The Murderers' Club

by P. D. Martin

  “Did you see any numbers?”

  He thinks about the question. “No…I didn’t even try to contact anyone in the houses around the area. I didn’t know who I could trust, or if someone from the club was watching me. So I ran toward the skyline.”

  The skyline was Tucson. “Did the skyline look far away?”

  “No. About five miles?” He seems uncertain, but distances are hard to estimate.

  “Do you remember where the sun was?”

  He thinks for a moment. “It was high. Nearly straight up.”

  “Okay.” Jonathan was picked up at 2:05 p.m. The sun would have already been heading in a westerly direction. “Was it slightly to one side of you as you were running?”

  “Um…yes. It was a little bit to my left and behind me.”

  “Okay.” I scribble down Northeast of city on my pad.

  “Did you see anything else?”

  “Lots of high fences. Big houses.”

  “What about a street sign?”

  “No.”

  I flip my pad onto a new page and give it a quarter turn so the page is landscape. In the center I put a square and write House above it. On the bottom of the paper I write Tucson. Next, in front of the house, I draw an arrow to the right.

  “I turned left at the end of the street.”

  I draw a T-intersection and then mark in an arrow to the left.

  Jonathan continues. “And then I took my first right.”

  I mark it into my mini map.

  Jonathan moves his hands up and motions to the right. “Then I took another right.”

  “Was it the first right you came to on this road?”

  He pauses, then, “No. The second.”

  I write it down. “Go on, Jonathan.”

  “I crossed over two small streets and took a left down the third street. I couldn’t see the city at that point, but I just kept running. I ran into a few houses, but I guess I looked less than desirable.” He looks down at his bloody shirt. “And at one point a car nearly hit me. The driver abused me and I went to ask for help, but then he seemed to notice my shirt and hit the gas.”

  “You watched him drive off?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jonathan, the license plate number. Think back, use your photographic memory.”

  “Of course.” He pauses and again I can see the concentration on his face. “It’s Arizona 543K19.”

  Surely the driver will remember what street he was on, or at least what part of town he was in when he nearly hit a man covered in blood. “Then where did you run?”

  “I’m not sure, but eventually I hit the freeway.”

  “The I-10. That’s where the truck driver said he picked you up.”

  “Yes.”

  “How long were you walking before that?”

  “I…I don’t know. I was walking when he stopped. I had to, I was out of breath.”

  “That’s okay. You couldn’t have run the whole way.”

  “I should have been able to. I jog. Why didn’t I keep running?”

  Jonathan’s mind is fixating on his guilt again, punishing himself undeservedly. But emotions are illogical.

  “You got out, Jonathan, and now you can help the others.”

  He shudders, perhaps thinking of their fates, or perhaps realizing that he nearly met his end in that house.

  “Look, Jonathan, why don’t you sit here and take a moment. I’ll talk to the detectives and see if we can’t pinpoint this location.” I tap my notebook and my map.

  “I can’t just sit here. I’d rather come with you.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Please let me help.”

  “Okay.” I pause at the door. “By the way, Jonathan, how far do you normally run?”

  “About four to six miles, four times a week.”

  I nod.

  Back in the main Homicide area I look at the board and grab a felt-tip pen. “May I?”

  “Knock yourself out.” Darren steps back.

  I put a large cross through two of the circled areas. “The house is northeast of the city let’s say within five to ten miles. Jonathan saw the skyline, from a raised part of town and estimated it was about five miles away. That’s probably an underestimate,” I say—any landmark in the distance always looks closer than it is. “By the time he got to the freeway—” I put my pen on the freeway “—he was out of breath, and having to walk some parts of it. He normally runs four to six miles every other day, so let’s estimate that he ran over five miles from the house to the freeway, but less than ten miles before he hit the freeway. I’m allowing for the fact that he was out of shape from being in the bunker but that his adrenaline would have kicked in.”

  Darren steps in and points to the board. “He was picked up here, and he was walking south. So if he came down onto this side of the freeway, he must have been somewhere around here.” He draws a circle with his index finger around a large area of the map, capturing about eight square miles of the Catalina Foothills district. Within the imaginary circle are two marked areas.

  “Are both of these areas hilly?”

  Darren thinks for a couple of seconds before responding. “Yes.”

  “We’ve got a near-accident. I’ve got the license-plate number. The driver should remember where he was when he almost hit Jonathan.”

  “I’ll take that number,” Stone says.

  I write it out again on the bottom of my sheet of paper, tear it off and pass it to her.

  “Thanks,” she says. “So, it would have been some time around one, one-thirty this afternoon?”

  “Uh huh.” I move back to the board and peer closely at the streets. I tear off my hand-drawn map and maneuver it around, trying to find a matching set of streets in one of the circled areas. But without knowing the exact distances, I find it impossible to pinpoint the location this way.

  I glance at Jonathan—he’s still ashen-faced and pasty, with dark circles under his eyes. Poor guy.

  Jonathan moves in closer to the map.

  “Anything look familiar?” I ask.

  “Not yet.” Jonathan shakes his head. “I didn’t really look up. Most of the time I was staring at the laptop.”

