Morbid Curiosity: Erter & Dobbs Book 3

by Nick Keller

  “What about his partners?” William said.

  “Yeah—they were just as baffled. It’s like when a child leaves the home and is never heard from again, right? It’s like, where’d they go, why’d they leave, I mean—what happened to them?”

  “Poof, just gone, huh?”

  “Yeah, like that. Poof. Gone.” She took a drag, blew out.

  “What can you tell me about his personality?”

  She cooed, “Oh, he was a sweet man. I mean like, the best. A real sweetheart.”

  “He’s missed,” William said.

  “Oh yeah. He’s missed.”

  21

  William on the take

  There was no real usable information to gather from the amanuensis, outside of her rather pleasant company, so William thanked her and left. Her testimony, as unofficial as it was, did open a few questions in his mind. So, Graves was an amenable guy, professional, respected. His absence left a hole in the field. It deepened William’s bewilderment, and he wondered if he was barking up the right tree.

  William picked up the temp phone Jacky had supplied him. He thought about calling his young cohort, but wasn’t sure what he’d ask. As he pondered this, the phone rang in his palm surprising him. He flipped it open, brought it to his ear. “Hello?”

  The voice on the other end was subdued, private. William did not recognize it as it said, “Is this,” there was a pause, “Prof?”

  William recoiled. Only one person ever called him Prof. Whoever this was had obviously spoken to Jacky, or vice-versa. “Uh, yes, this is he. May I ask who this is?”

  “I—uhem—I was told you are part of an investigation that may or may not involve Doctor Hugh Graves.”

  “That’s true,” William said still guessing at his caller.

  “Okay. So what happens next?” the caller asked.

  “To whom am I speaking?”

  There was a tactful pause on the other end, then, “I prefer to remain anonymous.”

  “Okay,” William said. “Are you prepared to do a phone interview?”

  “That depends on your questions.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “I don’t want to be directly involved in any investigation.”

  “Okay.” William checked his rearview mirror, got over and sidled into a parking lot coming to a stop. He breathed and said, “What can you tell me about Doctor Graves’s disappearance?”

  “How long ago are you suggesting he disappeared?”

  William squinted not sure how to answer that question. He settled on, “In earnest, about two years ago.”

  “That’s what I thought you’d say. To be honest, I never considered him to have disappeared at all. He was a private man. But all his loose ends were tied. Nothing was left amiss. I understand his home is still kept up, even. I never figured it strange, just his character. I always figured he was living on some island somewhere. He had the money.”

  William nodded. This guy’s assumption was actually quite feasible. “Were you a patient of Doctor Graves?”

  “No.”

  “An associate?”

  “It’s complicated. We are, we were, a part of a citywide network of like-minded professionals. There were a number of us. Lots of money, even local political clout. Our mission was urban revitalization. We bought abandoned homes in low-income areas, marked them for refurbishing. Some were to be demolished and rebuilt—everything from bank repossessions to former crime scene investigations, drug busts, you name it.”

  “Neighborhood drug houses,” William said.

  “Some, yes, at least at one point. Every neighborhood has one this side of Normandie. Now those homes are just sitting there, rotting. They’re hotbeds for transient homesteaders, drug dealers, any nature of crime. Half of them probably have bodies buried in the yard. They run down market values, create low community morale—things like that. Believe me, we had huge community support.”

  “It was a philanthropic venture,” William said, absorbing.

  “That’s right. Funding was state level. Everything was moving. But then the fed got a hold of it. Complications to the mission ensued, something about the Office of Urban Development. We were a private venture. Some cabinet in D.C. stood to lose support. Ultimately, the bottom fell out. It was all politics.”

  “Mmm—that figures. How far did it go?”

  “We were days away from breaking ground on a dozen sites around the city. It was phase one. We had them picked out—had all the real estate releases, documents from OSHA, financial institutions were on board. Then, well, you know.”

  “Huh,” William said very interested. His mind raced a second. “What about commercial properties?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Abandoned warehouses, that sort of thing. Did you deal with anything like that?”

  The voice chuckled, miserably. “No, not yet. It was discussed, but that was a long-term expansion plan. No, we were only interested in housing communities, at first.”

  “Can I see those plans?” William asked.

  “They were posted on our site. We believed in complete disclosure. It’s since been taken down, but it’s all public archived. You could probably find them through the department of public affairs.”

  “Okay. What would I search?”

  “Search for URGENT. That’s Urban Group Enterprise.”

  William thanked the man for the information and assured him he’d remain unmentioned in any report, not that there would ever be any official records. As he drove back home, the highway ahead of him was beginning to thicken with traffic. It would be an hour back home. He settled his mind. Something was eating at him—a girl that hadn’t been seen by anyone in two weeks, found dead after days of torture. Mark Neiman now missing for five days. A society of doctors and beauties. There was a sick underworld floating around amongst all this. He was probably closer to it than he thought. He couldn’t shake the idea that he was standing dead center in a race against time.

  And somewhere, in some way, his father watched his every move.

