Trent had seen death before, but never like this. The rats had feasted on the internal organs like tender morsels; the stomach, kidneys, liver, and eyes were gone. Cockroaches crawled through matted hair, and the skin on the face was gone revealing a line of dark teeth. A hideous black mush crawling with worms oozed from the sinus cavities and eye sockets; yellow mucus drooled from the sagging jaw.
Holding his breath against the smelly decay, he knelt in the shallow grave and cut a lock of hair and an article of clothing as proof of his find. Then he said a silent prayer for the deceased, stood, and shoveled the loose earth over the body.
The setting sun fanned coppery hues across the cold sky. He could hear coyotes up in the rolling brown hills as he started his long walk back through the woods. His feet felt frozen and his muscles burned as he struggled up the icy hillside; he wiped sweat from his face with the backs of his hands and stopped often to rest his protesting knee.
He found his Ducati-just visible in the falling dusk-and secured his grisly souvenirs under the seat.
He knew he couldn’t sit on what he had found, so he decided to call Priest when he arrived home; he also planned to stash the bag and never tell anyone he had been to the grave.
The sky was bright and clear and bursting with stars that gave Trent confidence as he navigated with authority toward the Atlanta skyline.
Chapter 17
At ten-fifteen that evening, Trent limped into the all-night Midtown Medical Clinic. The waiting room was neat and clean with wood furniture and hanging plants. And it was warm. Trent was grateful for the heat; and that the lobby was empty.
He stood at the admissions counter and drummed his fingertips. A young male nurse with a feminine face, slicked-dark hair, and imploring eyes slouched in a chair reading a glossy video-game magazine. He had a small goatee, and Trent thought he was a perfect postcard Jesus: the only thing missing was a red-jeweled heart that glowed.
Trent tapped on the Plexiglas with a ball-point pen. Postcard Jesus dropped the magazine and slid the panel aside. “A stickup, right?” he asked softly. “Did you call the police?”
“A motorcycle accident,” Trent lied. “I wasn’t wearing a helmet.” He dropped his Visa Platinum on the nurse’s magazine hoping to speed up the process.
Trent frowned inwardly when Postcard Jesus handed him a clipboard with several forms to fill out. When he had completed the paperwork, the nurse led him down a hall and ushered him into a tiny examination room that smelled of spearmint.
Postcard Jesus pulled the door shut. “Have a seat on the table,” he said. “How do you feel?”
“Like a million bucks.”
He wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Trent’s upper arm in preparation for the blood pressure test. “A motorcycle accident, eh?” he asked, pumping the cuff full of air with a rubber pressure ball while holding a stethoscope against Trent’s forearm.
“Yes. I should have known better. Those bikes are dangerous.”
He slowly released the air. “You weren’t in a bike accident,” he said with a knowing smile. Then he rested two fingers on Trent’s wrist.
“How’s my heart?”
“Appears normal,” Postcard Jesus said. “Although slightly fast.” He tapped Trent’s leg with a tuning fork. “Still sticking to your story?”
“Yes.”
The nurse opened the door. “Your vital signs appear normal.” He reached up and pulled a color-coded plastic marker out from the wall. “The doctor will be in shortly.”
Trent was thumbing through a well-worn National Geographic when the doctor breezed in without knocking. He was a short, slim Arab with wavy hair, boney angular features. “What happened to you?”
“I was riding my dirt bike,” Trent lied. “I hit a dip and went head first over the handlebars; my lower back hurts the most.”
The doctor laughed. “Try not to blink,” he said, using a lamp to peer into Trent’s eyes. The doctor gave him a local anesthetic then cleaned and stitched the tear above his eyebrow; then he placed a large Band-Aid over the wound and administered an anti-tetanus shot.
Trent screamed at the drilling pain when the doctor poked and prodded his lower back. The doctor crossed his arms and said, “Mr. Palmer, as a precaution, I’d like to rule out any spinal damage by taking a series of x-rays.”
“OK by me,” Trent said, feeling too miserable to make a fuss.
