Signature Kill (25 page)

“How’d he expect to get out of here clean?” Behr wondered aloud.

“I don’t know. I scream, my cousins kill his ass. But he knock me out,” Jasmine said. “He a asshole. He a motherfucker.”

“Did you call the police?” Behr asked, doubting it due to the nature of their business.

“No police,” a male voice said.

That’s when Behr noticed the two tough guys and the squat man had drifted over. They weren’t menacing him now. They were just interested.

“Can you describe him?” Behr asked. “Was he plain looking, wearing a cap? What color hair?”

“He don’t got no hair.”

“No hair,” Behr repeated, feeling an excited stab in his lungs at a piece of potentially strange information. “So he was bald, or …?”

“No hair, man. None. He got this weird wig under the hat. He draw on eyebrows with a pencil.”

Behr didn’t speak for a moment, as he felt possible understanding washing around him like an insistent tide. There had been no DNA recovered on any of the scenes, and he had already found a potentially logical reason for how that could be thanks to Prilo. But no hair fibers belonging to a perpetrator had been recovered either, on any of the victims, at any of the sites, even from Quinn, on whom
victims
’ hair had been found. Now Behr felt he knew why.

“He wear a rug, like he have cancer or some shit, but he don’t seem sick,” Jasmine went on. Behr wondered if the guy had that
medical condition that caused hair loss—he couldn’t recall the term at the moment—then one of the tough kids spoke up.

“Why you looking for him?”

He turned and considered the kid. Would it do more good for Behr to pretend he had a girlfriend or sister who had been beaten up by the guy he was looking for? Without much thought, Behr abandoned the idea of a pretext and just told him:

“I’m a private investigator tracking a missing girl. I think this guy may be killing women. I’m trying to catch him.”

There was the sound of Jasmine crying out in fear at what might’ve been, then it went quiet for a beat, before a burst of a staccato Asian dialect between the men filled the room and a decision seemed to be reached.

The squat man was the one who spoke next. “You come.”

He crossed the sitting room and disappeared through a door into the back. Behr followed, and the two young guys followed him, and he wondered if he was walking into some kind of ambush. But the door led into a cramped office dominated by a desk that was completely covered in an avalanche of paperwork and a battered computer.

One of the young guys sat down and his fingers flew over the keyboard, bringing up split-screen images of several security cameras.

“These no supposed to be here. Very illegal. For safety of girls, to protect from entrapment,” the squat man said.

Or to blackmail patrons
, Behr thought.

“You don’t say nothing,” the squat man cautioned. Behr nodded his assent.

The images came from half a dozen small rooms and showed a few massages, of varying states of legitimacy, in progress. Most of them had taken place earlier and had been digitally logged. It was possible one or two were happening live. There were even cameras rigged in the bathrooms, and in one an Asian woman with long black hair was in the shower copiously washing her crotch. As the kid typed, the images from one room were played back with highspeed scrubbing, and Behr recognized Jasmine entering her space, which had Chinese restaurant give-away calendars stuck all over
the walls, a burning incense stick and candle, and a single pink vinyl massage table with a pillow on it.

Before long the older woman appeared in the doorway with a man,
the
man, behind her. She sent him in and then left, and the tough kid let the images slow to regular speed. Behr watched as the man stepped inside. He was just beyond medium height, perhaps five foot eleven, squared off and solid looking, but it was hard to tell because of his tan canvas coat and roomy-cut khaki pants. On the monitor, Jasmine smiled at him and closed the door. There was no sound, but it appeared she offered to take his coat. He shook his head and kept his hands jammed in his pockets as he sat on the edge of the massage bed. The camera position was high, probably cut into the ceiling or placed in a light fixture or a vent, so the brim of the man’s beige-colored baseball cap obscured his face. Despite there being no truly identifying factors, Behr found something familiar about the man.

Jasmine stood across from him and gestured for him to lie down. The man shook his head. He said something to her, reached for a back pocket, and pulled out his wallet.

“Freeze it there,” Behr said. The kid stopped the clip. Behr stared at the open wallet, trying to see a driver’s license or other identification, but the image was hopelessly small and would lose resolution if it were blown up to any decent size. “All right, run it,” Behr said.

The man continued with his wallet, taking out two bills, placing them on the massage bed and putting away the wallet.

“So this guy had never been in before?” Behr asked.

“Never,” grunted the squat older Asian man.

“Those are hundred-dollar bills.” It was Jasmine peeking in from the doorway of the office.

“What did he say to you?” Behr asked.

“He say he want to punch me, like I tell you.”

The Jasmine on the computer monitor grew agitated, while the squat man spoke in Korean and the real Jasmine in the office averted her eyes. Behr glanced back to the monitor to see the khaki-clad man rear back and nail the poor girl in the side of the face with his clenched right fist. Her head jerked and her neck whiplashed,
then she went stiff and collapsed in the way that knockout victims do—like a felled tree and without her arms extended to help break the fall.

The man loomed over Jasmine’s unmoving figure, and his right hand went straight down the front of his pants and he began tugging. After a moment Jasmine’s legs started twitching, and the man pulled his hand out. Whether he was finished or not was hard to tell.

“The hundred-dollar bills,” Behr said, feeling a surge of excitement over the possibility of a fingerprint. But almost as if the man on the video heard him, he picked up his bills and pocketed them.

“Shit,” Behr breathed.

Then the man looked around the room, spotted a small folded towel on the edge of the massage table, took off his cap, and swabbed his face with it, and in the moment he moved the towel and replaced the cap, Behr realized he’d found his few frames of a chance. Then the man ran out, wiping the doorknob with the towel on his way.

“Freak motherfucker!” the tough kid who wasn’t working the computer said.

“How would you feel about calling the police with this?” Behr asked. Maybe Breslau and his resources could help track the guy down.

