There are two uniforms in the room, one of them looks up at me as I enter, giving me a slight nod, while the other discusses the events of the crime scene with Detective Waters. Waters is the kind of woman who thinks that hair only exists to be strung up in a bun or a ponytail. In fact, I’m surprised after the years that she hasn’t just shaved it all off, going butchy lesbian. She has a sort of distinct, peculiar way of making everything look dire and important. She carries around a ledger notebook in a portfolio that you expect businessmen to carry to their meetings. She’s not particularly tall, nor is she exceptionally beautiful. She’s about as plain Jane as they come because Waters doesn’t give a shit about her appearance or how other see her. She’s here to do a job and she makes that amply clear when she works. Her big green eyes look from the other uniform to me. Unlike Evans, she knows how to mask what she’s thinking. That probably pisses off whoever her current failing beau is.
“King? What are you doing here?” Waters looks at me with eyes that are almost concerned.
“I was in the area,” I lie to her as easily as I had lied to her partner. “I thought I’d stop by and see if you guys need any help. Evans looked busy down there in the common area.”
“What were you doing over here?” Waters looks back at her enormous ledger, making some sort of note. I bet she’s drawing dicks or something. “I thought you weren’t catching anymore.” Does everyone know about the arrangement? Why would Mendez release that to the bull pen? Why not push it a little farther and let the media know about it? Maybe I could hear about it while I’m eating dinner tonight.
“Well, that’s already starting to get old,” I tell her and she give a weak, sort of half assed laugh that makes me feel like I just told a joke, but that wasn’t what she found funny. Fuck her. I don’t think there’s a person in the precinct that actually thinks of Waters when they hear the name ‘detective’. “So what do we have here?”
“Jenny Martinez,” Waters answers. “Twenty three years old, graduated from OSU with a degree in business management a year early after working her ass off, apparently. She hasn’t been putting that to use over the past two years since she’s been home. She’s worked at a gym for the past year and hasn’t shown any signs of moving on, according to her employer. Other than that, all we know about her is that she committed suicide this morning.”
“Hanged herself?” I look at the scarves that are tied together, disappearing beneath the railing of the double doors. That fall doesn’t look like it was enough to actually kill her. She must have strangled out there.
“Well she wanted to make sure she wasn’t coming back,” Waters says, pointing out the window. “She shoved a hair pin into each of her wrists, severing both arteries and veins. If someone cut her down, they would have probably ripped out those pins and she would have bled to death. Good thing the hanging did the work for her. Hate to imagine what it would feel like for whoever tried to rescue her.”
“Seems like overkill.” I shake my head, putting my hands on my hips. “Did anyone see her commit the act?”
“No,” Waters shakes her head. “One of the neighbors across the street saw her hanging there dead, called the cops. The neighbors say that she’s been out all week, coming home with a different guy every night. Apparently she was noisy about her business.”
“So we’re certain that this was a suicide?” I lift an eyebrow, working Owens’s angle. After all, where the fuck is Owens? I have yet to see him since I got here. He would be proud that I’m subserviently slithering his ideas into the minds of others.
Waters looks up at me with a confused look in her eyes. “Why would you think that?” Waters’s voice is slipping into my mind now.
“If she’s home with someone new every night,” I shrug, “maybe she brought home the wrong guy.”
“Why would a murderer leave a suicide note that matches her handwriting?” Waters pulls a plastic bag off the dresser behind her and hands it to me. I take the piece of paper and look at it, holding it between my fingers and feeling the paper beneath. I read over the writing and can’t help but picture the cheap, pathetic messages that I’d read through the files last night. Some of them were oddly specific, worded strangely, or completely vague. Whoever this killer was, he wasn’t too good at detail. I hold the letter in my hands and read over it again.
“Sorry for being greedy,” I read aloud. “I just wanted the attention. Jenny.”
I look up at Waters with a doubtful look on my face. “You’re not convinced?” She looks at me with a doubtful expression of her own.
“I’ve already walked through this apartment and doesn’t it strike you as odd that a woman who is this clean and takes care of her apartment this well would just decide to kill herself?” I look at Waters, expecting her to answer or accuse me of not seeing the facts, but she doesn’t answer so I continue. “I mean, the only thing I can find in this apartment that could hint at the fact that she might have been depressed are the pictures on her fridge with her ex or whoever the guy is she’s scribbled out. Other than that, I’m not seeing a reason here that she would kill herself, especially leaving something so cryptic and vague. Why wouldn’t she apologize to whoever it was that she felt she’d offended. Also, where are her friends and family?”
“We have notified her family and I’ve sent uniforms to their homes to speak with them,” Waters looks at me with a growing sense of doubt. “People don’t always leave suicide notes when they go and get themselves killed, King.”
“She didn’t ‘get herself killed’,” I proclaim. “She intentionally stabbed two pins into her wrists and jumped out a window after tying together a rope of scarves and sex toys. If you put that much thought into your mode of execution, you’re not going to leave two vague sentences.”
“Maybe it means more to her family,” Waters argues.
“Bullshit.” I shake my head. “Are you declaring this a suicide, Waters?”
