Jim Knighthorse Series: First Three Books

by J. R. Rain

  “C’mon,” said Hansen. “We might as well get this over with.”

  “I thought cops were immune to seeing corpses. Part of the job and all that.”

  “Land corpses I can deal with. Floaters, not so much.”

  The commotion was centered on something lying on the ground, something sitting in a pool of water and mostly covered by a whitish sheet. I say mostly, because a pale arm was sticking out akimbo. The arm was covered in red slashes and strange markings, and as I got closer I realized that much of the flesh was missing. Hansen saw it, too, and turned to me. He looked a little green.

  “Looks like the crabs got to him first.”

  I nodded and felt bile rise up the back of my throat. I swallowed it back down and nodded again. I was pretty sure I had played it off.

  “This stuff doesn’t bother you?” asked Hansen.

  “He’s no deader than other bodies.”

  “But, Jesus...the crabs.”

  “It’s nature’s way.”

  He looked back at me. “Nature’s way? Thank you, Jacques fucking Cousteau.”

  Hansen held up his shiny badge and pushed through the crowd. The crowd, I noted, consisted mostly of sunburned fishermen wearing everything from shorts to yellow slickers. I noted the distinct aroma of rotting fish. And maybe something else rotting.

  I swallowed hard.

  Some uniforms were standing around, too, keeping the crowd back. They stepped aside and we got closer to the corpse. The smell of rotting meat hit me pretty hard and I made a small gagging motion. Luckily, no one seemed to notice my small gagging motion. Hansen, for his part, kept his cool, although I noted his complexion had turned considerably whiter.

  Hansen met with who I assumed was the Long Beach homicide investigator in charge of the scene. They chatted a bit. Probably not about the Lakers’ chances this year. A moment later, Hansen motioned toward me. The Long Beach investigator squinted at me, then nodded. He was a tall guy with a beer gut. Hansen waved me over.

  “Knighthorse, this is Detective Brewer.”

  I nodded. “Detective.”

  He squinted at me some more. Although he was tall, I still had him by a few inches. I had most guys by a few inches. Any way you measured it. He said, “You the same Knighthorse who played for UCLA?”

  “You mean that fullback who plagued USC for three straight years?”

  “Yeah, that one.”

  “You got him.”

  He looked at me some more. I think he decided he liked what he saw, since he might have grinned. “Your old man runs an agency in L.A. Worked with him on one or two cases.”

  “Sounds like him.”

  My old man could kiss my ass. He had allowed key evidence to my mother’s murder to languish at the bottom of a moving box for two decades. Yeah, he could definitely kiss my ass.

  Anyway, Brewer studied me a little more, then turned toward the body on the dock. “They fished him out about an hour ago. Came up with a load of mackerel.”

  “A haul of rockfish,” said Hansen.

  “A what?”

  “In fishing lingo, it’s called a haul. Not a load.”

  “Thanks for that fucking worthless piece of information,” said Brewer, shaking his head. “Anyway, fingerprints come back negative. So I scanned the missing person cases in the area and lo and behold, I get a redhead missing out of Huntington Beach. So here we are. You boys ready? It’s not pretty.”

  Brewer reached down and took hold of one corner of the sheet. He wrinkled his nose a little, and lifted.

  I took in some air. So did Hansen. The dead guy on the ground, not so much. He was badly bloated and it was extremely difficult to tell what we were looking at.

  One thing was certain, the man had died by a gunshot wound to the chest, which sported a massive reddish hole. The hole had been nibbled and clawed at by the critters, and seeing the exposed meat was enough to make my stomach turn inside out. It took a lot of willpower to keep the gorge down.

  Hansen lurched a little next to me. Something was coming up in the detective, and it took his own valiant effort to keep it down.

  I had seen plenty of pictures in Hansen’s police report of Mitch Golden, but nothing looked like the mess I saw before me. With that said, there was no denying the fact that something had, at one point, been wrapped around the man’s ankle. Also, he was only wearing swimming trunks, which I found interesting since Mitch Golden had been last seen fully dressed at a bar.

  Like Mitch Golden, the man did have red hair and his body was covered in what appeared to be freckles. But it was hard to be sure, because of the many hundreds of small animal wounds that covered his body.

  Hansen shook his head. “We’ll have to run DNA. He could be anyone.”

  “Anyone with freckles and red hair,” I said.

  Brewer mercifully dropped the corner of the sheet.

  Hansen asked, “Where was he found?”

  The tall Long Beach detective consulted his notes. His notes consisted of a few scribbles on a small, ringed notebook that might have had a happy face on the cover. Probably not police issued.

  “About twenty nautical miles offshore. Not too far from Catalina.”

  “And not too far from Huntington Beach, either,” I said.

  Brewer nodded. “The way I see it, he was shot, weighed down with something, then tossed over board.”

  “He was supposed to disappear.”

  We all thought about that. After a moment, I said, “He’s wearing swimming trunks.”

  Brewer jutted a thumb toward me and looked at Hansen. “Your guy always this observant?”

  “Not always,” said Hansen. “Maybe he’s going somewhere with this.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “He was last officially seen at night at a bar in Belmont Shores. Wearing jeans and a jacket.”

