“Far away.”
“That’s interesting,” he says.
She smiles despite her discomfort. “Do you have any water, please?”
Enoch takes the yellow flower around his neck and shakes it, producing a sharp sound.
A bare-chested man silently materializes in one of the doorways.
“Water, please,” Enoch says.
The man disappears.
Asham is still staring at the flower. “What is that?”
“A bell, silly.”
“I’ve never seen one before.”
“Why not?”
“I just — I haven’t. They don’t have bells where I come from.”
“Far away.”
“Yes, far away.”
“That’s interesting,” the boy says.
“Can I try?”
Enoch removes the thong and hands it to her. She shakes the bell, but the sound she produces is muted, nothing like the clear, piercing ring.
“No, no,” he says. “Like this.” He grasps the bell by its top and rings. “See?”
A new bare-chested man steps through a different door.
The boy giggles and hands the bell back to Asham. “Now you.”
She rings.
A third bare-chested man appears.
“Does that happen every time?” she asks.
“Oh, yes. Try it and see.”
Asham summons two more men, one of whom jostles the first man, hurrying in with a shining vessel that coughs water onto the floor. The three other men run to wipe it up, while the boy giggles and claps his hands and says, “Again, again,” and Asham complies, ringing the bell, bringing yet more men and resulting in confusion and dancing and more spilled water, and then footsteps approach and all the men withdraw rapidly to the wall, standing at attention as a new voice, tight with exasperation, cuts through the commotion.
“I’ve warned you: if you can’t stop that nonsense, I’m going to take it away.”
He emerges wearing a cape of skin, and carrying a flaming staff, and immediately she sees how the years have changed him. He is harder and leaner, and though he wears his hair long, it has receded at the front, so that the cord of scar tissue bisecting his forehead stands out. The sight of it causes Asham to swoon.
“It wasn’t me,” Enoch says. “She asked to try it.”
Cain does not reply.
“He’s right,” Asham says. Another wave of light-headedness overtakes her, more powerful than the last. She digs her fingernails into the flesh of her palm. “Don’t blame him.”
“Leave us,” Cain says.
The bare-chested men disperse.
“You, too.”
“Why?” Enoch asks.
“Go.”
The boy frowns but obeys.
Save the memory of the bell and the hiss of flames, the room is perfectly still.
Asham says, “You stole his dog, too.”
Cain smiles. “You must be tired.” He draws out a wooden stool. “Why don’t you sit down?”
She cannot move. Her body tingles unaccountably. Her knees knock together.
The torches shrink. The room shrinks and spins.
She has so much to say.
She faints.
Chapter twenty
The Creeper’s paper trail reflected the case’s long and complicated history, as well as the march of technology and the passage of time.
There were black-and-white photographs, color photographs, photographs that had been digitally scanned and reprinted. Interview transcripts and autopsy reports and forensic reports, enough documentation to reconstitute a medium-sized forest.
The earliest reports were typewritten or stippled by a dot-matrix; then smudged, the result of being whipped too quickly from the mouth of an inkjet. Most recently, the laser print was faint, as department-wide cutbacks had turned the wait for a new toner cartridge into a Soviet bread-line.
He counted forty-three different handwritings, some a single margin scrawl, a couple that filled page upon page — the key players on the LAPD end.
Howie O’Connor wrote in a blocky script that mirrored his no-nonsense approach. He was a grinder, a list maker, plotting the locations of the murders on a map to rule out a geographical pattern.
He was also bit of a bully in the interrogation room, cutting people off in mid-sentence when they strayed from answering his questions.
In Jacob’s mind, this was a cardinal sin for a detective. The idea was to get the other guy talking, and to do that, you had to shut up, let the mind wobble where it wanted. The best interviewers were like therapists, silence their sharpest tool.
Google offered a couple of pictures that might or might not have been O’Connor. It wasn’t an uncommon name. Nothing about a sexual harassment scandal. Hushed up or never publicized. These days they’d be blogging about it in Uzbekistan before the guy had time to zip up his pants.
Ludwig had called O’Connor a good cop; maybe the Creeper wasn’t his finest hour.
Maybe the impatience and witness groping were both signs of the same malaise, a decent man anesthetized by horror and buried in bureaucracy.
Maybe the case itself had driven him over the edge.
Jacob put the brakes on that train of thought. An atlas of Howard O’Connor’s psyche would tell him nothing about nine murders.
Aside from their youth and clean looks, the victims had little in common. They did not run in the same social circles. Cathy Wanzer and Laura Lesser both patronized a bar on Wilshire and Twenty-sixth, but everyone from boyfriends to bartenders swore up and down that the women didn’t know each other, and after keeping an eyeball on the place for months, O’Connor had chalked it up to coincidence.
MO was another story. That was consistent.
All nine lived alone, in unalarmed one-level houses or ground-floor apartments with a larger-than-average amount of space separating them from neighboring buildings.
No sign of forced entry.
Looking back, Jacob could understand the intensity of the public panic.
A monster waltzing into your home, slaughtering you, vanishing.
Hard as it was to imagine by today’s standards, prior to the fifth murder, nobody had thought to check the semen samples against each other. Hence there was no hint that O’Connor had considered the possibility of two killers until frustratingly late in the game.
Jacob tried to bear in mind the constraints of the era. In 1988, DNA testing was new, fancy, expensive. Its admissibility in court was subject to debate; the decision to spend the time and money would have been far from automatic.
In 1988, the watchword was end gang violence.
The collective computing power of LAPD, circa 1988, could fit on Jacob’s smartphone.
O’Connor deserved credit for requesting a test in the first place, more credit still for connecting the murders as quickly as he had.
It was evident in the files when Ludwig had taken over: Jacob recognized his neat handwriting from the monarch butterfly shadowbox. His touch was lighter than O’Connor’s. He asked the right questions — which was to say, the questions Jacob would’ve asked — gathering up loose ends and snipping them off.
Whatever his advantages as an investigator, however, they were more than canceled out by the intervening decade. Memories had weakened, details blurred. People had died, or left town, or grown rigid with resentment at being asked to revisit the worst moment of their lives yet again. Some were outright hostile, refusing to talk until they saw evidence of progress.
His master list of interviewees ran to thirty-six pages. A handful of names were starred. Jacob didn’t know if that meant they deserved special attention or could be ruled out.
Denise Stein was not among them.
The floor of the apartment was quilted with paper, bottles of Beam placed at strategic points, enabling Jacob to reach out and grab one without looking. He took a swallow and began crawling around, hunting for Howie O’Connor’s file on the Stein murder.