10

Till began his drive back to Los Angeles after the sun went down, staying on Interstate 10 all the way, hoping the boyfriend was aware of him and ready to come after him. He wanted to be easy to find. Till stopped occasionally at diners and truck stops for coffee. He always sat facing a window so he could watch his car in the parking lot. Even as he watched, he kept hoping the killer was out there thinking about going to the car to ambush Till.

After he arrived at his office on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, he went back to work gathering information about the murders. He searched jewelry outlets and manufacturers’ catalogs for the distinctive necklace and anklet. The gold disks had not been circles. They had been ovals. The little diamonds around the edge hadn’t been unusual, but the big diamond on each had been off center. He spent days looking, but he couldn’t find anything like them. He drew a picture of them with approximate sizes and descriptions, and drove downtown to the jewelry district. He walked from building to building, entering every store, every design and manufacturer’s workshop, and asked if anyone could identify the maker or the meaning. When he got home he scanned an enlarged and cropped photograph of the jewelry into his computer and sent it to dealers in estate jewelry and designers of custom jewelry all over the country. Then he kept looking.

He went back to study the information Sergeant McCann had sent him about the five girls who had been murdered before Catherine Hamilton. He was struck even more, now that he had spent a night with Kyra, by how similar all seven girls looked. It was as though the boyfriend kept browsing the escort ads until he found the same girl, and then he killed her again, over and over.

The necklace and anklet didn’t appear in pictures of either of the first two victims. They seemed to have originated with the third, three murders before Catherine Hamilton. He spent more time trying to concentrate his efforts on jewelry sellers in the Miami area, where that girl had died. She was Jenny McLaughlan from Savannah, Georgia. She had appeared in Miami at the age of twenty-two last June, and had found an apartment near the ocean. She had apparently taken to the beach life and then catered mainly to tourists who checked into the big hotels. It was almost impossible to guess where the jewelry had come from. No custom jeweler he could find had any knowledge or opinion.

He studied each girl’s murder. The police reports varied in their detail and in the intensity of the inquiries that they reflected. Some of the investigators seemed to see the murder of a prostitute as a simple cause-and-effect matter. Young women, usually small and thin, who were doing something illegal, for which they collected money in cash, were going to be in exceptional jeopardy. Any customer could see the opportunity, and sometimes one took it.

There were hundreds of fingerprints belonging to unknown males in each of the first few girls’ apartments. Nobody had found any set twice. There were also complicated mixtures of DNA. If there were relationships, rivalries, resentments, they remained unknown because the girls would stay in a city for a few months at a time and then move on to the next city, like migrating birds. If the victim was foreign-born, the police would try to find out if she had been trafficked, but in these cases they’d had no success. They wrote the report, signed it, dated it, and filed it.

Dated it. He looked again at each of the police reports and noted the time and date of death and the city where it had happened. Then he went back to the Web sites of the local newspapers to find out what else had happened in each of those cities in the day or two before those murders.

It took Till three days to be sure he had picked out the right events to correlate with the deaths of the five women. On April 17 of last year a strawberry blond who called herself Lily Serene was shot in the back of the head in her Minneapolis apartment, and the place was ransacked. The night before, William Rossi, the owner of three restaurants in the Twin Cities area, had disappeared. Rossi was found four days later in his car, which had sunk to the bottom of a lake. He had been shot to death.

A girl named Wendy Steffens was found dead in her apartment in Washington, D.C., on the night when a retired assistant district attorney had been shot in his home. He had been a successful prosecutor for thirty-two years, a man with a great many enemies.

On September 27, a woman named Jenny McLaughlan was found dead in a condominium in a desirable area of Miami near the beach. Two nights earlier, the president of a regional bank and his wife had been killed as they walked to their car after attending a play.

On December 29, Terri Hanford, a strawberry blond, died of two gunshot wounds in her apartment in New York. The same evening a wealthy man who owned a large number of Manhattan rental properties and a horse breeding farm upstate was murdered in the art gallery he owned.

On January 25 a contractor in Charlotte, North Carolina, was killed on the way home after a meeting with potential lenders. A strawberry blond named Karen Polenko was murdered in her apartment early the next morning, apparently while she was asleep.

Jack Till called the Los Angeles Police Department, introduced himself, and asked to speak with Detective Anthony or Detective Sellers. He called the number he was given, expecting to leave a message that would be returned when one of them got around to it, but instead, the phone was answered by a male voice that sounded calm and businesslike. “Detective Sellers.”

“Hello, Detective. My name is Jack Till. I was a homicide detective with the LAPD for twenty-three years, and now I’m working as a private investigator.”

“Nice to hear from you. What are you working on?”

“Catherine Hamilton. I wondered if you or Detective Anthony could spare me about fifteen minutes anytime today?”

“I think so. Can you be here around two-thirty today?”

“Sure. I’ll see you then.”

He drove to the Burbank Boulevard station in North Hollywood, where they worked; parked on the street three blocks away; walked in; and went to the front counter to identify himself. Then he sat down to wait. At four o’clock he went to the counter again to let the officer know that he wasn’t leaving, just going to the men’s room. At four-thirty, the two detectives appeared in the lobby.