An hour later the doctor returned to the examination room. “The X-rays revealed no spinal damage,” he said. “Though you suffered some serious bumps and bruises, I’d say you’re a very fortunate man.”
“Great news.”
Trent politely declined an offer to spend the night in the hospital for observation, but he accepted a shot of Demerol that softened the pain and made his legs wobble like a pair of Slinkys.
He stood at the admissions window while Postcard Jesus prepared his statement. When Trent had signed his exit paperwork, the nurse escorted him out of the building. He wrote Trent a prescription for Percocet and gave him strict orders to do nothing strenuous for a few days. And he advised him to sleep with a cold compress over his eye.
Trent stepped out when the pneumatic doors opened. The cold night poured in off the sidewalk. Then he stepped back in and buttoned up his coat. “When did it start snowing?”
“An hour ago,” said Postcard Jesus. He looked at Trent wryly. “Drive careful on that motorcycle.”
#
Fifteen minutes later, Trent was seated at his desk, sipping Gray Goose on the rocks, hoping the alcohol would help sooth his throbbing back. He picked up his cellular phone and called Priest.
“The Priest residence,” said a female voice heavy with sleep.
“Hi. Trent Palmer here. Sorry to bother you at this late hour, but would Inspector Priest be available?”
Trent could hear muffled voices in the background. “Palmer,” a curious voice said. “What is it?”
“Something very important has come up. We need to talk.”
“Does it have any bearing on the park murder or Chloe Lee’s abduction?”
“It could.”
“Talk now; or we’re going to have problems.”
Out came a cautious explanation of why he had driven to the Whiskey A-Go-Go Lounge and how Garcia had tipped him to the location of a body.
A short silence followed. “You’re kidding, right?”
Trent gave him the location of the body and a few other juicy details. “It’s the real McCoy,” he said. “I have no doubt whatsoever.”
“I’ll call Chief Clay. You and I will need to meet face-to-face.”
“I can—”
“Tomorrow at lunchtime,” Priest said. “I’ll stop by your apartment.”
“I’ll be waiting.”
Chapter 18
Early the next morning, Trent woke to the raw pain in his lower back. He wanted to go back to sleep, but a ruthless, forgotten dream was waiting for him.
He looked in the mirror and cringed. His face was bruised, and a purple half-moon with yellow highlights had developed over his reddened eye. Blood dotted the Band Aid.
Drinking his way through a pot of strong coffee, he decided how to proceed. The first person he wanted to find was the tramp he’d passed while searching for Chloe. He was part of the Midtown scenery, and Trent had a hunch that the cell phone he had been holding might belong to the killer or the victim.
But first Trent took a cab to a drug store and filled his prescription for the Percs. He placed them in his medicine cabinet then heated up a cold plate of mac and cheese for breakfast.
As the first light burned weak and gray through the windows, he limped across the bridge and into the park. The landscape was plentiful: hundreds of deciduous and evergreen shrubs and trees cast long shadows, and the glasswork of the skyscrapers that faced the rising sun shined like polished silver.
Trent shuffled through the park, careful to avoid collisions with joggers, bikers, and people on rollerblades. He questione
d park workers, police, homeless people, and a mulatto man with bleached hair smoking a controlled substance.
The temperature had plunged. A biting wind blasted through the streets of the lower city. He pulled his jacket tight and pushed his aching body to a Caribou coffee shop on Piedmont Avenue.
Seated at a window that overlooked the park, he pulled off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. A thin waitress with brown hair drawn back into a tight bun stopped at his table. Her eyes widened when she got a look at his face. “What happened?”
“I strayed into a hornets nest without an invitation.”
“You should be in the hospital,” she said, “not out walking around.”
“Done that, been there,” Trent said, exploring a chipped tooth with his tongue. “Is your espresso machine working?”
“It is.”
“Could I please have a double latte?”
“Coming right up.”
She set his drink down along with a crescent-shaped tart filled with apples. “On the house.”
“Thanks,” Trent said, trying hard to smile. “There’s a putrid smell outside the front door.”
