Damaged Hope

by L. K. Hill

  “It’s looking that way,” Shaun said. “We swabbed everything in the box for forensic evidence. No DNA or prints, but the bottled soap matches the chemical makeup of what the killer squirts over his victims.”

  Kyra fought to wrap her head around it. Having a background in crime writing, she knew something of victimology. “But why would a pedophile who takes little boys suddenly start killing adult prostitutes? Don’t most serial killers who go after prostitutes do it because they believe they’re ‘cleansing society’ or something? It’s a completely different psychology than a pedophile.”

  “Yes, it is,” Shaun nodded.

  “The other possibility,” Cora chimed in, “is that we have two killers working together. One of them is Dillon’s kidnapper. He’s here primarily to torment Gabe. The other is killing women in the Mire.”

  Tyke shook his head. “Even that would be bizarre. There are plenty of instances of killers working together, but they generally do one of two things. Either play off one another, supporting one another’s crimes from afar, or actually commit the crimes together. Neither makes particular sense here. As you said Kyra, the psychology clashes too much.”

  “So what are we left with?”

  “A lot of questions,” Shaun said. “I think we need to work this case for both possibilities. Assume it’s the same killer, and investigate accordingly. Also assume they’re different killers and cover all the bases.”

  All three detectives nodded grimly. Kyra shivered. If they were the same person, then she’d been face to face with Dillon’s kidnapper in Old Abstreuse. If not, he still probably knew where Dillon’s kidnapper was. Kyra looked at Gabe. He studied the carpet, his eyes far away, but his chest heaved. Far more than it should have while sitting still.

  Kyra couldn’t imagine how personal this must feel. Or maybe she could. What if she came face to face with someone who knew where Manny was and wouldn’t tell her? She’d probably look about how Gabe did right now.

  “So,” Shaun said, “back to what we do know. Has anyone looked into the name Gaap yet?” Gabe didn’t answer. Tyke and Cora both looked chagrined.

  Shaun raised an eyebrow. “No one?”

  “We’ve had cases piling up on cases,” Cora said gently.

  “I have,” Kyra said. “Sort of.” All eyes turned to her. “I wouldn’t call it investigating,” she said quickly. “Just…Googling.”

  “And you actually found something?” Cora asked.

  Kyra shrugged and got up to find her notebook. She’d taken a few lines of notes before leaving the hotel for Josie’s. “It’s the name of a goetic demon.” She flipped to the right page of the tiny, spiral notebook. “According to the online encyclopedia, he incites love.”

  Cora barked a laugh. “Yeah, obviously a real charmer.”

  Kyra ignored her. “He provides medical care for women, transforms them so it is easier to find lovers, renders them infertile, is invisible, transports people between kingdoms.” She trailed off. “It’s all like that.”

  “Why would a murderer take a name like that?” Tyke asked. “Nothing you read suggests murdering women. Quite the opposite.”

  “Maybe it does,” Gabe said, speaking for the first time since they’d sat down. “He’s psychotic. He must be. Maybe in some twisted way, he thinks he’s saving them. Soap suggests cleansing. As Kyra said, most people who kill prostitutes do it to cleanse society of its dregs. He'd kept under the radar for a long time. Maybe it’s his way of being invisible.”

  “Infertile,” Kyra murmured, and they all looked up at her. An idea formed that was more disturbing than she cared to admit. Something Mrs. Rosary said.

  Cora hit on the same conclusion two seconds later. “Mallory Butler’s baby died the same night she did.”

  Kyra nodded. “I asked Sadie about this. She said Gaap was a legend in these parts. A real Don Juan the girls tell stories about. I think they look on him almost as the patron saint of working girls, or something. Some of them are really superstitious about it. A john claiming to be Gaap might actually have more luck gaining these girls’ trust than other johns.”

  Kyra waited, letting that sink in before going on.

  “That may explain Chyna,” Gabe said quietly. “Most of these girls wouldn’t follow a john past the seventh layer. They’re too afraid of the Prowlers. But if this guy claimed to be Gaap, and said he would protect her, maybe it was enough to make her go with him.”

