by Carter Chris
She pushed the door open and stepped inside the smelly apartment.
‘Hello, babe,’ she croaked. She’d been smoking so much crack lately it’d started damaging her vocal cords.
There was no response.
She was about to start searching the apartment for him when she saw something that was much more appealing – a silver box sitting on the small dining table. Next to it was a square mirror, and on it Regina could see residues of a white powder. Her little brown eyes lit up like a 4th-of-July sky.
‘Babe?’ she called again, with a lot less enthusiasm this time. Who cared where he was when her payment was already there, waiting for her?
Regina approached the table and ran her middle finger along the mirror, collecting all the leftover residue. She quickly brought the finger to her mouth and rubbed it against her gums before licking it, as if it’d been dipped in honey. Instantly her gums went numb and she shuddered with delight from the strength of the drug. That was very good stuff. She opened the box and looked inside. There were five hand-folded paper wraps. Regina knew exactly what was in them. She’d seen plenty of those before. Her lips spread into a huge smile.
For once Christmas had come early.
She grabbed one of the wraps, unfolded it and tapped some of its white powder onto the mirror. Her eyes searched the table for something she could use as a snorting tube.
She found nothing.
Regina took a step back and looked around. Under the table she saw a rolled-up five-dollar bill.
This was turning out to be a fantastic day.
She picked it up, tightened the roll-up, and brought it to her nose. She didn’t care for arranging the powder in a straight line or anything, she just needed some of it to reach her bloodstream, and fast. Closing one of her nostrils with her finger, Regina sucked in a deep breath through her nose.
The drug-high hit her almost instantly.
‘Wow.’
That was the best thing she had ever tried. No stinging or burning effect, just pure bliss.
She moved the rolled-up bill to the other nostril and sucked in a second deep breath.
This had to be what paradise felt like.
She put the bill down on the table and stood still for a moment, simply enjoying heaven.
Outside the day was already hitting 86°F. Regina felt beads of sweat starting to form at the top of her forehead. The drug had also bumped her body temperature up. She undid the top button of her shirt, but she needed to splash a little cold water on her face. She turned around and made her way to the bathroom. As she reached the door, she was engulfed by a strange sensation, like something crawling up the back of her neck. It made her shudder on the spot.
Her hand paused momentarily over the doorknob and she looked around herself, almost feeling a second presence.
‘Babe, are you in here?’ she called, moving her face closer to the door.
Again, no reply.
The tingling sensation at the back of her neck quickly ran down her spine, spreading through her whole body.
‘Wow, that really was some good shit,’ she whispered to herself.
Regina twisted the handle and pushed the door open.
Paradise became hell.
Sixty-Eight
By the time Hunter and Garcia got to apartment 311 in Bell Gardens, the forensic team’s investigation was in full swing. Four people dressed in hooded white coveralls were stepping over each other inside the tiny flat, doing their jobs. In the living room, a young forensic agent was dusting a wooden sideboard for prints. A woman armed with a handheld vacuum was collecting fibers and hairs from the floor. An older agent with a spray bottle and a portable ultraviolet light was looking for blood droplets on a silver box that was sitting on the dining table. All the while, the official crime-scene photographer was snapping away at everything.
Detective Ricky Corbí and his partner, Detective Cathy Ellison, were standing in the corridor just outside the apartment. Another three uniformed police officers were busy conducting the standard door-to-door.
‘Are you Detective Corbí?’ Hunter asked, coming from the badly lit stairwell.
The tall black man turned around and faced Hunter. He was around fifty years old, with a scowling face topped with tight-cropped hair sprinkled with just a little gray. He wore horn-rimmed glasses, a brown suit, and, judging by his physique, he’d probably played football when younger, and was still very physically active.
‘That’d be me,’ he said in a baritone voice. ‘And by the looks of you two, you’re Homicide Special.’ He offered his hand. ‘Detective Hunter, I presume.’
