by Jacob Stone
If she had noticed Jack anywhere around so he’d be able to follow them, she would’ve taken him up on the offer, but Jack must’ve been waiting back at the motel.
“That’s sweet,” she said, “but I left the script in my room.”
He gave her a confused look. “We’re really going to be practicing a scene?”
“Oh yeah. But it is a nude scene.” She moved in close and nibbled his earlobe. “And we’ll be doing a lot of improvisational work.”
He grabbed her in his arms and tried to kiss her, but she pushed him away, laughing. “Wait until we’re in the motel room, sport.”
“You’re going to give me a heart attack,” he complained.
“If you’re lucky.”
His BMW sedan was only a few steps from the door, and he ran every red light on the way to the motel. “Some nights you just keep drawing aces,” he said, as if marveling over that fact. Grace pointed out her room and Wallaban pulled into the empty spot in front of it. Once they got inside and had the door closed behind them, he remarked that he didn’t see a script anywhere.
“Whoops,” she said, exaggerating the gesture as she innocently touched the tip of her index finger to her lips. “I must’ve left it back home. No problem, though. I’ve got all the lines memorized. Sport, you’re overdressed for the part.”
He grinned and kicked off his shoes, then hurried to strip off his pants, showing off that he was a tighty-whitey guy. Even though he was a pear-shaped chunk, he had spindly legs. When he took off his sports jacket, he revealed a shoulder holster that was being put to use.
“You’re packing?” she said, surprised by this.
“More ways than one, babe,” he said with a wink. He started to remove the holster, but she surprised herself by suggesting he keep it on.
His grin disappeared. “Why’s that?”
She lowered her voice to a whisper, because Jack was in the adjoining room and the motel had thin walls. “Because if you were half as smart as you think you are, you’d know I brought you here only so me and my man can rob you of the money you won tonight.”
All of his good-natured goofiness from before faded. He no longer looked quite as pear-shaped and harmless either.
“How exactly was that going to happen?” he asked.
“My man’s in the next room,” she said. “Once we start screwing, I’m supposed to make enough noise for him to hear me. That’s his signal to come in here and bust you up with a pair of brass knuckles. He likes busting up guys with brass knuckles almost as much as he does taking their money.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
She shrugged more with her eyes than her shoulders. “I’m a complicated person.”
Wallaban pulled his pants back up and put on his shoes. He took a 9mm pistol from the holster and moved so he’d be standing by the door. He turned off the room lights and told Grace to signal her partner.
“I’m supposed to make sure the door’s unlocked before taking you to bed,” she said.
Wallaban checked the door and unlocked it.
“Oh baby, oh baby,” she moaned loudly as if she were in ecstasy, “give it to me harder, harder.”
She repeated this until the door eased open. Readinger stepped into the room, a glint from an outside light showing off the brass knuckles he wore on his right hand. Wallaban stepped out from where he was hiding and slugged him on the back of the head with the gun, and Readinger slumped to the floor.
If Wallaban had asked Grace to join him, she would’ve left with him, but the look he showed Grace before he stepped out of the room showed he’d rather drive away with a carful of rattlesnakes. So instead, she watched as Readinger reached blindly for the back of his skull to see if he was bleeding, and then as he struggled to get back onto his feet. He looked groggy and in pain as he rubbed the back of his head.
“What happened?” he asked
“The mark figured out the game.”
Readinger squinted at her as if he were having trouble focusing. “Yeah? How’d he do that?”
The frightened little-girl look she was showing turned into a brazen smirk. “Because I told him.”
“Why’d you do that?”
“I thought it would be funny and I was right. It was downright hilarious!”
Readinger reached back with his right fist and, putting all his weight into the punch, hit her flush in the eye. If he hadn’t been wearing the brass knuckles (and to be honest about it—she pissed him off so much he had forgotten he was wearing them) he would’ve only knocked her out, but he felt her eye cavity caving in, and he knew she was dead before he knelt next to her and searched for a pulse that no longer existed.
