by Jacob Stone
The recording the woman played captured Hardacher making a 2000-dollar down payment for this Jack character to kill his wife, and agreeing to pay him an additional two grand after the job was done. The woman pressed a button to cut off the recording after these salient points were made.
Woman: You’re going to pay us ten-thousand dollars Saturday—
Hardacher: The deal I had was for Spenser—I mean Jack—to kill Wendy for four grand. I’m not paying anything more than that!
Woman: Look, genius, Jack’s not killing your wife. We’re blackmailing you, okay? You don’t pay us ten grand and the recording goes to the police and you go to prison, got it?
The woman must’ve been sneering when she said that. Lemmon could just about hear it in her voice. Neither of them spoke for the next thirty seconds, then Hardacher broke the silence.
Hardacher: (distraught) I can’t get ten grand by Saturday.
Woman: You better figure out a way. I’m leaving a flash drive on the backseat with directions of how you’re going to pay us. And don’t be a dumb-ass and try to take this recording from me. It’s a copy. Jack has the original.
The woman left the car and took off toward the opposite entrance. Hardacher didn’t bother chasing after her and neither did Lemmon. If he followed her, she’d lead him to the man Hardacher met at the motel room, the same one who was now blackmailing him. But Lemmon’s concern was Hardacher, not the blackmailer, and he now had more than enough for a solicitation-to-commit-murder charge to stick.
Hardacher hadn’t moved, and from what Lemmon could tell the man appeared to be deep in thought, no doubt struggling to figure a way out of his mess. Lemmon drove into the parking lot and pulled up directly in back of Hardacher, blocking him in. He got on the phone with Morris and told him what had happened. He asked whether Annie or one of Morris’s other LAPD contacts could send the cavalry pronto.
Hardacher had noticed Lemmon blocking him in and he stormed out of his car, his face contorting into an ugly mask of blind rage. It was bad enough his wife wasn’t being killed like he had expected. Bad enough also that he was being blackmailed! But now this? Some joker rudely blocking his car!
Hardacher pounded on Lemmon’s window and spittle flew out his mouth as he demanded to know what Lemmon thought he was doing. Lemmon rolled down his window and showed Hardacher the badge deputizing him.
“Relax,” he said. “Police cruisers will be here soon and when they arrive you’ll be arrested for soliciting a murder. For now, just sit in your car and wait. And try not to be a total jackass and make a run for it. You won’t get anywhere doing that.”
Hardacher stumbled backward as if he’d been punched in the face. His eyes took on the shifty look of someone who was thinking about making a run for it, but then his face just sort of collapsed as a look of utter defeat took over.
Hardacher got back in his car and waited.
Lemmon was mildly disappointed by this. He wouldn’t have minded the opportunity to chase after Hardacher and tackle the guy, and maybe knock out a few of his teeth in the process.
Chapter 51
Morris had left Parker back at the MBI office with Greta, and he and Annie Walsh drove to Pasadena and found Matt Kammer inside the Davis Street precinct with a chicken egg–sized bump over his right eye. A detective had told them they wanted to take Kammer to the hospital to be checked out, but Kammer insisted on going to the station house, telling the detective if he was taken to the hospital they’d probably give him a sedative, and he wanted to be clearheaded when he talked with the police.
Morris was about to introduce himself to Kammer, but realized that he had met this man before. Then he remembered where and when.
“I met you and your wife Sunday at the Santa Monica Pier,” he said. “Your wife wanted to pet my dog.”
A glimmer of recognition broke through Kammer’s dull, glass-like eyes. “You were the one with the bull terrier,” he said, as if coming out of a trance.
“That’s right. Your wife impressed me as being a very sweet woman. I can’t possibly understand how difficult this must be for you—”
Kammer interrupted him. “It would be so much worse if I wasn’t doing what I could to get justice for Hannah.” He clamped his mouth shut as he choked back a sob. It was a struggle, but the moment passed and he continued, “It’s all I have left that I can do for her.”