Hunter nodded. ‘Call me Robert.’ Corbí’s handshake was firm and strong. His palm was slightly tilted downwards, which Hunter knew from experience was usually a sign of an authoritative person or a controlling personality. From the word ‘go’ Corbí was indicating that he was the one in charge there. Hunter had no intention of opposing that authority.
‘Call me Ricky. This is my partner, Detective Cathy Ellison.’
Ellison stepped forward and shook Hunter and Garcia’s hand with almost the same firmness as Corbí. She was about five feet six in height, trim but slightly stoop-shouldered, with short dark hair, cut in a textured, graduated style. Her eyes carried the intensity of someone who took her job very seriously. ‘Call me Cathy,’ she said, quickly studying both detectives.
‘As I told you over the phone, the reason why I called you is that we found this in the victim’s living room,’ Corbí said, making a slight head movement towards the apartment, and handing Hunter a business card. ‘It’s one of yours, right?’
Hunter nodded.
Corbí reached inside his breast pocket for his notebook. ‘Thomas Lynch, better known as Tito. He was out on parole from Lancaster. Been out for eleven months. According to his record,’ Corbí faced Garcia, ‘you were the arresting officer seven years ago, and the one who got a confession out of him.’ He paused and reassessed his words. ‘Or should I say, you convinced him to cut a deal. If I had to venture a guess, I’d say that since he was released he became some sort of informer for you guys.’
‘Not really,’ Garcia said.
Corbí looked at him with a penetrating stare. ‘Friend?’
‘Not really.’
Corbí nodded, taking off his glasses, breathing on both lenses and using the tip of his blue tie to polish them. ‘Care to shed some light on how he came by one of your business cards? A very-crisp-and-new business card.’
The last sentence was delivered with a slight lilt in his tone.
Garcia held Corbí’s gaze. ‘We contacted him recently, looking for some information – but he wasn’t an informer,’ he added, before Corbí had a chance to retort. ‘He was just someone who showed up in a list of names.’
Ricky Corbí was experienced enough to know that Garcia wasn’t being stubborn. He was simply giving him all the information he was prepared to give at that time. Pursuing it further was pointless. He gave Garcia a barely noticeable nod.
‘Could you tell us when you saw him last?’ Ellison asked.
‘Yesterday afternoon,’ Hunter said.
Corbí and Ellison exchanged a quick look.
‘According to the ME, your boy was murdered sometime last night,’ Corbí took over again, returning his glasses to his face. ‘Or most probably in the very early hours of the morning. They are just getting ready to take the body away, if you guys would like to have a look first . . .’
Hunter and Garcia nodded.
‘I have no idea who he pissed off last night,’ Corbí added, handing the detectives a pair of latex gloves each, together with shoe covers. ‘But whoever it was, he did a job on this Tito character. We have a real work of art in there.’
Sixty-Nine
Corbí and Ellison stepped into apartment 311, followed by Hunter and Garcia. Together with the four forensic agents, the already-crowded living room became a sardine can.
‘What’s in the box?’ Hunter asked,
nodding at the silver box on the dining table.
‘Now, nothing,’ Corbí said. ‘But it did contain drugs – cocaine, to be more precise. A very fine cut. Probably very high-quality stuff. The lab will confirm it. Initial signs indicate that whoever whacked him took the drugs.’
‘You think this was a drugs hit?’ Garcia asked.
‘Who knows at this stage?’ Ellison replied.
‘Who called it in?’
‘Some terrified girl. Didn’t leave a name. She sounded very young.’
‘When was this? When was the call made?’
‘This morning. We checked the recording. The girl said that she came to visit a friend. Most probably she came here to score some drugs. From the door-to-door so far, no one knows who this young friend could be.’ Ellison’s eyebrows arched. ‘Actually, people barely knew the tenant in this apartment. No one is talking. And in a project like this, I’d be more surprised if they ever did. But forensics has already retrieved several sets of prints. Who knows, we might get lucky.’
