by Nick Keller
She laughed and said, “Okay, I’ll be right there. Just let me print these pages off Netscape and I’ll be right over.”
“Okay.”
He sat down and opened up to the contents page. The book was chock-full of unsolved crimes information, numbers and statistics. Most of it had been made public knowledge by certain bureaus, namely the FBI. He marveled over it as he began reading.
It took DeAnna forty minutes to print out her resources. But time had hardly passed at all for William. He found himself being sucked into the pages of the book. Unsolved crime after unsolved crime passed across his hypnotic gaze as he read. There was the case of three murdered convenience store clerks in Kansas, all within a seventy-two hour period. Then the 1989 case of four dead male strippers on the east coast, each reported to be homosexual. Two real estate agents found dead up in New York, both bludgeoned and raped. And many others. There was a whole roster of unsolved crimes that went on for pages and pages.
The one that made William do a double take was Leo J. Koury. He was a contract killer who’d up and disappeared. His murders went unsolved until his death of natural causes in 1991. The FBI had made him a top ten most wanted. The kicker: Leo was also a loving husband and father. Even coached his kids’ softball teams. William shook his head in disbelief. What a shot to the nuts? Daddy’s a murderer?
Wow.
The thought made him shiver as he flipped pages. Those kids are probably totally screwed in the brain now. Yeah—they’re gonna be twisted for life after that. The pages stopped flipping, landed on a page that caught his eye, even made him gasp. The section heading read “Portrait Killer” Under the heading were a number of family portrait style images, not very big and extremely grainy. He could hardly make out any of the faces, but as he read, the nature of those images became gruesomely clear. He made a horrified face tracking along the text with his finger, reading on with a ravenous need to know more, bleeding to understand the case of Portrait Killer. Who was he? Why did he do this? How had he eluded the FBI for …
DeAnna pounded a stack of printouts and schoolbooks onto the table, making William scream and jerk back in his seat. She looked at him shocked, then started laughing. “Did I scare you?”
He cleared his throat and said, “No.”
That made her laugh even bigger. “Yes, I did.”
He made a face at her and admitted, “Okay fine, you scared the crapola out of me. Are you happy?”
She sat saying, “Sorry.” She reached over and slid William’s book over to her. “What’s got you so tied up?”
He shook his head clearing away the moment and leaned across the table toward her. “Check this out. This guy’s a serious nutjob. So, he goes around to different cities like Boston and Chicago and wherever else, and like, takes out entire families.” DeAnna’s face went sour, disgusted. William continued, “Yeah, and guess what he does.”
“Uh—what,” she said.
“He arranges their bodies on the sofa or at the dining table or wherever like in a family portrait and takes thirty-five millimeter pictures of them. And then you know what he does?”
She shook her head at him slack-jawed.
“He sends them to the local FBI office just for fun.”
“That is completely disgusting,” DeAnna said, nudging the book away from her.
“Guess what they call this guy.”
“I don’t know,” she said.
“Look, it’s right here.” He straightened the book out in front of her and thrust his finger onto the section title. “Portrait Killer”.
She gave him a curious look. Their eyes were close. She said, “Why are you showing me this?” William blinked and began to retreat away. She said, “We’re supposed to be making an affirmative argument for continuing funding on unsolved crimes.”
He forced a smile. Panicking, he switched tactics. “Well yeah, this is our case right here. I mean, how can we not continue funding the search for guys like this?”
“Uh, no,” she said definitively. “We’re not presenting this guy, uh, Portrait Killer, as part of our case.”
“Why not?”
“Are you kidding?” she said, grinning wildly. “They’d laugh us off the stage. No, this has to be a congressional thing. It’s about taxpayers and tax dollars. It should be about resource allocation, you know, state versus federal, that kind of thing.” William sat fully down in his seat, deflated. She continued, “Look, here’s what I got,” and she went on and on about her findings concerning IRS reports, audit processes, tax codes in the legal system. But William hardly heard her. He wasn’t interested in the IRS. To him this was the purview of the FBI. But he loved her. He dreamed about her. So, who was he to argue?
He ended up taking half of DeAnna’s research material home with him. It was later than usual when he got home. DeAnna had driven him, so he had no complaints. Night had fallen. He walked in and the place was empty. He looked over at the back sliding glass door. It was open a few inches. He knew what that meant. It made him grimace. Mom was out there smoking a cigarette and sipping on wine, staring at nothing, not saying a word, lost in some secret thought, like always. William sighed, dumping his school materials onto the sofa and headed outside.
It felt cooler out on the back patio. It was always peaceful out here. He could hear the L.A. traffic murmuring in the night from a few miles away. Soon the cicadas would start their song. Mom was in her usual spot sitting over to the side where she could see the city lights way off in the distance. He moved to her like walking on egg shells.
“Hey, mom,” he said.
She looked over robotically and gave him a smile. “Hi, baby.”
“Yeah, so, I got a debate coming up.”
She dragged on the cigarette and nodded putting her faraway gaze back on those faraway lights.
“Whacha doing?” he asked.
“Nothing.”
He said, “Just sitting here?” It was a stupid question. She just sat here every night, sipping wine, smoking cigarettes and pondering L.A. But any conversation was better than no conversation.
