On The Edge

by Daniel Cleaver

  Outside The Dog & Duck Bar & Restaurant, 555 Pico Blvd, CA 90410 – 23:30.

  It was a balmy evening as we exited the pub. It was late and the traffic had died down. A few tourists shuffled past. Outside I acted nervously, almost like on a first date. I felt stirrings that I hadn’t felt in a long time. I liked Mia. I liked her a lot.

  I took out my car keys. Mia looked alarmed. “You’re not driving, are you?”

  “Sure, why not?”

  “You’ve been drinking.”

  “So, it’s not against the law.”

  “Yes, it is,” she said indignantly.

  “Since when?”

  “Since always.”

  “Man, no one tells me anything.” I made a big deal of gazing around for a cab. “I’ll get a taxi.”

  She laughed and realized I’d been kidding her or that’s what I wanted her to think. “You are a detective?” she asked, mimicking Bruce Matherson.

  “Funny, ha-ha,” I said, unamused.

  “A real detective?”

  “Not funny.”

  “A police detective?”

  “I’m not playing.”

  “I thought maybe you were a store detective,” she giggled.

  I liked the way she laughed. I liked her. I went in for a kiss just as she turned towards my Camaro. I wasn’t sure if it was deliberately or not.

  “Nice wheels,” she whistled her appreciation. “Did you rebuild it?”

  “Sure, from the wheels up,” I lied proudly.

  She looked at me for a long time. “Is anything you’ve said tonight true?”

  I thought about it for a moment. “Most of it.”

  She giggled again.

  “So you like muscle cars?” I asked, trying to keep her there longer.

  “Are you kidding? I’ve got one myself, not a classic like this, though.”

  “Can I drop you somewhere?”

  “No, I’m parked around the corner.”

  “Good work today, officer. Welcome aboard.”

  “If there is anything I can do?”

  “Just stay alive and break my jinx.”

  She walked off, turned back at the corner, and blew me a kiss. “See you tomorrow, partner.”

  I smirked. “Tomorrow, partner.” I liked the sound of that. I waited for her to turn the corner, then I climbed into my Camaro and drove off.

  CHAPTER 5

  My duplex, Driftwood Street, Venice Beach, CA 90292 – midnight.

  I flopped heavily onto my overstuffed leather couch; I was dog-tired but at the same time wired. Mia played heavily on my mind. It’d been a long time since I’d felt like this. She was attractive, sure, a bit on the skinny side for my tastes, but she had intelligence, humor, and a quick wit. I relaxed and worked on the Hangman clue when a basket on a string dangled down from the apartment above. It’s an arrangement I have with the surfer dudes who live in the upstairs duplex. There are four of them, each having an uncanny resemblance to The Banana Splits. The leader always wore oversized sunglasses and had a mouthful of oversized teeth that looked like he had Stonehenge as the front row of teeth and looked like the Banana Spilt called Bingo, another had an unfortunately long nose reminding me of Snorky-The-Elephant. They’re harmless enough, although they smoke too much dope and they don’t know I’m a cop and I guess I’ll keep it that way for now. We devised a scheme to aid one another when we’re low on provisions, to save going down to the store. They lower down a basket whenever they hear me in, with supply requests to save them going down to the store. I opened my French doors, stood on my balcony, checked in the basket. This time it was a request for bread and milk, which I happily supplied. I popped a note in for a couple of beers that I’d forgotten to get. I yanked the string and the basket disappeared. Shortly I heard a ‘clink’ against the glass of my French doors and saw my beers had arrived; I saw they’ve included a fat joint, gratis. I wondered whether to tell ’em I’m a cop, or would that spoil our arrangement? I took it and yanked the rope and the basket disappeared and I felt like I’m in a prisoner-of-war movie. The understanding worked well: there had been many a time when I’d had a hangover and the thought of a trip to the store was too much, a bang on my ceiling and the basket arrives in a timely fashion. I look at the joint and thought it would be a bad idea to spoil our civilized arrangement.