Hunter’s eyes swept the room in a matter of seconds; no blood anywhere. The living room looked a mess, but no different than it had the day before, when they’d paid Tito a visit. No visible disturbance. The chain lock and the inside doorframe were also intact. Nothing indicated a forced entry.
‘Are you guys through in there?’ Corbí asked the lead forensic agent, indicating the tiny corridor that led to the bathroom and bedroom.
‘Yeah, we’ve got everything. You’re clear.’
They crossed the living room.
‘There’s no way all of us will fit in there,’ Corbí said as they got to the bathroom door. ‘I thought there couldn’t be a smaller bathroom than the one in my house. I was wrong. You guys go ahead. We’ve seen it.’ Corbí and Ellison stepped back, allowing Hunter and Garcia to take lead.
Hunter slowly pushed the door open.
‘Oh crap.’ The words dribbled out of Garcia’s lips.
Hunter said nothing, his gaze taking everything in.
The floor, the walls and the sink in the tiny bathroom were splattered with blood. Arterial spray from a knife being swung across someone’s throat or body. Tito was naked, sitting on the floor inside the blood-soaked shower cubicle. His back was against the tiled wall, his legs stretched out in front of him, his arms loosely slumped by his side. His head was tilted back, as if he was looking at something on the ceiling. The problem was, he had no eyes. They both had been pressed back into his skull until they sunk in. One of them seemed to have busted in its socket. What looked like blood tears had run down the corners of the sockets, past his ears, and down the side of his shaved head. His mouth was opened, and half filled with thick, clotted blood. His tongue had been ripped from his mouth.
‘We found the tongue at the bottom of the toilet,’ Corbí offered from the door.
Tito’s throat had been slit the whole length of his neck, and blood had cascaded down his torso and onto his lap and legs.
‘According to the forensics guys,’ Ellison said. ‘There are no visible traumas to the body, which means he wasn’t beat up. He was simply brought to the bathroom and slaughtered like cattle. No blood was found anywhere else in the house.’
‘Drugged?’ Garcia asked.
‘We’ll need to wait for the autopsy for confirmation. But it wouldn’t surprise me if he was as high as my captain’s ego when this happened. There’s coke residue on the small square mirror on the table in the living room.’
‘The bedroom is a damn mess,’ Corbí took over. ‘And it stinks of dirty clothes, unwashed body parts and pot. But judging by the rest of the apartment, I don’t think that was a disturbance. I think he lived like a pig out of choice. We also found marijuana in the bedroom, a kilo of it, together with a few crack-cocaine pipes. If whoever did this was after something, that something was probably inside that silver box in the living room, drug or not.’ He waited for Hunter and Garcia to exit the bathroom. ‘I’m not gonna ask you what kind of information you requested out of this Tito character. That’s your business, and I know better than to butt in into another cop’s investigation, but is there anything you can tell us about the victim that might facilitate our investigation?’
Hunter knew he couldn’t give Corbí and his partner Ken Sands’s name. Corbí would start searching for him, asking around. The heat on the streets to find Sands would increase, and so would the chances of him hearing about it and disappearing. Hunter couldn’t risk that. He had to lie.
‘Unfortunately there’s nothing I can give you,’ he said.
Corbí studied Hunter’s face and demeanor and saw nothing that belied his answer. If that was a poker face, it was the best poker face Corbí had ever seen. A moment later his gaze reverted back to Ellison, who shrugged.
‘OK,’ Corbí said, adjusting his tie. ‘I guess there’s nothing else I can show you here.’
Seventy
Outside the sun was baking people and cars alike. Garcia reached for his sunglasses in his shirt pocket, and ran his hand around the back of his neck. It came back soaking wet. Standing by the driver’s door, he looked at Hunter over the roof of his Honda Civic.
‘Well, if Sands was the one who got to Tito, then it doesn’t look like he’s our killer, does it?’
Hunter stared back at him. ‘And why is that?’
‘Completely different MO, for starters. OK, he ripped the victim’s tongue out, but compared to the savagery of the amputations in our last two crime scenes, what happened up there looks like a holiday camp. And we’ve got no sculpture and no shadow puppets.’