He fumed as he thought about how she’d not only cost him eight grand, but set him up to have his head bashed in. Goddamned crazy bitch. Yeah, she got what she deserved, no question about it. That was the thing about honeypots: They didn’t last forever. Sooner or later they ran dry and when that happened you had to get rid of them, because they were nothing but trouble then. This one had showed a mouth on her from the very start, and it was only a matter of time before something like this happened.
He tried to be philosophical about it, telling himself there was no use crying over spilled milk, but that was easier said than done. Eight grand! That was what she stole from him. More than that, actually. He had paid the waiter at Hopper’s two bills and slipped the desk clerk at the motel another 300 so he’d be given two rooms off the books. And now he had to clean up this mess.
He pulled the sheet off the bed, used it to mop up the small pool of blood by Grace’s head, then laid the sheet on the floor and wrapped her in it. Most of the blood came off the cheap industrial-type carpeting used in the room, and the small stain that was left wouldn’t draw attention. He got his car and backed it up into the spot in front of the motel-room door, and then hustled Grace into the trunk. He had already moved the shovel he usually kept in the trunk into the backseat. Readinger always kept a shovel in his car. You never knew when you were going to need one.
He spent the next two hours burying Grace in a secluded spot off Mulholland Drive. He was dirty, tired, and in a rotten mood by the time he got back to his apartment. He filled a plastic bag with ice, got a beer from the refrigerator, and sat on the couch holding the bag of ice to the back of his head and drinking the beer. He couldn’t stop thinking about what a clusterfuck tonight ended up being, his mood darkening by the minute. Yeah, it was a bad one, all right, almost as bad as that night back in April when he was in Boston. Goddamn, that was one screwed-up night.
He had paid a grand to get the address for where five kilos of coke was supposed to be stashed, and had played his usual game that night, pounding on the door and claiming he was Dave. (Sometimes instead he’d knock on the door and yell for someone named Dave—it was amazing how often both of these simpleminded schemes worked.) The second the door swung open, he stepped forward and broke the guy’s jaw with a pair of brass knuckles, and before the guy hit the floor he realized he had the wrong address. The drug dealer had been pointed out to him earlier that week and this wasn’t him. Readinger could understand the mistake. The apartment building was in a complex of identical brick buildings, and he’d been given the wrong number. He should’ve left then. If he had, he might still have had time to get the right address and score those five kilos. But that pretty little blonde had to start screaming, which meant he had to shut her up.
She was a pretty little thing, no question about it, and he thought he might as well have a little fun with her—mostly of the harmless variety, but the way she looked at him, as if he were lower than a cockroach, made him change his mind about the kind of fun he would have.
Even after he had stripped her and bound her to the kitchen chair, he still wasn’t planning to do what he did. He was just going to cut her a dozen or so times and watch her boyfriend squirm, but i
t just became one of those nights. It was really the boyfriend’s fault. It was the way he acted—as if he’d do anything to save that pretty little thing’s life, even if it meant giving up his own. To be fair, it also pissed him off, realizing that while he’d have crazy, messed-up bitches he could take advantage of, he’d never have a pretty little thing like that, and it was never good when he got pissed off.
So things happened that night, and when he was done he had to forget about those five kilos and get out of Boston. He decided he’d go back to the west coast, this time choosing Los Angeles.
As he remembered that night in Boston, the boyfriend’s name popped into his head: Duncan Moss. He even remembered Moss’s address and an evil thought came to him.
He pushed himself off the couch. He’d have to clear out all of Grace’s belongings, but he could wait until later to do that. For now, he pulled out from under the bed the box of souvenirs she collected. He rummaged through it and found what he was looking for—a Welcome to Hollywood postcard. He brought the card to the kitchen table and very carefully wrote on it Now you have yourself an especially wonderful rest of your life, and admired his handiwork.
The idea of mailing the postcard to Moss lifted his spirits.
