The Perfect Impression by Blake Pierce
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
Ryan was impressed.
He had worked with Jamil Winslow on a case in Manhattan Beach just before the stabbing, so he knew the kid was smart. But even Jessie’s effusive praise, touting his brilliance once he transferred to the LAPD’s Central Station to become their resident police researcher, hadn’t prepared him for what Jamil was capable of.
By late morning, the skinny, frail twenty-four-year-old wunderkind had pulled up all available surveillance video from near the homes of the X-Acto victims, as he’d taken to calling them. They were just getting ready to review the footage when Detective Alan Trembley walked in.
“Hi, boys,” he said enthusiastically.
Ryan couldn’t help but laugh. Apparently the guy had enjoyed his vacation a little too much. In addition to his unruly, curly blond hair, smudged glasses, and too-big sports coat, he also had a bad sunburn. The hyper-redness of his cheeks only amplified his baby face. Trembley was pushing thirty but barely looked out of college.
“Hey, Trembley,” he replied. “Forget the sunscreen?”
“My first time seeing you in months and you start off by teasing me?” the young detective said, bounding over to give him a hug. “I guess some things never change.”
“Nor should they,” Ryan said. “Sorry to make you come in on a Sunday.”
“That’s okay. Captain Decker said he was short-handed and when I found out it was a chance to work with you again, I leapt at it. I still remember the first case we worked together with Jessie. You know it?”
“Of course,” Ryan said, thinking back to deviously clever woman who had almost gotten away with framing someone else for a murder she committed. “If not for Jessie, Andrea Robinson might still be out there, wreaking more havoc.”
“Where is she now again?” Trembley asked.
“At the Forensic In-Patient Unit at the women’s division of the Twin Towers Correctional Facility,” Ryan said. “It’s a good thing too. Apparently she’s developed a bit of a fixation on Jessie. The last thing we need is another psycho obsessing over her.”
“It sounds like we’ve got a psycho of another variety on the loose,” Trembley said. “Decker tells me this one uses an X-Acto knife to kill the victims.”
“Unfortunately, it’s not quite as simple as that,” Ryan said.
“What does that mean?”
“Jamil, you want to fill him in?” Ryan suggested.
“You’re letting Winslow handle case presentations now?” Trembley asked, pretending to be appalled. “At this rate, the kid’s going to be running the department by the spring.”
“Nice to see you too, Detective Trembley,” Jamil said, speaking for the first time. It was as close as the unfailingly polite researcher got to snark.
“Right back at you,” Trembley said, pulling up a chair. “So what are we dealing with?”
Jamil quickly walked the detective through all the details that Ryan had shared with him just hours earlier. When he was done explaining the grotesque nature of the crimes and why they hadn’t initially been connected, Ryan chimed in.
“There’s something else I haven’t told you. I was waiting to have you both here before I shared this. I know this is unusual but I need to ask each of you to treat what I say next with discretion.”
“Ooh, this sounds exciting,” Trembley said, rubbing his hands together in excitement.
“I didn’t mention this next part to Captain Decker yet,” Ryan said. “His plate is pretty full.”
Jamil gave him a look that suggested he didn’t buy that as the reason, but said nothing.
“What is it?” Trembley asked.
“When I described the murders to Jessie, it reminded her of a reference in one of Garland Moses’s old case files. She showed it to me. There were some similarities to a murder from decades ago that he was never able to solve. It involved the Night Hunter.”
“Who?” Trembley asked.
Ryan was about to explain but Jamil beat him to it.
“He was one of the worst serial killers in modern history,” he said. “Slaughtered about eighty people from the mid-1980s through to the end of the 1990s, and that’s just the number they could officially attribute to him. He only stopped after a brutal death match in Garland’s condo. The Night Hunter escaped by jumping from the second floor. He was never heard from again. Most people think he died from his injuries. Sounds like Garland didn’t agree. But didn’t he chop up his victims with a machete?”
“He did,” Ryan confirmed. “But according to the document Jessie showed me, after the fight at his condo, Garland found an address taped to his medicine cabinet mirror. When the cops got there, they found a woman who had been killed using an X-Acto knife. She had her skin peeled off like long ribbons of flesh. It was never officially attributed to the Night Hunter and I haven’t found a similar case anywhere in the country until these two.”
“So you think this Night Hunter is back?” Trembley asked. “Wouldn’t he be collecting social security right now? He has to be pushing seventy.”
“Probably well past it,” Ryan corrected, “at least based on Garland’s estimate from their fight. And I’m not sure it’s even him. Maybe he had a protégé he was grooming to take over.”
“Who didn’t commit a crime for almost twenty years?” Jamil asked skeptically.
