Bleeding Out (17 page)

“And you think he’s going to go for me just because I’m young?”

Noah looked at Frank. He sighed when she didn’t answer and picked up the slack. “Young, and in the right place at the right time. And if you act right, he’ll sense that you’re tentative, vulnerable. Hopefully he’ll be attracted to that. Almost all the girls we talked to were real hesitant and uncertain. Somewhat afraid of us.”

“Don’t you think that’s just normal for a girl who’s been traumatized and is talking to the police?”

There was the merest hint of a challenge in Kennedy’s questions. It irked Frank, but Noah didn’t seem to notice.

“Sure, but you can see it’s a basic part of their personality, too. It’s their vulnerability that appeals to him. It makes him feel confident and in control. It doesn’t look like he’s actually stalked any of his vies, but he definitely prefers a certain personality, so he must be watching them at least for a little while.”

Nancy paused at their table and poured the rest of a pitcher into Noah’s glass.

“You guys ready for another round?”

Frank nodded and Nancy asked, “Who’s your friend?”

Kennedy smiled, and before Noah could answer she shook Nancy’s hand and introduced herself. Frank watched the women boldly appraising each other. Their mutual interest was suddenly clear to Frank. She drained her mug, chagrined she hadn’t picked up on Kennedy sooner.

Nancy smiled, “Nice to meet you.”

“Likewise,” Kennedy replied with disarming attention.

Nancy blushed lightly as she wiped at the table, asking Frank if she’d eaten today. Frank thought for a moment before answering no.

“Are you going to?”

Nancy smiled down at her, but Frank was intent on Kennedy’s wide grin.

“No,” she said grimly.

“Fra-ank,” the waitress chided, then turned to Kennedy. “How ‘bout you, hon? You want something to go with that Coke?”

“I reckon I would,” she said, raking Nancy’s solid figure just long enough for the innuendo to register. Then she sat back and asked nonchalantly, “Ya’ll got ‘ny french fries in that there kitchen?”

The way she said
there
sounded like
they-uh
and Frank was amazed anyone could think that sticky inflection was charming. Kennedy’s blatant flirtation was equally astounding. Nancy wasn’t even a member of one of the most homophobic police forces in the nation and she was more discreet.

“I reckon we could rustle some up for ya,” Nancy teased, playing with the accent.

“Well, that’d do me fine. An’ how ‘bout a salad, ma’am? Could I get one a them, too?”

“Only if you start callin’ me Nancy.
Ma’am
sounds so old. I’ll bring you a menu.”

“Tha’s awright. Just gimme your house salad, with ranch dressin’, an I’ll be happier’n a pig in a sty.”

Just when she thought Kennedy couldn’t get any lower, she impressed Frank by taking out a shovel and digging deeper. Noah chuckled, and Frank cut him a withering glare.

“Where were we?” Kennedy asked, innocently crunching an ice cube.

Frank pushed away from the table.

“I’m out of here. See you in the morning.”

“Aw, come on,” Noah protested. “We just got here.”

Despite his pleas to stay, Frank slung her jacket over her shoulder and walked away, suddenly inexplicably angry. If she had turned around, Frank would have seen Kennedy smiling curiously at her retreating figure.

They didn’t joyride together anymore. The boy missed that. He and his father had fun then, cruising, picking out the whores. The old man always let him pick whichever girl he wanted. The boy liked the younger girls, the younger the better. His father was really good about that. They’d drive for hours until the boy found a girl he liked.

But now that all was gone. The boy was alone with only his magazines and his memories.

The next morning, Frank looked out the rainy window and thought briefly about going back to bed. She was cold but refused to turn the heat on, rationalizing that this was
southern
California. She settled for a hot shower and upped the heat in the car as she drove in to the office. Walking into the squad room, Frank was disconcerted to find the
enfant terrible
scrunched in Noah’s chair, surrounded by open case folders.

“Hey,” Kennedy yawned, circumspectly taking Frank’s measure. Faded jeans, old boat shoes, and an LAPD sweatshirt gave Frank a deceptively laid-back appearance. With her hair messed from the wind and her cheeks flushed by the cold, Frank looked almost sexy. She shattered the effect by grunting, “What are you doing here?”

