by Tim Green
The cheap brass handle on the door had faded long ago to a dull brown. Heart surging, Jack tried it. It was locked. He knocked twice and waited. The sun cast a single beam up over the treetops, stabbing at the earth with the day’s first barb of August heat. Jack knocked again, harder this time, insistent. This time he heard the creak of floorboards and a sleepy aggravated groan. He removed the gun from his waist and held it snug to his pant leg.
Brice opened the door bleary-eyed without asking who or what it was. He was unshaven and rough looking with long dark hair and deep blue eyes. His mouth was small and puckered, his nose long and bent, and his chin melded right into his gangly neck almost without a point of demarcation. He was naked to the waist, and his pale sunken chest was split by a black streak of long thin hair that ran straight through his navel and into his dirty yellow sweatpants.
Jack pulled up his gun and fired a round into the center of Brice’s chest. Brice staggered back with a confused look on his face, looking quickly from the scarlet hole in his torso to Jack before throwing his hands up in front of his face with a high-pitched scream. Jack stepped through the door and began firing more rounds. Splinters of wood flew through the air. Blood sprang from Brice’s arm, his shoulder, and his chest in three different places now. Jack kept firing, aiming more carefully now that his victim was on the floor. A bullet struck Brice under one eye and he stopped moving except for a tremor that seemed to run through the length of his body.
Jack snorted as he mechanically emptied what was left of the magazine into Brice’s bloody chest with a steady clank-clank-clank from the action of the gun. When he was finished, he fought back the wave of vomit surging up into his throat. The taste of bile filled the back of his mouth.
The gore of so many bullet holes was a logical necessity. He couldn’t leave a victim who could live to tell about it. Jack knew the human body was miraculously resilient. He once prosecuted a case with the Brooklyn D.A.’s office using an eyewitness account of a victim who’d been shot seven times, five of them in the chest, and lived. His attacker did twenty years for assault and attempted murder.
Even through his gloves, the silencer on the end of the Glock felt hot. Jack kept it at his side, thinking back to the time in Pittsburgh when he’d burned his skin with the hot gun by stuffing it back into his pants too quickly. He crouched to the floor and began picking up the spent shells, his mind swimming with the horror of the act he had again committed.
There were no other details for him to consider as he locked the door and closed it behind him. His method was as flawless as it could be. Six times prior to this he had successfully gone into his victims’ homes, killed them, and disappeared without a trace. His gloves prevented any fingerprints. His flat-soled shoes left no discernible marks and they, like the rest of the clothes he was wearing, would soon be disposed of. None of his victims had ever been able to scratch him or cut him so he never left behind any visible source of DNA. The only things that remained were the slugs he fired, and they were inconsequential. Because of the Glock’s unique polygonal barrel, they were unidentifiable.
Outside, the full force of the steamy sun had hit the porch and cooked up the smell of spent motor oil mixing with the sour stench that was already there. One of the stray cats scurried back under a broken baby carriage; a half-dead mouse skittered between Jack’s feet, dragging its hindquarters and causing him to leap almost two feet into the air. The mouse disappeared down a hole in the corner, leaving a thin trail of blood across the dusty wood. Jack caught his breath and jumped down off the porch without bothering to step on the pail.
Without looking back, he hurried down the rutted driveway to the road with the empty shell casings clinking in his pocket. As he walked along on the sandy shoulder toward his car, a sense of relief at having survived began to wash away his overwhelming sense of revulsion. He hadn’t reconnoitered the area. He hadn’t even known for certain if Brice was alone.
But as quickly as they had risen, Jack’s soaring spirits plunged when a dilapidated pickup truck chugged up over the rise in the road. It was coming his way trailing a blue plume of exhaust, and it was beginning to slow down.
CHAPTER 25
The stench was like a punch in the face. The smell of spoiling human blood and entrails cooked by the late-summer heat in an old wooden home was enough to make most men ill. David McGrew stepped across the threshold and drew in a deep breath to make a statement. The statement was this: I’m a homicide cop to the bone, one-third tough, another third cunning, and one-half crazy.
He wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. The crime scene technicians weren’t quite finished, and they didn’t like the detectives swarming through the scene contaminating things. But McGrew took advantage of everyone’s attention being drawn to the TV truck that had raced up outside. The lieutenant had started fluffing up his hair in the reflection of his car window, and everyone else gaped at the brunette reporter who got out and began doing the same. McGrew wasn’t the one being interviewed, so he wanted to get inside and check things out before anyone else.
McGrew was just twenty-eight, and he imagined himself as one of the cops he saw in the movies. He was the star. Other people were either minor supporting characters or extras. If he thought the scene called for a certain amount of macho indifference, then he had the stuff to do it. With Lawrence Brice’s bloated body offending the noses of passing traffic all the way out on Longcut Road, McGrew knew inhaling deeply was exactly what Clint Eastwood would have done in the original Dirty Harry.
McGrew’s sentiments weren’t limited to daydreaming. He possessed an extraordinary sense of confidence that was very real, even if at times it was unfounded. He was blessed with an innate sense that he was born to succeed. Everything in life to McGrew boiled down to winning and losing. He was an investigator and a damn good one, a winner. If he was on a case, he got his man. The fact that Lawrence Brice was a psycho pervert who deserved every slug that the M.E. would fish out of his rotten corpse made no difference to McGrew. It was a case. It was his case.
One of the laboratory technicians, a bleached blonde with long lashes and big brown eyes, stopped what she was doing to stare at McGrew from behind her filtration mask. She also knew he shouldn’t be there. McGrew stroked the small wisp of beard that grew from beneath his lower lip and winked at her. He liked the look of her shape and the slightly trashy air about her. McGrew knew his own shortcomings. His hair was going. His eyes were on the small side and his teeth weren’t the straightest in the world, but his personality more than made up for it with the ladies. Besides, it was his self-confidence that got them. He knew for a fact—a lesson direct from his Dale Carnegie course—that some women found it even more attractive than a strong chin and big blue eyes.
He looked intelligently at the dried patches of blood as though he could read the signs of the struggle. In fact, it was simple logic and not the smears of gore that told him Brice had been whacked by one of three things. A family member was not unusual in almost any murder. A drug buyer or dealer was also typical. Or, and this was a titillating notion, the killer in this case could be intimately connected to one of Brice’s victims. McGrew already knew that Brice was a perv. The officer responding to the complaint of the bad smell that had reached the road had already run a check on the man. Everyone now knew that he was a psychotic rapist out on parole.
McGrew didn’t let that bother him, though. When the call came in to the station, he was one of the first ones into his car, racing to the scene. Some of the old-timers actually sat disinterestedly, looking up from their desks and then back to their work when they heard the stiff was a level-three sex offender. But not McGrew. A dead body was a dead body. McGrew was out to make a name.
He had a good start already. He had an influential uncle—the congressman representing eastern Suffolk County and a member of the powerful appropriations committee—whose name he wasn’t afraid to drop in the right places. More important, he was seventeen out of seventeen on c
ases he had participated in and an impressive three for three on cases gone cold that he had been assigned to work. That was his record as a homicide cop, and he didn’t intend to ruin his perfect string of wins. McGrew could see his future. He might burn through partners, he might not get asked over to other cops’ homes for cheesy weekend cookouts, but his day would come. One day the young cops coming up through would punch one another’s lights out for a chance to work with McGrew. It might be tough, it might be lonely, but the ones who wanted to get the bad guys more than anything would look to him.
“Are you all set for us to let the rest of them in, Detective?” asked a short fat crime scene tech. He was being sarcastic. They both knew McGrew wasn’t supposed to be there.
But McGrew wasn’t mad. He looked solemnly at the plastic bag and gave one more audacious sniff, searching his mind for the right line.
After a moment of consideration he lowered his voice and said, “Yeah, let ’em in.”
