Chapter 34

Perlmutter almost drifted off, and if the guy he thought of as Mr. X hadn’t stopped to stand under the full moon as if he were soaking in the moonlight, Perlmutter might’ve missed him leaving the house. He woke up fully then, and watched Mr. X in silhouette as if he were a werewolf baying silently at the moon. Perlmutter sucked in his breath and pushed himself deeper into the bushes where he was hiding. It was a good thing he did, because Mr. X slung his bag over his shoulder and passed by so closely that Perlmutter could smell his muskiness. There was something almost bestial about the odor that came off of him. He watched as the man continued on toward the front gate, and no more than a minute later he heard what sounded like Mr. X climbing over it.

* * *

Earlier that day Perlmutter had gone to this odd little spy shop in downtown Los Angeles and overextended his credit cards, buying several items that he thought would be useful: binoculars, a lock pick, and a GPS tracking device. He would’ve also liked to have bought night goggles, but they were just too much money.

After his trip to the spy store, he made a quick stop at a doughnut shop before heading to Simi Valley. He’d originally thought he’d offer one of Sheila Proops’s neighbors a percentage of his movie if they’d let him use their house to spy on her, but three of the houses surrounding hers had For Sale signs. When he investigated the house right across the street, he found it empty. It made sense. Who’d want to live that close to a serial killer? He walked around to the back of the house, and put the lock pick to work. He’d never used one before, but the guy at the spy store had demonstrated how to open a lock with it, and after several minutes and a lot of sweat, Perlmutter succeeded in unlocking the back door.

All of the furniture had been cleared out except for a card table and a folding chair, which he guessed a realtor had left for open houses. He had to hide his car so it wouldn’t be sitting in the driveway for anyone to see. He moved fast, speed walking into the attached garage, pulling the garage door up, rushing outside so he could drive into the garage, then finally pulling the garage door down after him. He was close to hyperventilating as he stumbled out of his car and stood bent over with his hands resting on his knees. After several minutes he found he could breathe more normally. No sirens, no police banging on the front door, no sign that a neighbor had seen him do this. He reentered the house and stood to the side as he peered out the front window. It looked as if he was in the clear. In a whoosh, he let out his breath, not even realizing he’d been holding it.

He brought the chair up to the second level, and chose for his stakeout what must’ve recently been a little girl’s room, given the unicorns and the little princess painted on the wall. He used his binoculars to watch Sheila Proops’s house. If there was one thing Perlmutter had little trouble doing, it was sitting like a lump.

Much later, after it had gotten dusky out, Proops’s garage door lifted open and Mr. X drove a dented-up Honda out of it. Perlmutter stumbled to his feet then, and in his rush to his own car, left behind the remaining three doughnuts from the dozen he’d bought earlier. Mr. X had a solid-minute head start over Perlmutter, but fortunately he drove the speed limit and stopped at all the stop signs (something Perlmutter didn’t bother to do), and Perlmutter was able to catch up to him and follow him to Malibu.

By this time it had gotten dark out, and Perlmutter cut his lights and watched as Mr. X dumped his car in the driveway of a darkened house where the owners must’ve been gone for the night, and then carried a gym bag over his shoulder as he made his way on foot to the house where Perlmutter was now hiding. It was just ten o’clock when he had reached the gate. Perlmutter watched as Mr. X rang the intercom buzzer, and after several minutes of no one answering, threw the bag over the gate and climbed over it. Perlmutter then drove back to where Mr. X had dumped his car, and attached his GPS tracking device to the undercarriage of the Honda. He then drove around until he could pull the same trick that Mr. X did, parking his car in the darkened driveway of an owner who was gone for the night. After that, he jogged back to the property where Mr. X had rung the intercom buzzer. He was huffing and puffing badly by the time he got there. The gate was about four feet high. He waited until his breathing slowed down, and then somehow he was able to get over the gate without making too much noise.

Perlmutter quickly dropped to his hands and knees and moved carefully after that, staying where he’d be shielded from the moonlight. He didn’t so much see Mr. X as sense his presence, and Perlmutter then shrunk into the bushes and waited while the cool night air dried the perspiration covering his body. Forty minutes later the lights turned on in the house, then twenty minutes after that he heard what sounded like high school girls laughing as they raced to the ocean. It was only after the sounds of their laughter faded that Mr. X emerged from his own hiding space. Perlmutter could see him in the moonlight as he made his way to the back of the house.

