Private Page 13

  Murphy nodded yes.

  “I need to borrow her clothes,” Justine said.

  “Chief Fescoe and DA Petino already okayed their release,” said Murphy. “You’re the man.”

  She pushed a form over to Justine and handed her a pen.

  “Wendy’s left arm,” Murphy said. “It was under some garbage bags. The rain didn’t soak the sleeve. I’d have your lab check it out. Technology is a lot better now. Especially at a lab like yours at Private.”

  “Let’s keep some hope alive,” said Justine.

  “No, let’s get this bastard,” said Detective Murphy, smiling again, but also showing Justine just how tough and relentless she was.

  Chapter 69

  “YOU REMEMBER THE Wendy Borman case?” asked Justine.

  The air smelled of fried fish, fried onions, fried potatoes. Justine sat across a small square table from Christine Castiglia in the Belmont High School cafeteria. The only witness to Wendy Borman’s abduction was sixteen now. She was petite, hugging herself, looking up at Justine with big eyes half hidden under thick brown bangs.

  You didn’t have to be a shrink to see that Christine was afraid. Justine knew to tread carefully, and she wasn’t feeling so steady herself. She was desperate for this girl to tell her something that could lead to the Schoolgirl killer before he killed again.

  “I was only eleven when it happened,” Christine said. “You know that, right?”

  “I know.” Justine swirled a straw in her plastic cup of ice and Diet Coke. “Can you tell me what you saw anyway? I need to hear it from you.”

  “Are you thinking those same boys—I guess they’re men now—might have killed the girls around here?”

  Someone dropped a tub of dishes behind the steam tables. An awful, nerve-rending clatter.

  Justine waited out the kids’ applause before saying, “It’s possible. There was a gap of three years between Wendy Borman and Kayla Brooks. That’s why no one thought to connect them. It’s why what you witnessed is so important. If Wendy Borman was their first killing, they might have made a mistake.”

  “It was a plain black van,” Christine said. “It stopped in a cross street off Hyperion, and when I looked again, two guys had grabbed this girl. Like, it only took a second? And she was like having a fit or something. They swung her into the van, and then one of them got into the driver’s seat and they drove off. I told the police what the driver looked like.”

  “Wendy Borman was zapped with a stun gun,” Justine said. “That was the fit you saw. And your mom didn’t see anything?”

  Christine shook her head. “I wasn’t sure what I’d seen myself. It could’ve been a commercial between my thoughts—that’s how fast it was. I froze, and when my mom turned to see what I was looking at, the van was gone. She didn’t believe me—or didn’t want to.

  “But when it was all over the TV, she finally called the police. My mother believed the TV but not me.”

  Kids were passing the table, staring at the woman in a business suit having a deep discussion with a kid at their school.

  “Tell me about the boy—the one whose face you saw.”

  “In the drawing the police made, he looked kinda like Clark Kent in the Superman movie. But he didn’t exactly look like that. His nose was a bit pointy? And his ears stuck out? I mean—they definitely stuck out.”

  “Did you see the license plate number on that van? Even one or two numbers would give us something to work with.”

  The girl paused, eyes flicking up and to the left, searching her memory.

  A class bell rang then, loud, jangling. Kids got up en masse, and a couple of them brushed Justine’s arm and knocked over her briefcase on their way to the trash bins and out the door.

  Christine said, “There was a decal on the rear window. It said ‘Gateway.’ Like that computer company? But there weren’t any cow spots.”

  “You told this to the police?”

  “I think so. My mother was freaked out. She couldn’t get me away from the police fast enough.”

  Justine looked at the girl, and for a moment, the girl held her gaze. “See if you can draw that decal,” Justine said. She passed over her PDA and stylus.

  The girl sucked hard on her lower lip as she sketched an oval shape and the word Gateway in graduated letters.

  “I think this is it. I don’t know why I remember so well, but I do.”

  Justine stared at the crude drawing. The logo looked like that of a private school in Santa Monica called Gateway. When she had worked for the city’s psych ward, she used to drive past Gateway Prep when she did sessions at Stateside, aka the California State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.

