Zero to the Bone Page 7

  7

  I BAILED MY Cadillac out of the garage the next morning, engine tuned, lubricants and filters changed, rear bumper replaced, right rear fender mended, and a new money-green paint job shining from hood to trunk. A twenty-something punk in a BMW Z3 had rear-ended me two weeks before as I braked for a yellow traffic signal outside Beverly Hills. The driver wore a cell-phone headset as good as surgically implanted into his ear when he stepped out of the car, and as he strode to inspect the damage he complained to the headset—presumably he was talking to someone—that a stupid bitch had slammed on the brakes in front of him and now he was going to be late to his meeting. The Caddy was a vintage ’70s Eldorado, five thousand pounds of rusting steel and pitted chrome, and the Z3 had crumpled like a bird against bulletproof glass. When he saw the damage up close, he jabbed the stubby antenna of his cell toward my chest and screamed, “It was a fucking yellow light! Nobody in L.A. brakes on yellow!”

  At the garage I bid farewell to the four hamsters powering the Chevy Metro, bent to kiss the Caddy’s laurel-wreath hood insignia, happy to have a real car again, and drove to the converted sewage-works warehouse that served as the corporate offices of Scandal Times. While I joined Frank in his office the Rott stayed outside to play a little ball with the security guard, something they both liked to do. I plugged the digital camera into the back of Frank’s computer and watched the downloaded images in a silence broken by his loud sighs of disappointment. He didn’t blame me for the unimaginative framing and ho-hum staging, he said, certainly aware that such a statement was a backhanded way of blaming me. He knew I’d been shocked by the death of my model. But the results spoke for themselves, and they spoke badly. The images might work for mid-paper, continuation-of-story visuals but didn’t have enough zing for the first three pages, and if they dared put one of them on the cover, the entire Scandal Times readership would fall asleep in the supermarket checkout line from sheer boredom.

  “We’ll run a vidcap for the front-page visual,” he said. “Blow up just the image of her face, play the angle that the killer sent you the video. That ties the murder directly into Scandal Times, makes us look like a central player in the investigation, even if the cops are ignoring my calls at present.”

  I unplugged the camera and packed my gear. The thought of running an image from the video sickened me, but Frank was right; the photographs I took in Malibu weren’t dramatic enough to sell the story. Every issue hit the stands with a photograph of a celebrity or some type of mayhem, and preferably both. If the story didn’t get to the front page, someone who had seen Christine in the company of her murderer would be less likely to notice. Front-page publicity was essential to collecting casual eyewitness evidence like that. And I was going to be part of the story whether I liked it or not.

  “Why did he send the disk to me?” I zipped the camera bag and thought about it. “Why not send it to the Times?”

  “Publicity. The Times wouldn’t put it on the front page.”

  “How does that matter to him?”

  “I’m a tabloid journalist, not a psychologist.”

  “So make something up.”

  “I’m good at that, right?” He groped toward a box of donuts, looking for a sugar rush to help him think. “Let’s say Christine isn’t his first, let’s say he assaulted that girl out in Palmdale. You know the details of that?”

  “None.”

  “A hiker found her near a popular trail, half naked and her neck bruised. She couldn’t remember how she got there. Loss of memory, that’s one of the effects of Rohypnol. Her larynx was crushed. She couldn’t even speak. Whoever assaulted her came within a few seconds of killing her but stopped.”

  “Do the police think it’s the same guy?”

  “Too early to tell. But let’s speculate.”

  “He’s not the spontaneous type,” I offered.

  “You’re right there,” Frank said, nodding. “He doesn’t pick up some girl hitchhiking, strangle her on a whim and dump her in the desert, not this guy. If Christine is typical, he mounts a production. He scouts a location and sets up his bondage and video equipment like a director or film producer.”

  “Maybe he even pretends to be one,” I said, and told Frank about Christine’s plan to meet someone who claimed to be Johnny Depp’s assistant.

  “Depp’s assistant? What a headline! And she believed it?”

  “Actresses are desperate, you know that.”

