by JJ Lamb
“So, Ms. Stenz, I know you said you worked with Ms. Benke. Did you know both victims?”
“Both victims?” Gina said.
“Well, there’s an older women in the back bedroom. You didn’t know that?”
“Inspector, we didn’t think about there being other victims,” Harry said. “We saw Maria, immediately dialed 911, and waited. That was it.”
“Gina and Harry came with me,” Lolly said, “because I asked them to. But I wasn’t aware there was anyone else was living with Maria. I knew her mother had suffered a stroke. I assumed she was living in a rehab facility.”
“But you did work with her?”
“I’ve only been at the job for two months. I haven’t had a chance to get to know anyone really well.”
“From identification in the second victim’s wallet, it was probably Ms. Benke’s mother.” The inspector seemed really annoyed with them. “There’s a walker in there and a lot of other medical paraphernalia.”
“Do you mind if we take a look?” Harry said. “We might be able to help. The three of us are nurses; we probably could help identify any medical problems she had.”
“I was hoping Mulzini might be on call.” Gina forced a smile. “He’s a friend of ours.”
The inspector chuckled. “You know that pain in the ass Mulzini?”
“Yes.”
The inspector lost his smile. “He’s been out on sick leave for the last couple of weeks.”
“What’s wrong?” Harry said.
The inspector became jittery. “I don’t know. They don’t tell us anything. I called the schlub, but he was tight-lipped about the whole business.” The inspector looked at the three of them. “All right, come on back. Let me know what you think of her medical status. Otherwise, by the time the MEs finish, the killer could be half way around the world.”
They walked past the bedroom where Maria was, continued on around a corner and into the other bedroom.
Gina whispered in Harry’s ear, “I can see why we missed it with that turn in the hall.”
Harry nodded. “I don’t think any of us wanted to do any more looking around after we found Maria’s body.” He gave Gina a don’t-say-a-word look.
Outside the bedroom door, the inspector said, “Now don’t freak out on me. It’s really bad in there.”
When they walked inside, Gina’s throat closed. That was a good thing because the scene was a nightmare, enough to make anyone barf. Both Gina and Lolly grabbed Harry and held on for dear life.
Like Maria, the woman had something stuffed into her mouth. Also, her hands and feet were bound. There was blood everywhere and the metallic smell permeated the room, but unlike Maria, this woman’s trail of blood started at a vertical slice through her lips that continued down her whole torso.
Her neck had been slashed too, but instead of a smooth slice like Maria’s, this cut had been slow and jagged.
“It looks like she was alive up until her carotid was severed,” Harry said to the inspector.
“Yeah, I think the bastard raped and tortured her before he finished her off.”
Gina edged to the bed stand and looked at the bottles of medications. She lifted each one and read the label. “Considering her age and her medications, plus the equipment and the kind of books she was reading, I think she was most likely recovering from a stroke.”
Harry and Lolly agreed.
Gina was compelled to look into the woman’s eyes, just as she had with Maria, whose eyes had reflected horror.
Her mother’s eyes told a different story.
Gina saw only resignation.
Chapter 13
Vlad looked intently at the filet mignon the waiter placed in front of him. He cut into the center with surgical precision. It was rare, just the way he liked it, and he nodded at the waiting server. He sliced off a large piece for his first bite, chewed slowly, and savored it.
Perfection.
He always ate at Rizzo’s after a kill. Here, everything would be as exceptional as he was. After all, he did his job well—he expected the same from others.
He’d come here right after the hit—after killing Tallent’s target, Maria Benke. Her mother was only collateral damage control—a loose string he’d had to cut away.
Chewing the steak, he visualized how he’d finished the hit with a final slash across Maria’s neck.
Bloody and naked, he’d gone down the hall, knife in hand, the same one he’d used on Maria. He walked into the mother’s room which was heavy with the odors and messiness of some kind of sickness—the stink of decay.
The first thing he did was check the woman’s closet, the way he had her daughter’s. There would be no witnesses when he was finished.
His parents’ murderers had been sloppy. They’d left Vlad behind to remember, cling to every single detail of the crime—the death scene was seared in his brain forever.
Maria’s mother had looked at his naked body. He watched the fight go out of her when he placed the knife on the bedside table. Her gaze followed his every move as he advanced from closet to dresser, where he rummaged through all the drawers before pulling out one of her nightgowns. He carefully cut it into strips with his bloody knife to tie her hands and ankles.
She’d offered no resistance when his hands moved up and down her old and wrinkled body, or when he lashed her to the bed. He wanted to toy with her, the way he had with Maria, but her lack of movement, her complete surrender didn’t inspire his sense of perfection.
Vlad pictured his mother trying to move her hips away, fight the thrust of her attacker. But when Vlad pushed himself inside Maria’s mother, she remained so limp she might as well have been a corpse already.
Tears gushed down her cheeks when he grabbed the knife from the table and started slicing from her mouth on down.
She didn’t scream; she didn’t even whimper.
Annoyed, he’d slowly cut across her neck to make her suffer. But when her blood flew up like a geyser spraying the air, her eyes remained steady and fearless.
