Kellerman, Jonathan - The Theatre

"Snoozy himself, huh? What's he like?"

"Charming. He sees the world in insect terms. Anyway, Yossi, if you have any more questions for Wilbur, ask them now. He'll be walking soon."

"He already walked. Two tight-assed guys just slow-waltzed him out. Can I help Avi finish the papers? Kid's sweating buckets."

"Sure. Get anything more from Wilbur?"

"Not a thing. We fed him, gave him coffee. The guy broke down-not much substance to him at all. But all he gave us was bullshit. The last hour or so he did nothing but talk about his childhood. Seems he had a mean daddy, big-shot lawyer, wanted him to be a lawyer, too, never thought much of scribblers." The Chinaman yawned into the phone.

"Where's Nahum?"

"After he'd called Wilbur shmuck for the hundredth time, he stomped out-said something about interviewing students."

"Names from the university desert tour list. Try to reach him and help him with those interviews. Tell him, also, that I want an update on the Amira Nasser search. Take Cohen with you to speed things up but let him off by two. He's replacing Latam on the mailbox watch. Tell him to go to Hamashbir, buy some new clothes-nothing fancy, something a kibbutznik would wear. Also, he has to shave off his beard, get a short haircut and nonprescription eyeglasses."

"Mistreatment of the troops," laughed the Chinaman. "I'll catch his tears in a bottle, save it as evidence for the Review Board. Listen, Aviva called-she's got a morning off. Okay with you if I go home and get some breakfast?"

Daniel thought about it. The student hikers could wait. "Get in touch with Nahum, first. Then all of you go have breakfast."

"Last-meal time for Cohen," said the Chinaman, still chuckling.

At eight-forty, Daniel called his own wife.

"I love you," he said. "Sorry I had to rush out. Guess who was waiting for me in my office?"

"The Prime Minister?"

"More powerful."

"You're serious."

"Very."

"Who, Daniel?"

"The mayor."

"In your office?"

"I opened the door, there he was, dozing away."

"I always thought that sleep stuff was for the benefit of the media."

"This morning it was for my benefit."

"What did he want?"

"To have the American reporter released and check me out in the process."

"I'm sure he was favorably impressed."

"He'd be more impressed if I could solve the murders, which he sees as a civic nuisance."

Laura said nothing for a moment, then: "Pressure."

"Nothing unexpected."

"Listen, before I forget, Gene called about fifteen minutes ago, said he tried phoning you at the office but had trouble getting through."

"Is he at the Laromme?"

"I think so. You know they're due to leave this Sunday for Rome."

"Already?"

"It's been four weeks, honey."

Daniel sighed.

"There'll be other opportunities," said Laura. "Luanne's already talking about coming back next year. Anyway, they're coming over for Shabbat dinner, tonight. Will you be able to make it home by three?"

"Sure."

"Good. There's wine and pastries to pick up at Lieber-man's. The other woman in your life's got a new dress she wants you to approve before she wears it."

"Tell her I love her. Tell all of them."

He phoned Gene at the Laromme.

The black man picked up on the first ring, said, "I was hoping that was you. Been having a devil of a time getting through your switchboard. What is it, security?"

"Bad lines, more likely. What's new?"

"McGuire phoned me with the computer data. I think I've got something juicy for you. Got a pen and paper?"

"Now I do. Go ahead."

"They've got five hundred and eighty-seven unsolveds that fit into possible serial patterns. Two hundred and ninety-seven involve some use of knives. Out of those, the machine spat out ninety-one cases with wound patterns similar to yours over the last fifteen years-the data bank goes back longer than I thought, but stuff from the last five years is relatively sketchy."

"Ninety-one," said Daniel, visualizing heaps of mutilated corpses.

"Not that many, considering your wounds were darn-near generic," said Gene. "But most of them differ from yours in terms of mixed modus: knife and gun, knife and strangulation. And victim demographics: males, kids, old ladies, couples. In my opinion, that doesn't eliminate them-some of these monsters get pretty indiscriminate about who they kill and how they do it. But there's no use tackling something that huge. Thing to do is start breaking into subsets."