  Next step: contact the public files, investigate URGENT.

  He dialed Jacky’s number and brought the phone to his ear.

  22

  Info

  The kid had been feeding him information for nearly an hour when William got back home. It was all online, beamed to him from a special server that probably didn’t exist, at least not in any traceable form. Files popped up on William’s computer. They were official documentation. Everything had been submitted. The network of professionals that Dr. Graves had been a part of seemed to have left no stone unturned.

  Company filing docs, all nonprofit. Pages of state regs. Financial reports. Business model structural reports. Local and state licensing agreements. Real estate code logs. OSHA certificates. Everything.

  He opened another file. It took several seconds to download. It was big. When it opened on his screen, William found himself staring at a satellite map of L.A. suburbia. He scrolled it to the south, the west. The map was a complete rendering from Google Maps of every street, every house, every ally of the city. Neighborhoods were demarked with colorized boundaries. They were project centers for URGENT. Even the target homes were colored in red—the color of danger.

  The team at URGENT had done their homework. The map was a color-coded what’s what in L.A. low income, high crime centers. Every neighborhood in which tens of thousands of people were jammed together on postage stamp lots and left to their own threadbare wits to exist as a community, was represented. They’d been planning work in every hood from Chesterfield Square to Vermont Vista to Leimert Park.

  And Dr. Hugh Graves had touched every single house marked for revitalization.

  William studied the map for an hour, referencing address data against anything that seemed suspect, his mind always honed in on where Angela Newman might have been murdered.

  And where Mark Neiman might still be alive.

  He could feel himself getting closer to the
unknown, reaching out to touch it only to have it slip away, again and again. When he finally snapped himself away from the computer screen and snarled, “Dammit!” he realized he was sweating. His pulse was probably at a hundred plus.

  This was a job for the police. They would put multiple minds to it. But was there time? He’d have to convince them, present his findings. It would take a day, maybe longer, and in the end they’d reference his history with Dr. Oaks’s psyche evaluations of him, find him hopelessly obsessive, probably ship him upstate again. Their doubts about him were working against the investigation. No.

  William was on his own, now.

  He rubbed his face maniacally, pulling heat under his palms. When he snapped a look back at the computer screen, he froze. There was a red dot denoting an abandoned house that he hadn’t seen before. It was in Lincoln Park, the shit hole of shit holes. He’d been too consumed with the areas to the west. But this one was barely east of downtown. The whole area was block after block of rundown shanty dumps with dirt yards and piles of junk, everything fenced in behind leaning slats and decrepit, little sheds. There was no city zoning, just old, rotting homes shoved in with abandoned buildings.

  William leaned forward, eyes like a hawk on the prowl. There was a house. Twenty-first Street. It was small, falling apart. Ripe for demolition. URGENT had marked it. It shared a yard with another big cinderblock structure. A commercial building. A warehouse.

  23

  House

  This house. Google Maps did it poor justice. It was a small wood home, no more than a door, a busted front window, a small roof with a misplaced aluminum awning over a warping, old porch—maybe twelve hundred square feet of detritus and rotting framework. Paint was flecking away in large, gray swaths.

  Across the street were other homes, all very similar, dumpy, and poorly maintained, but lived in. Families lived in this neighborhood, children hanging on to the second grade, parents struggling with their government checks, a mere rock’s throw from such squalor. This was the dregs—the hole that people began their lives in, having to claw their way out a month at a time. It gave William a sickened hard spot in his gut as he pulled his brand new car up to the curb and got out.

  Down the street he spied a group of young black girls standing in a group, watching. His presence was a surprise in this neighborhood. It drew their attention and they stood gawking at him across the distance. William grinned and waved at them wondering if they took it as a notion of friendship or mockery. One of them timidly waved back and they shuffled back to themselves, started jumping rope, calling out their eclectic cadence

  Gypsy, gypsy please tell me.

  What my fortune’s going to be.

  William faded back toward the house and approached, hearing the girls’ dreamy sing-song carry up and down the street.

  Rich-man, poor-man, beggar-man, thief

  Doctor, lawyer, indian chief.

  He stopped at the leaning front porch and peeked in through the window.

  Tinker, tailor, cowboy, sailor.

  The place was tiny and messy, years of weathering having left garbage all over the wooden floor.

  Gypsy, gypsy, please tell me.

  He stepped toward the side of the house and craned up to look over the rotting fence.

  What my fortune’s going to be.

  There was a large dirt yard spotted with weeds. An old eighties model sedan sat on rusty wheels toward the back. There was a bicycle frame, a wheelbarrow, an ancient swing set. They were all spotted with rust and settling into the dirt after years of stagnation.

  The jump roper stumbled and the girls laughed in their youthful, chirpy way and took off running. It took William’s attention and he looked back, mildly amused.

  On the other side of the dilapidated fence, across the adjoining lot, maybe eighty feet away, was the cinderblock building, a thirty-foot tall, flat-topped saltbox construction with busted windows sitting up high. But something was wrong. He couldn’t tell if the scene was too benign or too abstract. Something hung on the back of his mind. This was a plan. Something was here that should not be, some mad creature’s heinous delight.

