Spree

by Michael Morley

  The coroner’s van turned heads. Parents hurried kids inside as the vehicle with blacked-out windows slid by.

  At the bottom of the street, Ruis saw the depressed faces of his team. Being one step behind this particular UNSUB had clearly started to take its toll on their spirits. There’d never been one moment when they’d seen him, let alone been able to chase, open fire on or capture him.

  Ruis dismissed most of them. Told them not to take the job home. Reminded them that family was a priority now. Their duties lay in reading stories, drinking wine and making love. It was a speech Jake had given him several times.

  Ruis held back only two units. The ones he needed to target the addresses of Januk Dudek and Warren Hendry.

  34

  Skid Row, LA

  Shooter stared at the keyboard and the last tweet from Elysia.

  He felt incapable of answering. Unable to do anything. His brain was fried.

  There seemed no moment to rest. No escape. No peace.

  The young cop’s body was only a room away, threatening his sanity with its dead flesh.

  He couldn’t dismember another corpse. All that rage that had fueled him and sustained him through the early kills was spent. Now he didn’t even have the strength to dispose of the last victim. Not the physical reserve, nor the mental fortitude.

  He was burned out. Wasted.

  The Internet was abuzz with his murders. This had been what he’d wanted. The surge of outrage—a preparation for his announcement of the injustice that had been committed. But it was costing him too much. He couldn’t sleep. There was no switching off. And his list was only half completed.

  “… you’ll only fuck things up and fuck yourself up…”

  Shooter covered his ears and tried to block out his brother’s voice.

  “Waaa—rrr—eee—n…”

  He ignored Winston’s call and stepped away from the computer. He told himself to keep his shit together. He could still see this through.

  Focus. That’s all he had to do. Stop thinking about how difficult things were and just do them.

  Shooter returned to the body. He couldn’t just leave it there. The room lacked air-conditioning and it would soon decompose.

  Hanrahan was a big guy but nowhere near as large or heavy as Dudek. He opened the door and dragged him by the feet. It was tough but he could move him.

  The cop’s head bumped over the doorway and spilled red goo as Shooter heaved his way into the washrooms.

  It was cooler in there.

  He stood panting and dripping sweat. His gaze drifted to the mutilated man. He felt nothing for him, nothing except the fear of being caught. He let go of the ankles and dropped the heavy-as-lead legs. Dizziness whooshed into his brain. A lack of sleep, food and calm caught up with him. He sat down and for a second shut his eyes.

  Winston was standing in the blackness of his mind, staring at him, bigger, stronger, all muscle and strength, the man he wanted to be. Shooter tried to banish him. Send him away. But even the thought made him feel guilty. He was betraying his brother’s memory.

  It was like killing him again.

  Winston’s mouth was open. He was speaking but no words were coming out.

  Warren had silenced him.

  Shut him up.

  Lost him.

  Big brother was dying and disappearing, silent and helpless like a space-walking astronaut who’s had his line cut and is drifting away.

  Little brother Warren felt left alone again.

  Abandoned. Deserted. Desperate.

  35

  Tess Holderbach, mother of two and leader of Team One, banged on the front door of the grubby apartment in Mid City that belonged to Januk Dudek. It was on Third Avenue, off West Adams Boulevard, just down from the local Polish church, Our Lady of the Bright Mount.

  If there was anyone on the other side of the paint-peeled wood, peering out at her through the dirt-encrusted spy hole, they’d have seen a round-faced redhead dressed in jeans and a baggy red sweatshirt. What they wouldn’t have seen was that she was wearing a Kevlar vest, and around the back of her jeans was a loaded Glock 23 ready to be pulled.

  Two feet on either side of her stood two more plainclothes SKU officers. One slid a Remington 870 shotgun out of his black duffel bag; the other lifted a door sledge into the strike position. Normally, such weaponry would be unnecessary for a call to check out a missing person, but given his connection to Hendry, Ruis had insisted no one take any chances.

