Blood and Bone

by V. M. Giambanco

  Mrs. Rojas was the mother of Jaime Rojas, the last surviving member of the drug cartel who had organized Cameron’s kidnapping. Rojas was a cautious man who kept to his estate and rarely went out—that’s why he had lived to the ripe old age of fifty-one in a business where longevity is notoriously difficult. The cartel was just one of many, all warring with each other and measuring their rewards in body bags and gold. The empty space left by the Rojas cartel would be taken by a new one who would continue their business without pausing for a moment to think about John Cameron.

  The issue was not how to kill Rojas but how to kill the man and walk away. Cameron had already dealt with seven members of the same cartel—five bodies had been found and two were still undiscovered. He had kept Jaime Rojas until last because he was the most important and Cameron wanted him to see his world fall apart. While Jaime was a good son who visited his dying mother every day, he was also the man responsible for ordering the disposal of at least forty business rivals, informants, associates, and probably a couple of east Los Angeles cops too. Cameron considered it a preemptive strike more than revenge.

  Two men stood by the door and four paced in the underground parking lot. Cameron was calm because this was the game and this was where he lived. He put on the glasses that he’d placed in his pocket—the gold frames altered his features another notch and added to the layer of deception.

  He headed straight for the door as he slipped on regular latex gloves. “Hello,” he said.

  The men had already clocked him and remembered the clumsy doctor with the spilled coffee from the previous day. Both nodded hello.

  Cameron’s hand was on the handle and he walked inside, closing the door behind him. It was a comfortable room that ensured a comfortably private death. The monitors attached to the patient ticked and beeped in their approximation of life.

  Jaime Rojas looked up. He was sitting facing the door on the far side of the bed where his mother lay; she had been unconscious for the last week, but her white hair had been combed out on the pillow. Rojas was an unremarkable man with dark features shaped by malice and grief. He could have been any businessman on a particularly bad day. They had never met in person before and he saw only a slightly overweight doctor with light brown hair and blue eyes.

  “I’m Dr. Ryan,” Cameron said. “I’ve just come to check on Mrs. Rojas.”

  Cameron had timed it so that it would be long enough after doctors’ rounds not to raise suspicions.

  Rojas nodded.

  The IV stand was unfortunately on the near side of the bed. Cameron flicked the bag and examined its contents, then walked around to the side where Rojas sat. The man seemed lost in his sorrow, barely noticing the doctor. So many nurses, assistants, and medics buzzed around his mother all day that he had lost track.

  Cameron wanted to finish the job without delay to minimize the possibility of exposure and yet he found it strangely intriguing to stand in this room where one person was already dying and another was about to be killed. He cleared his mind and with one smooth movement he extracted a syringe from his pocket and plunged the needle into Jaime Rojas’s neck. The man flailed, but Cameron’s left hand had closed on his mouth and barely a whimper came out. Cameron dropped the syringe and his arm went around Rojas, holding him tight as he thrashed. It took maybe five seconds before the man’s body flopped in his arms—so heavy that he had to arrange it half on the bed and half sitting on the chair. Gently he placed one of Rojas’s hands over his mother’s and cradled the man’s head in the crook of one arm—as if, in his vigil, he had fallen asleep. He picked up the empty syringe and slipped it back into his pocket.

  Cameron leaned forward and whispered into the man’s ear, “Enjoy the ride.”

  The muscle relaxant was known to act almost instantly and Cameron remembered very well when it had been used on him by Rojas’s man—the feeling of drowning in darkness as each cell struggled for air and yet the lungs would not inflate. Rojas was perfectly aware of everything that was going on around him as he sat slumped in the chair and slowly suffocating. The drug was used as an aid to intubate unconscious patients and help them breathe, and its effects lasted only a few minutes. However, if the patient was not helped to breathe, the consequences were lethal. And the good doctor had just given him a massive dose.