  I sat down to work on our clues; at least the Hangman’s been good enough to give us a pointer, for what it was worth, the letters were too obscure. I was getting nowhere fast. All I could surmise was the Hangman must be reasonably strong and own a large vehicle. There had been something like a three-year absence from the previous murders. He killed three that time, enough to get him a serial killer status and have me involved. In my experience, serial killers don’t stop unless forced to. Why had these Hangman-type murders started again? It had to be a copycat. A copycat with insider information this time. I looked at the crudely drawn Hangman doodle suspended from a gibbet then the dashes underneath with the letters helpfully filled in. ‘I.V.F.I.V.F.U.F.P.U.M.’ It meant nothing, not to anyone sane anyhow. With a sinking heart I tore out the page, screwed it up, tossed it at the trash can in the corner of the room and missed, again. There must be at least six balls of paper on the solid wood floor around the trash can. I saw Sharron’s uniform hanging on the back of the door and sighed heavily. I hardly knew her, but she didn’t deserve to die like that. No one did.

  ‘Ivfivfufpum’? What the hell did that mean? I looked at the newly added letters from the victim’s feet. Ferdy reexamined the heels of the first three bodies; they were still in cold storage as they were part of an open active case. He discovered using a powerful microscope, in minute writing, that the first heel revealed ‘L’, the next, ‘T’ and the last, ‘1’.

  L.T.1., but that didn’t help. I was still none the wiser. I tapped the pencil against my lip and put myself in the Hangman’s mind: why would I want to give the police clues? I’d be crazy. Then I must be crazy in the first place. Conventional thinking was that it was a cry for help, but I think the perp is way beyond help. The chatter at the station was that he could have been getting help during his absence. That, or he was in a sanatorium? George thought that they had released him back into the general public having pronounced him cured. It happened all too often, murderers released from jail, frequently early, due to good behavior, commit another murder, same with rapists and same with the guys who pulled a fast one and got themselves into a psycho ward. Act crazy for a while then slowly get better. It’s gotta be easy to fake. The doctors have to decide who’s crazy and who isn’t, but I get there is no test to decide sanity or not. I myself deal with my voices and can function normally.

  Well, normalish.

  Are the quacks the right people to decide? I betcha a bunch of cops could see right through the bullshit, the play-acting, no problem. The academics just don’t have street smarts. I’m sure they liked to release a ‘cured’ patient: not only does it make them feel better, but it also validates their job, which is quite often their lifetime’s work. I once dated a psychiatrist, briefly, and she admitted they were all incurable. That was not what I expected to hear and did not find it at all reassuring. She also told me she’d seen ex-offenders walking the streets that most certainly did not deserve freedom but had somehow managed to convince the panel that they were now solid, upright members of the community and had gotten themselves released, which was even less reassuring. I wondered why – apart from the cry for help – would a killer give us clues? It is almost impossible to figure out his warped mind.

  The guys threw a rope ladder down over their balcony and as it passed mine, I saw their over-optimistic sign saying, ‘girls this way’ and a giant arrow pointing up and below it read, ‘free booze and drugs’. Well, I had to admire their enterprise and optimism, although I thought they were a tad lazy: the beach and a street full of bars were only a hundred yards away, they could go down and find girls in a conventional way.

  What had the killer got agains
t vaginal piercing? Was he some religious nut? Did he find it wanton, lewd, something a good Christian girl would not do? Mia had done further research and found genital piercings mentioned in the works of the Marquis de Sade and the infamous Story of ‘O’, but they were used more like a chastity belt-ownership-type device. God knows why this quirk set him off, but it was also a damned difficult fetish to discover. Modesty and privacy keeping it a secret from all but the most intimate of partners. Who would have this intimate access? A gynecologist? A doctor? A male nurse? They would know and no doubt gossip about it in the canteen. Mia had already proposed a surgeon as a contender for the Hangman. It looked more and more likely to be a medical man, for the information on who wore such jewelry and who would also have their home and work addresses, and the medical knowledge to inflict such pain. I wrote ‘doctor’ on my pad and circled it. I made another note to cross-refer it to victims’ visits to clinics and see if I could find a pattern. Could it be some weird anti-abortionist with his wires crossed? Undoubtedly, the victims walked on the wild side and their sexual practices would be questionable, even unpalatable to some. Maybe the piercing of the sexual organs had marked them as the worst of the worst, of the orgy-going, carefree hedonists and therefore they must be punished? Or was the degree of the depths of depravity that they had sunk to deciding the amount of atonement they must suffer? In the past lustful thoughts were punishable: perhaps the Hangman had a severely strict religious upbringing? Did he feel that the more disgusting and debasing the act, the more that the heathen should suffer? It was worth checking out and I scribbled some notes to that effect.