"Young females," said Daniel.

"Exactly. Fifty-eight in the seventeen- to twenty-seven-year-old range. By playing statistical games with it, the FBI broke that down into seven groupings that appear to be the work of the same killer or killers, though there's overlap. The cutoffs aren't perfectly clean. But when you plug in dark complexion, multiple blades, and drug OD, it narrows way down and starts to get real interesting: seven cases, none of them strangled, which in itself is unusual. One additional case that matches everything, except no mention is made of multiple blades. The first is an L.A. case: girl found cut up fourteen years ago, March 1971, in a cave-how do you like that?"

"There are caves in Los Angeles?" asked Daniel, gripping the edge of his desk.

"Plenty of them in the surrounding mountain areas. This particular one was in Griffith Park-big place just north of Hollywood, thousands of acres. There's a zoo and a planetarium there, but mostly it's wilderness."

"Was she killed in the cave?"

"FBI says yes."

"What was the physical layout of the cave?"

"They don't have that kind of detail programmed yet. Hold on a second-there's something else I want you to hear: Victim's name was Lilah Shehadeh; she's listed as a twenty-three-year-old female Caucasian, black hair, brown eyes. But Shehadeh's an Arab name, isn't?"

"Yes," said Daniel, feeling the excitement grow within him. "Go on."

"Multiple stab wounds from several different weapons, death from exsanguination-poor gal bled to death. Heroin overdose to the point of general anesthesia, severed jugular, decimation of the genitals, no trace evidence other than residue of Ivory soap-sounds like she was washed."

"At the cave?"

"Printout didn't say that either. There are streams in Griffith Park-in March they could still be full from the rains. Let me see what else I've got… Shehadeh was an addict and prostitute. I racked my brains to see if I could remember her case but I couldn't. I was working Southwest Division back then, clear across town. To be honest, a single hooker-cutting wouldn't get much notice. I just got off the phone with a buddy in Hollywood Division, asked him to dig up the file, call me back and dictate the details."

"Thank you, Lieutenant Brooker."

"Onward: Number two occurred over two years later, July of '73, in New Orleans. Another prostitute, named Angelique Breau, drugged out-this time with Demerol-and cut identically to Shehadeh. Traces of soap and shampoo: Dial and Prell-he's not strict about his brands. The body was killed somewhere else, but found in a crypt in the St. Louis cemetery-which is kind of cavelike, wouldn't you say? And she and Shehadeh fit your genital destruction-removal sequence-Shehadeh's vaginal vault was cut up; Breau's ovaries were removed. She's listed as a female Cauc, black and brown, nineteen years old, but New Orleans is famous for race-mixing. If you put Caucasian on your driver's license application, no one's going to argue with you. Name like Breau she could be lily-white Parisian, swamp-rat Cajun, Creole mulatto, or any mixture thereof."

"Dark. Mediterranean-looking," said Daniel.

"Good chance of it."

"She could have been an Arab, too, Gene. Some of them-Moroccans, Algerians-have French names."

"Hmm. Maybe. But the next two are definitely not Arab, so it appears the killer's going after a certain look, not nationality."

Dark women, thought Daniel. The streets of any Levantine, Mediterranean, or Latin American city were teeming with them. Yet the killer-if it was the killer-had come to Jerusalem.

It had to be more than a look that he was after

"The third one took place April of '75, twenty-one months after Breau," said Gene. "Northeast Arizona, desert area outside of Phoenix. Victim's name: Shawnee Scoggins, female Native American-Indian. Eighteen years, black and brown. Ovaries and kidneys removed. Murdered somewhere else, but the body was found off the highway near one of the Indian reservations. Reservation police handled the case. Girl had a history of delinquency, drug problems. Fresh needle marks in her arm, heroin OD, no fiber traces, no mention of soap. But this is the one that doesn't list multiple weapons either, so we could be talking about a failure on the part of the locals to report all the facts, poor investigatory procedure, or a slipshod autopsy. Everything else fits. I'd suggest you include her."

"All right."

