Morbid Curiosity: Erter & Dobbs Book 3

by Nick Keller

  Graves jerked back, hurt.

  “I can already see it in my head,” William continued. “And it doesn’t torture me. Not you, Graves. I want it. I need it. I’m going to savor murdering you, Graves. I’m going to savor it. Every. Single. Day. Of my. Life.”

  Graves blinked as though he’d been punched in the face. He sank back on the stool. Those words stabbed him, made him bleed. His head twitched to the left, then to the right. He said, “Why—why did you say that?”

  William maintained his glare, spearing him all the way through. “Because I want you to die. I want you to do more than die. I want you to hurt, Graves. I want your pain and your anguish and your agony, too. I want it all, and I want to be the one to earn it from you.”

  Graves stood suddenly and walked in a circle unable to contain himself, rubbing the whorls and lobes of his face. “Look at me,” he cried. He marched over to the mirror set against the wall and flipped it over looking deep into his own face. “They see a monster. That’s all they see—a monster!” He gazed back at William, something growing inside him, rising to a zenith. He threw the mirror down exploding it into a thousand pieces and hurled himself at William. Face-to-face, he bellowed in a tremendous howl, “You’re the fucking monster! You are. You are!”

  William thrust his face forward and screamed, “No, I am the monster slayer. I am the monster killer, the arbiter, the destroyer, like my father before me. So do your worst you motherfucker. It means nothing. NOTHING!”

  Graves threw his head back in a mad wail. He marched to his workstation and lifted the entire structure with one mighty heave. The thing crashed over with a deafening bang sending the computer, the collection of surgical tools, everything, to the floor in a moment of madness. Not done, he went to the EKG machine and lifted it in an inhumanly strong clutch and sent it smashing down. Bits of it spread across the warehouse floor. Then he beat his other equipment with the IV tripod, smashing and smashing it into junk before hurling the tripod away. Still wailing in deep, hurtful moans he went to the forklift, saddled up and cranked the engine over with a coughing fit. The thing came to life, and he began positioning it toward William’s table. All William could do was watch in horror.

  Bernie’s car raced down Eastern Boulevard. He was getting close. Twenty-first Avenue was only blocks away. He hadn’t encountered any cops, but that chopper was still above him, its blades whupping on the air, and he figured an APB was out for him. Every cop in the city had their eyes peeled for a Chrysler 300 with a busted front end trailing chain-link fence behind it. He wouldn’t be too hard to find.

  And yep—here they came.

  Flashing lights in the rearview mirror. They’d seen him, prompted by the chopper, no doubt. And now they were moving to intercept. These streets were narrow, and too crowded with cars parked on either side to go screaming through. But Bernie stomped the pedal anyway, hissing through clenched teeth. He glanced up. They started falling back. “Haha!” he yelled.

  A flash of motion took his attention and his face changed to horror. A squad car roared up at him from a side street, not slowing down. “Shit!” he screamed. The car slammed into his rear quarter panel throwing him into a full one-eighty spin. His bumper sheared away. Bits and pieces went up like a fountain. Everything blew up in his face—glass and debris.

  Bernie jolted to a stop facing the opposite direction. The other squads were still coming. Shit, he was about to be severely outnumbered. He slammed it into reverse, turned around to see out the rear window and peeled rubber backward. Twenty-first Avenue was coming up quick, half a block. It was right—Gah!

  The cop that had struck him corrected and came up on him. Now their bumpers were locked together, crunching and grinding, Bernie flying backward, the cop shoving him powerfully from the front. He was under the squad car’s control, so he pumped the brakes wildly, trying to break away. Tires roared against one another. It worked. The cars broke apart. The Chrysler swung around, out of control. His ass end slammed up onto the sidewalk where a cement elevation inclined sharply. He felt his whole car grind against the incline. Steel frame groaned on concrete. He looked over frantically, saw a huge steel pole coming. He grabbed the steering wheel like a lifeline and yelled a lion’s roar.