A grim determination had hardened Kammer’s feature, but his eyes remained liquid and Morris knew that the man was barely holding it together. That once he finished talking with them he’d be breaking down. Walsh got Kammer’s attention, asking if he could tell them what happened. He told them in a near-lifeless voice how the Cupid Killer had found the spare key they kept hidden in a fake rock outside their house and snuck up on him when he was in the kitchen.
“He hit me with a club of some sort before I could do anything about it. The next thing I knew he was using something harsh to wake me.”
“Do you remember smelling ammonia?” Walsh asked.
“Yeah. It had a strong chemical taste. It made me feel like my nostrils were being burned.” He rubbed at his nose as if he were trying to dislodge the memory of that odor. “When I came to, I was in the kitchen tied to a chair, a gag in my mouth, and Hannah was across from me.”
He seemed to lose himself in his thoughts. Morris and Walsh had already talked with the detective in charge, and they knew that the killer wore a ski mask and the same black clothing he wore with Alex Frey. They also knew that Hannah had been stripped naked before she was tied up and gagged, and like the other two women, she had her nipples sliced off and was stabbed and cut over a hundred times. They didn’t need to hear any of this from Kammer, but they wanted to hear what he had to tell them in case something new popped loose.
Morris nudged him along by asking what happened next.
“That sick bastard did terrible things to Hannah with a knife.” Kammer’s mouth weakened and he had to stop for a moment before he could add, “The sick bastard kept cutting and stabbing Hannah until she died.”
“Did he say anything to you?”
“Yeah.” A hard grimace tightened Kammer’s lips. “I remember he called me champ a few times.”
Morris asked, “Champ?”
“That’s right. He was taunting me, saying stuff like, Lucky you, champ, having a front-row seat for this and Champ, how’d an ugly fuck like you end up with a beauty like her.” Kammer jutted out his chin, a resolve hardening his features. “At the end—and I’ll never forget this—this psychopath told me Now you have yourself an especially wonderful rest of your life.”
Morris waited for him to say something about him being offered the same cruel Faustian bargain that was offered to Alex Frey. When it became apparent that Kammer had nothing more to say, Morris asked, “Is that all?”
Kammer’s mouth fell open and he goggled at Morris as if he had three eyes. “Isn’t that enough?” he asked incredulously.
“He didn’t offer you a deal?”
“Like what?”
“That he would let you end your wife’s suffering.”
The baffled look that spread over Kammer’s face appeared genuine. “How would he have let me do that?” he asked.
“By cutting you free so you could strangle your wife.”
“That’s what this sicko offered those other two men?”
“We know he did with the first victim, and we think so also with the second.”
Kammer’s eyes glazed as if he were staring at something far away. He broke out of his trance, blinking several times and then looking back at Morris. “If he offered me that I would’ve taken him up on it, and I would’ve found a way to kill him and Hannah would be alive now. Why didn’t he make me that offer also?”
“I don’t know. Did you notice any marks, bruises, or tattoos on him?”
Kammer frowned as he considered that. “He
wore a ski mask,” he said. “A long-sleeve knit shirt also.” He squinted badly as if he were trying to pull a stubbornly elusive fact from his memory. All at once he smacked his right fist into his open palm, making a loud enough noise that an uniformed officer standing in the hallway stuck his head in the room to make sure there was no trouble. “He had a tattoo right here,” he said excitedly.
Kammer pointed to the underside of his right wrist.
Morris asked, “Do you remember what it was?”
“Yeah. A wolf’s face.”
Morris wasn’t sure he heard that right. It couldn’t be that, could it? “Please repeat what you just said?” he asked, trying to keep his voice calm.
“A wolf’s face,” Kammer insisted with absolute certainty. “Its fangs were bared. Like it was snarling.”
Morris’s cell phone rang. Fred Lemmon. He answered the call.
Lemmon asked, “What do you call a bunch of canaries?”
“I know a large group of crows are called a murder,” Morris said, frowning. “I think with peacocks it’s a muster. I don’t know what you call it with canaries.”
