City of Fire (18 page)

Lena had worked with Sample on two occasions during her stint in Bunco Forgery as a detective in Hollywood. They liked each other immediately.

“I’ve found something,” Sample said in a voice charged with emotion. “An anomaly.”

He grabbed the notes from the bulletin board, comparing them to the hand that filled in the crossword puzzles.

“It’s the way he forms the letter P,” he said. “It’s unusual. Very unique.”

Lena and Novak moved in for a closer look.

Sample beckoned them even closer. “Most people form the letter
P
in one of two ways.” He pulled a fresh sheet of paper from the drawer and grabbed his pen. “The letter
P
is essentially a line connected to a half circle. If they use two strokes to form the letter, they start at the top and make the line, then draw the half circle. If they form the letter using a single stroke, they start at the bottom, form the line, and continue around until they complete the loop.”

Lena watched Sample form the letter
P
using a double stroke, then a single stroke. There didn’t seem to be a third possibility.

“What’s the anomaly?” she asked.

He smiled. “Most people start with the line. The man you’re looking for doesn’t.” He slid the piece of paper closer and demonstrated the technique. “It’s a single stroke that begins at the bottom of the half circle and loops around to form the line.”

“How rare is it?” Novak asked.

“As good as a fingerprint. Whoever filled in this puzzle did that one, too. There’s no question about it. Every letter
P
was formed in the same unusual way.”

Lena glanced at the notes she’d pulled from the Brants’ house. “What about them?”

Sample shook his head. “Both Nikki and James Brant are right-handed. They form their
P’
s the way everybody else does. She used the single-stroke method. He forms the letter using two strokes. If the crossword puzzles are in play, then James Brant is clear.”

It hung there. Hearing Sample say the words.

James Brant is clear.

Lena’s stomach began to churn. She thought about her dealings with Brant. The way he’d played with the coffee cup and held a cigarette during their interview. The hand he used to remove the car key from his key ring when she’d confronted him at the house. Brant definitely favored his right hand. She looked at Novak and could tell that he was feeling it, too.

The heat. The fire. The train rolling down the tracks into the black.

Their eyes met and Novak grimaced. Then he mouthed those words again.

Number seven.

THREE things had kept Lena awake through the night. Three thoughts that hounded her and wouldn’t let go.

The first was that tomorrow would be a Monday, the forensic labs would be open, and they wouldn’t be working with one hand tied behind their backs. Second, they had spent yesterday afternoon searching through the RHD database for the first five kills. The effort had yielded nothing and, as a result, sparked new waves of fear that the doer remained hidden and they still didn’t have a single lead. But perhaps the real reason she’d spent most of the night tossing and turning and staring out the window was that Irving Sample’s findings offered a faint glimmer of hope.

Lena knew that it had been the work of the Questioned Documents Unit that clinched the Ennis Cosby murder case and sent Mikhail Markhasev, a nineteen-year-old Ukrainian immigrant, to jail. That it had been the side-by-side comparison of incriminating letters with known examples of Markhasev’s handwriting, the unique way Markhasev formed the letter
S
, that had turned the case in the mind of the investigators and, in the end, the jury.

If they could just find a suspect, Lena felt certain that Irving Sample had enough information to link the man to two murders. At the very least, the suspect would be off the streets long enough for them to issue a search warrant and see what turned up.

It was 6:30 a.m. The bureau was still quiet, and their meeting with Dr. Bernhardt wasn’t for another hour and a half.
Lena had come in early because she’d noticed over the past two months that the Computer Crime Section kept odd hours, getting a head start on the day and sometimes working late into the night. She already knew from phone records that the Brants’ computer had been used to access the Internet at 3:00 a.m. on the night of the murder. The doer spent two hours on the Web before the newspaper arrived and he logged off. Figuring out what he was doing on that computer seemed like the next logical step. Maybe even their only step.

Based on the same floor as RHD, the Computer Crime Section was a subsection of the Financial Crimes Division, known before the new chief arrived as Bunco Forgery. She walked down the hall to the other side of the building. The door was open, the overhead lights switched off. As she entered the darkened room, a tech looked up from a nineteen-inch flat-screen monitor and grimaced as if he didn’t want to be disturbed. He was about her age, maybe even younger, with a sullen face and hair so short she couldn’t really identify the color. He wore a cheap pair of reading glasses—the kind sold at a drugstore or bookshop—with remnants of the sticker still marring the right lens. His jeans looked as if they could use a wash, his denim shirt, a steam iron. A skateboard would have made the picture complete but she didn’t see one.

“You look lost,” he said in a snarly voice. “And I’m really busy. If you need directions, ask someone down the hall to help you out.”

His eyes snapped back to the monitor and his back stiffened. He was blowing her off.

Lena remained undaunted. She spotted the Brants’ computer on a shelf, wrapped in plastic and sealed with an evidence tag, then looked back at the tech. She had never met the man, but knew his name and had heard the rumors. Keith Upshaw had been arrested for hacking into AT&T’s computer system at the age of fifteen. The following year he found his way into American Express but was turned in by a friend before he could do anything stupid. Whether it was his age, his fear of prosecution, the private conversation he had with the judge in juvenile court, or the fact that both
AT&T and American Express offered to pay his way through college, at some point Upshaw crossed back over, graduating with honors and a degree in computer science. Now he was here, nervously tapping his sneaker on the floor and appearing totally disagreeable, yet sipping high-octane coffee from the Blackbird as he concentrated on his work.

