took a deep, long breath through his nose and told Doug Gilman, “MBI’s available if you want to hire us.”
Chapter 10
The meeting lasted another half hour as Morris and the rest of the team worked out a game plan. The LAPD would continue to pull whatever traffic and surveillance video recordings they could locate within a five-mile radius of Star Wax in the hopes of finding vehicle license plates that were captured between three and three fifteen a.m. While no one thought it was likely that the killer was named R. G. Berg, that lead still had to be investigated, and Polk, with help from several LAPD detectives, would take that on. Morris agreed with Malevich that it was worth investigating the crime as a murder that was dressed up to look like something else, and so Malevich would go after it from that angle and would look for suspects who might’ve had a motive for killing Heather Brandley. The FBI would attempt to identify stores that sold the scaffolding materials the killer used to support Brandley’s body. Finally, Morris and Walsh would try to piece together Brandley’s movements from the day before in an attempt to discover where and how Brandley met her killer.
As the meeting was breaking up, Morris found himself drumming his fingers against the conference room table as he thought more about the name the killer had chosen. R. G. Berg. Something about it was tickling the back of his mind.
“Why’d he pick that name?” he asked Finston.
The FBI profiler made a who knows gesture. “Impossible to say right now other than it fits the narrative that he wants to tell. But the name might still lead us somewhere.”
“Bull,” Polk groused. “He picked that name only to send us on a wild-goose chase. Or me, anyway, since I’m the unlucky putz who’ll be chasing after that wild goose.”
Morris didn’t argue with Polk. But still, there was something vaguely familiar about R. G. Berg, although he was sure that he had never met anyone by that name. Something else gnawing at him were those two drops of blood left on the business card. He asked Finston about that also. “What was the point of that? Could it be this psycho’s own blood? A way to taunt us?”
She showed another of her tiny v smiles, this one apologetic. “I wish I could tell you, but all I can say is it wasn’t an accident.”
Morris pulled his cell phone out from his suit jacket pocket and called Roger Smichen.
“Ah, Morris,” the ME said on answering the call, his voice sounding sincerely disappointed. “So you decided to break your pledge. I was rooting for you not to, and am sorry to hear that you’re letting yourself get mired in the mud with yet another serial killer.”
“I could just be calling to say hello.”
“But you’re not.”
“You’re right. But Roger, what choice did I have? You saw the card he left for me.”
“True, but just because this unhinged individual is dangling bait in front of your nose doesn’t mean you have to take it.”
“In this case it does. I’ll explain why at a later time. I wanted to ask whether the blood on the business card matches the victim.”
“I don’t know yet. The victim’s blood and both drops left on the card are A-positive.”
“That’s a common one,” Morris noted.
“The second most. Thirty-four percent of the population has it. I’ve sent samples to the lab for a DNA test, which I’ve marked as urgent, and I’ll let you know as soon as I hear back.”
“Okay, thanks.”
Morris got off the phone, and told Walsh, Malevich, and Polk what Smichen had told him about the blood. Walsh and Malevich were going to head over to the dead woman’s condo, and Morris told them he’d meet them there, that he had an errand he needed to run beforehand. As he left MBI’s offices, he found himself distracted. Once again, the name R. G. Berg nagged at the back of his mind. This continued as he left the building and headed to his car. He stopped and squinted off into the distance, trying to dredge out from his subconscious whatever it was about the name that seemed familiar. After several minutes of standing as still as one of those wax figures in the Star Wax museum, he gave up. Whatever it was he thought he knew, the only way it was going to rise to the surface was if he stopped thinking about it completely.
Morris first drove to the Hollywood station on Wilcox Ave. Doug Gilman had called ahead for him, so they had what he needed waiting at the front desk. After that he called Rachel, swung over to UCLA’s campus, and met his daughter as she sat waiting for him on the front steps of the law library. He handed her one of the GPS tracking bracelets he’d picked up from the Wilcox Avenue station house. Rachel stared at it with disdain.
“I need you to wear this, honey,” Morris said, his voice choking seeing Rachel’s face mottling with anger. “If anyone suspicious threatens you, press the button, and the police will find you within minutes.”
“I thought you weren’t going to take on any more investigations that would put me or mom at risk,” she stated in a low, icy tone.
“It wasn’t so much that I took it on as I had it thrust upon me.”
Morris explained the situation to his daughter as she stared at him, her face becoming an inscrutable mask. Rachel fortunately took after Natalie instead of himself, and was a slender, dark-haired beautiful twenty-three-year-old. The one thing that she inherited from Morris, besides his stubbornness, were his flinty gray eyes, and they remained unmoved as she listened to him. At the end, she relented and promised him she’d be careful and would wear the bracelet until he told her otherwise.
“Did you tell mom yet?”
“Not yet. I need to give her one of these bracelets, and I figured it would be better if I told her in person.”
Rachel agreed that made sense. “If I can, I’ll stop by for dinner either tonight or tomorrow. Maybe even sleep over.”
“That would be nice.” He cleared his throat and added, “It would give your mom more peace of mind if you did that.”
Rachel’s eyes softened more as she smiled at him, knowing full well that he was speaking as much for himself as for Natalie. She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, and then turned and headed back into the library. Morris watched as she disappeared into the building.
Chapter 11
Charlie Bogle dropped a fifty-dollar bill on the table. Sitting across from him in the dimly lit and mostly empty Koreatown restaurant was Lionel Simmons, who had been one of Bogle’s confidential informants when Bogle was on the force. Simmons, who had been rail thin the last time Bogle had seen him three years earlier, looked like he had lost even more weight, and from the nervous way he grabbed the fifty dollars from the table, had to still be smoking meth.
“If you were a car thief, and you were going to steal a 2004 Chevy Tahoe with a GPS recovery system installed, how’d you make the car disappear?”
Even though Simmons looked like he was trying hard to maintain a badass, empty stare, he broke out grinning from the question, revealing brownish, ruined teeth. Bogle knew that his former CI had at times worked as a car thief.
“What type of system?” Simmons asked.
Bogle