She wrinkled her face and said, “The sewer line must be backed up again; every once-in-a-while we get that sweet-smelling odor drifting up from the corner gutter.”
“You should complain to the city.”
“The people in Midtown filed a complaint about the stench last year. The city is supposed to start an overhaul of the Midtown sewer-system next month. They even gave it a fancy name: ‘The Midtown Alliance Sewer Renovation Project.’”
“I’ll hold my breath.”
“You ought to go back to bed.”
Trent ordered a second latte, then opened his backpack and pulled out a copy of the GID report he’d made on a Xerox machine at Office Max. He found his Spiral notebook and a ball-point pen and took notes.
The introductory paragraph stated the propriety nature of the report. ANY OFFICER CAUGHT DIVULGING ANY PART OF THIS SENSITIVE REPORT WILL BE SUBJECT TO CRIMINAL CHARGES UP TO AND INCLUDING IMPRISONMENT, it read.
His eyes fell to the beautifully colored diagrams and easy-to-read figures, and he idly wondered if the officers at the Midtown Police Plaza had the same level of expertise as their art department. Probably not.
The pie chart on the first page broke down the annual Atlanta murders by district and substantiated what Radcliff had told him.
What the sergeant hadn’t revealed was that ten of the thirteen Midtown victims-from three different gangs-had been shot with nine-millimeter hollow-point slugs fired at close range. Ballistics confirmed that the slugs collected from the ten murders had all been fired from the same gun.
Someone had penciled a chain of little circles down the margin of the page. Dates and tiny descriptions of the murder victims had been marked in each circle. The largest one was at the bottom and a comment had been penciled in: NO STRUGGLE HAS TAKEN PLACE. HOW DOES HE DO IT?
Quite a mouthful, Trent thought, as he resumed reading. Seven of the Midtown hits were individual, but last Wednesday three thugs were murdered in a crime-infested neighborhood across from the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. Ahhh, Trent thought, recalling the picture on the front-page of last Sunday’s paper.
The Midtown killings had taken place over the last four months, and the majority of GID officers believed that a vigilante killer was roaming the area.
“That’s a bright group,” Trent said, as the same thought kept whirling around his head: for no one to hear the shots, the shooter had to be performing some kind of a magician’s trick.
Of the remaining Midtown murders, one had been committed with a knife, one with a shotgun, and the other was a hit-and-run.
Trent nibbled his tart and read the second chapter. It examined the success and failure of illegal drug laboratory busts in Atlanta over a twelve-month period.
A vertical bar graph compared the local drug cartels and substantiated that Triple’s operation had the highest percentage of failed meth lab busts.
The general consensus was that Triple had been one step ahead of the police, clearing the toxic chemicals from a targeted site before the drug interdiction team arrived. An internal investigation had been launched to find the source of the leak, but thus far they had been unable to locate the department spy.
Another chapter detailed the individual meth lab busts. Each page was dedicated to a site and included the date, time, ground and aerial photos, and text discussing the outcome of that specific bust.
An entire chapter was dedicated to a fatal meth lab explosion that occurred last August. The lab, which had been hidden in an abandoned pump shed, had belonged to the Outlaws.
Four Midtown officers were killed in the fire, and the investigative board believed that the department spy tipped the Outlaws to the raid. The lab basement had been flooded with accelerants, and the fire was so intense that a positive ID of the remains could not be carried out.
Trent studied the accompanying photographs. A police helicopter pilot had taken pictures of the lab a week before the fatal fire. From those photos, he could see a small concrete-block shed situated next to a stand of Pecan trees. Subsequent photos shot at ground level showed the burned-out structure from various angles.
The text that followed discussed rewriting the SOP’s for entering a suspected meth lab so as to ensure the safety of future drug interdiction teams.
The last page of the report discussed the near-epidemic levels of meth overdoses inside the Atlanta Beltway. The prevailing theory was that a cartel-possibly Triple’s-was operating an enormous clandestine lab somewhere downtown.