Lena noted the logo on the coffee cup and took it as a good sign. Grabbing a chair from a second desk, she rolled it over to Upshaw’s, then moved it even closer so that she could see what was on his monitor.

“I’m busy, too,” she said. “And I’m not looking for directions. That’s my case you’re working on.”

He lifted his hands off the keyboard and shot her a close-up look. After a moment, a dark smile overtook his grimace and he laughed.

“Now I know you’re really lost,” he said.

The smile didn’t fade, and they introduced themselves. Then Lena turned and looked at the monitor.

“How far have you gotten?”

“What you’re looking at is a perfect copy of the Brants’ hard drive. A picture of their computer taken the moment the last user shut it off.”

“That’s what I’m interested in,” she said. “The last user.”

“All I can tell you right now is that he knows something about computers. The browser he was using to surf the Internet. He knew enough to delete the history and wipe out the cache. It’s gonna take some time to find out what he was doing.”

“What do you think he was looking at?”

Upshaw gave her a look as if she were crazy. “Porn. I found remnants of pictures in the system files.”

He clicked through several windows, revealing pieces of a woman’s face. An eye, a nose, and a mouth with lips so bloated from collagen injections that they looked as if they might pop.

“It’s part of a graphic,” he said. “The pieces come together to make the whole.”

“How do you know it’s porn?”

His smile deepened and he clicked open the next window without saying anything. Lena looked at an image of the woman’s swollen breasts and thought they might pop, too. She got the point, and Upshaw closed the window.

“The Web provider the Brants use is on the East Coast,” he said. “I gave them a call when I got in this morning. They promised a report within the next hour.”

“What else?”

Upshaw pulled the keyboard closer and grabbed the mouse. “He spent at least half an hour accessing files on their hard drive before he logged on to the Web.”

“What kind of files?”

“The Brants use an accounting program to keep track of their money and credit cards. The program requires a password on start-up. The last user knew the password and got in.”

“How can you tell?”

“Look at the time and dates.” He pointed to the screen. “That’s the data file. The program automatically saves your work when you exit.”

“Did you figure out the password?”

“On the first try. It was so easy anybody could have figured it out. They used their address. Nine thirty-eight. By the way, they’re broke. Thirty thousand’s riding on plastic.”

Lena thought it over. Twenty-four hours ago, hearing that someone had typed the correct password into the computer would have been another strike against Brant. But now all it meant was that the person they were looking for was educated, knew something about technology, and demonstrated a certain degree of curiosity toward his victims.

“I’m guessing it didn’t end there,” she said.

Upshaw nodded. “He went through their word processor.”

“He opened personal files,” she said. “Letters to friends and things like that.”

He laughed. “Are you a fortune-teller or what?”

She shrugged it off, wondering if she hadn’t just put her finger on a small piece of why the doer hung around the crime scenes after committing the murders. In the Brants’ case he had access to the documents stored in their computer. With
Teresa Lopez, a journal had been found in her chest drawer that was thought to be insignificant at the time. Maybe the doer got off on the intimacy, she thought. Maybe reading the private ruminations of the women he killed brought him closer to his victims and gave him a thrill.

TERESA Lopez was raped and murdered in her home in Whittier,” Dr. Bernhardt said. “Nikki Brant was found thirty miles away in her home bordering a public park. If we knew where the previous five homicides occurred, assuming they happened at all, then we could make an educated guess as to where he’s from and which side of the city you might focus on. Until then, or until he strikes again, I’m afraid all we have are snapshots of his personality based on his psychopathic behavior.”

They were sitting at the conference table in the captain’s office—the entire team, plus Lieutenant Barrera and Deputy Chief Albert Ramsey, the chief’s closest ally and the second-highest-ranking officer in the department. It was 8:30 a.m. To Ramsey’s credit, he hadn’t said a word since entering the room. Still, his presence tightened things up. Lena could feel him behind her back, sitting at the captain’s desk so that he could keep his eyes on everyone without moving his head. The bureaucracy had risen from its slumber.

“He likes to poke things,” the psychiatrist was saying. “He likes to probe his victims and torture them. And when he’s finished, he goes for the shock value by posing his victims with you in mind. Teresa Lopez was nailed to an imaginary cross. Nikki Brant was entombed in a sea of blood. This is about a guy who’s trying to make some kind of insane point that’s lost in translation. Just remember that it starts with his penis. In Romeo’s mind, his penis and the weapons he chooses have become one and the same thing.”

It was the second time in the past half hour that Dr. Bernhardt had called the man they were looking for Romeo. She wondered if the name would stick, and from the look on Barrera’s face, thought it might.

Romeo.

“I think we’re looking for a white male between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five,” Bernhardt said. “A voyeur who’s graduated from rape to murder.”

Lena took notes as she listened, even though she knew Dr. Bernhardt was giving them the boilerplate definition of a serial killer. Someone who was abused by his parents as a child. Someone who probably practiced animal cruelty as a teenager. A former victim whom no one noticed and who finally reached the point of striking back.