Looking Glass (The Naturalist Series Book 2)

by Andrew Mayne

  I go back down the steps and peer through the glass window at the top of the garage door.

  There’s a Volvo station wagon and a dark blue Toyota Corolla with tinted windows parked inside. One of these clearly doesn’t belong.

  I also spot something else suspicious: a big bag of dog food.

  There are three cars here, but evidently the pooch is the only one that had to go to work?

  I walk back up to the front door and ring the doorbell.

  I know full well that he’s not going to answer. He probably suspects that I’m a cop trying to see if there’s anyone inside.

  I peer through the side window again and catch sight of what might be blood on the staircase. Scratch that—a house this immaculate, it’s got to be blood.

  There’s not a lot. It doesn’t look like Oyo just blew the lawyer’s brains out when he answered the door.

  Oyo might have the man and his wife tied up in a bedroom closet, waiting to see if he needs them as hostages. It’s what I would do.

  Since kicking in the door isn’t an option, I need another plan.

  I flirt with the idea of calling the fire department and seeing what would happen if a fire truck came racing to the house next door. Then I realize that Oyo is definitely the kind of guy who would shoot his hostages before leaving a party.

  I go back to my car. As I climb inside, I’m positive I spot movement in an upstairs window of the house. There. The curtains moved again. He’s in there. No doubt about it.

  As I pull away, I catch a glimpse of something in the backyard through the slotted fence—a children’s playhouse.

  Damn it.

  I park just around the corner. In my rearview mirror, I notice that the house has the perfect view of cars coming toward it. The other end of the street is a dead-end loop.

  Oyo is sitting upstairs in the master bedroom, watching to see who is approaching.

  I should call the cops, but I know he’s not the negotiating kind, and if I spooked him, he might be minutes away from leaving—which means killing the homeowners.

  I race around the houses that border the backyard and come up the other side, opposite from where I was before.

  Peering over the backyard fence, I see a wooden staircase leading to a wooden deck—this was what I saw through the front door.

  To the left and over is a small balcony attached to the master bedroom. The drapes are pulled tightly shut except for a small gap at the top. They appear to have been pinned: this is how he watches the road that leads up to the house from behind.

  Call the cops, Theo.

  They’ll send a patrol car. Maybe they’ll roadblock him, but they’ll want to contain him first. He’ll know they’re coming.

  I move to the side of the fence not visible from the bedroom.

  I need to get to the deck, but I can’t do that while he’s watching the backyard.

  There has to be some other distraction that doesn’t involve a siren and dead hostages.

  Shit. There is. There’s actually an app for that.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

  SHARING ECONOMY

  I take out my phone and order an Uber to the house across the street from where I’m standing. This is a terribly unethical thing to do to the driver, but I’d like to think he’d agree to do it if we had the chance to discuss what’s at stake.

  The eight minutes it takes for him to arrive feel like eighty. As his icon rounds the corner, I can hear the sound of his tires rolling up the incline.

  I’m sure Oyo is watching, too.

  I wait for the car to reach the far side of the house. Then I climb over the back fence.

  I wait another moment for the car to come to a stop in front of the home directly in front of Oyo’s other window.

  I text the driver: Running late. I’ll be 5 minutes. Start the meter!

  He texts back: No problem.

  I feel a twinge of guilt but bury it as I slide around the house and start to creep up the deck stairs, trying to keep my back as flat to the wall as possible.

  I finally reach the sliding glass doors and poke my head around inside, making sure that Oyo isn’t getting a glass of orange juice in the kitchen.

  The inside is empty—except it’s not—there’s a figure standing at the front door, peering out into the street through the glass window.

  Oyo.

  Fuck.

  This was not my plan.

  I stand back, aim my gun through the glass door, and point it directly at him.

  Neuroscientists say they can predict an action our mind has decided to take moments before our conscious mind has even decided what we think we’re going to do. The function of consciousness, they argue, isn’t to make decisions, but to rationalize them after the fact. It’s our brain’s way of explaining why we did things—a kind of public-relations office that turns our id into a rational actor and not some lizard monkey acting out of fear.

  I would argue that my actions were based on a rational calculus. I weighed the risks and decided on the best solution.

  If you’d asked me a minute ago if I were a killer, I wouldn’t have known for sure. My reaction to Flattop and Skinhead should have been some indication, but even when I faced down Joe Vik, I was still looking for some other option besides proactive self-defense.

  I scream his name, “Oyo!”

  He spins around.

  I squeeze the trigger twice. The first bullet shatters the glass door but, given the reality of physics, takes a slightly altered path rather than the direct one from my muzzle to his forehead.

  It’s the second bullet that I fired that goes straight. Straight into his head.

  His neck whips back, and he falls to the ground as hundreds of shards rain down in front of me.

  I step into the home, gun pointed forward, and approach his body. There’s a pistol in his waistband. I reach down and grab it, tucking it into mine.

  It’ll be much easier to convince the cops that it was in his hand when I saw him and that I took it from him after—not that they will care.