“Shy and hesitant isn’t my normal MO,” the younger detective replied lazily. “I was just goin’ over the reports on all these girls, trying to absorb as much of their personalities as possible.”

Frank nodded, unlocking her door. Then she did an unusual thing: she closed it behind her, leaving Kennedy staring and tapping a pen against her teeth.

An old sax man wailed plaintively as Frank pressed through her notes. Oblivious to Kennedy’s Circean presence on the other side of the door, Frank was doing what she did best.

As a rookie, Frank had been fascinated by what she saw on the streets and she’d quickly learned what they didn’t teach at the police academy. How to feel fear and work around it. How to shoot with your left hand while you were moving. How to watch a cop die and not go crazy. How to turn all your senses up when you were out there. How to know, without knowing how you knew, when a lie had gone down. She’d enjoyed the theory in the academy, and the rigorous mental and physical training, but the street was reality. There should have been a sign on the way out of the academy that read: THIS IS WHERE THE TRAINING REALLY BEGINS
.

Frank believed in procedure but had learned to entertain other options when necessary. The chances she wouldn’t take in her personal life she took through her work. She was physically unafraid, at ease with leadership, and willing to sacrifice personal comforts. Her patience and determination lent themselves well to police work, but one of her strongest assets as a detective was her curiosity. If a case wasn’t closed, Frank wasn’t happy. She
needed
to know who’d done it and why. Frank had spent her life fixing problems and couldn’t relax until they were solved. The hide-and-go-seek for clues, the hunt and chase for the perps—this was as close as Frank came to being playful—and profiling particularly intrigued her.

It was a stretch to look beyond the physical evidence. That’s what cops were trained to rely on. But an eleven-month fellowship at Quantico had showed her how to use the available physical evidence to gather intangible psychological clues. Part craft, part science, profiling was particularly helpful in tracking down repeat, violent offenders. Scientifically, profiling utilized behavioral clues the perp left at the crime scene, clues that indicated a perp’s unique behavior patterns. For instance, a sloppy, disorganized crime scene could often be traced to a sloppy and disorganized offender, suggesting possible physical and behavioral distinctions about the perp.

And because people were capable of infinite permutations, the parameters for one sloppy perpetrator would not exactly match the profile of another. Being able to assemble the clues and predict the most likely set of behaviors for a given offender was part of the craft. Its inherent ambiguity made profiling an imprecise tool, but one that could be used with excellent results to narrow a list of possible suspects, hence narrowing the scope of the investigation and concentrating resources where they had the best chance for success.

Frank had no suspects in the Agoura case. Just plenty of victims. She needed to learn as much as possible about them before being able to fathom their perp. Frank laid out their pictures in the chronological order of the crimes. The most immediate distinction was the racial heterogeneity—three Hispanics, eight Caucasians, one Black. Serial perps usually targeted a specific race and stuck to it. This guy didn’t seem to care. That he was hitting outside strict racial lines said something in itself.

The girls were all pleasant and average-looking. There was nothing exceptional about any of them, and that very blandness was suggestive. Maybe the perp didn’t want anyone too extreme, too threatening. This would indicate he had a narrow range of life experiences and would be put off with unfamiliarities.

The assaults were not personal. None of the living victims knew their attacker, and apart from his direct assaults he had not engaged them in any other manner. She kept searching the display of photos, pausing to read each girl’s pedigree. Nothing stood out as connected. She couldn’t pin a common association, activity, or person to all twelve girls. None of their bios matched. They were from low to middle incomes, and though two-thirds of them had been accosted in a park, the other third were assaulted near high schools or in urban settings. Some were in junior high, some in high school, some in elementary, one was a runaway.

Frank sighed and stretched. She got up to change the music, absently trading the jazz for Faure’s
Requiem.
She turned up the volume, bowing her head as she listened to the first stanza.

Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis
thundered though the small space, and Frank thought, grant them eternal rest and let perpetual light shine on them, indeed. She lost herself in the grandeur of the introduction, and when it ended, she opened her eyes. The girls stared up at her.

