Medina went on. “A search for homicides involving known prostitutes, where the murder weapon was a knife or similar, resulted in hundreds of hits. Way too many to follow up on. Add dark hoodie and duffel bag to the search terms, and it goes the other way. We get nada. I suppose we could take a look at the first lot of hits and start with the most recent in the Hollywood area and work—”

Medina was interrupted by a low vibrating sound as his cell bounced across the desk. He grabbed the phone and checked the caller ID. “My buddy at QuikCar,” he told Pryce. “Let’s hope he has some good news for us.”

Pryce had already come up with a blank with Avis. He watched as his partner’s expression changed from hopeful to disappointed, then switched briefly back to hopeful again, before finally settling on frustration as he killed the call.

“No joy so far,” Medina said. “Ken reckons the red Ford is definitely not one of his. He’s gone through the entire fleet, and there’s no match with the plate number.”

“Ditto Avis,” Pryce said. “They called back while you were having a romantic lunch for one.”

“Ken’s based at QuikCar’s La Cienega location, but we still might get lucky with one of their other places,” Medina said. “He’s got a friend at LAX checking their own fleet as we speak, but the airport’s their biggest and busiest operation, so it could take a while longer for a definitive answer. Another buddy works out of West Hollywood, but he’s on a day off and says he’ll check their cars when he’s back on shift tomorrow. He knows they have a couple of red Fords but won’t have access to the plate numbers until he’s behind the computer.”

“Tomorrow?” Pryce asked. “Isn’t there someone else who can do it?”

Medina shook his head. “Ken’s doing me a favor. This is all unofficial. We start getting other staff involved, and the big bosses find out what’s happening, the next thing we know, they’re demanding a search warrant to access their customer databases.”

“I guess. While we wait, maybe we should both go through ViCAP again? See if anything stands out.”

The two detectives worked in silence at their respective workstations. As he scrolled through the results from the database search, Pryce thought about their guy and how he was sure he had killed before, how other victims could be languishing somewhere in the system.

And if he was right, Pryce knew the killer might already have his next target firmly in his sights.

25 JESSICA

25

JESSICA

The girl was about twenty, but the thick makeup made her look five years older.