On The Edge

by Daniel Cleaver

  Two deadly enemies play cat-and-mouse across L.A., one cop - one serial killer.

  One’s a violent schizophrenic who hears voices – the other’s a serial killer.

  ON THE EDGE

  By

  Daniel Cleaver

  Detective Spooky Jackson Book 1

  Copyright: Daniel Cleaver

  First published: March 3rd. 2021

  The right of Daniel Cleaver to be identified as author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, copied in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise transmitted without written permission from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For Sian.

  Join my mailing list and grab a free 57000-word novel featuring Spooky Jackson where he ends up on the wrong side of the law charged with murder.

  Free book

  PROLOG

  During the first seconds of a judicial hanging, the neck is swiftly broken, dislocated, between third and fourth vertebrae, occasionally the fifth and sixth, and death is claimed to be painless and instantaneous. However, during a botched hanging, such as this one, it takes three to four minutes, even sometimes up to twenty minutes, for the victim to die.

  This is going through my head as the noose tightens and I am in excruciating agony. The thought of one more minute, let alone twenty, is too much to bear and I beg all the known gods for death. I feel my body twisting, which is increasing the pressure on my neck. I can see flashing pin pricks of light fly from the back of my orbital sockets to swim in front of my eyes, making them feel like they are being jabbed with needles. The blood in my ears hisses, like a kettle coming to the boil. The root of my tongue is forced up and is blocking my airway. It wants to bulge out of my mouth, but insanely I’m fighting this. I don’t want my body discovered in the typical hanging pose of bloodshot eyes, purple-blue skin and protruding tongue, as if being hanged is not bad enough, they’ve botched it so that I’m slowly strangled. Did they botch it? Alternatively, is it on purpose, so that my last few moments on earth are in absolute torment? The hissing in my ears increases as the rope digs into my carotid artery, surely that’ll cut off the oxygen to my brain and render me unconscious and end this painful torture? Of all the sensations I experienced, the rope burns against the skin of my neck rates pretty high, that and the choking, my labored gasps for breath. I feel my legs spasm and kick uncontrollably, doing the infamous ‘Tyburn jig’, or ‘Ghost dance’: the crowds watching hangings of pirates or vagabonds would cheer upon seeing this phenomenon. I recalled that there would be jester types near the front of the crowd emulating the death throes. Man, the things you remember when you are dying. I thought the highlights of my life were meant to flash before my eyes. I expected to have pleasant thoughts to ease my passing, but there weren’t any really. I’d never married, never had kids, never really in love, family gone years ago, and no one was going to mourn my death. No real highlights, no wonder I’m thinking about jesters!

  My knees involuntarily rose up to my chest and then thrust down again and I hoped the momentum would be enough to put me out of my misery. My captor pushed me and the movement squeezed my neck. I gasped for breath as I swung to and fro. The hemp tightened and bit into my skin, the noose compressed and choked my breath further, and I managed one last raggedy breath. I looked down at my captor who circled around me, I kicked out but I missed by a mile and further increased the pressure on my neck; I could feel blood trickling down from my ears. My captor looked pleased with my slow, painful death and I realized that the strangulation was deliberate. A shiver ran up my spine and I could tell by the glint in the eye and the evil grin that the worst was yet to come. . .

  PART I

  Chapter 1

  Monday – June 27th

  MF Movie Props Storage Facility, Wilshire Boulevard, CA 90010 – 10:00.

