Maybe one of these days he’d get the lethal injection he deserved. (Colin thought he did, anyhow; he’d met only a handful of cops who opposed capital punishment.) Or maybe he’d die of old age first-he was up around sixty. The way justice worked in California, old age seemed the better bet.
None of these DNA tests was even within shouting distance of the South Bay Strangler’s genetic material. Except for rape and murder-details, details-the Strangler was a good citizen. He came from a family of good citizens, too. Or if by some chance he didn’t, his relatives were also careful criminals.
Colin muttered darkly. You couldn’t give up too soon. Just because none of these samples led anywhere, that didn’t mean some other one wouldn’t. Maybe it would come in the next batch. Wt was that song about tomorrow, tomorrow? You had to hope it looked better than today.
He’d had to try to convince himself of that too often lately. Sometimes it was true. He’d had that enormous hole in his life after Louise walked out on him. Kelly filled… some of it, anyhow. Did he love her? Did she love him? Even thinking the word scared him more than a crackhead with a shotgun. How long would he need to work up the nerve to say it?
And Vanessa had dumped (or been dumped by-she couldn’t tell the story the same way twice running, which made Colin’s bullshit detector go off) the old guy she’d been seeing. Colin came out with sympathetic noises whenever he talked to her, but he was anything but brokenhearted. The couple of times he’d met the guy, Hagop had been perfectly-almost greasily-polite. The Armenian didn’t have a record; Colin had quietly made sure of that. But the notion of Vanessa sleeping with a man his own age had still given him the willies.
So he didn’t need to worry about that any more. What she’d do next, whether she’d stay in Colorado or come back to L.A… Whatever she would do, she hadn’t done it yet. So he didn’t need to worry about it yet. So he wouldn’t.
Unless, of course, he did.
He still had plenty to worry about here at the cop shop. Not just the South Bay Strangler. His thoughts about a crackhead with a shotgun weren’t free association. Somebody with a shotgun had blown the head off a Korean who ran a liquor store near the corner of San Atanasio Boulevard and New Hampshire. That was only a couple of miles east of the station, but it was anything but a prime part of town.
Most of the time, people robbed liquor stores to get money for drugs. Most of the time, they started shooting because they were already amped to the eyebrows. That made crack and crystal meth the two leading candidates. A surveillance camera showed that the perp was African American, so crack seemed more likely. No guarantees, but more likely.
Three different news shows had run the surveillance video-including what happened when a charge of double-aught buck caught the luckless so-and-so behind the counter square in the face. “This footage may be disturbing,” they’d all said, or words to that effect. It was a hell of a lot worse than disturbing, as if they cared. If it bleeds, it leads.
With luck, somebody out there would recognize the asshole with the scattergun. With more luck, whoever did recognize him would have the nerve or the moral indignation or whatever else it took to call the police. It did happen. Not always, not even often enough, but it did.
No matter what the TV shows claimed, though, that wasn’t why they ran their “disturbing footage.” They ran it for the same reason they preempted things to show car chases: it made people watch. Once you’d said that, you’d said everything that needed saying, as far as they were concerned.
The phone rang. Colin picked it up. “Ferguson-San Atanasio Police.”
“Hey, Colin. Nels Jensen here.” Jensen was a Torrance police captain also chasing the South Bay Strangler. “Any luck on the DNA profiles?”
If there was, Nels would find some way to take credit for it. He was a pretty fair cop, but he liked seeing his own smiling face in the paper and on TV. He’d be a chief one day, and probably of a department bigger than the Torrance PD. Because he was a glory hound, Colin might have been tempted to tell him no even if the answer were yes. If he wanted yes so much, he could dwork that produced it instead of scrounging off other people.
As things were, though, Colin could say “Diddly-squat” with a perfectly clear conscience.
“Ahh, shit,” Jensen said. “I’ve got one of my sergeants plowing through them, too, but he hasn’t found anything close to a match. I was hoping you’d do better.”
Because I’m a lieutenant, not just a chickenshit sergeant? Colin wondered. At least Nels had somebody in his department checking through them. But if that hardworking sergeant did find a DNA close to the Strangler’s, two guesses who’d announce it. Not the guy who did the work. The captain who’d assigned it to him.
“I always hope,” Colin said. “I don’t expect too much, that’s all.”
“Yeah, I know that tune,” Jensen agreed. He was a cop. “Okay, I’ll check with you later-and I’ll let you know if we come up with anything juicy.”
Uh-huh. I’ll believe that when I see it. Colin kept his mouth shut there. It was usually the best thing you could do. “Right,” he answered. “Thanks.” He hung up. From the desk next to his, Gabe Sanchez raised a questioning eyebrow. “Jensen,” Colin said.
“Oh, boy.” Gabe silently clapped his hands together. “He’s got everything wrapped up in a pretty pink bow, I bet.”
“Yeah, right,” Colin said. “Torrance is looking at the DNA, too-I will give them that much.”
“Yippy skip.” The sergeant was good at curbing his enthusiasm. “I notice you aren’t saying Jensen’s doing it himself.”
“Nah. He gave it to a sergeant. Not like it’s important or anything.”
Sanchez flipped him off. “So what was his High and Mightiness doing instead? Getting his teeth whitened for the next time he goes under the lights?”
“He didn’t tell me, but it wouldn’t surprise me a bit.”
“One of these days, the guy will fuck up,” Gabe said. Colin wasn’t sure whether he was talking about the Strangler or Nels Jensen till he went on, “Assholes almost always do. They never think they will, but they do. It’s part of what makes them assholes.”
“Yeah,” said Colin, for whom that was also an article of faith. “I just hope to God he does it soon.”
When he got home that night, he grilled a couple of lamb chops with paprika and garlic powder and nuked a package of frozen mixed veggies. It wasn’t exciting cooking. It was an imitation of Louise’s, and she wouldn’t show up on the Food Network any time soon even if she did watch it. After they broke up, at first he’d eaten out almost every night. That got expensive fast, though. This saved him money, and it was more what he was used to.
Half the veggies went into a plastic icebox dish, then into the refrigerator. He wrapped half a chop in aluminum foil and stuck it in there, too. It would do for lunch when he had a day off. When he was done eating, he washed the dishes and left them in the drainer to dry-he hated drying dishes. The kitchen had a dishwasher, but using it for one person was another money-wasting joke.
He pulled out a mystery after dinner. Most of the time, he read them to laugh at them. What the authors didn’t know about police procedures would fill fatter books than the ones they’d written. Every once in a while, he had the pleasure of finding a good one.
This one seemed betwixt and between. Not silly enough to laugh at, not good enough to keep him turning pages. He tossed it aside and grabbed the remote. ESPN was showing the World Series of Poker. Poker was a fine game-he’d won several grand in his Navy days-but it was not a goddamn sport. Colin changed channels.
A talking head on Fox News bellowed his opinions to the world. Colin changed again, just as fast. He had opinions of his own, and didn’t figure he needed anybody else’s secondhand ones.
CNN was showing… What the hell was CNN showing? A long-distance shot from a helicopter. Snowy ground, with dead pine trees sticking up through the snow like whiskers on a corpse’s cheek. A big plume of black smoke climbing high in the air. Mountains in the distance.