Hunter placed his elbows on the car’s roof and interlaced his fingers. At that specific moment in time he was inclined to agree with Garcia, but there were still too many loose ends and something was telling him that discarding Ken Sands as a suspect right now was a big mistake. ‘From what we gathered so far, don’t you think that Sands is intelligent enough to change his MO on an unrelated crime?’
‘Unrelated?’ Garcia deactivated the central-locking system and got into his car.
Hunter followed.
Garcia unlocked the engine and switched on the A/C unit. ‘What do you mean, unrelated?’
Hunter leaned against the passenger’s door. ‘OK, for a moment let’s assume that we’ve been right in everything so far, and that Ken Sands really is our killer.’
‘OK.’
‘One of our assumptions is that Sands is going after his victims for revenge, not only for himself, but for his childhood friend as well, Alfredo Ortega, right?’
Garcia nodded. ‘Yep.’
‘OK, so where does Tito fit into his revenge plan?’
Garcia looked pensive for an instant.
‘Remember, Tito said that they never even talked while inside. So there was no bad blood between them from their time in Lancaster.’
Garcia pinched his bottom lip. ‘He doesn’t fit.’
‘No, he doesn’t. If Sands is our man and he came after Tito, it wasn’t because Tito was part of his original plan. It was probably because Tito went asking about him the wrong way, or to the wrong person.’
‘But killers don’t usually change their MO, unless they’re escalating.’ He pointed to the building. ‘That’s exactly the opposite. He’s gone from absurdly grotesque to . . .’ he tried to think of a word, ‘. . . plain nasty, I’d say.’
‘And again, it goes back to the fact that Tito wasn’t part of his original plan. Think about it, Carlos. To our killer, his MO is extremely important – the way he dismembers his victims, the way he carefully puts their body parts back together, constructing a sculpture to cast a different shadow onto the wall each time. To him, all that is mandatory, not a choice, not something he’s doing for fun. It’s as important as the killing act itself, and the choice of victim. It’s part of his revenge. And I have no doubt there’s a direct relation between the sculpture, the shadow, and each specific victim. There’s a reason why he chose a coyote and a raven for Nicholson, and a devil-li
ke image looking down at four other figures for Nashorn.’
‘And Tito wasn’t part of that at all,’ Garcia said.
Hunter agreed in silence.
‘But we’re still not sure what the real meaning behind those shadow images is,’ Garcia went on. ‘And if you’re right, and each image has a direct link to each specific victim, then there’s something that isn’t making any sense in my mind.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘In the first shadow image, the killer paid very close attention to detail, specifically carving the victim’s body parts so as to not leave us a lot of doubt. You said so yourself, the curved, chunky beak on the bird image ruled out a lot of possibilities, leaving us with just a few alternatives. And the same was done to the coyote image. But for the second shadow image, the attention to detail wasn’t nearly so careful. It’s hard to tell properly if we have a human face with horns, a devil, a God, or some sort of animal. The two standing figures, together with the ones on the ground could be people or not. Why would the killer do that? Be so specific with the first shadow image, but not with the second?’
Hunter rubbed his face with both hands. ‘I can only see one reason – relevance.’
Garcia pulled a face and turned both of his palms up. ‘Relevance?’
‘I think the reason why our killer paid so much attention to detail on the first shadow image, is because it mattered. He didn’t want us to make a mistake in identifying what it was. He didn’t want us to think that he gave us a dog and a dove, or a fox and an owl.’
Garcia thought about it for a heartbeat. ‘But it didn’t matter as much on the second one.’
‘Not as much,’ Hunter said. ‘The details of the second image are less important to its meaning. It probably doesn’t matter if the face with horns is human or not. That’s not what the killer wants us to see.’
‘So what does he want us to see?’
‘I don’t know . . . yet.’ Hunter looked out the window at all the police cars parked in front of Tito’s project building. ‘But I do think Ken Sands is smart enough to change his MO just to throw us off his scent.’
