The Little Black Dress Read online

  The officer was very friendly and told me his name was Ron and proceeded to guide me through a maze of corridors and up and down several elevators, using his passkey at every barrier until I was completely baffled.

  “So what are you doing over at homicide today, miss?” he asked, making conversation.

  “I just need to speak with Captain Greenberg about one of the cases he’s working on.”

  “Are you a friend of that high school girl who’s just been murdered?”

  “Not really. I go to the same school, though.”

  We finally turned down a hall where a large sign proclaimed the Robbery Homicide Division, and then down another hall to a door with a smoky glass window and a sign reading HSS—Homicide Special Section. Ron pressed a little button outside the door, and someone inside buzzed us in.

  This room turned out to be a spacious but typically antiseptic room with a big counter across the middle separating the waiting area from the working area, not unlike the reception room in our own high school admin building. There were loads of desks behind the counter with lots of haggard-looking people, some in uniforms, but many in street clothes, busily answering telephones, reading files, and filling out forms.

  Ron led me to the counter and called to an attractive Hispanic woman bending over the shoulder of a guy on a phone at a desk nearby. “Hey, Rosie, this young lady has an appointment with the new captain.”

  She looked up and smiled at me in a way that put me immediately at ease. Then she walked up to the counter and opened what looked like an appointment book. She was casually dressed in a charcoal-gray pantsuit with a white blouse open at the throat, revealing a tiny gold cross shining against her honey-brown skin. If she was a policewoman, she was the prettiest one I had ever seen outside of a television show. Her shoulder-length dark hair framed a small, fine-boned face, and she wore just enough makeup to accentuate her almond-shaped eyes and full lips.

  “Ah, you must be Lucy?” she asked, looking up at me and smiling again. “Just take a seat, and I’ll tell the captain you’re here.” She turned around and walked to a door I hadn’t noticed, over on the side. She opened the door and slipped in, quickly shutting the door behind her.

  I picked out a plastic chair near a table with magazines and sat down.

  “I’ll just leave you in Rosie’s fine hands, then, miss. You have a good day now.” And Ron left me there, leafing through a five-year-old copy of Reader’s Digest. But Rosie was only gone a minute or two, and when she returned, she was followed by Seth’s dad, Captain Greenberg himself.

  He was smiling at me, and he put out his hand for me to shake, like an adult. “Hello, Lucy. Nice to see you again.”

  I stood up and shook his hand and mumbled some kind of greeting while he turned to Rosie. “Why don’t you get us some coffee, Rosie. You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Lucy? Milk and sugar?”

  “Black will be fine, sir,” I answered. “Thank you.”

  “Well, just follow me into my office. You’ll have one up on Seth. He’s never seen the inside of the LAPD.” He turned, and I followed him through the break in the counter, then through that same door to the side of the reception area.

  It opened onto another surprisingly large room, but this one had a gigantic desk with stacks of file folders piled on top. There were bookshelves covering every wall from floor to ceiling, and I could see they were absolutely stuffed with heavy books, most of them looking like law or some other kind of reference book. There were four tall filing cabinets also topped with stacks of files, a large whiteboard on a stand facing out from one of the corners, and several miscellaneous chairs for visitors. Behind the desk, the window took up most of the back wall. The venetian blind was half-open, giving a pretty good view of downtown LA, but the office chair had its back to the window, and it looked like whomever sat there had plenty inside the room to occupy their attention.

  “I’ll just move one of these chairs a bit closer,” he said, as he slid a not-too-shabby leather visitor’s chair right up to the desk. “Please, sit down.”

  I sat, while Captain Greenberg took his place behind the big desk. He looked across at me for a second, but didn’t say anything. Then he started leafing through a file that was right in front of him. I wondered, for a second, how I was supposed to begin, but just then, Rosie came back into the room carrying a tray with coffee and donuts. Captain Greenberg hastily moved some files out of the way to make just room enough for Rosie to set down the tray.

  “There you are. We had some fresh donuts in the lounge. I thought you might like one.” And she looked over at me and cracked another smile. Her teeth were shockingly white. She made me think she was offering me an after-school snack, and I suddenly felt very young.

  “Thank you, Rosie,” the captain said, choosing a fat jelly donut and taking a big bite out of it, just the way Seth would have done, picking up a napkin in his other hand to wipe away the sugar from his face and fingers. “Help yourself, Lucy. Don’t be shy.”

  I was too nervous to be hungry, so I lifted a mug of coffee and said, “Thank you, I’m just happy to have coffee right now.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’m going to finish reading this file for a minute. It just came in. Then I’ll be ready to talk to you.”

  He continued to munch on his donut while leafing through the file, stopping every now and then to look back over something and make notes on a pad nearby. Then he finished his donut, wiped his mouth with the napkin, closed the file, and looked over at me.

  “I know you are understandably interested in both of these murder cases, but particularly your friend Carmen’s case, and I know you’ve been talking to Seth about it.” He was looking at me kindly, so I just sat there and nodded, not knowing quite where he was headed.

