The Golem of Hollywood

Chapter twenty

The Creeper’s paper trail reflected the case’s long and complicated history, as well as the march of technology and the passage of time.

There were black-and-white photographs, color photographs, photographs that had been digitally scanned and reprinted. Interview transcripts and autopsy reports and forensic reports, enough documentation to reconstitute a medium-sized forest.

The earliest reports were typewritten or stippled by a dot-matrix; then smudged, the result of being whipped too quickly from the mouth of an inkjet. Most recently, the laser print was faint, as department-wide cutbacks had turned the wait for a new toner cartridge into a Soviet bread-line.

He counted forty-three different handwritings, some a single margin scrawl, a couple that filled page upon page — the key players on the LAPD end.

Howie O’Connor wrote in a blocky script that mirrored his no-nonsense approach. He was a grinder, a list maker, plotting the locations of the murders on a map to rule out a geographical pattern.

He was also bit of a bully in the interrogation room, cutting people off in mid-sentence when they strayed from answering his questions.

In Jacob’s mind, this was a cardinal sin for a detective. The idea was to get the other guy talking, and to do that, you had to shut up, let the mind wobble where it wanted. The best interviewers were like therapists, silence their sharpest tool.

Google offered a couple of pictures that might or might not have been O’Connor. It wasn’t an uncommon name. Nothing about a sexual harassment scandal. Hushed up or never publicized. These days they’d be blogging about it in Uzbekistan before the guy had time to zip up his pants.

Ludwig had called O’Connor a good cop; maybe the Creeper wasn’t his finest hour.

Maybe the impatience and witness groping were both signs of the same malaise, a decent man anesthetized by horror and buried in bureaucracy.

Maybe the case itself had driven him over the edge.

Jacob put the brakes on that train of thought. An atlas of Howard O’Connor’s psyche would tell him nothing about nine murders.

Aside from their youth and clean looks, the victims had little in common. They did not run in the same social circles. Cathy Wanzer and Laura Lesser both patronized a bar on Wilshire and Twenty-sixth, but everyone from boyfriends to bartenders swore up and down that the women didn’t know each other, and after keeping an eyeball on the place for months, O’Connor had chalked it up to coincidence.

MO was another story. That was consistent.

All nine lived alone, in unalarmed one-level houses or ground-floor apartments with a larger-than-average amount of space separating them from neighboring buildings.

No sign of forced entry.

Looking back, Jacob could understand the intensity of the public panic.

A monster waltzing into your home, slaughtering you, vanishing.

Hard as it was to imagine by today’s standards, prior to the fifth murder, nobody had thought to check the semen samples against each other. Hence there was no hint that O’Connor had considered the possibility of two killers until frustratingly late in the game.

Jacob tried to bear in mind the constraints of the era. In 1988, DNA testing was new, fancy, expensive. Its admissibility in court was subject to debate; the decision to spend the time and money would have been far from automatic.

In 1988, the watchword was end gang violence.

The collective computing power of LAPD, circa 1988, could fit on Jacob’s smartphone.

O’Connor deserved credit for requesting a test in the first place, more credit still for connecting the murders as quickly as he had.

It was evident in the files when Ludwig had taken over: Jacob recognized his neat handwriting from the monarch butterfly shadowbox. His touch was lighter than O’Connor’s. He asked the right questions — which was to say, the questions Jacob would’ve asked — gathering up loose ends and snipping them off.

Whatever his advantages as an investigator, however, they were more than canceled out by the intervening decade. Memories had weakened, details blurred. People had died, or left town, or grown rigid with resentment at being asked to revisit the worst moment of their lives yet again. Some were outright hostile, refusing to talk until they saw evidence of progress.

His master list of interviewees ran to thirty-six pages. A handful of names were starred. Jacob didn’t know if that meant they deserved special attention or could be ruled out.

Denise Stein was not among them.

The floor of the apartment was quilted with paper, bottles of Beam placed at strategic points, enabling Jacob to reach out and grab one without looking. He took a swallow and began crawling around, hunting for Howie O’Connor’s file on the Stein murder.

O’Connor’s remarks about Denise were brief. She’d been the one to find her sister’s body. The detective considered her too ill to be a suspect.

Jacob guessed no one had taken the time to interview her at length.

No reason to. They wanted the Creeper, not the Creeper Avenger.

He sat at his desk, waved the mouse to clear away the screen saver.

Denise Stein was off the grid. No known address. No criminal record. The phone number Ludwig listed for her went to somebody else’s machine.

Was she institutionalized? Jacob doubted a doctor or administrator would confirm that over the phone. He’d have to show up in person to plead his case, hoping he wouldn’t be forced to jump through legal hoops.

He rummaged in the kitchen for anything within three months of its expiration date, returned to the living room with Lev’s Special Shish Kabab: seven martini olives impaled on a bamboo skewer. He pulled them off slowly, chewed slowly, concentrating on their meaty texture to avoid looking at the crime scene photos stacked atop the coffee table.

He’d been saving those for last, wanting to first explore both Ds’ perspectives thoroughly. Only then could he objectively assimilate the raw visuals.

A lie. He didn’t want to assimilate them.

