A Passing Curse (2011) Read Online Free PDF Page B

all they gave him was six men. It was pathetic. He couldn’t waste time whining. He had a week.
    Two men he sent to area dives, flops, and wine sheds. The last two men he stuck in front of the computers checking Lamb’s name against the victims’ names to see if their paths had crossed before. These two also handled phones and coordinated information with the Sheriff’s Office which was working on the first three women slaughtered in Anaheim before Lamb opened shop in LA.
    Reese worked Fifth alone, asking questions, handing out sketches. In all thirteen killings Richard Lamb had left no forensic clues: no hair, no fingerprints, no fiber, no blood, no semen, no saliva, no sweat. No tire tracks. No footprints. No one, not even a nosy neighbor, had seen the killer except for Melissa Cunningham and she was dead. All he had was a sketch of a man with a phony ID. In a court of law it was nothing, less than nothing.
    He needed a confession.
    After several fifteen-hour days of rousting piss-bums and various derelicts, up and down skid row streets, in and out of rescue missions and three Salvation Army centers, Reese found his signpost sitting against the corroded-brick front of a long vacant garment factory, cradling a jug of Mogen David wine, minus the paper bag.
    The man’s legs lay straight in front of him, the pants brown corduroy, shiny with dirt. One shoe was missing, the bare foot swollen and turning purple, white fungus on the toenails. The other foot sported a cordovan penny loafer. Gracing the penny slot was the crumbling remains of a cigarette. Before drying, a puddle between the man’s legs had sent rivulets nearly to the gutter.
    The man picked Lamb’s sketch out of three others. “Saw him walk by yesterday.”
    “Where?” Reese asked. The man gestured with the half-bottle of Mad Dog, indicating the gloomy buildings three blocks away. “Fifth and Alvarez more’n likely. He stared right through me. I know those eyes,” he said and took a long drink. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and offered the bottle to Reese.
    Reese pointed to the flies floating in the wine, not that he was overly hygienic when it came to drinking, but still.
    The man sucked through clenched teeth and cackled. “Just strain’em.” Reese gave the man twenty dollars and told him to get some food in him which caused them both to laugh.
    He’d been parked for two hours when Richard Lamb walked around the corner of Fifth and Alvarez, dodged across moderately heavy traffic, and stepped through the grim portal of a residential flophouse. Reese rubbed his eyes. Half the neon letters of the California Hotel’s sign were out. A few blinked a sad tattoo, the rest dimly orange in late afternoon streets.
    He grabbed the steering wheel and sat up. Lamb looked to be a sweetheart, a bland psycho, a gentle killer. The sketch had been dead on.
    Police work was 90 percent luck, he reflected, resisting the urge to run after Lamb and tackle him. It would do him no good to collar Lamb in public. He waited five minutes for Lamb to get settled into his room. He scribbled in his notebook that he was going into the hotel after the suspect Richard Lamb and put the notebook into the glove compartment. If his luck ran out, the cops would find his car and note. And then again, the car might not even be searched. Might go straight to the impound yard. Hernandez might take the call, with some glee no doubt.
    He left the car without putting on his bulletproof vest or calling for backup. The vest was an easy call: at seven and one half pounds it was too damn heavy. No backup made even more sense. No witnesses to Lamb’s interrogation was a no-brainer.
    The hotel lobby was dark, the sun a memory behind water-stained drapes. Several men sank into armchairs. They watched a flickering television and drank from paper cups. The smell of cooking onions in the air, below that the sharpness of disinfectant. Lysol alley.
    Behind the linoleum-topped counter, the