Julio did not reply.
Reese said, “The evening started out with one missing corpse. Now two are missing — Leben and the Klienstad girl. And we've found a third we wish we hadn't. If someone's collecting dead bodies, why wouldn't they keep Ernestina Hernandez, too?”
Puzzling over these bizarre discoveries and the baffling link between the snatching of Leben's corpse and the murder of Ernestina, Julio unconsciously straightened his necktie, tugged on his shirt sleeves, and adjusted his cuff links. Even in summer heat, he would not forsake a tie and long-sleeve shirt, the way some detectives did. Like a priest, a detective held a sacred office, labored in the service of the gods of Justice and Law, and to dress any less formally would have seemed, to him, as disrespectful as a priest celebrating the Mass in jeans and a T-shirt.
“Are the locals coming?” he asked Reese.
“Yes. And as soon as we've had a chance to explain the situation to them, we've got to go up to Placentia.”
Julio blinked. “Placentia? Why?”
“I checked messages when I got to the car. HQ had an important one for us. The Placentia police have found Becky Klienstad.”
“Where? Alive?”
“Dead. In Rachael Leben's house.”
Astonished, Julio repeated the question that Reese had asked only a few minutes ago: “What the hell is going on?”
1:58 a.m.
To get to Placentia, they drove from Villa Park through part of Orange, across a portion of Anaheim, over the Tustin Avenue bridge of the Santa Ana River, which was only a river of dust during this dry season. They passed oil wells where the big pumps, like enormous praying mantises, worked up and down, a shade lighter than the night around them, identifiable and yet somehow mysterious shapes that added one more ominous note to the darkness.
Placentia was usually one of the quietest communities in the county, neither rich nor poor, just comfortable and content, with no terrible drawbacks, with no great advantages over other nearby towns except, perhaps, for the enormous and beautiful date palms which lined some of its streets. Palms of remarkable lushness and stature lined the street on which Rachael Leben lived, and their dense overhanging fronds appeared to be afire in the flickering reflection of the red emergency beacons on the clustered police cars parked under them.
Julio and Reese were met at the front door by a tall uniformed Placentia officer named Orin Mulveck. He was pale. His eyes looked strange, as if he had just seen something he would never choose to remember but would also never be able to forget. “Neighbor called us because she saw a man leaving the house in a hurry, and she thought there was something suspicious about him. When we came to check the place but, we found the front door standing wide open, lights on.”
“Mrs. Leben wasn't here?”
“No.”
“Any indication where she is?”
“No.” Mulveck had taken off his cap and was compulsively combing his fingers through his hair. “Jesus,” he said more to himself than to Julio or Reese. Then: “No, Mrs. Leben is gone. But we found the dead woman in Mrs. Leben's bedroom.”
Entering the cozy house behind Mulveck, Julio said, “Rebecca Klienstad.”
“Yeah.”
Mulveck led Julio and Reese across a charming living room decorated in shades of peach and white with dark blue accents and brass lamps.
Julio said, “How'd you identify the deceased?”
“She was wearing one of those medical-alert medallions,” Mulveck said. “Had several allergies, including one to penicillin. You seen those medallions? Name, address, medical condition on it. Then, how we got onto you so fast — we asked our computer to check the Klienstad woman through Data Net, and it spit out that you were looking for her in Santa Ana in connection with the Hernandez killing.”
The Law Enforcement Data Net, through which the county's many police agencies shared information among their computers, was a new program, a natural outgrowth of the computerization of the sheriff's department and all local police. Hours, sometimes days, could be saved with the use of Data Net, and this was not the first time Julio found reason to be thankful that he was a cop in the Microchip Age.
“Was the woman killed here?” Julio asked as they circled around a burly lab technician who was dusting furniture for fingerprints.
“No,” Mulveck said. “Not enough blood.” He was still combing one hand through his hair as he walked. “Killed somewhere else and… and brought here.”
“Why?”
“You'll see why. But damned if you'll understand why.”
Puzzling over that cryptic statement, Julio trailed Mulveck down a hallway into the master bedroom. He gasped at the sight awaiting him and for a moment could not breathe.
Behind him, Reese said, “Holy shit.”
Both bedside lamps were burning, and though there were still shadows around the edges of the room, Rebecca Klienstad's corpse was in the brightest spot, mouth open, eyes wide with a vision of death. She had been stripped naked and nailed to the wall, directly over the big bed. One nail through each hand. One nail just below each elbow joint. One in each foot. And a large spike through the hollow of the throat. It was not precisely the classic pose of crucifixion, for the legs were immodestly spread, but it was close.
A police photographer was still snapping the corpse from every angle. With each flash of his strobe unit, the dead woman seemed to move on the wall; it was only an illusion, but she appeared to twitch as if straining at the nails that held her.
Julio had never seen anything as savage as the crucifixion of the dead woman, yet it had obviously been done not in a white-hot madness but with cold calculation. Clearly, the woman had already been dead when brought here, for the nail holes weren't bleeding. Her slender throat had been slashed, and that was evidently the mortal wound. The killer — or killers — had expended considerable time and energy finding the nails and the hammer (which now lay on the floor in one corner of the room), hoisting the corpse against the wall, holding it in place, and precisely driving the impaling spikes through the cool dead flesh. Apparently the head had drooped down, chin to chest, and apparently the killer had wanted the dead woman to be staring at the bedroom door (a grisly surprise for Rachael Leben), so he had looped a wire under the chin and had tied it tautly to a nail driven into the wall above her skull, to keep her facing out. Finally he had taped her eyes open — so she would be staring sightlessly at whomever discovered her.
“I understand,” Julio said.
“Yes,” Reese Hagerstrom said shakily.
Mulveck blinked in surprise. Pearls of sweat glistened on his pale forehead, perhaps not because of the June heat. “You've got to be joking. You understand this… madness? You see a reason for it?”
Julio said, “Ernestina and this girl were murdered primarily because the killer needed a car, and they had a car. But when he saw what the Klienstad woman looked like, he dumped the other one and brought the second body here to leave this message.”
Mulveck nervously combed one hand through his hair. “But if this psycho intended to kill Mrs. Leben, if she was his primary target, why not just come here and get her? Why just leave a… a message?”
“The killer must have had reason to suspect that she wouldn't be at home. Maybe he even called first,” Julio said.
He was remembering Rachael Leben's extreme nervousness when he had questioned her at the morgue earlier this evening. He had sensed that she was hiding something and that she was very much afraid. Now he knew that, even then, she had realized her life was in danger.
But who was she afraid of, and why couldn't she turn to the police for help? What was she hiding?