City of Fire (24 page)

Fellows rinsed himself off and reached for the towel. As he got dressed, he couldn’t help thinking about Finn’s plan for tomorrow. He thought Burell deserved an end that inspired anyone and everyone that gazed at the result. Something that stood out as special and made a statement. But he was also wondering where Finn had run off to without even saying good-bye. Finn seemed to enjoy keeping secrets and living a life of mystery. To this day Fellows still didn’t know what his friend did for a living and even had doubts that he was using his real name.

Was it Mick Finn or was it something else? As much as the name brought a smile to his face, what parent would name their kid after a drink that was doctored? Even poisoned?

Fellows shook it off as he slipped on a shirt and felt the fabric rubbing against his hardened biceps and baby-smooth skin. He always thought that Finn had something to do with the security business. Maybe that’s why he took off so quickly. Something had gone wrong in the security business tonight. When they’d first met, Fellows thought he made a mistake talking about his fantasy life because Finn looked like a cop. His eyes were dark and serious and stared back at him with a certain coplike reach. But after Fellows broke the ice, Finn opened up, revealing their common purpose. Over the nine months they had known each other, he’d never seen Finn dressed in a uniform or carrying any of the usual paraphernalia that went with a coplike job. Just that old briefcase.

Fellows zipped up his gym bag, strode through the lobby, and stepped outside. The fog had rolled in and he could smell the ocean in the cool night air. As he started down the sidewalk, a woman passed by with her eyes riveted to the ground. She seemed to be in a hurry. Too preoccupied with
something to stop and talk. Fellows paused to look at her figure. Her long legs. But when he caught the scent of her perfume, all he could think about was Harriet Wilson. The smell of her skin and the way she’d brushed up against him in the lab today.

His heart started pounding. By the time he reached the car, he thought it might break through his chest. He pulled into traffic, ignoring the BMW with the quick horn and pulling up to the light. His house was to the left, a mile down the road, but it might take hours before he finally got to sleep. When the light turned green, he made a right and headed for the hills. Then he switched on the radio, found the news station, and lowered his windows. He could feel the air swirling about his shaved head. He could feel the tingle.

A man has needs, he told himself. Particularly a man in love with a fallen angel. Maybe the drive would ease the pain. Maybe the wind would cool him down. If not tonight, then tomorrow.

IT had taken four hours, but Lena managed to get through her share of the case summaries. A share that amounted to 141 sexual assaults of women between the ages of sixteen and eighty-four living in Los Angeles County. It had been exhausting. Another long night.

She popped open the fridge and poured a glass of wine. Taking a quick sip, she glanced at her answering machine. When she got home, there had been a message waiting for her from Deputy District Attorney Roy Wemer, and she still found it disturbing. It had been an angry message, an insane message, something Wemer would never have left at the office. At first it sounded as if he was reprimanding her for being out of the loop on the DNA hit. But as he worked himself into a frenzy and began shouting, she realized that he was blaming her for losing the Lopez case. At one point toward the end he even claimed that he could still put Lopez away in spite of the science. When Wemer called her a stupid cunt, she looked back at the machine and hit
STOP.

Unfortunately, the district attorney’s office in Los Angeles kept a record of wins versus losses. They kept score, usually dragging out the results for Election Day. It was a dangerous statistic to keep because it encouraged people like Wemer to go for the win above all else. But it was also a meaningless statistic that many cities had long since abandoned in favor of getting it right. For Lena, keeping score pointed to the darkest side of her job. Something she’d talked about with her friend in the Cold Case Unit on more than one occasion.

DNA analysis of cases closed prior to the use of the technology indicated that 25 percent of the time they got it wrong. The reasons varied. Whether the problems originated at the investigative level or pointed to the prosecution and defense, an informant or eyewitness that lied or just got it wrong, or even a bad jury or an incompetent judge, the problems were systemic. While every inmate Lena ever met claimed to be innocent, one out of every four people locked up in a cell might actually be telling the truth.

Wemer was out of control. And his message might be worth keeping.

Ejecting the tape, she flipped the cassette over and snapped it back into the machine, rewinding Side 2 to the beginning. But as she closed the lid, she noticed a number jotted down on the pad by the phone and tried to place it. It took a moment before she remembered the message she’d picked up on Saturday night. Tim Holt, her brother’s writing partner, wanted to get together. She had been too busy to return the call.

She checked the time. Just after midnight. Odds were that Holt would be out, either hitting the clubs or playing at one. It was the perfect time to leave a message. They wouldn’t have to talk, and Lena wouldn’t have to say no when Holt asked to reopen her brother’s studio again. She dialed the number. After four rings his answering machine picked up. Holt sounded as good as he did when he’d left that message two days ago. He sounded
clean
, and she suddenly felt guilty for playing phone tag with her brother’s best friend.

“Tim, it’s me,” she said after the beep. “Sorry I wasn’t here when you called. I’m working on something right now, but maybe we can get together next week. I’ll try calling you back tomorrow around lunchtime. If not, let’s talk this weekend.”

Her CD player shifted from John Coltrane’s
My Favorite Things
to Pete Jolly’s
Little Bird.
After switching off the phone, she listened to Jolly crank it up on the piano and made a mental note to call Holt back when she knew that he would be in. Then she walked around the counter to the table by the window in the living room, sipping her wine and
glancing at the summaries she’d set aside for further inquiry. She hadn’t expected to find any, but three stood out. In each case the rape was interrupted before it got started, so DNA evidence wouldn’t be available. All three women were under thirty-five and lived alone. But what caught Lena’s eye were the MOs, which seemed to mirror their working theory of how Nikki Brant had met her end.

Each victim had been awakened in the middle of the night by a man entering her bedroom.

