Pursuit: A Novel

29

The northern end of the San Fernando Valley was only a few miles inland from where Millikan lived, but on nights like tonight, the air seemed to have drifted in from the desert and then remained still all day, heating up on the treeless boulevards and vast, blacktopped parking lots. The sweat had already begun to form droplets on his forehead. “She ran this place all alone—did the cooking and handled the cash register?”

“That’s right,” said Carrera. “The register’s got over two hundred in it, and nothing else seems to be missing either.”

Millikan went behind the counter into the little kitchen and stared down at her body. She was Hispanic, not much over five feet tall. She looked about sixty years old, but he knew she could have been much younger. Life in this tiny, sweltering space, standing over a griddle, squinting to protect her eyes from smoke and getting peppered with grease spatters, wasn’t much of a beauty treatment. He supposed it wasn’t always this hot, but after she had been shot, the killer had not bothered to turn off the oven or the deep fryer.

Lieutenant Carrera stood on the other side of the counter, leaned over it, and pointed. “See, she got just the two shots: one through the chest, and the other in the back of the head after she was down.”

Millikan had to step through the narrow door to go outside and then come back in through the front entrance to reach the small porch that had been enclosed and converted into a dining room. There was a big blue B grade from the Los Angeles County Health Department posted on the window. There were only four tables, and from the look of the place, all four had probably been filled at once only during lunch hours. This was not a night spot.

Millikan took a few steps, then stopped and stared down at the third man on the floor. Like the other two, he was Anglo, not Hispanic, and moving into middle age. He estimated that they were all in their late thirties to early forties. The man wore blue jeans that showed some wear, but not the wear that came from physical work. They were slightly faded because somebody had washed them a couple of times to make them soft and maybe to shrink them to give a custom fit.

Millikan would not have needed to look at the jeans to know that these men had not been laborers. Their hands were soft, not callused. Millikan knew that if he wanted to figure out how much a man made, the place to look was where the money showed. Car keys all came from the factories now, because they had computer chips and remote door-lock controls. They had the make of the car stamped all over them. And Millikan had become very good at identifying men’s shoes and watches.

The three men were arranged roughly in a line across the room. There was a hole in the forehead of the man on the right, a hole in the back of the man in the center, near the front door. The third man had ducked down behind a table, and gotten shot through it at least four times: Millikan could see several holes in the tabletop, and entry wounds in the man’s thigh, stomach, chest, and head.

Millikan had collected a great many tiny bits of mostly useless information over the years. He recognized the one that was in front of him now. When a man with a gun told a group of victims to line up, the place to stand was the center of the line. Right-handed shooters shot the one on the right first, and left-handed shooters began with the one on the left. There was something in the human mind that always kept killers from shooting the man in the middle first.

He pointed at the man on the right. “That one was first, through the head.” He moved his arm to indicate the one on the left. “The one over there saw what was happening—or maybe figured out the sort of trouble he was in after the first shot—and ducked down behind the table. The shooter fired through the tabletop a few times, quickly. While he was doing that, this guy was moving too, so the shooter got him in the back and dropped him before he could get to the door. The shooter is right-handed, probably.”

“I’ll buy that,” Carrera said, then paused for a moment. “Okay, so Danny, what do you think? What are the chances it’s the same guy?”

Millikan looked at the group of brass casings on the floor, each of them already circled with chalk. There was a small numbered placard beside each one. His eyes moved to the arrangement of bodies. “Absolutely none.” He saw the look of disappointment in Carrera’s eyes. “I’m sorry, Pete.”

Carrera shrugged. “Just so you’re sure.”

Millikan knelt above one of the brass casings, with a number 8 placard beside it. “See this? In the Louisville restaurant there was no brass. He picked it all up and took it with him.” Millikan stared more closely at the shell, then stood. “Forty-one Magnum. Remember those? You don’t see many of them anymore, but they were a big deal for a while. They were supposedly going to be the next standard police load in about 1964 or ’65. He probably wasn’t alive then.”

“But he isn’t a killer with a signature,” Carrera reminded him. “He seems to be able to use whatever comes to hand.”

