dollars? But if I were you, I’d get it, and bring it here today. They’re not real good at waiting.”
He nodded, numbly.
“And while you’re at it, don’t forget the thirty-five hundred you owe Mae, and the seventy-five hundred you owe me.”
He walked to the door, then stopped and turned to look at Tracy. “Does Mae know?”
Tracy sighed and shook her head. “No, she doesn’t. If she did, it would scare the poor girl to death. You pay, and she never has to know.” Tracy’s voice lowered a bit. “This can be just between you and me.” Her heavily made-up eyes were reproving, but he detected a hint of the tentative, conditional forgiveness that his mother had sometimes teased him with. “Just don’t ever do that again.”
29
The northern end of the San Fernando Valley was only a few miles inland from where Millikan lived, but on nights like tonight, the air seemed to have drifted in from the desert and then remained still all day, heating up on the treeless boulevards and vast, blacktopped parking lots. The sweat had already begun to form droplets on his forehead. “She ran this place all alone—did the cooking and handled the cash register?”
“That’s right,” said Carrera. “The register’s got over two hundred in it, and nothing else seems to be missing either.”
Millikan went behind the counter into the little kitchen and stared down at her body. She was Hispanic, not much over five feet tall. She looked about sixty years old, but he knew she could have been much younger. Life in this tiny, sweltering space, standing over a griddle, squinting to protect her eyes from smoke and getting peppered with grease spatters, wasn’t much of a beauty treatment. He supposed it wasn’t always this hot, but after she had been shot, the killer had not bothered to turn off the oven or the deep fryer.
Lieutenant Carrera stood on the other side of the counter, leaned over it, and pointed. “See, she got just the two shots: one through the chest, and the other in the back of the head after she was down.”
Millikan had to step through the narrow door to go outside and then come back in through the front entrance to reach the small porch that had been enclosed and converted into a dining room. There was a big blue B grade from the Los Angeles County Health Department posted on the window. There were only four tables, and from the look of the place, all four had probably been filled at once only during lunch hours. This was not a night spot.
Millikan took a few steps, then stopped and stared down at the third man on the floor. Like the other two, he was Anglo, not Hispanic, and moving into middle age. He estimated that they were all in their late thirties to early forties. The man wore blue jeans that showed some wear, but not the wear that came from physical work. They were slightly faded because somebody had washed them a couple of times to make them soft and maybe to shrink them to give a custom fit.
Millikan would not have needed to look at the jeans to know that these men had not been laborers. Their hands were soft, not callused. Millikan knew that if he wanted to figure out how much a man made, the place to look was where the money showed. Car keys all came from the factories now, because they had computer chips and remote door-lock controls. They had the make of the car stamped all over them. And Millikan had become very good at identifying men’s shoes and watches.
The three men were arranged roughly in a line across the room. There was a hole in the forehead of the man on the right, a hole in the back of the man in the center, near the front door. The third man had ducked down behind a table, and gotten shot through it at least four times: Millikan could see several holes in the tabletop, and entry wounds in the man’s thigh, stomach, chest, and head.
Millikan had collected a great many tiny bits of mostly useless information over the years. He recognized the one that was in front of him now. When a man with a gun told a group of victims to line up, the place to stand was the center of the line. Right-handed shooters shot the one on the right first, and left-handed shooters began with the one on the left. There was something in the human mind that always kept killers from shooting the man in the middle first.
He pointed at the man on the right. “That one was first, through the head.” He moved his arm to indicate the one on the left. “The one over there saw what was happening—or maybe figured out the sort of trouble he was in after the first shot—and ducked down behind the table. The shooter fired through the tabletop a few times, quickly. While he was doing that, this guy was moving too, so the shooter got him in the back and dropped him before he could get to the door. The shooter is right-handed, probably.”
“I’ll buy that,” Carrera said, then paused for a moment. “Okay, so Danny, what do you think? What are the chances it’s the same guy?”
Millikan looked at the group of brass casings on the floor, each of them already circled with chalk. There was a small numbered placard beside each one. His eyes moved to the arrangement of bodies. “Absolutely none.” He saw the look of disappointment in Carrera’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Pete.”
Carrera shrugged. “Just so you’re sure.”
Millikan knelt above one of the brass casings, with a number 8 placard beside it. “See this? In the Louisville restaurant there was no brass. He picked it all up and took it with him.” Millikan stared more closely at the shell, then stood. “Forty-one Magnum. Remember those? You don’t see many of them anymore, but they were a big deal for a while. They were supposedly going to be the next standard police load in about 1964 or ’65. He probably wasn’t alive then.”
“But he isn’t a killer with a signature,” Carrera reminded him. “He seems to be able to use whatever comes to hand.”
“He’s even better than that,” said Millikan. “He can make what he wants come to his hand. There’s no reason for him to do a paid killing with a gun in a caliber he’s not used to, especially one that’s a little bit eccentric and out-of-date. When he killed Officer Fulco at the hospital, he took her nine-millimeter Beretta. When he killed the security guard in the building on Wilshire, he got his gun too.”
“Any chance he’d do it to disguise himself, just to throw us off?”
Millikan shook his head. “Not him. But maybe whoever did this heard about him on television and gave it a try.” He stepped care-fully across the room. “This all looks a little bit like the killings in Louisville—three guys shot in a locked restaurant, and the cook taken out because she’s a witness—but it’s not. The Louisville killer would never make everybody stand in a row so he could shoot them. It’s a step that would never enter his mind.”
Millikan approached the table that had been turned on its side and punctured by several shots. “In Louisville he had two people down behind a table like this. He didn’t fire a bunch of shots through it, hoping he’d hit something. He took the time to walk around it and shoot what he could see. He stays calm and works efficiently. This just isn’t his work.”
Carrera looked around him at the bodies. “You think we’ve got a copycat?”
“Not exactly,” said Millikan. “Not the kind who got set off by hearing about the other shooting. I think the one who killed these people just figured his chances were better if you wasted some time thinking he might be the Louisville shooter.”
Carrera sighed. “You’ve got me there. As soon as I heard what kind of shooting this was, I thought of him. So did the first officers to respond to the call. I guess we all just hope he’ll do something else here, and this time he’ll screw up: leave a print, get noticed, or something.”
“Me too,” said Millikan. He wrenched his mind away from the direction it was taking, refusing to let himself return to the secret hope.
“Heard anything about how Roy Prescott’s doing?” It was as though Carrera had read Millikan’s mind, detected the vulnerability, and poked at it.
“I don’t know,” Millikan said. “I haven’t talked to him in a long time.”
Carrera nodded, pretending to look at the bodies on the floor but holding Millikan in the corner of his eye. “I suppose not. I don’t think I’d want to be in too close touch either.”
Millikan took a deep breath, and turned to face Carrera. “You and I have known each other for a long time, Pete,” he said carefully. “I won’t start hiding the truth from you now. The reason Prescott is after this guy is that I gave the father of one of the Louisville victims his phone number. I was the one who brought Prescott in. The father probably would have hired some private detective and thought he’d done everything there was to do. He had never heard of Prescott until I told him.”