  Shaun nodded thoughtfully.

  “I also went and saw a woman named Mrs. Rosary,” Kyra said. “Mallory Butler’s baby died in her care.”

  Shaun nodded. “I remember. We did a full investigation on her. I read the report. Nothing criminal was found.”

  Kyra nodded. “That’s what she told me. She also said that when she found the baby, he had something thick and sticky on his forehead. She thought it was drool. The odd thing was that he was already blue at that point. If he hadn’t breathed for long enough to turn blue, the drool should have dried.”

  Gabe’s head came up slowly, understanding in his eyes. “You think it was liquid soap.” It wasn’t a question.

  “Could have been,” Kyra nodded.

  “This Mrs. Rosary couldn’t smell the soap,” Cora asked, sounding skeptical.

  “The stuff the killer uses doesn’t have a terribly strong smell,” Gabe said. “Bailey didn’t know what it was until the lab results came back.”

  “And keep in mind,” Kyra said, “that most Mirelings aren’t terribly educated. What Mrs. Rosary knew was that the baby was an infant. He couldn’t have crawled out of bed and gotten under the bathroom sink. Drool was the only thing that made sense to her. She probably wiped most of it off doing CPR, so no one else noticed it.”

  “Why would someone killing prostitutes also want to kill their children?” Tyke asked.

  “Maybe it’s just part of his fantasy world,” Gabe said. “He believes he can render them infertile, and when one of them has a baby, it shatters his power. He can’t deal. So he eliminates the problem.”

  “We originally thought that this killer chose victims of opportunity,” Shaun said. “That’s nearly always the case when people of high-risk lifestyles—prostitutes, junkies, what have you—become targets. It doesn’t sound like that’s the case here. He must stalk these women. He knows which ones have children, and where those children are. He plans everything precisely, killing them on the same night.”

  Kyra’s hands went cold. “Sadie uses the same babysitter that Mallory did,” she whispered.

  Gabe gazed at her, looking disturbed.

  They all remained silent for a time, each obviously lost in their own thoughts.

  Finally Kyra broke the silence. “Can I ask about the Prowlers?”

  Shaun looked up at her. “What about them?”

  Kyra sat back down beside Gabe. “Who are they? What do we know about them?”

  “No one knows much,” Tyke answered. “They’ve been around for twenty years or more. The Mirelings first started calling them Prowlers because they prowl around in the dark, but are never seen during the day. They scavenge and vandalize. They’re violent. That’s exactly why we don’t know much about them.”

  “You mean because you never venture into their territory.”

  “Exactly,” Shaun said. “It’s no different than Watts or East L.A. When our officers go there, they become targets. We can go in if necessarily, but it’s rare. If someone got hurt in there, it would be difficult to even make the decision to send in a bus. The medics could be killed.”

  “You went in to the Purple Valentine to excavate the bodies.”

  Shaun nodded. “True, but the building lay fairly close to the outskirts. We went in with a large force, set up solid perimeters and kept them there while the excavators worked. We also sent in enough people to make sure they could do the entire excavation before dark. Armed perimeter or no, I wouldn’t want people there after dark. Just too risky.”

  “Why do you ask, Kyra?”
Cora said.

  Kyra shrugged. “Once I realized I was in their territory, I realized I knew hardly anything about them.”

  “Once you realized you were in their territory, you should have left,” Gabe said, annoyance filling his voice.

  Oops. She hadn’t meant to admit she’d known it before the killer jumped her. “I’m not trying to justify my actions, Gabe. You’re right. But we did learn some things about the killer because of it.”

  “Such as?” Cora asked, sounding genuinely curious.

  “That he lives there, with the Prowlers. He’ll always retreat there after dumping a body. And it,” she shrugged, “helps put a lot of the pieces together. Prowlers. Gaap. Chyna.”

  “It makes a certain amount of sense,” Tyke said. “Depraved minds tend to find one another. Of course they congregate in the darkest, most decomposed parts of the city.”

  “On the subject of the Prowlers,” Shaun said in an ominous voice. “I have some things to share. I know you’ve all been busy with other things, but the investigation into the warehouse in the Carmichael District is ongoing.”