“He’s even better than that,” said Millikan. “He can make what he wants come to his hand. There’s no reason for him to do a paid killing with a gun in a caliber he’s not used to, especially one that’s a little bit eccentric and out-of-date. When he killed Officer Fulco at the hospital, he took her nine-millimeter Beretta. When he killed the security guard in the building on Wilshire, he got his gun too.”

“Any chance he’d do it to disguise himself, just to throw us off?”

Millikan shook his head. “Not him. But maybe whoever did this heard about him on television and gave it a try.” He stepped care-fully across the room. “This all looks a little bit like the killings in Louisville—three guys shot in a locked restaurant, and the cook taken out because she’s a witness—but it’s not. The Louisville killer would never make everybody stand in a row so he could shoot them. It’s a step that would never enter his mind.”

Millikan approached the table that had been turned on its side and punctured by several shots. “In Louisville he had two people down behind a table like this. He didn’t fire a bunch of shots through it, hoping he’d hit something. He took the time to walk around it and shoot what he could see. He stays calm and works efficiently. This just isn’t his work.”

Carrera looked around him at the bodies. “You think we’ve got a copycat?”

“Not exactly,” said Millikan. “Not the kind who got set off by hearing about the other shooting. I think the one who killed these people just figured his chances were better if you wasted some time thinking he might be the Louisville shooter.”

Carrera sighed. “You’ve got me there. As soon as I heard what kind of shooting this was, I thought of him. So did the first officers to respond to the call. I guess we all just hope he’ll do something else here, and this time he’ll screw up: leave a print, get noticed, or something.”

“Me too,” said Millikan. He wrenched his mind away from the direction it was taking, refusing to let himself return to the secret hope.

“Heard anything about how Roy Prescott’s doing?” It was as though Carrera had read Millikan’s mind, detected the vulnerability, and poked at it.

“I don’t know,” Millikan said. “I haven’t talked to him in a long time.”

Carrera nodded, pretending to look at the bodies on the floor but holding Millikan in the corner of his eye. “I suppose not. I don’t think I’d want to be in too close touch either.”

Millikan took a deep breath, and turned to face Carrera. “You and I have known each other for a long time, Pete,” he said carefully. “I won’t start hiding the truth from you now. The reason Prescott is after this guy is that I gave the father of one of the Louisville victims his phone number. I was the one who brought Prescott in. The father probably would have hired some private detective and thought he’d done everything there was to do. He had never heard of Prescott until I told him.”

Carrera returned his gaze to the floor for a few seconds. “Just now I was about to ask you why, but then I realized that I would be the one who was lying. Asking would be pretending that I didn’t understand, that I wouldn’t have been tempted to do the same thing.” He straightened, sighed, and looked Millikan in the eye. “I would like to have a cop be the one who gets this guy, especially after what he did to Fulco and Alkins. It would be better for all of us. But it wouldn’t bother me that much if Prescott got to him first.”

“I can’t say it was the best way,” said Millikan. “I don’t even know whether it helped or hurt. I talked to Prescott in Buffalo after he’d had a brush with the guy, months ago. Then he dropped out of sight. Both of them did. I don’t know what it means. It might just mean that he doesn’t want anything more from me, and I’ll hear when everybody else does.”

“If anything comes in about him—about either of them—I’ll let you know right away,” said Carrera.

“Thanks, Pete.”

“And thanks for coming to look at this mess. I guess the captain didn’t need to spoil both our dinners.”

Millikan surveyed the room again. “This one, maybe we can do something about. You have three guys here who all look about the same age, thirty-five to forty. They’re all dressed in casual clothes, but not cheap. Look at the shoes: Mephisto, Ecco. I didn’t look closely at the third guy’s, but they seem to be about the same class, and practically new. All three of them have good watches. I figure they’re all in the same social or business set, and it’s not one that usually hangs out in a place like this at night. I would guess they’re all in the same line of work, and it pays okay. They couldn’t have all come here at once, dressed the same, by coincidence. They met here for something. Probably it was some kind of business meeting. Obviously, there was a fourth guy. I would guess he wasn’t somebody they just ran into here, some stranger who killed everybody. I would guess he was the one who arranged the meeting.”

