Patterns of Brutality: Erter & Dobbs Book 2

by Nick Keller

  “You want some coffee with that?” Mark asked.

  “You want to keep your dignity?” Bernie stared back.

  It was his third cup. Mark found it amazing the man’s pancreas still worked, much less his liver, kidneys and colon. He looked back down shuffling through Bernie’s files on the slain women.

  Bernie took a sip, watching him. They’d come to the coffee bar to share information, even if it meant sharing space. They’d worked cases together before and both had a cutting disdain for the other. They were each other’s spectrum opposites. But despite their outward dislike, there was an internalized code pumping through their veins, a die-hard need to right all the wrongs of the world—or at least Los Angeles. It was in places within them they were hardly aware of, but it controlled their lizard brains well enough to know who was ultimately on whose side.

  The enemy of my enemy is my friend…

  … Well, maybe not friend, but co-worker at least. So here they sat, sniping at each other’s coffee habits while they hacked out who the killer was.

  Mark put the files aside. “That’s everything?”

  “Yep.”

  “One girl’s brains smashed in. Another burned alive. Another thrown off a cliff.”

  “Yep.”

  “Five years ago. It’s pretty thin, Bernie.”

  “Then there’s yours. Her face got…?”

  “Peeled it right off, left it hanging on a tree along with traces of semen.” Mark jostled Bernie’s files. “The M.O. doesn’t match yet.”

  “There’s a match, Mark. We’re just not seeing it,” Bernie said.

  Mark looked at him not wanting to agree, but unable to disagree.

  “That’s why we’re here.” Bernie looked out at the restaurant. The people here had no idea the lack of humanity operating right here in their own town. For all any of them knew, the guy at the next booth was overhearing their phone conversations, studying their dining habits, plotting how to erase them from the planet. They were coffee shop people. Such perfect bliss. Meanwhile, somewhere in the morgue was a faceless girl. Chrissie Newton, the unwitting victim of a man with a body but no heart, a mind with no soul.

  Jesus, he cut her fucking face off.

  She had probably been one of these same coffee shop people just a few hours before her death, going about her business, interested in her life, experiencing another day. Bernie grumbled, “Bliss,” dabbing his fat lip with a napkin.

  “Say what?” Mark said.

  Bernie blinked, started stirring his coffee. “Nothing.”

  Mark grinned. That word—bliss—it could only have been muttered by a man up to his heart in crime, a man whose bitterness fueled him. An L.A. detective. Stepping across his demarked personal boundary, Mark chanced, “Yeah, I hear ya.”

  Bernie cleared his throat. “So, moving forward…”

  “Yeah, I’ll have the autopsy findings tomorrow morning. Hollywood Station’s in touch with me,” Mark said.

  “I want them as soon as you get them.”

  Mark grimaced, not comfortable taking orders from Bernie Dobbs. He sat back and said, “You’re loving this aren’t you?”

  “What?”

  “Finally got out of Cold Case, didn’t you? Get to play with the big boys again.”

  “Just burns you up, doesn’t it?” Bernie said.

  Mark slid his coffee mug out of the way and leaned forward. “We take this fucker down, Bernie, and I don’t care what you do, or which department you end up in.”

  “Fair enough.” Bernie started collecting his files. “I’ll get you my transcripts. You just get me that autopsy report. I’m going home.”

  “Gonna clean up?” Mark said, with dripping condescension.

  Bernie huffed at him and sneered, “Problem with that?”

  Mark smugly returned, “Not at all. I smelled you down the street.”

  “Aww,” Bernie snuffed, “save the sweet talk for later.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  21

  AUTOPSY

  Derrick Smyth pulled up to the Los Angeles morgue and sat there, not at all willing to get out of his car. The murder of Chrissie Newton had happened in his jurisdiction and he was the investigating officer. It meant he would have to be present for the autopsy to confirm the cause of death as a murder—as if there was any question. It was a bunch of protocol. He sighed popping an Emetrol tablet to control whatever nausea was sure to harass him, and got out.

