As the drive stretched on, she told Isaac about being impressed by the wound patterns and everything else she’d learned about the six murders.
He said, “Similar dimensions. That I didn’t notice.”
And none of the detectives had noticed June 28. “You’d have to be looking for it.”
“I’ll be more careful in the future,” said Isaac.
The future?
He said, “That call from the phone booth is interesting. The possibility that it might be someone Mrs. Doebbler knew. What if Mr. Solis knew him as well? Someone familiar to all the victims.”
“I thought of that,” she said. “But it’s a leap.”
“Still, it’s possible.”
“If our killer was acquainted with all six victims, he had a pretty wide social network. We’re talking runaways, male hustlers, executive secretaries, retirees, and that Navy ensign, Hochenbrenner. I haven’t even looked at his file yet.”
Isaac was staring out at the desert. If he’d heard her little speech, it wasn’t apparent. Finally, he said, “Mr. Solis had breakfast food on his plate but the murder occurred around midnight.”
“People eat at odd hours, Isaac.”
“Did Mr. Solis?”
“Don’t know,” she said. “What, you think the bad guy dished up sausage and eggs after bashing in Solis’s head and served it to a corpse?”
Isaac squirmed. She’d grossed him out and it gave her perverse satisfaction.
He said, “I really don’t have much of a database from which to make a judgment- ”
“A culinary killer,” she cut him off. “As if it’s not complicated enough.”
He kept quiet. The car got hot. Ten degrees warmer out here in the desert. A warm June to begin with.
June. Today was the fourth. If there was anything to this craziness, someone else would die in twenty-four days.
She said, “So have you come up with any other notable June 28 occurrences in the historical archives?”
“Nothing profound.” He spoke quietly, kept his eyes aimed at the window. Intimidated?
Bad Petra, mean Petra. He’s just a kid.
“Tell me anything you’ve found,” she said. “It could be important.”
Isaac half turned toward her. “Basically, I’ve been logging into various almanacs, printed some lists. Long lists. But nothing jumps out. Here, I’ll show you what I mean.”
Snapping open his briefcase, he groped around, removed a batch of papers.
“I looked at birthdays and the farthest back I got was June 28, 1367, which is when Sigismund, the emperor of Hungary and Bohemia, was born.”
“Was he a bad guy?”
“Your basic autocratic king.” Isaac’s finger trailed down a long row of small-print items. “Then there’s Pope Paul IV, the artist Peter Paul Rubens, another artist, Jean Jacques Rousseau, a few actors- Mel Brooks, Kathy Bates… like I said, it stretches on. That’s how I came up with John Dillinger.”
“Any bad guys other than Dillinger?”
“Not on the birthday list. When I looked at June 28 as a date of death, I found a few more. But none of them appear connected to this type of thing.”
“This type of thing?” said Petra.
“A serial killer.”
The term set her teeth on edge. Too TV. Too damn hard to solve. She kept her voice light and pleasant. “Which bad guys died that day?”
“Pieter van Dort, a Dutch smuggler. They hanged him on June 28, 1748. Thomas Hickey, a Colonial soldier convicted of treason, was hung in 1776. There’s not much more until 1971, when Joseph Columbo, a New York mafioso, was gunned down. Ten years later, Ayatollah Mohammad Beheshti, a founder of the Iranian Islamic Party, was killed in a bomb explosion. Though I suppose his being a bad guy would depend upon your political persuasion.”
“Anything of a more wacko criminal nature? A Ted Bundy, a Hillside Strangler?”
“No, nothing like that, sorry,” he said. “In terms of historical events, there’s been plenty of misery on June 28, but no more than any other day. At least I can’t find any statistically significant difference. History’s based on tragedy and upheaval, as well as on the accomplishments of notable people.”
He rolled the papers into a tight tube, drummed his thigh. “I can’t believe I missed similarities in the weapon dimensions.”
“Stop beating yourself up,” said Petra.
She switched on the radio, tuned to a station that played harder rock than she was accustomed to. Filled her head with thunder-drums and guitar feedback and screaming testosterone-laden vocals, until the mountains got higher and static buried the noise.
June 4.
She drove faster.
They were well past Angeles Crest now, zipping past canyon after canyon at eighty-five miles an hour, passing low, gray-brown bowls of high-desert to the east. A small-craft airport hugged the freeway, followed by scatters of white-box storage buildings and factories. Then tracts of red-tile-roofed houses in the distance, laid out neatly in the dirt. Between the structures, Petra spied tiny green lawns, the occasional turquoise pool. Lots of space between developments. Antelope Valley was booming but there was still plenty of room to move.
A sign heralding the approach of Palmdale came into view and Petra pronounced the city’s name.
Isaac said, “It used to be called Palmenthal. Founded by Germans and Swiss. It got anglicized around the turn of the century.”
Petra said, “Really.”
“As if you needed to know that.”
“Hey,” she said. “Education’s good for the soul. Where do you pick up stuff like that?”
“I had an advanced geography placement in high school, mostly independent study. I researched several cities in L.A. County and the surrounding areas. It was a surprise, you’d think everything had Hispanic roots, but many places didn’t. Eagle Rock- that used to be called the Switzerland of the West. Back when the air was good.”
“Ancient history,” said Petra.
He said, “Extraneous information tends to float in my head and sometimes it seeps out through my mouth.”
“And sometimes,” she said, “you come up with interesting stuff.”
She exited at the first Palmdale exit, checked her Thomas Guide, and drove toward the address on Conrad Ballou’s retirement forms, around three miles east.
Knowing about Ballou’s alkie-burnout history, she figured him to be living in a depressing pensioner’s SRO or worse, and the first few neighborhoods she passed were pretty sad. But then the environment took a swing upward- the same kind of tile-roofed tracts she’d spotted from the freeway, some big houses, gated enclaves.
Ballou’s place was a medium-sized Spanish house in a pretty development named Golden Ridge Heights, where the trees- palms and paper-barked things- had grown sizable and some of the lawns sported mature shrubbery. Lots of motor homes and motorcycle trailers, pickups, and SUVs. The streets were wide, clean, and quiet, and the houses had rear yards that looked out to desert panorama. Sharp-edged mountains served as a backdrop. Too quiet for Petra’s taste, but she imagined warm, silent, star-studded nights and thought that might not be too bad.
She pulled to the curb and crows scattered. A ten-year-old Ford half-ton sat in Ballou’s driveway. The neighbors on both sides sported basketball hoops over the garage, yards that were more cement than grass. Ballou’s place was done up beautifully with creeping dwarf junipers, impeccable mounds of mondo grass, lush Sago palms, and little cross-cut tubes of bamboo lining the pebbled walkway. A length of bamboo dipping toward a stone pot served as a fountain and the water trickle was a continuous soprano.
A Japanophile?
It didn’t look like an alkie’s place. Maybe the pension office’s data bank was out of date, as was so much LAPD data. She should’ve phoned first before wasting the time and the gas. Now she’d look like a doofus in front of Mr. Genius.