“A drug deal?”

“It doesn’t feel that way.” Millikan glanced down at the shell casings on the floor again. “I think it’s likely he’s a bit older than the others. He’s at least fifty, probably closer to sixty. He’s never done anything like this before. The brass is tarnished, as though he loaded the bullets into the gun with his bare fingers some time ago, and it’s been sitting there ever since. I wouldn’t even be surprised if he bought the gun twenty or thirty years ago, and never used up the box of ammo he bought at the same time. It will be something like this: these three business guys all conspired to cheat a supplier, and it’s putting him out of business. Or the three are partners who were just about to fire an older employee, and he found out about it. It had to be something that would make him angry long enough to plan this and go through with it. Find out what they did for a living, and how they knew each other, and you’ll be halfway there.”

“I’ve already got people finding most of that out now,” said Carrera. “We’ll just see who the older guy might be and try to pick him up quick, before he calms down.”

“That’s what I’d do,” Millikan agreed.

The two men stepped outside, and Millikan could feel the air immediately begin to pull the sweat off his body and cool his skin. A young woman from the forensics team he had never seen before tonight slipped past them through the doorway and returned to her work. Two others joined her, and he realized they must have finished out here a while ago, and waited.

“I guess I’ll get out of the way now, Pete,” said Millikan. “I appreciate your giving me a call. It wasn’t him this time, but it could have been.”

“Yeah,” Carrera agreed, unconvincingly. “By the way, I told Denise I’d seen you. She said to tell you hello.” He chuckled ruefully. “I think she’d probably invite you folks to dinner, but you and I were really the ones who knew each other. She’d be afraid she’d have to invite me, too.”

Millikan hesitated, not quite sure what to say. “I was sorry when you told me about the divorce. I hope you know I wish you both well.”

“You too. See you, Danny.”

Millikan walked uncomfortably to his car, leaving Carrera to turn away toward the tiny white board-and-stucco building. Millikan got in, started the engine, and quickly drove away. Being with Pete Carrera had induced a kind of tension in him that seemed not to disperse as they talked, but to mount and become worse until the awkwardness of each word he said became an overwhelming embarrassment. He intentionally drove down the street in the wrong direction just because his car had been pointed that way when he’d gotten into it. Then he drove around the block to keep from having to go back past the place.

He had been working homicide cases with Carrera when he had finally conceded to himself that it was time to leave the police force. They had gotten along well enough, but they had been different. Carrera had wanted to clear a case, make an arrest, and go home to dinner. Millikan had wanted something more: he’d wanted to get better at it, to understand what had happened, to be able to look at the evidence a killer left behind and figure out how he had done his killing and what sort of person he was. Each night, after Carrera had gone home, Millikan had devoted extra hours to preparing himself to become the department’s resident expert on homicide scenes. He had studied the photographs in old case files, compared investigating officers’ reports with the transcripts of confessions, and gone to examine scenes he had not been assigned to, just to see how more experienced detectives interpreted the things they saw. After a conviction, he would sometimes go to speak with the killer to see what he could learn. The hours he had put in astounded him now. He could barely remember the way it had felt to have that kind of stamina. But gradually he had learned and his judgment had improved, and soon, the officers in his division had noticed it.

In time, homicide detectives from other divisions, and then other cities, had begun to ask his advice. Because cops habitually worked on the basis of personal relationships and systems of reciprocal favors, the requests had not been directed to LAPD Van Nuys homicide, but to Sergeant Daniel Millikan. His superiors had not liked that. Eventually there had been a reprimand that had actually made it into his file. The union had managed to have it suppressed, but by the time they had accomplished that, he was already gone. The incident had convinced him that he had already hit the ceiling. No matter what he had already learned to do, or how he might work to improve himself in the future, his life as a police officer would be about the same. There seemed to be no choice for him except to get out.

