fog had provided adequate cover, he was concerned that the Pontiac might
have been glimpsed by witnesses who had seen the woman tumble from it on
the freeway.
He longed to return to the land of endless night and eternal damnation,
to be once more among his own kind, but he did not want to be gunned
down by police until his collection was finished. If his offering was
incomplete when he died, he believed that he would be deemed as yet
unfit for Hell and would be pulled back into the world of the living to
start another collection.
The second car was a pearl-gray Honda that had belonged to a woman named
Renata Desseux, whom he had clubbed on the back of the head in a
shopping-mall parking lot on Saturday night, two nights after the fiasco
with the blonde. She, instead of the punker named Lisa, had become the
latest addition to his collection.
He had removed the license plates from the Honda, tossed them in the
trunk, and later replaced them with plates stolen off an old Ford on the
outskirts of Santa Ana. Besides, Hondas were so ubiquitous that he felt
safe and anonymous in this one. He drove off the park grounds and out
of the county’s largely unpopulated eastern hills toward the panorama of
golden light that filled the lowlands as far south and as far north as
he could see, from the hills to the ocean.
Urban sprawl.
Civilization.
Hunting grounds.
The very immensity of southern California-thousands of square miles,
tens of millions of people, even excluding Ventura County to the north
and San Diego County to the south-was Vassago’s ally in his
determination to acquire the pieces of his collection without arousing
the interest of the police. Three of his victims had been taken from
different communities in Los Angeles County, two from Riverside, the
rest from Orange County, spread over many months. Among the hundreds of
missing persons reported during that time, his few acquisitions would
not affect the statistics enough to alarm the public or alert the
anthorities.
He was also abetted by the fact that these last years of the century and
the millennium were an age of inconstancy. Many people changed jobs,
neighbors, friends, and marriages with little or no concern for
continuity in life. As a result, there were fewer people to notice or
care when any one person vanished, fewer to harass authorities into a
meaningful response.
And more often than not, those who disappeared were later discovered in
changed circumstances of their own invention. A young executive might
trade the grind of corporate life for a job as a blackjack dealer in
Vegas or Reno, and a young mother-disillusioned with the demands of an
infant and an infantile husband-might end up dealing cards or serving
drinks or dancing topless in those same cities, leaving on the spur of
the moment, blowing off their past lives as if a standard middle-class
existence was as much a cause for shame as a criminal background.
Others were found deep in the arms of various addictions, living in
cheap rat-infested hotels that rented rooms by the week to the
glassy-eyed legions of the counterculture. Because it was California,
many missing persons eventually turned up in religious communes in
Marrin County or in Oregon, worshipping some new god or new
manifestation of an old god or even just some shrewd- man who said he
was God.
It was a new age, disdaining tradition. It provided for whatever
lifestyle one wished to pursue. Even one like Vassago’s.
If he had left bodies behind, similarities in the victims and methods of
murder would have linked them. The police would have realized that one
perpetrator of unique strength and cunning was on the prowl, and they
would have established a special task force to find him.
But the only bodies he had not taken to the Hell below the funhouse were
those of the blonde and the private detective. No pattern would be
deduced from just those two corpses, for they had died in radically
different ways. Besides, Morton Redlow might not be found for weeks
yet.
The only links between Redlow and the punker were the detective’s