He stalled some more, tossing the skewer into the sink, wiping his hands on his pants, pouring himself another drink. Easing over sideways; using his peripheral vision to make an abstraction of the first corpse; and then he looked unsparingly at Helen Girard, seeing her as her boyfriend had encountered her on the afternoon of March 9, 1988.

Nude, legs spread, facedown, the bed pushed aside to make room for her on the floor.

The autopsy report noted friction abrasions at wrists and ankles, though she’d been unbound at the time of discovery. Diffuse bruising on her lower back suggested the killer had been kneeling atop her, yanking her head up to slit her throat down to the spine.

Arterial spray striped the baseboards, the bed-skirt, formed an oblong stain in the carpet that stretched toward a windowpane hazy with daylight.

The bulk of the blood had pooled around her, soaking into the pile, drying black, suspending her over a depthless chasm.

To forestall nausea, Jacob asked himself questions.

Why tie her up, then free her? Afraid of leaving evidence? A little fight to heighten the excitement?

Cheapskates unwilling to spring for more than one piece of rope?

He moved on to Cathy Wanzer.

Likewise prone on her bedroom floor, likewise tied and subsequently freed, throat cut.

Similar spatter pattern, a long arm of lifeblood growing from a matte black hole.

Another point of similarity: the rest of her apartment was pristine. She hadn’t put up a fight. Maybe they’d told her they didn’t intend to harm her, as long as she complied.

That changed with Christa Knox. Signs of a major struggle in the bedroom — a toppled nightstand, a closet door listing on a broken hinge — spilled into the living room, where her body was laid out, blood spreading erratically on the Spanish tiles, sending out tributaries and plugging gaps in the grout.

She’d awoken and seen them.

Known what was coming.

Tried to run.

Further proof of her will to live: her knees and forearms were severely bruised, a chunk of hair missing at the base of her skull.

She’d wrenched and kicked and died all the same.

No semen recovered.

They got spooked — too much noise?

Patty Holt was a wisp of a woman, but like Christa she had fought back, making it to her kitchen for her last stand. The nonvictim blood Divya had mentioned showed up along the broken edge of a ceramic plate.

Good for you, Patty.

Jacob didn’t think it coincidental that the killers had next chosen to break pattern. By then the story was front-page news. They could no longer take stealth for granted.

So while the first four murders had occurred between midnight and three a.m., Laura Lesser died around ten in the morning after coming off a graveyard shift at the VA. Sitting in her den in pajamas, watching television, eating breakfast.

Jacob pictured her leaping up at the sight of two men.

Dropping her grapefruit juice.

A bowl of cereal had survived unscathed on the arm of the sofa.

Howie O’Connor had diligently recorded that its contents had turned to mush.

Alarmed by Laura’s absence at work, her best friend and coworker dropped by, peeking in windows when her knocks went unanswered. The house had a second bedroom Laura used as a walk-in closet; piles of shoes had been kicked aside to make space for her body.

Shortly thereafter the city had gone into lockdown.

Four months of peace.

When the killers resumed, it was with a return to form, a nighttime break-in, gore and damage confined to Janet Stein’s bedroom.

The following morning, Denise Stein let herself into the apartment with her duplicate key. She often crashed on her sister’s futon when things got rough for her at home. The two of them had made plans to go shopping for jeans; seeing the bedroom door closed, Denise assumed Janet to still be asleep. She helped herself to a Coke, waiting half an hour before growing impatient enough to enter without knocking.

An already troubled young woman, walking into that.

What the hell was he going to say to her?

The seventh murder was mildly anomalous. Inez Delgado was the second victim whose body did not yield semen samples; her wrists showed no evidence of rope abrasions; and while she’d been found in her bedroom, the rest of her house had been trashed, too.

Jacob’s initial impression was that she’d attempted to escape, knocking things over before fleeing back to the bedroom to try and lock herself inside.

Differences in the wound and spatter patterns put the lie to this. Inez had been stabbed in the abdomen fifteen times, painting the bathroom with blood and bile. Smear marks ran from there, down the hall, to the foot of her bed, where the relative lack of pooling around her throat led the coroner to suggest that it had been slit postmortem.

A need for consistency? Six cut throats demanded a seventh?

Katherine Ann Clayton was missing for a week before an upstairs neighbor called the landlord to complain about a smell.

Sherri Levesque, a single mother, had dropped her five-year-old at his grandparents’ for the weekend.

Jacob’s coffee machine clicked on.

Despite having worked through the night, despite having had minimal sleep in three days, he felt wired. That alarmed him; the only person he knew who could work uninterrupted for days on end was his mother, in the midst of a manic high.

There was no blood test for bipolar. No definitive genetic marker.

He tiptoed around folders and bottles to his bedroom and set an eight-thirty alarm.

Stripping naked, he slid between tangled sheets, stared at the popcorn ceiling.

Wide, wide, wide awake.

He couldn’t disentangle how much of his agitation had to do with the crime scene photos, how much had to do with the physical side effects of being awake for so long, and how much stemmed from the anxiety of knowing he’d been awake for so long.

He sat up. Time for a nightcap.

Morningcap.

Whatever works.