  His car pounded into the pole, exploding it from concrete. He slammed against the door. The car popped airborne and spun one full revolution sending a radius of plastic pieces everywhere. The Chrysler came down in an intersection like two tons of junkyard debris and stopped, dead.

  Bernie blinked, shook his head, mentally checked his parts. Everything was sore, but nothing broken. Groaning, he kicked open his door and flopped out to the ground. He was face down in a four-way stop. He looked up, read the street sign. Twenty-first Avenue. He threw his gaze down the street. It was three hundred feet of road lined with fencing, old weathered homes, a car lot full of junkers. Somewhere down there was door 679. And William was inside.

  He got to his feet painfully and heard, “Hands, let’s see your hands!” He spun around all clumsy on his feet, hands up, the bullet wound in his shoulder throbbing, and couldn’t believe what he saw. This was the son of a bitch that had shot him. Now he had crashed his car, too.

  “You little bastard—you going to shoot me again?”

  “Yeah, maybe.”

  “We don’t have time for this shit, kid!”

  The two other squad cars came roaring up, slid to a stop, doors flying open, more cops spilling out. They flanked him. He was surrounded.

  Bernie motioned down the street. “Jesus, people, he’s down there.”

  “Stay where you are!”

  One of the cops approached, cuffs in hand.

  “There’s going to be another murder!” Bernie shouted.

  “Sir, stay where you fucking are!”

  Bernie faded back a step. The cop—the young guy, a real cowboy—stepped forward, shifting his grip on the firearm. He looked nervous, had his bell rung by the crash. He looked perfectly volatile. Bernie pointed to the guy with the cuffs, barked, “Stop!” The guy froze. “Look—I’m walking that way. I’m just walking, I ain’t fleeing. You can shoot me if you want, or you can follow. But I’m …”

  A squall came over the car radio. “Lead, Seventeen. Copy.”

  Two of the cops, obviously partners, looked at each other. One of them nudged a chin toward the squad car. The other one jogged over, took the radio, said, “This is Seventeen. Go, Lead.”

  “Flight reports you have the assailant in custody.”

  The cop looked up at the helicopter buzzing five hundred feet above. Flight had their eyes on the entire exchange, relaying the situation. He looked back at Bernie. “Negative, sir. He’s not in custody yet.”

  “What’s the situation?”

  Bernie perked up. He recognized that voice. It was Captain Heller.

  “Sir, he’s not cooperating.”

  “You are to control assist, copy?”

  “Control assist, sir?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Yes, sir.” He clipped the receiver away, looked at Cowboy and said, “Put the gun down, Eddy. Top’s calling for a control assist.” His gaze went to Bernie.

  Bernie dropped his hands. Control assist—he knew what that meant. The cops were being ordered to assist Bernie from a position of control. Jacky must have pled their case to Heller. He probably begged them for Professor Erter’s sake, suggesting also that they were on Mark Neiman’s trail.

  Whatever works!

  “Let’s go, boys,” Bernie said, and started trotting down Twenty-first Avenue.

  William was suspended in the air. Graves had thrown a chain harness around the forklift’s forks, strapped it around the underside of the table and collapsed its legs. Now the table was a mobile platform. Graves swung him around, positioning him over the tank, which was now overflowing with water. Five thousand gallons. Plenty to drown a man strapped to a table.

  William jerked left and right fiercely. If he couldn’t shake the restraints,
perhaps he could topple the table off its harness. Of course, then it would be a fifteen foot plummet back to the warehouse floor. But it’d be better than drowning.

  His body was too weathered to be revived again, his heart too weakened. Eventually, he would simply slip away from death’s beautiful kiss and never come back.

  The forklift snarled to a stop leaving the table swinging back and forth. There was an electric whine and the forks lowered slowly, gently. The foot of the table rested high up onto the tank’s edge. There was a bump as Graves tapped the forks’ lateral controls. The table tipped into the tank, still secured by the harness. Water came up to meet William’s feet. He struggled. Now panic was rising up in him. Another tap on the control stick tipped him over a bit more. Graves was angling him just perfectly; his understanding of fork truck control was rather impressive. There was one more bump and William felt his weight shift. Gravity was trying to pull him down, drop him into the tank.