There was nothing he enjoyed more in life than sharing the pain.
Chapter 61
Los Angeles, the present
Morris learned how dire the situation was during his ride to Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. Before the paramedics arrived at the apartment, Doug Gilman’s heart had stopped and while they were able to resuscitate him, he was hanging on by a thread and would be in surgery for hours, if he survived that long. “Miracles do happen,” a trauma surgeon had told Morris, but the woman didn’t sound optimistic that would be the case this time.
Morris had brought Parker with him and the dog sensed something bad had happened. Instead of the bull terrier’s normal, rambunctious self, he was subdued, and as they walked through the hospital corridors to the room where Rachel was waiting, Parker sensed Morris’s growing anxiety and became more agitated.
It broke Morris’s heart when he saw Rachel looking grief-stricken and lost. Parker must have felt the same way. The bull terrier let out a painful whine as he padded over to Rachel, and was surprisingly gentle as he attempted to lick her face and do whatever he could to comfort her. Rachel hugged the dog around his thick neck and began sobbing, which only made Parker more persistent in his attempts to lick her face.
Morris wanted to say something to comfort his daughter, but he was at a loss for words. There was only a slim chance at best that Gilman would survive the night, and if he said something like “everything will be all right” it would sound trite and unconvincing. As he stroked Rachel’s hair, his voice broke into a gruff rumble and he told her that her fiancé was a good man. “I know he loves you with all his heart.”
She looked up at him, her eyes a sea of pain. “Doug saved my life,” she said. “If he hadn’t done what he did, that psychopath would’ve done to me what he did to those other women.”
“Doug’s a hero. Thank God for that. Were his parents called?”
“They’re on their way.”
Morris wanted to be there only to comfort his daughter, and hated the idea of questioning her right then, but what he had to ask was too important to hold off until later. His voice became gravel as he asked whether she saw any tattoos on her attacker.
She pointed to the underside of her right wrist. “He had a wolf’s face right here, the fangs bared.”
Morris showed her the photo on his phone of Jack Readinger’s tattoo. “Did it look like this?”
“Exactly like that.” She gave him an exhausted look. “What does this mean? Is the guy you arrested working with the psycho who attacked me and Doug?”
“I don’t know,” Morris admitted. Annie Walsh had already shown the blond cashier at the Hollywood gift shop a photo lineup with Jack Readinger’s picture, and the woman insisted that she never saw any of them so she couldn’t have sold their suspect the “cutest couple” mugs. Polk and Greg Malevich were off to show Jill Kincade’s parents the same photo lineup, and Morris was expecting the same results, which just made no sense. His gut was screaming at him that Readinger was involved somehow, but how?
Parker’s ears perked up and he turned toward the door, his tail wagging a beat faster as Natalie walked into the room. Rachel disentangled herself from the bull terrier, got to her feet, and stumbled toward Natalie. The two women embraced, both of them quickly teary-eyed. Morris felt a growing unease as he watched them, knowing that the only thing he could possibly do to help his daughter was catch the bastard responsible. He cleared his throat and told Natalie and Rachel he had to get back to work.
“I don’t think it’s likely, but an unmarked patrol car will be watching the house just in case this sonofabitch tries something.”
“I’m not budging from here until I know Doug’s okay,” Rachel insisted.
Natalie was using her thumb to wipe away tears from her daughter’s face. “And I’m not leaving you,” she said.
That was pretty much what Morris expected. “In case you need to go home for any reason, you’ll be safe,” he said. He knew Parker wasn’t going to budge. While the bull terrier was ostensibly his dog, he was nuts about Rachel, and there wasn’t any chance he’d leave her side while she was in such distress. He was glad Parker would be there to protect them in case the Cupid Killer tried something desperate.
Morris thumped the bull terrier on the side. Before he left, Nat showed him a tragically sad smile and then turned back to their daughter. Morris had never wanted to catch any bad guy more than this Cupid Killer.
