The Death Sculptor (41 page)

Back in Garcia’s car, just as he turned the key in the ignition, Hunter’s cellphone rang –
Restricted Call
.

‘Detective Hunter,’ he answered.

‘Detective, this is Tammy from Operations Crimeline. I have someone on hold who’d like to speak with the detective in charge of the Sculptor investigation.’

Hunter knew that the Crimeline team was trained to filter all bogus calls. Every time a high-profile investigation made the news, they received tens of those a day – people looking for rewards, drunks, druggies, cranks, pranks, tricksters, attention seekers, or simply people who liked to waste police time. If the investigation was related to a possible
serial killer
, the call-volume would multiply tenfold, easily going into the hundreds, sometimes even thousands, every day. Since this investigation had started, this was the first call Operations Crimeline had put through to either Hunter or Garcia. ‘She says she has some information,’ Tammy said.

‘What kind of information?’ Hunter asked, signaling Garcia to wait a moment.

Tammy cleared her throat. ‘She says she knew all three victims.’

The greasy café sat at the corner of Ratliffe Street and Gridley Road in Norwalk, southeast Los Angeles. All tables but one were taken. Sitting alone, facing the shop’s front window, was a black woman in her early fifties. On the table in front of her, a half-drunk cup of coffee had been pushed to one side. Twice now, in the fifteen minutes she’d been sitting there, she’d thought about getting up and leaving. She still wasn’t sure if she was making something of nothing, but it seemed like way too much of a coincidence to be
just
a coincidence.

She had clocked them way before they entered the café, as they parked their car outside. She could still tell cops from a mile away. She looked up as both detectives stepped through the door, and Hunter immediately saw a face that, long ago, must have been pretty, but now looked hollowed out and emptied of life. There was a long, thin scar on her left cheek that she made no effort to conceal. They locked eyes for just a second.

‘Jude?’ Hunter asked, coming up to her table. He knew that wasn’t her real name, but it was the name she’d given him over the phone.

The woman nodded as she studied both faces in front of her.

‘I’m Detective Hunter and this is Detective Garcia. Do you mind if we have a seat?’

She recognized Hunter’s voice from their brief phone conversation less than half an hour ago. Jude’s reply was a tiny shrug.

‘Can I get you another cup of coffee?’ Hunter offered.

She shook her head. ‘I need to get up early in the morning, and I already blew my caffeine quota for today.’ Her voice was slightly husky, sexy even, but firm. She was wearing a collarless, long-sleeve white shirt with a red rose embroidered over her left breast. There was a delicacy to her perfume, with a base-note of spice, something dry and exotic like clove or star anise.

‘What can I get you gentlemen?’ an overweight waitress asked, approaching the table.

‘Are you sure?’ Hunter tried again, sending a smile Jude’s way.

She nodded.

‘Two black coffees, no sugar, please,’ Hunter replied, looking back at the waitress.

The waitress nodded and started collecting the plates from the next table along.

They sat in silence for a few seconds. As the waitress moved back into the kitchen, Jude looked across the table at Hunter and Garcia. ‘OK, as I told you over the phone, I don’t know if this has any relevance, but it has been bothering me for two days now. I’m not a great believer in coincidences, you know?’

Hunter laced his fingers and rested his hands on the table. He knew that the best thing was just to let her speak, no questions.

‘I was taking the subway to work two days ago, as I do every morning,’ she carried on. ‘I tend to avoid reading the papers, specially the
LA Times
. It’s just too much crap, you know? And I already deal with a lot of that every day. Anyway, the woman sitting opposite me had the morning paper with her. As she flipped through it, I caught the frontpage headline.’ She pursed her lips and quickly shook her head. ‘I didn’t think anything of it at first. So there was another killer running loose in LA, what’s new, right? But then, one of the pictures made me look again.’

The waitress came back with two cups of black coffee.

‘Which picture?’ Garcia asked, once the waitress was out of earshot.

‘One of the victims.’ Jude leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table. ‘The guy called Andrew Nashorn.’

Garcia nodded calmly. ‘What about the picture? What made you look again?’