  She still vividly remembered her patients, the ones who burned down houses, killed their siblings, shotgunned their parents, and lit up schoolyards with explosives. It had been devastating and demoralizing work that had taught her about the mental workings of some of the most heinous humans on earth.

  Justine had thought then about the contrast between Stateside and Gateway Prep, only a mile apart geographically, worlds apart in every other way. Now she thought about the Gateway decal.

  There was no mention of a Gateway decal in the Wendy Borman murder book.

  The decal was news. The facial characteristics were news. Maybe she was getting somewhere. If these were the same boys.

  “Could you identify this boy if you saw him again?”

  “I could never forget his face.”

  “Christine, thank you.” Justine gave the teenager her card. “Call me if you think of anything else. The next time we meet, we won’t be strangers.”

  Chapter 70

  THIS WAS ANOTHER reason Private was the best place for Justine to work, or investigate a murder. Processing DNA took an eternity at the city lab because of the length of the line and the sheer volume of cases. At Private, it would take twenty-four hours from the git to the go because the forensic lab was Private’s, and because Wendy Borman was job one.

  The basement level was blazing with artificial light at four in the morning. Sci’s crew had been working for twenty hours straight, running swabs over Wendy Borman’s clothes, which had been stored in the LAPD evidence room for five years.

  The clothing had been packaged correctly after Borman’s body was discovered, but the rain and garbage had already contaminated the evidence. Still, more sensitive equipment and a new form of capturing trace had emerged since the murder. It was called “touch DNA.”

  Sci believed in happy endings, and his optimism drove him across the desert of repetitive tasks, inconclusive results, and negative findings.

  He had ordered the Borman clothing to be swabbed under the left arm of the jersey shirt and in the fold of a sock, places that hadn’t been soaked by the rain.

  After separating the DNA from the substrate and copying the DNA in a thermal cycler, Sci ran the samples through an instrument the size and shape of an office copy machine, a method called capillary electrophoresis. In this procedure, the material was sent through a long pathway, a capillary, that separated the DNA with attached dye by size and electrical charge. The output would be displayed as an electrophoretogram, ready to be matched against the national DNA database.

  Kat’s image was on one of Sci’s desktop monitors. He glanced in her direction to tell her how the work was going.

  “Still here with me, sweetheart?”

  “You forget the time difference, Sci,” she said. “There are other things I should be doing.”

  “Like what? Name something.”

  “Anything would be more productive, darling. Defragging my hard drive. Organizing my tax receipts. Having a nice lunch with Helga, whom I despise—Sci. Look at your integrator. You have something there!”

  Sci looked at the printout. There was one set of peaks—and then another. It was a freaking miracle: two single-source samples had been identified, both with Y chromosomes.

  This was a bombshell, actually.

  Sci turned to Kit-Ka
t, his open mouth curling into a smile.

  “Two males put their hands on Wendy Borman’s clothes. You believe it, Kat? We’ve got evidence. Beautiful, solid evidence.”

  Kat was saying, “I must be bringing you the luck.”

  “Baby, baby, what a lucky charm you are.”

  “So, you are welcome, and I will be going now.”

  “Stick around while I run the profiles through the system.”

  “You are looking for a spindle in a haystack,” said Kat. “And there are haystacks out to the horizon. As far as the eye can see.”

  “We can pass the time together, anyway,” said Sci. “I like it when you’re here with me.”

  Kat smiled. “Okay. Let’s dance, good-looking.”

  Chapter 71

  EVERYBODY AT PRIVATE was involved with Schoolgirl, and they all cared about the case. Mo-bot was in her pod in the lab down the hall from Sci. She’d personalized her windowless space with a recliner, scarves draped over her lamps, a slide show of her kids on the monitor to her left, an aquarium of utsuri to her right, and incense burning at all times.

  Jason Pilser’s laptop was open in front of her.

  Mo used a unique program she’d developed. She called it her “master key.” She had already begun to pick Pilser’s passwords, frisk his hard drive, rifle through the remains of his electronic brain.