  He had everyone’s full attention, now.

  “What of it?” Gabe asked.

  “We think most of the people in there were Prowlers.” He paused, letting that sink in. “They all fled through an underground tunnel, if you remember. It let out in the Mire, and by the time our men located the exit, most of the Prowlers had already scattered. They disappeared beyond the seventh layer, where our men didn’t have permission to go.”

  “Toward the Dictim,” Kyra murmured.

  Shaun raised an eyebrow. “I’m sorry.”

  “Have any of you ever heard the term Dictim?” They all shook their heads. Kyra launched into the explanation she’d given Gabe at the hospital earlier that day. She described the amphitheater-like crater and that the killer had called it the Dictim.

  “It was like whatever had been there just sunk into the earth or something.”

  “Hmm.” Tyke rubbed his jaw, then pulled his phone from his back pocket. “Maybe it did.” He began tapping and scrolling through his phone.

  “What do you mean?” Cora asked. “What are you looking for?”

  “Old Abstreuse was originally built in the early 1900s,” Tyke said. “It was built up around a well, I think.”

  “Would have had to, right?” Kyra said. “Any civilization in the desert at that time had to be near water.”

  Tyke nodded. “Exactly. The problem was that they didn’t realize it wasn’t just a well. It was an underground oasis.”

  Kyra frowned, not sure where he was going with this. Cora, Gabe, and Shaun seemed equally confused. “Okay,” she said uncertainly.

  “Ah, here it is,” Tyke said, and began reading off his phone. “The oasis was too far underground to create greenery on the surface, but it did create wet sand twenty feet down.” He paused and scrolled, reading silently for a moment. “Looks like it wasn’t an issue until the thirties. That’s when they started building strong, heavy buildings in this part of the world. Concrete, metal and brick. Before that, it was just wood and western shanties. The heavy buildings were enough to upset the water to sand pressure, and the city began to sink.”

  Kyra’s mouth fell open. “Are we talking quick sand?”

  Tyke chuckled, seeing her face. “Yes, but you do realize quick sand isn’t what Hollywood makes it out to be, right? It doesn’t actually suck you in. The only people who die from it are those who get stuck and can’t free themselves when an ocean tide is coming in or something. But that’s death by drowning, not quick sand. Here, the buildings became heavy enough to shift the sands below them and start to sink. When people realized it, they brought scientists to figure it all out. The affected area is only a few miles square.”

  “In other words, Old Abstreuse,” Gabe said.

  Tyke nodded. “The people moved out of that area and built up the newer part of the city atop ground not sitting on top of the oasis. Of course, now that’s the Mire. The oldest part of the city after Old Abstreuse. The city’s been built out farther and farther with the passing decades.

  “So you’re saying,” Kyra said, processing all the information, “that this site, what the killer called the Dictim, is a building that actually sank into the ground?”

  Tyke slid his eyes to one side, considering. “Probably not. For a building to keep sinking, you’d have to put something heavy enough on top of it, and then something on top of that to keep pushing it downward. Without getting an architect out there—really not gonna happen—we can’t know for sure.”

  “The Prowlers vandalize buildings and tear down walls all the time in the Mire,” Gabe said. “They could have just gutted the place, hollowed it out. If it had sunk father than most, it would probably look as you described.”

  What he said made sense, but still didn’t satisfy Kyra. “Yeah, but the killer was heading down the slope when I saw him. They’re not, like, hanging out in the quick sand, right? What else is down there? Where would he be going?”

  “Was there ever a sewer system in Old Abstreuse before it was abandoned?” Shaun asked.

  Tyke went back to tapping his phone and the silence stretched.

  “Yeeees,” he said finally, sounding uncertain. “According to this, there was.”

  “So maybe that’s where they live. Where he was headed when you saw him, Kyra.”

  “Just seems fitting for these lunatics to hang out with the sewage,” Tyke muttered.

  “They wouldn’t be, though,” Gabe said. “It’s not an active sewer system. Water isn’t piped into that part of the city anymore. Hasn’t been for decades.”

