An hour to an hour and forty-five minutes to mutilate the body, depending on the location of the killing ground.
The killer so sex-crazed that he ejaculates twice during that time.
The killer–maybe–taking a circuitous route to the Strip, rearview mirror hooked backward so he can view the corpse he is chauffeuring.
Flaw in the reconstruction so far: Doc Layman’s tenuous “blood bait” theory doesn’t fit. Well-trained vicious dogs did not jibe with the scenario–they would be too difficult to deal with, a nuisance, a mess, too noisy at a murder scene, too hard to contain during moments of psychotic duress. Which meant that the teeth marks on the torso had to be human, even though the mouth imprints were too large to have been made by a human being biting down.
Which meant that the killer bit and gnawed and swiveled and gnashed his teeth to get a purchase on his victim’s entrails, sucking the flesh upward to leave inflamed borders as he ravaged– Danny bolted out of his cubicle and back to the records alcove adjoining the squadroom. One battered cabinet held the division’s Vice and sex offender files–West Hollywood crime reports, complaint reports, arrest reports and trouble call sheets dating back to the station’s opening in ‘37. Some of the folders were filled alphabetically under “Arrestee”; some under “Complainant”; some numerically by “Address of Occurrence.” Some held mugshots, some didn’t; gaps in the “Arrestee” folders indicated that the arrested parties had bribed deputies into stealing reports that might prove embarrassing to them–and West Hollywood was only a small fraction of County territory.
Danny spent an hour scanning “Arrestee” reports, looking for tall, gray-haired, middle-aged men with violence in their MOs, knowing it was a long shot to keep him busy until Musician’s Local 3126 opened at 10:30. The slipshod paperwork–rife with misspellings, smudged carbons and near illiterate recountings of sex crimes–had him to the point of screaming at LASD incompetence; turgid accounts of toilet liaisons and high school boys bribed into back seat blow jobs kept his stomach churning with a bile that tasted like fried coffee grounds and last night’s six shots of bonded. The time got him four possibles–men aged forty-three to fifty-five, 6’1” to 6’4”, with a total of twenty-one sodomy convictions among them–most of the beefs stemming from fruit tank punkings–jailhouse coitus interruptus that resulted in additional County charges being filed. At 10:20, he took the folders up to the dispatcher’s office and Karen Hiltscher, sweaty, his clothes wilted before the day had hardly started.
Karen was working the switchboard, plugging in calls, a headset attached to her Veronica Lake hairdo. The girl was nineteen, bottle blonde and busty–a civilian LASD employee flagged for the next woman’s opening at the Sheriff’s Academy. Danny pegged her as bad cop stuff: the Department’s mandatory eighteen-month jail tour would probably send her off the deep end and into the arms of the first male cop who promised to take her away from dyke matrons, Mex gang putas and white trash mothers in for child abuse. The heartthrob of the West Hollywood Substation wouldn’t last two weeks as a policewoman.
Danny straightened his tie and smoothed his shirtfront, his beefcake prelude to begging favors. “Karen? You busy, sweetheart?”
The girl noticed him and took off her headset. She looked pouty; Danny wondered if he should lube her with another dinner date. “Hi, Deputy Upshaw.”
Danny placed the sex offender files up against the switchboard. “What happened to ‘Hi, Danny’?”
Karen lit a cigarette a la Veronica Lake and coughed–she only smoked when she was trying to vamp the cops working day watch. “Sergeant Norris heard me call Eddie Edwards ‘Eddie’ and said I should call him Deputy Edwards, that I shouldn’t be so familiar until I get rank.”
“You tell Norris I said you can call me Danny.”
Karen made a face. “Daniel Thomas Upshaw is a nice name. I told my mother, and she said it was a really nice name, too.”
“What else did you tell her about me?”
“That you’re really sweet and handsome, but you’re playing hard to get. What’s in those files?”
“Sex offender reports.”
“For that homicide you’re working?”
Danny nodded. “Sweet, did Lex and Quentin call back on my Marty Goines queries?”