The Mad Thing

By Michael Davidson

ﾠThe Mad Thing characterizes that most uncommon of all slayers, the female serial killer. A self-appointed vigilante roams the streets of Los Angeles at night, hunting, killing and mutilating men who have but one tortured behavior in common. Jon Sadler, a profiling for long-time friend, Larry Radino of the Los Angeles Police Department, discovers a common denominator between the victims buried deep within the voluminous files of LA s largest bureaucracy, the Los Angeles Department of Children s Services. In a bizarre turn of events, Jon discovers the identity of the killer, but is compelled to withhold the identification.

ﾠ

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Jul 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9781682134535

Michael Davidson

Michael Davidson is Professor of Literature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of The San Francisco Renaissance: Poetics and Community at Mid-Century (1991) and several books of poetry.

Book preview

Chapter One

The killing began in December of 2008. My involvement started on the morning of January 4th, 2009. I’m sure of the day because the previous morning I had scrawled a note in my Day Runner that read, ‘Hardy family 10:30.’ I was in my office brewing coffee, which somehow always falls short of what the aroma promises when the phone rang.

The sign on the door reads, ‘Jon Sadler, Psychotherapist.’ As a rule, I would say that psychotherapists do not lead lives exciting enough to write about.

However, that was about to change.

The call was from Lorna Smaul. Lorna is an emergency response social worker out of Metro Family, Region II of the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services. Her job is to protect children even if it means removing them from the custody of their parents. One of the alternatives to removal is me, Jon Sadler. When I first began my practice, I had very few clients and I was dependent on counseling referrals supplied by Lorna. Although that is no longer the case, I owe her, and since her clients require a field visit, it allows me a chance to get out of the office.

She gave me the information I would need, in a practiced fashion.

Case number 4564829-1. Mother’s name, Mary Hardy. The address is 1322 North East Garvey # 11, Covina.

Kids in the home? I asked.

Sherri. Mary adopted her when she was two. She’s twelve now.

What’s the problem?

Sherri has taken to going AWOL on a regular basis. If it continues, we’ll be forced to replace her. A little family therapy might make the difference.

Any indication the child’s being abused? I asked.

Sherri says she’s taking off because she’s being slapped around. I have my doubts about that; she may just be getting restless.

Is there a man in the house?

You mean a father?

I mean a male presence. There was a pause.

Not exactly.

What does that mean?

Jonny, why don’t you go on out there and do an eval and get back to me on whether or not you think you can help. Can do?

I didn’t like the little pause. Sometimes Lorna pulls my chain just for her own amusement. What’s the mystery? I asked.

No mystery. I’m taking the case over from another caseworker and I’m not sure of all the facts yet.

I took down a few more details, and then disconnected and dialed the number Lorna gave me. I could tell someone had picked up the receiver, but they weren’t talking so I said, Hello.

Yes?

The voice had a raspy resonance. Mr. Hardy?

This is Mary Hardy.

Oh well. Mary, my name is Jon Sadler. I’m a counselor. Lorna Smaul, at the Department of Children and Family Services, gave me your name. Did she tell you I would be calling?

She said someone would call.

I suppose she could have been suffering from laryngitis, but it sounded as if she was in pain. I asked a few more questions, got what I needed, and made an appointment to see Mary and her adopted daughter the following day. And except for Mary’s voice, and Lorna’s slight, but noticeable vacillation, all seemed normal and I didn’t give it another thought until the next morning.

Over the years I have charted many McDonald’s restaurants throughout Los Angeles County. This morning there was a two for one deal on the Egg McGuffin, so I pulled in off Azusa Boulevard at Garvey, and placed my order with a pretty Latino girl I’d seen there before. I received my order in a manner, which gave new significance to the concept of fast food, and retired to a table next to the window so I could keep an eye on my car. I hadn’t been able to lock my old Chevy wagon since someone threw a brick through the side window while it was parked on 125th Street in South Central, two weeks earlier.

The coffee was hot and revitalizing. I kicked back and sipped at it. Three years earlier I had become part of the herd of therapists attempting to scrape out a living in the Los Angeles area. I was older than most when the license arrived. I remember it was a windy late afternoon and because the envelope was too big to fit into the mailbox, I found it propped up in a flowerpot hanging on to a Chrysanthemum for dear life. An extra-large envelope meant I had passed the oral exam and I was receiving my State license. There were a lot of years on the line and my heart was pounding. I had made it.