  He moved to the commercial building having to peel up a section of temporary, chain-link fencing to get into its large, cement driveway. It was a drive-around for delivery trucks. William scanned the front. There was an entrance door up on a cement walkway, but it was padlocked with a heavy, rusty chain. He scurried over to it and checked it out. Not even bolt cutters would cut this thing away. He’d need an acetylene torch and about fifteen minutes. Maybe there was another way in.

  He moved quickly around the side and down the cement drive-through toward the building’s rear. It was long, easily two-hundred feet, but turning into the rear loading docks he found a row of roll-up logistic-style doors designed to accept deliveries from truck trailers. One was at the top of a long, cement ramp.

  William moved to the top of the ramp and yanked the door handle. It lifted an inch before it jerked to a stop. They were locked from the inside. Disappointed, he took several steps back from the building looking up, scanning, searching for a way in. He moved to the far side of the building.

  There were no other exits, save a steel door on the opposite side leading out to a rusty steel stairway. It was sealed tight with another chain. The place was completely closed off, unless there was another way in, something not immediately apparent, a secret way. There was more to this place than met the eye, William was sure of it, and if his hunch was right, Mark Neiman was in there, and he was in trouble, if he was alive at all.

  William felt frustration surface inside him. It lent to the first gut-wrenching taste of desperation. He angled in his mind like crazy. Eyes were on him. He could sense them. Standing here, he was naked, vulnerable. To catch a killer, he would have to become one. That was, after all, his forte. Killers didn’t like being seen.

  So, where would those eyes be blind?

  He looked over to the fence separating the commercial lot from that cloistered moonscape of a backyard. He squinted. That house held secrets. He moved in that direction.

  William stepped over shards of long, jagged glass up on the porch and stopped at the front window. It was a large, wooden frame with toothy shards jutting up from the bottom. An old, weathered two-by-four lay to the left. He picked it up and poked out the remaining glass shards letting them clink to the floor and giving him access into the house. Peeking in, he stepped into a small front dining space with the two-by-four held up like a weapon, ready to swing.

  The place blasted him with the ancient scent of mildew and decades of rotting wood. A million motes of dust settled lazily on the air, illuminated by the failing light outside. The floor popped under foot. Holes were in the planks leaving scabrous footfalls. Sheetrock had crumbled from the walls in soppy areas, and outdated wallpaper had peeled away in large swaths. Who knew what life-forms had found shelter in this place—transients, crack addicts, rabid dogs. The place had the dreadful aura of a dungeon.

  Over in the kitchen was a pile of rotting garbage that caught his attention. Scattered around on pitted vinyl flooring were pieces of plastic tubing, five-gallon metal pots, smatterings of glass that looked to have once been vials, like in a mad scientist’s laboratory. He knew immediately, the last residents to have inhabited this place were meth cookers. This was an old drug lab. A crack house.

  But it wasn’t a kill room. That much was obvious.

  Careful of his footing, William moved into the living room navigating around an old sofa that had completely deteriorated down to its metal frame. Chunks of fabric and material lay around giving the place an eerie, historic feel. It saddened him. Before the druggies and the police invasions, the house had been alive once. It had housed a family, watched them grow and love and learn, then move away. Now it was a gutted rat hole, as decrepit on the inside as the out. Except for what URGENT had planned for this place, it served no purpose.

  William went to the back door. The knob didn’t wor
k. Its guts had all weathered away, but the door was canted in its frame. William jabbed the board into the jamb and pried hard, clenching his teeth. The door broke open, swinging out onto the back patio. He stepped out.

  The sun was down on the horizon casting a brilliant, bloody color across the city. In minutes it’d be dark. William shivered eyeing the back yard. There was a leaning, aluminum shed eight-by-eight foot square in the corner of the yard, buttressed up against the fence, surrounded by tall tufts of bittercress and carpetweed. The warehouse loomed just beyond.

  He scoped across the place, dejected. There was nothing here. Maybe he’d been wrong about this place. Perhaps he’d been fooled by an over-eager sense of involvement. Coming to a final decision, he sank back into the house and started to leave.

  No. This was wrong. That feeling of being watched drowned him again. Secrets were hiding out here, and they were close. He looked back out into the yard searching for blind spots, seeing into the invisible areas of the yard. A slow grin etched across his face. Yep—that’s where those secrets were hiding.

  The shed.

  William slunk quickly to the structure, probing around. There was a chain and a lock, nothing as elaborate as the padlocks on the building in the next yard. But it was very telling. Why would there be a locked shed in the back of a dilapidated house? Someone was hiding something.

  William peeked around between the fence and the shed where the weeds had created a thick overgrowth. The shed itself had been waging a long, slow war against nature and the aluminum panels had been rending against the elements. There was a gap. It was large enough for his two-by-four, if he could squeeze between the fence and shed amongst a jungle of weeds.