  I check for a pulse, just to make sure that the bullet actually did wipe out his brains and it’s not just a bad scratch.

  He’s dead.

  I move up the staircase with my gun still drawn. He’s had accomplices in the past.

  The door to the master bedroom is open. Inside, two bodies lie on the bed: the lawyer and his wife in their bedclothes.

  His throat is slit and hers is dark purple.

  I check the closet—empty.

  I move down the hall and see a small doll lying in the middle of the carpet.

  The first door is a little girl’s room. I sweep inside and open the closet. Just clothes.

  I move down the hall to another doorway. This is also a little girl’s room.

  I sweep it: also empty.

  I move down to the end of the upstairs and come to a bathroom door. I push it open and see two blurry shapes lying in the bathtub behind a frosted curtain.

  They’re not moving.

  My feet feel like lead, but I have to check. I step onto a frilly pink rug and stand directly in front of the curtain.

  With my left hand, I grab the edge and yank it away.

  Two pairs of frightened eyes stare up at me.

  Tearful eyes. Alive.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

  CLOSURE

  Sheriff Duane is sitting next to me on the curb as law-enforcement officials tape off the house and go over every square inch.

  He’s keeping me company just like I did the traumatized little girls while we waited for the police to arrive.

  Their names are Connie and Becca. They were scared because they couldn’t understand why Mr. Christian was so angry. They’d never seen him like that.

  They still didn’t know that their parents were dead. God help the person who has to tell them that.

  I finally left their side when a female cop with a soothing voice came into the bathroom. I then let the deputies escort me out of the
house and into the front yard, where they bagged the guns I had on me and did their due diligence getting swabs from my hands.

  Sheriff Duane arrived within twenty minutes. After he took an assessment of what happened inside, he sat down next to me to get my story.

  Thankfully, nobody put me in handcuffs.

  “So you had a hunch he’d be here?” asks Duane.

  “More or less. I knew he had business with the lawyer. I thought it might be a likely spot.”

  “And you didn’t think about calling it in?” There’s only a touch of recrimination in his voice.

  “Sheriff, people like you never take my hunches all that seriously.”

  “You’d think that would change by now,” he replies. “But I can see your point.”

  “There’s also the fact that I don’t know who I can trust. You ever find out why I ended up handcuffed with those two animals last night?”

  “Nope. And I can’t find out why federal marshals checked the big one out of a hospital this morning and took off with him in an out-of-town ambulance. Fact is, I can’t even find his arrest report.”

  “Mysteries,” I reply.

  “Yep. Like how so much blood ended up on the inside of your handcuffs.” His eyes dart over to me.

  “You should run a cleaner jail.”

  “Maybe. Maybe.” He points a thumb at the house behind us. “How about this crime scene? How clean is that going to be?”

  “Oyo’s prints are on his gun.” They should be, or someone else tucked it into his pants.

  “Good. And I can tell the bullet went through the front of his head. So that makes things easier.”

  “And if it hadn’t?”

  “I’d make sure you had a lawyer right about now.”

  I’ve been asking myself what I would have done if Oyo didn’t have a gun. Would I have still shot him? Would I have then tried to cover that up?

  Ethically, I tell myself, I would have been fine with ending him—even though only circumstantial reasons led me to the house. And that’s where it gets sticky. In principle, vigilantism is a horrible idea. There’s a reason why we have courts and thresholds for evidence.

  As much as the aftermath proves that I made the right choice, I tell myself not to be so arrogant. This wasn’t as clear-cut as it now appears to everyone.

  Duane looks down the street as news trucks start to pull up. “Here come the buzzards. We’ve already got a small carnival at Sweetwater Road.” He shrugs. “At least we have closure.”

  “Do we? You heard my story about how I found Oyo. We don’t have closure.”

  “We have the normal kind, son. The kind you’re talking about, I don’t think that’s on the table.”

  “You know there’s no way he did all this without some folks straining their necks to look the other way.”

  “Yeah. But this isn’t going to be my problem.”

  “Maybe not. So when do I get my gun back?”

  He chuckles. “You’re from Texas. You might want to get a replacement. This one’s gonna be in evidence for a while.”

  I nod to the crime-scene van. “But you and me, we’re good?”

  “I reckon. Unless the FBI shows me videotapes of you and Mr. Oyo dancing around in your birthday suits together laughing it up about the prank y’all gonna pull. We’re good.”

  He leaves me on the curb. A detective approaches me and politely offers me a seat in his unmarked car so I can go back to the station and make a statement.

  I ask if I can sit in the front seat so the reporters don’t get wind of the fact that I just showed up at another crime scene when we pass by them.

  The detective obliges and, for the second time in twenty-four hours, I let the police drive me off.

  It’s become frighteningly routine for me. All I can think of are the scared little girls and what led to this.

  Oyo may be over, but this isn’t. They’ve already fucked with my life several times, and I suspect that even if I run my mouth off to the press and anyone else who will listen, I may get more visits from ghosts before I have a chance to tell my story to someone who can make a difference.