"After Scoggins there's a thirty-two-month lapse until December of '77. Back in California again, but up north near San Francisco. This one I remember: nude dancer named Maria Mendoza, twenty-one, black and brown, history of prostitution and narcotics convictions. What was left of her was discovered near a cave up in Mount Tamalpais."

"Not in the cave?"

"I asked McGuire about that. Printout said near-didn't say how near. Hard to understand why they put some data in, leave other stuff out."

"Was she killed up there?"

"No. Somewhere else, site unidentified. This one was very messy, Danny. All the internal organs were removed-she was literally skin and bones. San Francisco police had been dealing with a bunch of unsolved homicides attributed to some crazy who wrote letters to the papers calling himself Zodiac. The last suspected Zodiac killing was in October of '75, farther east, in Sacramento. San Francisco thought he'd come back to haunt them. Reason I remember the case is that one of the primary Zodiac suspects moved down to L. A. shortly after Mendoza's body was found, and we were alerted. We watched him-it came to nothing."

"What was his name?"

"Karl Witik. Weirdo biology student. White guy but rented a house in Watts, had squirrels and mice running wild inside the place. But don't worry-he's not your man. He blew his brains out in early '78. Two more possible Zodiacs went down in '79 and '81, so he probably wasn't San Francisco's man either."

"Eight," said Daniel, looking at his notes. "Four more."

"Four more," said Gene. "And they keep getting nastier. Mendoza's the last intact body on the list. The rest are all dismemberments: August 1978 in Miami, Florida; July 1980, Sun Valley, Idaho; March '82, Crater Lake, Oregon; January '84, Hana, Hawaii. Young, dark women, no fiber or prints, soap traces, heroin residue in the tissue, bone rills indicating multiple knives, body parts tossed in wooded or desert areas. Three of the victims have never been identified, including one whose head was never recovered. The one from Crater Lake was ID'd as Sherry Blumenthal, seventeen-year-old runaway from Seattle. Same old song: drug history, prostitution busts. 'Remains found in state of advanced decomposition on the north bank of the lake.'"

Gene paused. "Sounds like your guy, doesn't it?"

"The modus is identical," said Daniel. His sweaty hands made wet marks on the desk. "A traveling killer."

"Beast of the highway," said Gene. "The more we coordinate our interstate records, the more we keep turning up. Looks like this one traveled far."

Daniel scanned his notes again. "Two murders took place in California. Perhaps that's his home base."

"Same state, but L. A. and San Francisco are four hundred miles apart," said Gene. "Maybe he just likes the weather."

Daniel examined the list of murder sites again. "All these places have good weather, don't they?"

"Hmm, let me see: Oregon, Louisiana-you get your rain and chill there, but yes, generally they're mild."

"Places to visit on holiday?"

"I suppose so. Why?"

"The time lapse between the murders averages almost two years," said Daniel. "Perhaps the killer lives normally for a while, goes out on holiday to murder."

"Let me take a look at the dates," said Gene. He grew silent for several moments, then: "No, I don't think so. January in Hawaii is the off-season, cloudy and rainy. New Orleans and Miami are hot and sticky in July-folks fly down there in the winter. Anyway, there are plenty of guys who don't need a vacation to travel: drifters, truckers-anyone with a job that puts him on the road. And don't depend too much on the time lapse. He may have killed plenty of others in between-FBI estimates six undiscovered victims for every one in the file."

Five hundred eighty-seven by six. "Over three thousand undiscovered murders," said Daniel. "How can that be?"

"Runaways, throwaways, orphans, missing persons who remain missing. Big country, big mess-it's not like over here, Danny."

Daniel put the numbers out of his head, returned to his notes. "The first murder was fourteen years ago, which tells us something about his age. The youngest he could have been at the time would be, what-fourteen?"

"I've heard of sex murders committed by kids," said Gene, "but they're usually a lot more impulsive-looking. Sloppy. From the care taken on these-cleaning up the evidence, using dope to knock them out-my guess is they were committed by an adult. Eighteen, nineteen at the youngest, probably early twenties."

"Okay, let's be cautious and say sixteen," said Daniel. "That would make him at least thirty today, most likely older."