Cassandra Nichols smiled doe-eyed and gap-toothed. Claudia Menendez smiled too, contrasting sharply with Frank’s memory of her heartbreak and puzzlement. Even the ones he’d left alive he’d managed to kill somehow.

Alright, buddy. Let’s go one on one. You and me.

Frank was finally ready to get into his head, but first things first. Frank pulled out a VICAP form and started filling in the offender information section.

“Always start where you are,” she muttered out loud. Joe Girardi had told her that her first day in Homicide. Answering the questions on the FBI form, she ended up with a long list of the perp’s data. Armed with that, Clay’s tape, and her own limited knowledge, she played with the information and the options it suggested, starting with a physical description of their perp. He was a big man with brown hair. None of the girls could remember anything remarkable about his body or the feel of it against them, so he probably wasn’t too skinny or too fat. If he didn’t have a good image of himself, he probably wasn’t concerned with keeping up his physical appearance. The Troupe witness had said maybe he was slightly overweight.

His hair would be unkempt. He’d only cut it when it started to draw attention, but then he wouldn’t cut it too short. He’d just have the barber trim him, keep him from feeling conspicuous. Their witness had described a man in jeans and a T-shirt. In Los Angeles that was standard attire. Frank bet his clothes had small holes or stains. Again, nothing too noticeable, just ordinary enough for a man who didn’t care much about his image.

Frank looked at the notes she’d made while talking with Clay. All the assaults had happened between mid-morning and early evening. All of them were on weekdays. This made Frank feel that the perp worked evenings and weekends, most likely as an unskilled laborer. That would fit with his workboots, and explain his wearing blue jeans in the summer heat. He would be unassuming enough to keep a job, would probably never make waves, but he would most likely never be promoted. She figured he did what he had to to get by but didn’t have the incentive to further himself. He probably worked alone, or with minimal contact with other people.

Frank continued in this vein, rearranging facts and figures into the logical behavior pattern critical to good profiling. She used her ability to slip into the perp’s head, to see what he looked at, hear what he heard, feel what he touched, taste what he licked, loathe what he loathed, love what he loved. Ultimately, Frank needed to know how it felt for him to rape, batter, and finally kill a young girl. If she knew why he was doing this, maybe she could stop him.

“Yeah,” Frank answered to a knock on the door.

Kennedy opened up. “I’m gonna go get something to eat. Wanna join me?”

Frank had glanced up from her work but looked back down as she replied, “No thanks.” End of conversation.

“You sure?”

“Very.”

“Want me to bring you somethin’ back?” Kennedy pressed.

Frank patiently sat back in her chair, giving Kennedy her full attention. Slowly and evenly, as if dealing with a simpleton, she replied, “No.”

With concentrated detachment Frank noted that Kennedy’s eyes were brown. They caught the cold fluorescent light and warmed it. A warning flickered in Frank’s gut. And in her brain. The flicker became cognition: Maggie’s eyes had looked like that.

Frank blinked like a lizard.

“Is there anything else I can do for you, Detective?”

“Well…I’ve got a couple questions that maybe you could help me with.”

Kennedy took an uninvited seat on the couch. Frank was sorry she’d asked.

“You seem to have an angle on this guy we’re lookin’ for—”

“Which is all speculative,” Frank warned.

“Right, but still you’ve thought a lot about this. So I’m going through the books, and I’m trying to figure out what’s the hook for him? What’s gonna make me stand out from any other chick out there?”

Frank considered the question. She started to reach up and stroke her chin but stopped, almost as if she were being interrogated. She refused to give Kennedy even that much.

“A lot of things,” Frank shrugged.

Kennedy was unrelenting.

“Like what?”

She leaned forward eagerly. Frank noticed she’d lost the accent.

“Could be any number of things.” Frank outlined her sketchy victimology, stressing his apparent preference for passive, vulnerable victims.

“So basically, I should be a rag doll,” Kennedy concluded.

Frank nodded. “Be innocent. Be vulnerable. Make yourself as visible as possible.”

“Kind of contradictory, isn’t it?”