Seeing Carrera always brought those days back, the sick, bitter feeling of the end of the experience, but also the sweet days when they had both been young and feeling their strength. That was nearly as bad, because it reminded him of loss. Being the youngest had meant being surrounded by older men—uncles and teachers and enemies—who had, in the years since then, disappeared. It was a different department, a different world, because those men were not in it. Carrera had become one of the old-timers now. In another year or two, he would probably either make captain and become an invisible administrator or be passed over again, retire, and get started on drinking himself to death alone in the apartment he had rented when Denise had thrown him out. As Millikan had the thought, he could not avoid the knowledge that he looked forward to losing touch with Carrera. It was painless to deal with a department made up of young strangers who knew him only as the professor, the man who wrote the books, and not the cop who had quit.

Millikan reached the small, two-story house on the quiet street in the northern part of Sherman Oaks, and pulled into the driveway. He got out of the car and closed the door as gently as he could. He looked around him, as he always did, but this time his mood made the sight irritating. When he and Marjorie had moved here, the whole neighborhood had been single-family houses much like theirs, but now on the busy east-west boulevards on two sides, he could see tall apartment buildings. Down the next street they had just bulldozed another house and begun digging a hole for a foundation that could hardly be anything but an underground parking garage for another big apartment building. It frustrated him that he had no memory at all of the house that had been destroyed.

He was also frustrated because it should not have been allowed: this area had always been zoned R-1. But Millikan had enough connections in the local government so he should have been incapable of surprise at the granting of exemptions. The lives of politicians were a tormented rush to collect money for the next election, so their frequent meetings with developers were a degrading alternation of bribery and extortion. He only hoped that it would remain tolerable to live here for the years he and Marjorie had left.

Millikan took a step toward the front door, then stopped and stood motionless for a moment breathing the hot, still air and listening to the distant, whispery sounds of cars speeding along Chandler. He knew that he had just been distracting himself from his personal discomforts by railing against the anonymous forces he liked to blame for ruining things. He leaned against the door of his car and considered what was really bothering him. It was that the Louisville restaurant killer had caused him to do things that he had never intended to do, never would have believed he would do.

There were homicide detectives who had never actually solved a murder in their careers. What Millikan meant when he used the word solved was that there was no eyewitness, no confession, no suspect who was indisputably the only possible killer. What the investigator had was a crime scene and a mind. Millikan had solved many, perhaps three hundred. His books and his courses had helped police officers all over the country solve an unknown, larger number. He had sacrificed security and suffered doubt and long, lonely hours early in his life in exchange for knowledge, and then worked steadily and tirelessly to improve, but in the end he had made a contribution. If he had been able to look at himself from a distance, through someone else’s eyes, he would have had to say that he had been a reasonable success. But the premise was false: the distant observer would not know that after a lifetime of professing his faith in the slow, logical process of collecting evidence and helping prosecutors present it in courts of law, he had finally resorted to sending someone like Roy Prescott out to get a killer.

It suddenly occurred to him that Marjorie had probably heard the car drive in, and she would be wondering what he was doing out here. He stepped to the door, unlocked it, and opened it, ready to turn off the alarm. There was no alarm sound.

“Dan?” It was Marjorie’s voice, the sound of all the good in his life: warmth, softness, a bit of concern.

“Yeah, honey,” he called. “It’s only me.”

She padded into the kitchen on bare feet, wearing a soft flannel nightgown, her long dark hair hanging loose, a hairbrush in her hand. She came close, stood on her toes, and kissed his cheek as he took off his coat.

“You forgot to turn on the alarm again,” he said.

“I was going to go to bed without you, and if I fell asleep and you came in late, it would go off and scare me.”