  If I really want to end this, I may have to make a compromise I never wanted to make.

  CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

  RESPONSE

  Never believe anything that’s reported in the first twenty-four hours. In the age of social media, this is especially true. People are so quick to rush to Facebook or Twitter with their hot take on whatever headline just flashed across their screen that they don’t even bother reading the article or waiting to find out if it’s confirmed.

  Watching the Toy Man story unfold is fascinating. I have the news on in my hotel room as correspondents rush to Sweetwater Road to cover the second gruesome house of horrors to be discovered.

  What are the odds that there would be two serial killers uncovered in such a short span of time, they muse. Are we in a new age of super-serial killers? Well, I wouldn’t call it a new age. And second, I remark to myself, wait until they find out the twist.

  As soon as I got back to my room and bothered to turn on my phone, I found dozens of messages. Detective Chen called me six times—desperate to find out what was going on in Atlanta. Apparently local officials here are too busy trying to figure out what the hell all this is to brief other law-enforcement agencies.

  The LAPD is going to be in a particularly hot spot, because they effectively closed the case on the Wimbledon house, calling Ordavo Sims the primary suspect. If they plan to stick with that narrative, they’re fucked.

  Because John Christian / Oyo Diallo was from California and even had his car from there here, the FBI is on this case now—which means they’re going to be revisiting every witness in Los Angeles. Especially Artice.

  I’ll be real curious to see what happens when they find out what kind of pressure was put on him.

  Plus there’s the fact that there was another set of fingerprints at the Wimbledon house. I’m guessing they belong to Oyo.

  Chen and company are going to look really, really bad over the one that got away.

  I’d gloat if this were office politics. But lives were lost. Hopefully the kid from the nursery isn’t going to have too much trauma. I’m not so sure about the girls in the bathtub.

  Their frightened faces are going to stay with me.

  I’ve seen terror in the rigor mortis expressions of the dead and even felt some of my own, but to be in the moment—to be right there—affects a different part of me.

  I understand even more how people like Joe Vik and Oyo can function. That part of a healthy human that feels empathy and wants to ease the pain of someone suffering in front of them, they don’t have. Or worse, they get off on it.

  Something else I’ve noticed was the strong scent of death in Oyo’s kill rooms and Joe Vik’s victims. The part of the brain that processes chemicals like oxytocin—which helps us feel empathy—is related to our olfactory senses.

  I’ve heard anecdotally about correlations between serial killers and peculiar olfactory functions, but I wonder if there might be something more to it?

  Personally, I feel it’s dangerous to start naming genes that serial killers have in common—it could quickly become a horrible new kind of profiling and lead to authorities ignoring outliers. But there might be something to studying the idea of which variations can lead to that kind of behavior. It may not be as simple as “If this is broken, then you’re a killer”; instead, it may be more like a diagram of which intersecting mutations can lead to that behavior.

  There’s a knock on my door. I grab my pepper spray and move quickly to the threshold, but before I can check through the peephole, I notice an envelope on the floor.

  By the time I realize it’s not a hotel bill, whoever left it is no longer in the hallway.

  I open the envelope and find myself staring at a photocopy of an arrest report.

  It describes a black male who was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder of a minor he was accused
of sexually molesting.

  The name is Scott F. Quinlan, but the face is Oyo’s.

  Well, damn. The report is from 2005 and was made by the Baltimore Police Department.

  I’m on my phone two minutes later, calling to get the full file.

  It takes an hour to find out that no such case is in the system.

  Well, double damn.

  Who dropped this on my door?

  I do an Internet search for Scott F. Quinlan and come up with nothing. I try two of the research portals I used to find Oyo, and still it comes up blank.

  Finally, I look up the name of the arresting officer and get a number.

  “Hello?” says a man with a gruff Baltimore accent.

  “Is this Officer Kimberly?”

  “Sergeant Kimberly. Who may I ask is speaking?”

  “My name is Theo Cray. I have a question about a case.”

  “Are you a cop?”

  “No . . . I’m an independent investigator.”

  “What the hell is that?” he replies, clearly short of patience with me.

  “You see the story on the news about the house in Los Angeles with all the dead bodies?”

  “Yeah? You have something to do with that?”

  “Well, I found them. I’m here in Atlanta. Maybe you heard about that?”

  “Something. What do you need?”

  “Could you pull up a website and look at the photo of the suspect?”

  “Hey, guy, I’m in the middle of dinner. Can this wait?”

  “Trust me. Just do it.”

  “Hold on . . .” A minute later, “Fuck. Those motherfuckers.”

  “I take it you recognize that man.”

  “No fucking kidding. I pulled that piece of shit in after the kid’s mother came running out to my squad car. He was two blocks away washing down his van without a fucking care in the world. Arrogant prick said that he had diplomatic immunity or some shit like that. Which he didn’t. But apparently he had something just as good.

  “We book him. Get the statement from the kid, even get a rape kit. A couple hours later, some assholes from the State Department show up saying they have to put him under their custody.