  John Cameron studied the scene: Rojas looked as if he had been overtaken by emotion at his mother’s deathbed and was quietly sobbing his heart out. It was time to leave. He started to move away from the bed.

  “Papi . . .”

  Cameron turned, his hand flying to the knife against his underarm.

  The boy, five, maybe six years old with huge black eyes, stood by the bathroom door. His gaze swept over his father and the man in the white coat.

  Cameron’s mind staggered. He had staked out the room for days and Rojas had never brought anybody before. The boy stared at him. How much had he seen and heard? Cameron wondered if the child had seen him inject his father and considered idly whether he’d make a good witness on the stand. He was so small. His body could fit under the bed or in the closet and they wouldn’t find him for hours. So small.

  “Papi . . .” the kid repeated and Cameron realized the boy was about to touch his father.

  He trusted that the kid’s first language would be Spanish. He needed him to understand.

  “Tu Papá necesita un momento solo con tu abuela. Pórtate bien y ven afuera conmigo por un ratito.”

  The boy looked at his father. Cameron could only imagine what Rojas was feeling at that point—if he could still think and feel.

  Cameron crouched and extended his hand. “Ven conmigo, hombrecito. Quieres una soda?” (Come with me, little man. Would you like a soda?)

  Say yes, little boy, because I do not want to leave you here with your father, Cameron thought, and he didn’t ask himself whether it was out of compassion or the certainty that the kid would find out something was wrong and call the men outside.

  The boy looked at his father again, but the man’s silence seemed to indicate consent. He took Cameron’s hand and followed him out of the room.

  The bodyguards turned as Cameron and the boy came out and he closed the door behind him.

  “Mr. Rojas is very distressed; his mother is close to the end. He doesn’t want the boy to see him like that. Please keep him out of the room for ten minutes or so. Give him a chance to get himself together, you know?”

  One of the bodyguards nodded. He understood. No man wants his boy to see him upset.

  “Would you like a soda?” Cameron asked the boy.

  “I’ll get it for him,” the bodyguard said and the boy followed him like a puppy to the vending machine.

  Cameron nodded good-bye to them and walked off to catch the elevator.

  His child. The man had brought his child to his own execution. Cameron did not turn back; he stood by the elevator and waited until the doors opened and then he stepped inside. As the doors slid shut he saw the boy pick out a can from the vending machine.

  John Cameron went into exit-strategy mode. He needed to get out of the hospital as quickly as possible. He would be very surprised if the bodyguards waited for ten minutes before checking in with their employer.

  Cameron got out on the third floor and took the emergency stairs but not before he had retrieved a small black backpack that he had stashed inconspicuously behind a bench. As he hit the stairs two at a time he took off the white coat, the glasses, the gloves, the belly, and the latex prosthesis and shoved everything that carried traces of his DNA—including the clipboard and the contact lenses—into the pack.

  By the time he stepped out of the stairs into the lobby he wore the workman’s coverall that had been under the doctor’s white coat with a navy baseball cap and sunglasses; the pack hung on his shoulder. His car was parked one block away and he reached it easily. He hadn’t run or looked back even once at the hospital entrance.

  “Papi está durmiendo,” the boy said, sipping his Coke and swinging
his legs as he sat on the bench by the closed door.

  The bodyguards looked at each other. One—the older and more experienced one—checked his watch. They’d given their boss nine minutes.

  “Durmiendo?” he repeated.

  The boy nodded.

  The man knocked lightly on the door and walked in.

  His boss lay half on the bed, his slack hand over his mother’s, his face still hidden in the crook of his arm.

  “Jefe?” the man said softly.

  As it was, Mrs. Rojas would outlive her son by eleven days.

  Chapter 21

  Alice Madison splashed water on her face in the restroom. She was used to briefings, but this was going to be a bigger deal than usual. She wiped her hands on a paper towel. She had to get it right. She could not afford to screw it up. Other detectives were going to be involved now, but she was on point and what was at stake was more than they could possibly have imagined when they walked into Matthew Duncan’s home that first night and saw his body.