He would’ve bet almost anything earlier that Jack Readinger was their guy, and he still couldn’t let go of the idea that Readinger was somehow involved, even though that no longer made sense. Was it possible that two men were committing these murders? It would be diabolical if that were true. If they caught one of the killers, but only had a heavily circumstantial case, the other could set up an airtight alibi by continuing the killings.
Morris shivered involuntarily over that awful thought. But even if they had to cross off Readinger, at least they weren’t starting from scratch: They now had a 9mm pistol from the killer, and they had the dead man left inside Rachel’s apartment. Rachel had told the first officers at the scene she had never seen the dead man before; that when she woke up the Cupid Killer had just killed this person. For some reason, this man had followed the Cupid Killer to Rachel’s apartment and confronted him there. He didn’t have any identification on him, and from photos that were texted to Morris, the man looked like a meth addict and could’ve been living on the streets. But there had to be a connection between him and the Cupid Killer. The first step was to check the shelters, drug clinics, meth dealers, and skid-row boarding houses, and figure out who this man was, and maybe that would lead them to the killer.
Morris got a call from Polk, first asking about Rachel, then telling him that Jill Kincade’s parents didn’t recognize Readinger. “They’re both sure he wasn’t at the engagement party. I could try showing the dirtbag’s photo to other guests, but I think I’d be wasting my time.”
“I’d have to agree,” Morris said. “I’m heading back to the office. Let’s regroup there and see if we can come up with any ideas while LAPD works to identify our dead guy.”
“Makes about as much sense as anything,” Polk agreed.
Later, when Morris was pulling into his spot at the MBI office building, he got a call from Walsh to let him know the gun was a dead end. “On a hunch, I called Matt Kammer and asked if the Cupid Killer had taken a gun from his house, and he told me he had bought an illegal nine-millimeter because he was worried about his wife. He looked in the drawer where he’d left it, and it was gone.”
Morris said, “We got to find out who that dead man is.”
; “Hadley has made it a departmental priority. We’ve got a small army working on that right now. Should I still try to pull a warrant on Readinger’s apartment?”
“Yeah. I still think he’s involved somehow. Both he and the killer having those same tattoos are too big a coincidence.” Morris wasn’t sure he entirely believed that, but he also wanted Readinger’s apartment searched to see if they could find a connection between Readinger and Grace Warren. “Let me know when you get the warrant; I want in.”
“Sure thing.”
Morris felt emotionally and physically drained as he made his way into the building and took an elevator to MBI’s office suite. Blind rage flared up inside him whenever he let himself think about what had happened to Rachel and Gilman, and he knew he had to fight harder to keep those thoughts at bay. If he was going to catch this psycho, he would somehow have to keep a clear head.
He checked his watch. It wasn’t even seven yet. It felt so much later. He was dragging the same as if it were four a.m. He’d have Greta order pizza for the office. He planned on being there however long it took to get a lead on this killer, and he knew the rest of the team would be doing the same whether he asked them to or not.
He walked into the office and saw Greta behind the reception desk, and Lemmon leaning against it, immersed in a thick file. Greta’s face melted into a look of concern as she asked about Rachel and Gilman.
“Rachel’s hanging in there, trying to stay positive. Doug’s battling. It’s going to be a long night.”
Lemmon walked over to him and put a hand on Morris’s arm. “Doug’s tougher than he looks. And they got him at Ronald Reagan, right? That’s one of the best trauma centers in the country.”
Morris felt his eyes misting up. He choked back a sob, then said, “He saved my little girl’s life.”
“That’s what I’m talking about. And with a beautiful, smart, and loving girl like Rachel waiting for him, nobody’s got more incentive to pull through than he does. Keep the faith, okay? And in the meantime, take a look at this.” He handed Morris the file he’d been reading. “The Julia Swan homicide. Charlie faxed it over earlier, and this has to be our killer. Maybe you’ll be able to glean some other nugget from it.”
