“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” Murphy said and started to dial the precinct. She felt a tug at her shirt and looked in to see Larson grinning at her, the door open a crack.
“Door was open,” he whispered, gun ready.
“What the fuck were you thinking?”
He shrugged and stepped inside the room. One of these days, he’d go too far and tank her career, she thought. She joined him inside anyway.
The apartment was empty. No sign of Nurse Louise or Dads.
“Don’t touch anything. We’ll get the techs in here.”
“On what grounds? They could be in the cafeteria, eating or out shopping or something. Let’s get out of here,” Murphy said but Larson shook his head.
“If this man is the Jerry Killer, there will be proof in here.”
“It won’t be admissible in court. I know you’ve heard of illegal search and seizure,” Murphy said. “Let’s get out of here before they return.”
Murphy left Larson standing in the middle of the apartment as he scanned the room for anything they could use. Finding nothing, he joined her back in the hallway.
“Let’s go find them then and have a nice little chat about their previous residences,” Larson said. “It must be past their bedtime. They have to be in here somewhere.”
Sara Caine stood in the alleyway behind the Bockerman, waiting for him to open the door. Cop cars crowded the front entrance and prevented her from entering that way. She shifted from foot to foot and wondered what was taking him so long. She hoped the cop cars weren’t there for him. She checked her watch one last time. It was way past midnight. The door opened at that moment and Barney’s head poked out.
“Sorry, I’m late. The cops are crawling everywhere,” Barney said.
“I’m so glad you showed up. I was worried that you might have…”
“Been killed?” He laughed. “I’m a strong, old bugger. Nurse Louise and Dads have disappeared. Our plan worked.”
“They’re gone?” Sara asked.
“Yup. That’s why there are cops everywhere. They’re looking for them,” he said and motioned her inside. She stepped into the gloom of the back hallway.
“Do you really think that Nurse Louise killed Barbara?”
“Who else could it have been?” Barney asked. Sara hadn’t a clue.
“If the cops are everywhere, how are we going to get to the eighth floor?”
“They’ve cleared that floor. I checked,” Barney said, and headed to the back staircase. “Are you sure Barbara will be there?”
Sara nodded. “She’s appeared every other time.”
They started up the stairs, Sara taking her time going up, making sure she conserved her energy. Barney noticed and slowed down.
“I know you’re eager to converse with her,” Sara said as an apology. Barney nodded.
“It’s only a couple more flights.” He held out his hand, and she took it gratefully. They climbed the rest of the way in silence. When they reached the eighth floor, Sara took several deep breaths and nodded. Barney opened the door to the hallway, and they both stepped out.
Silence. No sounds came from behind the doors like the last time she had been here. She closed her eyes and focused her concentration on her breathing.
In and out. In and out.
“What should I do?” His voice came from behind.
“Stay behind me,” she whispered and focused on her breath until she felt the familiar cold on her skin. Her eyes fluttered open to find Barbara standing in front of her. The woman wore the same flowered robe and rollers in her hair as she’d seen the other times. She gestured to the end of the hall and walked a few steps away from Sara and Barney.
“She wants us to follow her,” Sara whispered, keeping her eyes fixed on Barbara.
“What are we waiting for then?” Barney said and stepped up next to her. Sara gave him a crooked smile as Barbara turned away and walked down the hall. Sara and Barney followed right behind her. She turned the corner and disappeared through a smaller door in the wall.
“What’s behind there?” Sara pointed at the same door.
“It’s a staircase that goes between the seventh and eighth floors. This place was a hotel, and these smaller stairs were used by the servants,” Barney explained.
Sara tried the knob, and the door creaked open. Barbara stood on the top stair, waiting for them. She beckoned and walked down the first flight. Barney followed right behind her.
“What is she doing now?” Barney asked.
Sara watched as Barbara dropped to her knees and pointed at a small door inset into the stairwell wall.
Her mouth opened in a scream that even Barney heard. The effort of making herself heard depleted her energy and she disappeared, leaving Sara and Barney alone.
Barney looked at Sara expectantly. “Was that her?”
“She’s gone now,” Sara added. “She pointed at that door before she screamed,” Sara said, and pointed at the small door. They both stared at it.
“We should get the police.”
“We should,” Barney replied. “Are you going to open it?” Sara took a deep breath and squatted in front of it.
“Maybe it’s some clue of where they went?”
“Maybe,” Barney said, not sounding hopeful. Sara grasped the knob and pulled it open in one fast motion. Screams rebounded against the walls, and it took some moments before Sara realized the voice was hers. Her back hit Barney and cut off his own screams.
Louise Fairbanks’ body was stuffed into the tiny space below the stairs, her neck twisted in such a way as to be staring right at them. The Jerry killer’s mark, the crude trident, the life rune, the elk, was cut into her forehead.
Sara stumbled back up the stairs, pulling Barney along with her. “Police. We have to get the police,” she managed to sputter out.
Simon Schrieber cried when he called the police about his father’s supposed suicide.
“He missed her so much. I just wasn’t enough for him,” he babbled when two uniformed LAPD officers came to investigate. He wiped his snot on the edge of his sleeve and let his shoulders droop.