Walsh, who was driving, volunteered that there was nothing special about canaries, and a large group of them was just a flock.
Lemmon asked if that was Annie Walsh.
“Yep,” Morris said.
“Tell her I said hi.”
Morris’s frown deepened. He suspected that Lemmon had a thing for Walsh and the way Lemmon sounded just then, as if he were embarrassed by what he had just said, made Morris suspect that even more.
“You can tell her yourself,” he said gruffly, and he put the cell phone on speaker.
Lemmon said, “Annie, I thought it’s a flock of seagulls?”
Walsh made a face at that bad joke referencing the 1980s new wave band. She said, “Are you sure that’s Fred and not Polk?”
“Ah, I’m wounded deeply,” Lemmon responded.
Morris asked Lemmon why he was calling.
“Hardacher ended up singing more than any flock of canaries, and he said something interesting about the hit man he hired. Or really the con man who masqueraded as a hit man and is now blackmailing him. Two things, actually, and they sounded familiar, so I called Felger to confirm why they sounded familiar. This case intersects with your Grace Warren missing-person’s investigation.”
“How so?”
“First, Hardacher met Jack at the High Spot Lounge in Inglewood, the same bar where Grace Warren was last seen. Second, Jack has a wolf’s-face tattoo on the underside of his right wrist.”
Morris found the photos that Lemmon had sent him of the man Hardacher met outside the motel room. A real badass-type who also fit the description Trey Johnson gave of the man who took Grace Warren from him. Was it possible that he was also the Cupid Killer?
“Did Hardacher by any chance give you a phone number or address for Jack?” he asked, his voice echoing faintly in his own ears as if it were coming from a distance away.
“Not quite. But he told me how we might be able to make contact with him.”
Chapter 52
There were benches outside UCLA’s law library, but Duncan chose instead to sit on the lawn under a tree. He had a copy of Crime and Punishment that he had picked up for $1.98 from the discount rack at a used bookstore and he assumed, given the way he was so neatly dressed and his carefully groomed appearance, that if he sat where he was and looked like he was reading the book, people would think he was a college student and they’d leave him alone. He’d been mostly right, other than a horny law student whom he caught an hour-and-a-half ago staring at him with obvious interest. Tall, long blond hair, large bust, narrow waist, big-toothed grin. She looked like she could’ve been a Playboy model from an earlier era, and was what Wainwright might’ve called statuesque if the old man had had a better vocabulary. Not Duncan’s type, though. After he caught her eyeing him over, she grinned, walked over to where he was sitting, and asked if he wanted to exchange briefs with her. The stunned look on his face caused her to break out laughing.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “A bad law school joke.”
“I wouldn’t know. I’m an English major,” Duncan said with a big aw-shucks grin. “At least you didn’t make a crack about us exchanging oral arguments.”
He had decided earlier to play nice if anyone approached him. Less chance he’d draw unwanted attention by doing that. All he’d been able to think about was that flinty-eyed dark-haired beauty he’d seen having lunch with her mom yesterday—even when he was torturing Hannah Kammer last night, he found himself drifting into thoughts about that other woman. He was hoping if he camped out by the library he’d spot her again, and it would’ve been idiotic of him to intentionally piss off anyone and give them a reason to call security on him.
The statuesque blonde giggled at what he said. “That’s actually not a bad idea. I’m up to it, if you are.”
He deadpanned, “You mean right out here in the open?”
“We’d get arrested, especially if we did all the things I’d like to do to you. But no, let’s go back to my apartment. I live less than a half mile from here.”
“My dear, are you propositioning me?” Duncan said with an exaggerated, wide-eyed innocence.
“You bet I am. Life’s too short not to go for what you want. And after hitting the law books for the last four hours, I could use a naked tumble in the sack.” She held out a hand whose fingernails were painted a deep blood-red. “Sandra.”
Duncan reached up and took her hand. “Connor,” he said. “As gorgeous as you are and as much as I’d like to take you up on your offer, I have to finish this book today or I’m toast.”