  Tess gave courtesy one last chance. She knocked again, this time with a balled fist, and shouted, “FBI, Mr. Dudek. Please open up.”

  The request was loud enough for a white-haired woman two doors away to open her door and crane her neck into the hall.

  “Get back inside, lady.” Tess pulled the Glock and stepped to one side.

  The man with the sledge hit the woodwork. Splinters flew. The door bounced back on its hinges. Remington man kicked it wide and swung through the open space. Tess and her Glock followed.

  The apartment was a squalid rectangle filled by a moth-eaten sofa and an old box of a TV. A waterfall of fast-food cartons overflowed from a stuffed kitchen trash can onto a linoleum floor and across to the wall. Flies buzzed the trash and languished on a stack of unwashed plates. Tess could see that food scraps were all but soldered to the top plates. She guessed it was days since anything had been added to the stack.

  Remington man shouted from the doorway of a bathroom the size of a single closet. “All clear.”

  “Any soap in there?”

  He looked. “Yeah, small bar.”

  “It wet or dry?”

  He looked again. “Hard and cracked.”

  “Thought so.” Tess investigated a pile of bills near the moldy crockery. They were addressed to a Mr. J. Dudek. This was his place, no doubt about it.

  She walked to the bedroom and cringed. It stank to high heaven. She picked up hits of sweat, dust, cigarettes and stale male air. The floor of the tiny room was covered in abandoned newspapers and porn. All the material was in Polish.

  Tess hitched a radio from her hip and called Ruis to give him the bad news. “Dudek’s gone. All that’s left are his unpaid bills and bad habits. Best have CSIs turn the place—tell them they’ll need gas masks and double gloves.”

  36

  South Los Angeles

  The Jeep felt like a prison to Angie.

  She cracked the window open, not for air but to make a connection to the outside world.

  Warren Hendry was close.

  It wasn’t that she felt it in some inspired cop-instinct way.

  She knew it.

  He worked and lived locally and had unfinished business. He’d gone to ground and not been discovered. Each time he surfaced he got away with a new murder and they were all local.

  Local was his comfort zone.

  No doubt about it, Warren Hendry was still close.

  Angie wasn’t going to wait for Ruis, but she was torn between heading out to the home address Dominic Cleere had given them or waiting a while and driving to his workplace, the roadkill clearance depot. The latter was most likely to pay dividends. Her suspicions were that the home address would be bogus.

  One thing for sure—she wasn’t going back to the office.

  Chips interrupted her thinking with a call. She picked it up, guessing there’d been another tweet. “Hi there, what’s the latest?”

  “Nothing,” answered the young profiler. “We haven’t received anything from the UNSUB since our last message.”

  Angie swore to herself.

  “I do have the background you asked me for, though.”

  She closed her eyes and tried to clear space in her brain to process it. “Okay, fire away.”

  “It turns out that Winston and his brother were orphaned. Stayed together through care homes and some fostering. Records have gaps but it looks like Warren went to school and did okay. Not so with Winston. He was absent pretty much from the day he had his first class.
Some of it, of course, due to his spell in juvie. Seems that last time he got out of pokey he made some serious money. Anti-Gangs Unit says this was around the time they got rumors he was into dealing guns. Also a spell when he took little brother away from the kids’ home and brought him up on his own in Florence-Graham.”

  Angie took it all in. “How old would Winston have been then?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “That’s too young to care for a minor. Anyway, with his record, he would never have gotten custody.”

  “I don’t think Winston Hendry was the type who ever asked permission. He’d have just grabbed the kid and vanished. Social workers would have looked for a day, maybe two, then given up. You know the shit they have to deal with out in South Central.”

  “Same shit as ours, just earlier in the chain. Tell me more about Warren as a youngster.”

  Chips checked his notes. “Well, he was no school genius. His grades were all average or less, except in drama and computer studies, where he was up there with the best of them.”