  “So he goes home, sleeps it off, wakes up, puts on some swim trunks and heads out to the beach.”

  “Except he doesn’t go home,” I said. “He lives with his girlfriend.”

  “So he goes to another broad’s home, shacks up with her, then hits the beach,” said Brewer.

  “Maybe,” I said. “If so, then that means someone, somewhere, saw him at the beach.”

  Brewer looked at me. “So what are you saying?” he asked.

  “I’m saying, someone at the beach saw him last.”

  “It’s a big beach,” said Hansen.

  “Then I suggest we get started.”

  Chapter Eight

  It was late and I was sitting alone on my balcony, drinking.

  The wind was unusually blustery, with low clouds that seemed to glow faintly from within. It was a rare night in southern California that you couldn’t see the stars, the moon, or the occasional UFO.

  I had spent the rest of the day canvassing Huntington Beach, handing out many hundreds of flyers with Mitch Golden’s picture, my name and my number. So far, no luck. And no calls.

  Something would come up. I was sure of it. Someone, somewhere had seen something. Someone, somewhere knew something.

  I drank some more beer and pictured the corpse lying at the bottom of the ocean, being nibbled and feasted on, until a trawler came chugging by with its nets.

  Hell of a way to go.

  The clouds above swirled and churned and raced towards wherever clouds went to.

  Sounds like a Shel Silverstein book, I thought.

  When I was ten, my father and I came home after picking up a pizza, only to discover that my mother, Mary Knighthorse, had been murdered. She had been raped, her throat had been slit, and she had been left to bleed to death in her bedroom.

  Which was where I had found her.

  I’m thirty-one now. The image of my mother’s corpse reaching under her bed will forever haunt me. Hell, it’s now who I am, a part of my genetic make-up. It’s also a reminder that her killer is still out there.

  That was twenty-one years ago.

  I now had in my possession a time-lapse photograph of a young man, a
surfer by the looks of him, who had been following my parents on the very day my mother had been killed.

  My parents had spent that day in Huntington Beach, working hard to rekindle their love. I rarely gave my father much credit for anything, but I did give him credit for that: at least, making an effort to salvage their marriage.

  Granted, his many affairs had done much to spoil the marriage to begin with.

  Anyway, my parents had been taking photos of each other on that day—her last day. Some of the photos were just him, some were just of her. Some were together, no doubt taken by strangers. There were over twenty photos. And in three of them, a young man had been watching them.

  Using state-of-the-art age-progression photography, I had one of the pictures analyzed. The image that came back was startling.

  Startling, because I recognized the man.

  The son of the detective in charge of investigating my mother’s murder. My mother’s murder which remained unsolved to this day.

  I shook my head again, and considered the implications all over again.

  His son. A cover-up?

  I didn’t know.

  But I was going to find out.

  Chapter Nine

  It was early Monday morning and I was re-reading Hansen’s police report and eating one of three breakfast burritos that were wrapped in foil and lined on my desk in front of me when an elderly woman stepped timidly into my office.

  Stepped might have been overreaching. Poked her head in a little was a little closer.

  “Are you the detective?” she asked.

  Her voice was oddly strong, coming from what I assumed was a very old woman.

  “I am,” I said. “And you would make a fine one yourself.”

  She blinked at me. “It says ‘Knighthorse Investigations’ on your door.”

  “Sometimes the most obvious clues are the hardest to see.”

  She nodded as if I had spoken the truth, then stepped all the way in. She then carefully turned around and eased the door shut. Her back was bent and her hair was white, and she probably could have used a cane or a walker, but didn’t. That said something about her. What it said, I wasn’t sure. Stubborn? Independent? Anti-cane?

  I got up out of my chair and offered her one of my four client chairs, pulling it aside a little to give her easier access. She hobbled straight to it, placed a spotted hand on the chair’s wooden arm, and eased slowly down. I turned the chair slightly so that it was facing my desk again. The old woman weighed maybe 80 pounds. My three breakfast burritos weighed almost as much.

  As I went back to my chair, she set a very shiny black purse on her lap, which she held onto with both hands.

  “So how can I help you, Mrs...?”

  “Poppie,” she said. “Just Poppie.”

  I grinned. I liked the name for reasons I couldn’t quite articulate. “So how can I help you, Poppie?”

  “We, Mr. Knighthorse, we have a problem in our neighborhood and the police just don’t seem to be taking it very seriously, and we want it to stop.”

  “Understandable. What’s your problem, Poppie?”

  “There’s a man in our neighborhood who likes to...” She paused, looked away. Some sort of emotion raced through her. What it was, I couldn’t tell. But her lower jaw trembled a little. She tried again, “Who likes to...expose himself.”

  “I see,” I said, although I didn’t. “Where do you live?”

  “Leisure World. Have you been there?”

  I had. It was in Seal Beach, and it was an epic retirement community, complete with its own driving codes and police force. To get in was a nightmare. To drive around was a nightmare. To find addresses was a nightmare.

  I nodded. “Have you seen this man?”

  “More of him than I care to admit.”

  “How many times?”

