The Crescent Arms was a two-story courtyard-style apartment building with exterior stairs and walkways. When Ellis and Long got to apartment 2B, Ellis used a key to open the door without knocking. One of the Bobbsey Twins was sitting on the couch watching the Home Shopping Network on the flat-screen. She didn’t appear surprised to see them. She kept glancing at the screen, where there was a sale countdown on a high-powered blender that could be bought in three easy payments.
“Where’s Ashley?” Ellis asked.
“I’m Ashley,” the woman said.
“Sorry. Where’s Annie?”
“Her bedroom.”
“Does she have a date? I didn’t see the bear.”
The arrangement was that a small teddy bear was put in the window next to the door when the apartment was a no-fly zone because of a customer visit.
“No, I think she’s just sleeping or something,” Ashley said.
“Well, go get her,” Ellis said.
“Chop-chop,” Long said.
Ashley got up off the couch. She was wearing only a hot pink T-shirt that was barely long enough to cover her hairless crotch. It said “Porn Star” on it, the letters stretched by her unnaturally large breasts. She quickly disappeared into a hallway that led to the back bedrooms. Ellis and Long didn’t talk while they waited. Ellis stepped over to the IKEA table in front of the couch and turned off the television with the remote. He then went to the coat closet next to the front door, unlocked it, and opened it, revealing the video surveillance equipment stacked on a steel rack. There was a nine-inch screen on top and he was able to rewind and play back surveillance video from the twins’ most recent dates. Each of their bedrooms was outfitted with two pinhole cameras — one in a ceiling fan, the other in the fake thermostat on the wall by the door. There were two more cameras hidden in the living room.
Ellis put the playback on fast-forward so he could quickly speed through all the sex scenes. At intervals he stopped the playback and froze the image so he could get a look at the customer. He usually did this while they were still clothed so he could make judgments on their wealth and possibly gain hints about their professions. All that went out the window when guys got naked. Usually the rich guys were fat and ugly. Ellis needed to see them with their clothes and confidence still on. He’d also look for wedding rings or the indentations on fingers where the wedding rings had recently been.
Long came and looked over his shoulder but said nothing. Ellis scanned through five separate dates. Two singles for each of the twins and then a threesome on the couch in the living room. None of the johns looked like good candidates to Ellis.
“Anything?” Long asked.
“Doesn’t look like it,” Ellis said.
He set the equipment back up for recording and closed and locked the door. When he turned around, Ashley and Annie were sitting together on the couch. Annie wore neon pink panties and a black bra. It was like they were sharing parts of one outfit. They were both bottle blondes with breast enlargements and spray-on tans. Their lips were distended beyond natural bounds. There wasn’t a thing about them that looked real and lately there had been some buyer’s remorse. The videos on the free porn sites were about five years old now and filmed before the girls had made some of the supposed enhancements to their bodies. Putting up fresh videos wouldn’t solve the problem, because in porn, five years was a lifetime. It was a young woman’s game. In this case, honesty in advertising would backfire.
“It’s time to move again,” Ellis said. “So, tomorrow morning get out your suitcases and pack your shit. We’ll come by to move you at two.”
“Where are we going?” Annie asked in a whiny voice.
“A place off of Beverly by the Farmer’s Market. It’s big, there’s a lot of units, and maybe we’ll get to stay longer this time. There’s a Starbucks over there that you can walk to.”
He paused to see if they would complain. They didn’t. They knew better.
“Okay, then,” he said. “What’s on the schedule today?”
“We’ve got a double at ten tonight,” Annie said. “So far that’s it.”
“How much?”
“Two.”
Ellis showed his disappointment with his silence. The threshold for a double was supposed to be three grand.
“Better than nothing,” Long said.
Ellis glared at him. He had just ruined the chance for Ellis to make it a teachable moment.
“Let’s go,” he said instead.
He walked to the door. Before opening it he turned back to the twins. “Remember, tomorrow at two,” he said.
21
Dr. Hinojos had put three different profiles into a file for Bosch. All were redacted in very minor ways — primarily with the names of victims and witnesses blotted out with a black marker and no crime scene photos attached.
The second profile in the folder came from the James Allen case. This was obvious to Bosch because Haven House was named in the summary and because of the date of the murder. Bosch put the other two aside and dove in. He had always found a similarity in all the profiles he encountered as a detective — whether they came from inside the department’s Behavioral Science Unit or the FBI’s profilers in Quantico. There were only so many ways to describe a psychopath and the unstopped urges of a sexual predator. But after reading the profile on the Allen murder, he reread the Sheriff’s Department profile on the killer of Lexi Parks — done before DNA found in and on the victim was matched to Da’Quan Foster. These profiles carried some basic similarities but their conclusions about the killer from each case were distinctly different.
The summary on the Parks case had pegged the killer as a nascent sexual predator who had likely stalked Parks and meticulously planned the deadly attack, only to be disorganized in carrying it out and to make several mistakes, chief of which was leaving his DNA behind. The culmination of his plan in murder left the killer feeling guilty enough to attempt to psychologically cover up his crime by placing the pillow over the victim’s face. This was indicative of a sexual predator who was new at killing, who had moved up the ladder from other lesser sex crimes to murder — possibly for the first time.
The profile of the murderer of James Allen was different. Because of the victim’s occupation, it was concluded that the killing came out of a prostitution arrangement and was not motivated by a compulsive psychosexual urge. But as with the Parks killing, there was evidence of guilt being a motivating factor, this time with transference — blaming and punishing the victim for the killer’s own actions. The profile suggested that Allen’s killer was likely a closeted homosexual male who hid his sexual orientation behind the front of a heterosexual lifestyle. It was further surmised that the killer was probably married with children and a career, all of which he would consider threatened by a sexual liaison with Allen. The feeling of threat was turned into rage and then directed at Allen for “exploiting the suspect’s weakness.” The killer blamed Allen and sought to end the threat to his family and livelihood by eliminating him. Discarding the body in the alley underlined the suspect’s dismissal of Allen as nothing more than detritus. He was human trash left in the alley for pickup.
It was also suggested that this killer could have acted in such a way before. Details of the prior murder that Ali had mentioned to Soto were contained in the profile but also redacted. The victim’s name was not given, but a summary of the facts of the case showed both eerie similarities and stark differences.