And now somebody else was alive inside her. She hadn’t expected that when she walked out the door. Did she really have the energy to raise another one? More and more, she leaned toward finding out.
Colin Ferguson sat in an uncomfortable chair in a windowless conference room at Torrance PD headquarters. Torrance was the biggest South Bay city, and had the biggest police department. Said department boasted the biggest buil, and said building boasted the biggest conference room, in the region. Torrance was also centrally located. It was the logical place for cops going after the South Bay Strangler to meet. But Colin had seen interrogation rooms with a warmer human touch.
Beside him, Gabe Sanchez fidgeted in his seat. Colin didn’t figure that was on account of the chair. No-chances were Gabe needed his nicotine fix. Hardly any town in California let you light up in a place like this any more. Colin had never got that particular vice. He didn’t miss the smoke-filled meetings of his earlier days as a cop. Gabe had the jones, though.
Nels Jensen sat at the head of the long table. The Torrance captain had a lacquered mat of silver hair and features that would have seemed distinguished if his eyes weren’t a little too close together. He wore an expensive suit that looked expensive. How he afforded it… was none of Colin’s business.
Jensen glanced around the room. Everybody who should have been here was. Cops were mostly a punctual bunch. As soon as the wall clock showed two straight up, Jensen got to his feet, which naturally made everybody look his way.
He nodded heavily and pawed at some papers on the table in front of him. “Well, gentlemen, I got the DNA reports this morning,” he said. “It’s official, I’m afraid. We can chalk this latest one up to the South Bay Sonofabitch.”
“No big surprise,” Lou Ayers muttered. The Palos Verdes lieutenant sat a few seats up from Colin. And he was right. The murder of Margot Keller matched the Stangler’s MO too well to leave much doubt. The bastard was back in business. Mrs. Keller-she was a widow-was seventy-three, she lived alone, she was throttled and raped, and there wasn’t a fingerprint in her neat little tract home that didn’t belong to her.
That little tract home was in Torrance, not far from the big shopping center at the corner of Redondo Beach Boulevard and Hawthorne Boulevard. One more reason for Captain Jensen to hold the meeting here. He went on, “We have got to catch this guy. We’ve got to. Every time he does another one, the media take out their knives and start raking us over the coals.”
Block that metaphor! Colin thought. He had no use for the New Yorker ’s politics, but appreciated the magazine’s wit.
“The Strangler’s made all of us look bad for way too long now,” Jensen said. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I don’t like it when the papers and the TV news calls-uh, call-me a no-good stupid stumblebum.”
I won’t make chief if they keep calling me names like that, at least not in any town around here. Those were the words behind the words. Colin heard them loud and clear. He suspected the other officers in the conference room did, too. Roy Schurz was happy as a clam being the boss cop in Orofino, Idaho. Colin was mighty glad that made Roy happy; otherwise, Kelly might still be stuck in Missoula. Even before the supervolcano went off, though, he wouldn’t have wanted to live in Orofino himself-not for all the plastic junk in China, he wouldn’t. There, if nowhere else, he sympathized with Nels Jensen.
“One of these days, the asshole’s got to slip up,” Jensen continued plaintively, a sad song Colin-and everybody else here-had also sung. “Someone will see something, or hear something, or he’ll pick a cop’s widow to go after and she’ll blow his head off with her husband’s service revolver. Something.”
That was what you called whistling in the dark. None of the cops seemed to want to meet his colleagues’ eyes. But it sparked a thought in Colin. He stuck up his hand, the way he would have in school. Jensen nodded at him.
“Have we got any idea at all how the guy picks his victims?” Colin said. “He doesn’t cruise the streets till he sees a little old lady walking along. No way-he scopes things out before he breaks in and kills ’em. So how does he find ’em? Churches? Senior centers? Facebook, for cryin’ out loud? If we can get a handle on that, we’re a step closer to psyching out what makes him tick. It’s something we haven’t tried up till now, far as I know.”
He waited to see what the other cops would think. Slow nods went up and down the table. “Gives us something to do besides cussing at the bastard, anyhow,” Lieutenant Ayers said. More nods followed.
“We can follow it up.” Captain Jensen sounded like the Pope approving something a cardinal had said in an ecumenical council. If he thinks I’m gonna kiss his ring, he can kiss my ass, Colin thought. “No way to know if we’ll get any leads from it, but I can’t see how it’d hurt.”
The first thing Gabe did when they got outside after the meeting finally broke up was light a cigarette. The next thing he did was say, “You had a good idea there. Mr. High and Mighty shoulda got more turned on about it.”
“Nah.” Colin shook his head. “The only ideas that turn him on are the ones he gets himself.” Then a reporter bore down on him-the press knew the South Bay Strangler had struck again. Since the Strangler had struck in Torrance this time, Colin could convincingly plead ignorance. He not only could, he did. He and Gabe got to their car more or less unscathed.
He turned on the news while he was eating dinner after he got home. There was Nels Jensen, telling a TV reporter, “It seems like a good idea to me to see if we can determine how the perpetrator targets his victims. Does he search for them in houses of worship, or at gatherings of senior citizens, or perhaps even by utilizing social-networking technology? We are actively pursuing several of these possibilities at this point in time.”
Colin didn’t Frisbee his dinner plate through the TV screen. The damn set was expensive. But he almost gagged at hearing Jensen not only lift his notion but turn it into mind-numbing bureaucratese. Was it really true that no good idea went unpunished? It sure seemed to be.
He was glad when Kelly called half an hour later. She let him vent about all the different kinds of chickenshit chicken thief Captain Jensen was. She sympathized: “He’s a lousy plagiarist, is what he is.”
“Lousy is right,” Colin agreed. “It sounded a lot better when I said it.”
“I believe you,” she said. “You aren’t into bureaucratic BS.”
That was true. It was one more thing that went some way towards explaining why Colin had probably come as far as he could in policework. Every once in a while, he wished he could quit calling a spade a spade, or even a goddamn shovel. Like kidney stones, those moments soon passed.
Kelly went on, “I’ve got news, too.”
“Oh, yeah? What is it? Better’n mine, I hope, whatever it is,” Colin said.
“Well, I think so. I picked out my dress today,” she told him.
“All right!” he said. “What’s it look like?”
Her reply got more technical than he was ready for. He d the dress was long and white and had a veil. He could have guessed that much without fancy explanations. He didn’t worry about it. This was Kelly’s first marriage, after all. She was more excited about tying the knot than he was. He’d put on a tux, march down the aisle, and say Yes or I do when that was called for. Then he’d hope for the best. With her, he thought-yes, he hoped-he had a fighting chance of getting it. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t march down the aisle.
“Hey,” he said when she slowed down. “One thing I’m sure of. Whatever you’re wearing, you’ll look great. And when you aren’t wearing anything, you’ll look even better.”
“You’re impossible,” Kelly said. “Or else you’re just male. I’m not sure which.” She didn’t say I’m not sure which is worse, but Colin didn’t need to be a practiced interrogator to hear it anyhow.