'You want one?' he asks, offering the pack to me. I fight the omnipresent urge to accept. 'No, thanks.'
'You quit?'
'I'll have to live vicariously through you.'
'Hey,' he says, magnanimous, as he strikes a match. 'I'll even blow some smoke into your face, if you ask me nice.'
He brings the flame close, gets his cherry tip, and takes a deep, satisfying drag. I watch him blow the smoke out. It forms a huge cloud that hangs in front of us, no breeze available to move it along. My nostrils flare. The sweet smell of addiction, yum, yum, yum.
'I'm gonna go see the girl in the morning,' Barry says. 'Be helpful if you came along.'
'Call me early on my cell.'
'You got it.' He puffs again, indicates the house with a nod. 'How do you see it so far?'
'A lot of it is confusing. The one thing that's clear is that there's a message behind his actions. The question is: Is it a message for us, or just for himself ? Does he want us to understand what all that blood means, is that why he left the words on the wall? Was that a calculated act? Or was he doing it because voices in his head told him to?' I turn so I'm facing the house. 'We do know he's confident and bold and competent. We don't know if he's an organized or disorganized offender. We don't know what he fears, yet.'
Barry frowns. 'Fears? What do you mean?'
'Serial killers are narcissists. They lack empathy. They don't choose their method of death or torture based on what they think their victims will fear. That would
Barry stares at me. 'You got some dark shit going on in that mind of yours, Barrett.'
I'm about to reply when my cell phone rings.
'Is this Agent Barrett?' A man's voice, vaguely familiar to me.
'Who's this?'
'Al Hoffman, ma'am. I'm on the hotline.'
The 'hotline' is what we call the LA FBI's 24-7 version of an answering service. They have the contact numbers for everyone from the Assistant Director on down. If someone from Quantico wants to talk to someone here, for example, and it's after hours, they call the hotline.
'What's up, Al?'
'I just got a weird anonymous call for you.'
My hackles go up.
'Male or female?'
'Male. Voice was muffled, like he was holding something over the mouthpiece.'
'What did he say?'
'He said, quote: 'Tell the bitch with the scars that there's been another killing, and that this place equals justice.' He gave me an address in Granada Hills.'
I'm silent.
'Agent Barrett?'
'Did you get a trace on the number, Al?'
This question is a formality. The hotline had automatic tracing installed post 9/11, but that's supposed to be classified information.
'It's a cell phone. Probably cloned, stolen, or untraceable disposable.'
'Give me the number anyway. And the address, please.'
He reads off the address. I thank him and hang up.
'What's going on?'
I tell Barry about the call.
He stares at me for a moment. 'Fuck and shit and all the rest!' he exclaims. 'You kidding me? You think it's for real?'
' 'This place equals justice'? That's too close, too coincidental. It's for real.'
'This nut really knows how to ruin a Saturday night,' he mutters. He tosses his cigarette into the street. 'Lemme tell Simmons I'm leaving. You grab Red and I guess we'll go and see what the difference between pain and justice is for this guy.'
Alan is still nowhere to be seen. I call him on his cell phone.
'I'm three doors down eating cookies with Mrs. Monaghan,' he says. 'A very nice lady who also volunteers with the neighborhood watch.'
Alan is inhumanly patient when it comes to witness interviews. Unfazeable. His 'nice lady who volunteers with the neighborhood watch' probably translates to 'cranky, nosy woman who watches everybody with a sharp eye and talks about them with an even sharper tongue.'
I fill him in on the phone call from the hotline.
'Want me to come with?' he asks.
'No, you and Ned eat your cookies and finish the canvass.'
'We will, but call me and let me know what happened. And be careful.'
I consider using the same 'If I was going to be careful, I wouldn't be going' quip I'd given Dawes but decide against it. Alan's voice sounds too serious.
'I will be,' I reply instead.
12
WE'VE TAKEN THE 118 FREEWAY HEADING EAST. THE ROAD IS half-packed, neither busy nor deserted, the constant state of freeways in Los Angeles.
I feel tense and crabby and dark. This day continues to fall farther and farther down the rabbit hole.
'Why you?' Callie asks, startling me from my self-pity party.
'Why me what?'
'Why did Mr. Bad Man call you?'
I consider this.
'It could have been planned, I suppose, but I don't think so. I think he was there.'
'Come again?'
'I think he was there. Watching. He saw us arrive and he recognized me.'
It's a staple of profiling and criminal investigation that perpetrators will return to the scene of a crime. The reasons are myriad. To find out how the investigation is going. To relive the experience. To feel powerful.
'I think he always planned to tell us about the second crime scene. He decided to hang around, see what happened, and call it in. It just happened to be us.'
'So he recognized you.'
'Unfortunately.' I sigh.
'Barry's signaling to exit.'
Barry knows the area we're going to, an apartment complex.
'Not a total shit hole, but not a great place either,' he'd said. 'I caught a suicide there about four years ago.'
I follow and we turn right onto Sepulveda Boulevard. Things become busier here than on the freeway. It's Saturday night, and people have places to go, things to do, the hamster wheel of life.
'I wonder if this scene will be fresher than the last one,' she says.
'Do you think he's going on a tear? Making a night of it?'
'I really don't know, Callie. This guy is puzzling. He guts a family, but he leaves the boy alone and Sarah gets to live. He paints the room with their blood, but he plans well enough to drug them. On the one hand he seems psychotic and disorganized, on the other he's purposeful and controlled. It's weird.'
She nods in agreement. 'Swimming in the pool was impulsive.'