“Fuck the cops,” the kid on the computer said. Behr looked to the older squat man. All he saw were dead eyes and the man shaking his head emphatically no.

“You find him, we pay you to bring him to us,” the kid on the computer said.

The squat man nodded gravely in agreement. “We pay you ten thousand for the chance to fuck him up.”

Not nearly enough
, Behr thought.

“I’m going to need some stills from that security footage,” Behr said.

It was around dawn when he heard a faint tapping and looked up. The sound was actually Mistretta banging on her plate-glass window to get his attention. After stopping by home, recognizing how hopeless the idea of sleep was, Behr had driven over to her place, getting there by around 5:45, and parked in her driveway since he hadn’t wanted to wake her.

He was out of his car, computer bag in hand, by the time she’d reached her front door.

“You my bodyguard or just some kind of freaking gargoyle?” she asked.

“Not sleeping much, huh,” he said.

“Just an early riser.” She stepped aside and let him in. One look at her weary eyes told him the truth. “What’s happening?”

“I got something and wanted you to be a part of it.”

He set up his laptop at her dining table, and she got him coffee while he spouted wearily about DNA and lack of hair and what he’d learned from Shantae Williams. She sat down next to him as he opened an e-mail from the screen name “daesoodrift,” one of the tough kids at the Oriental Grand, and quickly downloaded the images.

“Who’s this?” she asked, as Behr opened and began scrolling the faces from the community meeting.

“A bad, bad man, I believe,” Behr said. He knew exactly where to look. He’d spotted the guy after five or six minutes of searching the footage before he had driven over. He’d gone ahead and sent the picture to Breslau to cross against the crime computer. The department had better software for this kind of thing, which would save hundreds of hours of combing. If the man had a record, eventually he would come up. Behr set the images next to each other on his desktop—a shot of the man with and without his hat from the massage joint and an image of him in similar hat, clothes, and pose in the church basement.

“Holy shit, Behr,” Mistretta said. “Lookit that.”

They both stared at the pictures of the man at their staged meeting, and of him as he was captured the previous night: with his hat off, intense slate gray eyes, his shoe-polish-brown toupee and drawn-on eyebrows. Behr told her how he’d stumbled into the massage place, what had happened to Jasmine.

“You manage to get a name on this scumbag?”

“No. Not that lucky,” he said, “but I have an idea. Just need to wait for the stores to open.”

Hope for a break and fear of failure wrestled in Behr’s gut as he parked in front of Williams Photographic. And fear was winning. The world had changed. Years ago, before shopping online had become ubiquitous, there would have been two dozen brick-and-mortar photography stores to investigate, to see if anyone recognized the picture Behr held. Now there were four. Five if you counted this place, down toward Franklin, which seemed too far away, but which now represented a last chance. The day had bled away in a spiral of dead-end questions and futility, including a call from Breslau’s office around lunchtime informing him that the department’s software had come up blank on the face in the picture from the Oriental Grand. So whether it was the software’s shortcomings, or the man wasn’t in the system—either way, it was bad news.

Hope: Behr believed his man was a photographer. That taking pictures was integral to his obsession.

Fear: He could shoot digitally, download to his computer, and print his pictures at home.

Hope: Something about the man, his age, his methods, felt analog, not digital. And Quinn had said something about recognizing the smell of film-developing chemicals during his encounter.

Fear: That Quinn was brain damaged. And after visiting a few Walgreens and Walmarts with photo sections, Behr had learned they didn’t even sell developing supplies and they processed their color film in-store while sending out their black-and-white to a lab
in Chicago. There was no way this guy would let his images be handled publicly.

Hope: That if Quinn was right about what he smelled, and if Behr was right about the guy being analog, the man might insist on buying his chemicals in person.

Fear: That the other shops he’d stopped in, Courtland Camera and Winter’s Imagery, had tiny chemical sections and none of the salespeople recognized the man in the photos.

Fear: That even the most analog types these days just went ahead and ordered hard-to-find shit online when they had to, and if his man did, Behr was all the way back to nowhere.

Fear: He was down to his final stop.

Fear was kicking hope’s ass at the moment.

Behr got out of his car and entered the store. As soon as he walked in he felt the pretension of photo snobbery in the air. He quickly found a clerk, wearing a velvet vest over his T-shirt and a straw porkpie on his head, fiddling around with a tripod. Behr showed him the photo from Oriental Grand and asked if he knew the man in it. Velvet Vest hardly gave it a look.

“Nah, bro, I don’t. I’m kinda new. Ask Benj, he’s been here forever. He might.” Behr’s eye went to where the clerk was pointing, and he saw a lanky salesman with a chin beard who was playing with his iPhone near the back of the store.

Behr glanced around for a moment and spotted a display of the most expensive cameras in the place and went to it.

“Can I help you with something there, chief?” Benj, the lanky salesman, inquired. Behr could see his shoes behind the glass counter: hipster sneakers with the white toe caps.

“Maybe,” Behr said.

“You a photographer?” Benj asked. “Do you currently own an SLR?”

“Have a Nikon D-90,” Behr said.

The hipster salesman nearly stifled his snort. “Solid body,” he allowed.

“Yeah. Might be time to upgrade,” Behr said.

“Well, there’s plenty of room to move up from there,” the salesman said. “Plenty.”

“Uh-huh,” Behr said. “Let me see that one, please,” Behr said, pointing at a boxy black number that rested on a velvet-covered pedestal.

“That one?” the salesman said reluctantly.

“Yeah.”

Benj took the camera gingerly from the case and handed it over.

“That’s a Hasselblad H4D-60,” he said reverentially.

“Is that right?” Behr said and ran his hands over it like a low-rent pimp checking out some new flesh. “Pricey?”