  “I’m into his e-mail,” she called out to Sci. “I’m the best. Right, Sci?”

  “Motherboard of all geeks, Mo,” he called back to her.

  “You got that right. Watch me now.”

  Jason Pilser had been a pack rat when it came to electronic communication. He deleted nothing, and he utilized several screen names. Mo easily cracked open his office account, skimmed the memos to and from his bosses and colleagues. They revealed nothing, meant nothing, led to nothing, so she moved on.

  Pilser’s Commandos of Doom mailbox was listed under the screen name Atticus. Mo-bot attacked the password and it fell. Then she ransacked the suspect’s files. Pilser used “Atticus” to enter gamer message boards and send private messages while he pillaged kingdoms and slaughtered foes in the virtual netherworld of Quaraziz, circa 2409. What a fricking dork this guy must have been.

  Mo made note of his friends and enemies in Quaraziz, then accessed Pilser’s MyBook page with her electronic passkey.

  Pilser had posted photos of himself on his page, blogged movie reviews, hailed and poked his MyBook “friends.” But there was nothing on his web page more sinister than political vitriol. No screen names crossed over from Commandos of Doom to MyBook, and Mo found no indication that Jason Pilser had been depressed. Though it sure was depressing to probe into his life.

  Closing his mail folders, Mo-bot clicked through the icons on Pilser’s toolbar. One intrigued her—a graphic of lightning shooting from a pointed finger. It was captioned “Scylla.”

  Mo-bot clicked on the link and was taken to a new web page. Pilser had titled the page “Scylla Lives.” It was a trapdoor to Pilser’s personal journal—and it almost stopped Mo’s heart.

  She read quickly, clicked through links, then found a bridge between the real and virtual worlds.

  She pushed away from her desk, and her chair rolled back. A moment later, she was standing in the doorway to Sci’s office.

  Sci stared as if he were looking through her.

  What was wrong with him? Didn’t he get it? She’d unlocked the whole damned murder plan. She was the female modern-day Sherlock Holmes.

  “Less than a week from now,” she said, “there’s going to be a Freek Night. You hear me, Sci? That’s what they call their killing game. Jason Pilser would’ve been part of it—if he’d lived.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m distracted. I’m running the DNA—”

  Mo said, “Listen to the words coming out of my mouth. There are two of them. They call themselves Street Freeks. Their screen names are Morbid and Steemcleena, and they’ve already picked their target. She lives in Silver Lake, calls herself Lady D.

  “Sci. Are you getting this? In five days, they’re going to kill this girl.”

  Chapter 72

  JACK HAD CALLED ahead to Private’s new East Coast office. A senior operative, Diana DiCarlo, was waiting at the gate when Emilio Cruz disembarked at Miami International Airport.

  CIA trained, DiCarlo was very efficient. She handed Cruz a briefcase with everything he would need: gun, surveillance equipment, car keys, and phone numbers of Private sources throughout South Florida. And she told Cruz where his subjects were staying.

  Cruz checked in to the Biltmore, the room directly above the men he was tailing. He set up his microphones and listened.

  Later, he followed his subjects from the hotel to clubs and restaurants, even watched them place their bets at the dog track in Hialeah.

  Now, three days into the job, he was in South Beach, the flashiest, sexiest part of old Miami.

  Emilio Cruz was sitting on a coral-rock wall, the beach rolling out before him to the ocean’s edge. He was dressed to blend in, wearing a wife beater under an open shirt, black wraparound shades, hair banded at his nape.

  He appeared to be engrossed in the daily racing form, but it was a prop. He had a camera eye embedded in the frames of his sunglasses that was not just taping; the images were bouncing off a satellite a couple of miles overhead, sending pictures and sound back to the office in LA.

  Directly ahead and maybe thirty feet away, three men sat on a bench facing away from him and toward Ocean Drive.

  They were talking together, but their eyes were on the inked, half-naked girls skating by on the hot plum-colored sidewalk.

