Stanton stretched his arms and stood up, arching his back as far as it would go before twisting his neck from side to side and spinning his arms. It was all in an effort to appear like he was limbering stiff muscles, but in reality, he was trying not to fall asleep.
He went around the makeshift call center and listened to everyone’s phone calls. Some of them were diligent and actually calling to try to help, many were not. Stanton walked the room once and went for the door to hit the vending machines for a Diet Coke when one of the interns said, “Detective, I think you should hear this.”
Stanton turned and walked to him. The intern put the call on speaker. It was an older woman stating that she had seen the man coming and going from the condominium next door. There was a young woman that lived there and she never had men over so it was odd to see him there.
“How old is the young lady?” Stanton asked.
“In her twenties I think. Pretty young thing. She’s in pictures she said.”
“Have you ever seen the two of them together?”
“No, he just comes and goes. He may be housesitting because I haven’t seen her lately. He looks just like the picture I saw on the news.”
Stanton got the address and thanked her for her call. They hung up and Stanton stood quietly a moment before saying, “I’m running down there myself. Tell Danny where I am when he comes by.”
“Sure.”
The condominiums were well kept and most of the cars in the ports were old Cadillacs and Lincolns and Buicks. Easily fifteen or twenty years old but appeared new, freshly cleaned with few dings and scratches. There were colorful flowers next to the common walks and a few of the windows had American flags hanging from them.
Stanton found the condo he was looking for and parked out front. Joy Division was playing on his CD player and he turned it down as he listened for anything around him. An elderly couple was up the private road a bit, arguing about something as they made their way to their car. Stanton waited until they had driven away before stepping outside and sitting on the hood of his car, looking around.
When he was satisfied that he wouldn’t hear anything he went to the front door of the condo and knocked. He rang the doorbell and put his ear to the door. There was no sound from inside. He walked around out front and noticed that the window leading to the kitchen was broken out and the shattered glass hadn’t been cleaned. He pushed through the shrubs and looked through the window. The kitchen was clean except for a few bowls that were lying out. All the drawers and cupboards were closed. He was about to turn away when he quickly glanced at the floor.
With murder scenes in homes and apartments, most landlords don’t tell prospective buyers and renters about the space’s history. As they pass by stains on the floors, most people assume they’re from wine or fruit juice. But when you see blood stains enough, you learn to recognize them. Blood is very unique. Blood from veins is bluer and darker than the red arterial blood and a good homicide detective can tell the difference right away. Stanton knew the small trail of droplets on the kitchen’s linoleum floor was of arterial blood, at least a few days old, that no one had bothered to clean up.
He looked both ways and saw that no one was around. He called into dispatch on his cell phone and gave his CAD call number for the homicide unit and requested back-up. The nearest unit was at least ten minutes away at another scene. He decided he couldn’t wait ten minutes.
Stanton hopped up onto the window and crawled into the home. The window was right above the sink and he put his palms down on the counters and pulled himself through before jumping onto the kitchen floor. He brushed off the shards of broken glass that had cut up his knees.
He waited quietly until he couldn’t hear his heart beating so loudly in his ears. He took out his firearm, a Desert Eagle .45, and held it low as he followed the trail of blood to the carpet of the hallway.
The condo smelled of apple blossoms. A bodywash or shampoo a teenage girl might select. A portrait of a family was up on the refrigerator. Three young girls and a mother and father. They were at Sea World in front of the walrus exhibit and the mother was making rabbit-ears on the father. Stanton went gun first down the hallway.
Creaking came from upstairs but not in a way that suggested someone was walking on the floor above him. More like the floorboards were settling in. He scanned the living room. Nothing out of the ordinary and he saw the stairs leading to the second floor. He took them gingerly as he made a slow ascent and heard a groan behind him.
He spun around, his weapon aimed at the origin of the sound coming from the living room, and noticed the bare feet sticking out from near the coffee table. The nails were painted red and the skin was tanned almost to the point of being orange. He leapt off the stairs and ran to the table, his weapon still in front, as he saw the young woman sprawled on the carpet in between the couch and the coffee table. A white bandage was wrapped around her head and near the back was a dark red stain on the gauze.
Stanton came and sat by her and soon heard sirens outside. The girl was only semi-conscience and a chain was binding her to the entertainment center. But Stanton didn’t remove it. Instead, he held her hand. She looked up at him once and said, “Can I go home now?”
“Yes.”
CHAPTER 46
Forensics, Stanton, and Slim Jim ran over the entire condo in the course of several hours. Amber was taken to the emergency room and Stanton had gotten word that she suffered a massive concussion but that she would be all right.
The latent print team had managed to find over twenty-five different sets of prints in the condo. Stanton had them only run the sets found on the windowsill. There were two: one was his, and the other was unidentified. Stanton found a number in his contacts and dialed as he sat down on the couch in the living room.
“Federal Bureau of Investigation, Los Angeles,” a female voice said on the other line, “how may I direct your call?”
