Happy Wok near Sherman Commons was far from happy at just after 4:00 in the morning, though the all-night Chinese spot did indeed smell like a greasy skillet. Behr walked in to find two wrung-out kitchen workers sitting at a back table playing cards, and no customers besides Jonesy, who was looking like all kinds of bad news, sitting with Shantae Williams, a broad, strong-bodied African American woman in her late twenties or early thirties. She had long, twisted hair that could have been a weave, and when she gazed up at Behr it was with rheumy eyes that said she was on something.
As Behr reached the table, Jonesy blocked the other chair before he could sit, and he saw it wasn’t going to be a long or friendly chat.
“Tell him what you told me,” Jonesy commanded Shantae.
“I saw that freaky white dude,” Williams said, a cigarette rasp to her voice.
“Okay,” Behr said, “why was he freaky?”
“He just is.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Plain. Just a face. A hat. But weird, you know?”
Behr didn’t know. “Where?”
“Up on Tenth, east of Sherman, I think. I’s walking.”
“What was he doing?”
“Sitting.”
“Sitting?”
“You talk to him?”
“Hell no.”
“License plate?”
“Nope.”
“What kind of car?”
“Blue one.”
“Color was blue. The kind?”
“Four doors. American style. Kind of nice.”
“Model, make?”
“Don’t know, I ain’t in the detective squad. I ain’t fucking five-oh.”
“When was this?”
“Couple hours ago.”
Behr gritted his teeth. Those hours were most likely very costly.
“What happened in between?” he asked.
“I had things needed doing. I forgot, then I remembered.”
Behr looked to Jonesy.
“Don’t eye-drill me,” Jonesy said. “She called me and I had to track down your number. Now you know what she knows, and I can forget all about your irritating ass, right?”
“I’m gonna miss you too,” Behr said, then turned to Shantae Williams.
“Anything else?”
“Not unless you wanna go somewhere and give it a try.”
“What?”
“Go for a roll, big boy,” she said, and half laughed. “Fitty-dollar ticket to heaven.”
“Tempting,” Behr said.
She shrugged and Jonesy piped up again.
“Pay for her shrimp-fried rice. Least you can do.”
Behr sighed and reached for his money.
“It was a long time ago, you’re sure this was the same guy you saw near Kendra Gibbons that night?”
Shantae’s eyes momentarily cleared and her jaw set.
“I’m a hundred percent sure this is the stock-same motherfucker.”
Behr had his window open, cold air slapping his face, as he drove the streets in a grid pattern searching for a kind of nice, American-style, four-door blue car piloted by a freaky white dude. It was fairly hopeless. Oncoming cars were just glaring headlights until they passed. Almost everything was closed for the night. Very little life or activity of any kind was taking place at this hour. Even if this guy was the guy and he had been out, why wouldn’t he be home in bed or just generally gone by now?
He kept up the grid though, wondering what he’d do when he’d exhausted the bordering streets and had nothing else to try. That’s when he turned onto 10th just east of Sherman and saw some motion in a strip center. Any type of action was too much at this time of night, so Behr drove toward it. He saw two cars pull out—neither one of them blue or American made. And just as he got there he saw a squat Asian man get out of an SUV and enter a business, which was open, and happened to be a massage parlor. Behr got out of his car and followed him in.
Bells on the door chimed and canned Asian spa music greeted him when he walked in, but that was the only thing soothing about the place. Two young Korean tough guys with rooster-like haircuts and bad skin leapt toward him the minute he was inside. One grabbed him by the arm with one hand, and Behr saw he held a rusty five-iron in the other. The other guy held a putter, though they weren’t looking to play eighteen holes. Behr pummeled his arm free from the first guy’s grip and shoved him, sending him toppling to the floor.
The guy with the putter raised his weapon, and Behr charged him before he could swing. They crashed into the wall as the first guy got up and rejoined the fray. Behr slammed the putter wielder into his friend and used their momentary imbalance to drop and reach for the Mag Pug on his ankle, when an aged woman behind the counter screamed out in frantic Korean. The guy with the putter lowered the club and stepped back, the one with the five-iron squared up with the club still raised while Behr stood straight and opened his hands at chest level.
