“Hey, Baltimore!”
“Yeah, you got something?” Detective Baltimore was beaming with enthusiasm.
“Uh, no. I’m done here. I’m gonna head back to the station and run these prints.”
Titus glared at him like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He gestured around the victim’s living room at all the evidence to be collected and then shook his head.
“Yeah, whatever,” he said.
“Tight Ass.” James hissed under his breath as he turned to leave.
Detective Bryant slid behind the wheel of the almost new, white, 2009 Dodge Intrepid the Department had given him and cruised away from the crime scene, headed for University Hospital. Tight Ass had promised the press he would have a suspect in custody by sunrise. James wasn’t so sure. Fools rush in. James wanted to know a little more about the Family Man, the Chaperone, the Pine Street Slasher, the butcher who had hacked through the Cozen family like a lawnmower—Malcolm Davis.
VIII.
James had been with the force a long time. He’d already buried two partners and survived one brutal divorce. Rosalyn Ali had been his partner for fifteen years when she’d fallen to a stroke during the search for a serial child murderer ten years ago. The stroke left her partially paralyzed on her right side, relegating her to a desk for two years before another stroke relegated her to the grave. Rosalyn, Rosie, who was a double minority as a Puerto Rican/Filipino female with the added handicap of being young and sexy, had fought her way up from the streets with him, even making detective before he did. She’d had to kick a lot of ass to prove that she was not the useless piece of fluff most policewomen were considered back then. Everything she did, every case she volunteered them for, every arrest she made, seemed to be aimed at getting that gold shield and she’d gotten it, years after other non-minorities in the department had already gotten theirs, but she’d done it. Even now thinking back, he was proud of her.
The glass ceiling, which from where they stood was not transparent but opaque, hadn’t bothered either of them at the time. They both knew the realities of racial politics in Philadelphia, particularly in the police departments where minorities generally only came in handcuffs. They were both just happy to not be teamed up with one of the many corrupt and racist dinosaurs that polluted the PPD back in the ’90s. Neither one of them wanted to have to deal with being forced to decide whether to turn in a fellow officer who’d gone buck-wild on some innocent or even guilty black kid, or whether to keep quiet and thereby become an accomplice. And they definitely didn’t want to deal with a partner who took bribes or shook down dealers and prostitutes. Neither one of them wanted to feel like a sellout. It had been important to them that they feel like a benefit to their respective communities rather than yet another hardship. Back then when the department was overwhelmingly white and male, they had been extremely grateful for one another.
When James finally made Detective, Rosie fought to have him partnered with her again. As James struggled to pass the detective’s exam, she’d been partnered for nearly a year with Greg Jonieack, a lazy, moronic, Polish Neanderthal who Mother Teresa would’ve made dumb Polack jokes about, and who was bringing her closing rate for murder cases way down by spending most of his time flirting with prostitutes. Every murder case seemed to take them to Broad and South where they’d spend hours questioning prostitutes and Jonieack would inevitably take one into an alley for “questioning” while she waited in the car. If they hadn’t gotten her a new partner, the department would’ve had a scandal on their hands because she was nearly to the point of turning him in.
As detectives working cases together, James and Ali’s closing rate had been incredible. They’d gotten all the shit cases that nobody wanted and they’d somehow managed to solve most of them. In their first year together they’d closed every case handed to them and had received the grudging respect of the other homicide detectives. Then, when their solve rate started to slip and cases started to go into the files unsolved, they’d caught other detective’s looking into some of the cases they’d solved the year before to see if they’d faked or planted evidence. No one found anything and even though James and Ali didn’t solve every case, their solve rate remained higher than most of the other detectives, which continued to lead to envy and suspicion. That envy and suspicion had even spilled over into James’ marriage.
It was hard for a woman to accept that her man spent most of his day with another woman. Twelve to fourteen hour days were common and, when James came home tired and sexually unmotivated, Lois’s suspicion had grown. In truth, James and Ali did have a brief affair, but they’d ended it when it started to interfere with work and when they realized that, despite the depths of their friendship, they were not in love and what they were doing was just fucking and not worth ruining a career over. Lois didn’t start suspecting them of having an affair until years after it had ended. It enraged him that when he was doing bad she was blissfully unaware but now that he was innocent, every day was an inquisition.
