O’Connor’s remarks about Denise were brief. She’d been the one to find her sister’s body. The detective considered her too ill to be a suspect.
Jacob guessed no one had taken the time to interview her at length.
No reason to. They wanted the Creeper, not the Creeper Avenger.
He sat at his desk, waved the mouse to clear away the screen saver.
Denise Stein was off the grid. No known address. No criminal record. The phone number Ludwig listed for her went to somebody else’s machine.
Was she institutionalized? Jacob doubted a doctor or administrator would confirm that over the phone. He’d have to show up in person to plead his case, hoping he wouldn’t be forced to jump through legal hoops.
He rummaged in the kitchen for anything within three months of its expiration date, returned to the living room with Lev’s Special Shish Kabab: seven martini olives impaled on a bamboo skewer. He pulled them off slowly, chewed slowly, concentrating on their meaty texture to avoid looking at the crime scene photos stacked atop the coffee table.
He’d been saving those for last, wanting to first explore both Ds’ perspectives thoroughly. Only then could he objectively assimilate the raw visuals.
A lie. He didn’t want to assimilate them.
He stalled some more, tossing the skewer into the sink, wiping his hands on his pants, pouring himself another drink. Easing over sideways; using his peripheral vision to make an abstraction of the first corpse; and then he looked unsparingly at Helen Girard, seeing her as her boyfriend had encountered her on the afternoon of March 9, 1988.
Nude, legs spread, facedown, the bed pushed aside to make room for her on the floor.
The autopsy report noted friction abrasions at wrists and ankles, though she’d been unbound at the time of discovery. Diffuse bruising on her lower back suggested the killer had been kneeling atop her, yanking her head up to slit her throat down to the spine.
Arterial spray striped the baseboards, the bed-skirt, formed an oblong stain in the carpet that stretched toward a windowpane hazy with daylight.
The bulk of the blood had pooled around her, soaking into the pile, drying black, suspending her over a depthless chasm.
To forestall nausea, Jacob asked himself questions.
Why tie her up, then free her? Afraid of leaving evidence? A little fight to heighten the excitement?
Cheapskates unwilling to spring for more than one piece of rope?
He moved on to Cathy Wanzer.
Likewise prone on her bedroom floor, likewise tied and subsequently freed, throat cut.
Similar spatter pattern, a long arm of lifeblood growing from a matte black hole.
Another point of similarity: the rest of her apartment was pristine. She hadn’t put up a fight. Maybe they’d told her they didn’t intend to harm her, as long as she complied.
That changed with Christa Knox. Signs of a major struggle in the bedroom — a toppled nightstand, a closet door listing on a broken hinge — spilled into the living room, where her body was laid out, blood spreading erratically on the Spanish tiles, sending out tributaries and plugging gaps in the grout.
She’d awoken and seen them.
Known what was coming.
Tried to run.
Further proof of her will to live: her knees and forearms were severely bruised, a chunk of hair missing at the base of her skull.
She’d wrenched and kicked and died all the same.
No semen recovered.
They got spooked — too much noise?
Patty Holt was a wisp of a woman, but like Christa she had fought back, making it to her kitchen for her last stand. The nonvictim blood Divya had mentioned showed up along the broken edge of a ceramic plate.
Good for you, Patty.
Jacob didn’t think it coincidental that the killers had next chosen to break pattern. By then the story was front-page news. They could no longer take stealth for granted.
So while the first four murders had occurred between midnight and three a.m., Laura Lesser died around ten in the morning after coming off a graveyard shift at the VA. Sitting in her den in pajamas, watching television, eating breakfast.
Jacob pictured her leaping up at the sight of two men.
Dropping her grapefruit juice.
A bowl of cereal had survived unscathed on the arm of the sofa.
Howie O’Connor had diligently recorded that its contents had turned to mush.
Alarmed by Laura’s absence at work, her best friend and coworker dropped by, peeking in windows when her knocks went unanswered. The house had a second bedroom Laura used as a walk-in closet; piles of shoes had been kicked aside to make space for her body.
Shortly thereafter the city had gone into lockdown.
Four months of peace.
When the killers resumed, it was with a return to form, a nighttime break-in, gore and damage confined to Janet Stein’s bedroom.
The following morning, Denise Stein let herself into the apartment with her duplicate key. She often crashed on her sister’s futon when things got rough for her at home. The two of them had made plans to go shopping for jeans; seeing the bedroom door closed, Denise assumed Janet to still be asleep. She helped herself to a Coke, waiting half an hour before growing impatient enough to enter without knocking.
An already troubled young woman, walking into that.
What the hell was he going to say to her?
The seventh murder was mildly anomalous. Inez Delgado was the second victim whose body did not yield semen samples; her wrists showed no evidence of rope abrasions; and while she’d been found in her bedroom, the rest of her house had been trashed, too.
Jacob’s initial impression was that she’d attempted to escape, knocking things over before fleeing back to the bedroom to try and lock herself inside.
Differences in the wound and spatter patterns put the lie to this. Inez had been stabbed in the abdomen fifteen times, painting the bathroom with blood and bile. Smear marks ran from there, down the hall, to the foot of her bed, where the relative lack of pooling around her throat led the coroner to suggest that it had been slit postmortem.
A need for consistency? Six cut throats demanded a seventh?
Katherine Ann Clayton was missing for a week before an upstairs neighbor called the landlord to complain about a smell.
Sherri Levesque, a single mother, had dropped her five-year-old at his grandparents’ for the weekend.
Jacob’s coffee machine clicked on.
Despite having worked through the night, despite having had minimal sleep in three days, he felt wired. That alarmed him; the only person he knew who could work uninterrupted for days on end was his mother, in the midst of a manic high.
There was no blood test for bipolar. No definitive genetic marker.
He tiptoed around folders and bottles to his bedroom and set an eight-thirty alarm.
Stripping naked, he slid between tangled sheets, stared at the popcorn ceiling.
Wide, wide, wide awake.
He couldn’t disentangle how much of his agitation had to do with the crime scene photos, how much had to do with the physical side effects of being awake for so long, and how much stemmed from the anxiety of knowing he’d been awake for so long.
He sat up. Time for a nightcap.
Morningcap.
Whatever works.
Chapter twenty-one
Denise and Janet Stein’s parents lived in Holmby Hills, their Dutch Colonial manse set back behind pittosporum hedges. Jacob rang the intercom. The maid came on to inform him that nobody was home.
“Try the club.”
He turned to face a woman with pink flotation-device lips, pink Juicy Couture tracksuit, a Yorkshire terrier on a pink leash with a pink Swarovski-studded collar.