  Angie smiled at the irony. “Well, he’s certainly put both of those to good use, as we know to our detriment. Computers would have been his escape from reality, and I’m pretty sure there was no shortage of drama in his parentless upbringing.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. The drama training almost gave him a big break—Hollywood style. He won a scholarship to LACHSA, the performing arts school. Dropped out in year three of a four-year course. I spoke to the dean and he says, up to then, Hendry was one of the stars of their Tech Track program.”

  “What’s Tech Track?”

  “It’s a course all performers have to do. Behind-the-scenes stuff—special effects, costumes, scenery, lighting and videography. Our guy really shined at this.”

  “ ’Course he did. Explains all the damned costumes and skin color changes.”

  “What now?”

  “I have to let all of this sink in, then work out how he’s likely to behave. Dramatic types tend to be highly strung but organized. They rehearse, they plan, they learn their lines and then they perform.”

  “That’s certainly our UNSUB.”

  “It is.” A theory was beginning to form in Angie’s mind. “What’s really interesting, though, is that it was always Winston who was in the limelight; he was the star of the street and Warren just kind of played a cameo part in life out there. Only when older brother went to the pen did his sibling feel compelled to step up and perform.”

  Chips knew she was heading to something. “You think that date of arrest is significant?”

  “Might be. Go back to Gangs. Get me more on Winston’s criminality. Where and when he was first and last arrested, any crime scene locations named in his charge sheet, courts he was tried at, station houses he got held in. See if there are any previous fits to JZ’s Saloon, Sun Western or the Strawberry Fields massacres.”

  Chips typed notes. “I’m on it.” He glanced at a Post-it he’d written on. “By the way, McDonald’s been down looking for you.”

  “Damn.”

  “Actually, she was really nice. She was asking how you were. Said she just wanted to touch base when you have a moment.”

  “You sure that was McDonald?”

  “Yep, I’m sure. She still scolded me for how I was dressing.”

  37

  Ruis took two phone calls as he was driven in an SKU van over to East Eighty-Seventh Street, the last known address of Warren Alexander Hendry.

  The first told him that a street patrol had found Januk Dudek’s car parked at a West Side hotel after a bellboy noticed one of its tires was blown and they tried to trace the owner among their guests. From what Tess had said, Dudek wasn’t the kind of guy who could afford to stay at joints like that.

  The second was more serious.

  Nathan Payne was dead.

  He’d died on the way to hospital.

  Ruis thought about calling Angie straightaway and then realized he was just being selfish. His motive was solely to get it over with. On reflection, he decided to let her get through today if possible, then break the news in the morning.

  He was still in a daze when he got out of the vehicle a block away from Hendry’s building—the address Dominic Cleere had given him.

  SKU officer Todd Garcetti met him at the curb. “The guys are all plotted out, boss. They’re ready to go when you are.”

  Ruis walked to the back of an obs van. He checked the monitor. Garcetti’s team was deployed around the doorways, stairwells, fire exits and main entrance. No way was this sonofabitch getting out. “Okay,” he said to his colleague, “do it.”

  Garcetti bent over the mobile comms box and called Hendry’s landline.

  It rang for a long time; then a male voice answered the withheld number with a hint of suspicion in his tone. “Hello?”

  “Hi,” said the SKU agent breezily. “We’re from the State Lottery. We’re looking for a Mr. Warren Hendry.”

  The caller hung up.

  Garcetti looked toward Ruis, who’d been listening on headphones. “You want me to recall?”

  “No. We can’t afford the time delay.” He clicked his radio. “Team Two, go. Go. Go.”

  Seconds later, a sledgehammer hit the front door.

  The big slab of wood held.

  The hammer man hit it again.

  It still held.

  “Fucker’s reinforced,” he announced, red-faced.

  “Step away.” Another SKU agent leveled his shotgun at the lock and blasted it twice.

  It booted in.

  Three black-clad operatives burst through the opening.

  A man ran from the room in terror.

