I knock on his door and when it opens, he’s standing in a towel and stares at me like he’s seen a ghost. “Michael Jones?” I take off my sunglasses and fish out my ID. “I’m Detective King, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“Whatever you think I did.” Mikey is trying to sound like he’s black, no doubt trying to camouflage in with the environment that he’s become a part of.
“Mind if I come in?” I ask him as I put my hand on his chest and push him back into the house and enter the property. I’m breaking the law, but I don’t really care. Mikey might be able to get some cheap ass lawyer to scream a lot, but no one believes felons. No one gives a damn about them down at the department. The only one who might raise an eyebrow is IA, but I’ve given them nothing in the past five years, not even a sniff of trouble. Mikey is out of luck.
“Hey, this is private property, asshole,” Mikey shouts.
“Asshole?” I punch him square in the face, feeling his cheekbone and teeth through his skin as I split his lip and send a shock of pain through my fist and wrist. It feels good to punch someone every now and again, especially criminal trash. “You’re done for, Mikey,” I tell him. Reaching into my pocket, I fish out Jenny Martinez and show him her picture while he scuttles away from me, his towel coming off as he squirms buck ass naked across the carpet. “Do you recognize this girl?” I ask him.
“Yeah, that’s the bitch from my brother’s club,” Mikey shouts in horror as I take a few steps closer to him.
Brother’s club? That would explain Mr. Million Dollar Smile’s horror at me asking about Mikey. Poor bartender, he’s probably out of a job right now. If Mikey is at the club pushing pills, his brother is probably setting him up with suppliers to cut the profit at the club. I’m going to let Vice know about Mr. Million Dollar Smile, since they’re clearly clueless when it comes up about him. I reach into my pocket and pull out Ted and show him the picture.
“You recognize him?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he nods, holding up a quivering hand to stop me from punching him again. “Yeah, man, he went home with that bitch.”
“Did you follow them?” I read his face carefully. An entire career of reading the faces of assholes, criminals and scumbags has led me to this point and I know without a doubt that this guy is going to give me the answer I want, whether he says it or not. I look at his shaking face, the muscles contracting out of fear and curiosity. Am I going to beat the shit out of him and leave him for dead? Am I going to let him go? Am I going to arrest him? These questions fly around his mind, but all the while, his subconscious is an honest animal, incapable of lying to me.
“No, man,” he says. I read instantly that he’s telling the truth. “I was getting heavy with that bitch in the bathroom, fucking her brains out, and then some other bitch comes in and took her away. Sure, I watched them for a while, but then that dude started hitting on her and I watched them leave together. I was pissed, but there’s fucking pussy dripping all over my brother’s joint. So I moved on to more profitable grounds.”
“Did you see anyone else watching them?” I demand. This isn’t going the way I wanted it to. Mikey was supposed to give me more. He was supposed to give me something that I could use. Hell, he was supposed to be a lying piece of shit that would give me the answer I was looking for. He was supposed to be their killer. Now, I realize that Mikey isn’t even smart enough to get his own supply. He’s a target for the police to shoot at while his brother makes off like a bandit in the night. Damn it, Mikey, give me something to work with here.
“No man.” He squirms away. “There wasn’t anyone interesting in that club and I would know. I keep my eyes open for everyone. I’m my brother’s inside man. I see the things Cheto and his roided goons don’t see. I’m their spy.”
“Way to go, super spy.” I stuff the pictures back in my breast pocket and turn toward the open door.
“Hey, what did you say your name was?” Mikey shouts after me as I walk across the dead lawn to my Shelby which is already drawing notice. That’s the problem with having the best car ever made. It draws flies in places like this. It might as well be a big wad of cash driving down the road. I watch Mikey rush out the house, barely holding on his towel as I speed off down the street. If he goes to the station, he’ll be able to describe my car, and anyone working the desk will know who it was that forced their way into his house and split his lip.
