waiting with a phone call. Frank glanced at several small but carefully hung pictures of fleshy, billowy nudes. She’d been to a party at Foubarelle’s house, where his penchant for nudes was unmistakable. His walls were lined with reproductions of Renoirs and Botticellis, all showing carefully posed women in various stages of disarray.

She studied one of the pictures from her chair, wondering how it differed from a pin-up. Frank was pretty sure that if someone of a lesser rank had these tacked above their desk, they would be considered sexual harassment; in a captain’s office, it was art.

At last Foubarelle hung up and smiled broadly.

“How are we doing, Frank?”

She felt like she was in a dentist’s chair. Slapping a progress report on his big, clean desk, she announced, “We’ve connected the Agoura perp to what looks like at least nine rapes and two other murders, besides Peterson.”

Foubarelle had been about to pick up the report, but now he froze, as if the fat folder on his desk had suddenly turned into a rattlesnake. Frank artfully concealed her amusement.

“What did you say?”

“I think our boy’s got a whole string of assaults behind him.”

“In our jurisdiction?”

Frank shook her head. “A rape at Crenshaw, but the rest are in Culver City.”

Foubarelle sagged with relief, then he jerked up again. Like a fucking puppet, Frank thought.

“Is this on the streets yet?”

Again she shook her head, and again her boss was obviously relieved.

“What are you doing?”

“There are gaps in the case reports. If this is the same guy, we’re dealing with a major offender. And he’s crafty. I want to do some profiling on him, use what I learned at Quantico. I submitted a Request for Information to VICAP and I want to talk with Richard Clay, the shrink at Behavioral Sciences, get his input.”

Frank paused, waiting for objections, but there were none.

“We’re going to have to reinterview everyone. That’s going to take a lot of time. Plus I’d like to recanvass the area where the original incidents took place, see if we can’t come up with something new, find someone that wasn’t hit before. We’re going to need additional manpower if you want us to move on this with anything resembling speed. There was a witness to the third rape. He’s coming in this morning to do a composite. I think we should plaster this guy’s image all over L.A. We’ll need extra staffing just to handle phone calls on that, and then we’re going to need help following up on all the leads.”

Foubarelle was nodding as if his neck had just gone elastic.

“Do we know what the perp looks like?”

“Maybe. The wit didn’t actually see the assault go down, but he saw a man who fits our description peeking into the women’s room right around the time the rape went down.”

The captain’s face clouded. The DA would throw that back in their face like spit in a headwind. Frank explained it was the best lead they had and that she didn’t intend to use the witness as supporting evidence.

“And this is going to raise a shit storm, but we need to get the physical evidence from the two prior murders transferred into our custody. The forensic work was minimal on each of the cases, and I’m going to submit them for everything. I hope we can pull some DNA off their clothes that will match what we’ve got. If we could get a fire under CCPD’s ass, that’d be helpful.”

“I’ll make some phone calls,” Foubarelle said pompously, adding,
“I
know you’re going to burn me for overtime on this. Aren’t you?”

Frank shrugged. “It’s your call, but more people makes better odds.”

“Alright. How soon do you think we can get this wrapped up?”

Her wooden expression didn’t change, but Frank wondered if Foubarelle had just dropped down into his seat from Mars.

“I really can’t say, John.”

“Give me an estimate,” he wheedled.

She knew he wanted a number for the press. “I can’t. We could get a call right now from someone who turns us on to the guy, or we might look for years and never catch him.”

“Never
is not an option, Frank.”

“All I’m saying is I can’t tell you we’ll have a suspect in custody by noon next week. We’re doing the best we can with what we’ve got. Get the extra personnel, get the perp visible, show people we’re moving on this, and it’ll look good.”

Being a man who easily confused sound and motion for action, Foubarelle liked that.

“Alright. You’ll get your people. What else?”

She wanted to say, “A boatload of luck,” but answered instead, “Dedicated hot line.”

Foubarelle nodded, jotting a note.

Joe Girardi, her predecessor, had fought tooth and nail with the previous captain, and even though Foubarelle didn’t know shit about homicide investigation, Frank had to grudgingly admit he knew how to pull strings to get what he wanted. Especially if he was in peril of looking bad. She played on that fear of his, and it usually gave her what she wanted—case resolutions—and that made Foubarelle a happy man.

Leaving his office, Frank wondered why she didn’t feel more victorious. In the squad room she told her detectives to have a good weekend because they were going to be spending the rest of their careers going door to door in Culver City.

A couple of hours after their shift ended, Noah and Frank were creeping along Manchester Boulevard. An injury accident had shut down two lanes of traffic on Florence, and Manchester was getting clogged with the overflow.

The detectives were on their way to interview the last rape victim. Five out of the eight families had consented to having their daughters reinterviewed, which Frank considered pretty good odds. If the testimony of the remaining victim was similar to that of the other girls, it would corroborate what they already knew: it was looking more and more like the same man was responsible for both the rapes and murders.

But where are you?

Frank had taken to spending downtime inside this guy’s head.

She’d fallen asleep last night on the couch in the den, imagining him lurking in the park, patiently waiting for just the right girl to hit on. While Noah drove, Frank again indulged in her new pastime.

We’ve established a lack of confidence, so you’re probably not going to be economically successful. But you do have a car. Have to the way you’re moving these girls around. It’s probably an older car, a practical model. You’re a young man, so maybe it’s your parents’ car. Probably not a sibling’s car
—
that would be harder to get hold of. You need more dependable wheels. We’ve ruled out friends and girlfriends. I bet you’re a loner, that you spend more time with fantasies than people—

“Hey,” Noah interrupted, “did I tell you Les made two jump-shots last night?”

It took Frank a moment to pull her thoughts together.

“What?” she asked, rather dreamily, and Noah cut her a quick glance.

“Are you alright?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“I don’t know. You look…weird.”

She ignored him even though she felt weird. Frank was trying to clear her head by studying the two men in the car next to her. A song with a hard bass line beat inside their car. She wondered what percentage of hearing loss they were incurring. The driver felt her staring and turned to glare. Frank’s arm was resting out the open window, and the driver rolled his window down too.

“What you lookin’ at, bitch?”

He had two blue teardrops under one eye and a partially shaved head with a gang tat on the back. Frank grinned widely, showing teeth, and smoothly pulled her hand in under her jacket. The
cholo
must not have liked what he saw in Frank’s eyes because he just sneered and looked ahead, but he made sure to roll his window up.

“Friend of yours?”

“They’re all my friends, No. I’m sworn to protect and to serve.”

Practice hadn’t gone well, and his father had snarled at him all the way home.

“You think you’re smarter than me now, don’t you?”

“No, sir.”

“Think you know more than your old man?”

“No, sir.”

“Well I’m not too old to take you on and you’re not too big.”

They pulled into the garage. His father tossed the keys at him.

“Wait for me in the office,” he growled before slamming into the house.

Had it not been for dread, the boy wouldn’t have felt anything as he dragged himself into the little locked room. He’d stopped crying years ago and had never imagined fighting. His father joined him after ten long minutes, his scowl replaced by an excruciating smirk.