She looked at him with a thin-lipped grin and nodded. “Yes. Just sitting here,” she said. There was a wine glass on the table. She lifted it, took a sip, put it down, looked back at the city.
“Okay. Well, I’m going inside.”
She smiled again, but didn’t take her eyes off those night lights. “Okay, baby. Food’s on the stove.”
He pondered her for a long moment knowing she was hardly aware of him standing behind her. Something about her had begun slowly pulling his heart out of his chest right about the time he’d hit puberty. Right about the time he began understanding the world, at least on a newcomer’s level. She hadn’t always smoked. She hadn’t always drank, either. In fact, she hadn’t always been sad. But now, here she was only a few years later, an empty shell of what she once was. William sank back inside the house and left her to her thoughts.
DeAnna’s materials turned out to be halfway useful. After plunging through way too many empty consensus reports and bland factoids, he came across the secular spending on FBI top ten cases. He perked up, hopeful, and flipped the pages to a financial breakdown of specific cases. There it was—Portrait Killer.
The case had engaged sixteen cities nationwide to date, executing protocols through FBI offices from Boston to Chicago, Kansas City to Houston. And the dates were listed. He chuckled excitedly scanning the listing, absorbing everything:
Chicago, IL—June 1, 1984.
Shreveport, LA—September 20, 1985
Colorado Springs, CO—September 7, 1986
Baltimore, MD—January 29, 1988
Columbia, KS—March 14, 1990
Pueblo, NM—December 2, 1990
And so on. There was a Portrait murder every year or so since 1984. There had even been one in Colorado Springs, CO on the very day he was born—September 7, 1986. He had to pull back from his studies. His heart was starting to palpate and he noticed he was perspiring. T
o the right, he’d been scribbling mindlessly in his note pad. He looked over and had to shake his head. Yes, scribbling. But not mindlessly. Theraphosa had made an appearance.
He could spot DeAnna in any hallway at any time. There could be a thousand moving parts congesting his pathway—elbows and legs and shoulders—but only hers were unique. It seemed she didn’t move or weave around the others at all. She floated through them, parting them out of her way as she did, with her heels an inch above the floor, weightless like a feather conducting his senses into a ball of unrecognizable mush until he had to catch his breath, balance himself against the wall. Simply talking to her was hard enough. Now they were on the same debate team. Now he was rubbing elbows with her while she drove him home at nights.
But time was on his side. He felt it, knew it. Any day, any moment, he would make his move. And she was into him. Of course she was. She was too sweet and kindhearted toward him not to be. And playful, too. That’s what he liked most; her expressive qualities. Explosive laughter. Broad, enlightened smile. The voice of a child.
Before long, he found himself following her down one hallway, around a corner where he bumped into a crowd of students, along a second hallway and toward her locker. She stopped and began manipulating the lock. He stopped, frozen, suddenly afraid of looking suspect. If she turned, if she saw him standing there looking doe-eyed and tiny, he’d have to cover his intentions up. He’d have to lie.
My classroom? It’s back that way.
I must’ve taken a wrong turn.
No, I wasn’t following you.
“Well?” came a voice from behind, as an elbow nudged him sharply in DeAnna’s direction. William spun around. It was Milo. “You just going to stand there like an idiot?”
“What? What’re you talking about?” William said, hustling back around the corner and out of sight.
Milo laughed openly and followed him down the hallway. “Dude, please. I see you watching her.”
“What!”
“You think you’re the only swinging stanky that follows her around?”
“Come on!”
Milo chuckled again. “You’re going to miss out, Will. Someone’s going to snatch her up, and you know it.” William picked up his pace. Milo struggled to follow, grinning like a Cheshire. “You want me to talk to her for you?”
William spun around. “No, man. It’s not like that.”
Milo flinched back looking at him with an insane, doubtful grimace. “Man, you got it bad.” William flapped his lips at him and turned back, started walking. “I haven’t seen you this obsessed since Xbox came out.”
William rolled his eyes and kept walking. Obsessed? Bullshit!
Well, maybe a little. He did think about her a lot. He dreamed about her, too, jacking off from time to time, thinking about what her tits must look like under that sweater. He would never admit it, but he did. It made his mind spin. Was this love? Jeez—maybe.
Then he stopped in midstride, a bolt of anger flashing through him. He looked back toward Milo, but he wasn’t there, just a crowd of students.
Comparing his feelings for a flesh and blood girl, especially one as perfect as DeAnna, with a stupid Xbox? That was just ridiculous. William shook his head, and moved on down the hall. He’d never even gotten that Xbox. Yeah, he’d wanted one, for sure, but that was, like, two years ago. His mind went back to that time. He’d asked for one for Christmas, but it never came. It was something about his father being gone that Christmas two years ago. He was out of town. It was somewhere in Oklahoma, maybe Ardmore or Norman. Something about his job.
That day after school, William discovered how right his buddy was. Milo had said it best, and though William doubted him, it was at 3:18 pm that he watched his world start to slip from his grasp, right between his fingers.