  “Maybe he comes on like somebody important to gain just enough of her trust to slip a ruffie into her drink, or even better, maybe he is somebody important, though certainly not Depp’s assistant.” He yanked open a desk drawer organized like a garbage dump and rifled it. “You saw the video. Do you think he could be a pro?”

  “No idea.”

  “Would it help to see it again?”

  “I thought you gave the disk to Sean.”

  “I burned a copy first—that’s how we’ll grab the vidcap.” He pulled a plastic CD sleeve from the back of the drawer, shook loose a disk, and fed it into his computer. “Imagine going to all that effort. Location, lights, camera, stirring performances, and nobody notices. The girl in Palmdale, she’s just another victim to the cops, a sad and tragic story but nothing they don’t deal with fifty times a year. Her story makes the front page of the Antelope Valley Press—a box in the lower right corner, no headline—but the L.A. Times and Daily News bury it in the journalistic equivalent of where the sun don’t shine. It’s like he released a film into an empty theater. Nobody even noticed. So he decides to do it again, and this time, send a copy to the press. No way he’s going to be ignored a second time.”

  I drifted behind Frank to stand and watch the parts of the video that I could stomach, too uneasy to pull up a chair. A small, black box popped onto the screen of Frank’s computer. He pressed a few keys and the video zoomed full screen, Christine already chained to the wall, sheathed in latex, a black ball strapped into her mouth. From the angle and steadiness of image, the camera looked to be mounted on a tripod in the corner of the room. The lens framed her in long shot, no sound, the frame wide enough to show a section of cream-colored wall and a wide swath of ceramic-tiled floor, the white of each tile enclosing a gold, Walk of Fame–style star. Her arms hung slack against the chains, hips thrust back as she stooped slightly forward. She glanced over her shoulder toward the camera as though she watched someone behind the lens, even though the man who assaulted her entered the frame from the opposite side of the room.

  I mentioned the discrepancy in her eye line.

  “Someone on ruffies, they don’t know up from down,” Frank said. “She may be looking but I don’t think she’s seeing much of anything.”

  The man approached Christine with a strutting confidence, a black latex suit stretched taut over a tall, athletic frame that matched Rakaan’s and a hundred thousand others. His lips protruded like obscene fruit from a slit cut at the mouth of his hood, and twists of latex cowled his eyes in a nightmare image of man as Minotaur. I couldn’t distinguish man from beast behind the mask. She flinched when he first touched her from behind, perhaps not expecting someone to come from the opposite side. She bucked away, once, as he mounted her, but he was big if not particularly strong, and Christine was a small girl, drugged and bound to the wall. She didn’t have much of a chance to resist. He outweighed her by more than fifty pounds. But still, she seemed resigned to the act, and if I hadn’t seen the violent end, I could have mistaken it for a harmless game of bondage captured on home video.

  “Whoever shot this left the sound off,” Frank said, fiddling with the sound control at the base of the player. “Or maybe he purposely exported the video file without sound before burning the disk.”

  As I watched the scenario play out I tried to remove any thoughts of Christine from my mind, and above all from my heart. I didn’t need another excuse to break down in tears. I needed to watch the video for evidence of the identity of the killer, and so I told myself that this wasn’t
Christine being violated, this wasn’t how she spent her final moments, gagged and raped on camera, drugged so far out of her mind that she may not have been all that aware of what was happening to her, but when the killer looped the strap around her throat and jerked her head back so sharply it could have broken her neck I couldn’t keep my eyes on her approaching death and glanced away the moment a ghosted image flitted across the corner of the screen.

  “Stop, go back.” I grabbed Frank’s arm so fiercely he nearly jumped out of his chair in fright.

  “What is it?” He lurched forward to pause the video.

  “Can you play it back in slow motion?”

  He hadn’t seen it, his eyes focused like Sean’s two nights before on the act of strangulation, not on the periphery. The action reversed looked not much different from the action in forward motion, just a little more hellish.

