The Wrong Side of Goodbye(16)

The connections Bosch identified between the cases were confirmed when the DNA results came back linking the three cases in which semen had been collected. There was now no doubt that a serial rapist had struck at least four times in four years in tiny San Fernando.

Bosch also believed that there were more victims. In San Fernando alone, there was an estimated population of five thousand illegal immigrants, half of them women and many who would not call the police if victimized by crime. It also seemed unlikely that such a predator would operate only within the bounds of the tiny city. The four known victims were Latinas and had similar physical appearances: long brown hair, dark eyes, and a slight build— none of them weighed more than 110 pounds. The two contiguous LAPD geographic divisions had majority Latino populations, and Bosch had to assume that there were more victims to be found there.

Since discovering the connection between the cases, he had been spending almost all of his time on the SFPD job making contact with investigators from LAPD’s burglary and sexual assault squads throughout the Valley as well as in the nearby departments in Burbank, Glendale, and Pasadena. He was interested in any open cases involving screen cutting and the use of masks. So far nothing had come back but he knew it was a matter of getting detectives interested and looking, maybe getting the message to the right detective who would remember something.

With the police chief’s approval, Bosch had also contacted an old friend who had been a senior profiler with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. Bosch had worked with Megan Hill on several occasions when he was with the LAPD and she was with the Bureau. She was now retired from the FBI and working as a professor of forensic psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. She also kept her hand in profiling as a private consultant. She agreed to look at Bosch’s case for a discounted rate and he sent her a package on the Screen Cutter. He was keenly interested in knowing the motivation and psychology behind the attacks. Why did the Screen Cutter’s stalking pattern include determining his intended victim’s ovulation phase? If he was trying to impregnate his victims, why did he choose two women who were taking birth control pills? There was something missing in the theory, and Bosch hoped the profiler would see it.

Hill took two weeks to get back to Bosch, and her assessment of the cases concluded that the perpetrator was not choosing the attack dates because he wished to impregnate his victims. Quite the opposite. The details of the stalking and subsequent attacks revealed a subject with a deep-seated hatred of women and disgust toward the bodily ritual of bleeding. The day of the attack is chosen because the victim is considered by the offender to be at the cleanest part of her cycle. For him, psychologically, it is the safest moment for him to attack. Hill added to the profile of the rapist by describing him as a narcissistic predator with above-average intelligence. It was likely, however, that he had a job that did not involve intellectual stimulus and allowed him to fly below the radar when it came to the assessment of his employers and coworkers.

The offender also had a high degree of confidence in his skill at eluding identification and capture. The crimes involved careful planning and waiting and yet were marked by what seemed to be a critical mistake in leaving his semen in the victim. Discounting that this was part of an intention to impregnate, Hill concluded that it was intended to taunt. The offender was giving Bosch all the evidence he needed to convict him. Bosch just had to find him.

Hill also focused on the seeming incongruity of the offender leaving probative evidence of identity behind—his semen—and yet committing the crimes while masking his visual identity. She concluded that the offender might be someone the victims had previously met or seen, or he intended to make contact with them in some manner following the attacks, possibly deriving some of his satisfaction from getting close to the victims again.

Megan Hill’s profile ended with an ominous warning:



If you eliminate the idea that the perpetrator’s motive is to give life (impregnate) and realize that the attack is urged by hate, then it is clear that this subject has not concluded his evolution as predator. It is only a matter of time before these rapes become kills.



The warning resulted in Bosch and Lourdes upping the game. They started by sending out another set of e-mails to local and national law enforcement agencies with Hill’s assessment attached. On the local level, they followed up with phone calls in an effort to break through the typical law enforcement inertia that descends on investigators who have too many cases and too little time.

The response was close to nothing. One burglary detective from LAPD’s North Hollywood Division reported that he had an open burglary case involving a screen cutting but there was no rape involved. The detective said the victim was a male Hispanic twenty-six years old. Bosch urged the investigator to go back to the victim to see if he had a wife or girlfriend who might have been attacked but was afraid or embarrassed to report the assault. A week later the LAPD detective reported back and said there was no female living in the apartment. The case was unconnected.

Bosch was now playing a waiting game. The rapist’s DNA was not in the databases. He had never been swabbed. He had left no fingerprints or other evidence behind other than his semen. Bosch found no other connecting cases in San Fernando or elsewhere. The debate over whether to go public with the case and ask for the help of citizens was simmering on the back burner in the office of Chief Valdez. It was an age-old law enforcement question: Go public and possibly draw a lead that breaks the case open and leads to an arrest? Or go public and possibly alert the predator, who changes up his patterns or moves on and visits his terror on an unsuspecting community somewhere else?