The Boyfriend Read online

  It took Till three days to be sure he had picked out the right events to correlate with the deaths of the five women. On April 17 of last year a strawberry blond who called herself Lily Serene was shot in the back of the head in her Minneapolis apartment, and the place was ransacked. The night before, William Rossi, the owner of three restaurants in the Twin Cities area, had disappeared. Rossi was found four days later in his car, which had sunk to the bottom of a lake. He had been shot to death.

  A girl named Wendy Steffens was found dead in her apartment in Washington, D.C., on the night when a retired assistant district attorney had been shot in his home. He had been a successful prosecutor for thirty-two years, a man with a great many enemies.

  On September 27, a woman named Jenny McLaughlan was found dead in a condominium in a desirable area of Miami near the beach. Two nights earlier, the president of a regional bank and his wife had been killed as they walked to their car after attending a play.

  On December 29, Terri Hanford, a strawberry blond, died of two gunshot wounds in her apartment in New York. The same evening a wealthy man who owned a large number of Manhattan rental properties and a horse breeding farm upstate was murdered in the art gallery he owned.

  On January 25 a contractor in Charlotte, North Carolina, was killed on the way home after a meeting with potential lenders. A strawberry blond named Karen Polenko was murdered in her apartment early the next morning, apparently while she was asleep.

  Jack Till called the Los Angeles Police Department, introduced himself, and asked to speak with Detective Anthony or Detective Sellers. He called the number he was given, expecting to leave a message that would be returned when one of them got around to it, but instead, the phone was answered by a male voice that sounded calm and businesslike. “Detective Sellers.”

  “Hello, Detective. My name is Jack Till. I was a homicide detective with the LAPD for twenty-three years, and now I’m working as a private investigator.”

  “Nice to hear from you. What are you working on?”

  “Catherine Hamilton. I wondered if you or Detective Anthony could spare me about fifteen minutes anytime today?”

  “I think so. Can you be here around two-thirty today?”

  “Sure. I’ll see you then.”

  He drove to the Burbank Boulevard station in North Hollywood, where they worked; parked on the street three blocks away; walked in; and went to the front counter to identify himself. Then he sat down to wait. At four o’clock he went to the counter again to let the officer know that he wasn’t leaving, just going to the men’s room. At four-thirty, the two detectives appeared in the lobby.

  Anthony was a woman about forty years old who was about five feet three inches tall. She wore a gray suit that looked boxy, as though it had been made for a small man, and a pair of men’s shoes. She wore her gun in a holster at the right side of her belt, and that further filled out her silhouette. Her black hair was pulled back into a tight bun so from the front it looked like a man’s hair combed back. “I’m Anthony,” she said, and shook his hand.

  Sellers was tall, but soft-looking, wide at the waist and hips with narrow shoulders. His lips were fleshy, and looking down to talk to other people gave him a double chin. He smiled. “Sellers. Come on back where we can talk.”

  Till noted that they had no inclination to mention that they were two hours late. He simply said, “Jack Till,” and followed them to the big communal office where they had desks side by side. He took the chair that Anthony pushed his way. The two sat in their swivel chairs and waited for him to speak.

  “I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to catch up with Catherine Hamilton’s killer.”

  “So have we,” said Anthony.

  “Of course,” Till said patiently. “I caught up with him in Phoenix just before he killed his next victim, but I didn’t read the signs in time. I saw him leaving her house and, because I suspected he was the man I was after, I followed him. He lost me for a minute, switched cars, and got away. When I went back to her house, she was dead.”

  The two looked at each other. Neither seemed pleased. Anthony said, “Who are you working for?”

  “Catherine’s parents. The Hamiltons.”

  “And how do you know the two murders are connected?” asked Sellers.

  He reached into his manila folder and produced two ads for escorts: Catherine Hamilton’s and Kyra’s. He handed them to Sellers. “Notice the resemblance. And notice the identical necklace and anklet. Both were killed in their homes by a shot to the head. If you get in touch with the Phoenix police you can probably compare the bullets.”