  Graves hopped down off the truck and stood under his hanging apparatus. He called up to William, “I loved my life, William Erter. Do you hear me? I loved my life. Maybe not so much at the end, but everything else—I loved it. Maybe now, I can love my death. Yes, maybe now. I’m very very curious.”

  William closed his eyes. Here it came. This was it. He took a huge breath knowing it was his last, and held it tight.

  Graves jerked the release cord hanging from the harness unlatching the chains, and gravity did the rest, sliding the table, William Erter and all, down into the water tank.

  Bernie jogged down Twenty-first Avenue shooting his gaze frantically for 679. This was a ragged piece of Los Angeles. The structures were a combination of age and rot. He couldn’t even locate addresses on most of them. Something caught his eye and he paused, just looking at it. There was a brand-new Acura sitting on the curb. That car didn’t belong here. He trotted over to it, looked inside it. This wasn’t William’s car.

  Or was it?

  He looked up at the house, an old dilapidated pile of junk with a rotting, wooden front deck and a misplaced tin awning. Trees were overgrown and the yard was scrubby, littered with trash. No address.

  He ran up to the porch clomping over debris and stopped at the door. The window to the side was all smashed out, glass everywhere. The house was abandoned, for sure. Up high on the door, there were marks, what used to be decorative numbers identifying the house by address. He gasped, squinted. Those spots. They were numbers.

  Six. Seven. Nine.

  “This is it!” he yelled to the cops. Three of them were following him on foot, each looking rather lethargic, the other was tooling slowly along the street with the squad car flashing its lights. Bernie stepped back and pounded a foot into the door shattering it from its rotten doorjamb. He bounded in, crunching over rotten flooring that bowed underneath him. “William!” he screamed. “William!”

  There was no response. He kicked the rotten couch frame out of his way and barreled into the rear hallway. There were only two bedrooms. One was at the end and had been used to store mountains of beaten, old furniture. The other bedroom’s ceiling had rotted out lending to a view of the old, dusty attic above. Something stunk, bad. But there was no William.

  Bernie was back out into the living room within seconds calling out, “William!”

  Goddammit!

  He shoved open the back door that someone had obviously jimmied open at one point, and stood in the dirt yard taking in a three-hundred and sixty degree view. There was nothing here but an old junked out sedan, rusty swing set, scrubby-looking bushes and an aluminum shed in the corner, too small to house a kidnapping victim.

  “Think, Bernie,” he sneered to himself. He took a big breath, lowered his shoulders, put his face to the sky, closed his eyes.

  What would William do—if the situation were reversed, where would that crazy son of a bitch go in his head?

  William was submerged. And he was trapped. The more he struggled the sooner his last gulp of oxygen would deplete. He forced himself to be calm, lowering his shoulders, letting all his parts relax. Normally, given his conditioning, he could hold his breath for an excruciatingly long time—two, maybe two and a half minutes. Given his current condition, he figured he had about ninety seconds, if that.

  He watched Graves through the glass. The man crossed in front of him, their eyes locked on each other. Graves bore a morbid look, a man whose life hadn’t truly ended until his meeting with William; and now, a man who had nothing left to live for. Even his body, wracked with tumors and sickness, was less of a thing than the mind burning inside him.

  He turned away from William and stepped toward his busted workstation. He leaned over and picked something up off the floor. William couldn’t tell what it was. He adjusted to see through the water, the glass, the distance. But he couldn’t. When Graves emerged back toward him, he stood very calmly not three feet from the tank. They stared at each other, almost peacefully, reading the other like men in their final moments. They were separated, yet unified. Both monsters. Both men.

  Graves lifted the object—a very large, very heavy, non-serrated amputation saw, six inches in width, easily a foot long, glinting chromium and brilliant in the low light of the warehouse. Its edge was razor sharp. William’s eyes bugged. Graves cupped the blade under his free hand, pressed the razor’s edge to his own throat, and committed a long slow draw. Blood appeared immediately, a sheet of it covering his entire chest, running in one river-like swath down his belly. He lowered the utensil to his side and let it fall. With a smile of discovery and wonderment etched across his broken face, his eyes rolled back and he collapsed to the floor.

