Mary, Mary

Chapter 51

FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL HOURS I stayed focused, one of those very productive work states I wish I could put myself in every time I sat down at a desk.

I ran several theories through the VICAP system, looking for any kind of match to the rash of murders in L.A. Anything even remotely close.

Something finally came up that caught my attention. A triple murder more than six months earlier.

It had happened in New York City though, not L.A. But the murders took place in a movie theater, the Sutton on East 57th Street, and the details were intriguing at first blush.

For one thing the murders remained unsolved. There'd been nothing even close to a solution by the NYPD. Just like the murders in Los Angeles.

There was no apparent motive for the New York killings either. That last bit was important. Maybe this series of pattern killings began a lot earlier than anyone had thought up to now And maybe the killer was from New York originally I pulled up the NYPD detective notes on the case and read them through. A patron inside the movie theater, as well as two Sutton employees, had been killed that afternoon. The detective's working theory was that the theater workers had walked in on the killer just after he killed a man named Jacob Reiser, from Brooklyn. Reiser had been a film student at NYU, twenty years old.

But then something else caught my eye - the murder weapon listed in the report. Based on the bullets removed from the bodies, a Walther PPK had been used.

The gun used in the L.A. murders had also been a Walther PPK, though apparently an older model.

But there was something else that grabbed me: The murders in New York had happened in the men's room.