  County Examiner Olday met him at the reception desk looking like a kid on Christmas morning. Plunging into corpses with the snap, crackle and pop of a man ripping apart a rotisserie chicken required a constitution just south of normal. Olday fit the bill. “How are you, Detective?”

  “Fine,” Derrick said. A lie.

  “Excellent.” Olday grabbed a box of donuts from the desk. They had a yesterday-morning look to them, all deflated and stale. “Donut?”

  Derrick waved a hand at him.

  “Food helps me along, helps me concentrate,” he said turning and walking down the hall.

  “Uh-huh.”

  With a mouth full of glazed, Olday said, “The lab’s already taken their toxicology samples. Swabbed the lip and throat tissue, extracted blood and spinal column fluid, that sort of thing.” He took a last bite of the donut and stopped at a victim admin slot with a gated fence. Licking his fingers, he said, “Here’s the victim’s belongings.” He pulled the plastic bucket over. Chrissie’s clothes were folded, her shoes laid out.

  Derrick grabbed her wallet and opened it up flipping through an assortment of cards. There was a California ID with Chrissie Newton smiling. She had been a gorgeous girl, a young Natalie Wood with those pronounced eyes, a cute, turned-up nose and pouty lips… before someone cut her face off.

  “We’ll index everything after the autopsy,” Olday said.

  Derrick pinched one of the cards in between two fingers. It was black with red, velvet letters and the logo of a stiletto on a phallic symbol. In gold, embossed lettering it said Red Rocket Studios. Maybe Mark Neiman was right about his doubts, not that he’d ever admit it. Derrick put it away and sighed, ready for the morgue. “Okay.”

  Bodies were arranged on stainless steel tables, all covered. There was the occasional tub of investigable body parts on the floor. Most of the tubs were sealed, but one had severed feet sticking out of it. He could sense the antiemetic going to work in his gut.

  Olday dropped the box of donuts aside on a bench and yanked Chrissie’s cart out into the center, under a bank of white lights. With unceremonious flare, he unzipped her body bag displaying her bare torso from the knees up. The naked, clotted muscles of her face showed stark against her bone-white skin, and the eyeballs still glared like diamond-painted eggs toward the ceiling. Derrick had to look away.

  Olday took a last bite of donut, brushed his hands together and slapped on a pair of rubber gloves. He grinned at Derrick’s trepidation. “We’ll make this fast. I’m really only here to investigate for semen in her stomach and uterus.”

  Derrick made a sound halfway between a groan and a cough. “Okay,” he muttered.

  “But first,” Olday prodded the body’s chin upward exposing the wound in her neck. There was still dried blood around the opening and on her breasts. “Cause of death—laceration to the throat severing the carotid artery causing victim to bleed to death. Detective, will you corroborate?”

  Derrick cleared his throat, took a look and nodded an emphatic yes, goddammit.

  “We need voice confirmation,” Olday said.

  “Yeh—uhem—yes.”

  “Excellent, thank you.” He snatched up a large, stainless steel blade with a curve in it and a handle. He placed the utensil over the victim’s sternum and hammered down. The suddenness of it made Derrick jerk. Her breastplate crunched like a log. “No sign of frontal injury in the crash,” Olday said in his robotic, desensitized voice. “A little bruising on the ribcage and breast structure. The seatbelt and air bag protected her in the col
lision well.” He wrenched her two sides open with the deference of a man loosening a lug nut on his truck, revealing God’s country within her—liver, lungs, a heart. Everything.

  Derrick took a step back. Then he took another.