Anthony was a woman about forty years old who was about five feet three inches tall. She wore a gray suit that looked boxy, as though it had been made for a small man, and a pair of men’s shoes. She wore her gun in a holster at the right side of her belt, and that further filled out her silhouette. Her black hair was pulled back into a tight bun so from the front it looked like a man’s hair combed back. “I’m Anthony,” she said, and shook his hand.

Sellers was tall, but soft-looking, wide at the waist and hips with narrow shoulders. His lips were fleshy, and looking down to talk to other people gave him a double chin. He smiled. “Sellers. Come on back where we can talk.”

Till noted that they had no inclination to mention that they were two hours late. He simply said, “Jack Till,” and followed them to the big communal office where they had desks side by side. He took the chair that Anthony pushed his way. The two sat in their swivel chairs and waited for him to speak.

“I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to catch up with Catherine Hamilton’s killer.”

“So have we,” said Anthony.

“Of course,” Till said patiently. “I caught up with him in Phoenix just before he killed his next victim, but I didn’t read the signs in time. I saw him leaving her house and, because I suspected he was the man I was after, I followed him. He lost me for a minute, switched cars, and got away. When I went back to her house, she was dead.”

The two looked at each other. Neither seemed pleased. Anthony said, “Who are you working for?”

“Catherine’s parents. The Hamiltons.”

“And how do you know the two murders are connected?” asked Sellers.

He reached into his manila folder and produced two ads for escorts: Catherine Hamilton’s and Kyra’s. He handed them to Sellers. “Notice the resemblance. And notice the identical necklace and anklet. Both were killed in their homes by a shot to the head. If you get in touch with the Phoenix police you can probably compare the bullets.”

The two detectives looked at the two copies of the ads. Anthony said, “Interesting. Can we keep these?”

“I brought them for you.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Of course, there are many possible explanations. There could be a jeweler who is popular among sex workers, or even one who pays the girls in jewelry. And there are enough sex workers killed that you can get lots of correlations that don’t mean very much.” She looked as though she was about to stand and offer her hand so she could shake his and terminate the meeting.

Till didn’t budge. He reached into his folder and produced the other five ads. “Here are his previous five victims. New York, Minneapolis, Miami, Washington, D.C., Charlotte.” He looked at them. “Hard to tell them apart, isn’t it?”

“Again, so many of these girls become crime victims that you can draw a lot of correlations,” Anthony said. “We could collect five black-haired girls killed in those cities during the past two years too. That wouldn’t mean it’s the same man.”

“Three of these girls are wearing the same necklace and anklet too.”

Anthony said, “So it would appear to be a fad.”

Till looked down at his feet for a moment, then said calmly, “I’ve searched the country for more of them, and so far, no manufacturer or designer has recognized them. The consensus is that they’re a custom set made for somebody and the design meant something to this person. Now, the reason I came here was so I could share with you a development that might help. I think I figured out what this guy is doing.”

“You mean besides killing pretty girls?”

“I think he’s a hit man who has figured out a way to be invisible while he’s setting up a hit and then avoid leaving a trail afterward.”

“He’s killing all those girls for that?”

“He seems to have realized at some point that he could get them to give him a place to stay. What is safer than living in an apartment rented by a hooker who uses a false name? Each girl probably rented her place under her real name and gave the landlord some bullshit job information. But she doesn’t use her real name when she starts working. She makes up a new name.”

“So why do the girls all look alike?”

“He becomes a boyfriend. That’s why they let him stay. Maybe he has a strong preference for girls who look that way, so that makes it easier for him to seem interested. Maybe they’re a type who seem to like him, so he sticks with the tried and true. Who knows why women pick one guy instead of another? I read one time it’s that they subconsciously like the smell of one guy’s sweat. The point is that the girls aren’t the point.”

“Then what is the point?” asked Sellers.

“The girls make him invisible. He stays with them for a month or a few weeks or three months while he gets his killing all planned out and studies his victim. Then, one night, after he’s killed whomever he’s been hired to kill, he gets ready to leave town. That means he kills the only witness who knows that he’s ever been in town. And before he leaves, he takes whatever she has—which is always a lot of cash. He uses that to pay expenses for another month or six months, and maybe to impress his next girlfriend. Then he does the same thing in the next town where he has a hit to do.”

“That’s a pretty wild theory.”

“I know. But in each of these cities we have a high-end killing that happens just before one of these girls gets shot.”

“Intriguing,” said Sellers. “And what person do you connect with Catherine Hamilton’s killing?”

“I’m not sure yet. Hit men don’t usually get hired to kill middle-class suburbanites or poor people. There were three murders here on that day that might fit the pattern—important people who seem to have been killed by strangers. I can’t pick one on the little information that was in the papers about the method and circumstances. And it doesn’t matter to me. What I’m doing now is trying to move ahead and figure out where he turns up next.”

Anthony said, “Why did you come to us?”

“I guess it’s professional courtesy,” said Till. “I can’t sit on what I know about a murderer because for a lot of years the homicide detective who needed to have a lead fall out of the sky into his lap was me. I’m also telling you because the guy is good at this. He’s well-trained, disciplined, and decisive. He moves quickly. He’s not some kind of mental defective who will say, ‘Okay, you’ve got me.’ If you get close to him, he won’t surrender, and he won’t go without a fight. He’s done too much for that.”

“What are you planning to do?”

“Catch him, if I can.”