  The two detectives looked at the two copies of the ads. Anthony said, “Interesting. Can we keep these?”

  “I brought them for you.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Of course, there are many possible explanations. There could be a jeweler who is popular among sex workers, or even one who pays the girls in jewelry. And there are enough sex workers killed that you can get lots of correlations that don’t mean very much.” She looked as though she was about to stand and offer her hand so she could shake his and terminate the meeting.

  Till didn’t budge. He reached into his folder and produced the other five ads. “Here are his previous five victims. New York, Minneapolis, Miami, Washington, D.C., Charlotte.” He looked at them. “Hard to tell them apart, isn’t it?”

  “Again, so many of these girls become crime victims that you can draw a lot of correlations,” Anthony said. “We could collect five black-haired girls killed in those cities during the past two years too. That wouldn’t mean it’s the same man.”

  “Three of these girls are wearing the same necklace and anklet too.”

  Anthony said, “So it would appear to be a fad.”

  Till looked down at his feet for a moment, then said calmly, “I’ve searched the country for more of them, and so far, no manufacturer or designer has recognized them. The consensus is that they’re a custom set made for somebody and the design meant something to this person. Now, the reason I came here was so I could share with you a development that might help. I think I figured out what this guy is doing.”

  “You mean besides killing pretty girls?”

  “I think he’s a hit man who has figured out a way to be invisible while he’s setting up a hit and then avoid leaving a trail afterward.”

  “He’s killing all those girls for that?”

  “He seems to have realized at some point that he could get them to give him a place to stay. What is safer than living in an apartment rented by a hooker who uses a false name? Each girl probably rented her place under her real name and gave the landlord some bullshit job information. But she doesn’t use her real name when she starts working. She makes up a new name.”

  “So why do the girls all look alike?”

  “He becomes a boyfriend. That’s why they let him stay. Maybe he has a strong preference for girls who look that way, so that makes it easier for him to seem interested. Maybe they’re a type who seem to like him, so he sticks with the tried and true. Who knows why women pick one guy instead of another? I read one time it’s that they subconsciously like the smell of one guy’s sweat. The point is that the girls aren’t the point.”

  “Then what is the point?” asked Sellers.

  “The girls make him invisible. He stays with them for a month or a few weeks or three months while he gets his killing all planned out and studies his victim. Then, one night, after he’s killed whomever he’s been hired to kill, he gets ready to leave town. That means he kills the only witness who knows that he’s ever been in town. And before he leaves, he takes whatever she has—which is always a lot of cash. He uses that to pay expenses for another month or six months, and maybe to impress his next girlfriend. Then he does the same thing in the next town where he has a hit to do.”

  “That
’s a pretty wild theory.”

  “I know. But in each of these cities we have a high-end killing that happens just before one of these girls gets shot.”

  “Intriguing,” said Sellers. “And what person do you connect with Catherine Hamilton’s killing?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Hit men don’t usually get hired to kill middle-class suburbanites or poor people. There were three murders here on that day that might fit the pattern—important people who seem to have been killed by strangers. I can’t pick one on the little information that was in the papers about the method and circumstances. And it doesn’t matter to me. What I’m doing now is trying to move ahead and figure out where he turns up next.”

  Anthony said, “Why did you come to us?”

  “I guess it’s professional courtesy,” said Till. “I can’t sit on what I know about a murderer because for a lot of years the homicide detective who needed to have a lead fall out of the sky into his lap was me. I’m also telling you because the guy is good at this. He’s well-trained, disciplined, and decisive. He moves quickly. He’s not some kind of mental defective who will say, ‘Okay, you’ve got me.’ If you get close to him, he won’t surrender, and he won’t go without a fight. He’s done too much for that.”

  “What are you planning to do?”

