Yet open him up and there'd be unremarkable viscera. Bouncing around the vault of his skull would be a lump of gray jelly, outwardly indistinguishable from the brain of a saint.
A man-it always came down to just a man.
Marvelle Haas closed her eyes again. Whimpers struggled to escape from behind the red ball. All that emerged were pitiful squeaks. Milo crouched, ready to shoot, but Crimmins was still too close to the line.
'Open your eyes, Mrs. Haas,' said Crimmins. 'Give me your eyes, honey, come on. I want to catch your expression the moment it happens.'
He checked the tape around Peake's hand. Adjusted the gun barrel so that it centered on Marvelle Haas's left temple.
She squeaked.
He said, 'Come on, let's be professional about this.' Moved toward her. Away from the fishing line.
'Used to fish,' he said, arranging her hair, parting her housedress. Slipping a hand under the fabric and rubbing, pinching. 'Look what I caught here.'
Still within arm's reach of the line.
'Back when I fished,' he said, 'a tug on the line meant you'd caught something. This time it means throwing something away.'
She turned away from him. He moved to the left, focusing, filming.
Away from the line. Far enough away.
'Don't move! Drop your hands! Drop 'em drop 'em now!'
Derrick Crimmins froze. Turned around. The look on his owlish face was odd: surprised-betrayed.
Then the flush of rage. 'This is a private shoot. Where's your pass?'
'Drop your hand, Crimmins. Do it now!'
'Oh,' said Crimmins. 'You talk so I'm supposed to listen, asshole?'
'Drop it, Crimmins, this is the last time- '
Crimmins said, 'Okay, you win.'
He shrugged. The lipless mouth curved upward 'Oh well,' he said.
He lunged for the fishing line. Milo shot him in the smile.
Chapter 41
The explorer showed up on a Hollywood Division want list. Stolen from a strip mall at Western and Sunset two months before. In the rear storage area were five sets of license plates, three phony registrations, two videocams, a dozen cassettes, candy wrappers, soda cans. Wedged in the spare-tire case, barbiturates, Thorazine, methamphetamine.
Hedy Haupt was traced to a family in Yuma, Arizona. Father's whereabouts unknown, Welfare Department clerk mother, one brother who worked for the Phoenix fire department. Hedy had earned a B average during her first three years at Yuma High, played a starring role on the track and basketball teams. After she 'fell in with a bad crowd' during her senior year, her grades had plummeted and she'd dropped out, earned a GED, gotten a job at Burger King, run away. During the ensuing eight years, her mother had seen her twice, once for Christmas five years ago, then a one-week visit last year, during which she'd been accompanied by a boyfriend named Griff.
'Had a bad feeling about him,' Mrs. Haupt told Milo. 'Carried a camera around and did nothing but take our picture. Wore nothing but black, like someone died.'
Milo and Mike Whitworth found the tapes while excavating the mounds of stolen goods in the garage at Orange Drive. Sixteen cassettes in black plastic cases, buried under thousands of dollars' worth of motion picture gear that Derrick Crimmins had lacked the will, or the ability, to master.
Sixteen death scenes.
The first recognizable victim was the fourth we viewed.
Richard Dada, young, handsome, talking animatedly about his career plans, unaware of what lay ahead. Cut to the next scene: Richard's head yanked back by the hair, exposed for the throat slash. The body bisected with a band saw. The dark-sleeved arms of the murderer visible, but no face. The camera was stationary, making it possible for one person to murder and film. Other tapes featured a roving lens that necessitated two killers. The log on the tape said Dada had been killed at one A.M.
Ellroy Bearty's tape featured two segments, an initial shot of the homeless man sucking a bottle near the train tracks, then, four months later, Beatty prone and unconscious on those same train tracks, followed by a long shot of an approaching express. Poor technique; the camera jumped around and the moment of impact was just a blur. Next came brother Leroy, also in two installments. Smiling drunkenly as he talked about wanting to be a blues singer. Four months later, a similar smile, cut short as a black hole snapped onto his forehead like a decal and he collapsed.
Both brothers killed the same night. Ellroy first, his death mandated by the train schedule. Leroy's turn two hours later. Midway through the stack was Claire Argent's final day on earth: like the others, she'd been unprepared. Crimmins had filmed her in front of a bare white wall. Whether it was her own living room couldn't be determined. She talked about psychology, about wanting to learn more about madness, made allusions to the project she and the cameraman would be starting soon, then said, 'Oh, sorry, I'm supposed to forget you're there, right?' No answer from the cameraman.
Claire talked more about the origins of madness. About not jumping to conclusions, because even psychotics had something to tell us. Then she smoothed an eyebrow-primping for the camera-and smiled some more. Five seconds of shy smile before she was smothered by a pillow. Long shot of her motionless body. Close-up on the straight razor… Twelve other home movies, unlabeled. Seven females: five teenage girls with the haunted look of street kids, two attractive blond women in their thirties. Five males: a painfully thin goateed boy around sixteen or seventeen and four men, one Asian, one black, two Hispanic.
Folded into an empty box were two sheets of paper.
Title page:
Second page:
We worked on that for a long time.
The 'fag actor' was most likely Dada, the 'old-maid pro-fesor,' Claire. Other designations included 'the wino twins (Monster finds a perfect match)' and three headings- 'pompos businessman,' 'coke whore,' and 'girl shopping'- for which no conforming tape could be found. 'Greaser farm-chick' matched Suzy Galvez, 'the sheriff's hotblooded wife' Marvelle Haas. The 'teenage pimp' could've been the goateed boy stabbed in the chest, then dismembered. But he fit 'street punk,' so my guess was Christopher Soames. Never had his audition, lucky lad.
At the bottom of the page: '
The job of identifying the unnamed victims was assigned to a six-detective task force from LAPD and the Sheriff's Department. After two months, three of the teenage girls had been matched with runaways on various missing persons rosters; all the girls, it was believed, had been living on the streets of Hollywood. Hedy Haupt would've understood that scene. Two girls and the goateed boy remained nameless, as did the younger of the blond women, probably the 'stripper,' and the black man (the 'nigger stud'). 'Greaser 1' and 'greaser 2' turned out to be Hernando Alas and Sabino Real, cousins from El Salvador seeking work as laborers by standing outside a paint store in Eagle Rock. Contractors seeking cheap labor cruised the store daily. No one remembered who'd picked up Alas and Real, but family members living in the Union District finally stepped forward to make the identification.
A Korean-American salesman named Everett Kim, bludgeoned with a baseball bat-the 'chink'-was traced to the Glendale-based skydiving club where Derrick Crimmins and Hedy had first met. The ex-wife of another member, a dental hygienist from Burbank, turned out to be Allison Wisnowski. 'The nurse.'
Four months later, no new I.D.'s and only one of the bodies had been found: one of the runaway girls, a sixteen-year-old named Karen DeSantis, discovered by hikers in Bouquet Canyon.
One additional tape was found in the Explorer, the scene barely discernible because of poor light: Hedy Haupt aka Heidi Ott, getting out of the four-wheeler, smiling uneasily. Handing the camera to someone off screen, then