  The laptop. I wonder how Gerard is going with our most precious piece of evidence—second to Jonathan, of course.

  NeverCaught: You must have made a bundle out of this, Psycho.

  AmericanPsycho: Not at all. How much do you think it cost to set this up?

  NeverCaught: $100,000?

  DialM: Not with all this electronic equipment. Maybe $250,000.

  AmericanPsycho: That’s getting closer, M. And I had labor costs, too.

  DialM: You mean people know where the bunker is??

  AmericanPsycho: Of course not.

  DialM: Then?

  AmericanPsycho: I killed them, obviously.

  NeverCaught: Wicked. Bodies?

  AmericanPsycho: Disposed of. Danny’s with them, actually.

  DialM: So somewhere in the desert?

  AmericanPsycho: Yes. They should mummify nicely.

  NeverCaught: Susie and Clair look so bored.

  AmericanPsycho: It’s amazing what people will do for money.

  NeverCaught: I kinda like reality TV, though.

  DialM: Television is a plague on our society and reality TV… well, that’s…

  NeverCaught: The man is stuck for words!

  DialM: It is true. I feel very strongly about the evil of television and my feelings toward reality TV are unquantifiable.

  AmericanPsycho: I can see your point, M, but you are benefiting from the legacy of reality TV right now…with Ling in that dungeon of yours.

  DialM: True—but I’m the one in power.

  28

  Darren, Stone, Jonathan and I ride in Darren’s car. We swing into the street we tracked down from our near hit-and-run and pull up. It only took us half an hour to get the driver’s details from his registration, contact him and find out the street name. Jonathan
gets out of the car and looks around, trying to relive the escape. The sun’s setting and soon we’ll be battling to find anything in the dark.

  He’s back in the car within seconds. “This way.” He points forward and Darren takes off. Between my makeshift map and Jonathan’s memory—albeit affected by stress—we piece together the way backward, back to the house. We climb up the final hill.

  “It’s around here somewhere,” Jonathan says. “Stop!”

  Darren slams on the brakes and Jonathan races out of the car. He runs back and forth along a three-hundred-foot section of the street, looking carefully at the high-gated houses. For most of them you can’t actually see the house, just a walled perimeter and maybe a glimpse of garden or a rooftop.

  After a few minutes Jonathan comes back to the car, shaking. “I’ve found it.”

  “Are you sure?” I ask. “It’s almost dark. Things may look different.”

  “This is it.”

  I call through to the judge we had on standby and give him the exact address for the search warrant. Jonathan’s statement was compelling and the judge didn’t even mind that we disturbed his dinner. Darren coordinates another three patrol cars and an ambulance—for the female serial killer—to rendezvous at the club’s house.

  We only have to wait twenty-five minutes before the patrol cars, the ambulance and the search warrant arrive. As Darren instructed, the cars turned off their sirens as soon as they pulled off the freeway. If Chester or someone else is in there, we don’t want to alert them to our presence.

  “Jonathan, you have to wait here until we secure the house,” I say.

  He nods and seems relieved. I wouldn’t want to go back into the house in a hurry either.

  It’s unlikely anyone except the woman is inside, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Maybe the pick-up time has been and gone, and the house is empty, or maybe Chester is in there right now, discovering the mess and trying to figure out what to do. For the sake of our case, I hope at least she is in there. I want to meet and cuff the woman who’s inflicted so much carnage on young men over the past fifteen years. And that password sure would speed up our tech efforts.

  Darren divvies up the grounds. Darren, Stone and I will take the front door, two teams will each take a side of the house, and one team will head around the back, near the helipad. We set the entry time for exactly five minutes and all head off. A house like this would have an advanced alarm system, but it should also have been disabled to allow Jonathan and the woman to walk around. Unless Chester got here before us, it should still be off.

  We crouch low and move quickly up the drive, fanning out when the house is within three hundred feet. The gardens are perfectly kept and consist mostly of small trees, including lots of Japanese maples, and flowering shrubs. The house itself is set on a slight angle, with the driveway snaking around to the front, which is actually on a diagonal to the street. The three other teams head off to the left, one taking the near side, one the back and one the far side, while we follow the meandering gravel path to the front door. There are only two lights on inside the house.

  Once we get to within thirty feet of the front door, we crouch behind a few shrubs. A quick glance at my watch tells me we’ve got one minute to go. At least two of the other three teams should be in place by now, with only the far-side team having further to travel than us. We wait the minute, fixated on our watches. We look up as the countdown ends, and nod at one another. I’m the first to move. I try the obvious first—the door handle—and am relieved when it opens. Hopefully that means the house is as Jonathan left it. I enter taking all precautions—flashlight and gun trained on the crack of the door as I push it open with my left hip. From the small gap between the door and the frame, I can see through into the large kitchen area that Jonathan described. One of the officers uses his elbow to break a glass door that links the outside to the kitchen, and we acknowledge each other. Darren slips in between me and the door, and in one fluid yet fast movement, lunges forward and takes the left-hand side of the brightly lit foyer. Stone is less than a second behind him, also training her gun to the larger space on the left. As the door opens fully, we see a black-haired woman tugging desperately on her handcuffs.

