door.
In the car, Sloan buckles up. “So we’ve got an ex-boyfriend who admits to having sex with her only a couple of miles from the crime scene. It’s not looking good for Todd Fischer.”
“I don’t know.” I start the car. “My gut instinct says he’s innocent.”
“Maybe. But it sounds like there was a new man on the scene and maybe Fischer was jealous…and angry.”
“What about the bite marks? They clearly point to someone from the vampire community. And now we’ve got confirmation that Sherry had some contact with that world. Even if it was just for research.”
Sloan raises her finger. “But Todd knew. He seems like a smart kid to me. Smart enough to make it look like a vampire attack.”
Four
Sunday, 4:30 p.m.
Once I’ve dropped Sloan, it’s on to the Federal Building and my desk. In the end we decided the professor had to wait. Sloan needs to start logging her requests and getting the DNA sample moving and I want to find out more about Anton Ward and vampires. Besides, I’d like to interview Carrington at UCLA. It’ll be interesting to see how he responds to a police and FBI visit in the middle of a class.
At my desk I open the file and turn over the first few crime-scene photographs. Rosen printed them out on regular paper, but the digital images are high resolution. The next document in the file is on Sherry Taylor, starting with the missing persons report. According to the report, she’d told her parents she was going out with Desiree Jones last night—but Desiree was with her family and had no idea she was Sherry’s cover. I bet that shocked Mrs. Taylor. And despite this, she still seemed so confident that she knew her daughter’s associates and comings and goings. You’d think her faith would be starting to crumble a little bit. So where was Sherry from 9:00 p.m. to midnight last night? At the Goth nightclub like Todd Fischer said? Or was there some other mystery date? These are questions we need to answer, but first things first…the file.
I read through the three-page missing persons report filled out by Officer Saporo from the LAPD. Even though she’d really only been missing for a few hours when the parents reported it, Saporo still did it by the book. He wasn’t too worried about a twenty-year-old still being out at eight on a Sunday morning, but there’s no legal requirement to wait twenty-four hours or any other specified time in California. Saporo classified Sherry’s disappearance as Missing/Lost rather than as a runaway, parental abduction, stranger abduction or disaster victim. While it’s possible she was abducted by a stranger, there was no evidence to suggest that. According to the form, Sherry Taylor was last seen by her parents leaving the house at nine last night. She was wearing tight Guess jeans with an eveningwear-style, short-sleeved top—black with lots of beading—and a leather jacket. The clothing doesn’t help us much, given Sherry was found naked, although it does tell us she wasn’t dressed for a Goth nightclub…at least not when she left her parents’ house. So she either changed after she left, or Todd lied.
The next section of the form relates to any companions the missing person was with, but in the case of Sherry she left the house alone and we don’t know who she may have seen after that—except for Todd. Information covering Sherry’s car has been completed in the next spot, including the fact that her Toyota Celica hasn’t been found. I give Sloan a call to confirm.
“Sloan, it’s Anderson. Don’t suppose Sherry’s car was at our crime scene?”
“No. It doesn’t look like she drove herself to Temescal Gateway Park. Unless someone else drove the car away.”
“And her cell phone wasn’t found?”
“No,” Sloan confirms. “According to the parents, they were ringing her cell every ten minutes or so, from about seven this morning. It was going straight to voice mail.”
“Does it have a GPS unit?”
“No.” She pauses. “I do have some news.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Our footprint experts have finished on-scene and identified three different sets of footprints that could be part of a circle around the body. Two are only partials, but one is more complete.”
“Go on.”
“They’ll run them against shoe databases, but we’ve got a women’s size eight and what looks like a men’s eleven and a men’s eleven or twelve.”
“It’s a start.” Although the shoe sizes are all very common. Hopefully something more specific will come from the imprints themselves.
“Problem is these prints were found amongst a lot of others. Given how much that clearing was used, any defense attorney’s going to smash them in court.”
I grimace. If Sloan’s repeating the forensic expert’s words “could be part of a circle,” she’s right—that’s not good enough for court. “Okay, thanks.”
I hang up and move back to the form and the details of the complainant—in this case Mr. and Mrs. Taylor—and then on to the more detailed information about Sherry. Again, nothing particularly stands out. The last two sections are for forensics data, but they’re blank, as you’d expect when the report had just been logged. Soon enough they would have added credit card checks and phone records and then, if suitably concerned that foul play was a factor, they would have assigned a computer technician to start the laborious process of looking for clues on Sherry’s laptop. But for a twenty-year-old, that may have been weeks away.
Next in the file Sloan pulled together for Rosen and the Bureau is all the information on the trespass charge and the preliminary information they dug up on Anton Ward, once they made the link between the two trespassers, After Dark and Ward. The file contains a printout of Ward’s driver’s license, as well as an article LA Weekly did on him and After Dark a few months back. It’s a feature article with a large photo of Ward and on the other side of the page is the After Dark logo. It’s a pentagram enclosed in a circle with the word After written above it and Dark below it.
According to the article, Anton Ward was born Brett Simons in Virginia. He was educated at Stanford, but inherited his parents’ substantial fortune when they were both killed in a car accident when he was eighteen. Ward is thirty-two, single, with no children. A large photo for the article shows me he’s extremely good-looking, with raven-black hair that drapes across his dark blue eyes and pale skin. Could be hair dye, contacts and makeup. Or maybe the LA Weekly Photoshopped the file. Who knows?
I ring up Mercedes Diaz from the Bureau’s Cyber Crime Division. Mercedes is my workout partner and a good friend. “Hey, Mercedes.”
“Hi, Soph. What’s up?”
“Sorry to bug you on a Sunday, but do you mind running a background check for me?”
“Sure thing. Hold on a sec while I fire up my laptop.”
“You mean it’s not on?”
She laughs. “Hey, I’m not that bad.”
In my experience, most computer techs are addicted—in and out of work. Unlike the chef who never cooks at home, computer analysts seem to spend countless hours on their computers.
“Okay. What do you want?”
“Give me everything you’ve got on Anton Ward. According to an LA Weekly article he was born Brett Simons in Virginia but you better check that, too.”
“Police, travel, education, investments, newspapers?”
“All of it.”
“Okay.” She’s already typing speedily on her keyboard. “I’ll e-mail you everything I find. Give me about thirty minutes, an hour tops.”
“Man, you guys are fast.”
“It’s