I’d paid my way through graduate school by working as a counselor at a child abuse prevention center in Pasadena. I spent my days roaming the neighborhoods of Los Angeles trying to convince parents it was a dumb idea to beat their kids. At night I interned at a clinic trying to help psychotics become neurotics; a little dysthymic, with a touch of anxiety and a splash of identity disorder, in other words, normal.

While my peers began opening offices in West Los Angeles and Encino, I was working out of my car. I had become proficient at doing therapy in the homes of my clients. The overhead was low and the results were good, so I kept at it developing an unorthodox practice that soon afforded me a meager living.

Garvey Boulevard fronts the 10 Freeway for several miles as it snakes through the Baldwin Park/Covina area. Some of my clients rent trailers in parks that have never known a blade of grass. Finding #11 was a challenge because numbers were non-existent. I counted, starting from the first trailer in the circular drive, but the screen door I talked to said it was #7 and my intrusion was not appreciated.

I knew I was at the right place when she spoke to me in that same raspy voice I’d heard on the telephone. Mary Hardy was short and overweight. She was in her late forties and wearing a Kelly-Green dress with a large red and yellow flower print. She avoided eye contact as she stepped aside allowing me entrance. The confining space was, in contrast to what I had expected, organized and clean.

The room was in semi-darkness. The blinds covering the narrow windows over the weathered couch in front of me, were shut. Except for an old recliner and a television set at the far end of the trailer to my right, that was it. The floor was covered in faded, worn linoleum, causing a flashback to my mother’s kitchen when I was a kid. We appeared to be alone.

Mary, do you understand that Lorna would like you and Sherri to have some counseling sessions? I asked.

I understand that’s what Ms. Smaul thinks we need.

Where is your daughter?

Sherri ran away again.

When?

She didn’t come home last night.

This has happened before, hasn’t it?

She was silent. Do you know where she is?

I think she stays with friends.

Can you call them?

I have called, Mr. Sadler, but she’s not with any of her friends.

I hung around for about thirty minutes, plodding methodically through subtle questions designed to gain basic information about Mary’s relationship with her daughter. Is she unhappy? Was she afraid of something? Do you fight a lot? Do you slap her around?

Some people say they can smell a cop down the block. I can smell abuse, but Mary’s trailer had an atmosphere of something else, and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I had done all I could. Without the girl, there was no counseling. I got up to leave.

Mary, I want you to call me when Sherri comes home.

Yes, I’ll do that Mr. Sadler.

Call me Jon, I said, but there was no response.

It was clear Mary Hardy would prefer to jump off the Santa Monica Pier rather than suffer me in a counseling session. She had not asked for counseling, the Department of Children and family Services and had given her an ultimatum. Sherri had a Medi-Cal card, and that meant the County would cover my services. Chances are that Sherri had made the decision to break with Mary. If so, and due to her age, the Courts would probably support the girl and order Lorna to place her in a foster home. I knew there was a good chance I would not be returning.

I gave Mary my card and was stooping through the trailer door when the sound came from down the dark narrow hallway on my right. When I heard it, I realized there was someone else in the trailer and I stepped back into the room.

Ten years earlier, while working through undergraduate school, I was employed part-time at a center for blind and developmentally disabled adults. When I heard the sound in Mary’s trailer, I sensed there was a disabled person down that dark hallway. I should have kept going, but I didn’t, and now Mary was watching me with the silence of a lamb. It was an awkward moment, and I suddenly felt something.

That’s my son, Mr. Sadler.

Your son?

Yes.

How old is your son, Mary?

He’s twenty-four.

I heard the sound again, this time a little closer. I glanced down the hallway. Something moved in the shadows. I was spooked, but I tried not to show it and stood my ground.

Maybe I could meet your son, Mary?

Prob’ly not a good idea, Mr. Sadler.

It was the way she said it. Perhaps on my next visit, then. She didn’t respond.

I stepped through the door. Good-bye Mary.

Nothing, nothing but the sound of something dragging itself down the hallway.

Chapter Two

As Roger Cardinal drove into the parking structure, he reflected on how much he loved his Marina apartment. It was perched nearly over the main channel, and he never tired of watching the sailboats glide past his living room windows. Roger was a corporate tax attorney and was, almost certain, to become a partner soon in the West Los Angeles law firm where he worked. His life was great! Like a pig in shit, he thought. That had always been a favorite expression of Roger’s. Of course, it had not always been so good.

