by J L Aarne
“In my professional opinion, the perpetrator of these crimes is a disturbed man who hates women almost as much as he hates himself,” he bit out. “In my professional opinion, if you let Henry Cairn go, he will do it again, except this time more innocent people will die.”
“Objection!” Pruitt shouted.
“I have no more questions for Agent Herod at this time, Your Honor,” DeWitt said. He sat down.
Pruitt walked around the table where he’d been sitting with his client and made a show of reading something from a file. “Agent Herod, isn’t it true that one of the women in this case did in fact go on several dates with my client?”
Ezekiel knew where this was going. “Yes. Annalisa Burke, the first victim, dated Henry Cairn briefly,” he said. “But she cut off contact with him after their second date and their relationship was never sexual—”
“Please just answer the question,” Pruitt said sharply.
“Yes,” Ezekiel said. “They dated.”
“Isn’t it possible that Miss Burke conceived the child that she claims was a product of rape by my client through consensual intercourse then? After all, there was a preexisting romantic relationship and—”
“Objection,” DeWitt said.
“No,” Ezekiel said.
“It’s not possible for a woman, who has dated a man in the past, to change her mind about terminating their relationship and engage in sexual intercourse with him that then results in a pregnancy?” Pruitt asked. There was some stirring in the courtroom and DeWitt looked ready to object again. “Or for that woman to later have regrets about it and—”
“That’s a hell of a story,” Ezekiel said flatly. DeWitt did not object, but he looked uneasy. “And sure, yeah, anything is possible, but that’s not what happened. Miss Burke was violently raped and beaten. She recognized her attacker because of her prior association with him as being Mr. Cairn and reported it. The rape resulted in a pregnancy, which she terminated. She gave permission to have the fetus tested for paternity against a DNA sample taken from Mr. Cairn.”
“Which turned out to be vital in the arrest of my client, didn’t it?” Pruitt asked.
“Yes,” Ezekiel said.
“So, if the aborted child was conceived through consensual means—”
“It wasn’t.”
“But if it was—”
Ezekiel steepled his fingers on the flat tabletop before him and said, “Miss Burke went on a total of two dates with your client in the month of August, 2014. He made her uncomfortable during the second one by making inappropriately lewd comments to her throughout dinner. She ceased contact with him. According to our medical examiner, who has already testified I believe, she became pregnant several weeks after ending the relationship. There is no evidence whatsoever that Miss Burke renewed contact with your client, though he did attempt to call her many times.”
Pruitt frowned at him and returned his gaze to the file he had consulted several times while speaking to Ezekiel. It was a prop was all. There was nothing in it that he didn’t know by heart.
“There are many inconsistencies in the initial police reports and later statements made by the alleged victims,” Pruitt said. “I would look at such contrary statements as lies, Mr. Herod. Yet your investigative team did not seem to regard them that way. Why not?”
Ezekiel did not correct him about his title. He didn’t want to come off as petty or combative with the jury, at least not any more than he had to. “It wasn’t my investigative team. I lead a team of behavior analysts for the FBI that consulted on this case with the LAPD, but my people were not directly involved in the investigation itself.”
“And yet you visited the crime scenes and spoke to the alleged victims,” Pruitt said.
“They’re victims, not alleged victims,” Ezekiel snapped, his temper slipping just a little.
Pruitt smiled faintly and Ezekiel calmed himself by imagining tearing his lips off.
“We try to visit the crime scenes whenever possible. It helps us to see things more clearly and sometimes recognize evidence that would otherwise be missed by looking at photographs and listening to statements only,” Ezekiel said. “But the lead investigator was Detective Lukas Weir.”
Which Pruitt knew perfectly well. He was trying to confuse the jury a little about who Ezekiel was and put some doubt on his testimony.
“Why did your team—or the investigators—not view the contradictory statements of the victims as suspicious or indicative of falsehood?” Pruitt asked.