“It seems cut and dry to me.” She shakes her head.
“So you’re not going to investigate the losers she brought home with her?” I press her, not willing to let her hide from this.
“There’s nothing here to point to a homicide,” Waters argues.
“It’s everything that’s not here that points to homicide,” I argue. She looks at me and has her doubts, I know it, but something about this makes her too scared to call it what it is.
“You’ve been talking to Owens,” she mutters to me, shooting a look at the uniforms around us. Is she scared of them? Or is she scared that they might report back to Owens and tell him that we’re talking about him and the conspiracy? She looks at me with those big green eyes of hers and I nod silently to her. “It’s a fucked up conspiracy, King.”
“I know,” I say. Part of me wants to go explode all over Owens that I wasn’t his first choice to come to with this insanity, but I already suspected as much. I can’t hold it against him. I’m retiring in less than a month now, so why get me involved if I couldn’t commit entirely to the cause? Waters looks back at the rope of scarves. They’ve erected a screen outside to keep others who aren’t a part of the investigation from gawking and getting pictures of her. I want to go outside and get a look at her. I want to commandeer this whole operation. “If you’re too afraid to declare it, I’ll take over from here, Waters,” I say to her with all seriousness. “I’ve looked at the files and they have a compelling argument. I think it’s compelling enough to have another look at it.”
“The Chief is going to rip you apart if you waste resources on a suicide case.” Waters shakes her head. I know that she’s right. This is the kind of shit that ruins detectives. It’s the kind of mistake that sends them to the archives with all the other screw-ups to rot and turn into dust before everyone forgets that they even exist. She looks at me for a moment. I know that she wants to hand it over, but she’s scared that Mendez is going to rip her apart if he hears that I’ve taken over and am declaring a cut and dry suicide as a homicide.
&nbs
p; “I’ll take full responsibility,” I tell her, trying to convince her to come out into the light of all of this. She is, after all, one of the evidence junkies like all the other young academics. “Evans will back you up, saying I hijacked the entire operation.”
“Sounds like a plan to me,” one of the uniforms says. Clearly he’s working for Owens and the other conspirators.
I look at Waters and she looks at me with those dull green eyes of hers and she slowly nods. I nod back to her and look at the two uniforms in the room who immediately set to work. This is now a homicide. It doesn’t even need to be said.
7
I’ve known of Courtney for most of my life, but I can’t say that I’ve ever actually known her. Truth be told, I can’t think of a reason why I never spent the time to get to know her, or at least be a sort of guardian angel for her. After all this time, I wish that I could just go back in time and tell myself that I should keep an eye on her, that she might be worth my attention later on in life, because right now, God, I wish I knew her better. I look across the store to where she’s walking slowly past the coolers, looking at the beverages inside. I want to call her over and kiss her, to feel her, to taste her.
Last night had been a fantastic night. I don’t even know what the girl’s name had been, but she had practically melted in my hands like butter when I got ahold of her. I bought her another Cosmo while we chatted for a while. Thankfully, I never even had to tell her a lie about myself. She’d been drunk and she’d definitely been smoking something or someone had slipped her something at the least. I know that that club in particular is pretty rough on the naïve girls that go there and don’t watch their drinks. I know that she probably didn’t have the slightest idea that someone had given her something, but she definitely had taken something. I wonder if I could be charged with raping her, because I know that I definitely took advantage of her. But in the end, we all take advantage of each other. I’m not a gentleman. I’m a conqueror.
I watch Courtney open up one of the coolers as she looks at the beer, even though I know that she’s too young to buy them. It’s one of the few reasons Mr. Chen had hired me—because I knew everyone in the trailer park across the street where we draw most of our business from. I hate to admit it, but my roots reach out far. Since I was little, I had been a product of that trailer park. It was like a society that existed for only me and those who live inside those high, chain link fences to abide within. If there was a bully in the trailer park and a separate bully at school, I could always depend on my home bully to come to my aid. If anyone had claim over me for my entire life to this point, it was the trailer park. It was called Whispering Hills, but there was nothing whispering there except for the drug deals and we were still a bit away from the hills.
But for every ten worthless pieces of shit that the trailer park produced, there was always one like myself to arise or one like Courtney. Granted, Courtney was quite a few years younger than me. I remember Courtney as that cute little blonde girl in pigtails that would rush to wait for the bus while I was in middle school, and I remember her as the quiet girl waiting for the middle school bus, and when I was in high school, I never even paid her any mind. I was too busy trying to carve out my own piece of the world to spend time thinking about Courtney, but since the trailer park pulled me back, I couldn’t help but wonder about her. She was a marvel, all by herself. I imagine that she is a supernova in a corner of space with nothing but black holes and dying stars.
She has a long set of legs that reach down from her high short shorts that are so high it makes you feel wrong just looking at her perfect ass, but in the end, does anyone feel bad about checking out the lovely and the fit? It’s a compliment and a blessing for us to look at them. Her legs are long and thankfully she doesn’t have a damn tattoo like everyone else at the trailer park. She’s wearing wedges that have a high heel on them that make her look about as tall as me, if not a little taller. They’re the kind of legs that make me want to run my tongue from the tip of her painted, crimson big toe to all the way up to her pussy. I want to bite her ass, lick chocolate off of it, and worship it. It’s so perfect.