He kept himself from repeating his lecture on precautions; she knew. He put his arm around her waist and felt the soft cloth move against her naked body, the narrow waist curving outward to the rounded hip. In early middle age, she had been concerned and upset by the graying of her hair and subtle changes she detected in her body, but a few years ago, she had simply stopped. One day she had said, “My body isn’t young anymore, but it’s a body that somebody loved, and that carried our children and nursed them.” She still dyed her hair to cover the gray, she still dieted and exercised, but there was not the same frantic and despairing quality to what she did. He suspected that even now, she did not quite accept that she was a beautiful fifty-year-old, any more than he had been able to convince her that she was a beautiful twenty-eight-year-old at the time. She had always been distrustful of compliments, but she seemed to have grown comfortable in her body again. The way she stood still and leaned to his hand was at once a familiar, comforting assertion of her proprietary right to his affection and a gesture that was intensely erotic to him.

She turned to put her arms around his neck and look up into his eyes. “It wasn’t him, was it?”

“No,” Millikan said. “Not this time.”

“Then come to bed, and forget about it for now.”

Millikan waited until she had gone up the stairs and turned on the hall light at the top before he went through the first floor, checking the bolts and locks on the doors, resetting the alarm system, and switching off the lights, one by one. He made his way upstairs as she was leaving the bathroom, then took his turn. It was a ritual that had become changeless, efficient, and nearly silent years ago, to keep from waking Katie and Mary Ann when they were still small. Now they were grown, married women, each the mistress of her own house in another city, and mother of her own children.

He turned off the last lights and slipped under the covers beside Marjorie. She snuggled close to him and rested her head on his chest, as she did most nights, and he felt the calm, comfortable sensation that he supposed must be a quality of old marriages, where all the rough edges had been worn smooth and there were no longer any boundaries that mattered. She knew she was entitled to the spot and was welcome there. “You didn’t have to wait up for me,” he said.

“Well, yes.” He felt her shift a bit closer as she shrugged. “Actually, I did. Unless you’re too tired . . .?” He felt her hand move lower on his belly. “You don’t seem tired to me.” He could hear the amusement in her voice.

“I’m not.” He turned toward her only a few degrees and their position became an embrace. “I can’t imagine being that tired.”

The hour was late, but the Millikans were beyond worrying about it, having made the decision to ignore the clock many times before and suffered no consequences that either of them cared about. Their caresses were gentle and unhurried, but uninhibited and sure, from deep knowledge of each other. He was not inclined to pull his attention away from his senses at any time during the next couple of hours, but because the mind could do many things at once, it recorded impressions and observations that he would think about later.

He was making love to the woman who had been his girlfriend and then his wife for so many years that she had gone from the desired to the epitome to the ideal and, at last, to encompass all and become the only woman, to whom he was the only man. Neither of them made any awkward, tentative overture, because there was no longer any doubt, no uncertainty in what they might do to give each other not pleasure, but the greatest pleasure. That was one of the secrets between them: there were no limits. Both of them wished they could do everything they knew for each other every time. And they knew so much now—that being touched exactly here in exactly this way made her feel so excited that she couldn’t quite contain it, couldn’t still her voice or her body, and that her reaction was what in turn made him ecstatic—that it would have taken days, weeks, to repeat everything. And to him each time was better, because it included memories of the others that were strong enough to be partly physical, and each act not performed was an option and therefore a promise for another time.

It ended, and he was lying on his back again in the darkness, with Marjorie in her proprietary place, her head resting on his chest with her soft hair loose and her arm across his stomach. He gently stroked her hair and the nape of her delicate neck and her shoulder, silently bringing down upon her whatever blessing an imperfect man might coax out of a benevolent God for this good woman. Her breathing gradually slowed and deepened to a soft, even tempo, and she was asleep.

Millikan remained motionless, staring up at the ceiling. He began to see again the images of the evening, the four murdered people lying on the bloody linoleum floor in the hot, cramped space of the restaurant. This time it wasn’t the Louisville killer, but next time, it might be. He reviewed the places in his house where he had put loaded guns after he had returned from Buffalo, and determined to remind Marjorie of them in the morning. He would also have to beg her again to turn on the alarm system whenever he was out: the killer might very well come here looking for the way he could hurt Millikan most. Under certain circumstances, that would be this killer’s next likely move, and tonight it seemed to Millikan that these circumstances might be the ones that had come into being. He had not heard from Prescott for a very long time, and that meant that Prescott was probably dead.