  The two men Cruz had been following were Kenny Owen and Lance Richter. Both were NFL referees. Owen was bald and freckled. Richter was twenty years younger, with a lot of bushy brown hair, a fresh sunburn, and a gaudy Rolex watch that must have weighed a pound.

  Five minutes ago, the refs had been joined by Victor Spano, a lieutenant in the Chicago-based Marzullo family.

  Cruz had almost said it out loud.

  Holy shit.

  Chapter 73

  SPANO LOOKED FRESHLY showered and wore a shoulder holster under his ice blue jacket. He was telling the refs about the good time he’d had last night at the Nautilus Hotel across the street. There was no sexier town in America than Miami, not even Vegas.

  “The mother was a little hotter than her kid. But the kid was more enthusiastic.”

  Richter shrugged and said, “Mr. Spano, wasn’t that, like, incest?”

  “Nah,” Spano said. “It was her stepmother. What do you think? I’m a pervert?”

  Everyone laughed. The kid with the hair said, “But seriously, Mr. Spano. Back to the assignment we have this week. Tennessee by seventeen points at Oakland? Seventeen points is no walk in the park, and we could be under a lot of pressure here.”

  Spano said, “I follow your point, Lance, but you know what they say. Pressure is self-inflicted. You guys are pros. I don’t see a problem.”

  A homeless teen with meth mouth and wearing a Speedo and a dirty green shirt came over to Cruz and asked for some spare change for his college fund.

  Cruz said, “You’re standing in my sun.”

  The kid—already a bum—said, “It’s why they call it spare change, dude. You won’t miss it.”

  By the time the fresh kid had pushed off, Spano and the refs had finished their meeting and split up, Spano returning to the art deco hotel across the street, the refs inside a cab heading downtown.

  It didn’t matter. Cruz had the whole story. The Titans were favored to mow the Raiders down. The refs had to prevent a massacre and protect that seventeen-point spread. If they did, someone was going to make a whole lot of millions.

  Cruz tapped buttons on his iPhone, calling Jack.

  “Good news, very good news. I recorded the fix. Do you receive me, captain?”

  “Loud and clear. We got it all here. Audio and video. Who’s that in the blue jacket?”


  “Victor Spano. Out of Chicago. Marzullo family.”

  “Unreal,” Jack said. “Good job, Emilio. Come home. We need you here.”

  Chapter 74

  JUSTINE WAS AT BESO, the spectacular restaurant owned by Eva Longoria and Todd English. It was a huge vaulted space known for its Mexican cuisine with an original twist.

  Justine’s round booth gave her a wide view of the room, but she hadn’t exactly been stargazing. That wasn’t her style.

  She’d been passing the time paging through a short stack of yearbooks from Gateway Prep. The waiter cleared the table and brought her check.

  “Everything was good this evening, Dr. Smith? You enjoyed your lemon sole?”

  “Yes, Raphael. I’m practically addicted to the lemon sole. Everything was perfect.”

  Actually, nothing was perfect, other than the fish. She’d tagged ten boys, Gateway graduates from the years 2004 through 2006, who somewhat matched Christine Castiglia’s description. Some had pointy noses, some had sticking-out ears; none of them had a police record.

  Justine paid her check, and as she waited for the valet to bring her car around, she switched on her phone and checked her messages. She saw that Bobby had called and so had Christine Castiglia’s mother, Peggy.

  Was it possible? Had Christine made a breakthrough? Justine tapped the button to return Peggy Castiglia’s call. She muttered, “C’mon, c’mon,” until the phone was answered on the fifth ring.

  “Leave my daughter alone,” Christine’s mother told her. “She’s an anxious child, and now she’s got you to worry about. You can’t rely on anything she says, do you understand? Because she doesn’t want to disappoint you. She’s in her room crying right now.”

  Justine blocked out the traffic, the pedestrians on the sidewalk. She stared at her blue pumps as she told Peggy Castiglia that she was sorry, she didn’t want to upset Christine, but it was necessary to keep her involved.