Her stomach is flat and even has a hint of abs. She clearly cares about her figure because she doesn’t have love handles or any kind of fat on her and her back is just as flawless. She pierced her belly button, which is about as trashy as it gets, but she does live in Whispering Hills, so I can’t hold too much against her or expect absolute perfection. She’s wearing a red, frilly bikini that’s covering her ample, young, perky breasts that I want to grab and squeeze and suck on. Her arms are long and slender, maybe a bit too skinny if there is absolutely a need for criticism. I look at her pointed chin, her pouty lips, her straight nose, big blue eyes, and long, honey colored hair and I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to take her into the backroom and fuck her brains out.
God, since last night, I’ve felt like a tiger on the prowl. The girl last night had been wild, screaming and moaning while she gave me the best sex of my life and I almost felt bad slipping out of that apartment this morning. But since I got home and showered, I can’t help but feel like I’ve been hunting for my next prey. Genghis Khan, Julius Caesar, and Patton all knew that conquerors had to keep moving. The moment you give up or stop hunting for your next conquest, that’s when everything falls apart. I look across the room at where Courtney is reaching into the cold treat box.
The ice cream sandwiches, tacos, fudge pops, fruit pops, and otter pops are all perfectly positioned so Mr. Chen can do the exact same thing that I’m doing right now. I’m watching her reach in, staring as she bends over at her perfect, swaying tits. There’s enough trash across the street who don’t believe in bras that dirty Mr. Chen, with his low standards, gets all the tit action that he could dream of. All of us know that he goes back into his office and jerks off to customers or Tiffany. But I have to hand it to him, sometimes this job pays off, even though it’s a soul sucking vortex.
“Going to the pool?” I ask Courtney, deciding that it’s time to change things up. It’s time to start talking to her. It’s time to make my way into her shorts.
She looks up me with those big, emotional eyes of hers and I see that she’s pleasantly surprised by the exchange, and I let her catch me staring at her breasts. Why should I shy away? It shows her that I’m interested in her. Hell, I’m more than interested. She stands up straight and looks me over for a second before answering.
“Yeah,” she answers in her soft voice that you don’t expect, from a girl who has remained mostly untarnished from a place like Whispering Hills. “I’m meeting Tommy there and he’s going to take me out on his motorcycle.”
Tommy, that guy is a piece of shit that she should have given up on a long time ago. Last I heard, Tommy was stealing from his parents and working at a meth hut out in the hills somewhere on the edge of town, coming back to the trailer park to sling his product. It was only a matter of time before the local boys got real tired of that and Tommy ended up a piece of pulpy flesh on the side of the road. But Courtney had an ongoing relationship with him. I knew that much from just seeing them together. But if they wanted each other, that was fine. I just wanted to show her that there was a better world out there, and if she still wanted him after me, then that was fine too. I wouldn’t hold that against Tommy. After all, there were plenty of girls out there, just like the one I’d spent last night with.
“I didn’t know that people still went to the pool this time of year?” I want to keep the conversation going. The pool is what some in Whispering Hills call the Water Park, but it’s just a pool, there’s nothing fun or exciting about it, which that name would imply. It’s a pool with a shower faucet spraying over a slide that heats up to temperatures that rival certain sun spots. It’s a shitty pool that someone always pisses in or shits in at least once a day. But I remember that when I was in high school and it was summer, the pool was where everyone went.
“You seem a little out of touch with thing
s,” Courtney smiles as she approaches the register counter, walking like a model on the runway.
“Want to keep me up to date?” I ask her playfully, hoping that she’ll latch on.
She looks me over and opens her fudge pop, slowly lifting it to her lips. She pokes out her glossy, pink tongue, taking the shaft of the pop and sucking on it as she closes her lips around it. I can feel my penis hardening, and her eyes study me like a cat watching a mouse. She’s looking for any sign of weakness.
I dropped out of college my sophomore year and it was probably the worst day of my life when I picked up the phone and my mom told me that she had lung cancer. It wasn’t the kind of lung cancer that medicine and chemo will treat. It’s the kind of cancer that you drop shit loads of money on just so she can die with some dignity, not screaming and hacking too much. I decided after a week of hell that I was going to enjoy this little detour that my life had taken. I was going to get something out of this exchange, if I was going to stay with Mom. So I started fucking anything that I could get my hands on and I have to admit that for the first time, I’m interested in a little more than just fucking and dumping Courtney. In fact, I know that she’s going into her senior year, but I’d be willing to make her my girlfriend after a year of secretly dating and sneaking off. Hell, she might even be up for keeping our affair secret, adding to the drama so we don’t get caught. Yeah, I’d take her out. I’d take her to the clubs that I’ve been running off to every night. I’d show her the possibilities of the world. When Mom finally dies, the two of us will run away from Whispering Hills and never look back.
The Monster Within Page 6