Roger thought back to his graduation from Harvard. He’d been 123rd in his class, but at least he’d gotten through. And then. there was Marsha. Marsha was older than Roger; thirty-three when he’d met her through that ‘Great Exasperation’ rip-off. Marsha looked really good on video. For the promo she’d worn a light blue satin blouse, cut low with no bra. She had an incredible pair of melons and Roger was a tit man, no mistake about it. And when he talked to her that first time on the telephone, he could tell they were all his for the picking. They damn well came with the territory. It was good for a while, and the tits had helped.

It was the kid who had fucked everything up. Terrie was three, and a product of Marsha’s first marriage. At first, they’d gotten along fine, and then Marsha started getting jealous. Imagine a mother getting jealous over her own kid. After about a year, things started to get out of hand and she’d divorced him. She and Terri just took off, no child support, no nothing, but that was behind him now.

He parked in the underground structure and made his way toward his apartment. Marni would be there in an hour and he was looking forward to the evening. Marni was a great cook, and she had promised him a birthday dinner, his favorite, pasta with garlic and salmon, caesar salad and champagne to celebrate his fortieth. Marni didn’t have any kids, but she had raised a damn fine pair of melons.

Roger’s apartment was on the third floor. He punched the button for the elevator. It lit up signifying that all was well in his universe. He heard the soft hum as the elevator descended. The doors slid open and Roger stepped in and hit the third-floor button with a jaunty stab of his elbow. Funny, Roger thought, with all the people in this apartment building, he almost never met anyone coming or going in the elevator. It was spooky the way these big apartment buildings were as quiet as tombs. In fact, it was always a little surprising when the elevator doors opened and someone was standing there. So, no one could have been more surprised than Roger when the elevator doors opened on the third floor and someone was standing there. And before Roger could even smile, that someone, ceremoniously, buried a common steak knife deep into Roger’s heart.

Of course, Roger didn’t know it was a common steak knife. He really didn’t know what it was. Roger was slammed to the rear wall of the elevator and felt himself slumping to the floor. He was aware of a figure stepping into the elevator. But mostly, he was aware of a terrible, painful invasiveness in his chest. As the doors closed the figure pushed the emergency stop button. Roger’s now sightless eyes stared at the notice taped to the opposite wall of the elevator, warning tenants not to park in the visitor spaces or they would be towed away. Roger’s final thoughts were focused on his trousers. It seemed odd that the person who had attacked and clearly hurt him seriously, was now removing his pants.

At 7:32 PM that same evening, Charmaine, one of the apartment housekeepers, started screaming. It would be two weeks before her brother removed her from the Daniel Freeman Marina Hospital on Lincoln Boulevard and accompany her to their mother’s home in Mexico City, where she would live the remainder of her life, never to enter an elevator again.

Chapter Three

Los Angeles has always been my home. I grew up in the San Fernando Valley when there were more empty lots than buildings. I remember hunting rabbits with a lever action twenty-two caliber Winchester in the vastness of Lankershim and Saticoy. I remember digging forts and smoking my brains out, eating Cupid hot dogs, and wearing red tag Levi’s. And I remember thinking it would never end.

Los Angeles doesn’t end. It seems to creep in all directions forever. I can only imagine the terror it must strike at first sight in the hearts of Midwesterners. It’s not a rational city, and whatever evil lurks in the minds of men, can be found lurking in the shadows of Los Angeles.

On the morning of January 28th, I was running late when I came barreling out of the Sierra Madre canyon, where I live, headed for downtown. I was late for a meeting with a client at the Immigration Court on Los Angeles Street. I inherited Maria Robles from the Children’s Court, through Lorna, after the woman was reported for possible neglect of her children. She turned out to be an illegal, but that was not the concern of the Court. The Court order forced her into counseling, the great American cure-all, and that’s where I came into her life. She couldn’t speak a word of English, but she had a brother who could, and he agreed to sit in and translate. We were in the midst of struggling through the Court ordered sessions, when she was arraigned at Immigration.

I met her on the concrete steps in front of the Courthouse. She was small, dark, and pretty. She had five cute little kids clustered around her and how she got there I have no idea. I have ceased trying to figure out how people, like Maria, manage to survive in Los Angeles, but they do, and by the thousands. She smiled at me. I scooped up two of the lightweights and we headed for Immigration Court C, presided over by the honorable Justice, Ida Morales. As we wedged ourselves into the cracker box courtroom, Justice Morales eyed us and cocked her little finger at me, come-hither.