‘Actually it was the name underneath it. I recognized the name.’ Jude picked up on the hint of doubt that had colored Garcia’s face. ‘When I was in school,’ she explained, ‘I had this big crush on this kid, Andreas Köhler. His family had immigrated from Germany.’ A melancholic smile parted her lips. Her teeth looked stained and damaged. ‘Anyway, I thought that I could increase my chances of getting with him if I could speak a little German. So I borrowed a few tapes from the school library. I listened to those tapes for about a month solid. Didn’t learn much. It’s a difficult language. But one of the things I did learn was the names of animals. And I still remember them.’

Garcia’s confusion intensified, but he tried not to show it.

‘
Nashorn
means rhinoceros in German.’

‘Really?’ Garcia looked at Hunter.

‘I didn’t know that either.’

‘It does,’ Jude affirmed. ‘And that made me take a closer look at the picture. He obviously looked older. His hair was all gray, but I would recognize that face anywhere. It was the same person. And that’s when I paid a little more attention to the photographs of the other two victims, and it all came back to me. They were all much older, but the more I looked, the less doubt I had. I knew all of them.’

Hunter hadn’t touched his coffee yet. His eyes were studying Jude’s facial and body movements. There were no twitches, no rapid eye movement, no fidgeting. If she was lying, she was really good at it.

‘Well, I didn’t actually know them,’ Jude clarified. ‘I was beat up by them.’

Those words fell over Hunter and Garcia like slabs of rock, almost knocking the breath out of them.

Garcia shook the surprise off his face. ‘You were beaten up by them?’

For the first time Jude broke eye contact with the detectives. Her gaze moved down to her unfinished coffee cup. ‘I’m not proud of it, but I’m also not ashamed of my life. We’ve all done things we wished we never did.’ She paused, collecting her thoughts. Hunter and Garcia respected her breathing space. ‘When I was a lot younger, I worked the streets down in Hollywood Boulevard, the low end of the Strip.’

The east end of the famous Hollywood Boulevard used to be LA’s best-known red-light district.

‘I was new to the area. My usual spot used to be around Venice Beach, but back then the Strip was a much more popular place. If you could handle the numbers, you could make some serious cash.’ There was no shame in her words. She couldn’t change her past, and she accepted that with tremendous dignity. ‘Anyway, I was picked up one night by this guy. It was really late, past midnight, I think. He was quite good-looking, and funny. He took me to this place out by Griffith Park, but what he’d never told me in the car was that there were another three guys waiting for us.’

Jude’s gaze moved past both detectives and up into the distance, as if she was trying to see what was coming.

‘Well, I told them right then that I didn’t do gangbangs. Not for any money.’ She stopped talking and reached for her cold coffee.

‘But they didn’t care,’ Hunter said.

‘No they didn’t,’ she replied after having a sip. ‘They were all high on something, and they were drinking a lot. The problem wasn’t really having sex with four drunken men at once. The problem was that they liked it rough.’ She paused and thought better of her words. ‘Well, two of them did, more than the other two. By the time they were done, I was so bruised I wasn’t able to work for a week.’

It was pointless asking Jude if she’d gone to the police. She was a working girl, and the sad truth was that the police would’ve barely lent an ear to her story. She might even have been arrested for prostitution.

‘But things like that happened. It came with the job,’ Jude said in a resigned tone, without bitterness. ‘And they still do. It was a risk us girls took when we chose to work alone. I was beaten up before, worse than that. The reality is that, out on the streets, you never really know what kind of jerk is going to roll down his window and call you over.’

By ‘work alone’ both detectives knew Jude meant she didn’t have a pimp. Pimps provided protection for their girls. If anyone laid a rough hand on them, or decided they didn’t want to pay, they would have their legs broken, or worse. The problem was, the girls had to work for peanuts. Pimps would take 80 to 90 per cent of all the money their girls made, sometimes more.

‘The driver,’ Jude continued. ‘The one who picked me up and took me to his friends, that was the guy in the picture in the paper. Nashorn, rhinoceros man.’

‘He told you his name?’ Garcia asked.

‘No, but while he was on top of me, slapping my face with his animal hands, I heard one or two of the others cheer him on. First I thought it was a joke or something. That they were calling him rhinoceros in German for fun. But then I realized it couldn’t be. I remember thinking that he wasn’t the only rhinoceros in that room. They were all animals. But when you hear a name being called while someone is on top of you, beating you up, you tend to remember it forever.’