  Olday reached in and lifted her organs out one at a time placing them gruffly into separate steel bowls. “We’ll weigh them later.” Whatever melon-sized organ he held in his hands, he flipped it over and back, inspecting it. “On first glance, her internals appear fine, no abnormalities.” Once he’d unveiled her insides down to her digestive organs he went to work on the small intestines drawing it up like a Boy Scout rappelling rope. His eyes hawked across the length of tubule, studying. He snipped it at the separation between large and small intestine, and collected it into another bowl. Next, he reached in and pulled out her stomach. “Okay, this is where we’ll discover her activities moments before death.” He sawed it open with a fine-toothed bone saw until it fluttered open with the sound of a fart. Even Olday backed up. “Whoa, there’s been some gas build up. You might want to get one of those…” he pointed Derrick over to a medical mask hanging on the wall in its plastic baggie.

  Derrick thought about bolting, but stopped himself. Instead, he just held his breath motioning Olday to get it over with. The smell was so alive and horrid it triggered his anger receptors. He stood there pissed off for a moment, and didn’t know why.

  Olday prodded the stomach open delicately like an orphan digging into a large cake, and rummaged into it with his gloved fingers looking for something. “Yeah,” he called, “we got some substances here—along the lining. Looks like semen. Hmm—very deteriorated, though.” Without looking away, he reached over and grabbed a swab tool and collected his sample.

  Derrick had no interest in looking closer.

  Olday capped off his sample case and performed the same operation on her mid-section, opening her pelvis to the same toneless crushing as her breastplate. Once her uterus had been extracted and placed on the inspection table under hot, white light, Olday scoped and prodded with scalpel and swab. The more he rummaged, the more he shook his head dumbfounded. “I don’t see any sign of intercourse. There’s no semen. There’s bruising but no foreign substances, like lube or nonoxynol-9, like from a rubber. Whoever did this probably just used his fingers. That’s just weird.” He looked at Derrick and said, “She might as well have been a virgin otherwise.”

  Derrick took a deep, labored breath and said, “So, we have oral sex, possible digital sex, but no traditional sex?” Just the words alone made his stomach turn over in this environment.

  “Looks that way,” Olday said.

  “Okay great. Are we done, please?”

  Olday laughed snapping off his gloves and grabbed another donut out of the box. “Yeah, we’re done. I’ll wrap and tag later.”

  “Good.” Derrick didn’t wait for Olday to escort him out. He pushed through the doors and headed straight across the hall, for the men’s room.

  22

  INTRODUCING RUTHI

  What can an investigation tell from dead sperm? This was the question on William’s mind.

  Finding similarities in the three murders was easy. They were glaring, in fact. Candy Starr, Andi Jones and Dulce Dios might as well have been the same case. It seemed they had all died for the same reasons. But even those reasons were vague at best.

  The key to this case lay in the semen found in each body. There was no rape—no forced entry as it were. Just a man’s fruitless seed.

  Find the seed, find the man.

  The task, as hopeless as it seemed, had driven William to the online L.A.P.D. labs public information archives. They included public death records, city coroner’s office employee rosters, toxicology protocols. A more direct search led him to a site that broke down the standard semen detection practices, and more specifically, the chemical composition of human semen—proteolytic enzymes, citric acid, acid phosphatase and lipids. It was all wildly interesting, but of no real use.

  William rarely got frustrated. He accepted each roadblock in his research to be a redirection, each redirection pointing him toward the place he needed to be. Spinning a red pen in his fingers, he closed the L.A.P.D. public access files. He had to redirect his inquiries.

  Where else would one find information about the identification processes of semen? The pen stopped spinning in his fingers. Of course, the sperm bank.

  HE SAT on a bench across the street from the Los Angeles Fertility Institute. The sign over the glass double door jokingly read: No shirt, no shoes, no service. Pants optional. In his research, William had discovered donating sperm was far more involved than donating blood, and for most young men, they quickly discovered it was a daunting process requiring a certain degree of commitment. The sign was an obvious ploy to set their minds at ease.

  He’d have to be tactical in his approach. How does one go to the front desk of a sperm bank and start asking questions of a forensic nature without raising a few eyebrows? He sighed and got up, made it half way across the street and turned back as nonchalantly as possible. He might only get one chance at this before being asked to leave.

