The taxi left LAX, heading toward the city’s west side, and I texted Cassie to see how far along she was with her study of which agents had checked out the old case files. Now that we had a third dead serial killer, it would make things both simpler and more complex. Cassie had to see who had checked out this third case, which would limit the field. But if agents had been watching Lazarian and somehow missed a killer entering a safe house, it also meant there was more information to take into account.
A message came back from Cassie.
On the phone. Send you a note in twenty.
As the taxi wound its way through side streets, I mentally reviewed every detail of the Lazarian case.
Over a period of seven years, four women from Southern California had been brutally murdered by Ronald Lazarian. The victims were blond and young: twenty-six, twenty-nine, thirty, and thirty-three. Each had been stabbed at least thirteen times.
Cassie and I had received the Lazarian file on a Monday morning last February. We’d pored over the police data, but LAPD had done an exhaustive job already, and we uncovered nothing on the first day.
On our second day, though, I woke with an idea. By lunch, I had found Cassie and Frank in the small kitchen near the PAR cubes.
“HVAC repair,” I said.
I remember them staring at me. Then I explained that each of the buildings our victims lived in had been built between 1961 and 1968. “The heat pumps from that era,” I said, “their fail rate has been phenomenal in the last eighteen months.”
“Heat pumps?” Frank repeated.
“Fail rate?” Cassie said.
“Each attack came one week after a cold spell,” I explained. At least, “cold spell” as defined by LA locals, where fifty-eight-degree daytime weather demanded a heavy jacket.
“An HVAC workman is the most likely person to intercept all four women,” I said. “He wears coveralls, gloves, and disposable booties. This is also how he leaves no evidence. No prints.”
When we passed on these details, local police balked at the specificity of the occupation and the examples of the failed heat pumps, which I listed by brand. But two of the jurisdictions compared notes anyway and landed on a name: Ronald Lazarian.
Lazarian was thirty-one and owned a heating and cooling business, one that specialized in historic buildings and retrofits. The other two cities discovered that Lazarian was also the vendor in their victim’s buildings. They put him under surveillance and followed Lazarian into the unit of a woman who scraped his face—just as police rammed down her door.
The taxi slowed on Goshen Avenue in an area of LA that backed up to retail on one side of Wilshire Boulevard and, a block later, morphed into the beginnings of the suburb of Brentwood.
“There’s a bunch of cops up here,” the taxi driver said. “Not sure if I can get you any closer.”
I paid him and got out. My phone buzzed. A text from Cassie.
Need another few hours on agents. As for our team, Jo and Frank are clean. Still looking into Richie. Lil sus though. His personnel file is encrypted.
“Sus” was a big thing with Cassie. Anything out of place was sus. Someone weird was sus. I’m sure before she met me, I was sus. Suspicious behavior was everywhere.
Still, she was using Marly’s access to do this study, and there was no reason Richie’s file would be encrypted to Marly Dureaux.
Moving under the outermost piece of yellow tape, I badged an LAPD cop. He examined my ID and pointed. A quarter block had been closed off, and I walked down the center of the road. Up ahead, I saw the apartment complex where the murder must have occurred. It was the one building where the yellow tape turned inward and blocked sidewalk access.
As I arrived, I saw the place was in the shape of a U with a central pathway and units spread left and right over two stories. At the back of the property, two metal gates led out to an alley. I counted sixteen doors total.
The what and why of this being a safe house was immediately clear to me. Apartment 211 was at the back, second floor. Its position allowed a quick look down at the other units. A smart federal unit would sit an agent outside as observation.
I also noted that the back left second-floor unit had its own stairwell, which led to what was probably a gated garage out back. If I was correct about that, it meant the garage was below the unit, meaning no one could hear when someone was in the safe house unless you were inside the locked garage that came with it. And, from my initial glances left and right, apartment 211 appeared to share just one common wall with any other unit.
As I got to the bottom of the stairwell, cops were clearing a path. At the top of the stairs, Shooter and Cassie stood beside Frank. Richie had been left in New Mexico.
“Looks busy,” I said.
I’d counted twenty-two uniforms so far, and I recalled a statistical analysis of crimes where over eighteen cops signed in at a scene. Those cases resulted in a twenty-nine percent decrease in conviction.
Shooter eyed me. No smile. No smart-ass comment. Sometimes what’s missing is more conspicuous than what’s not.
“Welcome to LA,” Frank said, his voice flat.
They led me into the apartment, and from there, into a hall bath.
Inside, the body of Ronald Lazarian hung from the showerhead. A six-millimeter metal wire wrapped around the fixture before coming around the front of his neck, cutting into his throat, and holding his body suspended.
Lazarian was fully dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, but his neck had been sliced 60 percent through.
I walked closer to the tub, visually inspecting the wire, which was slung over the fixture and came down along the underside of Lazarian’s jaw, cutting into his throat four inches below his chin. The wire had severed his omohyoid and sternocleidomastoid muscles and was buried deep in a mess of mangled skin.
The bathtub itself was striped with arterial blood spray, but no one was looking at that. Shooter’s, Cassie’s, and Frank’s eyes were on the wall outside the shower.
The killer had used bright red spray paint.
Two phrases. One stacked atop the other.
Too slow, Gardner.
But don’t worry. I got this one, partner.