“Because victims of rape often have distorted memories of the event,” Ezekiel said. “They often remember things about what happened later that they initially did not. Victims of traumatic events also experience distorted, lost or even false memories. Rape is traumatic, Mr. Pruitt. Rape as violent as what happened to these women even more so.”
“So, it would be possible for them to lie without even knowing they were lying?” Pruitt asked.
“That is not what I said,” Ezekiel said.
Pruitt smiled. “Thank you, Mr. Herod. That will be all.” He turned and walked back around the table to sit. “I have no further questions for the witness.”
Henry Lee Cairn was grinning. He leaned over so Pruitt could say something in his ear and he looked so smug that for a second Ezekiel saw red. He heard a mountain lion’s roar in his mind as he stood and stepped down from the stand. Henry Lee Cairn followed him with his eyes as Ezekiel crossed the room and walked by their table.
Ezekiel could feel the growl rising in his throat as he straight-armed the door out of his way. He walked out as quickly as he could and left the courthouse.
Chapter 23
That evening after dinner at home with Jacob, Ezekiel told him he had some work to do at the office and returned to Rainer’s apartment. It wasn’t a total lie; he did have work to do. There was always work to do if he needed it. He even sat doing some of it in the car with his laptop propped against the steering wheel as he kept one eye on Rainer’s door.
From an observer’s perspective, Rainer led a pretty boring existence. He had a career, he had friends, he had a (much too) close relationship with his brother. He went to work, he exercised, he smoked too much and slept too little. He was liked by people who had a passing acquaintance with him and well respected. A serial killer couldn’t ask for a better cover. Being boring was one of their greatest weapons. A person could get away with almost anything if they were boring.
At 8:15, Rainer’s friend Elijah and his wife Erzsé left the apartment. They had been there when Ezekiel arrived and some men with a moving truck had been there taking furniture up the stairs into Rainer’s place. They had left half an hour earlier and Elijah and Erzsé had stayed to visit.
Ezekiel watched them descend the steps, get into their car and drive away. He had looked into them and found the kind of odd, meticulous paper trails and historical records that he had come to expect in those of his own kind who had lived more than one lifetime. He didn’t know exactly which race of shifters they were, but they were not human.
It was really strange how many of them Rainer Bryssengur had in his life. Ezekiel wondered if Rainer knew. Somehow he doubted it. If he did, he wouldn’t still be human himself.
Things were quiet for about an hour after Elijah and Erzsé left. Then Rainer’s front door burst open and he shot outside onto the walkway screaming and cursing.
Ezekiel put his laptop aside to watch.
“Fuck you! You fucking piece of shit! You stupid motherfucker! You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, you—!” A burst of papers went flying out into the parking lot and the small courtyard in the center of the apartment complex.
In high functioning, intelligent psychopaths, violent outbursts are less common, but they still occur, often without warning and with very little provocation, said the wildlife narrator in Ezekiel’s head. He grinned.
“Ignorant fuck!” Rainer screamed at the softly falling pages. “What a bunch of horseshit! Dem
on possession?! I’ll show you fucking demon possession!”
Such outbursts are more likely to occur in territory that the psychopath has claimed and marked as his own. In his own territory, the free-range psychopath is more at ease and his guard is down.
Rainer stomped on something, kicked it, stomped on it again and kicked it under the lower bar on the handrail. It appeared to be the ripped and dismembered cover of a hardback book. It flew out into the parking lot with the shredded pages, bounced off the hood of a car and landed on the blacktop.
Anything can trigger such an extreme reaction in the psychopath, especially if it contradicts his own concept of reality, from a burned dinner to… a book.
Rainer went back inside and slammed the door behind him.
Ezekiel put his head down on the steering wheel and laughed until his stomach hurt. When he had managed to control it, he got out of the car and walked across the lot to take a look. Rainer was an English teacher who read crappy prose every single day for a living, so whatever had upset him, it must have been pretty bad. Ezekiel was dying of curiosity.