“Or it could be a copycat,” Ryan offered. “Someone who recently got access to a copy of the same document I saw and was inspired. It’s not unheard of. Bolton Crutchfield studied other serial killers for inspiration, including Jessie’s father. If someone else was equally infatuated with the Night Hunter, maybe they stumbled across this detail. It would be like gold to them.”
“Or maybe the simplest explanation is the best,” Trembley suggested. “The Night Hunter got amnesia from hitting his head after jumping out of Garland’s condo and only recovered his memory recently. Now he’s picking up where he left off.”
“That’s the simplest explanation?” Jamil asked incredulously, trying not to laugh.
“Whoever it is,” Ryan said, not deigning to address Trembley’s theory, “I worry that they’re not done.”
“And that’s why you don’t want to tell Decker,” Jamil said quietly.
“What do you mean?” Trembley asked.
Ryan could tell Jamil had put his finger on it and considered trying to stop him from revealing the truth. But he didn’t do it. Trembley was an integral part of Homicide Special Section and he deserved to know what was going on.
“HSS is on the ropes,” Jamil whispered. “With Mr. Moses’s murder, Ms. Hunt’s departure, and Detective Hernandez’s rehabilitation, the unit has been shorthanded. As a result, fewer major cases have been closed. It’s obvious that HQ has taken notice. If Captain Decker thought we had a chance to nail one of the most notorious serial killers of the last half century, who was operating right here in L.A., it might be hard for him to keep that to himself, especially if it could save the unit.”
“Is that true?” Trembley asked Ryan.
“It’s a concern,” he admitted, “which is why I don’t want to involve him until we have more to go on. That means we need to start reviewing the footage Jamil has cued up.”
“Well, I hope it is the Night Hunter,” Trembley said, choosing not to linger on what he’d just learned. “It would be a lot easier to take down some old dude trying to escape using a walker.”
“Don’t underestimate him,” Ryan cautioned. “If it is him, he’s killed countless people and managed to evade capture for over thirty-five years. Even if he’s less mobile than I am right now, he’s a threat. Forget that at your own risk.”
*
At first they didn’t even know what they were looking for. But after an hour of fruitless scrolling through multiple video feeds they found something.
“Look!” Jamil said, pointing at Ring video footage culled from a home across the street from Jenavieve Holt. It showed her speaking to an older man on the night of her death. It was dark out and the video was grainy, but the man’s hunched frame and slow movements suggested he was in his twilight years. The view of her door was blocked so they never actually saw him enter her place, but it was the logical conclusion.
“With that large windbreaker on,” Trembley noted, “it’s impossible to discern many notable characteristics. I think he was holding what looked like a small travel bag, but that’s about it.”
Even when he reappeared outside her door hours later and shuffled out of frame, they couldn’t make out any useful details. Ryan did notice one thing, however.
“Check that out,” he said, noting that a few seconds after the man left the screen, a dim, red light appeared on the street.
“What do you think it is?” Trembley asked.
“I can’t be sure, but based on how low the light is to the street and the wattage, it might come from a car’s brake light. If so, that suggests that the man had driven there rather than walking or getting a rideshare or cab.”
“It’s not much,” Trembley muttered. “But I guess it’s something.”
Ryan didn’t say it out loud, but he was starting to suspect that it was much more than “just something.” The man in the footage was older, even elderly. The time the image was taken matched when Jenavieve Holt was killed. It wasn’t a straight line yet, but the chances that this was anyone other than the original Night Hunter were getting more remote with each passing second.
He said nothing. That was partly because he didn’t want to jump the gun and make assumptions the evidence couldn’t yet confirm. But it was also because he almost didn’t want to believe it. If this was the work of a serial killer who had been in hibernation for decades, that was something new. A killer willing to patently lie in wait for years was somehow more troubling to him than one on a rampage.
He returned his attention to Jamil’s monitors. It looked like the researcher had a little more luck with the first victim, the young man named Jared Hartung. There was no footage from nearby houses showing his place during the approximate time of death. But Jamil had found video from a house about half a block down, earlier that night.
In it, an old man parked an older model sedan on the street before scuffling off in the direction of Hartung’s place. He returned to the car three hours later, still hobbled but with what Ryan could only describe as extra pep in his step, like he’d just done something that had him in a playful mood.
“Any chance you can get a license plate off the car?” he asked Jamil.
“Not from this angle,” the young researcher said, frustrated. “But I have another idea.”
“What’s that?” Trembley wondered, leaning in so close that Ryan could smell the aloe vera he’d rubbed on his burned skin.
Jamil’s fingers flew across the keys as he typed a series of instructions into the system that Ryan couldn’t pretend to understand. After about thirty seconds, a small image popped up in a box at the top corner of the screen.