“Is that him?” the squat man, in his fifties, asked of Behr.
“No,” came the answer from the older woman.
“No,” echoed another female voice from behind the older pair. Sitting on a stool was a petite Asian girl with dyed blond hair. The hair color wasn’t her distinguishing feature at the moment. Rather it was the swollen cheekbone and black eye she sported.
“We closed now,” the squat man said firmly to Behr, “you get out, come back some other time.”
“I’m not a customer,” Behr said. “What happened here?”
The old lady spoke in Korean, but the squat man seemed to ignore her.
“You not a cop,” he said. “We know the cops around here.”
“Not a cop,” Behr said. “What happened?”
Now the young tough guy with the putter spoke. “A asshole beat our cousin and we gonna crack some fucking skull.”
“I think I may be looking for the same asshole,” Behr said. “Can I talk to her?”
None of them answered for a moment, then the girl spoke in Korean and slid off the stool.
“I talk to you,” she said, and crossed to a couch in a sitting room. Behr followed.
“You might want to get some ice on your face,” Behr offered.
“I already did that,” she said in a sad voice that made Behr feel for her.
“What’s your name?”
“Jasmine,” she said. He doubted it was her real name, probably the one she worked under.
“How’d it go down, Jasmine?” Behr asked.
“Guy come in right after my shift start. I don’t see him come in, I in back. He ask for me.”
“By name?”
“He ask for blonde,” she said. “I the blonde.”
“You ever have him before?”
She shook her head. “Most white guys his age okay. Not him.”
“We go in back. He no want to take off clothes. He no want nothing. He say he want to hit me. He say he pay me,” Jasmine said.
Behr suddenly felt the bit in his teeth. The guy had probably spotted Jasmine in an online ad, or on the street or someplace else and followed her, thinking she was his type—which she was, albeit not a natural blonde, and that’s when Shantae Williams had seen him.
“What’d you say?”
“I say: you joking. He say: this no joke. I say: fuck no. He say: it gonna happen, I pay. I say no. He say he gonna do it.”
“How’d he expect to get out of here clean?” Behr wondered aloud.
“I don’t know. I scream, my cousins kill his ass. But he knock me out,” Jasmine said. “He a asshole. He a motherfucker.”
“Did you call the police?” Behr asked, doubting it due to the nature of their business.
“No police,” a male voice said.
That’s when Behr noticed the two tough guys and the squat man had drifted over. They weren’t menacing him now. They were just interested.
“Can you describe him?” Behr asked. “Was he plain looking, wearing a cap? What color hair?”
“He don’t got no hair.”
“No hair,” Behr repeated, feeling an excited stab in his lungs at a piece of potentially strange information. “So he was bald, or …?”
“No hair, man. None. He got this weird wig under the hat. He draw on eyebrows with a pencil.”
Behr didn’t speak for a moment, as he felt possible understanding washing around him like an insistent tide. There had been no DNA recovered on any of the scenes, and he had already found a potentially logical reason for how that could be thanks to Prilo. But no hair fibers belonging to a perpetrator had been recovered either, on any of the victims, at any of the sites, even from Quinn, on whom victims’ hair had been found. Now Behr felt he knew why.
“He wear a rug, like he have cancer or some shit, but he don’t seem sick,” Jasmine went on. Behr wondered if the guy had that medical condition that caused hair loss—he couldn’t recall the term at the moment—then one of the tough kids spoke up.
“Why you looking for him?”
He turned and considered the kid. Would it do more good for Behr to pretend he had a girlfriend or sister who had been beaten up by the guy he was looking for? Without much thought, Behr abandoned the idea of a pretext and just told him:
“I’m a private investigator tracking a missing girl. I think this guy may be killing women. I’m trying to catch him.”
There was the sound of Jasmine crying out in fear at what might’ve been, then it went quiet for a beat, before a burst of a staccato Asian dialect between the men filled the room and a decision seemed to be reached.
The squat man was the one who spoke next. “You come.”