  I smile at her for an instant, but it’s more of a smug grin than a smile—we’ve got her. We check the rest of the area.

  Stone proceeds up the stairs, her flashlight and gun moving in a sweeping motion in front of her. Darren and I flank her, our weapons and lights pointing outward and down to the foyer area. The other teams will finish securing the ground floor, while we head up to the second story. The wide stairway splits in two about halfway up. Darren and Stone fan to the left, I take the right. The split in the stairs is more for show than anything else, and a landing joins the two prongs at the top. Our flashlights illuminate five doors, all shut. One is directly in the center, where the staircase would have met the landing if it didn’t split, and the other four doors are evenly spread on either side. I think about what went on in these rooms for an instant before I control my body’s natural reaction and refocus on the immediate. Even though it looks like we got here first and the place is as Jonathan left it, I can’t let my guard down. The darkness of the house unsettles me too—like the dark always does.

  I reach the room and take a deep breath before gently pushing the door open. I can distinctly hear Brigitte’s screams, and an image of her blood spraying over the killer replays in my mind. But it didn’t happen that way. There was no blood. I push the thoughts away and move into the room, again fighting my instincts, which in this case are telling me to get the hell away from this room. But I can’t. I try to ignore the sensations and concentrate purely on the search. Heart pounding, I check the room thoroughly before moving on.

  Back on the landing I see Darren and Stone exiting the far-left room. I move to the second room on my side, while Darren takes the next room on the left side and Stone moves to the center room.

  “Jesus,” I whisper. My flashlight light catches a stainless-steel trolley with an assortment of horrors—from bondage-style to old-fashioned torture implements. I move my light beam to the bottom tray, where a selection of surgical instruments sits. But none of the victims showed any sign of torture. Maybe it was just for show, mental torture rather than physical for Malcolm, Cindy or Brigitte. Or maybe Ling’s body will be different, maybe she was tortured.

  I move around the room, checking all the likely hiding spots. The room has an ensuite and I check that, too. Nothing.

  I emerge from the room and join Stone and Darren on the landing. The second story is clear. We move down the stairs, guns facing downward in case the teams haven’t finished securing the ground floor. But before we reach the bottom, all six uniforms meet at the front foyer.

  “All clear down here, sir,” one of them says to Darren.

  With the house checked, we turn on some lights and focus on the woman. I take a closer look at her. She’s drawn her legs up toward her chest and sits sullenly, no longer tugging on the handcuffs. I notice that her left wrist, the handcuffed one, is bruised and bleeding slightly from her escape efforts. Her face looks bad—Jonathan certainly gave her a working over. But that’s what saved his life.

  “What’s this about?” she demands, a well-rehearsed line. She’s had many years to perfect it.

  I can’t control my snicker. “Come on, you must be joking.”

  “What’s your name?” Darren asks.

  She turns her focus to him and smiles bewitchingly. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

  “Yes, I would as a matter of fact.” Darren stands up. “Stone, get her out of here.”

  Stone flies down the last few stairs and eagerly moves closer to the woman. She’s about to cuff her when she realizes she’s already cuffed.

  I fish the handcuff key out of my pocket. “Stone.” A gentle underhand throw sends the key flying in Stone’s direction. I look at the female killer. “From your friendly neighborhood…” I move down and get in he
r face. I won’t be questioning her anyway. I push my face inches from hers to finish my sentence, “…Jonathan.”

  “Bitch!” she screams, unintentionally spitting, at least I think it’s unintentional.

  I wipe the spit off with my gloved hand. “Thanks. Just what I wanted…DNA.” I stand up and smile. I must admit, once in a while I do enjoy being a bitch to the bad guys.

  Stone unlocks one set of cuffs and gathers both of the woman’s wrists into her police-issue. “You’re under arrest for the attempted murder of Jonathan Cantor. Anything you say….” Stone continues to Miranda the woman, while Darren and I move outside.

  “Interesting display in there.” I know he’s talking about my intimidation of the woman.

  I shrug. “I couldn’t help myself. You’ll be questioning her anyway.”

  He laughs. “Why do I get the honor?”

  “You know why.” I move in and whisper in his ear. “You’re her type.”

  Darren seems confused by my slightly flirtatious remark, and I back away instantly, remembering the awkward kiss we shared in Vegas. I bet that’s exactly what he’s thinking about, too.

  An uncomfortable silence threatens to take over, but I break it by holding up my left finger. “I’ve got spit to get to forensics.”

  Darren laughs. “They should be here any second.” He finally puts his gun back in its holster. “So, you’re the profiler, how should I approach the questioning?”

  “We need answers, fast.”

  “I know. We’ll keep some guys on this place too, maybe catch this Chester guy coming to make the pickup.”

  I nod. “Sounds like a plan.” I move further away from the door and Darren follows. Stone will be coming out soon to take the perp to the ambulance, and I don’t want the woman overhearing our strategy. “You need to play her game. When she comes on to you, respond.”

  He nods. Then adds, “How much should I respond?” I hear the concern in his voice.