“You know when you caused all that havoc when you first got here? Caused that pileup down near Staples Center? In the report, witnesses say they saw you running from some kind of dog . . .”

“It was a werewolf.”

“Whatever . . . this wolf threw the hood of a car through the windshield of a car belonging to a Mr. Tom Davis and a Ms. Nancy Wright. Both dead. Both decapitated.”

I shook my head. “They’re not the ones. Next.”

Brueger laughed. “You are one cocky son of a bitch.”

“I know my beheadings. What about the other two?”

She fumbled with the paper. “Okay, next we got a case that happened on Mulholland.”

“That’s pretty close to Runyon Park,” I said.

“That’s right. Mulholland has one of the jogger entrances, but listen to this. . . . About three years ago, a single father that goes by the name, now get this, Admiral Walter Bennington. He used to command one of the largest fleets in the Navy. He retired four years ago. It says in the report that three years ago he was on an outing with his daughter, Jenny, age twenty, and several other fathers and daughters. Evidently they had been white-water rafting. The admiral’s daughter was in the front of the raft. . . . Well, some local kids thought it would be humorous to tie a line of rope across the path of the rafters. It didn’t work that way. The rope was too strong. Jenny Bennington was decapitated.”

“And they never found the head,” I said. “That sucks.”

“You got it, but there’s more. Admiral Bennington spent time during Vietnam working in the ship’s hospital.”

“Lots of amputations, I’m sure,” I said. Brueger nodded. “And there’s that drowning/water connection, too.”

“You’re just smart as the dickens, aren’t you?” said Brueger. “That, and the medical background puts Bennington in the prime suspect column.”

“What about number three?”

“A little more cut and dried. Divorced father, Tom Burns, is driving on the 101 with his nineteen-year-old daughter, Trisha. There’s some kind of confusion, and the car loses control. The top of the car is ripped clean off and the kid’s head goes with it. The father suffers minor injuries, but—”

I cut in, “They never found the head.”

“Right.”

“A highway accident and they can’t find a girl’s head?”

“Evidently.”

“This stinks like all hell. What’s this Burns’s record like? What’d he do for a living?”

“You ready for this? He’s a bio-engineer. Still is. He’s one of those fucks trying to genetically alter vegetables and fish. He was supposed to retire last year, but after his kid got killed, he decided to stay on.”

Both men sounded suspicious as fuck, but what were the odds? The Valley is a big place and Los Angeles is fucking huge. Was it possible that two men who lost their daughters could meet?