  “FBI! Stop or we’ll shoot.”

  He ducked around the corner.

  They followed.

  A teenager was at the sink, frantically trying to flush a bag of dope. His hollow-eyed girlfriend was cowering in the corner, face buried beneath her hands and pulled-up knees.

  Ruis watched it all on a monitor in the truck. He turned away in despair. There was only one more place for them to hit.

  Warren Hendry’s work depot.

  38

  South Los Angeles

  The list Chips sent Angie was a long one.

  Fortunately, most of the locations were within a short distance of each other.

  She started in Watts, an unimpressive poverty-blighted settlement overshadowed by the extraordinary, Gaudíesque Watts Towers. Even though she’d seen the giant, weirdly Gothic spires thousands of times, she still couldn’t help but stare up at them. They’d been built by a local artist back in the early to mid-twentieth century and rose almost a hundred feet. The twisting metal girders were encrusted with broken bottles, tiles, metal and stones that had been found discarded on neighborhood streets.

  It was also the spot where Winston Hendry first got arrested as a juvenile.

  He and his buddies had clashed with a Latino gang and as a result a Hispanic boy ended up hospitalized with stab wounds.

  Watts was certainly a tough hood.

  During the day it was filled with locals working hard to make a living. At night, the place crackled with tension. Race. Poverty. Gang grudges. They were all incendiary ingredients that got banged together far too hard and far too frequently.

  Beneath the shadows of the defiant towers stood a well-frequented arts center, a place Angie was certain Hendry Junior would have visited and whiled away time in.

  She spent almost half an hour asking around and drawing blanks. Angie drove away feeling she’d missed something.

  Her next stops were schools in Florence-Graham that the Hendry boys had attended. She spent another thirty minutes walking the sprawling blacktopped grounds where they’d played and visiting the worn outbuildings of Ninety-Sixth Street Elementary School where Winston had attended the odd lesson and Warren had shown flashes of promise.

  Again no one was saying anything of value. The name Hendry seemed to pull down a curtain of silence.

 
; Angie checked the long strips of nearby wasteland that contained the power pylons and dense trees that ran along Success Avenue. She found hideouts for the homeless but nothing sophisticated enough to meet the high-tech needs of the man she was hunting.

  Close to exhaustion, she bought a bottle of water and a bar of candy from a shop off Firestone Boulevard. It came as no surprise that the storekeeper knew nothing about Warren or Winston.

  Her cellphone showed two missed calls from Sandra McDonald. When she dialed back she was relieved to hear a no-nonsense voice message. “This is McDonald, leave a message, thanks.”

  “Hi, this is Angie Holmes. Really sorry I missed your calls. I’m still out of the office. I guess you’re at dinner so I won’t disturb you by calling again. Hopefully I’ll catch you in the morning. Bye.”

  She took a final swig of water and set off to finish her list.

  It was creeping toward half-past eight and she knew Warren Hendry was due to start his shift at Cleereroads in just over thirty minutes’ time.

  Angie looked up at the sky. The light was fading fast and with it her hopes.

  39

  The local Cleereroads depot lay near the cross of the Santa Monica Harbor and Rosa Parks freeways. Ruis Costas checked his watch as he walked through the gates of the local depot.

  He passed a sign marked INCINERATOR and a row of E Wagons that would soon be filling up with roadkill from LA’s highways and byways. Alongside him was Tess Holderbach, the redhead who’d turned over Januk Dudek’s apartment. Her squad members and others from Team Two were slipping into covert positions around the outside of the unit.

  As he entered the building, Ruis spotted a cleaner in a blue apron pushing a mop kart. He shouted to her, “Hey, we’re looking for the supervisor’s office.”

  The young Polish woman turned and fingered back a fall of black hair that had escaped from a slide. “You police?”

  “It doesn’t matter who we are,” answered Tess. “Where’s your boss?”

  The woman swayed a little. “Have you found that niechlug?”