The Golem of Hollywood

Chapter twenty-five

Roughly twenty-seven thousand white Ford Econolines were registered in the state of California, not one of which bore the license plate number Jacob copied from his photograph. He ran it several times, each successive search taking longer to return the same verdict.

Not found.

Head spinning, back smarting, he rechecked that he’d entered the number correctly.

Not found.

Forged plate?

He tried his own license plate number. It came back as expected.

He plugged the van’s plate in for a fifth time. The progress bar slowed, froze. He waved the mouse, whaled on the space bar, cursed. He was reaching around to do a hard reset when the system crashed entirely, a wisp of smoke wafting from the front panel vent.

To stop himself from bashing the screen in, he escaped to the kitchen. Nothing to eat; he didn’t dare take a drink. It was two in the morning. He put on a fresh pot of coffee.

Mindful of his bruised tailbone, he eased down to the floor in front of his sofa, slumping against his disconnected TV, and wondered what terrible thing was happening to him.

He flashed back: the van, speeding past. Screaming tires, stench of burnt rubber. No normal person could grab on without dislocating a shoulder. So either Mai was a stuntwoman, or he hadn’t really seen her.

But he had. Clear as his own reflection.

And Victor — Victor had seen her, too.

And if Victor hadn’t?

Would he trust his own perception?

Subach, cradling him in his linebacker’s arms.

Where’d she go.

Who?

Mai. The girl.

What girl?

The girl.

Jake—

Don’t fuck with me. Don’t you fucking fuck with me.

Jake. Buddy. Calm down.

Did it — did she get hit?

You sound funny, man.

I’m—

Maybe I hurt your neck. You should go to the ER. You might have whiplash.

I need to go.

What’s — hey — wait a second.

I need to get out of here.

Wait. Jake. Wait. You’re not good to drive. Jake.

Breaking free, standing. Tell Mallick to call me.

You need to chill out, lemme buy you a drink — c’mon, give you a ride, at least...

ASAP.

The computer panel was no longer smoking, and the desktop booted up normally, but the moment Jacob opened up the DMV database and retried his search string, the screen froze again.

He left the coffee untouched, the progress bar grinding away in futility, staggered to his bedroom, swept aside the crime scene photos still blanketing his duvet, and fell into a blessedly dreamless sleep.

Divya Das said, “Good news first or bad?”

“Good.”

“I found your second offender.”

“That’s great news.”

“Well, but the bad part is he doesn’t bring up any additional hits. All I can tell you is he’s male and probably Caucasian.”

“Thanks for trying.”

“My pleasure,” she said. “What next?”

“I’m going to start poking around seriously for other cases that match the Creeper MO. Maybe L.A. got too hot and they moved on to someplace else.”

“Sounds like fun.”

It sounded like grunt work, and it was: once he restarted the still-churning computer and sat down at the desk, he didn’t get up for another ten hours except to refill his glass, go to the bathroom, or stretch the muscles bunching in his lower back. Grunt work, and he needed it, because if he allowed himself a second to think freely, his mind brought him to the events of the previous evening, and his guts began to roil.

He had seen her.

He’d seen the letters, too.

He was seeing things, and they were disappearing. Blame Sam and his eyes. Blame Bina and her mind. Sooner or later, he thought, he’d have to get himself to a doctor. An ophthalmologist. A shrink. For now, he wrote his own prescription: facts and liquor, maximum strength.

By eleven-thirty p.m., four Post-its fluttered on the wall over the desk.

Lucinda Gaspard, New Orleans, July 2011.

Casey Klute, Miami, July 2010.

Evgeniya Shevchuk, New York, August 2008.

Dani Forrester, Las Vegas, October 2005.

The information Jacob had access to online didn’t indicate what direction the vics had been facing when they died.

Put that aside and the cases matched up.

Four women, mid-twenties to late thirties, living alone. Fresh-faced and smiling, the new quartet was right at home alongside his nine.

Four first-floor residences, four doors with no forced entry.

Sixteen rope burns, two for each of eight ankles and eight wrists. No ropes found.

Eight rapes, four vaginal, four anal.

Four facedown bodies.

Four cut throats.

Four cold cases.

