“See, I doted on her. She was pretty and she was a trouper.

“Dad used to talk about getting Laurie ballet lessons and piano lessons and singing lessons. I was gonna work goon squad at Firestone Tire like him, and Laurie was gonna be an artiste. It was just talk, but I was a kid, and it was real to me.

“Anyway, right around the time she disappeared, Dad was talking up this lesson stuff a lot, and it made me mad at Laurie. I started ditching her when she went to play after school. There was this wild girl who’d moved into the neighborhood. She was a roundheels, and she used to get tanked on bathtub and put out for all the boys. I was dicking her when Laurie got snatched, when I should have been protecting my sister.”

I reached for my partner’s arm to tell him I understood; Lee pushed my hand away. “Don’t tell me you understand, because I’ll tell you what makes it bad. Laurie got snuffed. Some degenerate strangled her or chopped her up. And when she died, I was thinking ugly things about her. About how I hated her because Dad thought she was a princess and I was a thug. I pictured my own sister cut up like that stiff this morning, and I laughed about it while I was with that floozy, screwing her and drinking her father’s booze.”

Lee took a deep breath and pointed to the ground a few yards away. A separate, inside perimeter had been staked, the two halves of the body marked in quicklime. I stared at the outline of the spread legs; Lee said, “I’m gonna get him. With you or without you, I’m gonna get him.”

I dredged up a ghost of a smile. “See you at the Hall tomorrow.”

“With you or without you.”

I said, “I heard you,” and walked back to my car. Hitting the ignition, I saw another empty lot a block to the north light up.

Chapter 8

The first thing I saw when I walked into the squadroom the next morning was Harry Sears reading the Herald headline: “Hunt Werewolf’s Den in Torture Slaying!!!”; the second thing I saw was a chain of five men—two derelicts, two squarejohn types and one in county jail demins, manacled to a bench. Harry put his paper down, stammering, “C-c-confessors. S-s-said they s-sliced the girl.” I nodded, hearing screams coming from the interrogation room.

A moment later, Bill Koenig led a doubled-over fat man out the door, announcing to the bullpen at large, “He didn’t do it.” A couple of officers clapped satirically at their desks; a half dozen looked away, disgusted.

Koenig shoved the fat man out to the corridor. I asked Harry, “Where’s Lee?”

Harry pointed to Ellis Loew’s office. “W-with Loew. R-r-reporters, too.”

I walked over and peered through the crack in the doorway. Ellis Loew was standing in back of his desk, playing to a score of newshounds. Lee was seated at the DA’s side, dressed in his only suit. He looked tired—but nowhere near as edgy as he did last night.

Loew was sternly enunciating, “… and the heinous nature of the killing deems it imperative that we make every effort to catch this fiend as soon as possible. A number of specially trained officers, including Mr. Fire and his partner Mr. Ice, have been detached from their regular duties to aid in the investigation, and with men like them on the job, I think we can expect positive results soon. Moreover…”

I couldn’t hear for the pounding of blood in my head. I started to nudge the door open; Lee saw me, bowed to Loew and exited the office. He dogged me back to the Warrants cubicle; I wheeled around. “You got us detached, right?”

Lee put restraining hands on my chest. “Let’s take this slow and easy, okay? First off, I gave Ellis a memo. It said we got verified dope Nash blew our jurisdiction.”

“Are you flicking crazy!”

“Sssh. Listen, it was just to grease the skids. The APB on Nash still stands, the fuck pad is being staked out, every southside cop is out to cancel the bastard’s ticket. I’m gonna stay at the pad tonight myself. I’ve got binoculars, and I figure between them and the arclights I’ll be able to catch the plates on the cars that cruise down Norton. Maybe the killer’s gonna drive by to gloat. I’ll get all the license numbers, and check them against the DMV and R&I.”

I sighed. “Jesus, Lee.”

“Partner, all I want is a week on the girl. Nash is covered, and if he doesn’t get collared by then, we go back to him as our priority warrantee.”

“He’s too dangerous to let go. You know that.”

“Partner, he’s covered. Now don’t tell me you don’t want to build on your shine killings. Don’t tell me you don’t know that the dead girl is a better piece of pie than Junior Nash.”

I saw more Fire and Ice headlines. “One week, Lee. No more.”

Lee winked. “Copacetic.”

Captain Jack’s voice came over the intercom: “Gentlemen, everybody to the muster room. Now.”

I grabbed my notebook and walked through the bullpen. The ranks of the confessors had swollen, the new ones cuffed to radiators and heating pipes. Bill Koenig was slapping an old guy demanding to talk to Mayor Bowron; Fritzie Vogel was taking down names on a clipboard. The muster room was SRO, packed with Central and Bureau men and a shitload of plainclothes cops I’d never seen before. Captain Jack and Russ Millard were at the front, standing beside a floor microphone. Tierney tapped the mike, cleared his throat and spoke:

“Gentlemen, this is a general briefing on the 187 in Leimert Park. I’m sure you’ve all read the papers and you all know it’s a damn rough piece of work. It’s also a damn big piece of work. The mayor’s office has gotten a lot of calls, we’ve gotten a lot of calls, the City Council has gotten a lot of calls and Chief Horrall has gotten personal calls from a lot of people we want to keep happy. This werewolf stuff in the papers is going to get us a lot more calls, so let’s get going on it.

“We’ll start with the chain of command. I’m supervising, Lieutenant Millard is exec, Sergeant Sears is the runner between divisions. Deputy DA Loew is liaison to the press and civilian authorities, and the following officers are detached to Central Homicide, effective 1/16/47: Sergeant Anders, Detective Arcola, Sergeant Blanchard, Officer Bleichert, Sergeant Cavanaugh, Detective Ellison, Detective Grimes, Sergeant Koenig, Detective Liggett, Detective Navarette, Sergeant Pratt, Detective J. Smith, Detective W. Smith, Sergeant Vogel. You men see Lieutenant Millard after this briefing. Russ, they’re all yours.”

I got out my pen, giving the man next to me a gentle elbow to get more writing room. Every cop around me was doing the same thing; you could feel their attention rivet to the front of the room.

Millard spoke in his courtroom lawyer’s voice: “Yesterday, seven A.M., Norton Avenue between9th and Coliseum. A dead girl, naked, cut in half, right off the sidewalk in a vacant lot. Obviously tortured, but I’ll hold off on that until I talk to the autopsy surgeon—Doc Newbarr’s doing the job this afternoon at Queen of Angels. No reporters—there’s some details we don’t want them to know.

“The area has been thoroughly canvassed once—no leads so far. There was no blood where we found the body; the girl was obviously killed somewhere else and dumped in the lot. There’s a number of vacant lots in the area, and they’re being searched for weapons and bloodstains. An armed robbery-homicide suspect named Raymond Douglas Nash was renting a garage down the street—the place was checked for prints and bloodstains. The lab boys got zero, and Nash is not a suspect on the girl.

“There’s no ID on her yet, no matchup to anyone in the Missing Persons files. Her prints have been teletyped, so we should get some kind of report soon. An anonymous call to University Station started it all, by the way. The officer who caught the squeal said it was a hysterical woman walking her little girl to school. The woman didn’t give her name and hung up, and I think we can eliminate her as a suspect.”