  I stared at the ceiling when the first letters from the earlier hangings came back to me. ‘L.T.1.’? It made no sense. I scribbled it out repeatedly and filled my pad when I noticed that the ‘T’ could be a badly written plus sign. I now had ‘L plus 1’. What could that mean? L plus 1? I was hit by a thought that it could it mean ‘left plus one space’.

  I started a fresh piece of paper on my pad and wrote out the clues as we had them, ‘ivfivfufpum.’ I moved the letters one place left and got ‘Huehueteotl.’ Still none the wiser. I threw my pencil across the room and lit a Marlboro. The pencil landed next to where Sharron’s uniform was hanging on the peg. I wondered whether I should dispose of it. However, if it was then found that would make me look guilty. No one knew I had ever dated her, better leave it that way. I went back to the new word, ‘Huehueteotl’, and typed it into my iPhone and Googled it. My jaw dropped open when I saw the answer.

  CHAPTER 6

  Tuesday – June 28th

  Homicide Special Section, 100 W 1st St 5th, Los Angeles, CA 90012 – 09:00.

  I bumped into Ferdy and the crime tech geeks in the corridor by the coffee dispenser. I grabbed a Snickers bar from the vending machine, took a bite that included the wrapper as well, enjoying the amazed look from the nerds and knew it would be around the station in minutes adding to my reputation, although I had to say it tasted like crap.

  “Please tell me that sweet old lady is innocent?” said Ferdy.

  “Who?”

  “Mary Thompson?”

  “I dunno who ya mean?”

  “She’s the sweet old lady being charged with murdering her husband.”

  I slapped my head; I’d forgotten all about the senior citizen who had killed her husband in what looked like an assisted suicide. We had to investigate just to be sure that it wasn’t a homicide dressed up to look like a mercy killing, but then a mercy killing was against the law, too.

  “Ain’t anyone dealt with her yet? Ain’t she been charged with anything?”

  “Not that I know of,” Ferdy replied.

  “Where’s the report?”

  “There isn’t one.”

  “How long has she been in there?”

  He shrugged sheepishly. “She’s in interrogation room 2.”

  “I’m gonna kick her,” I said, sweeping past them.

  “Hur?”

  “Kick her loose, ya understand?” He looked at me blankly. “Okay, ya don’t understand. I mean I’m gonna let her go.”

  He looked pleased, then puzzled. “Can you do that?”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “She’s guilty, isn’t she?”

  “That’s a matter of interpretation.”

  “That reminds me, I.A.D. are looking for you?”

  “Who?”

  “I.A.D.,” he said again. It was my turn to look blank. “You really should learn these acronyms. The Internal Affairs Division?”

  “Oh, okay. Ya ain’t seen me, right?”

  “Right and S.R.B. want –”

  He stopped in his tracks as I gave him my look and gestured with my hand for an explanation.

  “The Shooting Review Board. . .” he prompted.

  I gazed at him until he got the point. “Oh, I haven’t seen you, right?” he guessed, grinning broadly along with his fellow dorks.

  “Right. But first, Ferdy, come to the squad room, will ya? I need ya help.”

  “My help?” He couldn’t believe his luck and in front of his contemporaries, too. His pride swelled.

  “I need all you can find on ‘Hue-hue-teotl.’”

  “Huehueteotl?” he corrected my pronunciation. “The Inca sun-god?” His big brain never ceased to amaze me. “Why?”

  “You’ll see.”