Flipping open my phone, I pass a parked squad car and realize that they were probably back up waiting for me. I search through my contacts and give Owens a call. He answers almost immediately. “Owens, I need your web of spies to make sure a Michael Jones gets picked up,” I tell him before he can ask if I got anything. “He’ll be carrying pills or pot, one of the two. Anyways, hand him over to Vice. They’ll be able to flip him.”
“Did he have anything on the victims?” Owens asks.
I shake my head, already kicking myself for wasting the time. “Nothing,” I say. “I got to go.”
Before I can stuff my phone back in my pocket, I feel it vibrate. It’s not a number I recognize but I figure that it might be worth checking out. I flip open the phone and hit the talk button, holding the phone to my ear. “King,” I answer.
“Hey, King,” a familiar voice says, but a name eludes me. Thankfully he pulls back the veil so I don’t have to keep guessing. “Detective Carson, we found Chad Roberts. It looks like your pal Mendez is here. You should be getting a call soon.”
“Thanks for the heads up,” I furrow my brow. What could this be all about? And why would Mendez call me?
“You owe me one, King,” Detective Carson says before hanging up. I’m racking up the favors lately. I need to stop that or I’m going to start building a habit of it. I go to put the phone in my pocket again and it starts to vibrate. Sure enough, like a fucking prophet, Carson was right. Mendez is calling me.
14
The last place I expected to be today was suburban America. I’ve been to ritzy high rises, trashy trailer parks, and dumpy ghettos, but this was the first time I’ve been called out to the breadwinners and the salt of the earth. I drive by their houses like they’re alien domiciles, invaders from another world. Honestly, I can’t tell what the fuck it is that draws them to this city. They’re here like pioneers, trying to stake a claim to their part of the world and they only end up getting caught in the crossfire of the perpetual war that rages on like a tire fire up to the extinction of our species. There will always be crime in this town, and there will always be people living here who think that the crime came after they did. These are the people that blame the blacks or the Mexicans or the Asians. These are the people too deluded to see that they’re the invaders setting up camp in the middle of the battlefield.
I pull up to the crime scene, late again, my ears still burning from Mendez’s call. Hearing him ask for my consultation on a crime scene was as good as I was going to get for an apology. This was the prime showing for this killer. He’s finally drawing the flies and the attention. I see media trucks set up, blocking my way to the house that’s been blocked off. With Mendez out on the streets, there’s bound to be media publicity. I see uniforms interviewing everyone in the surrounding houses who stand out on their lawns, holding their hands over their eyes as they peer up the street at the house swarming with uniforms and forensics teams. Whoever this killer is, we’re on to him now.
I shut my car door and lock it, looking around at all the lingering souls, wondering if he’s here among them. Is he watching me? I walk along the sidewalk, feeling the heat of the sun boring through my head, making me feel like I’m melting. It’s so damn hot out here. People are going to freak out. So far, two of the victims have been white. That means that white people will draw action and publicity, because they’re the movers and shakers in this town and for some reason, we all want white people to feel safe. But Jenny Martinez. She’s Mexican, which means there are going to be Mexicans up in arms and defending themselves now. There are going to be s
hootings, lots of shootings. People are going to start dying, all in the name of self-defense or vigilantism. Gangs are always good for doing a little investigation of their own. They’re great at shit like that. They start hunting and looking for who killed one of their own. Usually they start with the other gangs, the blacks, and then they start hunting the white gangs. Killers always see killers behind the masks of strangers. I know for a fact that killers do.
I show the officer at the yellow tape my badge and I step across it. This is hallowed ground, just like all the other crime scenes. I look up at the two story house, the white walls and the dark gray shingles on the rooftop. It’s a happy house with a manicured lawn. There’s nothing about this house that would make you think that something terrible would happen here. There’s nothing about it that would make you think that you’re unsafe or unwelcome. It’s a place people would call home. It’s a place people live. I wonder if they thought it would come to this, ever in their darkest thoughts.