He picked up a handful of pages and found the header at the top. The book was Dexter in the Dark by Jeff Lindsay. Ezekiel had heard of them and seen some episodes of the television show, but he had never bothered to read the books himself. He knew what they were about and they seemed the kind of thing someone like Rainer would enjoy. Not something to warrant the epic tizzy fit he had just witnessed.
He folded one of the pages and slipped it into his pocket.
The next day, Ezekiel stopped at a bookstore and picked up a paperback copy of the novel. He took it to work with him and intended to begin reading it during his lunch hour. Until he opened his lunch and completely forgot about it.
In the Tupperware container Jacob had packed his lunch in, he found a slab of what looked like white sponge atop a mound of spinach, nuts and berries. When Jacob went off the rails, finding strange, mostly inedible things in his lunch was one of the early signs, so Ezekiel had a moment where he actually thought it was a sponge. He picked it up by two fingers and examined it to see if it had been placed with the rough green scratchy side down.
Crewes walked by his open office door and Ezekiel called to her. She came to stand in the doorway. “Yes, sir?”
Ezekiel dropped the rectangle back into the container. It didn’t feel like a sponge. “What the hell is this?” he asked, pointing at it. He thought he knew, but he wanted confirmation.
Crewes looked at it and frowned. “Uh. Tofu, I believe.”
Ezekiel put the lid back on it. “I’m going out of the office,” he said, standing.
“Yes, sir.”
“Call me if you need me.”
“Okay.”
“Goddamn tofu,” Ezekiel muttered.
He picked up chili cheese fries to go at a greasy spoon diner he liked and drove to the university to sit outside the liberal arts building and watch for Rainer. He had a single class on Mondays at 10 o’clock, office hours until lunch, then he was free to leave and he almost always did.
The fries came with a set of plastic utensils, but Ezekiel opted to eat them with his fingers.
He wasn’t there very long when Rainer emerged from the building and walked down the shaded pathway toward the parking lot. His car was parked near Ezekiel but his head was down, reading something as he walked and he didn’t notice Ezekiel.
Ezekiel tapped the horn.
Rainer stopped and looked at him. He smiled faintly and continued on to his car.
Ezekiel dropped a couple more fries coated in chili and cheese into his mouth before setting the food aside, wiping his hands and starting his car to follow him.
Rainer didn’t drive home and Ezekiel at first thought he was going to Thomas’s house, but he turned off into the city and got on the highway. He followed him to a tattoo shop in Echo Park. He parked across the street so he could watch those coming and going while he ate the rest of his lunch. As he was settling in to do that, Rainer crossed the street, tapped the roof of his car and leaned down to look in the window at him.
Ezekiel rolled the window down.
“So, I’m going to be in there for a while,” Rainer said. He looked up at the clear blue sky. “It’s about eighty degrees outside, which means you’ll be broiling at a good hundred or so in this nice little black car of yours by the time I leave.”
“What’s your point?” Ezekiel asked.
“My point is, if you’re going to stalk me, you might as well come inside where there’s air-conditioning,” Rainer said. He smiled and nodded his head toward the shop. “Come on.”
Ezekiel watched him go back across the street and inside the shop and he thought about it. He wasn’t finished with his lunch, but it was starting to congeal in an unappetizing way. Rainer was more interesting than chili cheese fries and Dexter any day. Ezekiel also had something of a tattoo addiction, which he kept a secret from his colleagues, so Rainer Bryssengur in a tattoo shop was twice as interesting.
He got out of the car, dumped the rest of his lunch in a trashcan and jogged across the street to the shop.
Rainer was sitting in a chair with his button-down shirt off and tossed over the back, arms bared in a white tank top while a young guy with spiked hair set up his tools. Ezekiel got his first good look at the tattoo he had only glimpsed before on Rainer’s upper right arm. It was a half sleeve, a heart with angel wings, a banner wrapping around it reading “If You Had A Heart This Is How It Would Break.” He caught Rainer’s eye and smirked. Rainer’s lips quirked.
Everyone with a secret self itched to be known.