“I’m sure that’s not true,” the older of the two police officers said, and Simon knew he was in the clear.
“What’s going to happen to me now?” he asked as a knock on the door made all of them turn to see Regina Michaels. A widow who lived three doors down and had been friends with Frau Schrieber, she stood in the open doorway, tears streaming down her cheeks. Just like that Simon had found his savior.
Regina agreed to let him stay with her and it didn’t take long for him to adopt her name. He became Simon Michaels and worked hard to put his past behind him. Regina helped him in any way she could. He never told her that the Schrieber’s had kidnapped and brainwashed him into being their son, but she was perceptive enough to know that they weren’t the happy family she once thought they were. The nightmares that followed him out of the old country subsided gradually and with Regina’s unconditional love, he blossomed in high school. He excelled in science and mathematics and had no difficulty in landing a spot at UC Berkeley to study medicine. Regina encouraged him to go, and he did.
Simon moved back down to Southern California twelve years later as a newly qualified Doctor at the UCLA Medical Center. He had only been in Santa Monica for two months when Regina died of sudden cardiac arrest. Between sleepless nights in the ER and his grief over Regina’s death, Simon’s lust for blood grew as the nightmares of his past took over his daily life. He took the most mangled cases in the ER and worked hard to stitch them back together. His sleep returned. The blood washed away the terrors of Auschwitz. However, dreams of his mother started in earnest.
His coldness and emotional distance didn’t inspire warmth in his colleagues, but it made him a brilliant surgeon. He managed to keep his nasty blackness at bay for many years. No one questioned his bachelorhood since they understood his life was his work. And in truth, it was.
Until 1975,
when Simon saw him.
Simon Michaels first encountered Andreas Bauer at a dive bar off Lincoln Boulevard after a twenty-four-hour shift. He had stopped in on a whim to quiet his mind from a hard day of catastrophes when he encountered Herr Schrieber’s long lost buddy. Simon remembered Andreas and his vitriol towards everyone and everything in his new home country.
Simon took a swig of his whiskey when Andreas Bauer’s still accented German voice rang out in the nearly empty bar.
“So the Polack told me not to come back. Claimed I didn’t work fast enough,” he snorted and threw back another vodka. “This whole town is crawling with the Jews, Commies, and Polacks.” He glared at Simon who lifted up his drink to him. The old bastard didn’t recognize him at all. The grizzled bartender nodded absently at him, not really paying attention. But, Bauer’s words lit the nasty, black, and wondrous rage that hovered just below Simon’s surface. The man hadn’t changed in thirty years.
“I think it’s time to leave, sir.” The bartender took Andreas Bauer’s empty glass and pointed to the door. Andreas Bauer grunted and slid off the stool. Simon finished his own drink and left a generous tip.
He followed Andreas out of the bar and watched as he took a left turn onto a smaller side street. Simon ran to his car and followed Andreas Bauer to a ramshackle bungalow, its front yard overgrown with weeds. Simon memorized the number and knew he would be back.
The murder of Andreas Bauer went off without a hitch. The old man was more than happy to let a fellow German into his home, however lame the excuse was, and never noticed the surgical gloves Simon wore. It took Simon a minute to overpower the old man, and he did it without disturbing anything but the rug.
He expertly used his scalpel to emasculate him and finished old Bauer with Herr Schrieber’s Parabellum Luger Mauser pistol. He knew he had kept it for a reason and thought its use poetic.
As he glanced around one last time, he found an old picture of Herr Schrieber’s buddies. When he checked the back, he found all their names written neatly in the back. Germans were nothing if not precise and organized. He smiled. An idea formed, and his blackness blossomed.
After going through the men in the photo, six in all, he found that his blood lust was not satiated. It felt right to rid the world of the Nazi vermin, and he wanted to keep his good work going. The only problem was finding them. Israel had done an excellent job of hunting down many Nazi criminals and there just weren’t that many around the States anymore. Simon stopped hunting and sleeping for several years.
His need wouldn’t leave him. Each time he saw a blond woman with that look, the high cheekbones and the broad Germanic face, the nasty black would well up inside of him. He remembered the blond women with the brown uniforms in the children’s home and their smiling faces as they led the less desirable children off to their deaths. He fed the rage and decided these women didn’t deserve to live either. Their entire race.
He did his due diligence in making sure the men and women he chose were of Germanic descent. Once he was sure, he did his good work and his sleep came back to him.
Age was not kind to anyone, Simon thought. He had never made a mistake in the forty years he hunted the vermin. Not like the one with LuAnn and Gillian Herrmann. He hadn’t prepared properly, and luck was the only thing that made him come up on Gillian Herrmann and not the other way around.
Ever adaptable, Simon knew he could use her to his advantage. He didn’t want to kill her. She wasn’t right. She would have never been stolen, grabbed and brainwashed. She would have been shot in the street. She was petite and a brunette and could have been Jewish. He decided to keep her. It was time to do something more befitting his age.
It took him three years to break Gillian down and transform her into Louise Pickford and himself into Dads Pickford. He believed it would only take several months, at most, but he hadn’t taken Gillian’s age into consideration. Most of the children brainwashed at the Kindererziehungslager were under ten years old and their malleable brains made breaking them so much easier.