* * *

Now that Mr. X was gone, Perlmutter crawled away from the bushes and clumsily got to his feet. His legs had fallen asleep, and he stamped his feet while trying to slap some feeling into his legs. Once the pins-and-needles feeling subsided, he cautiously made his way to the back of the house. He got onto the veranda, then moved silently toward the sliding glass doors, stopping only when his nose was an inch away from them. He strained to peer through the glass. The lights were set on dim in the great room, but something about the floor looked wrong. It was as if there was a puddle of something back there. Perlmutter tried the sliding door and found it unlocked. An uneasiness filled his chest as he walked into the house and continued on to where he thought he saw a puddle. In the dimness of the room, he first saw the expanding purplish-black puddle, then his gaze lifted and he noticed the numbers scrawled on the wall: 43, 44, 45, and 46. Only then did he see the four naked girls lying under those scrawled numbers in what he guessed was a large pool of blood. They were dead. Perlmutter knew that right away. Anyone would’ve known that right away. But there was something very off about the way they looked. Their eyes were all open, but they seemed too large and mismatched. Their breasts also were mismatched. Perlmutter couldn’t quite make sense of what he was seeing. He left to find the light switch. After he dialed the overhead lights to their maximum brightness, he returned to the dead girls.

Under the brightened lights, Perlmutter could see that the viscous liquid the girls were lying in was indeed blood, and that the numbers on the wall were also painted in blood. The girls looked so much paler in the brighter lights, and as Perlmutter studied them more intently, he realized why their eyes looked so wrong. Their eyelids had been cut off, and the eyes in their sockets weren’t their own and weren’t matched up. The killer (because now Perlmutter thought of Mr. X only as the killer) must’ve dug out their eyes and swapped them around. Perlmutter, while avoiding the pool of blood, moved closer, and he saw that their breasts had been nailed to their bodies. As with their eyes, the killer had cut off their breasts and had swapped them between the girls, leaving them mismatched.

He felt an intense coldness filling up his head. If this were a clichéd serial-killer movie, he’d be retching his stomach out, but this wasn’t some clichéd movie. Perlmutter walked away from the dead girls and sat down heavily on a cream-colored leather sofa. He took out his cell phone and started to dial 911, but instead of hitting the call button, he turned his phone off.

If he called the police, they’d want to know why he was there, and if he told them about the killer, they’d want to know why he didn’t call them earlier when he knew the man was hiding outside the house. Perlmutter knew there was something very wrong about him, and not just because the man was staying with Sheila Proops. But did he really believe the killer had come to this house to butcher these girls? He saw him ringing the buzzer earlier. Didn’t that mean they were expecting him? The killer might’ve climbed over the gate, but wasn’t it possible that his intention was simply to innocently surprise them when they returned?

Perlmutter sat numbly as he tried to figure all this out. He struggled to make sense of the thoughts he’d had when he was hiding in the bushes and heard those girls laughing as they ran to the beach. When Perlmutter saw that man leaving his hiding place and head toward the back of the house, he had imagined sickening things happening to those girls once they returned from the ocean, but at the time didn’t he blame those thoughts on an overactive imagination? Spending his day following that man had seemed surreal. Dreamlike, almost as if he were watching a movie. Did he really believe that man was going to torture and kill those girls? But if not, why else was he drawn to the house to see what had happened?

As Perlmutter tried to sort through all of this and understand his role in the girls’ deaths, he realized he didn’t feel much of anything. He didn’t even feel sorry for the horror those girls had gone through. Slowly, he accepted why that was. They didn’t seem real anymore. The killer had left them looking like grotesque movie props. Even though he had only hours earlier heard them laughing with so much life and vitality, after what the killer had done to them it was impossible to think of them as ever being living, breathing people.

Perlmutter knew if he called the police he’d be publicly shamed for not doing anything to save these girls. He also knew he might find himself in serious legal trouble. That wasn’t why he didn’t call them. No, if that was all it was, he would’ve taken his lumps, even if it meant Jane thinking the absolute worst of him. But something else stopped him from completing the 911 call, and for a long time he couldn’t figure out what it was. When the answer finally hit him, it was like a lightning bolt. He understood fully then what it was his subconscious had picked up on to keep him from calling the police, and he started trembling. Not out of fear, but excitement. Because he saw clear as day the new direction his movie had taken, and he understood the impossibly unique opportunity he’d been handed. A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

There was nothing he or anyone else could do for these girls. His movie was an entirely different matter.

Perlmutter found a towel in the bathroom that he used to wipe off any surface he might’ve touched, and he left the house.