“Mickey Parsons in Behavioral Science please.”
“Who may I say is calling?”
“Jon Stanton with the San Diego Police Department.”
“One moment.”
There was a long delay and then a click before Mickey’s voice came on the line.
“How are you, Jon?”
“Doing well. I haven’t seen you down at the gym in a while.”
“Been pretty slammed with paperwork these days.”
“I saw the news story about Evonich. That was good work.”
“Thanks. I wish we could’ve snagged him earlier. We searched one of his old homes in Lincoln County in Nebraska and found the remains of two girls. Sisters. We think there’s more, but no one’s coming forward with anything else.” Stanton heard some papers shuffling. “So I’m guessing this isn’t a call just to harass me about my fat ass. What’s going on?”
“I have a favor to ask. I was hoping you could run some prints through ViCAP for me?”
“No problem, shoot them over.”
“I need them as soon as possible. Preferably in the next couple of hours, Mickey.”
“Now that is a favor. Anything I can use to narrow the search? Locales or race?”
“Nothing. We know nothing about him other than a composite sketch we have from witnesses. They say he looked Caucasian but one of our witnesses saw him from relatively close and thought he might’ve been of Mediterranean or Middle Eastern descent.”
“Well, I’ll do what I can. Get me a print card couriered over and I’ll have my guys get on it.”
“You’re not even going to ask what it’s for?”
“I saw you on the news. I thought you might be calling us for something on this one. By the way, you looked like shit.”
“Thanks. And I owe you for this.”
“Beer and a burger is fine. I’ll let you know.”
Stanton hung up and placed the phone back in his pocket. He rose from the couch and walked over to the entertainment center. There was a rack of DVDs and he glanced through them quickly. They
were mostly Disney and Pixar films with a few romantic comedies thrown in.
“Detective?”
Stanton turned to see one of the forensics techs, a man named Lee Gyun, wiping the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand.
“Tell me you have something for me, Lee?”
“I have something for you.” He held out a small notebook with red leather binding. Stanton slipped on some latex gloves and then took it. “Found it in the bedroom upstairs on the nightstand. Could be our vics, I don’t know, I just flipped through it quickly.”
“Thanks.”
Stanton began going through the pages. The writings were in pen and they were so illegible he couldn’t make much of them. But there were passages that rang out to him. There were no dates and no times. Many sentences would end without a period and the next one would start immediately afterward on a completely separate idea. There was no name on the journal and it was possible that it belonged to the victim or a past victim. On the inside flap of the back cover was an imprint that said, MSH. On the cover, which was bland and gray, was a number: 1842.
Stanton flipped through it again. There was one passage toward the front that was fully legible:
they walk through their lives like billboards their clothing has the name of their God corporations on them and they advertise for them as if they are remarking on something of consequence they watch television shows now that feign reality in a way that demeans it they neglect the poor and the weak in favor of the wealthy they are ruled over by a small class of tyrants and they fight for their system as if it would ever give them a fair chance I walked to the store today to feel the air on my face and hear the whisper of the birds but instead only received lungfuls of black exhaust and air that smelled so putrid it made me gag I won’t be walking out there again
Stanton flipped through the rest of the journal, reading the legible portions. No names on any page. It was little more than rantings and some of them had apocalyptic predictions and spoke of cities turned to dust and brothers eating brothers. Stanton finished and placed it down on the coffee table. His cell phone buzzed in his pocket and he took it out; it was Childs.
“This is Jon.”
“What you got for me?”
“Journal and a set of prints. FBI’s running the prints through ViCAP right now.”
“What kind of journal?”
“Personal. Still don’t know for sure that it’s his, but I think so. Nothing to identify him in it.”
“Keep me updated.”
“How’s everything up there?”
“Still running down some leads where we can. The calls are dying out, though. We’ve only gotten maybe ten the past hour.”
“Let me know if there’re any good ones.”
“Okay.” A pause. “Jon, I never doubted you. I want you to know that. That’s not why I was riding your ass and took you off this case. There’s going to be other cases like this, and there’s going to be other vics. I need to know that I can trust you to follow orders. Can I trust you to do that?”
“Yeah, you can trust me.”
“Good. Call me if you find anything else.”
Stanton hung up and placed the phone back in his pocket. He couldn’t take this anymore. There were no rules to bureaucracy. Even if there were, they were probably corrupt and he wouldn’t be able to follow them anyway. Every day it was as if lead weights were being placed on his chest and he couldn’t get them off. They would just slowly accumulate until he couldn’t breathe anymore and one day would just suffocate him.
This was it, he thought. This was going to be his last case.
CHAPTER 47
It was almost midnight by the time Stanton parked in the underground garage and got out of his car to get some sleep. Tomorrow was Sunday and as much as he wanted to be back at that condo or in the hospital or interviewing the Richardsons, he couldn’t. It was the Sabbath and he fully believed that God had commanded us to rest on that day. So Slim Jim had taken over and would be contacting him Monday morning with the results of interviews and anything else they’d found in the condo.
