Michael Connelly: The Wrong Side of Goodbye

But the follow-up interviews did more than reopen wounds for the victims. They helped focus the investigation and underlined the urgent need to identify and arrest the Screen Cutter.

Bosch and Lourdes adopted a conversational approach to each victim that started with assurances that the case was still being investigated as a priority by the department.

They scheduled the interviews in chronological order of the assaults. The first woman was the victim from whom no DNA evidence had been collected. The initial report on the crime explained that the woman had taken a shower and douched immediately after the attack out of fear that she would become pregnant. She and her husband at the time were trying to conceive a child and she knew that the day of the attack was also the day that she was most fertile in her ovulation cycle.

The victim was still separated by almost four years from the attack, and while the psychological trauma persisted, she had found coping mechanisms that allowed her to talk more openly about what was the worst single hour of her life.

She described the attack in detail and revealed that she had attempted to dissuade the suspect from raping her by lying and saying she was having her period. The woman told Bosch and Lourdes that the man replied, “No, you’re not. Your husband’s coming home early to fuck you and make a baby.”

This was new information and it gave the investigators pause. The woman confirmed that her husband was scheduled to come home early that day from the bank where he worked so that they could have an evening of romance, with the hope that it would result in her pregnancy. The question was, how did the Screen Cutter know that?

Under questioning from Lourdes the victim revealed that she had an app on her cell phone that tracked her menstrual cycle and told her the day of the month when she was ovulating and most likely to conceive. It was then her practice to transfer this information to a calendar kept on the refrigerator door. Each month she marked the day with red hearts and phrases like “Baby Time!” so her husband would be reminded of its significance.

On the day of the attack the woman had gone out to walk her dog in the neighborhood and was away from her home no more than fifteen minutes. She had her phone with her. The Screen Cutter had gained entrance to the house, and when she returned, he was waiting for her. At knifepoint he made her lock the dog in a bathroom and then took her into a bedroom, where the assault took place.

Bosch wondered whether those fifteen minutes she was walking the dog were enough time for the Screen Cutter to break into the house, see the calendar on the refrigerator, and understand its meaning to the point that he could make the comment to her about knowing what she and her husband had planned for the day.

Bosch and Lourdes discussed this and both felt it was more likely that the rapist had been in the house previously, either as part of stalking the victim, or because he was a family friend or relative or a repairman or someone who’d had some other business there.

This theory was supported when the other victims were interviewed and an eerie new component to the Screen Cutter’s MO was established. In each case, there were indicators inside the victim’s home that revealed details of her menstrual cycle. In each case as well, the assault had taken place during what would have normally been the ovulation phase of each woman’s cycle.

The second and third victims revealed during the interviews that they used birth control pills that were dispensed from push-through pill cards. One of the women kept her pill card in a medicine cabinet, and the other in her bedside table. While the pills suppressed the ovulation cycle, the cards and color-coding of the pills could be used to chart when that five-to-seven-day phase would normally occur.

The last victim had been attacked the February before. She was sixteen years old at the time and home alone on a school holiday. The girl reported that at fourteen she had been diagnosed with juvenile diabetes and her menstruation cycle affected her insulin needs. She tracked her cycle on a calendar on the door of her bedroom so she and her mother could prepare the proper insulin dosage.

The similarity in the timing of each of the attacks was clear. Each victim was assaulted during what would normally be the ovulation phase of their cycle — the time when a woman is most fertile. For this to have occurred in four out of four cases seemed beyond coincidence to Bosch and Lourdes. A profile began to emerge. The rapist had obviously carefully chosen the day of each attack. While information about each victim’s cycle could be found inside her home, the attacker had to know this information beforehand. This meant he had stalked his victims and likely had previously been in their homes.

Additionally, it was clear from descriptions of the attacker’s body that he was not Hispanic. The two victims who spoke no English said he gave them orders in Spanish but it was clearly not his first language.

The connections between the cases seemed stunning and raised serious questions about why the cases had not been linked before Bosch arrived as a volunteer investigator. The answers were rooted in the department’s budget crisis. The assaults occurred while the detective bureau was shrinking in size and those left in the squad had more cases to work and less time to work them. Different investigators initially handled each of the four rapes. The first two investigators were gone when the second two cases occurred. There was no cohesive understanding of what was going on. There was no constant supervision in the squad either. The lieutenant’s position was frozen and those duties were assigned to Captain Trevino, who had responsibilities in other areas of the department as well.

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.