He glanced at the blonde, who was pulling a slug out of the floor with a pair of heavy tweezers. She heard it. McGrew knew he should get his ass out of there. The lieutenant would finish his TV gig and come walking in any minute. The tech people were beginning to migrate toward their van. They were loaded down with plastic bags full of evidence. He lingered in the entryway, eyeing things up like a golfer getting ready for a long putt. The blonde kept her back to him, and that allowed McGrew to carefully study her curves. She had a lot going on.
She turned and faced him, and he could tell from the wrinkles around her eyes that she was smiling from behind her mask. McGrew sensed something vaguely erotic about the mask and the cheap blonde and the stench, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. Maybe it was just the sense of danger from being where he knew he shouldn’t. Whatever it was, he quickly wiped the look of confusion from his face and asked her name.
“Lindsey,” she said. “I’m from Tampa. I just started.”
“I’m McGrew. Detective McGrew. David McGrew. Homicide.”
McGrew held out his small hand. Lindsey removed her mask and one of her rubber gloves. The rest of her face was a little disappointing for McGrew. Her nose was off kilter and her lips didn’t have much color to them. They looked chapped. Her chin was too small for her to be called pretty, but still, there was something sexy about her. And that backside. He liked those curves. Her fingers were long and cool and rough. McGrew held them longer than was necessary or proper in a greeting between two coworkers.
“Maybe I could buy you a drink sometime, kinda like the welcome wagon or something,” he said with an expert wink.
“That’s nice,” she said. “I really don’t know anyone yet. My mom had to move up here. Her doctor wanted her here, so I came, too.”
“What’s your number?” he said. “I’ll give you a call.”
Lindsey looked at him and waited.
“Don’t you want to write it down?” she asked.
McGrew tapped his head. “It all goes right here. In the computer. McGrew doesn’t need paper and pencil for a pretty woman’s phone number.”
She smiled and recited her number for him. “Well,” she said. “I better be going. We’re finished and they’ll be waiting for me.”
“Hey,” he said as she made her way past him, “you forgot your slugs.”
“What?”
“Your slugs,” he said, nodding toward the plastic bags lying on the floor, “your bullets. The evidence.”
“Oh,” she said. And then as if to change the subject she asked, “What do you think happened?”
McGrew shrugged and said, “I got a couple ideas banging around, yeah. I’ll find him.”
“How do you know it was a ‘him’?” she asked. “You said ‘him.’”
“Women don’t kill like that,” he told her, narrowing his eyes. That was the cheapest bit of knowledge in the book, something you could learn from any one of a thousand B movies. He checked to make sure she wasn’t playing with him before saying, “They might pop a guy, but they don’t unload the whole magazine into someone, blood everywhere, the guy flopping around, screaming like a stuck pig.”
He looked out of the corner of his eye to gauge her reaction.
“No?” she said. Her eyes widened. “How do you know that?”
“Because,” he said, dramatically lowering his voice and stepping closer to her, “I know women. I know women very well . . . But whoever did it, though, they made one big mistake.”
“What’s that?” she said, eagerly searching the bloody scene for some obvious clue she herself had overlooked.
McGrew glanced warily around to make sure that none of his counterparts had arrived.
“You know how they say you don’t shit where you eat?” he asked. It was a cagey line that he’d heard somewhere. He spoke in a low conspiratorial tone. “Well, this guy? He took a shit where I eat . . . And let me tell you, this guy? Whoever he is? I’ll get him. I haven’t come across a case yet that I haven’t solved.”
CHAPTER 26
McGrew watched the morning news over a bowl of Lucky Charms, fervently hoping to hear his own sound bite coming back at him. Because of the brutal nature of the slaying, there was a lot of media play on the Lawrence Brice murder. A local plumber had seen all the hoopla and finally come forth with a story of his own, their first real lead.