He crossed the sitting room and disappeared through a door into the back. Behr followed, and the two young guys followed him, and he wondered if he was walking into some kind of ambush. But the door led into a cramped office dominated by a desk that was completely covered in an avalanche of paperwork and a battered computer.
One of the young guys sat down and his fingers flew over the keyboard, bringing up split-screen images of several security cameras.
“These no supposed to be here. Very illegal. For safety of girls, to protect from entrapment,” the squat man said.
Or to blackmail patrons, Behr thought.
“You don’t say nothing,” the squat man cautioned. Behr nodded his assent.
The images came from half a dozen small rooms and showed a few massages, of varying states of legitimacy, in progress. Most of them had taken place earlier and had been digitally logged. It was possible one or two were happening live. There were even cameras rigged in the bathrooms, and in one an Asian woman with long black hair was in the shower copiously washing her crotch. As the kid typed, the images from one room were played back with highspeed scrubbing, and Behr recognized Jasmine entering her space, which had Chinese restaurant give-away calendars stuck all over the walls, a burning incense stick and candle, and a single pink vinyl massage table with a pillow on it.
Before long the older woman appeared in the doorway with a man, the man, behind her. She sent him in and then left, and the tough kid let the images slow to regular speed. Behr watched as the man stepped inside. He was just beyond medium height, perhaps five foot eleven, squared off and solid looking, but it was hard to tell because of his tan canvas coat and roomy-cut khaki pants. On the monitor, Jasmine smiled at him and closed the door. There was no sound, but it appeared she offered to take his coat. He shook his head and kept his hands jammed in his pockets as he sat on the edge of the massage bed. The camera position was high, probably cut into the ceiling or placed in a light fixture or a vent, so the brim of the man’s beige-colored baseball cap obscured his face. Despite there being no truly identifying factors, Behr found something familiar about the man.
Jasmine stood across from him and gestured for him to lie down. The man shook his head. He said something to her, reached for a back pocket, and pulled out his wallet.
“Freeze it there,” Behr said. The kid stopped the clip. Behr stared at the open wallet, trying to see a driver’s license or other identification, but the image was hopelessly small and would lose resolution if it were blown up to any decent size. “All right, run it,” Behr said.
The man continued with his wallet, taking out two bills, placing them on the massage bed and putting away the wallet.
“So this guy had never been in before?” Behr asked.
“Never,” grunted the squat older Asian man.
“Those are hundred-dollar bills.” It was Jasmine peeking in from the doorway of the office.
“What did he say to you?” Behr asked.
“He say he want to punch me, like I tell you.”
The Jasmine on the computer monitor grew agitated, while the squat man spoke in Korean and the real Jasmine in the office averted her eyes. Behr glanced back to the monitor to see the khaki-clad man rear back and nail the poor girl in the side of the face with his clenched right fist. Her head jerked and her neck whiplashed, then she went stiff and collapsed in the way that knockout victims do—like a felled tree and without her arms extended to help break the fall.
The man loomed over Jasmine’s unmoving figure, and his right hand went straight down the front of his pants and he began tugging. After a moment Jasmine’s legs started twitching, and the man pulled his hand out. Whether he was finished or not was hard to tell.
“The hundred-dollar bills,” Behr said, feeling a surge of excitement over the possibility of a fingerprint. But almost as if the man on the video heard him, he picked up his bills and pocketed them.
“Shit,” Behr breathed.
Then the man looked around the room, spotted a small folded towel on the edge of the massage table, took off his cap, and swabbed his face with it, and in the moment he moved the towel and replaced the cap, Behr realized he’d found his few frames of a chance. Then the man ran out, wiping the doorknob with the towel on his way.
“Freak motherfucker!” the tough kid who wasn’t working the computer said.
“How would you feel about calling the police with this?” Behr asked. Maybe Breslau and his resources could help track the guy down.
“Fuck the cops,” the kid on the computer said. Behr looked to the older squat man. All he saw were dead eyes and the man shaking his head emphatically no.
“You find him, we pay you to bring him to us,” the kid on the computer said.
The squat man nodded gravely in agreement. “We pay you ten thousand for the chance to fuck him up.”
Not nearly enough, Behr thought.
“I’m going to need some stills from that security footage,” Behr said.