  “I want you to know that that’s all right. You can talk to my son about the case, but I also want you to understand that I am not going to talk to Seth about these cases myself. I also do not want you to speak to him about anything we discuss in this office. He’s not involved, and he shouldn’t be involved. But I think you have the right to know what we’ve found out so far and where we are headed in our investigation.”

  I caught my breath. Was he really going to be frank with me? “Thank you” was all I said.

  “So, let me tell you a few things we know to be true.” He put down his coffee mug. “I told you the last time we met that we would be looking out for similar crimes either here in California or out of state, crimes with the same MO or with a similar level of brutality.” He stopped suddenly, as if he had just remembered something. “Are you all right with me talking to you like this? I’m not making you uncomfortable, am I?”

  “No, I’m fine. Please go ahead.”

  “Well, first of all, we’ve looked for similar crimes—and we’ve been in contact with the FBI profile team on this also. We’ve concluded that, although there have been other similarly brutal murders of women, some with nearly as much savagery as these two murders, the crimes we have here are unusual. This is because crimes of this nature almost always prove to be the work of one perpetrator. Occasionally, we’ll come across a helper, or what we call ‘a facilitator,’ who might be a friend or sometimes even a wife. These people are often used to lure the victims into a vehicle or a home, but these helpers don’t usually take part in the actual rapes or murders. It just doesn’t happen. Crimes of this sort are almost always the work of one individual. But here, we have a case where there are three perpetrators involved. We almost never see that except in war crimes.

  “Then there’s the fact that now we have two similar crimes committed by two of the same perpetrators. Usually, when we discover two crimes by the same perpetrator, we’re talking about a serial killer. And again, when we talk about serial killers, they are almost always the work of one individual, although, once again, sometimes they will have a facilitator. Still, crimes like these just don’t exist with three perpetrators.”

  “But there were only two perpetrators in Ste
phanie’s case,” I chimed in.

  “Yes, you’re right. In other crimes, like robberies, which are often performed by gangs or groups of perpetrators, it is not unusual for the MO to change, for one or two of the guys to drop out, whatever, because it doesn’t always have to be the same group of guys. Maybe some are now in prison, maybe they’ve moved away, but it’s not important for the crime.

  “But in murders this brutal, it would be almost impossible for one of the participants to just stop, to tell the others ‘I quit.’ It would be far too dangerous for the other two. Even if one of them did have a change of heart, even if he felt remorse, whatever the case might be, the other two couldn’t let him off the hook. They would be afraid that this one might go to the police. In other words, he would become a liability. What I am saying is that it would be completely out of character for this third person to remain alive after crimes like these.”

  All the time he was talking, Captain Greenberg hardly looked at me. He just kept looking down at his files or at his mug of coffee. He had picked out another donut, this time a cinnamon roll, and he munched on it between sentences. When he lifted his eyes to mine, he looked serious, and he made no attempt to smile.

  “So, one of the lines we are pursuing is a search for this third guy.”

  I didn’t say anything then and waited for him to go on, but I was cheering inside.

  “Another line we are pursuing is the vehicle. We know they used the same vehicle in both crimes. We’ve been looking over the videotapes from all the CCTV cameras near any of the scenes, either where the girls were picked up or where their bodies were found.”

  I caught my breath. Even though we were talking about Carmen’s murder, hearing the word “body” in reference to Carmen always brought back the horror of those photos I had seen from forensics, the photos Captain Greenberg had no idea I had seen.

  “We’ve just finished studying the tapes from the gas station in Malibu, on the corner near where Carmen’s body was found. Now our team is cross-referencing license plates from the other crime scenes. And we’ve also taken another look at the upholstery fibers found in the first investigation to make certain they were the same as the new ones picked up in the second forensics search, and we can definitely conclude that they are.” He looked down at that last file he had been looking at before continuing, “This time, my crew noted that the color was more significant than was first thought, because although the upholstery fabric is generic in all high-end SUVs, the color will only match a certain number of vehicle models for each make because of the color coordination with the exterior paint choice.” He looked over at me again and interrupted his line of thought.

  “I know this probably sounds really boring, but it can prove very helpful, because we now know that the fabric fibers are from an upholstery color called ‘Midnight Charcoal,’ which was only installed in vehicles manufactured by Mercedes, Porsche, or the General Motors’ Hummer and of those, they had to match the exterior paints. Fortunately for us, these exterior paints came in only two colors, ‘Onyx Black’ or ‘Charcoal.’ This will definitely narrow the field.”

  Now he was looking at me with almost a gleam in his eye. “So you see, Lucy. This all brings me to the last line of investigation that we’ve been pursuing. Do you want another cup of coffee?” he asked suddenly, apropos of nothing except maybe his own empty cup, but by now I was too speechless to do anything but nod my head.

  He pushed his chair back and got up and walked out of the office, evidently in pursuit of Rosie. I guess the intercom wasn’t working, or maybe he just needed to stretch those long legs of his. Anyway, he returned a few minutes later.

  “Rosie will be back in a minute with the coffee,” he said as he sat down again. He didn’t say anything for a while and just sat there with his elbows on his desk, resting his chin against his fist, staring at the remaining donuts. Then he looked up and continued without cracking a smile.