Students fanned out into the enormous parking lot, all the upper classmen headed to their cars and trucks. Milo always parked toward the back, so William weaved his way through parked cars on foot, eager to get home. Something in the distance stopped him cold, made him clench up. It was over by the athletics facility where all the football players parked every morning.
DeAnna.
She stood next to Kevin Ronin at his truck as they spoke. William squinted and ducked behind the nearest vehicle watching like a hawk. Kevin was a six-footer, lean as hell, rangy and muscular, with long pretty locks unfurling down around his neckline and shoulders. He dwarfed her causing her to roll her head back to gaze up at him. They were standing too close.
William adjusted his position around the car to get a better look. What were they saying to each other? What was he asking her? Kevin was the king of the football squad, quarterback and team leader, headed for a football scholarship. She was a debate nerd. Why were they standing so goddamn close? He hoped for something bad.
Let them be arguing.
Let him hit her.
Let her fall to the pavement.
Make her cry.
Please, God.
But the more he watched, the less he could deny the truth. They were smitten with each other. It was obvious. Kevin’s body language was too subtle, too resigned. Hers was too thrilled, too happy. She bounced up and down and squealed with delight. And then he leaned down and hugged her, squeezed her in his arms. She hugged him back having to reach up and around to do so.
What an ugly, awkward couple.
Then she walked away wearing a huge smile and floating in her light, skipping way. Kevin had just asked her out. They were probably going to the homecoming dance. William frowned until it hurt his face.
That asshole.
That huge asshole.
That night, William dug into his research material preparing for the upcoming debate like an animal driven by starvation. He flipped pages, licked his fingers, read words that never sank in. The deeper he dove into the material, the more he couldn’t get DeAnna out of his mind. She betrayed him, stabbed him through the heart. He flushed with anger and didn’t know where to put it. Should it be directed toward her, or that Kevin friggin’ Ronin? Maybe it was Milo. Could he hate his greatest friend for pointing out such a benign truth? He had been right. Someone snatched DeAnna away from him. William had waited too long, didn’t have the balls to approach her, let her know how he felt.
In the back of his mind a tiny seed began to grow. It poisoned him, made him feel sick. Maybe it was he himself that deserved all his animus and hate. He was a coward, a big chicken, a pussy! He slammed a fist into the carpet ruffling the research text in front of him. A page flipped over revealing those horrible, magic words:
Portrait Killer.
He stared at them, enrapt. The page section described Portrait Killer’s most heinous killing. A family in Tulsa, Oklahoma had been murdered. It was a big family, too—a father and mother with three daughters and a son, all under twelve years old, arranged around the coffee table, the parents on the couch, daddy’s arm around mommy, the four kids propped up around them, each as blank as the other. The Tulsa FBI office had gotten another photograph sent to them. It was a stark and grizzly indicator that Portrait Killer had struck again. December 25th, 2003. Christmas Day, two years ago.
The information snapped William out of his well of disgust, turned him cold.
Tulsa, Oklahoma.
He gasped.
Not Ardmore. Not Norman.
It was Tulsa.
How could that be? Maybe they’d seen each other—dad and Portrait Killer. Maybe they’d shared a drink, just two guys in some hotel bar, traveling on business, separated from their families on Christmas day. Maybe they bumped into each other. Yeah, that’s it. Had to be.
Just had to be.
His eyes opened. He heard the beeping of an EKG, smelled the funk of an ancient warehouse. His body was sore, felt like it had been trampled by an elephant. Graves had injected the antidote into the IV tube and zapped him back to life with defibrillator paddles. Nevertheless, he was back.
34
Bernie Dobbs, P.I
Open for business.
This was the big day. Bernie’s ads went active at the earliest hours of morning. He was in the L.A. Sentinel and the Santa Monica Daily Press along with a number of local rags. He was also featured in a number of civic databases as a new business. There was a whole city of misdemeanors and minor capers out there waiting for the Dobbs touch. And somehow, he was less than enthused.
He figured it’d be a day or two before the phone started ringing. So it came to him as a tremendous shock when the desk phone rang first thing in the morning. He looked at it ridiculously.
When it rang a second time, he cocked his head over, doubtfully. He picked up the receiver, said, “Yeah—uh, this Dobbs.”
A voice on the other end said, “Do you do, um, surveillance work?”
It was a woman’s voice, a jilted lover, no doubt, probably a wifey. But she was using a voice scrambler. Paranoid. “Surveillance. Yeah, I do surveillance.”
“Um, well, is this line …”
“It’s secure,” he said. “Are we talking a husband?”
“A husband?” she asked, then, “yes, a husband.”
“Yours?”
“Uh—mine.”
“Uh-huh,” Bernie said, reaching for a pad and pencil, flipping through a few random items and snagging them over. “I’m going to need some information, ma’am. Some basics.”
“Okay.”
“Name,” he said.
“His name?”
“No, your name.”
“I, uh, can I just give you his name?”
“Well,” he figured this was her first time calling an investigator. She wasn’t very good at it. Of course, he had to admit, he’d never received a phone call as an investigator. Perhaps he wasn’t very good at it, either. “Ma’am, I think it’s important that you and I come to a trusting arrangement before you contract me to spy on your husband.”