  “Where’s the light source?” I asked, and when Frank guessed it came from somewhere in the ceiling, out of frame, I traced the way the shadows from the chains binding Christine slanted right to left on the wall. “Light from directly overhead, the shadows would hang straight down, and you’d get subtle hot spots on the black latex here.” I pointed to a small, glinting reflection of light on her right shoulder, then traced a closely observed line to the upper right corner of the screen. “From the angle of the shadow and the positioning of hot spots on the latex you can track the source of the light, probably a portable film light on a stand, mounted maybe eight feet high. Look, see the way the wall is brighter on the right side of the screen than the left?”

  “Okay, I’m convinced,” Frank said. “But so what?”

  “So watch the lower right corner of the screen, the floor there.”

  The action moved forward again, the killer unbuckling a strap that circled his chest and looping it around Christine’s neck, and when he jerked the strap taut, crossing his wrists behind her neck to increase the killing power of his hold, a shadow crossed the floor in the lower right corner of the frame. “See it?” I said, gripping his arm again. “Go back and freeze the image if you can.”

  Frank inched the action backward and stopped. The shadow hovered from right to left on the floor, a gray ghost on the white and gold tiles, squat head and shoulders clearly defined on a curiously compressed torso—the type of shadow cast by a strong light placed above and behind a man.

  “They aren’t alone in the room,” I said.

  8

  WE DROVE THE Antelope Valley Freeway out of Los Angeles late that morning, top down on the Cadillac, the Rott banished to the back to make room for Frank, who huddled with the cell phone in the passenger seat, his forefinger plugging the opposite ear to block the wind noise while he made one call after another, tracking down leads to the Palmdale assault. The Caddy’s air conditioner had expired long before I bought her, and as we approached the 25,000-square-mile hot plate of the Mojave Desert, the dry, hot air whipping over the windshield did no more than wick away the sweat like a combination fan and blast furnace. As I drove, I thought about why the killer had sent the video to me care of Scandal Times. Frank had said he wanted publicity. That raised a question that made me even more uncomfortable than the heat: Why Christine? Enough people had died around me that I sometimes felt like a modern Typhoid Mary, an unwitting carrier of death to those I touched. I didn’t want to think about it anymore. I noticed Frank checking his notes between calls and asked, “How do you know Sean?”

  He said something I couldn’t hear above the noise of the road, something about a club. At speeds above forty-five miles per hour, holding a conversation in the Cadillac was like shouting into gale-force winds.

  “I met him in a strip club,” he repeated, this time shouting.

  “What was he doing there?”

  He looked at me like I’d just asked a particularly stupid question.

  “Okay,” I said. “What were you doing there?”

  “Same thing Sean was,” he said and laughed. “He used to work undercover. This was before you started shooting freelance for us, before he got promoted to Homicide.”

  “What station?”

  “North Hollywood now. Van Nuys before that.”

  “He was working undercover when you met him?”

  Frank put his cell phone away and pulled down the bill of his baseball cap. “I thought he was just another sleazeball in a strip club, like me, even if I was working on a piece at the time.”

  “A piece of what?” I asked.

  “Journalism, wiseass. We were doing a series on amazing identical twins, you know, one case study a week, each written up by a different reporter, and I drew stripper siblings from Scandinavia, Fawn and Dawn Svedenson.”

  “Their real names?”

  “Hardly. Try Cristina and Krisztina Szegedi from Budapest.” He smiled as though remembering something pleasant. “They didn’t quite have the Swedish accent down but I think I was the only one in the joint who noticed, besides Sean.”

  “So he was working undercover,” I said.

  “What do you care?”

  He stared at me with a little too much curiosity.

  “Because I’m trying to figure out how you knew he was a cop.”

  “I interviewed him after he got his transfer to North Hollywood, remembered drooling next to him at the strip-club bar. We’re both from the north side of Chicago, originally.” He pointed to the Cubs logo on his baseball cap. “When we were at the bar he asked me why I wore the cap and I told him because I was a rabid Cubs fan suffering from premature male-pattern baldness. We talked baseball—this was the year Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were breaking Maris’s record—and when I mentioned I worked for a newspaper he vanished like a vampire. I thought he was a drug dealer at the time, because, you know, what do drug dealers do for entertainment except go to strip clubs? And he looked like one.”