Chief Clay had penned the concluding statement. It stated that until more information was collected, no mention of the vigilante killer, the department spy, or the super meth lab would be made public.
Trent glanced at his watch. Leave it to a politician, he thought, placing the latte-stained GID report in his bag.
It was time for him to fulfill his end of the bargain he had made with Garcia.
Chapter 19
Trent left a ten-dollar bill on the table to cover the tip. He decided he’d rather be caught by the police giving a copy of the GID report to the Apostles than suffer sleepless nights wondering when Utah and his thugs would ambush him.
He descended the stairs into the cold hard air of the city, shuffling along a sidewalk that rimmed the park, head down, hands in his pockets while the wind whipped his hair around. He spotted the agreed upon steel-mesh trashcan. An instrumental ‘Jingle Bells’ from a store competed with a bar-belled muscled man ringing a handheld bell by a red bucket. When Trent loitered by the trash bin, the man turned toward him. “Drop it in the bin,” he said gruffly.
“It’s damn cold out,” Trent said.
“Keep walking, Palmer,” the man said. “It’ll warm you.”
Trent dropped the copy into the bin and hurried along.
Fortified by the caffeine, he continued down Fourteenth Street and turned into a harmless looking neighborhood in search of the house where the triple homicide had occurred.
The first block consisted of high-rise condos and retirement homes; further in, the neighborhood deteriorated rapidly, becoming a dreary wasteland of rundown tenements blighted by corruption and poverty, violence and drugs.
Trent had reached the Midtown Public Housing Project. The temperature was hovering just around the freezing point. Thick, misty fog, streaked and dirty, complemented the weed-infested yards, seedy wood-frame houses with bars and grills on the windows, and old dented cars at the curb.
Trent found the creaky house where the killings had occurred. The dirty windows were boarded-up, the stained paintwork was cracked and chipped, and rusty junk and rubbish littered the yard.
The police said the killer had not gone out the back because an eight-foot fence with strands of barbed wire rimmed the adjoining property. Trent knew the police were thorough; he had no reason to doubt them. That left the street. The only way out of the neighborhood was
back to Fourteenth Street and then left or right.
Trent went door-to-door asking questions.
After an hour he was bone-cold and shivering and had decided to pack it in for a rum and coke, when he spotted a disabled man in a wheelchair rolling down the street. He wore a water-proof bomber jacket, had a round pink face, and wore an Atlanta Braves baseball cap.
“Hey there,” Trent said. The wind gusted harder now, with snow at times.
“Goddamn litter bugs,” the man said, using a metal pole with a trigger and a grabber-claw to pick up coffee cups and fruit bar wrappers.
Trent dropped a few singles into his coffee tin.
“Thanks,” he said. “You don’t live on this street.”
“No. I’m checking into the triple murder; know anything about it?”
“Today’s Wednesday. Been a week.”
“That’s right.”
“You a cop?”
“No.”
“A PI?”
“No,” Trent said, handing him a business card.
The man studied Trent’s card and said, “Peoplefinders.com. So you ask questions and find people?”
“That’s it. I’m searching for the little girl who was abducted from Piedmont Park.”
He tilted his head to one side. “What happened to your face?”
“I get paid to take a few bumps and bruises. Now, about the murders . . .”
“I know it was Wednesday because that’s when the garbage trucks come through; those guys spill half the shit they take out. I was picking up trash.”
“Anything unusual happen?”
“Yes, sir,” he said, tilting his head forward and back, as if trying to bring Trent into focus. “I would’ve told the cops, but they never came back.”
Trent stared back at him. “Told them what?”
“That truck and trailer.”
“What about it?”
“Well, there’s always a lawn crew that comes on Wednesday morning.”
“So?”
“A Latino crew cuts that yard,” he said, pointing at the house directly across the street from where the triple homicide had occurred. “They’d finished, packed up, and split. Five minutes later this jet black pickup truck pulling a black covered trailer whips into the neighborhood. Driver does a one-eighty in that cul-de-sac and parks right there,” he said, nodding at Trent’s feet.
The Midtown Murderer Page 6