  The police patrol cars joined the unmarked Crown Vics and screeched to a halt outside the building in a cloud of dust. The cops swarmed into the cavernous warehouse, where the previous tenants had left behind many props. They were mostly of the low-budget horror variety. Detective George McGinty, a wary, seen-it-all, done-it-all, overweight and underpaid red-faced man of Irish descent in his early fifties took a handkerchief from his off-the-peg, stained, gray, crumpled suit and wiped his stained, gray, crumpled face. He had the sort of hangdog face which looked like it needed a shave even after he had just had one. He shone his flashlight around him, dust mites swirled in the beams, as if they were the first people to have been in the building for a long time. His flashlight beam picked out expertly made horror movie masks and prosthesis, with zombies featured highly amongst the collection. Zombie faces and severed limbs. The younger, keener detective was Milo Sanchez, a wiry Mexican in his early thirties, who dressed brightly as if he were off to a fiesta every day. He wore his hair chopped in a bizarre style that seemed to be popular with the kids of today, short to the skull in places, long elsewhere. He’d just made Detective and was eager to get on. He was a religious man and gazed in alarm at some of the gory face masks hanging on pegs staring down at them. They crashed through the double doors ahead, their flashlight beams crossed, flicking around the larger room, a stage set of a Nazi Germany town square complete with gallows and a realistic corpse dangling from the noose. Milo stumbled in front of it, gazed up at the corpse and crossed himself. George patted him on the shoulder and shone his flashlight onto the girl hanging by her neck. “Jesus, it’s real,” he said flatly.

  Her lidless eyes glowered at him, bulging, the whites bloodshot. Her tongue protruded in an obscene manner. She had been hanging for several days and the smell was overpowering, her flesh putrid, and she had lost control of her bowel and bladder, the contents pooled below her, a normal occurrence in a hanging. What was not usual was the lacerations slashed across her exposed chest, or the gashes and stabbings to her limbs. Milo vomited involuntarily. He clasped his hands across his mouth in an effort to contain it, but it was projectile vomit and it squeezed from between his lips. He bent over and emptied his stomach.

  Detective George McGinty patted him on the back, comforting him. “Don’t worry about it, son. It happens.”

  “Not to me,” said Milo, embarrassed. “What the hell happened to her?”

  “What am I? A pathologist?” He gazed at the corpse’s face, at the wounds inflicted upon it, and thought she must have suffered greatly. “I don’t think I want to know, God rest her soul,” he said quietly.

  “Do you think God had anything to do with this?”

  The rope creaked and Milo spun around half-fearing that she had somehow come alive. She grinned down at him, mockingly. Her skinless lips had peeled back during rigor, showing teeth and gums, making her smile sinister and skull-like.

  “The medical examiner is on his way,” said the captain joining them accompanied by flat-foots who cordoned off the area with scene-of-crime tape. The captain, an overweight African American, strode up to the corpse. He put a sense of purpose into his stride, hoping it looked authoritative but in reality only made his stomach wobble. He steeled himself in front of his troops. He set his face into a firm mask, not wanting to show fear. He fully circled the hanging corpse. A torn brown, nylon uniform draped on the girl’s body and the captain used his pen to pull aside the cloth without disturbing the evidenc
e as he looked for a certain clue and saw the Hangman doodle crudely carved into her torso.

  “Well?” asked George McGinty nervously.

  The captain sucked his teeth and nodded grimly. “It’s there.”

  “Crap,” George said flatly as he shook his head. “I’d hoped that sonofabitch had crawled under a stone and killed himself. Could it be a copycat?”

  Milo asked, “What’s wrong? What is it?”

  “It was before your time, a series of homicides about three years ago,” the captain told him.

  Milo racked his brains, then it dawned on him. “Oh no.”

  The captain nodded. “Yep, it looks like the Hangman’s back.”

  Milo crossed himself yet again. “It’s the work of the Devil,” he said in awe.

  “It not the Devil’s work,” said the captain. “I’m afraid to say that it was a fellow human being who committed this atrocity. Possibly the worst serial killer we’ve ever known. In a field where slaughter is commonplace, this murderer stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries. He haunted us a few years back and then just stopped as abruptly as he started. Vanished into thin air.” He clicked his fingers. “Just like that. We checked the reports in other States, to see if he had started up elsewhere.” He scratched his balding head. “We cast our net even wider to incorporate other countries, but there was nothing, nothing remotely similar. We’d hoped he had died.”

  George McGinty sucked in a breath. “This is as bad as it gets,” he told Milo.

