Chapter 39

Los Angeles, the present

“You were right about the guy being a hired gun,” Joe Penza said. “A hard case by the name of Ed Blount. He was a freelancer whose home base was in LA, but he did jobs throughout the country.”

Morris vaguely remembered the name. Back in 2001 he had looked at photos and mugshots of every suspected hitman, but he didn’t remember Blount resembling the 1984 sketch.

“He was arrested for capital murder,” Morris said as he pulled that fact from a deeply stored memory. “A contract killing.”

“That’s right. He was convicted, too.”

“You recognized Ed Blount from the sketch?”

“Forget that drawing,” Penza said. “The only thing that paper’s good for is picking up after your mutt. Ever hear of Vittorio Capotondi?”

“No.”

“That figures. He was well before your time.” Penza’s eyelids lowered and his facial muscles relaxed as he reminisced. “The man was a genius, a true craftsman. He made masks you couldn’t tell were masks unless you were right next to the guy wearing it. Blount would’ve had several made for himself, and he’d be wearing one if he was out doing a hit where he could be seen. So like I said, forget that drawing.”

“So let’s say the sketch is worthless—”

“Which I’m saying it is.”

“Okay, so how’d you know it’s Blount?”

Penza sat back heavily in his chair and began rubbing his thick lower lip with his thumb. “This is all off the record.”

“Yeah, we agreed to that already.”

“I still want you imagining me saying the word hypothetical over and over again so I don’t have to keep saying it.”

“Agreed.”

Penza breathed in deeply, inflating his barrel chest, then letting the air out slowly like a tire that had been punctured. He nodded to himself, as if making up his mind.

“After those ferkakte murders happened, my old man heard from a freelancer who was offered a job to kill a rich guy’s wife.”

Morris said, “The rich guy being Donald Trilling.”

“Yeah. This Trilling character had special requirements for how his wife had to be done. Some real sicko stuff that ended with her having a live rat stuffed down her throat. The freelancer turned it down. It was too sick for him to want anything to do with, but when Trilling’s wife turned out to be one of the women killed by this so-called Nightmare Man, he put two and two together and figured that someone else took on the job.”

“Name of the freelancer?”

“Uh uh. You don’t need it and you’re not getting it.”

“Okay. Forget that. How about you explain why this would matter to your old man or this anonymous freelancer?”

Penza’s jaw dropped as if he were incredulous. “You think we’re savages?” he asked. Anger flashed in his eyes, and his voice sounded strained as he explained, “There’s what’s right and what’s wrong. You want someone iced, okay, that’s your business, but you’re going to torture and kill four other women in a sicko way to hide the hit? That’s just wrong and can’t be tolerated. My old man thought so, and so did I.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “It had to be dealt with.”

“How’d you figure it was Blount?”

“My old man did some digging. I won’t say exactly what he found out, but it pointed to Blount, and it made sense he’d be the guy. I wasn’t kidding before what I said about him being a hard case. A guy with ice water instead of blood. When the client, Trilling, was found hung from his closet to make it look like a suicide, we knew for sure it was Blount.”

“Why was that?”

Penza smiled. “His signature move.”

“So it wasn’t just bad luck Blount got picked up for another hit?”

Penza’s smile stretched another inch. “Like I said, Blount had to be taken care of, but he wasn’t the type of guy you send a couple of boys after. You do that with a guy like him, and there’s a better chance your boys get sent back in pieces. Something else had to be done.”

“So you framed him.”

“Me, personally? Nah. But let’s just say Blount must’ve been surprised when the cops found a gun where they did. Or a shirt buried in the hamper with the target’s dried blood on it.”

Morris remembered something about Ed Blount from his research in 2001. “He died in prison,” he said.

“Yeah, he did,” Penza said. “When those murders started up again that second time, I wanted to see if any freelancers got the bright idea to hide a contract in those killings, because my old man was right. Someone willing to do that needs to be permanently shut down. I can guarantee you none of the women killed in 2001 had contracts on them. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but whoever took over for Blount did so for strictly personal reasons, not business.”