  * * *

  I had everyone’s full attention as I showed them my PowerPoint presentation. It was standing room only, as I revealed the first break we’d had in the case, for what it was worth. I drew the Hangman figure and I filled in the missing letters. The detectives looked bored. “It ain’t a ‘T’, it’s a plus sign.” I wrote it on the screen and it projected onto the large widescreen. “It’s ‘L’, plus ‘1’. It hit me that ‘L’ equaled left, meaning the clue was left plus one.” I wrote the original word we had, ‘Ivfivfufpum.’ “Ya move the letters left by one and you get, ‘Huehueteotl.” I enjoyed the blank stares.

  “That’s so much clearer,” snorted George.

  “It’s an Inca sun god,” I told them.

  “How does this ancient dago-spic help us?” asked the captain, as Milo reacted to the slur. The captain’s apparent racism surprised me, considering he was an African American himself.

  “He demanded appropriately gruesome sacrifices in his name.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, it was one a day, getting worse each day until the feast day.”

  “Don’t tell me,” said Mia. “Culminating on the fourth of July?”

  She really was bright. “Correctamundo,” I said in my best Fonz.

  “Such as?”

  Ferdy hovered at the door and I beckoned him in. He had books and charts and handed them out as he took over the slide projections.

  “Tell ’em, Ferdy.”

  “Huehueteotl. One of the sun kings, who insisted upon vicious slaughters in his name. Sacrifices were a part of everyday life. He wasn’t the worst: other gods demanded child sacrifices and others wanted the heart cut out while the victims were still alive.”

  Candy shuddered. “Eww, that’s super-gross.”

  “Some children were raised purely to be sacrifices. They considered it an honor. They were treated almost like royalty, with a promise of paradise in the afterlife. In fact, the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés released some of these sacrificial children and they demanded to be taken back immediately: they wanted to be sacrificed, it was their destiny.”

  I made a ‘move it on’ gesture.

  “Before the big celebration, there would be one sacrifice per day, escalating in pain and agony until the grand feast on the biggest day of the calendar.”

  “So we’re expecting one sacrifice a day until Saturday,” I said.

  “That would be my assumption.”

  “Do ya know what sacrifices we can expect?”

  “In order, flaying –”

  Milo crossed himself. George said. “What’s that?”

  “Skinning t
he victim while still alive.”

  He slapped an engraving in a textbook onto the monitor that projected it onto the giant screen on the wall.

  Mia and Candy swapped a glance.

  “The high priest would wear the skin of the first victim while slaughtering the next. Victim two would suffer cannibalism.” He projected an image onto the screen. He coughed with embarrassment. “Then, thirdly their version of being Hanged, Drawn and Quartered.” He displayed engravings to depict the various stages, the hanging until unconscious, secondly the ripping down the stomach and the emptying of the entrails, and lastly an engraving depicting the quartering of the body as it was torn into pieces.

  “So,” I said. “We’ve seen him flay the first victim. We can expect that the next time he will eat their flesh.”

  Interrogation room 2, H.S.S., 100 W 1st St 5th, Los Angeles, CA 90012 – 09:30.

  I entered interrogation room 2. Mary Thompson looked up and smiled. I froze. I remembered her from a long time ago, nothing connected to cop work and this was from way before I was a cop. She didn’t recognize me. I was shocked to see the gentle, kindly-faced lady and I could see the purity in her heart. This was a murderer? It constantly surprised me, even now, the appearance of a killer. By her look, you would think that this senior citizen sitting in front of me would be at her church or collecting for charity. Yet she’d been accused of her husband’s death. Most murderers looked like perfectly normal, ordinary people. Just one day something snapped inside and before you know what has happened, it’s too late and someone’s dead. A convenient weapon – usually a gun, too close to hand, that split second of uncontrollable rage and a squeeze of the trigger and you’d cross the line and killed someone. It was all too easy. I often wondered if people who’d killed in such a fashion, had to use their bare hands instead, how dramatically the number of homicides would drop. Using bare hands to kill someone was hard. They struggle and, more often than not, that moment of rage would pass. Guns kept in the home for protection are the number one weapon used in a domestic murder. However, by all accounts, Mary Thompson had committed a mercy killing, as its name implies a sense of kindness, yet it was illegal.