  “I can take it,” the young detective said, as if he thought the comment was a slur on his manhood. He felt embarrassed by his earlier vomiting. “Seriously, Sergeant, it just took me by surprise, that’s all. I’m fine.” He gazed at the body, but not her face, to prove it; he gulped down his revulsion, desperate not to vomit again when the corpse twisted slightly, making the rope creak, and a quiver shot up his spine.

  “So what have you got?” the captain asked.

  “Nothing, we just got here ourselves.”

  “Typical Mick and Spic actions. Do nothing. Laze about. Leave it for someone else to sort out.”

  McGinty’s lips moved, but no protest emerged.

  The captain turned to him and asked, “Have you called him?”

  “We don’t need that freak on this case.”

  “That ‘freak’ solves crimes. Especially crimes like this: you know that.”

  “But he’s been suspended –”

  “As of now, he’s reinstated.”

  “But –”

  “No buts, Sergeant, call him in. Get me Spooky.”

  Eastbound on Santa Monica Boulevard, Santa Monica, CA 90404 – 10:10.

  My reinstatement came as something of a shock, but it felt great to be back and right into the thick of it. I left my duplex on Venice Beach, which cost me a bundle, but had been a childhood dream to own, ever since watching The Monkees share such a property on the Saturday morning reruns. I even copied them down to having a spiral staircase from my living room leading nowhere. I lit a Marlboro and jumped into my classic cherry-red Camaro SS convertible. My car is my only indulgence, my pride and joy. My name is Detective Spooky Jackson. I used to be a lieutenant, but that’s a long story. I’m a detective working for the Los Angeles Robbery-Homicide Division – the Homicide Special Section, to be precise. We are a citywide bureau dealing with multiple murders, usually three or more at any one time, or high-profile homicides likely to involve intense media coverage, or my specialty, serial killers. The FBI has calculated that there are over two hundred serial killers operating in the United States at any one time. An underestimate in my opinion. A huge proportion, something like eighty-five percent, live on the West Coast concentrating in California. No one knows the reason for this strange phenomenon. I guess it could be the weather. Maybe they home in on Los Angeles, or more specifically Hollywood, as they must have a desire to rub shoulders with the stars. I’d lived here all my life and only seen a handful, most recently Mel Gibson.

  “You saw him collecting shopping carts at Safeway, man,” said Elvis.

  “Well, yah, I guess I might have called that one wrong.”

  I have had an exceptional success rate in catching serial killers. Unlike my colleagues, I have the ability to get under the murderer’s skin. Almost like inhabiting their body and melding with their spirit, I’m able to empathize with the killer. I ‘see’ the crime from their point of view and by thinking like them, by becoming them; I gain the insight that’ll find the mistakes that eventually lead to their capture. Nevertheless, this ‘gift’ distances me from the others in the department. It tends to creep them out. They prefer the more usual tools of a cop’s trade to catch villains, searching for clues, asking around and the heavy reliance these days on science, in particular the irrefutable DNA.

  I can somehow occupy their soul. I’m able to ‘understand’, for the want of a better word, what the killer wants and I grasp where the killer’s coming from. I comprehend their reasoning, however muddled; it was always going to make sense to the perpetrator and I follow their thought-processes as to why they are compelled to kill – however gruesome. I visualize the scene, almost like a replay on TV, my ‘vision’ is that clear, that I essentially live it. I see what the killer sees and feel what they feel, but what most people don’t know is that I can see the guilty, the very evil: I can see their rotting core, and their putrid souls reveal themselves to me. Obviously, I can’t tell anyone of my gift, but it has never let me down yet and it means I can home in on the suspect with a one hundred percent accuracy. Although red tape, lawyers and overwhelming police procedures can run into weeks and sometimes months, at least I know who the killer is and can sometimes prevent further killings while we try and get the paperwork straight, which can be extremely frustrating at times.

