Bleeding Out

more important than who the girls actually are.'

Clay paused before adding, 'You asked why he's not choosing boys to relive this. There could be a number of reasons. If he was assaulted, I think it was by someone older, definitely someone with considerable power, a parent, teacher, close older relative. It could have been a female, but I think again we'd see him assaulting a specific stereotype, someone that resembled his abuser. That leads me to think it was a male who abused him, an older male, someone he doesn't feel able to strike back against. If this person raped him, that would explain his anal fixation.'

Frank shook her head.

'Also, attacking boys could be too confrontational, too personal. It would be harder to disassociate from a boy,' Clay continued. 'Whoever he is, he is crazy like a fox.'

'He's smart,' Frank agreed. 'Careful.'

'This could go on awhile, couldn't it?'

'Maybe,' Frank said coldly, 'but sooner or later he's going to trip up. And when he does, I'll be right there waiting.'

They made it into the district play-offs. His team had fought hard all season, and they were finally here. He had fought harder than anybody, knew the rest of the team was riding in his wake, but he didn't care. It was his junior year, and he needed this moment. Dressing in the locker room, he remembered his father's face in his this morning.

'There's going to be a scout from USC at the game today. This is your chance, boy. Don't blow it,' he'd warned, and the boy had no intention of that. He dressed quietly, and alone, not sharing in the nervous, pregame banter caroming off the locker room walls. He stayed focused, reviewing over and over in his head, like a prayer, the play signals. He saw the team reacting to the quarterback's calls, thought of his moves in response to his teammates, the defense. He was ready. He was so ready he was almost getting a hard-on. No one better get in his way because there was no stopping him today.

This was finally his moment. At last his father would be proud. This was it. Do or die.

14

The days that followed were monotonous and frustrating. Frank and Noah had followed up on all the assaults they could and were glad when they wrapped up interviewing the girls. Lisa McKinney was the last girl they talked to, a gangly blonde sporting a healing scar for her fifteenth birthday. When Noah asked her about it, she shot him a look full of misplaced venom, vehemently declaring, 'That's where my face was pressed against a rock when he was pounding on me.'

'What did he pound you with?' Frank asked easily, thinking it might be better if she took over the questioning.

'He was ramming his head and his shoulder into me the whole time he was...,' the girl's defiance faltered, '...doing what he did to me.'

Her account was much like that of the later victims.

Based on the limited recall of their one possible witness, Frank had a sketch drawn of their perp. Two of the girls confirmed that their assailant had brown hair and one remembered him wearing dun-colored workboots. The sketch was widely distributed, and a special task force was set up to handle the subsequent load of phone calls. The majority of calls were ridiculously unrelated. One woman reported a man with the same height and weight, but he was black. It turned out he was her ex-boyfriend and she wanted to get back at him for breaking up with her. Another caller was sure she knew the man and took Bobby and Jill straight to him. He was a Vietnamese grocer, stood barely taller than Jill's big tummy, and couldn't have weighed more than one hundred thirty pounds. The caller accused him of tipping the scales, and the detectives left them screaming insults at each other.

But the call they all liked best, the nine-three decided after a late afternoon round of pitchers, was the old Mexican guy who pointed to his stocky neighbor next door, insisting he was the one. 'I know he don't look like the description,' he assured them, 'but I seen him change. He don't know I know, but I can see it,' he confided. He explained to Gough and Nookey how the neighbor could shift shapes, that he could become anybody or any animal he wanted to be. The old man said he'd seen him turn into a bat, a black dog, even a beautiful woman one time. After the interview, Nookey spent the day howling like a werewolf and Gough eagerly counted his remaining days on the force.

After several weeks of back-to-back interviews, the nine-three had followed up on some solid leads, even arresting two felons with outstanding warrants, but none of them had led to their perp. Frank spoke with the lead detectives on the Culver City cases, questioning their methodology and generally pissing them off. She didn't understand how they had missed the connection between the assaults at the parks and the dump at Culver City High.

To their credit, they had seen the connection. But it still hadn't given them anything new to go on, other than they were looking for their man in a wider area, making their search even more difficult. They justified not putting up posters because they didn't have the personnel to handle the additional work it would entail.

Returning from CCPD, Noah drove and Frank checked out the deteriorating scenery. Storefronts were gaudy with tinsel and canned snow. Someone, maybe a wishful kid, had chalked a crude Christmas tree on a crumbling block wall. A banger had scrawled his placa through it, but a rival had rubbed him out, spraying his name and affiliation over the original message. The city impressively whitewashed graffiti as it occurred, but in South Central they'd conceded the battle.

The afternoon was cool, somewhere in the fifties Frank guessed, but she still had her window down. Once a cop always a cop, hyper-alert for the anomaly in the scenery, the thing that didn't belong.

'Tracey wants you to come over for Thanksgiving dinner. You'd better come, 'cause you know she'll kick my butt if you say no.'

'How's she doing?' Frank asked, by way of side-stepping the invitation.

'She's good. I think she's mellowing with age. She's cranked about all the hours I'm putting in lately, but at least I'm not sleeping on the couch or banging on your door at 2:00 a.m.'

Both detectives grinned.

'And the kids,' he continued, 'when was the last time you saw them?'

'Labor Day?'

'You're kidding. Man, that's way too long. You gotta come over. I'm telling her you'll be there. One o'clock.'

'Hmm. I'll call and find out the time myself. Last time you invited me it was three. I thought she was going to kill me until I told her you said five, and then you were almost the dead man.'

'Three, five, whatever.'

'I'll call.'

They drove in silence for a while before Noah said, 'Hey, Frank?'

She glanced at him.

'What do you think about setting up a decoy and trolling for him?'

Frank shifted in her seat, chewing slightly at the inside of her lip.

'Crossed my mind.'

'And?'

'Too many drawbacks, not enough potential.'

'Yeah, but there's a lot of drawbacks to being dead, too. I mean, how many bodies we gotta go through before we can catch this guy?'

'Where would you start?'

'The area where we found Nichols. We know that's his 'hood—'

'We think that's his 'hood.'

Frank consistently reminded her detectives when they were speculating. The worst thing they could do was get locked into an idea. If it was wrong, they'd lost valuable time on a fool's errand, and the more committed they were to an idea, the harder it was to see other options. Noah continued impatiently.

'We know he's got a thing for schools, right? Am I safe in saying that? He's dumped two bodies at high schools, he's raped at and around two high schools. I think we should set up a decoy, maybe a homeless girl like