  The case had started morphing and changing from that moment. It was like shifting smoke that choked and tainted everything it touched. Madison’s fears went unspoken—she hadn’t really been able to talk about her thoughts to Brown when so much rested on the implication that he might have gotten it wrong seven years ago. Nevertheless, she reflected, she needed to be completely honest if they were going to work through it.

  Madison walked up and down the restroom—it was the only place where she could be alone for a few minutes and it would have to do. She had to get the ball rolling on something that would change the game plan entirely and could be crushing for Brown. He had not made a mistake, but they were only now beginning to understand the consequences of his deductions.

  Brown was the one whose judgment she had trusted from the very first day in the Homicide Unit and she was not happy about being forced to second-guess his decisions. Then again, happy had nothing to do with this—whatever this would turn out to be.

  There was no good way to talk about it; the only way was to just do it. Madison left the restroom and went searching for Brown. She found him getting his notes together.

  “We need to talk before we go in,” she said to him urgently.

  “I know,” he replied.

  “Let’s just find a—”

  “I mean, I think I know what you’re going to say. I’ve been thinking about it since we left Sorensen . . . and I agree.”

  “Sarge, I wouldn’t have done anything different from what you did back then, but—”

  “I know. This is what we have to deal with today. Let’s go to the briefing and we’ll take it from there.”

  They stood around the long table: Lieutenant Fynn, Detectives Spencer, Dunne, Rosario, and Kelly. Brown and Madison had put the files in the middle and the crime scene photographs were passed around. None of the other detectives had been part of the Duncan investigation; none had been part of the Mitchell case. They had listened to the facts and studied the pictures and now they had come to the questions. Questions are always the most important part of an investigation: you ask the wrong ones and—whatever else you might get right—nothing else much matters.

  “Murder weapons?” Dunne asked Madison. He’d had a fresh haircut in honor of his imminent wedding on Sunday and his red hair looked uncharacteristically tidy.

  “For Duncan it was the trophy—a bronze statuette—and for Mitchell it was a hammer. In both cases the killer would have had those at hand. No firearms, no knives. Nothing that we wouldn’t find lying around in any house.”

  “The implication being . . .” Fynn said.

  “Spur-of-the-moment situations,” Madison replied. “A quarrel between Mitchell and Karasick; Karasick grabbed his hammer and things went south from there. For Duncan, a burglar gets caught out by the victim and attacks him with the first thing he can find.”

  Madison felt Chris Kelly’s eyes on her—small blue eyes lost in a wide face with dainty features. He managed to radiate hostility just standing there.

  “The killer broke into the Duncan home while the wife was out for a run; the husband was fixing dinner and all the lights were on?” Kelly said.

  “Yes,” Madison replied.

  “Not a particularly good burglar,” Kelly commented.

  “I can’t explain why he would do that, why he would choose that time of day. Except that he must have had a very good reason since he had taken the trouble to check out the house the previous week. And in order to cover his tracks he had hacked into the server of the HVAC company—Sorensen’s people are looking for any trail he might have left behind.”

  Kyle Spencer held a close-up of the victim’s body still at the crime scene and gazed at it. “It doesn’t make any sense that he would put so much preparation into knowing about the house and yet when he gets there he’s unarmed and has to improvise.”

  “It doesn’t,” Madison agreed; she hated the feeling that the more facts they had, the less they seemed to know. “This was always going to be more than a burglary,” she said, and looked at Brown who gave her the tiniest nod. “The containers we found buried in the garden told us that. Sorensen is still working on the contents from the tin, but we have the ones from the cigar case in the Duncans’ backyard right here.” She spread the magnified copies on the table. “Some have already been identified.”

  Madison gave them a moment to look over the strips of paper.