I went forward and leaned on the dark, polished, mahogany banister separating the haves from the have-nots. Justice Ida and I weren’t exactly old friends, but I had been in her courtroom enough times that I could grin at her without being found in contempt. She was in her late forties, and good looking in a judicial sort of way. There was a kind of poetry in the way she administered her little world of Court. I admired the way she appeared to take pleasure in kicking lawyer ass. I couldn’t help wondering if, in private, she was as self-assured. The therapist in me said no, but then, what does he know.

Jonny, what have we here? she asked.

Hi Judge, what are you doing for lunch?

Judges don’t eat with the riff-raff, she countered. I’m going to see Miss Robles first, before those kids get restless. And quit trying to bribe a Superior Court Justice.

Thanks, Judge, I said.

Twenty minutes later we were back on the front steps. Maria had ninety days to show cause why she should not be deported. Through five-year-old Jorge, I asked Maria if I could drop her somewhere. She smiled and said no. I made an appointment to see her next week, and left.

I was glad the court thing went fast because I had an appointment for lunch downtown and now, I was early, and I like to be early. I think it’s a control issue—but what hell, it works for me. I headed south on Hill Street because I wanted to see how the construction was coming along on the new underground Metro rail. The area was familiar, because years ago I’d done an internship at the Veteran’s Administration building. My psyche program at Antioch required that I spend time in the community doing some hands-on. I remembered at the time feeling a sense of boredom while helping those old geezers fill out forms and plan their next meal, but now, I realized they were teaching me something; they were showing me what getting old could look like. And as I stood in the archway of that memory and watched the guys in the hard-hats watch the girls go by, I had a sense of nostalgia and I wondered about those old guys.

Out on the street were these huge mute machines for digging dirt out of the ground for LA’s first underground railway. It seemed odd that I’d never seen any of them in operation. And there were never a lot of guys, surely not enough to get this Herculean project completed in this century. And they seemed to be standing around watching, like I was. Sometimes a guy would be pushing a little dirt with a shovel. And there was the guy who would be looking at a set of plans. And there were always a few who were sitting down eating their lunch no matter what time of the day it was. So, over the years, I’ve developed a great respect for these men who complete gargantuan projects while giving the impression they’re doing nothing at all.

After about 30 minutes I was reminisced out and I worked my way back to the parking lot on 2nd Street, where I had left my car. I drove up one block to Main, turned right and drove over the Hollywood freeway. About six blocks later, I pulled into the parking lot of Philippe’s Famous French Dip Sandwiches. I spotted the unmarked police car parked at the far end of the lot and pulled in alongside of it.

Lieutenant Larry Radino, of the Los Angeles Police Department, looked up from his clipboard and grinned. What kept you?

Larry and I met while doing our undergrad at Antioch University in Venice Beach. Larry is a local boy and grew up in the Palisades. After spending ten years on a surfboard sharing himself between the Southern California beaches and Hawaii, Larry, as the self-perpetuated myth goes, was chased out of the surf by a Great White. His dad made a fortune as one of LA’s most successful defense attorneys, and was happy to pay the going rate for a college education.

Back then, Antioch was the wet-dream of liberal arts educational institutions and they’d been handing out degrees for over a hundred years. Larry and I thought we had died and gone to heaven. While I was receiving credits for working a part-time job, Larry was piling them up writing experiential papers with titles like, The Cultural Significance of Beachfront Cafes. Don’t get me wrong, Antioch was, and is, fully accredited. It employs a close-knit group of instructors who appreciate the nature of knowledge, both academic and experiential. Larry was heading for an MBA; my interest was in Clinical Psychology.

We stood in a line of half a dozen behind the chest-high glass counter. Philippe’s is one of those restaurants that had been around forever, because it defied the law of entropy. It stands, unchanged through the years by the natural thermodynamic forces of the universe; an island in a sea of prejudice, serving hobos and homeless, white and blue-collar workers, the rich, and almost famous. Their specialty is a classic French Dip sandwich, beef, ham, or pork, accompanied by such delicacies as pickled egg, potato salad, pie, coffee and beer.

We waited patiently with the others and ten minutes later carried our lunch up the stairs to the second floor and found our regular table adjacent the window overlooking Broadway.

How’s Marilyn? Larry asked.

Fine.

He grinned. Really?

Really.

How would you know? he said. Where is she?

In the Philippines, I think.