McGrew personally leaked the plumber lead to the press and did several interviews, but somehow they got hold of the plumber himself. McGrew scowled as he watched the plumber on TV describing a blond-headed man with glasses whom he’d seen walking down Longcut Road one morning around the date that the murder was thought to have taken place. The damn toilet plunger was taking up his spotlight. This was a scene for the star of the show, not some old fart missing a front tooth.
McGrew tossed his spoon into the bowl. Milk splashed onto the table.
“Fucking guy,” he said.
The plumber wasn’t even that much of a help. His description was too vague. The old guy wasn’t able to give them a straight answer on how the killer looked besides the glasses and blond hair. A monkey could have done that. They didn’t even have a credible composite from this dope. No way did he deserve to upstage McGrew in the quote department. The old man had no media appeal whatsoever. McGrew shut off the TV and refilled his juice glass.
Already two weeks had gone by. The investigation had started out fifteen strong, three shifts, around the clock. Now it was just McGrew. Another big case came along after only a week—a rich woman stabbed to death and found floating in Noyack Bay—and everyone else’s attention got diverted. McGrew asked to have the Brice job for himself and he got his wish. No one else seemed to really care about going undefeated. No one seemed to care about becoming a legend.
It was now the second Saturday of September. The summer season had ended in the Hamptons and McGrew, thanks to his uncle the congressman, had moved in to house-sit a beachfront mansion in Quogue. He was still keeping his apartment in Riverside so he didn’t have to store his black lacquered furniture set and his leopard couch. And even though he wouldn’t have easy access to his gym, the mansion had its own weight room full of Nautilus equipment, so McGrew could keep his cuts. Looking good was a big part of his game.
The best thing about the temporary move to Quogue was that it put him close to the scene of the crime. McGrew went back to the run-down house where Brice lived, sometimes first thing in the morning, sometimes late at night when he couldn’t sleep. He was going to go over everything two, three, even four times a day, whatever it took. Today he was going to pay a second visit to Brice’s mom. That’s how you made something out of nothing. That’s how you won where others failed. You kept digging.
The crazy old bitch lived in a trailer wedged into a wooded lot that some farmer had used as a dump for all his old equipment for about fifty years. Mrs. Brice had a nest of ratty gray hair and about three teeth to her name. She mumbled when she talked and McGrew knew by the way she stuttered and shuffled that he made her uncomfo
rtable, but that was just too bad. He was on a case.
He drank the milk from his bowl and slurped down his last few Charms, then went to the billionaire’s master bedroom suite and strapped on his gun. McGrew smiled at himself in the big mirror in front of the bed. He’d been told to use the guest quarters, but the Jacuzzi tub, the pink granite fireplace, and the extraordinary view out over the dunes was too much for him to resist. He’d jimmied the lock on the master bedroom within the first hour of his arrival. So far he’d slept in the big sleigh bed by himself, but someday the ladies would recognize his talent. He was expecting Lindsey to fall into the win column any day now.
McGrew’s car was parked outside on the circular drive beneath a massive roof that extended off the front of the house and was supported by two giant white columns. As he circled the sand-swept driveway, he stole a glance at the mansion. It was more a castle than a home.
He pulled out of the big place and onto Dune Road. The drive to Mrs. Brice’s trailer took him less than ten minutes. A small patchy dog on a chain barked at him as he got out of his car, and McGrew fantasized putting a bullet in the little mutt’s head.
“Here poochy,” he said, glanced at the trailer, and then kicked the dirty little beggar in the ribs.
He picked his way through the junk.
“Acorn don’t fall far from the tree,” he said, thinking of the son’s dilapidated hovel.
He knocked hard on the door about ten times.
“I’m coming. I’m coming,” the old hag said with a shriek.
“What do you want?” she asked through a crack in the door. Immediately she began to gnaw on the lower part of her mouth. She was mumbling something about police.
McGrew wedged his foot in the door and then opened it, slowly pushing her back. There was a hoard of empty Campbell’s soup cans on the little kitchen counter; lying in the middle of the floor amid the other refuse was a tidy little mess that the dog had left behind as a memento. In the old woman’s hand was a filthy dishrag.
