He had seen her.
He’d seen the letters, too.
He was seeing things, and they were disappearing. Blame Sam and his eyes. Blame Bina and her mind. Sooner or later, he thought, he’d have to get himself to a doctor. An ophthalmologist. A shrink. For now, he wrote his own prescription: facts and liquor, maximum strength.
By eleven-thirty p.m., four Post-its fluttered on the wall over the desk.
Lucinda Gaspard, New Orleans, July 2011.
Casey Klute, Miami, July 2010.
Evgeniya Shevchuk, New York, August 2008.
Dani Forrester, Las Vegas, October 2005.
The information Jacob had access to online didn’t indicate what direction the vics had been facing when they died.
Put that aside and the cases matched up.
Four women, mid-twenties to late thirties, living alone. Fresh-faced and smiling, the new quartet was right at home alongside his nine.
Four first-floor residences, four doors with no forced entry.
Sixteen rope burns, two for each of eight ankles and eight wrists. No ropes found.
Eight rapes, four vaginal, four anal.
Four facedown bodies.
Four cut throats.
Four cold cases.
Zero offender DNA recovered, except in New York, where traces of vaginal semen had turned up. In the last case, Vegas PD noted that their vic’s fingernails had been closely trimmed, far down enough to draw blood, maybe to eliminate skin cells. No mention of that in the other files.
Maybe the evil twins had grown more careful over twenty years. In the New York case — Shevchuk — he guessed broken condoms.
If the sample taken from Shevchuk was filed in CODIS, why hadn’t Divya gotten a match to Mr. Head?
Jacob wondered if he was reading too much into the similarities, desire deepening shallow footholds. He needed to speak to the other Ds, find out more about body positioning. Midnight. Too late to call.
Perfect hour for building speculative castles, though.
None of the investigators had linked their murders to the Creeper — understandable, given the lack of proximity and the fact that the story had been out of the news for two decades.
Nor had they linked any one of them to any other. He couldn’t fault them for that, either.
What jumped out at Jacob were the dates. If even one of the four murders belonged to his bad guys, the duo had been active within the last seven years, possibly as recently as last year.
Increasing the likelihood that the remaining guy, Mr. Head’s partner and possible slayer, was alive.
Out there.
The first killing had gone down in 2005. Bad guys checked the paper like anyone else. More often, and more carefully, if they were looking for information about themselves. Could be they’d read the 2004 Times article about Ludwig retiring and decided it was safe to resume operations — just not in L.A.
New Orleans, Miami, New York, Las Vegas.
Each of those cities had its fair share of action and distraction. They were places you could go and be anonymous.
Find a cheap weekend fare, carve up a girl, come home?
Open-ended searches for the cities and dates yielded too many hits. Putting quotes around each city and year created the opposite problem.
The months of the murders clustered, somewhat: July through October. At this point, anything remotely patternlike was tempting. Human nature to see faces in the clouds or Jesus in oatmeal.
NCIC had only listed one sample found on Shevchuk, raising another possibility: one of the bad guys had gone solo. Or found another partner who hadn’t left semen.
The latter seemed a big risk to take. Three can keep a secret if two are dead. And one or both of the Creepers had been careful enough to evade capture for this long. So if one bad guy had found a new buddy, he’d have to be persuasive.
I’ll cut off your head persuasive?
Jacob checked his e-mail yet again, hoping for an answer from Mallick about the 911 recording. Instead, a message from Phil Ludwig caught his eye.
The subject heading: Your bug.
From my friend the entomologist, best I could do, sorry.
Below it, a forwarded e-mail.
Dear Phil,
We’re good thanks, Rosie sends regards. Exciting news, we booked Costa Rica.
Jacob skipped down several paragraphs of chitchat.
So anyhow about your friend’s beetle. I agree w/ you, v. hard to tell from low-res images. Head shape and size (if he is remembering it correctly, that seems pretty big to me, people get spooked, he probably overestimated)
Jacob frowned. He knew how big the beetle was; he’d held it, and it had easily stretched the length of his palm.
He kept reading.
put me in mind of rhinos but none that I know a lot about, I’m no expert, maybe O. nasicornis (see below) but coloration is wrong and never seen one in Southern California. Could be someone’s pet that got out? Too bad you don’t have it, you could name your own species lol.
Take care
Jim
The attached photo showed top and bottom views of a beetle. The head was spadelike, with a prominent central horn. Jim was right, though: the color was off, a shiny reddish brown instead of jet black.
Jacob typed O. nasicornis into Wikipedia and read about the European rhinoceros beetle, a member of the subfamily Dynastinae (rhinoceros beetles), of the family Scarabaeidae (scarabs). It ranged in size from about three-quarters of an inch to an inch and a half, and its maximum of two and a half inches appeared too small. Where his beetle’s underside shone like onyx, O. nasicornis sprouted long red hair.
A pet?
He started clicking through links, hoping he’d luck onto a match, but it swiftly became clear that Ludwig’s estimate of a hundred jillion species was conservative. He did learn that large horned beetles were indeed kept as pets in parts of Asia, and that they were pitted against each other for money, like pit bulls or gamecocks or tiny exoskeletal MMA fighters.
At least he knew what to get Bar Lady for Valentine’s Day.
He closed out the browser and went around the apartment, checking his roach motels. They didn’t seem to be doing much business, so he tossed them out and determined not to think about it anymore. He had enough on his hands without worrying about an infestation that, for all appearances, had cleared up on its own.
Chapter twenty-six
The first detective he reached was Tyler Volpe, from Brooklyn’s 60th Precinct. He sounded friendly enough, if somewhat guarded. His interest jumped when Jacob mentioned the Creeper.
“That was what, eighty-five? Eighty-six?”
“Eighty-eight. You were around then?”
“Me?” Volpe laughed. “Shit. I was nine.”
“It made an impression on you,” Jacob said, thinking of himself at that age.
“My dad was on the job, and I remember him discussing it with my mom, like, ‘Thank God it ain’t mine.’”
“It’s mine now.”
“Huh. All this time, still nothing?”
“For the most part. You mind telling me about your vic?”
“I mean, it was like my second homicide. I almost shit my pants.”
“That sounds about right.”
“The brutality read like a mob thing, which made sense, cause she danced at one of those nightclubs in Brighton Beach where the Russian guys in leather jackets hang out. Also did some stripping on the side. She was studying to be a dental hygienist. Nice girl, but a cocaine vacuum, so we figured she ran up a bill she couldn’t pay, or jilted the wrong guy.”