  Don’t blow it…

  He sat back down on the bench looking perplexed.

  “We won’t bite,” someone said.

  William fired a look to his left. A woman stood next to the bench giving him a knowing grin. She wadded up a fast food bag and discarded it into the trashcan.

  William said, “Pardon me?”

  She offered a crooked little grin showing a tiny face framed in a silky ginger-colored bob cut hanging down around her shoulders, and matching eyebrows. She had sharp features highlighting unusual genes, wide eyes the color of green olives set behind the most enticing, black-framed glasses, and lines on her face which deepened when she smiled. “Bite, I said. We don’t do that. This is not a blood bank.” She leaned down and whispered, “We take semen, here.”

  His eyes drifted across the street, and he grinned. “Oh, yes.”

  “Have you been to our website?” she asked.

  “Our… I’m sorry?”

  She pinched her nametag, which read Ruthi Taylor, Laboratory Supervisor, and said, “I work here.” She had standard blue scrubs with white under sleeves hiding her contours. But she was small with narrow shoulders and a long, slender neck. She was bookish looking, but the more William stared at her, the more gorgeous she became.

  William diverted his eyes across the street. “Oh, you work at…” he nodded laughing at himself. “Yes, I see.”

  “If you’re thinking about donating, I would suggest visiting the website, setting up an appointment.”

  William took a breath beginning the conversation. “Oh—actually, I have.” He looked at her taking in her features. She was pretty, but underneath was a hidden person, someone hard to get to. “I recognize your picture now.”

  She made a patient smile. “The Our Staff page, right.”

  “Yes.”

  She tilted her head at him, and for an instant they made eye contact. “Our signup document pages are online. Or you can fill them out on site.” She looked at him, and for a moment neither of them said anything. She sighed, inviting him to follow. “So, do you want to walk in together?”

  William remained seated, looking up at her. “Actually, I’m not a donor.”

  She shrugged quizzically and said, “Twenty-five to thirty-five. Tallish. Lean. Nice musculature. Obviously fit. Decent hair.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “It sounds like a job interview up in the Hills, doesn’t it? Actually, it’s what needy parents look for in a donor. Good genetics. You’ll do fine.”

  It made him grin. He could feel his cheeks flush under the cool sun. But he knew sperm banks wanted more than a person’s physical attributes. They wanted family history as well. That counted William out. The state of California would see to it. He said, “Oh well—that’s not the whole story, I’m afraid.”

  She cocked her head with a grin, curious
. “Why, do you have bad parents, or something?”

  An alcoholic mother. A serial killer, death-row dad. He muttered, “Evil.”

  She laughed. “Could make things interesting. So, why are you here if you’re not going to donate?”

  “Well, um—I’m working with the L.A.P.D. It’s a contract basis. I have a few questions.”

  She perked up, gave him an intrigued look. Deeply intrigued. “L.A.P.D.?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Huh. What sort of questions?”

  “I was hoping to gain an understanding of the nature of semen.”

  “Is this a forensics thing?”

  “I’m not sure I can discuss that.” He smiled at her apologetically.

  She returned the smile, curious. “Is it for a case or something?”

  William nodded, thinking. He didn’t want to admit it. “A study.”

  “Oh.” She sounded disappointed. “Well, it’s generally harmless.”

  “Harmless?” he asked, a little baffled.

  “Semen.”

  “Oh yes—well, depends on who it belongs to, I suppose.” He chuckled referring to the sperm bank across the street.

  She said, “Right. Can you tell me what you’re study concerns, exactly? It might help with your findings.”

  Surprised at her interest, William said, “Oh, uh—can’t reveal. Ongoing investigation and all.”

  She glanced across the street at the sperm bank, then sat down on the bench next to him offering a hand. “I’m Ruthi.”

  They shook hands. “I’m William Erter. Pleasure.”

  “William who?”

  “Uh—Erter.”

  She said, “I see.”

  “I’m actually glad you stopped by. It’s very… serendipitous,” he said.