City of Fire (20 page)

He might be a molecular biologist, but he wasn’t about to begin eating anything that came out of a lab. Even if it carried the label
All Natural.

The roach hissed at them from within the glass box, rocking its head up and down and wiggling its legs in Harriet’s hands.

“It won’t hurt,” she said in a soothing voice. “It won’t hurt, I promise.”

Fellows slid the razor-sharp blade down the insect’s chest and belly, the roach still flailing its legs and hissing at them. After prying open the exoskeleton, Fellows scooped out its viscera with a spoon and flicked them into a petri dish.

“See,” Harriet said to the dead cockroach. “It didn’t hurt at all.”

Fellows smiled, taking in the scent of her body. Every aspect of the scent in all of its wondrous parts.

“If it did,” he whispered, “the hurt didn’t last very long.”

THE meeting with Dr. Bernhardt had ended ten minutes ago. Now they were huddled around Novak’s desk. Lieutenant Barrera was at the other end of the floor, speaking with DDA Roy Wemer on the phone. Apparently Wemer found out about their lab request for a side-by-side on the DNA samples found at the Lopez and Brant crime scenes. From the look on Barrera’s face, Lena imagined Wemer was pissed off for not getting a heads-up and being out of the loop.

“Here’s what I think we need to do,” Novak said. “You guys have a better idea, just say the word.”

He glanced at Lena, then grabbed a pen and paper.

“I want you to call Dr. Westbrook, Lena. Bernhardt’s okay, but we’re high and dry and we’re four days in on a trail that could be seven months old.”

She looked at the area code and phone number Novak was jotting down from his address book.

“Who is he?”

“A criminal psychiatrist with the FBI’s Behaviorial Science Section. Use my name and give him whatever he needs to get started. Just make sure he understands that we’re late on this.”

Novak spotted the Lopez murder book on Lena’s desk, snatched it up, and handed the three-ring binder to Rhodes.

“It’s the Lopez case, Stan. You’ve never seen it before, so everything should read like new. Maybe Lena and I missed something. Maybe you can find something we didn’t.”

“Anything you think you might have overlooked?”

“No,” Novak said. “It seemed righteous, but so did everything leading to Brant.”

Rhodes nodded. Novak turned to Sanchez.

“You need to get back on the computer, Tito. But this time, limit your search to sexual assaults, not homicides. Any woman who’s been raped over the past two years.”

“What about ages?” Sanchez asked.

“Sixteen to dead,” Novak said. “Pull everything.”

Sixteen to dead.
The words hung there.

Novak glanced across the floor at Barrera, still on the phone with Wemer, then turned back and met Lena’s eyes.

“I’m heading over to Piper Tech,” he said. “Wemer might be holding things up. I want to make sure the lab still has us up on top. I’ll be back in an hour. You need to reach me and can’t get the cell, call SID. We cool?”

Lena nodded. So did everybody else.

A NEW BRAND
of urgency was in the air. Lena wasn’t sure if the energy emanated from their briefing with Bernhardt, or the dread she felt in her stomach as she went through the case from the very beginning with Dr. Westbrook over the phone.

Halfway through, Dr. Westbrook was interrupted by someone in his office, and Lena heard him say, “Hold all my calls.” A door closed and the background noise quieted. When he got back on the phone, he said they wouldn’t be interrupted again.

He seemed particularly interested in the way the bodies were posed. The grocery bag covering Nikki Brant’s face and her missing toe. The cross painted on the sheet with Teresa Lopez’s blood. He asked Lena to describe these findings twice, pressing her for details and writing everything down. When she told him that Brant failed the polygraph, he didn’t say anything. When she described the hit made by Irving Sample after studying the writing samples found at both crime scenes, any doubt he might have had that the murders were related completely vanished.

“So what you’re looking for is a left-handed alien from another planet,” Dr. Westbrook said. “In L.A. that narrows the field down to what?”

Lena hesitated. She didn’t know the man and wondered if he was making an ill-timed joke. But when he spoke up again, she realized that he was merely thinking out loud as he did the math.

“About a million,” he said. “Approximately ten percent of the population is left-handed. What about hair and fiber?”

“Nothing was found at either crime scene.”

“What about the ME?”

“He combed both victims out. No pubic hairs were found on either body.”

Dr. Westbrook became quiet again. It didn’t take much for Lena to know why he seemed so troubled. The lack of pubic hairs in a rape case was unusual.

“Are your reports digitized?” he asked.

“No,” Lena said.

“Then here’s what I’d like you to do. E-mail me a short summary of each case. Just the main points, but make sure you include everything we discussed and the observations made by Dr. Bernhardt. Attach a photo of each victim. What I’m looking for are shots of the crime scenes before anything was touched. The way he left them for you to see. Then copy everything you’re sending me to Teddy Mack.”

Lena jotted the name down, wondering why it seemed familiar as Dr. Westbrook gave her Mack’s e-mail address and cell phone number.

“Give Teddy a call and let him know it’s coming. He’s in California right now, about three hours south of L.A. on the border by the New River. We’re working on something I can’t really talk about, but I think he’s got time to take a look. Not much goes on in the desert during the day. At least not the kind of thing we’re looking for.”

Lena glanced at Rhodes, studying the Lopez murder book at his desk. The intensity in his eyes made her feel a little sad. They were grabbing at straws, and all of a sudden it sounded as if Westbrook might be blowing them off on a field agent.

But she remained undaunted, thanking the psychiatrist for his time and getting started on the report. It took only twenty
minutes to complete the summaries. When she was finished, she gave Lamar Newton a call, requesting digital scans of the crime scene photos. As the files appeared on her monitor, she found Teddy Mack’s cell phone number in her notes and grabbed the phone. After half a ring, the call bounced over to his service. But his message was personalized, and Lena listened to his voice, still wondering why his name seemed so familiar.

