The job of identifying the unnamed victims was assigned to a six-detective task force from LAPD and the Sheriff's Department. After two months, three of the teenage girls had been matched with runaways on various missing persons rosters; all the girls, it was believed, had been living on the streets of Hollywood. Hedy Haupt would've understood that scene. Two girls and the goateed boy remained nameless, as did the younger of the blond women, probably the "stripper," and the black man (the "nigger stud"). "Greaser 1" and "greaser 2" turned out to be Hernando Alas and Sabino Real, cousins from El Salvador seeking work as laborers by standing outside a paint store in Eagle Rock. Contractors seeking cheap labor cruised the store daily. No one remembered who'd picked up Alas and Real, but family members living in the Union District finally stepped forward to make the identification.

A Korean-American salesman named Everett Kim, bludgeoned with a baseball bat-the "chink"-was traced to the Glendale-based skydiving club where Derrick Crimmins and Hedy had first met. The ex-wife of another member, a dental hygienist from Burbank, turned out to be Allison Wisnowski. "The nurse."

Four months later, no new I.D.'s and only one of the bodies had been found: one of the runaway girls, a sixteen-year-old named Karen DeSantis, discovered by hikers in Bouquet Canyon.

One additional tape was found in the Explorer, the scene barely discernible because of poor light: Hedy Haupt aka Heidi Ott, getting out of the four-wheeler, smiling uneasily. Handing the camera to someone off screen, then turning her back and cocking her hip. Moving slowly, seductively. Vamping. Smiling as she turned to look back.

Saying, "How'm I doing-sexy enough?" just before her head disappeared in a flash. No designation on the list. Perhaps Derrick Crimmins had conceived her as "coke whore," or maybe he had yet to dream up a designation.

Creating characters, killing them off.

Folded in a pocket of Crimmins's black silk shirt was a copy of the Blood Walk title page we'd found in his night-stand. On the reverse were several handwritten paragraphs in the same sharp-edged hieroglyphics used for the production notes:

The Monster: combenation of extreme evil-madness and supernatural psychic ability s to tell the future and to get into peoples heads. Locked up in the high security asylem just like Haniball Leckter he also cant be stopped like Leckter, can go through walls, beam himself around change his moleculs like a StarTrek alien. Exits at will, goes around killing at will. Various people, all types just cause he likes it, gets off on it, not crazy all the time this is just what he does, his job, his callin in life, no one will ever understand it because theyre not in the same dimension. And he canot be stopped anymore than Jason or Freddie Kruger or Michael Meyers.