  “Three.”

  “Has he exposed himself to other women?”

  “Many.”

  “How many?”

  “Maybe eight. Maybe more. Sometimes whole groups.”

  She wouldn’t look at me. As she spoke, she looked off to her right. Her lower jaw still quivered. I realized now what the emotion was: fury.

  “Can you describe a typical, ah, encounter?”

  She looked at me. “Do I have to?”

  “It would help.”

  She took in a lot of air. She continued looking away. “It’s always at night. At first he would knock on doors and flash whoever opened it.”

  “Single women only?” I asked.

  She nodded. She still wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Of course, only single women. It even got to the point that we wouldn’t answer our doors any more.”

  “Was he disguised?”

  She shuddered a little. “A wig, I think.”

  “And you told the park authorities?”

  “Of course. They beefed up security. It stopped for nearly six months.”

  “Long enough for security to forget about it.”

  She nodded. “Right. Then the...exposing began again.” She turned her full gaze onto me, and her jaw was really shaking now. “Last night, he flashed me and my friends while we were walking back from a play.”

  “A play in Leisure World?”

  “We have plays all the time. And concerts, too.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Has he ever hurt anyone?”

  “Oh, heavens no. He just shows us his little willy and takes off running.”

  It was all I could do not to laugh. “Could you tell how old he is?”

  “It’s hard to tell at night, but we think he’s a resident.”

  “Any, ah, distinguishing features, other than his little willy?”

  She shook her head sharply. This was all, of course, highly distasteful to her. Her grip tightened on her purse. No doubt she wanted to flee, or shuffle energetically, far away. But circumstances forced her here. And for that matter, circumstances generally forced all clients here.

  “Is he Caucasian?”

  “Yes.”

  “Any chest hair?”

  “Really, Mr. Knighthorse. Is that important?”

  “Maybe not. But I like to be thorough.”

  “Be respectful, young man,” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said immediately, and that might have been the first ma’am I’ve uttered in ten years.

  We discussed my retainer, and learned that the women had all pooled their money together to hire me. So I told her that I was having a special. The first two weeks were free. She seemed relieved and put her checkbook back.

  Now, I thought as she shuffled off, I just need to find the perv in two weeks.

  Chapter Ten

  I was halfway through my second egg burrito when I got a call from Detective Hansen.

  “DNA came back. He’s our boy.”

  “Have you talked with his girlfriend?”

  “Yeah. Met with her this morning. Let her know that her missing boyfriend case has turned into a murder case. You still on the job?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Technically, I was hired to find the body.”

  “A trawler found the body.”

  “Found is found,” I said. “I’ll check with her.”

  “And what if she relieves you of your services?”

  “She won’t. It’s not just about her boyfriend.”

  “The dogs,” he said.

  “The dogs and the sharks.”

  “I could give a fuck about sharks.”

  “They probably don’t think much of you, either.”

  “Whatever. Let me know what she says. I could use the help.”

  “Could you say that again?”

  “Fuck off, Knighthorse.”

  And he hung up.

  * * *

  Any good detective clarifies the parameters of the investigation with the client, especially in a case like this, when the parameters have changed.

  I had jumped the gun a little yesterday when I had passed out the flyers at the beach. In
a murder investigation, time is of the essence, and we were already a week behind. Tourists go home. People forget. The flyers had to get out. Hired or not hired.

  So I arranged to meet Heidi a few hours later at a Starbucks in Sunset Beach. Sunset Beach is famous for the world’s stupidest house. A converted water tower, it soars high above the surrounding two-story clapboard beach homes and inns and used car lots. It’s an example of what too much money can buy. As I sat in Starbucks waiting for Heidi, I could just see the monstrosity. Maybe it wouldn’t have been so ugly if it didn’t sit atop a tangle of steel beams. Maybe, I don’t know. As it was, it looked like an architect’s practical joke.

  Shortly, Heidi came in. She spotted me and came over, sitting opposite me. I couldn’t helped but notice that she was dressed in a nice pantsuit. Her face was made up, as well.

  “You want a drink?” I asked.

  She shook her head. Her eyes were even redder than the last time I had seen her. Her nose was about as puffy as before.

  “I’m sorry about your boyfriend,” I said.

  She nodded again.

  “The police say he was shot,” she said.

  “He was.”

  “You saw him?” she asked.

  I nodded. She was about to ask something else, something she probably shouldn’t ask, something that might scar her for life, and I simply shook my head. She got the hint and closed her mouth.

  The day was mostly sunny, but there was a wispy cloud coverage that made things interesting. A woman was sitting in her car at the far end of the parking lot feeding seagulls what looked like a chocolate donut.

  “They killed him,” she said after a few minutes. “Those motherfuckers shot him and dumped him in the harbor.”

  “‘They’ being the shark hunters?”

  “Yes, the shark hunters.”

  “Can you tell me when you last saw Mitch?” I asked.

  “The night he disappeared.”

  “Do you recall your last conversation?”

  Her last conversation was summarized in the police report, but I wanted to hear it from her. “We were in our apartment in Huntington Beach. Over on Yorktown. He told me he was heading out to meet some of our guys.”