  William stared down at him momentarily, feeling his body need breath. He struggled against the restraints, writhing like mad. The cuffs were too tight. They wouldn’t budge, not at all. He looked out at the warehouse knowing beyond hope he was about to meet Graves in the afterlife. He opened his mouth and released the muted scream of a drowning man. When all the breath in him was emptied, his body inhaled, and he began the final death spasm of his life.

  Think, Bernie. Use your stupid head. Be like William. See the blind spots, no matter how invisible. Accept the world’s truths. Let them come into you. Heed its word. Take its advice.

  Always look over your shoulder.

  Oscar Erter’s words, stuck in his head.

  Bernie blinked his eyes open, looked over his shoulder, turned all the way around, looked up. There was nothing but a crumbling fence, and beyond that, there was just a dusty old warehouse.

  A dusty old, abandoned warehouse.

  47

  Gamma Oscillations

  William’s apology to DeAnna was brief, but heartfelt. He tried to keep from tearing up as he asked her to forgive him. It was his first lesson in humility, but nevertheless, it had to be done. They were teammates, after all. She was gracious enough to accept. He’d spent the last five days trying to put it behind him.

  He had also concentrated on the upcoming debate while putting Portrait Killer at the back of his mind. Staring in the mirror he convinced himself he was just being crazy, and that Milo was right. Dad wasn’t the Portrait Killer. How stupid! In a world with six billion people, drawing similarities and cross-pollinating facts was inevitable. No pattern was perfect, no fact irrefutable.

  Besides, dad was too loving to be so heinous. William had always felt fortunate to have such a father. He’d actually felt guilty for his earlier suspicions. Maybe mom was just a kook. Maybe she was the one that was nuts.

  Now, here he stood at the Woodbridge High School regional debate competition stuffed in his finest suit and tie with a panel of judges watching his every move. He stood toward the back with DeAnna on one side, Tanvir on the other, while Milo eloquently orated their case. Milo’s opening remarks were perfect. Their research was bulletproof.

  “In conclusion, when one considers these three points of contention along with the corresponding evidence, the only conclusion to draw is that we continue funding th
e search for unsolved crimes on a federal level,” Milo wrapped it up quickly.

  “Time,” called the student keeper.

  “On behalf of my team and myself, we thank the judges,” Milo said, and stepped to the side of the podium.

  The keeper called, “Counter argumentation and cross?”

  One of the opposing students, a thinly-built eastern Indian wearing a dark jacket and dress pants moved to the podium and waited, all eyes on the keeper.

  The keeper said, “You may cross.”

  He started quickly and with an unexpected presence. “You state that one of your primary reasons for such fiscal continuance is the idea of taxpayer cost versus taxpayer benefit, correct?”

  Milo said, “Absolutely.”

  “Yet without such crimes being solved there is no proof maintained of which crimes are committed by which perpetrator.”

  “The FBI has extensive cross-referencing database resources that connects unknown perps to their crimes,” Milo stated.

  “Can you suggest the degree of error that may be present in such data crossing?”

  Milo looked back at his team inviting a response. DeAnna switched panicked eyes with William and Tanvir. No one knew how to answer. William took a breath and said, “The FBI is the single greatest crime fighting department in our nation, which is to say quite possibly, the whole world. They consist of forensic schools of thought, all of which are technologically-driven opening up fields of research and investigation that the average American has no understanding of and therefor can’t even fathom. What other source of evidence could possibly replace what the FBI determines in such cases?”

  The opposing player nodded, defeated, but gracious. He looked down, opened a binder, flipped through pages of preparation and looked back up. “With current events which have recently played out, there is undeniable argumentation for the need to distribute tax dollars toward the pursuit of more current crimes in lieu of unsolved crimes. In fact, if it’s taxpayer risk versus taxpayer reward that is the central concern, it would be more feasible to commit those tax dollars to catching today’s bad guys, not yesterday’s.”