She left a short message that included her contact information and hung up. Then she turned back to her computer for a look at the photos Lamar had chosen. The horror depicted in living color. Each one was worth more than a thousand words, she imagined. Even for someone working in the Behaviorial Science Section at the FBI.

After double-checking the e-mail addresses Westbrook gave her, she clicked
SEND
and watched her report get sucked into the digital pipeline. Checking her watch, she realized that it was only 9:45 a.m.

Upshaw hadn’t tried to reach her with an update on the Brants’ computer and she didn’t want to hound him. Deciding to give him another ten minutes, she grabbed her empty coffee mug and headed for the door.

There were only two choices for coffee on the third floor. The closest was kept in the janitor’s closet beside the sink and mops outside the captain’s office. The better choice was on a detective’s desk in the Cold Case Unit, an office not much bigger than a closet staffed by six detectives just down the hall. But as Lena reached the doorway, she saw Rhodes inside and stopped. He was holding an empty mug and flipped it upside down.

“They’ve moved,” he said. “No hot java.”

Lena read the note taped to the door. “Looks like they’re on the fifth floor. Better digs.”

“Bigger, you mean.”

“Yeah, bigger,” she said. “I forgot where I was.”

The new chief was doubling the size of the unit, and the ten-by-fifteen-foot space would no longer do. Lena had been here for only three weeks when she realized that in spite of the
working conditions, her goal was to eventually make the transition to this unit. The detectives were some of the department’s best and brightest and had a sense of humor whenever she showed up with her empty mug. Because her brother’s murder remained unsolved, she had a personal affinity for the work they did. This was the last stop for the victims’ families on the hope train. This was where the forgotten bought their ticket, took a seat on the bench, and waited for news that just maybe they could start life over again.

She followed Rhodes down the hall.

“Who’s Teddy Mack?” she asked.

He thought it over a moment, then gave her a look. “The E.T. murders. Five or six years ago in Philadelphia. Don’t you remember last year when that guy finally got the needle? Cable TV wanted to air it live.”

An image surfaced. She remembered seeing Mack’s picture on the front page of
The Times
and reading the story.

“Twenty or thirty bodies,” she said. “But I thought Mack was an attorney.”

“He worked the case and closed it. Why are you asking?”

“Westbrook had me copy everything to Mack. He must be working for the Bureau. He’s in California somewhere near the New River.”

Rhodes gave her another look, different this time. “It sounds like maybe Westbrook said more than he should have.”

It dawned on her what Mack was doing along the New River. Over the past ten years the bodies of more than three hundred young women had turned up on the Mexican side of the border. Because of the number of victims and the duration of the crime, because each woman was sexually assaulted, each body mutilated, the crimes were thought to be perpetrated by an organized group that warranted an American response. But the official line from the Department of Justice was that the United States wasn’t involved in the investigation.

Rhodes was right. Westbrook had said more than he should have.

They reached the janitor’s closet outside the captain’s office. Rhodes opened the door to reveal the coffeepot of last
resort, set on a plywood shelf overtop a bucket filled with gray water and a heavy dose of ammonia. Lena ignored the harsh odor, filling Rhodes’s cup and then her own.

MORE CURIOUS THAN
ever, she returned to her desk thinking about the E.T. murders and Teddy Mack. But as she sat down, she noticed the e-mail waiting for her on the computer.

Upshaw had come through without being rousted.

She clicked open the message and read it carefully. The doer had spent two hours surfing the Internet. According to the Brants’ Web provider, the computer had been used to visit two sites. The first for roughly fifteen minutes. The second, for an hour and forty-five. Upshaw included links to the Web sites in his note, promising contact information within another half hour. As Lena read the Internet addresses, it was obvious that both were porn sites.

She checked the bureau floor, conscious of the detectives working in the room around her and grateful that her back was to the wall. Then she moved her cursor over the first link and clicked the mouse, waiting for the home page to render on her outdated computer.

Lena had grown up with a brother. As the images began to register before her eyes, she didn’t see anything she hadn’t seen before. But as she scrolled to the bottom of the home page, she noticed a password was required to continue.

She looked at the menu and noticed that a visitor’s section was available, promising free sample images for the viewer to download. Lena clicked through the screens, eyeing the samples. The women were young, some maybe even too young, posed in various states of undress and leaving nothing to the imagination. Inside a box at the top of the screen she read the sales pitch. For $19.95 a month, a member could have unlimited access to the hard-core section and see these same young women in action.

Lena checked the bureau floor again, saw Rhodes glance her way, then looked back at her monitor. From the quality of the graphics and high-resolution photographs, the Web site appeared to be making money. But what interested Lena
most were the sets the women were posed in. The furniture and appliances. Even the shower fixtures and electrical outlets. She looked back at a model’s face, noting a smile that appeared forced. These pictures had obviously been taken outside the United States. Probably Russia or Albania or some other Eastern European country where posing nude and the life that went with it wasn’t necessarily a matter of choice. Lena remembered reading a department bulletin sponsored by the FBI while still working out of Hollywood. It was all about moving the model out of her own country. Once her passport was taken and she couldn’t escape, she was bought and sold and forced to repay debts for her estimated street value by the people who owned her.

Lena closed the window and reopened Upshaw’s e-mail, moving her cursor over the second link.

Mounds-A-Plenty.com
.

She paused a moment, thinking about the name of the site and the deadbeat who’d thought it up. Then she clicked the link and waited for the home page to render on her monitor. Mounds-A-Plenty was decidedly more crude than the first. But as she read the menu, she understood why Romeo spent more time here. This site was devoted to amateur hard-core movies and didn’t offer sample photographs. Like the previous site, a password was required to enter. The only free section appeared to be a live feed from a webcam.