  I thought I should just drop it there, knowing any more questions would tip Frank something was going on, but I couldn’t help it, I had to know. “Did you tell him anything about me? That night, I mean, when he came to the show.”

  “Why? Did he make a move on you? And more important, did you knock his teeth out?”

  “Did you tell him anything about my history?”

  He settled into the wedge between the seat and door to watch me while I drove, looking for signs of embarrassment or dissimulation. I adjusted my sunglasses and draped my wrist over the wheel to conceal the fluttering in my stomach.

  “That was fast,” he said.

  I glanced down at the speedometer, said, “I’m barely doing seventy.”

  “You just met and already you’re banging each other?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  “No, I didn’t tell him you’re an ex-con on parole.” He pursed his lips and whistled a high note. “When he finds out it’s gonna be like a dog discovering he’s sniffing the tail of a cat in doggie drag.”

  We met Charlotte McGregor near the student cafeteria at Antelope Valley College, a flat desert campus of concrete buildings huddled low to the ground against the heat, students picking their way from shade tree to shade tree along the concrete paths. Charlotte waved to us from the trunk of a poplar tree a few steps from the cafeteria entrance, wearing a champagne-colored cotton jacquard dress that fell just above the knee and a gold silk scarf tied loosely around her neck. Even at a distance her beauty was striking, her hair the color of weathered brick and her pale skin an act of defiance against the desert sun, but like a trick of perspective she didn’t get much bigger as we approached, her height about eight inches short of fashion-model regulation, reminding me of a young Holly Hunter. She studied acting in the Theater Arts Department, Frank told me, and hoped to be admitted into UCLA for the coming fall semester. Charlotte extended a shy hand, and when she spoke her voice rustled and creaked like the broken reed of a clarinet.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, high cheekbones flushing a vibrant pink against her pale skin. “My voice hasn’t recovered yet. Maybe w
e should get started? I’ll fill you in while we drive out to where I met him.”

  Charlotte began communicating with the man who claimed to be Brad Pitt’s assistant through Hotornot.com, a dating website devoted to the game of rating sexual attractiveness on a scale of one to ten. He’d been one of hundreds to respond to her photograph and bio—she’d scored a 9.8, she said—and they e-mailed back and forth for a week before agreeing to meet. She’d thought posting on the website would be a good way to hook up with people in L.A. She wanted to become an actress and spoke of the same kind of discovered-in-a-drugstore dream most young actresses have—a small but significant role in an independent film or television show that would launch her career. Los Angeles can be cruel to aspiring actresses.

  The Starbucks where they initially met was separated from campus by a few barren miles of landscape notable for the lack of anything in particular to look at, the broad streets laid out on a grid and named after numbers or famous letters in the alphabet, as though something a little more distinctive might ruin the minimalist effect of the place. Outside, the Starbucks offered a drive-through service window for those who had been permanently grafted to the seats of their vehicles. Inside, it looked like just about every other outlet and the coffee tasted the same, which is what most people accept as the charm of the place, if such a thing can be said to exist. I leashed the Rott to a handicapped parking sign near the shaded entrance and followed Charlotte and Frank up to the service counter. The coffee shop’s air conditioner had been set to stun, the effect of walking in from the hot desert like jumping from a sauna into a cold pool.

  “What made you believe he was Brad Pitt’s assistant?” Frank asked.

  “He sent me a snapshot of him and Brad hanging out together at some event, a film premiere maybe.” She paused at the baked goods counter, staring at her reflection in the glass. “I mean, why wouldn’t I think he was legit? Sure, maybe he could be exaggerating about the assistant thing, maybe he’d show up and say he’d worked as an assistant on a film that starred Brad Pitt, sorry for the misunderstanding. But you have to understand, where I am now?” She turned her head from the glass to give us a look both grim and self-disparaging. “Even a gofer seems glamorous. Anybody connected to the film business is a step up from Palmdale. Of course it turned out the picture was a fake.” She stepped up to the counter to order a cup of Nepalese tea from the barista.