“I don’t need to tell you about the kind of ridiculous press coverage this is getting. I want everyone thinking and acting as though there’s a camera on you at all times, because there probably is. Absolutely no shortcuts out there, people. I’m serious as lung cancer on that last point. S.O.P. should be a nonissue.”
I noticed Galletta’s eyes shift toward Van Allsburg while she spoke. Procedure had probably been the topic of their closed-door meeting with the deputy mayor. It occurred to me that this was an election year. The mayor needed a clean result on this one, and a fast one. I doubted it was going to happen that way.
“Okay, that’s it for now,” Galletta said, and the room came alive. She caught my eye and nodded her head toward the conference room in the back.
I had to push through the crowd to get there, wondering what she wanted to talk about.
“How’s it going?” I asked as she closed the door behind us.
“What the hell was that?” she snapped.
I blinked. “What the hell was what?”
“Contradicting me, talking about Mary Smith as a man, confusing the issue at this time. I need these people focused, and you need to keep me informed before you start reviving dead issues out of the blue like that.”
“Dead issues? Out of the blue? We talked about this. I told you my feeling.”
“Yeah, and we put it away.”
“No. We didn’t put it away. You did. Jeanne, I know you’re under pressure—”
“Goddam right I am. This is Los Angeles, not D.C. You have no idea.”
“I do have some idea. In the future, if you want me to present at a briefing, and avoid any surprises, you should check in with me ahead of time. And try to remember what you said up there, about how I caught Gary Soneji and Kyle Craig.”
I tried to stay calm and even supportive with my tone, but I also wasn’t going to cave because of anyone’s bullying.
Jeanne gritted her teeth and stared at the floor for a second. “All right. Okay. Sorry.”
“And for the record, I’m not saying you need to check in with me. This is your case, but with something so big and unwieldy, there’s only so much control you can have.”
“I know, I know.” She breathed a big sigh, not one of relief, more like a cleansing breath. Then Jeanne smiled. “You know what, how about I make it up to you? You like sushi? You have to eat, right? And I promise we won’t talk about work.”
“Thanks,” I said. “But I’m not done for the day. Unfortunately. I need to head back to the office from here. Jeanne, I don’t think this killer is a woman. So, who is it? Some other time for a bite, okay?”
“Some other time,” Jeanne Galletta said; then she walked away hastily, the same way she’d entered the conference room earlier.
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.