The investigation is taking place in the garage where a screen has been erected to keep the flocks of news crews at bay, and the peeping eyes of neighbors. A uniform holds back the opening flap and I step into the harsh floodlights that illuminate the scene. There are three detectives all standing around a body sitting in a wooden chair. I recognize the man from Carson’s file. It’s him, just without the wild eyebrows and the fake mustache that he’d been wearing.
He’s sitting in a wooden chair with his head limp, hanging over the back of the chair like he’s looking up at the ceiling, waiting for God to answer his prayers. His eyes are open and his mouth is slack. The only strange thing is that Chad Roberts decided that last night would be a good time to tie four belts to his appendages. There’s a light belt at each elbow and just under each knee. It’s strange that he accomplished all of this without any hands at the end of his arms. I look at the pools of blood, the gory instruments with which he removed his feet and hands, and the enormous pool of blood around the chair. His makeshift tourniquets did their job, but only for a while. Inevitably, he bled out.
For his feet, he used a hacksaw on his left foot, leaving it next to the jagged tears that removed his foot form his ankle. The white bone is sticking up through the serrated red flesh. His right foot was taken off with a chainsaw and on the far side of the room. It looks like he started with that one then hopped over to the chair. Next came the circular saw and his left hand which fell to the floor with a nice clean cut at the wrist. With only his right hand left, Chad turned on his table saw and sliced the last appendage that he didn’t seem to want off and left it on the table in a pool of blood. From there, he seemed to just lean back in the chair and bleed out, peacefully.
Mendez approaches me with a plastic bag in his hand. He looks at me without saying a word. He read my file, everything that I had on this case. I left it on my desk for him to pick up if he ever decided to change his mind and I’m so glad that I did now, because that asshole knows I’m right. As he hands me the piece of paper, I look at the supposed suicide note that Chad decided to leave behind for his loved ones.
“He had a wife,” I tell Mendez.
“We’ve contacted his family,” Mendez answers. “A patrol car stopped by last night and found the lights in the garage on. When he called out to see if Chad had returned home, he called for backup and entered the premise under the pretense of hearing noises inside. That’s when the officer, his partner, and two other officers discovered him in the garage like this. They say that he was still alive when they found him, but he died shortly after. They searched through the house and found this.”
I look at the letter in the bag. It’s wrinkled and crinkled, but on the back of Chad’s final message to the world, there’s another note. I read through it carefully and recognize where he’d cried on the letter. His wife had been contacted by Detective Carson about her husband’s activities. She left him. Everything was over for Chad Roberts. He was done for. No wonder he decided to kill himself. I look at the letter and realize that there’s nothing I could do to make this not look like a suicide. Thankfully, Mendez is already on my side, because honestly, this is the first body I found that makes me think that it’s actually a suicide.
On the back of Chad’s wife’s note, I read the message he left for the world. It’s short like all the others, simple, and strangely vague just like the rest. I’m sorry I wasn’t the man you needed. I’m sorry I was a failure at everything. Chad. Why do they always end like that? Why do they always end with the name and that’s it? There’s nothing here that shows a personal touch to all of the bloodshed he’s caused to himself. Why would be feel so emotional about his failure that he’d give up on life and kill himself, but not write his wife and kids an apology? Nothing about these notes make sense to me.
“This one actually looks like a suicide,” I say with a sort of sad, defeated feel to it.
“Except that it’s the exact same method of the others,” Mendez answers. “Two short sentences, a name, and a dramatic, horrific suicide. The coincidences are stacking up against these suicides. Had you not started poking around about this, I doubt any of us would have taken a peek into it. Thankfully, you’ve been such a pain in my ass, I had all suicide notifications sent through me. If a uniform found a suicide in this city, I wanted to be informed. This was the first one that popped up. Same MO as the others you listed in your report. Subtle, by the way.”
