Chapter 56
“I need a third act,” Perlmutter complained to Orson. The orange tabby blinked once, rose to his feet, stretched, and disappeared behind the sofa Perlmutter was sitting on, moving more gracefully than you’d expect from an overweight cat.
Perlmutter was too deep into his own thoughts to notice the snub. He now had sixty-two pages written. Thanks to the GPS tracking app, he’d tracked the killer last night to a Culver City address. Perlmutter knew the killer would be using the same trick that he had in Malibu—finding a darkened home to park near his victims, which meant that Perlmutter might not be able to discover where the killer had gone, but he got lucky. By the time he drove to Culver City, the killer’s car hadn’t moved. He found a darkened place where he could hide and still watch half the block, and forty minutes later he spotted a shadowy figure slipping out from behind a house. Less than five minutes after that, the GPS tracking app showed the killer’s car was on the move. Perlmutter emerged from his hiding place and made his way to the back of the ranch-style home that the killer had left. He noticed a door leading to the kitchen had been jimmied open, probably with a crowbar. Perlmutter put on a pair of gloves he had brought along and entered the house.
He found the two victims in the dining room. A man and a woman, both in their late forties, with the number 47 scrawled in blood on the wall over the man, and 48 scrawled over the woman. Like the girls in Malibu, they were naked, lying on blood-saturated carpet, their eyelids cut off, with their eyes gouged out and swapped around to give their faces a disorienting, weird effect. The woman’s breasts had been cut off and nailed to the man, and his genitals had been sliced off and likewise nailed to her. The killer had added another gruesome twist. Their legs and arms had been cut off and swapped around, with the limbs duct-taped onto the bodies. Perlmutter had smelled burned flesh when he had entered the house, and he understood then that the killer had used heated metal to cauterize the wounds from their severed limbs so the victims wouldn’t immediately bleed out.
He stared, bleary-eyed, at the clock in the kitchen area. It was now past nine in the morning. Since returning to his apartment hours ago, he had worked feverishly on his screenplay before printing out the sixty-two pages and reading through what he had so far. By the time he was done, he was nearly breathless, his hands shaking. That was how good it was. But he needed that third and final act. All of this had to wrap up soon, and in a powerful and explosive way.
Perlmutter pushed himself to his feet. He needed coffee so he could think more clearly. Once this script was done he was going to reward himself by sleeping for twenty-four hours straight, but for now, no sleep for the weary.
He made his way out of the apartment, squeezed his thick body down the narrow staircase, and trudged over to the small grocery store at the corner. Along with the coffee, Perlmutter also picked up a copy of the LA Times. He wanted to see if the police had made any headway in finding the killer.
The clerk, a young twentysomething kid with a scraggly goatee, wrinkled his nose when Perlmutter paid for his purchases. No doubt Perlmutter needed a shower. Probably a change of clothing also. Fortunately, if that was what the kid was thinking, he kept it to himself.
There was a small park two blocks away. Perlmutter wandered over to it and sat on a bench as he drank his coffee, read through the newspaper, and tried to knock some of the fuzziness off his brain. He also tried to think of what his film’s third act could possibly be, but he came up mostly empty. He did come up with one idea. A small one. He dug the burner phone he had bought earlier out of his pants pocket, and called the police.
* * *
Charlie Bogle was still in Seattle and Fred Lemmon was on a flight back from Chicago, which left Morris, Walsh, and Polk to sit in Morris’s office and debate the pros and cons of releasing the drawing they had to the media. The pros were obvious—get the killer’s face out there. The cons were also obvious. They’d be alerting the killer that they were onto him, which would give him a chance to slip away, or disguise himself so he could continue his killings. Although Polk was being difficult, they’d pretty much come to a consensus to release the drawing when Morris received a call from Doug Gilman.
“I just got off the phone with Roger Smichen. Our psycho killed again,” Gilman said, his voice angry and dejected. “This time in Culver City. A middle-aged couple. He broke into their home late last night and butchered them.”
Morris put his cell phone on speaker so Walsh and Polk could listen in, then asked, “The same way?”
“I haven’t been there, but according to Smichen these killings are nearly identical, except this time he went further.” There was silence where Morris imagined Gilman clenching his jaw and fighting to compose himself. When the mayor’s deputy assistant spoke again, his voice sounded tight, almost strangled. “This bastard cut off their limbs and mixed them up. He heated up a frying pan and used that to cauterize the wounds.”
“How are they held in place?” Polk asked.
“What?”
“The arms and legs. How’d he attach them to the bodies?”
“Duct tape.”
“Yeah, makes sense,” Polk said. “You can use duct tape for almost anything.”
Walsh shot him a withering look while Polk returned her an innocent smile. Morris asked Gilman whether the killer scrawled numbers on the wall.
“He did. Forty-seven and forty-eight. And he used the victims’ blood, just like he did last time.”
“Tell us about the victims,” Walsh asked.
“As I said, a married couple. They were killed in their home. Husband was chief counsel for one of the studios—”
Morris felt a coolness filling up his head. His voice sounded distant to his own ears as he interrupted Gilman and asked whether the victims were named Tim and Regina Pence.
“That’s right. How’d you know that?”
Polk groaned and muttered, “Ah, jeez.”
The coolness in Morris’s head had intensified and was now almost an Arctic blast. “Tim Pence was a client,” Morris said.