faced guardhouse. Beyond the gate I could see rows of model homes marching to the end of a pennant-lined street, with the blue of Lake Mission Viejo sparkling through trees farther in.
“Can I help you?”
Flipping out my shield, I addressed a young man who had stepped from the guardhouse. “I’m meeting somebody inside.”
The guard, a sallow youth with lank blond hair, gaped at my badge. “This about the murders?”
“That’s right. Open up.”
The youth swallowed nervously, reached into the guardhouse, and grabbed a clipboard. After jotting down the Chevrolet’s license number, he thrust a visitor pass through my window. “Here you go, sir,” he said.
The gate lifted. But instead of proceeding, I inspected the rectangular white card I’d been given. “You do this for every visitor coming through?” I asked, watching a gray Ford enter through a keyed gate marked “Residents Only.” “You write down every license?”
“Uh… yes, sir.”
“And you collect these cards on the way out?”
“No, but-”
“So I could give this pass to somebody else and you’d wave them by.”
“I… I guess,” the guard stammered. “But it’s no good after the expiration date.”
I tossed the card onto my dashboard. “How many gates are there into this place?”
“Three, but this is the only one staffed past nine PM. After that you have to have a keycard to get past the others.”
I watched as a young couple strolled into one of the model homes across the street. “Seems like you have a fair amount of construction going on. I’ll bet it gets busy around seven in the morning, with all the trade guys coming through.”
“It sure does,” the youngster conceded. “Sometimes they’re backed up around the block.
“So with everybody trying to make it to work on time, traffic jamming up and all, maybe not every license gets written down.”
“Sometimes,” the guard admitted.
By now a line of cars had formed behind me. “Thanks,” I said, heading through the gate. “You’ve been helpful.”
After rechecking my directions, I arrived minutes later at a two-story Mediterranean-style home with arched windows and a three-car garage. A gray Taurus sat in the driveway. Lounging against the fender, a heavyset man with a pronounced potbelly and the flattened nose of a prizefighter watched as I rolled to a stop.
“Barrello? Lou Barrello?” I called as I climbed out, sizing up the balding man across the driveway as a typical twenty-year cop-streetwise, jaded, and fast approaching burnout.
“Glad you could make it, Kane.”
I reached back into the car and grabbed my file on the Larsons. “Sorry I’m late,” I said, starting up the driveway. “Traffic.”
“Don’t give it a second thought,” Barrello said. “Orange County cops like me have nothing better to do than wait around for a hotshot big-city detective like yourself.”
I had extended my hand as I approached. Hearing this, I let it drop to my side. “You got a problem, Barrello?”
“Not at all. I love havin’ some expert drop by with helpful hints on how to run my investigation.”
“That’s not exactly what I had in mind,” I said slowly. “I’m sure you boys down here can screw things up just fine without any help from me.”
“Think so, huh? Well, as we’re on the subject, let’s get somethin’ straight. No way LAPD’s taking over my case. Orange County is cooperating on a strictly voluntary basis.”
“Let me ask you something, Barrello. Ever consider switching to decaf?”
Barrello smiled thinly. “All the time,” he said, eyeing the folder in my hand. “You turn up anything?”
“See for yourself.” I started to pass him the file, then pulled it back. “You have something for me?”
“Yeah.” Barrello reached into his car and grabbed a thick binder marked “Pratt.”
I squinted at the sky. “What do you say we go inside, get out of the sun?”
“The lawyer ain’t shown up yet with the keys,” said Barrello. “Maybe it’s cooler over there,” he added, tipping his head toward a portico shading the front door.
I followed him to the front entrance of the house. Barrello sat on the landing and dived into my report. I leaned against a wall and started on his. For the next fifteen minutes we studied our respective folders in silence.
First, I turned to the description of the Pratt crime scene. According to the Orange County investigators, there had been no sign of a break-in. As with the Palisades killings, whoever murdered Andy, Carol, and Natalie Pratt had apparently gained access through their unlocked front door. Either that, or used a key. After entering sometime between one and two AM, the intruder disabled the phones and turned off the power at a breaker panel in the garage. Blood spatters and a trail of blood from the kitchen to the Pratts’ second-floor bedroom suggested that the husband, possibly hearing a sound, went downstairs to investigate, encountered the intruder, and suffered a cracked skull and. 25-caliber gunshots to the right elbow and left knee. Once he had dragged the husband upstairs, the killer bound him and his wife, gagging them with Ace bandages. Carol Pratt, hands and feet fastened to the bedposts, died of multiple stab wounds. Blood and urine on the carpet near the closet indicated that the killer-using rope and a piece of galvanized pipe-strangled Andy Pratt there, then placed his body on the bed alongside his wife. Investigators discovered extra rope under the covers. The murder knife, found beside one of three burned-out candles in the room, had been taken from a set in the kitchen.
The Pratts’ four-year-old daughter had died in her bedroom down the hall, suffocated with a plastic trash bag matching others found in the house. A later canvass of the area turned up little. None of the neighbors saw or heard anything out of the ordinary.
I flipped to the eight-by-ten crime scene photos, pausing on a closeup of the husband. Rope encircled his throat, almost hidden in the mottled flesh. The pipe used to tighten the coils had been wedged behind his shoulder to maintain pressure. A second ligature mark ran across his chest and beneath his armpits. I looked closer, noticing that one eyelid had been cut crudely up the center. The other was completely missing. After shuffling past photos of the child, I inspected several shots of the woman. Like Susan Larson, she had once been beautiful. Now her face appeared somehow out of focus, her lips drawn back in a grimace, dried blood on her cheeks giving the appearance of some grotesque makeup that had run under her tears. Shallow knife wounds traversed her upper torso, accompanied by a hideous pattern of bites. Like gaping mouths, deep incisions below her ribcage, probably the killing strokes, split the skin of her abdomen.
Moving on, I scanned the OC autopsy protocols, learning that the woman had died of penetrating wounds to the heart and aorta, her husband of soft ligature strangulation. The bruising, degree of swelling, and increased histamine levels in the husband’s eyelid cuts and the woman’s bites and incisions indicated that most of the wounds had been inflicted before the time of death. Both victims showed signs of skin and eye irritation from a chemical currently available in pepper spray. Vaginal and anal tears, along with traces of a gel-type spermicide, were present on the woman.
Other lab tests proved disappointing. Semen, saliva swabs, and fingernail-cutting examinations all came up negative. No unexplained blood was found at the scene. Unmatched latent prints were lifted with no computer hits, and six unidentified hairs were recovered from the bed sheets and pubic combings.
Closing the folder, I looked over at Barrello. The OC detective had already finished the smaller LAPD file. He now sat smoking an unfiltered Camel, seeming lost in thought. Noticing my glance, he took one last drag and ground the butt into a flower pot. “Same guy,” he said.
I nodded. “There are a few differences. The plastic bag on the kid, for instance. And the pepper spray. But yeah. It’s him.”
“When will your lab and autopsy reports be available?”
“It’ll be a couple days on the lab. The coroner’s report probably won’t be available for a while longer, but the results will show the same things you guys found down here. Eyelids, bites, knife wounds, ligature strangulation.”
“Damn.” Barrello pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and shook out another.