She looked both disappointed and relieved. At a subconscious level, she must’ve realized the mistake it would’ve been to bring a predator like Duncan into her home, even if she couldn’t exactly articulate that insight.
“Another time, perhaps?”
“God, I hope so,” Duncan said.
He watched her start to walk away. The poor girl just wasn’t in tune enough with her subconscious, because after she’d gone only twenty yards, she turned to give him a questioning look. After all, he’d gotten to watch her delicious rear end wiggle for the last ten seconds, and that had to be enough to change his mind. He raised his hands in a helpless gesture, and she gave him a too bad look and continued on her way. After that, he went back to staring at a page in the book, the words just seeming to blend together.
It wasn’t so much that Dostoyevsky’s more complex writing style had him stymied, but that he would’ve had trouble that day concentrating even on Dr. Seuss. At times, his thoughts drifted to that flinty-eyed slender cutie and how much he wanted her to be one of his victims—or more precisely, how much he wanted to enjoy making the lucky bastard who was her fiancé suffer. Other times, he’d wonder about whether the police had found the Kammers yet, and what they would think about him deviating from his routine. He’d done everything to Hannah that he had to the other two women, but he didn’t offer the husband a deal to stop her suffering. He could see in Kammer’s eyes that if he made him that offer, Kammer would’ve taken him up on it, but instead of doing what he promised he would’ve tried saving his wife, and Duncan might very well have killed him then and he couldn’t afford to do that. He needed to make sure Kammer got a good look at his temporary snarling wolf’s-face tattoo so he would later be able to tell the police about it.
If Duncan were being completely honest about it, there was more to it than that. Kammer might’ve been a member of the fortunate-few club, and he might’ve been well-off and happily married to a beautiful woman, but he wasn’t like the other two men. He wasn’t GQ-model good-looking, that was for sure. At best he was a lumpy, average-looking guy who got lucky marrying a woman as gorgeous as his wife. Most lottery winners never got that lucky. While Duncan didn’t actually feel sorry for h
im, he nonetheless didn’t find himself as rage-filled as with the other two murders. This killing was purely because his plan needed it, and not so that he could unleash his inner demons.
Duncan was making a concerted effort to decipher the meaning of what he was reading, and he almost missed it when the flinty-eyed dark-haired cutie left the library. It startled him when he noticed her on the pathway right across from him. She saw him looking startled.
“Is anything wrong?” she asked, her eyes narrowing and looking especially flinty.
He felt his stomach flip a little. How crazy was that? Up until a year ago he would’ve simply admired how beautiful she was and left it at that. There was even a time when he would’ve wanted to introduce himself, talk her into a date, and someday marry her. Now he just wanted to slowly torture and kill her in front of her bound and gagged fiancé.
He smiled apologetically and held up the paperback so she could see what he was pretending to read. “No, nothing,” he said. “I was just trying to make sense of a particularly dense passage in this.”
Her eyes narrowed further as she read the book’s title. “That’s a difficult one,” she agreed. “Good luck.”
He nodded thanks, and waited until she cut through the trees and shrubs so that she could get onto Hilgard Avenue, and then took off after her. There were plenty of trees lining the sidewalk that he could dart behind if she looked back, but he was careful to hang far enough back to keep her from suspecting she was being followed. He had his backpack with him, which had everything he needed, and his plan was to follow her home (she had to be going home, right?) and to catch her unaware as she unlocked her door. Then he would tie her up, draw the snarling wolf’s-face tattoo on his wrist, and wait for the fiancé to show up. He slowly narrowed the gap between the two of them. The anticipation of what was coming left his mouth dry and his pulse thumping loudly in his temples.
There were only fifty yards separating them now, and when she turned to head into a large apartment complex, he began sprinting so he could catch the vestibule door before it closed behind her. Odds were she wouldn’t notice him, and would instead be too busy heading toward the elevator. If she did notice him, well, he’d change his plan. Maybe he’d knock her out, drag her into the elevator, and go through her pocketbook for her keys and driver’s license so he’d know her apartment number. One way or another, he’d be alone with her in her apartment very soon.
