him in the act. We requested and got six undercover teams from Chief Brown. The teams of Wynn and Brasher and of Frank and me brought the total to eight. We arranged to have all eight cars cruise the bandit’s area of operations from 9 p.m. until 1 a.m. nightly, the hours during which all previous robberies had taken place.
Despite these precautions, the bandit hit twice more over the weekend.
* * * *
Monday, July 1st, at 11:26 p.m., Frank and I were cruising along Nichols Canyon Road in a 1955 Chevrolet undercover car. There had been a hard summer rain earlier, unusual for this time of year, but now the night was clear and warm.
Dozens of couples were parked alongside the road, taking advantage of the nice weather.
Frank said, “This would be a good night for him to hit. For us, I mean.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Rain softened up the ground. Might leave some footprints.”
I grunted. “Way things are going, we better bring in more than footprints soon. Captain’s getting a little short of patience.”
“Well, we’re doing the best we can,” Frank said. “It’s a pretty big area.”
Up ahead our lights picked out a new Ford sedan parked alongside the road. As we neared it, I noticed that the door on the right-hand side hung wide open, and that no one seemed to be sitting in the car.
“Slow it down,” I said to Frank.
He braked to a crawl as we passed the Ford. I peered in and saw that both the front and rear seats were empty. I motioned Frank to pull up on the shoulder in front of it.
I lifted a flashlight from the glove compartment as we got out of the car. We walked back, staying on the concrete, and I flashed the light into the car’s interior. It was still empty.
I walked around behind the car and shined the light on the ground near the open door. There were clear impressions of both a man’s and a woman’s shoes, showing where they had stepped to the wet ground from the car. A churned-up area, halfway between the car and a drainage ditch that paralleled the road a few yards away, suggested that some kind of struggle had taken place. A man’s footprints led away from this spot around the front of the car onto the concrete.
I walked over to the edge of the drainage ditch, being careful not to disturb any of the footprints. The ditch was only about three feet deep, and had a bare trickle of water in it. When I turned my light downward, I saw that it also contained something else.
“Frank,” I called softly. “Chief Brown was right.”
“Huh?” Frank said.
“He finally got around to killing somebody. Two of them.”
Frank came over to the edge of the drainage ditch, carefully stepping in my footprints, and gazed down at the two figures lying there. The man seemed to be about twenty-five. He wore a Marine uniform with sergeant’s stripes. He lay on his back, his eyes gazing sightlessly straight upward. The top of his head had literally been beaten fiat. It was nothing but a red, pulpy mass. Even at the distance of several feet, there was no question that he was dead.
The girl lay on her side, half across his chest. She was a slim redhead of about twenty. She wore a white-and-green summer dress, and the top right corner of it was stained with blood. I slid down into the ditch and felt the girl’s pulse.
I called up to Frank, “She’s still alive. Get an ambulance rolling.”
He moved away toward the undercover car, while I bent over the girl to give her a closer examination. The bullet seemed to have passed entirely through her shoulder, and though she had shed considerable blood, both the entry and exit wounds had now stopped bleeding. She was unconscious, but breathing regularly.
The first rule of first aid is to do nothing that isn’t necessary. Making injured persons “more comfortable” as often as not only aggravates the injury. Since the girl’s bleeding had stopped of its own accord, there was nothing I could do for her until the ambulance arrived. I left her where she was.
Frank came back to the car just as I climbed to the top of the ditch.
“I radioed for an ambulance,” he said. “Also got the other seven cars blocking all roads out of the area. Maybe we can still net him.”
“Doubt it,” I told him. “The girl’s wound isn’t bleeding. This must have happened some time ago if her blood is beginning to clot. Call for the Crime Lab?”
“Yeah. And Latent Prints, just in case he touched the car.”
Walking back onto the road, I scraped some of the mud from my feet off on the concrete. Sirens began to sound in the distance. The sound grew in volume, its direction indicating the vehicles were coming up the freeway.
The first vehicle to the scene was a black-and-white squad car. I motioned the driver to park on the far side of the road. When the two uniformed officers got out of the car, I took them over to the Ford and pointed out the footprints made by the victims and the suspect.
“Happen to have a rope in your car?” I asked one of the officers. A rope is not standard equipment in squad cars, but many officers furnish their own equipment for their personal convenience.
“Yeah,” he said. “We’ve got one.”
“Then I want this area roped off,” I instructed. “Be a million people around here to trample over the evidence before long.”
As the policemen were getting the rope from the squad car, a Buick convertible pulled off on the shoulder behind them. A tall, lean man wearing horn-rimmed glasses got out and walked over to me. Simultaneously, an ambulance rolled to a stop.
“Accident?” the lean man asked me.
“No, sir,” I said. “Police business.”
“You a detective?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
I turned toward the ambulance, and the lean man started around the front of the Ford. I changed direction and caught his arm just as he raised a foot to step off the concrete. “Sorry, sir,” I said. “Have to ask you to go back to your car.”
Shaking off my hand, he stared down his nose at me. “Your badge doesn’t give you the right to manhandle private citizens, Officer.”
“No, sir,” I said. “Just go back to your car, please.”
The ambulance attendant and the driver had gotten out of the ambulance meantime, and Frank was leading them in a wide arc around the rear of the Ford toward the drainage ditch. The two uniformed policemen came over and began roping off the area. Another car parked across the road, and Marty Wynn and Vance Brasher got out of it. The lean bystander started to follow the ambulance attendants.
I said to Vance, “Get that joker to go back to his car and move on,” then turned to Marty Wynn. “Any luck?”
He shook his head. “Got every road out of here blocked off, and the boys are checking every parked car. We don’t even know that