‘And you’re sure about the others? I mean the other two victims you saw in the paper – Derek Nicholson and Nathan Littlewood?’

‘I never heard their names being called that night. But I remember their faces. I made a point of never closing my eyes. Never giving them the satisfaction of my fear. I know that’s what dominant men thrive on, right? The submission. That night I did all I could to not submit to them, at least not mentally. While they were on me, I looked straight into their eyes. Every single one of them.’ Jude looked up at Garcia. ‘So yes, I’m very sure the other two men I saw in the paper were there that night.’

Hunter was still studying her. There was anger in her words, but it sounded dead, something that was now in the past, something that, just as she’d said, was a risk that came with what she did. And she had accepted it.

‘You said that two of them liked it rough more than the others,’ Hunter said. ‘Which two, do you remember?’

Jude ran a hand through her hair. Her stare returned to Hunter. ‘Of course I do. Rhinoceros man and the Littlewood guy. They pretty much did all the beating. The other two joined in for the sex, but they weren’t violent. In fact, I think they even asked the other two to take it easy.’

Hunter’s eyes dropped to the plastic tablecloth and he thought about Jude’s last words. He’d seen that sort of situation many times when young, and countless times in his adult life –
peer pressure
. It happened everywhere, even inside the LAPD. People would do things they didn’t agree with, or didn’t want to do, simply to be accepted, to feel part of a group. It ranged from common behavior like smoking and bullying, to terrible and damaging acts like committing a crime – even murder.

‘How long ago was this?’ Hunter asked.

‘Twenty-eight years,’ Jude confirmed. ‘A few months after that, I quit the streets.’

For a long moment they all sat in silence. Jude had just confirmed that Derek Nicholson did indeed know Andrew Nashorn and Nathan Littlewood, and that they all used to hang out together. Further to that, Hunter’s theory seemed to be correct when it came to the group having a fourth member.

‘Are you sure you can’t remember any other names?’ Hunter said finally, rupturing the silence.

Jude ran her tongue over her dry bottom lip. ‘I’ve been thinking about it since I saw their pictures in the paper and realized who they were. That was one of those nights you just don’t want to remember. And to tell you the truth, I hadn’t thought about it for years. As I said, I’d been beaten up before, just never by anyone called Rhinoceros and his gang.’ She reached for her handbag. ‘That’s everything I had to say. I don’t know if it will help you any, but at least now the weight is off my shoulders, and I can hopefully get some sleep again.’

‘Just one more thing,’ Hunter said before Jude got up. ‘Did you ever see them again? Any of them?’

Jude stared at her thin hands. Her pale-pink nail varnish was chipped everywhere. ‘I saw the rhinoceros man once, a few months after that night. I just told you, I quit the streets later that year.’

‘Where did you see him?’ Garcia this time.

‘Same place, down Hollywood Boulevard. He was picking someone else up.’ She paused and gave them what sounded like a suppressed chuckle. ‘Huh.’

‘Is there something else?’ Hunter read her expression.

Jude took a moment, searching her brain for an old memory. She put her handbag back down. ‘There was this girl who had just started down at the Strip. Roxy, she called herself. Because she was new, she was easily hustled away from the good spots by the other girls. I told her she could work the corner where I was.’ Jude tilted her head to one side and explained. ‘I know how hard it can get, especially for the new girls. I was just trying to give her a little hand. She was nice. Not stunning, but attractive enough. Very petite, though. I told her she had to get some more meat on her bones. Men like curves, it’s a fact. The problem was, she was way too nervous, and she had no idea of how to stand.’

Neither Hunter nor Garcia said anything. Jude explained anyway.

‘Out on the streets we had to sell ourselves, and it’s all about the way you stand and the way you look. You stand wrong, you never get approached. That’s how it works. Well, after about an hour I took pity on her. I bought her a coffee and decided to give her a few tips. That was her first night on the job. She told me that she’d tried, but she couldn’t get a job anywhere. She was desperate, and that was why she’d decided to hit the streets. But she wasn’t a junky. I know a user when I see one.’