Marilyn and I had been going together for seven years. She’s a flight attendant for United Airlines. Her flights are international; she’s gone a lot and Larry thinks that’s funny.

When are you and the little woman going to settle down? he asked.

The little woman and I aren’t going to settle down, I said. We like it the way it is.

"We, white man?"

Larry had this idea that Marilyn was tired of being, as she sometimes referred to herself, a flying bar maid. And ever since he married Komo, five years ago, he thought of himself as the middle-aged model for the entire male population. As Larry put it; You, the self-proclaimed expert on relationships, have a non-relationship with one of the most beautiful women to ever traverse the Atlantic at 35 thousand feet.

Now, I’m not going to deny that Marilyn’s being away so much of the time doesn’t work for me. It’s not that I play around, because I don’t. But when a man finds out what style of relationship works best for him, well, a man should stick with it. Besides, as far as I know, Marilyn is quite happy with the arrangement. Why does it sound as if I’m defending myself?

Larry and John having lunch at Philippe’s, on Broadway, in downtown Los Angeles.

As we began the process of devouring our meal, I thought about the relationship Larry and I had developed over the years. Like most men, when we get together, we talk about externals rather than internals. After all, men have a non-verbal way of showing their sensitivities that women don’t always appreciate. The current men’s movement is trying to make us all more verbal and demonstrative, but Larry and I are politely resisting. And yes, it did occur to me that such an attitude is incompatible with current psychotherapeutic techniques.

After we had graduated from Antioch, Larry went on to the University of Southern California, took a course in criminology and got hooked. Four years later he applied to the Police Academy in Chavez Ravine, and after doing his time in uniform, he worked his way into the Homicide Division of LAPD.

Over the years, when we get together, we end up discussing his current cases. I admit an addiction to discerning criminal behavior, and twice in the past, I have unofficially consulted on cases contributing to solving them by creating a profile of the killer and predicting his behavior.

Remember Ruiz? Larry asked.

Can’t forget Charley, I said.

Charley Ruiz had gone on a murderous rampage a few years earlier killing six homeless men in a sixteen-block area, downtown. Charley was territorial and methodical. He murdered one-a-day for six days. On the seventh day, early on a hot Saturday morning, Larry stared over the sights of his 38 caliber police special into the eyes of a madman, and read him his rights.

You know, Larry said, Charley might have iced a few more of those old guys if it weren’t for your insight.

We got lucky, I said, knowing it was true.

Larry wasn’t just being metaphorical when he said Charley iced his victims. Charley had inserted an ice pick, fourteen times into the chest of each one of them. Never more, never less, and his mother’s birthday turned out to be August 14th. On the third day/third victim, one of Larry’s team, Sgt. Myles Hobart, saw something at the crime scene that looked familiar to him. He remembered seeing something similar at the location of the first homicide. At the time, it had no significance, but later he thought it might, and it did.

All of the victims had been killed at night. All of them were found close to where they had slept, a location with some structural protection against the elements. What Sgt. Hobart had observed on the scene of the third killing, was a series of punctures in the stucco wall adjacent to, and just above, the body as it lay on the concrete walk some ten feet from the curb on Agatha Street. At a glance it looked as if someone had hacked away at the wall indiscriminately. On closer inspection, it was clear that the punctures had been made by what could have been the murder weapon—an ice pick.

There were traces of a dark coloring contrasting against the faded light green wall. And one other thing, when the punctures were counted, they totaled out to fourteen. When he reported to his Lieutenant that he thought he had seen something similar at the first scene, Larry and the Sargent walked around the corner, and down toward Eighth Street, turned right into the alley, knelt down and examined the wood fence where the first body had lain two days earlier. Sgt. Hobart pointed at the scarred fence and they began counting. They looked at each other and grinned. They bounced to their feet and jogged over to Olympic. When they got to the small indented entrance to the Adams Apartment Building Larry knelt and examined the aluminum frame of the window. There were punctures—fourteen, to be exact.

When they found body number four on Gladys Avenue the next morning, Larry took an hour off to have lunch with me at Philippe’s. As he related the case, I couldn’t help but appreciate the orderliness of it. There were four bodies, each stabbed fourteen times. The obsessive graffiti of fourteen puncture wounds in the adjacent structures was a psychologist’s dream. I noted, for lesser mortals, that the last victim had been killed on the fourth day of April, and that came to five fours. There was no doubt this guy was caught in a loop. He was a classic obsessive-compulsive personality, and he was showing us the way to his front door if we could just read the script.