But, it worked out in the end and they landed at the Comfort Homes just as he had planned. In his many years of living in California, Simon never encountered someone like him until he met Grazyna Nettlebaum at the Comfort Homes. He couldn’t believe how good it felt to speak Polish with someone again.
At first, he spoke rather haltingly but the more they talked the more his mother tongue came rushing back to him. He tamped down the nasty, black rage and focused instead on the Poland of his memories, his mother and Grazyna. He could have stayed that way if it wasn’t for Jacques Fournier and his anti-Semitism. He saw Grazyna’s tears and knew he would have to kill again.
He couldn’t shoot Jacques since that would bring the cops running and wake up the entire home. Using his trusty scalpel would be too messy, and he couldn’t take the risk of getting any blood on himself. It didn’t take long for him to settle on air embolism, a way of death created by the Nazi’s, and one that would fly entirely under the radar. If he was good enough, the death might even be ruled as a natural cause. He smiled at the very thought.
He had to give it to her. Her technique was ingenious. She started at the lowest dosage and was patient enough to not raise it for months. She almost convinced him that he was in the middle of a descent into dementia and muddled his brain enough that he took the pills she gave him without question. If it hadn’t been for the weeklong stomach flu that affected his dosage, his mind might have never cleared and Lou would have gotten away with it.
But, luck was not on her side. He devised ways of hiding the pills and within several months he was back to his old self. He made sure to keep mindless anytime Lou was around. It wasn’t hard as she was devolving right before his eyes. He knew all of Sunshine blamed her for the current spate of murders. Barney Leonard had even tried to see him several times. Simon figured it was time to get out from under Lou’s thumb. It barely hurt when he carved HELP ME into his arm.
He’d be free of her one way or another.
Sara Caine sat across from Detective Murphy and Detective Larson at the Hollywood precinct, a cup of steaming hot coffee in front of her. As far as Sara knew, no one had slept since Nurse Louise’s body was found under the stairs. Sara was upfront about how she and Barney had found the body, but Detective Murphy felt that those details shouldn’t be mentioned in the report. Sara took a sip of coffee and rubbed her bloodshot eyes.
“So Dads, whatever his name is, is the Jerry Killer?” Sara asked the detectives.
“We think he is.”
“Nurse Louise had been drugging him to keep him in a state of dementia,” Detective Larson offered.
“Who was Nurse Louise then? Were they related?”
“She was the sister of one of his victims. We think that she was his slave for years. Severe Stockholm syndrome, our shrink says,” Detective Murphy said, ignoring Detective Larson’s discreet headshake. Sara guessed he felt Detective Murphy said too much.
“Did you hear Dads speak at the séance?” Detective Larson asked.
“I’ve told you all of what happened and Fredrick should have the tapes to back me up. I don’t remember Dads ever saying a word.”
“We do have the tapes, and he doesn’t speak on them,” Detective Murphy said.
“So what now?” Sara asked.
“A manhunt is underway. We’ll be cataloguing their room for some time and are hopeful that forensics will find something we can use to track him. We’ve never had his fingerprints before.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” Sara asked. Detective Murphy and Detective Larson exchanged a look.
“We’re concerned you might be in danger. If he thinks you might have something on him…” Detective Murphy trailed off. Sara’s already pale face turned translucent.
“But I don’t know anything,” Sara said.
“We’re going to put a security detail on you for a couple of days until we’re sure that he’s left town,” Detective Murphy said.
“He’s an old man.”
“Who can and has done a lot of damage,” Detective Larson reminded her.
“But I don’t know anything. He never spoke with me, and I had barely any contact with him.” She looked from one to the other. “That doesn’t matter, does it?”
“You’ll be safe with us,” Detective Murphy said and smiled at her. Sara didn’t feel safe at all but decided to keep that to herself.
“Is it safe for me to go home? I can hardly keep my eyes open.”
Both of the detectives nodded. “Just know that we’re watching you,” Detective Murphy said as Sara got to her feet. “Will you be OK to drive?”
Sara nodded.
“I’ll give you a call later today to check in on you,” Detective Murphy said and Sara nodded again.
Sara walked out of the precinct and blinked against the bright sunlight. She’d been wrong about Louise Fairbanks, and the visions had made her point the finger at an innocent woman. She’d never felt this kind of guilt before.
Sara entered the elevator in her loft building, pressed the button for the fourth floor, leaned against the wall, and closed her eyes. She’d failed. The guilt swarmed in her belly like snakes curling around her intestines. The elevator doors slid open, and Sara stepped out onto her floor. Bleariness was making it hard for her to focus and the harsh afternoon light filling the hallway made seeing anything in front of her difficult.
She rubbed her eyes and squinted down the hall, making out a figure in front of her door. Was that Johan? She shielded her eyes from the glare, but all she could make out was a shape.
The elevator dinged closed and she could hear it go down back to the lobby. That had to be Johan. No one else visited her at home. She took several steps forward.
The Elk (A Caine & Murphy Paranormal Thriller Series Book 1) Page 21