Vlad didn’t like that memory. He pushed his plate away, with its half-eaten steak.
“Is there something wrong, sir?” the waiter said, hurrying to the table.
“No! Just take it away and bring me a double Stolie. Make sure it’s ice-cold.”
“Yes, sir.”
He caught a cab to Chinatown and went directly to his favorite Pai Gow game. It was not a good decision. When he finally came back out to Grant Avenue. The owners of the game were holding his chit for $10,000.
Not a good decision at all.
* * *
None of them had spoken during the cross-town drive. Now, the three of them still sat silently in Lolly’s Honda outside Gina and Harry’s apartment building. All the happiness and optimism Gina had felt earlier was stripped away—she felt wasted and empty
“Come inside, Lolly,” Gina finally said. She could barely feel her lips move. “Let’s have some coffee and talk for a while.”
Lolly started crying; she covered her face with her hands. “I don’t want to talk about it right now. I keep thinking that if we’d gone to see her sooner, we might have saved her.”
“Come on, Lolly, it’s not your fault,” Harry said. “It is what it is.”
“Please don’t say that, Harry,” Gina said. “You know how much I hate that meaningless expression.”
“Don’t like it much myself, doll. But it fits the situation.” He reached between the front seats and squeezed her arm. “There was nothing we could have done to save her.”
“It was all so strange. I knew she was afraid of Tallent,” Lolly said. “She was frantic and convinced she might be murdered. She made me uneasy and I was scared when I came to you. But deep down, I never really dreamed someone would actually kill her.” Lolly wiped away tears and blew her nose. “I tried to tell myself that what she was really afraid of, was being fired.”
“Mort Tallent has a reputation for being a badass,” Gina said. “But in the
short time I’ve been in CCU, he’s been one of the calmest people I’ve ever worked with. Even when I screwed up one of his NPO orders.”
“You didn’t?” Lolly said.
“The time you fed a patient before a procedure, right?” Harry said.
“That’s the one. They had to put off a trip to the Cath Lab that day because of me,” Gina said. “In my defense, the bed chart had nothing on it about NPO and I missed it in the nurses’ notes. So I gave her breakfast.”
“What did Tallent do?” Lolly asked.
“Well, I expected him to rant and rave. I mean, I had it coming, and he’s not known to be understanding with the nursing staff. But he was truly nice about it.” Gina said. “I was shocked, but, you know, why look a gift horse in the mouth?”
“Me, I dread going to work tomorrow,” Lolly said. “Now I have to find an opportunity to take a look at the office files.”
“You can’t do that, Lolly,” Gina said. “You could end up dead, too.”
“How else are we going to find out what it was Maria saw, what she was so afraid of?”
“There has to be a way to get to the truth,” Gina said.
“Just a minute!” Harry barked. “You’re not getting involved in this, Gina Mazzio. Have you forgotten how you almost got killed a year ago sticking your nose into other people’s business?”
“Stop it! You make me sound like some old busybody. I only got into trouble because people needed help.”
“But why do you always have to be the one to go looking for the answers?” Harry’s hair was flying every which way, his voice was rising, and he was half out of his seat.
“I’m sorry I got you two into this mess,” Lolly said. “I didn’t know who to turn to.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Gina said. She took a long moment to think. “Do you really think you can get into the office’s bookkeeping files without getting caught? Or Tallent’s private files?”
“Very risky.”
“Gina, you’re doing it again,” Harry said. “Back off! This isn’t your fight.”
Lolly looked at Harry, then back at Gina. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”
Chapter 14
Mort Tallent showed his “Do it” chip to the man dressed in a tux at the doorway. The name of the club had intrigued him ever since Vlad told him about it a couple of months ago. What Vlad didn’t tell him about was the hefty fee Tallent would have to pay up front if he wanted to join.
“Anything worth doing comes at a price,” his dad would have said.
He stepped through the doorway onto plush burgundy carpeting. A tall, gorgeous brunette immediately laced her arm through his.
“Good evening, sir,” she said in an almost-but-not-quite sultry voice.
“Hello.”
He didn’t really know what to do next. He’d never been to an S&M club—didn’t even know if it was something he wanted to do. But after Vlad called and said that Maria would no longer be a problem, he was determined to celebrate his freedom with something new and different.
The woman led him into a dimly lighted dressing room; the walls and the ceiling were covered with mirrors. There was no one else in the room.
“Please remove all of your clothing and slip into this,” his escort said, offering him a black suede loincloth. “Someone will come for you in a few minutes.” She smiled and walked out.
He was beginning to think this was a dumb idea, but everything he’d done this night had been to keep Maria’s face from flashing in his head. He’d already downed an entire bottle of Merlot without feeling even the slightest buzz.
He couldn’t stop thinking about Maria, wondering if she had suffered. He hadn’t wanted her to feel pain.
I liked her. She should have kept her nose out of my affairs. It was all her own fault.
He stripped. Since there was no place for him to put his clothes, he laid them neatly on the floor and put on the soft loincloth.
He looked at himself in the mirrors. For the first time, he admitted to himself that he looked every single day of his fifty-five years. Maybe older. When did his paunch get so big and the muscles in his arms so small? And what happened to his chest? His pecs?