The police department employs psychologists to pick up stuff like this, but it was happening too fast. I dubbed our boy the ‘Foreman’ and it stuck, which delighted me immensely. Two victims later it was clear that the Foreman was killing in a four block by four block area. Larry couldn’t believe the guy was that stupid and I had to remind him that he couldn’t help himself; he was a prisoner of his obsession. If we had enough police officers we could stand around after sundown, in a sixteen-block area, and witness the next murder.

I suggested to Larry that he check out every hotel within a twenty-four block area, and go to the fourth, the fourteenth and the twenty-fourth floor; and knock on every door that has a four in the number. Three hours later, Larry was staring at the door of room number 404 on the fourth floor of the Aztec Hotel, three blocks from ground zero. The door looked as though it had been stabbed to death, with; you guessed it, fourteen stabs.

Larry called in the LAPD SWAT Team. Charley was staring into a bowl of Campbell’s Chunky Chicken Soup when his front door dematerialized and four darkly clad men rushed in with automatic weapons. Charley must have creamed-his-jeans when he found his captors were from the fourth precinct.

What’s up? I asked, Did Charley break jail?

Larry was in no hurry to answer. He took a bite of his dip, sampled his beer, seemed to approve, and said, What do you know about disfigurement?

As in? I asked.

As in murder, of course.

Who, pray tell, was disfigured?

An adult male.

Give me a hint, I said, murderer or murderee?

Larry took another bite of his sandwich, chug-a-lugged the beer and said, You’re gonna’ love this one: Back in December of ninety-eight there was a homicide in a stateroom on the Queen Mary out in Long Beach. A maid found a guy by the name of Walter Burrows with a knife in his chest. It was what we call an atypical homicide. Larry finished off his pickled egg.

Atypical?

I’ll get to that. It was a six-inch blade, clean to the heart. Five days ago, we received a call from the Sheriff’s Department in Marina Del Rey. The desk Sargent had heard someone screaming from the direction of the Villa Venetia apartments next door. A couple of Deputies and a Coast Guardsman stationed adjacent to the Sheriff’s Department ran to the lobby of the building. Two tenants and one of the apartment housekeepers were standing in front of the elevator doors. The housekeeper was still screaming and the tenants were trying to counsel her. Just about then, the officers reported they heard more screaming coming from above on the second floor. The Deputies took off via the stairwell. Ensign Copeland of the Coast Guard said that seconds after the deputies ran upstairs, the elevator doors opened on the first floor. He looked inside and vomited. There was a dead body inside the elevator with enough blood floating around to start a Marina blood bank.

Larry finished off his sandwich and waited for me to comment.

And?

And when I got there about an hour later, what I saw in the elevator matched the signature of the Queen Mary homicide, and a second one that occurred in Claremont last September.

Signature, meaning?

"Modus Operandi, counselor. And although Long Beach and Claremont are out of my jurisdiction, when the Marina Del Rey thing came down, they made me the coordinating officer.

My, aren’t we the lucky one. Why don’t I remember hearing about this? I asked.

Because all the facts weren’t made available to the press. And without knowing the signature, three separate homicides in Los Angeles are no big deal. In fact, outside of the officers involved in the case, very few people know the killings are related.

Isn’t that a little unusual? I said.

Isn’t what a little unusual?

That you could keep it covered up?

Yeah, well, we work hard at it, and whoever’s been knocking these guys off doesn’t seem to be looking for press. Larry leaned back in his chair.

But isn’t it out after the last one? I asked.

No. We wrapped it pretty tight and we sure as hell don’t let the press get a look at the damaged goods. In the Marina, only four people other than our own saw the corpse. The housekeeper is still in the hospital and not available, Copeland can be controlled, and the tenants never got a really good look. In any case, we’ve asked them not to talk to the press and, up until now at least, they’re cooperating.

And the signature? I asked.

Yeah, have a look.

Larry pulled his briefcase out and flipped it open. He pulled out a large brown envelope and handed it to me.

The envelope had a bunch of eight-by-ten color photographs inside. The one on top showed a man lying on his back on a carpeted floor with his head propped up against a bed. There was a lot of blood all over the guy. His pants had been pulled down to his knees. The genital area was a mess. Christ, Larry, is this the guy on the boat?

The very same.

It looks as though someone carved up his crotch. There was something else not right about the photograph. What the hell is wrong with his face?

You’re the trained observer, Larry said.

There were two reasons