In the first case, the perpetrator was chased off by the victim’s dog. In the second, the victim switched on the light after hearing the window open and the man ran off. Unfortunately, he wore a ski mask and no identification could be made. But it was the third case that Lena found the most horrific. The doer had actually removed his clothing and was slipping beneath the covers on the other side of the bed when the woman fled the room and her house and started screaming for help on the front lawn.

All three cases had the look and feel of a match. Something she couldn’t ignore or deny, particularly in light of what Dr. Bernhardt had said this morning. Romeo had graduated from rape to murder and was just getting started.

Lena set her glass down, lining up the summaries in chronological order. Like the murders, two of the three rape attempts had occurred a month apart. And in all three cases the assaults took place over the six months prior to the first murder. Flipping open her weekly planner, she paged forward until she reached the calendar. The first sexual assault attempt covered October of last year. While November remained blank, the second and third attempts occurred in December and January. February was blank as well, but Teresa Lopez had been murdered in March, and Nikki Brant was killed one month and three days later. If the CDs found at the murders were in play, the only symphonies she couldn’t account for were No. 2 and No. 5, which might be in the stack of summaries Sanchez had handed out to the rest of the team.

Lena reached into her briefcase and fished out the
Thomas Guide
, a book of street maps that covered the entire
county. On the back of the front cover was a foldout map that she had never used before. Pushing her wineglass aside, she laid the map out on the table and grabbed a marker. Maybe it was more than a theory. Maybe they weren’t late on the investigation, but so early that no pattern could have been established before this moment.

A serial rapist in transition, she told herself. Romeo graduating to murder.

She found the approximate location of the first rape attempt on the map and wrote down the date and victim’s name. After locating the next two, she added Teresa Lopez and Nikki Brant to the map and stood up for a better look.

The Lopez murder was the anomaly. It stood all by itself thirty miles on the other side of town. Although she wouldn’t discount it, she could feel the weight of the map speaking to her. Nikki Brant’s murder and each of the attempted rapes had occurred within two miles of each other on the Westside. If she joined the dots, the intersection was Venice Beach.

Lena didn’t have much experience with sexual assault cases, but she had worked enough robberies to know that the locations of the crime scenes represented the doer’s
comfort zone.
She also knew that what she was thinking right now wasn’t based on a guess, a feeling, or even the wine she’d consumed.

The doer got started at the beach because he lived there. He knew the escape routes if something went wrong. He knew the quickest way back home if he was being chased. And that’s exactly why in at least one case he wore a ski mask. The doer had concealed his identity because he was afraid someone might recognize him in his comfort zone. The place where he walked the streets, got out of his car to fill it with gas, and pushed a cart through the grocery store.

The doer, perhaps Romeo himself, lived somewhere near the beach. And if the doer really was Romeo, then something happened two months ago that had pushed him over the edge.

She looked back at the map. Something was troubling her, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. When her eyes glided over the marina, it dawned on her what it was.

Avis Payton lived within the doer’s comfort zone.

Although Novak agreed with her, Lena wondered if she’d made the right decision. After confirming the woman’s story with the bank and verifying that her father was a cop in Salt Lake City, Lena made the call to Pacific Division rather than requesting a surveillance team from the Special Investigation Section. SIS was their primary surveillance unit but didn’t usually get the callout unless they had a confirmed suspect to watch or tail. Keeping an eye on a location based on a one-month-old purse snatching seemed like a waste of resources. Even so, as Lena found Payton’s street on the map and estimated the short distance to Venice Beach, she couldn’t help but worry.

The phone rang. It was 1:00 a.m., and she wondered if it might not be Novak or even Rhodes. She glanced at her hand as she reached for the phone and thought about what had gone down in the elevator with Rhodes. His eyes probing her fingers. What she was thinking when he zeroed in on her hips and legs. Something inside her was hoping that it would be Rhodes.

“Sorry about my timing,” a man was saying. “Hope I didn’t wake you. But this is Teddy Mack with the FBI and it’s the only time I’ve got.”

She sat down on a stool at the counter. The slider was open and a breeze was playing with the map on the table.

“I can barely hear you,” she said. “Where are you?”

“A place you never want to go. It’s the middle of the night and it’s still over a hundred and ten degrees. I’m standing outside my motel. The only place I can get a signal down here is a three-foot section in front of the lobby. If I lose you, I’ll call back.”

He sounded uncomfortable and tense. She could hear papers rustling in the background and thought about the heavy wind. Life in the desert required a shell.

“Have you had a chance to look at the report?”

“I’ve made some notes,” he said. “I think you’ve got a problem and wanted to talk.”

The FBI was calling it a
problem.
Lena eyed the three summaries laid out on the table.

“I guess you could call it that,” she said. “A problem.”

“Whatever it is, you got it. Let’s start with the porn and why he accessed it at Nikki Brant’s house.”

“He used a stolen credit card to enter the Web site,” she said. “We can’t figure out why he’s hanging around after the murder.”

“We’ll get to that,” Mack said. “But don’t you think it’s curious that he would hide behind a stolen credit card when he could have easily joined the site and looked at it on his own turf without risk or consequence?”

Rhodes had asked the same question at their meeting with Dr. Bernhardt.

“You think it’s a mistake,” she said.

“Not necessarily. But I think it’s proof that what we’re looking at could cut both ways. Either this guy’s into porn, or he’s on some kind of bent mission and wants to keep it at a distance. The religious themes he’s using to pose the bodies make me think he wants to keep the stuff at a distance. He doesn’t want it in his home. What I’m saying is that it’s possible Romeo was drawn to those two Web sites for a reason that might not be so obvious. Did you find the cardholder?”