  “Catch him, if I can.”

  11

  Joey Moreland couldn’t go on this way much longer. After two years moving from place to place, crossing names off lists, he had become very good at staying invisible, but that wasn’t good enough. His method would work for only a couple of years longer. It required that he still look handsome and unthreatening, but, especially, boyish. That was the most important part.

  He was twenty-eight, but he looked much younger. His smooth skin, blue eyes, long dark eyelashes, and wavy black hair made him look like the kind of young actor who was on the cover of teen movie magazines. He was lean and sinewy, and six feet tall, but his muscles were long and stringy, so he could still give the impression he was a teenager just by sprawling when he sat and letting the physical energy he felt find its way into his movements.

  Moreland was just pushing into Boston on Route 93. He wasn’t a fan of the Ted Williams Tunnel, which he had to take under the Inner Harbor. Down in those close quarters he was always vulnerable to some stupid mistake one of the other drivers might make. He hated to be subject to accident and random proximity to five lanes of people with inferior brains, nervous systems, and muscular control.

  He thought about where he was going. He would come up out of this hole in a few minutes and get himself to the Four Seasons on Boylston. The hotel was right by the Boston Common, and overlooked the Public Garden and Beacon Hill. There were lots of MTA stations—Arlington, Boylston, and Chinatown were all a five-minute walk away. The only drawbacks were all the employees kissing the asses of the guests and the high price of the rooms. He’d have to find another girl soon.

  Moreland liked coming into each new city and starting to plan a new job. He had spent a couple of weeks since he’d left Phoenix resting in various out-of-the-way Midwestern resort hotels as he slowly made his way east. That was an expensive way to travel, but there was another reason why finding a girl was a top priority. Boston was going to be his toughest job this year. He would have to defeat the most elaborate precautions, and afterward the kill would probably attract the most attention.

  While he was living in Arizona he had come up with the idea of the Barrett .50-caliber rifle. He had seen the rifle on television and fallen in love. The version on television was the M82 Long Range Sniper Rifle, fired by a marine sniper. The guy had used it in Afghanistan, where he had fired a shot that traveled a mile, went through a brick wall, fragmented, and killed the three men standing behind the wall.

  Moreland hadn’t been able to buy the actual military-issue .50-­caliber rifle. Nobody was selling those to civilians, maybe because there were two wars going on where there weren’t many trees or buildings in the way and maybe because the authorities didn’t want a lot of them in the United States. But Barrett made a general production model called the M107A1 that could be bought in gun shops.

  It had cost more than twelve grand, including the optics. Moreland was glad he had taken the time to search Catherine Hamilton’s apartment in Los Angeles before he’d shot her, because the money he’d found had covered expenses like the rifle. The twelve grand included a Leupold 4.5 × 14 mil dot scope and six ten-round magazines and a carrying case. The price didn’t include ear protectors, but those weren’t expensive, and they would save his hearing from 180 decibels of sound. He had also estimated that it would take five hundred rounds of .50-caliber ammunition for even a fine marksman like himself to move from being competent with the new rifle to highly skilled to lethal. In all, he had spent nearly twenty thousand dollars to buy and master the Barrett M107A1 while he was in Arizona. The Sonora Desert was perfect. Moreland had met a man named Dave Bright in a shooting club, and learned that Dave had built a range on a vast piece of land that he owned outside Tucson.

  What building a range meant was putting a bench rest on the highway end of his property, shielded from the highway by a hill, and then pounding a few white posts into the dirt to mark off each hundred meters to a distance of two thousand meters. There was nothing on the desert end of Bright’s property but the side of a small mountain. Bright owned both sides of it, but the only side he ever looked at was the side he could see through a rifle scope. On the first day, when Moreland came to test his new purchase, Dave Bright had taken out his own Barrett M107A1, and said, “Come on. Let’s go break some rocks.”