“I thought leaving it out in the open would draw some curious eyes,” I shrug. I shake my head at the peculiarity of all of this. “Lola Maretti ends up dead and no one has any clue if Lola knew Jenny Martinez. But, we know that Jenny Martinez had sex with Ted Martin the night before she commits her suicide. The following day, Chad here robs Ted on a four day theft spree, after which, Ted goes home and kills himself. Now, that night, Chad comes home, finds that his wife is leaving him because he’s been made, and kills himself in the most unreasonable way conceivable. So either this is all a bunch of random coincidence, or someone is doing this. Someone has to have known the four victims.”
“Except that other than the robbery,” Mendez shakes his head, “our techs can’t find a single way the four of them could have known of each other. Jenny and Ted hardly stand up as acquaintances. They were just a one night stand for each other.”
“So how is the killer choosing his victims?” I furrow my brow. The killer can’t just be following his victims around, choosing someone they come in contact with and randomly then deciding to kill them. That doesn’t work because how could the killer murder Ted and then keep following Chad, who had evaded the police for days? So how was the killer keeping track of everyone? How was he staying on top of all of it? “I need to talk to his wife,” I look around. “If the killer is targeting people that Chad has come in contact with, we need to know everywhere he’s been since Ted Martin was killed.”
“Ted Martin was killed yesterday and Chad robbed at least three places before coming home last night,” Mendez shakes his head. “There’s no way you’re going to be able to piece together everywhere he’s been and everyone he’s come in contact with.”
“Keep the techs digging,” I say, heading back to the Shelby. “There has to be some other way that they all knew each other. There has to be a substantial connection.”
I push through the flap and step back out into the sunshine that feels like it’s judging me, glaring down with no forgiveness and bitterness. There’s a dozen different voices talking and soon people start to catch on that I’m standing there. They turn and look at me, their eyes like those of hyenas, hungry for rot and death. They live off of the stuff. They crave it more than any meth head will ever understand. This is the fuel for the great big fear machine that runs the world. This is the media god’s sacrifice, the blood of the innocent, the guilty, and the uninvolved. They don’t care. Their apathy is your shame. They look at me with blood on their lips, eager for more.
“Detective,” one man in a suit nicer than Mendez’s shouts to me, “you’ve
been spotted at multiple suicide scenes. Is there something that the police department isn’t telling us?”
“Is there a serial killer on the loose?” a woman in a low cut shirt asks, giving her viewers something to jerk off to in the shower after their wives go to bed.
“Is there a connection between the recent murders on Charter Boulevard?” a faceless voice shouts from the back. I shake my head and push through them. I’m not commenting on any of this bullshit. I’m not going to let them stir up people at home with their speculations and their conjectures. I guarantee that violence will spike tonight because of all of these reports and tomorrow they’ll criticize the city for not doing enough to protect their precious concerned citizens. I push through them all as they continue to shout their questions. They continue to follow me once I’ve broken through their swarm, but they break off, one by one, and head back to the yellow tape, waiting for Mendez to appear and give them their little scraps of food so they can go home happy to their producers.
I sit in the sweltering heat of my car a moment before I turn on the ignition. Dispatch still needs to get back to me with Rebecca Roberts’s location. I think she went to go stay with her parents, if Carson knew correctly. I’ll have a chat with her, see if she or Chad knew Lola, Jenny, or Ted. There has to be a connection that I’m not seeing. Maybe they all took the same community class together or checked out the same library book. I’ve caught killers doing stranger things in finding a method of killing their victims.
Looking back at the house, I’m feeling my first sense of doubt. What if Chad really did just decide to kill himself? What if he wanted to end it all because he didn’t want to go to jail for God knows how long, only to get out an old man with no one waiting for him? His children would have grown up and moved on with their lives without him around. I can understand that. Chad has been the only one with a legitimate reason to kill himself. What if this all is just a series of terrible, random circumstances?
The Monster Within Page 13