  “Dried up, crusty, old sewage,” Tyke grinned. “Even better.”

  “I won’t say your observations aren’t valuable, Kyra,” Shaun said, “Ill advised though they may have been. The strange thing about the Prowlers is how active they’ve been lately.”

  “Active?” Gabe asked.

  Shaun nodded. “In past years, they’ve kept mostly to themselves. They do come into the Mire at night to harass and destroy, but they’ve always run from the police. They’re chaotic, but also non-confrontational. We’ve seen a tangible change in last months.”

  “You mean the warehouse in the Carmichael District,” Cora said.

  “Most notably, yes,” Shaun said, nodding. “An operation like that takes organization. In the past, the Prowlers have been too—I don’t know; anarchist?—to pull something like that off. But it’s more than just that. When you two,” he motioned to Gabe and Tyke, “went to pick up Kyra few weeks ago in the Mire, you encountered a group of them. Remember?”

  Kyra didn’t, even though she’d been there. Well, she remembered vaguely, but didn’t actually set eyes on the Prowlers. She’d taken a ricochet shot to the foot and called Gabe to come pick her up. By the time he arrived, she’d lost enough blood that she’d passed out.

  “They ran at us,” Gabe said. “Threw glass bottles at my car.”

  “That’s exactly what I mean,” Shaun said. “Their behavior has become aggressive. Much more so than we’ve seen in the past. Before, if they could get away with something in the dark, they’d do it. But to chase a running, lighted car? That’s odd for them.”

  “What do you think it means, Shaun?” Cora asked.

  “We don’t know. But something has changed in past months that’s affecting their behavior.”

  No one answered. The silence stretched.

  “Anything else we need to discuss?” Shaun asked.

  “How about what the killer said to Kyra?” Gabe said softly. “He called her his equal and wanted her to watch him bury someone. Why?”

  Kyra studied her hands, feeling self-conscious. No one seemed to have any answers.

  “Well,” Cora said. “Maybe he wanted you to watch because he sees you as an equal. Like maybe he thought you’d be impressed or something.”

  “But why would he think that?” Kyra said. “If he knows who I am, if he’s b
een watching me, he knows I don’t kill people. So how am I his equal?”

  “He said the thing about not many people being able to follow him unseen,” Gabe said. “Maybe he was impressed with your stalking skills.”

  “Maybe,” Kyra said doubtfully. “It just seems like too simple an explanation.”

  Gabe frowned at her.

  “It’d be like if,” she searched her mind for an apt metaphor, “you were impressed that I was good with a gun, and you jumped from that to saying I was the equal of any cop in the city. I mean, maybe I am, maybe I’m not, but it’s not a logical conclusion.”

  “She’s right,” Cora said. “It’s too big an over-generalization for such a meticulous killer.”

  Shaun heaved a sigh. “This killer is complex. That much is obvious. Whatever his reasons for what he does, they’re bound to be complex as well.”

  “Simple acts and complex killers,” Cora murmured.

  The silence lengthened out again.

  “Well, if there’s nothing else anyone needs to discuss, let’s get moving. Kyra, we’d like to move you to a new hotel.”

  Kyra raised an eyebrow. She’d been planning to switch rooms anyway, but what did he mean we?

  “Okay,” she said warily.

  “Best to stay ahead of this killer. He found your hotel room before. He may again. Not to mention, we wouldn’t want this teenage thug returning. Pick a hotel. I don’t care which. I’ll assign a plain-clothes officer to you for the time being.”

  Kyra sighed. She did a double-take when she noticed Gabe’s face, daring her to disagree. “Okay.” She looked at Shaun. “Thank you.”

  He nodded. “Let’s go.”

  *******

  Gabe opened the door and walked in ahead of her. Shaun followed her in. Tyke and Cora had already left to return to the precinct.

  Gabe flicked on the lights, glanced around the room, and dropped the key card on the round table. “The plain clothes officer will be sitting right outside in the chair across from the vending machines,” he said.

  Shaun’s phone went off. He excused himself and stepped into the hallway to take the call, shutting the door softly behind him.