  “This was not something the killer accidentally left behind; this was not a mistake. He found a safe place and buried the case, making sure it was protected from the weather. Making sure it would last.”

  “As it did in Mitchell’s yard,” Brown said.

  Their eyes met for a moment and then Madison continued. “This slice of paper is taken from a ferry ticket, this from a gas receipt, this from a grocery shop, this long one here comes from a page of the Seattle Times from three weeks ago.”

  The men around the table looked stunned and she could read on their faces the worst of her own fears.

  “This,” she continued, “is from Time magazine, this one is from a map of Seattle, and this is from a Ferris wheel ticket. The other ones are still being worked on, but we do know that none of them had any fingerprints and, as you can see, none of the receipts gives us any clue in terms of date and time. Nothing that could lead us back to him.”

  “This is . . .” Dunne struggled with putting the notion into words. “This is a day in the life of the killer.”

  “Is there any chance at all that these . . . whatever we want to call them . . . the tin and the cigar case . . . is there any chance that they have nothing to do with the killings?” Spencer asked.

  Brown stepped forward. “They had both been wiped clean, meticulously so. And the killings are tragically similar: both victims were beaten to death with an excess of violence. As if the violence itself was the point of the whole exercise. A hair found on Mitchell’s body and a drop of blood in Duncan’s dresser are a DNA match. The same person was present at both crime scenes.”

  Brown looked at Madison: he was asking her to say it and say it now in front of everybody. She’d rather have spoken quietly to him first—to clear the air—and yet this was where they were. The storm was about to hit.

  Madison took a deep breath. “I don’t think it was a quarrel and I don’t think it was a burglary. We were supposed to think they were a quarrel and a burglary. The killer staged the crime scenes so that we’d have ready-made suspects.” She paused to let them get their heads around it. “This was about killing, in the most violent way possible, and getting away with it. The killer targeted Mitchell and Duncan and created false paths for us to follow: Henry Karasick could not give us an alibi; he was drunk, stoned, and passed out at home all night. Plenty of time for someone to plant the evidence that would lead us to him.”

  “Someone made sure he was high?” Fynn said.

  “They could have. We need to go back to the file and find out who he was buying from,” Brown said
.

  “And Duncan?” Spencer asked.

  “The Duncan murder was meant to look like a burglary—that’s why the jewelry was missing—but he didn’t bother to take the laptop or the camera. It was a quick in and out before the wife came back. However, he had spent God knows how long casing the place and knew exactly where everything was by the time he broke in.”

  The photographs in the middle of the table bore witness to unspeakable cruelty. Madison took a sip from a bottle of water. Here we go, she thought.

  “And I think we should look for more,” she said.

  “More what?” Fynn replied.

  “More of the same kind of murders. They would be, in all probability, closed cases. Like Mitchell’s.” She looked around the table. “What if Mitchell was only the first? The violence was bad, but clearly we can see how it escalated to what he did to Duncan. What happened during the last seven years? Can we honestly think that he would have stayed at home quietly just biding his time? There might be more . . . and we have to look. We must look.”

  She didn’t need to say it. There could be people in jail—people any of the men standing around the table could have put there—who were innocent. And if Detective Sergeant Kevin Brown had been taken in, anybody could have been.

  Fynn looked like a man who had to give his boss impossibly bad news.

  “What do we have on this man, Madison? Give me something because I can’t go to the Chief with a serial killer and a bunch of paper strips.”

  “We have a likeness from the housekeeper. It’s a pretty good sketch, good enough for witnesses to identify him. And we have his DNA.”

  “That’s a starting point. We need to release the likeness to Public Affairs and put it out there.”

  “Definitely. But let’s keep it connected only to the Duncan investigation. The killer should not know that we’re working backward as well. The less he knows, the better. Let’s just let him think that we’re still looking at it as a horrific burglary. And be ready for the jewels to turn up somewhere—anywhere—where he might have found a scapegoat.”