  “I know you’ve been impatient with us for constantly asking if the girls knew their attackers, and you insist that neither girl did, and at any rate, they would never have willingly gotten into a vehicle driven by anyone, whether they knew them or not. Well, that’s all well and good, but we have come down to the bottom line here, and with what we know, we are pretty certain that the girls did know their attackers. We are pretty certain that these were local guys, local meaning from their part of Los Angeles—and judging by the cost of the vehicle, these were probably guys going to the same local high school.” And he stopped and looked at me again. “That means your high school, Lucy. And Seth’s high school.”

  The way he was looking at me made me think he might actually be aware that Seth and I were undertaking our own clandestine investigation. But before I could get too uncomfortable, Rosie opened the door and walked in holding a pot of fresh coffee, and we sat there in silence while she refilled our cups.

  When she left, Captain Greenberg took a long sip from his mug and continued. “What I mean to say is that we are fairly certain that there are some very brutal students walking among you, and I want you two to watch out for each other. That buddy system they encourage you to participate in. That’s a smart idea. We’re not ready to go to the school officially with our suspicions, so we can’t do anything publicly yet, so please, Lucy, just be careful.” I didn’t know what to say, so I took another sip of coffee and nodded.

  “The school is aware that we have extended our investigation to include the staff as well as the student body, and they are helping us with this. We have asked the administration to provide us with all the names of students fifteen years of age and over, meaning those who can drive and might own a car, as well as all the staff, the teachers, and substitute teachers who worked at the school during both years the girls were murdered.

  “We’ll run the list through DMV to get all the vehicles registered to these students and teachers, as well as the vehicles registered to the parents of the students. Once we’ve cross-referenced all this information with what we have from the CCTV tapes, we’ll be that much closer to catching them. I just wanted you to know this—that we are closing in.”

  “I’m amazed that you’ve made so much progress,” I said, putting my mug down on the desk.

  Finally, he leaned forward again, and asked, “So what have you come here to tell me today?”

  I stared down into my coffee mug, my mind a blur with all this new information I’d just heard. Then I decided to go ahead and speak.

  “I just came to tell you that I’ve been thinking along those same lines. That it must be guys connected to our school somehow. Only, because I’m actually at the school, I might have heard some other stuff that could have a bearing on all this.”

  He perked up and swiveled around in his chair. “Oh, what have you heard?”

  “Well, sometimes when I’m in the girls’ restroom, I hear all kinds of things that the girls wouldn’t tell me themselves, when they think they’re alone with their friends. And one of the things I’ve heard is that the coach of the football team has been feeding the team steroids.”

  “But what has this got to do with these murders?”

  “Well, I’m sure you’ve heard about ‘’roid rage,’ and I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but our school has one of the worst records for unsportsmanlike conduct on the field. I mean, they play rough, really rough!”

  “Okay, I see where you’re going. That’s interesting. And you say the coach is involved? What did you say the coach’s name was?”

  “Billy Boehm.” And I spelled it for him. “He just came to our school a little over a year ago from some junior college in the Midwest.”

  “All right, we’ll look into him. Quietly. We don’t want to raise any flags at the school yet. Anything else you’ve noticed?”

  “The coach seems to be way too buddy-buddy with some of the players. Luke Ritter, for one, that’s the quarterback, and Carl Brandt. I don’t know what position he plays. Maybe a running back.”

  �
��Okay.” And he wrote those names down also.

  “And I think I know who the third guy is.”

  He stopped writing and turned to me with a look of total surprise.

  CHAPTER 24

  MY CLEVER PLAN

  ONCE I started talking, it was easy to keep going, and I told the captain the entire Jonny Freeman saga. Naturally, none of his predecessors on the force would have attached any significance to a teenage car wreck or would have tied it to Carmen’s murder in any way. But Captain Greenberg was immediately engaged; I could see him working through the possibilities in his mind as he listened. I even told him about the instant urban mythology that had sprouted up after Carmen’s murder.

  I told him everything, from Jonny’s history of rapes, including my firsthand experience with Wendy’s escape from Mulholland Drive, up to Jonny’s flaming crash and him insisting he saw Carmen’s ghost in the backseat of his car before he ran off the road.

  “This is really interesting, Lucy,” Captain Greenberg said at the end of my story. He had been leaning forward over the desk, watching my face and listening closely the entire time, except when he paused to jot something down on his pad. “This boy’s thinking that he saw Carmen’s ghost could definitely be a sign of his guilty conscience. You could be right about him having hallucinations because of it, and this hysteria that you noted taking place around the boys’ locker room, that’s also very interesting and ties in with what you’ve been telling me about the football coach. Maybe someone else is suffering from a guilty conscience.”

  He rocked back in his chair and fiddled with a pencil, turning it over and over between his two hands as he thought about my story. Then he stopped fiddling with the pencil and stared past me at the bookshelves before he continued.

  “Now, we have a difficult situation here in that our getting a warrant to take this boy’s DNA won’t be easy without any hard evidence—which is exactly why we need his DNA. If we make an official visit to the hospital, it might arouse the suspicions of his two partners, especially at this late date. We have to think this through and proceed with caution.”