  The recoil was like a trip-hammer pounding his shoulder. The bullet, a streamlined spinning metal projectile the size of a man’s thumb, streaked across the two thousand meters of desert in four seconds, smacked into a chunk of sandstone, and exploded it into dust and flying chips. Once Moreland had experienced the power of the weapon, his interest in it intensified into a passion. He became a fanatical convert, a true believer.

  Moreland’s excitement grew as he picked out targets at the far edge of the rifle’s range. He adjusted the clicks of the sight for fifteen feet of elevation, and experimented with windage to compensate for the complicated and changing air currents over the long distance. Between the bench and the final post there were winds blowing left, right, and in eddies rising from the hot desert floor. As he kept firing and refining his aim he felt himself gaining power. A man who could project his hatred a mile downrange, punch through a car or through a wall, and kill his enemy was like a god.

  Moreland kept firing that day until he had fired forty rounds and his right arm felt painful, wrenched, and bruised. He was reluctant to relinquish the power, but he knew he had to put away the rifle or it would be much longer before he could use it again.

  He was sore after each practice session, and his head pounded from the noise, but he kept coming back. Sometimes it would take four or five days to recover from the pounding before he could go back. Between visits he worked at the job of killing two Phoenix city councilmen. He had known from the beginning that the councilmen would be a simple job. The only thing that was challenging was that there were two of them. He didn’t want to get one and then have the police put the other under protection. Both men had to be done quietly in rapid succession, and right after that he had to be gone.

  Getting out of Phoenix had been complicated. He had originally planned to kill Dave Bright before he left, but Dave had conveniently died in a car accident a month before Moreland had planned to leave. Then, on the final day, Moreland had almost run into a problem with one of Kyra’s customers. The man—her overnight date—had apparently chosen that one day to follow her Jaguar to her house. He had seen Moreland leave in her Jaguar, and apparently had not been able to see that Kyra wasn’t driving it anymore. Moreland couldn’t let this man catch up and see him, because by then the councilmen and Kyra we
re all dead. He had tried to lose the john at a supermarket, then had gone on to switch cars and get out. He had been right to leave. If he had stopped and shot the john, it would have pushed the already odd story of the night of shootings into a bigger story.

  Moreland didn’t feel much anymore when he pulled the trigger. He killed each person because it was necessary, and he did it in the most effective and humane way—a surprise shot through the back of the head. He wasn’t especially squeamish, but he didn’t like noise, and he didn’t like having to move bodies around. He didn’t want to dig holes for them. Everything a man did after taking out that gun was best done quickly.

  Moreland traveled most of the time. He was like a fish that kept moving to keep the water flowing through his gills. He could easily find everything he needed in any large city in the country, and if he stayed near the major highways most places were about the same. In any city he could find a good restaurant and a good coffee shop, a luxury hotel, a store that sold clothes that looked good on him, and a beautiful girl.

  Joey Moreland liked escorts, maybe because they were like him. They weren’t people who had been babied all their lives. Nearly all of them had started turning tricks before they were eighteen, so there wasn’t much drama about it by the time he met them. He liked spending time with them. In their professional lives they spent all their time faking and lying, but after they got to know Moreland, they would begin to reveal what they really thought, just because he didn’t judge them. He didn’t really like killing them, but it was necessary. If he hadn’t shot Kyra when he’d left Phoenix, she would be talking to the police about him right now.

  The Internet had changed everything for escorts. There were very few who worked for pimps now. All they had to do to get customers was strip to their underwear, use a cell phone to take a few pictures of themselves in a bathroom mirror, and upload them to an ad with a phone number on one of the sites that had “adult services” sections. The money didn’t seem that great, but it was cash and they got to keep all of it. If a girl attracted a few regulars she could stop advertising, schedule their visits for convenient times, and spend the rest of her life shopping. If she charged $200 an hour and had two customers a day, she made $2,800 a week. If she was pretty enough to charge $300, it was $4,200 a week.