Zero offender DNA recovered, except in New York, where traces of vaginal semen had turned up. In the last case, Vegas PD noted that their vic’s fingernails had been closely trimmed, far down enough to draw blood, maybe to eliminate skin cells. No mention of that in the other files.

Maybe the evil twins had grown more careful over twenty years. In the New York case — Shevchuk — he guessed broken condoms.

If the sample taken from Shevchuk was filed in CODIS, why hadn’t Divya gotten a match to Mr. Head?

Jacob wondered if he was reading too much into the similarities, desire deepening shallow footholds. He needed to speak to the other Ds, find out more about body positioning. Midnight. Too late to call.

Perfect hour for building speculative castles, though.

None of the investigators had linked their murders to the Creeper — understandable, given the lack of proximity and the fact that the story had been out of the news for two decades.

Nor had they linked any one of them to any other. He couldn’t fault them for that, either.

What jumped out at Jacob were the dates. If even one of the four murders belonged to his bad guys, the duo had been active within the last seven years, possibly as recently as last year.

Increasing the likelihood that the remaining guy, Mr. Head’s partner and possible slayer, was alive.

Out there.

The first killing had gone down in 2005. Bad guys checked the paper like anyone else. More often, and more carefully, if they were looking for information about themselves. Could be they’d read the 2004 Times article about Ludwig retiring and decided it was safe to resume operations — just not in L.A.

New Orleans, Miami, New York, Las Vegas.

Each of those cities had its fair share of action and distraction. They were places you could go and be anonymous.

Find a cheap weekend fare, carve up a girl, come home?

Open-ended searches for the cities and dates yielded too many hits. Putting quotes around each city and year created the opposite problem.

The months of the murders clustered, somewhat: July through October. At this point, anything remotely patternlike was tempting. Human nature to see faces in the clouds or Jesus in oatmeal.

NCIC had only listed one sample found on Shevchuk, raising another possibility: one of the bad guys had gone solo. Or found another partner who hadn’t left semen.

The latter seemed a big risk to take. Three can keep a secret if two are dead. And one or both of the Creepers had been careful enough to evade capture for this long. So if one bad guy had found a new buddy, he’d have to be persuasive.

I’ll cut off your head persuasive?

Jacob checked his e-mail yet again, hoping for an answer from Mallick about the 911 recording. Instead, a message from Phil Ludwig caught his eye.

The subject heading: Your bug.

From my friend the entomologist, best I could do, sorry.

Below it, a forwarded e-mail.

Dear Phil,

We’re good thanks, Rosie sends regards. Exciting news, we booked Costa Rica.

Jacob skipped down several paragraphs of chitchat.

So anyhow about your friend’s beetle. I agree w/ you, v. hard to tell from low-res images. Head shape and size (if he is remembering it correctly, that seems pretty big to me, people get spooked, he probably overestimated)

Jacob frowned. He knew how big the beetle was; he’d held it, and it had easily stretched the length of his palm.

He kept reading.

put me in mind of rhinos but none that I know a lot about, I’m no expert, maybe O. nasicornis (see below) but coloration is wrong and never seen one in Southern California. Could be someone’s pet that got out? Too bad you don’t have it, you could name your own species lol.

Take care

Jim

The attached photo showed top and bottom views of a beetle. The head was spadelike, with a prominent central horn. Jim was right, though: the color was off, a shiny reddish brown instead of jet black.

Jacob typed O. nasicornis into Wikipedia and read about the European rhinoceros beetle, a member of the subfamily Dynastinae (rhinoceros beetles), of the family Scarabaeidae (scarabs). It ranged in size from about three-quarters of an inch to an inch and a half, and its maximum of two and a half inches appeared too small. Where his beetle’s underside shone like onyx, O. nasicornis sprouted long red hair.

A pet?

He started clicking through links, hoping he’d luck onto a match, but it swiftly became clear that Ludwig’s estimate of a hundred jillion species was conservative. He did learn that large horned beetles were indeed kept as pets in parts of Asia, and that they were pitted against each other for money, like pit bulls or gamecocks or tiny exoskeletal MMA fighters.

At least he knew what to get Bar Lady for Valentine’s Day.

He closed out the browser and went around the apartment, checking his roach motels. They didn’t seem to be doing much business, so he tossed them out and determined not to think about it anymore. He had enough on his hands without worrying about an infestation that, for all appearances, had cleared up on its own.