  It’s not clairvoyance as such; I don’t have an out-of-body experience. It’s part psychological profiling and a larger part instinctive. I don’t have to sit down and analyze it, I just know. My results keep me in a job I love, but my results also get me in the papers and this publicity makes me unpopular in the department as if I’m showing the other detectives up on purpose. It’s as if they’d prefer me not to catch the killers if it was going to make them look bad. Therefore, I deal with a certain amount of animosity at work. It doesn’t bother me, as I prefer to work alone. The times I had partners forced upon me did not work out.

  “They all died,” said Sheldon.

  As Sheldon said, having a partner just doesn’t work for me.

  Due to my expertise in this field, my empathizing with the killer led to more than one accusation of me being the perpetrator. My style of detecting is not popular in the department. I don’t get it myself, if it gets results that should be all that matters, but the others give me a wide berth and they nicknamed me Spooky. I hoped it was because I looked like Mulder from the cult TV show, The X-Files, as this was sometimes his nickname, but it’s more likely that I give off an eerie vibe. I’m tall like him and have a cocky self-assurance, but where he would wear suits, I’m always in dusty cowboy boots, Levi’s 501s and a plain white tee, with a baggy shirt, sometimes Hawaiian, more often plain silk, to cover my gun and badge, which I clip to my belt.

  So, I work alone: I prefer it and it’s safer for all those around me if I do.

  Oh yeah and one more reason why they call me Spooky, and probably the main reason I creep people out, is that I hear voices.

  2019 South Corinth Avenue, West LA, CA 90025 – 10:20.

  South Corinth Avenue was not quite in Santa Monica proper, but still near enough to everything and just about affordable, a pleasant residential area near to the district known as Little Tokyo. Mary Thompson lived in a tidy, one-story Spanish-style hacienda, with a smartly trimmed lawn and a modest car in the driveway. She was in her late-sixties, smartly dressed in her twinset and pearls. She looked in the mirror above the telephone shelf, flattened her hair and put on her glasses. She straightened a photo on the wall of her husband
and herself on their wedding day, and she sighed wistfully and sat on a stool in the hallway. She picked up the telephone handset and dialed a three-digit number. The operator answered and asked her a question. “What’s that, dear?” She listened carefully to the answer. “Oh, police, please. I wish to report a crime. . . An ambulance? No, it’s too late for an ambulance. He’s dead, you see. I murdered him.” She replaced the handset and tried to sit as straight as she could, knowing that the police would arrive shortly. She checked the contents of her purse and was satisfied she had everything she needed.

  She glanced through to the bedroom where her husband was lying dead upon the freshly made bed. They had made a pact sometime earlier when he was first diagnosed, knowing their medical insurance would only go so far. Her husband, Stanley, had been a highly active sportsman in his youth and he still remained active in his later years, and did not relish a slow decline into where he would be little more than a vegetable. No, they had decided when the time came that he would take his own life. He’d had a long, satisfying and fulfilling life and he did not want to go into a rapid decline. He decided that when the pain finally got too much and the pills could no longer help, then he would take his own life with Mary’s help. They knew that she would get into trouble for an assisted suicide, but she did not care what happened to her once her beloved Stanley had passed, and if she could ease his suffering in any way, then she would. When the appropriate time arose, they had a last meal of T-bone steak and fries, his favorite meal, and said a tearful farewell. They lay down on their marital bed where, for reasons unknown, they had never managed to procreate. Not for want of trying, it just wasn’t to be. They’d adapted to the fact that they would never have kids and had gone on to enjoy each other’s company without them and could not imagine their lives with children in them. They’d been able to take modest vacations and enjoy life unhindered to the fullest. They chatted while the drugs took effect and they remembered buying the home they’d lived in for their entire married life and how they had struggled in the beginning. They had remembered the wonderful times, the many trips to Florida or down to Mexico; they laughed over the broken-down cars they had owned, and they especially fondly remembered all the different pets, the cats and dogs that they had loved over the years. They laughed and cried until his breathing stopped. Mary lay with him for as long as she could bear, knowing she would have to get up eventually and had a long list of things to do, letters to mail, canceling subscriptions and deliveries and things around the house, like turning off the gas and electricity, arranging a funeral as best she could and lastly telephoning the police.