“Here we go,” Jamil said. His voice was calm but Ryan sensed an undercurrent of anticipation in it.
“What have we got?” he asked.
“I input the car’s image into the system and asked it find any matches in the area in the days around the murder. This is what it gave me. It’s from earlier that day.”
He hit “play” and they watched as what looked like the same car from before passed slowly through an intersection. Jamil froze the image. It wasn’t great quality but the driver certainly looked like the man in the Holt footage.
“Where is this from?” Ryan asked.
“It’s a convenience store about two blocks away from Hartung’s house,” Jamil said. “I wonder if he went there earlier in the day to scout it out.”
“That’s not a crazy theory,” Ryan said, more impressed with Jamil every moment.
Jamil smiled shyly but said nothing. After a few more seconds of searching, another box popped up. It was a video clip from two hours after the initial one.
“Freeze it!” Ryan shouted, and then added, “Go back a little.”
Jamil scrolled back several frames and stopped on a fairly clear image of an elderly man. The quality wasn’t good enough to discern many details. But one jumped out to Ryan.
“He’s got a long scar across his forehead,” he pointed out, reluctant to say the words out loud because of what they meant. “In the exact spot where Garland Moses slashed the Night Hunter the night they fought. It’s him. There’s no doubt.”
All three men were silent for a second. Trembley recovered first.
“This is awesome,” he said. “I mean, obviously not awesome for the victims, but great for us. We can bring this to Decker now. We can save HSS.”
“Not so fast,” Ryan warned. “I don’t want any of this leaving this room yet. News like this could have serious consequences. Decker will want to use it to bolster the unit. Invariably word would leak out and that might tip the Night Hunter off. The last thing we need is for a guy who’s been hiding for decades to go back underground. The best thing we have working for us is that he doesn’t know that we know it’s him. We have to find a way to get ahead of him somehow.
“I might have an idea for that,” Jamil said, forwarding the footage a couple of seconds to a wider shot of the car. “Look, the license plate is visible. With a little digital cleanup, I think we can get the whole thing.”
Trembley looked perplexed.
“It’s hard to believe a guy who stayed off the radar this long would use his own car to do this,” he said. “That seems awfully sloppy. I realize he’s older but he has to know we have cameras that can grab plate numbers.”
“I’m sure he does,” Ryan said, “which is why I doubt that’s his car. I wouldn’t be surprised if he bought an old junker like that for cash from a private seller. He’d want something that was impossible to trace back to him.”
“And impossible to track in other ways—a vehicle that old wouldn’t have GPS,” Jamil noted. “But at his age, and if he’s been out of circulation for a long time, he might not be aware of some of our other tricks.”
“Like what?” Trembley asked.
“Like that regardless of who the vehicle is registered to, we can track the license plate location.”
“Oh yeah,” Trembley said. “I forgot all about that. The database logs plates periodically, right?”
“That’s right,” Ryan confirmed. “We’ll give you a pass since you’ve been on vacation. And remember, it’s not just periodically. Traffic camera feeds hold onto that data for months before dumping it. And since both these murders took place in the last month, the vehicle data should still be available.”
“They will be,” Jamil assured him as he started typing again. “Better than that, if we give it enough time, the system should be able to pinpoint patterns of movement. We should be able to determine where this car went most often. That might give us leads on where he’s been holed up.”
“And who he might be targeting next,” Ryan added. “Great work, Jamil. How long do you need?”
“It’s a lot of data but it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.”
“Excellent,” Ryan said. “I want to focus on locations the car has frequented often—at least ten times to start with. That should narrow the search a bit when we go out.”
“Wait a second,” Trembley said. “Is that a good idea? I thought the whole reason Decker brought me in was to be your feet on the ground.”
Ryan smiled broadly.
“Just because I can’t kick open a door or even drive doesn’t mean I can’t come along for the ride. I’ll keep you company. If we find anything suspicious, we’ll call it in.”
“Maybe we should make sure the captain is cool—” Trembley started to say.
“Let’s get to it,” Ryan instructed, bulldozing through the detective’s objection as he headed for the door. “We don’t know how close this guy is to killing again.”
He hurried out of the room as fast as his recovering legs would allow. In part he wanted to short-circuit any more protest from Trembley. But there was another reason.
He needed time alone to think about the two questions that were central in his mind: Why had the Night Hunter started killing again? And why here, in Los Angeles?
There was actually a third question eating at him, one he was deliberately avoiding: Why did the thought of this septuagenarian killer fill him with a dread that murderers half his age did not? If he was honest with himself, he knew the answer. It was because the Night Hunter and this version of Ryan Hernandez—hobbled, weak, uncertain—were equal matches. If they met in a dark alley tonight, he wasn’t sure who would come out on top.