Ezekiel turned his head to look at some of the flash art on the walls. He still had a little room on the sleeve on his right arm and like with most addictions, seeing it and being in the presence of it made him think about it and want it. But he would have to wait. He was too dedicated to keeping his addiction a secret to take one of the other chairs with Rainer looking on, roll up his shirtsleeve in front of him and do it now.
“Hey, we take walk-ins, too,” a man with a lot of facial piercings said as he walked out of the back of the shop and saw Ezekiel looking around.
“No, thank you,” Ezekiel said. He gestured with his thumb over his shoulder at Rainer. “I’m waiting on him.”
“That’s cool,” the guy said, and went by him.
“Thomas told me you came to see him at the restaurant the other day,” Rainer said.
The machine buzzed as the artist tattooing him started to work on the inside of Rainer’s left forearm.
“Yeah,” Ezekiel said.
“He said you weren’t really there in an official capacity,” Rainer said. “Your questions were all very personal.”
Ezekiel shrugged and turned back to face him. “So?”
“He was pretty mad,” Rainer said.
Ezekiel smiled and leaned on his elbows on a divider that separated the short entranceway into the shop from where Rainer sat. “I know,” he said. “He has a really awful poker face.”
“He has no poker face at all. Thomas has a temper,” Rainer said.
“And a record,” Ezekiel said.
Rainer gave him a sharp look. “Leave him alone.”
Ezekiel raised an eyebrow at him. “What if I don’t?”
Instead of answering him, Rainer changed the subject completely. “You work with serial killers a lot, Agent Herod.”
“My team and I, sure,” Ezekiel said. “We do other things, but yeah, we get to play with the real psychos a lot, too.”
Rainer smiled, looking down at his arm as the artist wiped at the blood and ink with a cloth. “What’s the worst one you’ve ever hunted? Personally, I mean.”
Ezekiel didn’t have to think about it much. The one who had turned him into the creature he was now would always be the worst. “When I was kinda new on the job they had a case out in New Mexico that was pretty brutal. The victims were maimed and ripped up. It was so bad that the Indians in the area talked about it
being skin-walkers. You know, monsters? Only something supernatural could do what this guy did, they said. And I saw the bodies and it was bad enough, you could almost believe it was some kind of half-animal, half-man thing doing it. Only a man could be that cruel and only an animal could be that vicious. He got the drop on me.”
Rainer looked at him critically. “You don’t appear maimed to me,” he said.
“I got scars. Most of them under my clothes, but that fucker got me with a… hand rake, I guess it was. You know, one of the old wicked metal ones? Sliced open my scalp.”
He stepped around the divider and crouched on his heels by Rainer’s right side. The bloody winged heart was close to his face as he took Rainer’s hand and ducked his head to place it there where he could feel the raised scars under his hair. The little white beads on the bracelet he wore on that wrist rattled softly and Ezekiel wondered what kind of bones they were really made of.
“Go ahead. Feel it,” Ezekiel said.
Rainer slipped his fingers through Ezekiel’s hair, ran his fingertips over the scars and petted his hand back. Ezekiel had always liked being petted and he closed his eyes. Rainer didn’t stop touching him after affirming that there were indeed scars there. He stroked his fingers through it again, wending them into the soft dark strands until Ezekiel could feel the urge to purr rising in his throat.
He made himself lift his head and Rainer’s hand fell away. Rainer closed his fingers into a fist like he had taken something from touching Ezekiel and he was keeping it for later.
“He left me for dead,” Ezekiel said, standing up again. “We never caught him, but the killings stopped. Guess he moved on.”
“Some of them do get bored with it and stop on their own I’ve heard,” Rainer said, shifting his gaze from Ezekiel back to his arm. Under the blood and smeared ink, the tattoo appeared to be words. “Like with anything, I can see where it would lose its novelty after a while. You bake enough cakes and you get tired of baking cakes. You kill enough people and you get tired of killing people. How many ways can you really dismember someone before it stops being a thrill and it just becomes a routine?”
