'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?'