Pectoralis major. In my case, minor, very minor. God, how I’ve let myself go to seed.
Well, at least he still had that bushy crop of hair on the top of his head even though the streaks of gray were turning into wide roadways.
What the hell am I doing here anyway?
He was about to shed the loincloth, get dressed again, and walk out of the club when another voluptuous female, this one a redhead, came into the room through one of the mirrored doorways. She was totally naked, except for five-inch heels. No question, she was a natural redhead. He gulped several times and wanted to cross his hands across the front of the loincloth, which was starting to push out.
“Madame Catcora is waiting for you.” She placed a hand gently on his forearm and led him back through the doorway. He walked obediently along side of her despite a strong desire to cut and run.
“Where are we going?”
“As I said—to Madame Catcora.” Her voice was very soft.
Tallent was now in a torch-lit hallway that ramped sharply downward. They walked for what seemed like forever before entering a small room that was even dimmer than the hallway and glass-paneled dressing room.
Standing in front of him on a raised platform was a woman in a black bodice corset that extended from her breasts to her hips. Her legs were very long and seemed to go on forever before ending with narrow feet inside a pair of glittering silver shoes with spiked heels. He couldn’t see her face. Once again he wanted to turn away, run, but he couldn’t do anything other than stare at the hairless vulva that was right in front of his eyes.
“Come over here!” She pointed to a specific spot with the end of a whip that was silver, like her shoes.
Again, all he wanted to do was run, but his legs betrayed him and carried him to the designated spot.
As he moved forward, he noticed another man in the room, dressed the same as Tallent. The man’s eyes were wide open and his expression said that he, too, wanted to escape.
Madame Catcora seemed to float down from the platform; her black mascara-coated eyes made her look like a demon. With the heels, she must have been six-five or so. She walked up to the other man, bent slightly at the waist, licked his face, and moved down to suck his nipples.
“Tie him up!” she ordered.
A huge, buff man, also dressed in a loincloth, stepped out of the darkness. An overhead soft spotlight followed him as he tugged the man to a scaffold and slipped his wrists into cuffs that were chained to the framework. A swift yank also pulled away the loin cloth.
Without a word, Madame Catcora began to lash him with her short whip, gently at first, then with more and more force until he cried out for her to stop.
She moved closer, licked his face again. “What’s the matter, little man?”
Madame Catcora waited for an answer that never came.
It was only then that Tallent noticed the man had an enormous erection. He couldn’t take his eyes off of it, watched intently as the woman ran one hand up the man’s thigh and let it come to rest on his buttock.
With her other hand, she reached out and removed a huge dildo from the drawer of a stand next to the scaffold. She held it in front of his face, wiggled it a couple of times, and squeezed his buttock. “Isn’t this what you’ve been waiting for?”
Mort Tallent turned around, ran from the room, up the ramp, and into the mirrored dressing room. Half-dressed, he raced out of the club as though demons were chasing him.
Chapter 15
The next day, during her lunch break, Gina found a quiet corner in the nurses’ lounge and sipped at a cup of coffee. She’d added more half-and-half than she should have, along with two teaspoons of sugar. It was like having a low-calorie desert.
It was one of those days.
The chair she’d snagged
was almost too comfortable, like almost everything in the new CCU wing. She pulled out her cell and hit the button for Inspector Mulzini. After the fourth ring, he picked up.
“Yeah?”
“Hi, Mulzini. Um, you sound like you’re ripping mad. If this is a bad time, I’ll call back later.”
“If I hadn’t seen your goofy name, Mazzio, I wouldn’t have picked up. I’m not in the mood to talk to much of anybody lately. What’s it been, a year since I last saw you?”
“Yep. Been no hot water for you to pull me out of lately.”
“A whole year, huh?”
“Something like that.” She paused for a moment before adding, “Rumor has it that you’ve been out sick for a couple of weeks.”
“Yeah, so what? I’ve got months of sick leave coming. And that’s exactly what I told Harry when he called.”
“Well, you don’t have to chew my head off. We’re concerned about you.”
The phone went quiet for a long time. Gina began to think he’d hung up on her.
“Sorry, Mazzio, guess I sound like a nut, but just between you and me, I‘ve got an appointment with a doc tomorrow and I’m ... I’m kinda scared.”
“Oh, Mulzini! I’m so sorry.” She held her breath for a moment, trying to squash her own fears for her friend. “If you don’t mind my asking, what’s going on?”
Another long silence.
Mulzini had always been pretty much up front with her from the first day they’d met four years ago, but now he was holding back. If the inspector in charge of Maria Benke and her mother’s murders hadn’t said something at the crime scene about Mulzini, she’d have been in the dark altogether. It had to be something big to keep that workaholic away from the job.
“Listen, you and I have been friends since I came to California,” Gina said. “You’re my go-to guy in law enforcement. When I heard you’d been out sick for two weeks, I was ... was worried. You can’t blame me for that, can you?”
“It’s my ticker.”
“Your heart? What about it?” She was fighting hard to remain calm, but she couldn’t help it—she was scared.
