So, Doug has finally come around, decided that I need to be informed.
What excellent timing, he thought. Now, he could finally put his mind at ease, let the bitches rot in perpetuity as he moved forward with his career, with his life. Opening his Outlook contacts, he found Doug’s name and cellphone number among the hundreds of other connections that he had made during his career. Without leaving himself room to second-guess his actions, he dialed.
The phone rang twice before Doug’s gruff voice answered with, “Thanks for calling me back. I—”
“I figured it must be important if it couldn’t wait even a day.” He cut Doug off, impatient to hear what the captain had to say.
He doubted that the captain would even realize that he had never called him personally before, or that instead of letting his secretary organize a meeting, he was calling himself. Doug, as much good as he’d done for the LAPD, was too trusting, loyal to a fault. Which was why he’d never been successful in the political sphere and, coincidentally, why he’d never suspect one of his longtime friends of being involved in anything akin to murder.
“Well it’s not good that’s for sure.”
The captain sighed, and he tapped his fingers impatiently on his desk, waiting for the news. “What is it?” he asked calmly, kindly, adding a hint of concern to his tone.
“We think we have a serial killer on the loose,” Doug spat out. Without pause, he added, “I just thought that I’d warn you in case there’s a media frenzy in the next few days.”
“What?” He grinned over the phone at the shock that resonated in his voice. “How many women?”
There was a brief pause.
Come on, Doug. I don’t have all day for this shit.
“Three, so far. All with the same COD and physical characteristics.”
He fell silent as Doug spewed of the details of the murders right back to him, breathed quietly through the descriptions of the strangulations, the scenes of the murder, the coroner’s reports. There was something so…gratifying about listening to the mayhem that his labor had created. Six hours of work for him was resulting in more than ten city employees working overtime to try and catch a killer. And they’d still never know that it was him who’d tricked the women into pulling over, him who’d felt the life leave their bodies while he’d strangled them.
“Shit, Doug.” He paused for effect when the captain was done. “Do you have any leads?”
“Not yet, but we’re working overtime on this. We’ve pulled in a few boys from Central to help out too. You know Jake Simmone?”
“Yes.” The news made his brow furrow. He knew Simmone, knew that the lieutenant of the Central Division was one of the youngest in the history of the LAPD. He’d even attended a medal ceremony for the lieutenant and his partner when they had made detective nearly eight years earlier. The thought made him shift uncomfortably in his chair. “I don’t have to tell you to keep this quiet until we have a lead, Doug. We can’t hold a press conference without any information or any leads. People will go crazy. There’ll be mass hysteria.”
“I know. We’ve even kept it quiet here for as long as possible, but…you know how these things come out. It’ll be a rookie pouring his heart out to his wife or someone we interviewed telling a friend.”
“Your point being that it won’t stay quiet forever.”
“Exactly. To be honest, we’re pretty damned surprised that we’ve been able to keep it under wraps for a week.”
“I understand, Doug. You know that you have my full support and the use of any of my resources?”
“Thanks. I might take you up on that.”
They were quiet for a moment before Doug added, “We have a fourth woman, a potential victim who wasn’t murdered.”
“How’s that?” Bile rose in the back of his throat.
“A young woman in the same neighborhood had a break-in during the same time frame, probably on the same night as the third murder. Said she could hear the man breathing behind her while she lay in her bed. Apparently, she screamed when he touched her, but we have no witnesses. Nobody even heard her scream.”
The world slowed and he glanced around his office. He hadn’t been expecting the police to link the incidents so quickly. “Are you sure she’s legit? I mean a guy broke in to, what? Watch her sleep?”
Stupid! Should have fucking killed her! What if…
He forced his mind to calm as Doug’s voice started up again. “Simmone thinks she is and, well, his instincts coupled with the fact that she fits the murderer’s physical preference are enough for me to have set up extra precautions for the girl. You know how these psychos are. Obsessive. Once they fixate on someone, well, things don’t tend to end well.”
“I see.” He wasn’t sure that he liked the descriptor, but he let it pass. After the first girl, he had deliberately set the scene for a serial killer, taking pains to ensure that they looked related and, well, so far so good. The LAPD was lapping it up.
The truth was that he hadn’t even realized how similar all the girls had looked when he’d decided to kill them. He’d only realized once he’d seen Deborah Duran’s corpse that she’d looked similar in death to the other two. After he’d lost his temper with the first girl and had killed her with his bare hands, he’d committed to strangling the other two also. He knew that he needed to make their deaths look connected, like the act of a deranged serial killer, not the act of an extremely intelligent man with a life-long career to protect.
He thought back to the Michaels girl. Yeah, she was a brunette, but other than that, she didn’t fit the bill. Maybe, if he needed to dispose of her, she’d look more like them in death too? The thought, a strange one, made his body shudder with pleasure, made him wonder if he’d ever get to prove or refute that hypothesis.
“You still there?”
“Yeah, sorry.” He sighed loudly into the phone. “What measures have you taken to protect this girl, Doug? We do not need the feds poking their noses into our city.”
Or into my business.
“I agree. Martha and I nominated Jacob Simmone to be her point of contact and nighttime protection, but she stays pretty low-key during the day, so we figured that she didn’t need to have twenty-four-hour protection. I’ve added drive-bys every two hours during the day with two stop-ins at random times.”
“Mnnn.” He didn’t like that Martha Petluski had gotten involved either. The DA was a fucking A-grade student. To make things worse, Simmone seemed to be coming back to haunt him too. But at least he had an approximate twelve-hour window every day where he could go back to the bitch’s apartment if he had to. “I’d tend to agree that a twenty-four-hour detail seems extraneous.”
“Yeah.”
“Alright, Doug. Thanks for letting me know and keep me updated in case I have to attend a press conference?”
“Sure thing. Have a good one.”
He hung up the phone.
Chapter 10
He looked at the woman, no…girl who sat opposite him in the small café, and smiled kindly when she tapped her long, fake nails on the white, lacquered table. She was short, with wide hips, a narrow waist, and a big bust—things which he noticed first because she was wearing shorts that barely covered her ass and a shirt that hugged her breasts before ending abruptly two inches above her belly button. Her hair was nearly black and fell in thick curls to the waistband of her high-waisted shorts. Jacob thought that she was pretty but felt immensely relieved that there was no sexual pull for him. Meghan Reiner, Veronica Tally’s college roommate, may have been twenty-one years old, but to him, she was very much still a child.