"They've got five hundred and eighty-seven unsolveds that fit into possible serial patterns. Two hundred and ninety-seven involve some use of knives. Out of those, the machine spat out ninety-one cases with wound patterns similar to yours over the last fifteen years-the data bank goes back longer than I thought, but stuff from the last five years is relatively sketchy."
"Ninety-one," said Daniel, visualizing heaps of mutilated corpses.
"Not that many, considering your wounds were darn-near generic," said Gene. "But most of them differ from yours in terms of mixed modus: knife and gun, knife and strangulation. And victim demographics: males, kids, old ladies, couples. In my opinion, that doesn't eliminate them-some of these monsters get pretty indiscriminate about who they kill and how they do it. But there's no use tackling something that huge. Thing to do is start breaking into subsets."
"Young females," said Daniel.
"Exactly. Fifty-eight in the seventeen- to twenty-seven-year-old range. By playing statistical games with it, the FBI broke that down into seven groupings that appear to be the work of the same killer or killers, though there's overlap. The cutoffs aren't perfectly clean. But when you plug in dark complexion, multiple blades, and drug OD, it narrows way down and starts to get real interesting: seven cases, none of them strangled, which in itself is unusual. One additional case that matches everything, except no mention is made of multiple blades. The first is an L.A. case: girl found cut up fourteen years ago, March 1971, in a cave-how do you like that?"
"There are caves in Los Angeles?" asked Daniel, gripping the edge of his desk.
"Plenty of them in the surrounding mountain areas. This particular one was in Griffith Park-big place just north of Hollywood, thousands of acres. There's a zoo and a planetarium there, but mostly it's wilderness."
"Was she killed in the cave?"
"FBI says yes."
"What was the physical layout of the cave?"
"They don't have that kind of detail programmed yet. Hold on a second-there's something else I want you to hear: Victim's name was Lilah Shehadeh; she's listed as a twenty-three-year-old female Caucasian, black hair, brown eyes. But Shehadeh's an Arab name, isn't?"
"Yes," said Daniel, feeling the excitement grow within him. "Go on."
"Multiple stab wounds from several different weapons, death from exsanguination-poor gal bled to death. Heroin overdose to the point of general anesthesia, severed jugular, decimation of the genitals, no trace evidence other than residue of Ivory soap-sounds like she was washed."
"At the cave?"
"Printout didn't say that either. There are streams in Griffith Park-in March they could still be full from the rains. Let me see what else I've got Shehadeh was an addict and prostitute. I racked my brains to see if I could remember her case but I couldn't. I was working Southwest Division back then, clear across town. To be honest, a single hooker-cutting wouldn't get much notice. I just got off the phone with a buddy in Hollywood Division, asked him to dig up the file, call me back and dictate the details."
"Thank you, Lieutenant Brooker."
"Onward: Number two occurred over two years later, July of '73, in New Orleans. Another prostitute, named Angelique Breau, drugged out-this time with Demerol-and cut identically to Shehadeh. Traces of soap and shampoo: Dial and Prell-he's not strict about his brands. The body was killed somewhere else, but found in a crypt in the St. Louis cemetery-which is kind of cavelike, wouldn't you say? And she and Shehadeh fit your genital destruction-removal sequence-Shehadeh's vaginal vault was cut up; Breau's ovaries were removed. She's listed as a female Cauc, black and brown, nineteen years old, but New Orleans is famous for race-mixing. If you put Caucasian on your driver's license application, no one's going to argue with you. Name like Breau she could be lily-white Parisian, swamp-rat Cajun, Creole mulatto, or any mixture thereof."
"Dark. Mediterranean-looking," said Daniel.
"Good chance of it."
"She could have been an Arab, too, Gene. Some of them-Moroccans, Algerians-have French names."
"Hmm. Maybe. But the next two are definitely not Arab, so it appears the killer's going after a certain look, not nationality."
Dark women, thought Daniel. The streets of any Levantine, Mediterranean, or Latin American city were teeming with them. Yet the killer-if it was the killer-had come to Jerusalem.
It had to be more than a look that he was after
"The third one took place April of '75, twenty-one months after Breau," said Gene. "Northeast Arizona, desert area outside of Phoenix. Victim's name: Shawnee Scoggins, female Native American-Indian. Eighteen years, black and brown. Ovaries and kidneys removed. Murdered somewhere else, but the body was found off the highway near one of the Indian reservations. Reservation police handled the case. Girl had a history of delinquency, drug problems. Fresh needle marks in her arm, heroin OD, no fiber traces, no mention of soap. But this is the one that doesn't list multiple weapons either, so we could be talking about a failure on the part of the locals to report all the facts, poor investigatory procedure, or a slipshod autopsy. Everything else fits. I'd suggest you include her."
"All right."
"After Scoggins there's a thirty-two-month lapse until December of '77. Back in California again, but up north near San Francisco. This one I remember: nude dancer named Maria Mendoza, twenty-one, black and brown, history of prostitution and narcotics convictions. What was left of her was discovered near a cave up in Mount Tamalpais."
"Not in the cave?"
"I asked McGuire about that. Printout said near-didn't say how near. Hard to understand why they put some data in, leave other stuff out."
"Was she killed up there?"
"No. Somewhere else, site unidentified. This one was very messy, Danny. All the internal organs were removed-she was literally skin and bones. San Francisco police had been dealing with a bunch of unsolved homicides attributed to some crazy who wrote letters to the papers calling himself Zodiac. The last suspected Zodiac killing was in October of '75, farther east, in Sacramento. San Francisco thought he'd come back to haunt them. Reason I remember the case is that one of the primary Zodiac suspects moved down to L. A. shortly after Mendoza's body was found, and we were alerted. We watched him-it came to nothing."
"What was his name?"
"Karl Witik. Weirdo biology student. White guy but rented a house in Watts, had squirrels and mice running wild inside the place. But don't worry-he's not your man. He blew his brains out in early '78. Two more possible Zodiacs went down in '79 and '81, so he probably wasn't San Francisco's man either."
"Eight," said Daniel, looking at his notes. "Four more."
"Four more," said Gene. "And they keep getting nastier. Mendoza's the last intact body on the list. The rest are all dismemberments: August 1978 in Miami, Florida; July 1980, Sun Valley, Idaho; March '82, Crater Lake, Oregon; January '84, Hana, Hawaii. Young, dark women, no fiber or prints, soap traces, heroin residue in the tissue, bone rills indicating multiple knives, body parts tossed in wooded or desert areas. Three of the victims have never been identified, including one whose head was never recovered. The one from Crater Lake was ID'd as Sherry Blumenthal, seventeen-year-old runaway from Seattle. Same old song: drug history, prostitution busts. 'Remains found in state of advanced decomposition on the north bank of the lake.'"