He went inside and sat on his balcony before opening the journal found at the girl’s condo. There were passages that seemed to fade in and out of coherence but sometimes a lucid thought would come through. One passage stated that:
A baby screams when born and an old man screams when he dies how can anyone believe that a life that begins this way and ends this way is meant for anything but suffering?
He stared for a long time at the imprint on the back. MSH. They could have been the owner’s initials, but the imprint wasn’t written in. It was stamped, like an old library card of the type he had in elementary school. He brought his laptop outside on the balcony and googled “MSH.”
Several businesses came up as did a hormone with “MSH” as its acronym. He brought up a Word document and began typing in a column. He wrote:
HIGH SCHOOLS OR COLLEGES
FRATERNITIES
BUSINESSES
HOSPITALS
GOVERNMENT AGENCIES
NOVELTY STORES LIKE HALLMARK
There was always the possibility that the owner had simply ordered a stamp with their initials, and he couldn’t rule that out. But the stamp looked faded and old and the journal itself was something one would buy in bulk: a plain cover with cheap paper. It didn’t strike him as something a person would pick out while perusing a novelty store.
He limited his Google search to southern California and began searching for high schools with the acronym MSH. He followed through with colleges, universities, and private schools. One school did come up: the Madison Selena Hollinger School for the Blind. He clicked on their website and cut and paste the address and phone number into his Word document.
He then moved on to hospitals. The third result from the top caught his interest: the Mckay State Hospital of California. Stanton clicked on the link. He went to the ABOUT US tab and read their mission statement. It was a hospital for the criminally insane.
His guts tightened and his knees and belly had an icy feeling run through them. They were replaced by the warm sensation that came with adrenaline running through his body and heightening his senses. He saved the link to his favorites and did the same on his phone before reading through everything about the hospital. The clock on his laptop said 9:53 p.m. He decided to chance it and called the main line for the hospital.
“Mckay,” a feminine male voice said on the other end.
“Yes, this is Detective Jon Stanton with the San Diego Police. I’d like to set an appointment to see, hold on…is it a Dr. Nathan Reynolds?”
“Yeah, he’s the administrator. I’m just the night security I don’t set the appointments. But if you come in Monday morning he’ll be here. Come in like after ten ‘cause he has rounds until nine thirty.”
“Thanks. I’ll do that.”
Stanton hung up. He was about to decide what to do next when his phone rang. It was an unknown number.
“This is Jon Stanton.”
“Yes, is this the person that just called the Mckay Hospital?”
“Yes.”
“And who are you exactly?”
“I’m a detective with San Diego Police. Robbery-Homicide. Who am I speaking with?”
“Just one moment…hm, I just searched your name and phone number and it came back accurate. Well, Detective, this is Dr. Reynolds. I was told by night security that you’d called for me.”
“Yeah, they told me you wouldn’t be in until Monday.”
“Saturday nights are my call nights and I usually just spend them here. I prefer security not let anyone know.”
A flash entered Stanton’s mind. It was brief, no more than a second or two, but it encapsulated Nathan Reynolds life and gave Stanton a foundation that told him what type of man he was dealing with.
A man that had gone through multiple divorces, women marrying him for his status and realizing that being married to the ego of most physicians was full-
time work. He saw a man that drank or gambled or womanized, or had some vice that he clung to that he felt was necessary. No matter the cost. Stanton saw loneliness and pain, and belief that the time he spent with madness eased that pain. He pictured Nathan Reynolds sitting in a cluttered office with the screams of the insane around him, saying, At least I’m not them.
“I’m glad to hear that, Doctor. I had a few questions.”
“Certainly.”
“I found a journal. It’s bland looking and the corners are rounded with a rubber coating on them. There’s a stamp that says MSH on the inside of the back cover.”
“Yes, that’s one of ours. We issue journals to our patients for therapeutic purposes.”
“This journal was found at the scene of a kidnapping and we think the owner might be responsible for several homicides.” The line went silent, and Stanton noted that the doctor had even stopped breathing. “Doctor? Are you there?”
“Yes. There should be a code on the cover of the journal on the lower left hand side. A number.”
“Yes, it’s 1842.”
“Just a moment…Detective, I don’t think I can release this information without a court order. You will simply have to secure one for me.”
“You have a name, don’t you? Doctor, this man targets families. He’s killed—”
“I know perfectly well what he’s capable of, Detective. But I won’t be responsible for any HIPAA violations and lose my license. You will have to get a court order.”
“Can you tell me at least when he was last incarcerated?”
“We don’t incarcerate our patients, Detective,” he said, annoyed. “We treat them.”
“I apologize. When was he last in for treatment?”
“He was released a little over a month ago.”
“May I ask why?”
The doctor exhaled loudly. “There was a woman that worked here. She no longer does, Detective. She advocated for his release.”
Stanton read exactly what he was saying: the woman, probably a treating psychiatrist, had been sleeping with the man.
Arsonist Page 19