The divorce was far from peaceful. She’d wanted the house, the car, and five hundred dollars a month in alimony. She’d gotten the car and the alimony. Now, he could barely afford to keep the house with all the money he was sending to her each month. Rosie felt bad that she’d caused the breakup of his marriage, but James knew that it wasn’t her Lois had been jealous of. It was the job. And he’d chosen the job over her. She was a bitch, anyway. He’d loved that car. He’d loved Rosie.
James remembered the day she died. Her brain had turned to mush from lack of oxygen and there was no recognition in her eyes as she stared at him from the hospital bed. He’d left the hospital knowing that he’d just seen her for the last time.
Before Rosie, his first partner, back when he was a fresh-faced rookie, was a Gung Ho ex-marine named Cliff Douglas who missed all the action in Vietnam and seemed to regret riding a desk through the war and never seeing front line combat. He made up for it with near suicidal recklessness on the street. For him, the streets were his second chance at seeing combat. Where many of the old-timers avoided any calls where there were shots fired or armed suspects of any kind, Cliff would go out of his way to join a gunfight. Cliff regularly charged into dangerous situations with guns blazing. He had more courage than common sense and it seemed to James he had a death wish. There were always jokes about “Crazy Cliff” but James didn’t think they were funny. Having a borderline psychotic on the force made for amusing bar stories but not when you were his partner, not when his madness could lead to you catching bullets.
James was the only one on the force at that time who regularly wore a vest and it already had dents in the breastplate from what would have been fatal impacts. He was constantly teased about it by the macho assholes who sat in pizza and donut shops half the day, leering at and making lewd comments about every girl who passed by, only leaving long enough to gang up on some doped-up juvenile delinquent. They thought it was cowardly to wear a vest, but those idiots weren’t partnered up with “Crazy Cliff.” James quickly grew tired of the whine of bullets whizzing past his head. He pulled his service revolver more in those first few years partnered with that nutcase than he had in all the rest of his twenty-five years on the force. James’s GI-Joe partner finally got his wish during one of the many riots on South Street. He’d finally gotten his Purple Heart, chopped in half by friendly fire and left paralyzed from the neck down. Years later, after thousands of hours of physical therapy, he’d regained enough movement in his right arm to point a gun at his temple and blow his brains out.
Now he had Tight Ass. From the moment he heard about the youngest detective on the force, James had hated him. James had been on the force for thirteen years before he finally made detective, and here this young punk gets his detective’s shield after spending less than two years on the streets. Regardless of his Ph.D. and genius level IQ, James felt all cops needed to do their time, pay their dues. What they learned in the streets they could never learn sitting in a classroom re
ading case studies.
James aimed the Intrepid towards Broad and Olney with his mind still lost in the past and hiding from the present. It was easier to direct his anger at long-dead partners, an ex-wife he hadn’t seen in years, and a partner who was not here to defend himself than at the monster he was tracking. The man who had committed these crimes scared James worse than the shootouts he’d had as a rookie, worse than “Crazy Cliff” ever had. This man was completely outside his frame of reference. He’d looked all kinds of murderers and rapists right in the eyes without fear, but he had understood them. No matter how sick or depraved they were, he’d been able to relate to them. He knew what motivated them. The Family Man, he could not relate to, could not understand.
James knew that if he had any chance of catching Malcolm Davis he had to find a way to comprehend his madness, and that meant finding out all he could about the killer. He needed to go where Malcolm lived, to breathe the air he breathed, smell the scents he smelled, see what he saw. He needed to talk to Reed Cozen and drag Malcolm Davis out of him.
James knew that this case would take a toll on him. He wasn’t sure he could afford to pay it anymore. He felt old, tired. Something this dark and ugly might destroy him. In some ways, it felt as though it already had.
He and Titus had been working the case for two years, and it had already worn him down. Some of the things he’d seen still kept him up at night—especially the kids. The children made this whole thing so much more terrible. There was a reason why James didn’t work vice. Seeing abused and exploited children everyday was something he hadn’t wanted to deal with. Now, he dealt with their corpses and the Family Man left him knee deep in them.
It was more than simply catching the man. A part of him needed to understand him, if only to convince himself that he could never be like him.
James had been to enough Sex Addicts Anonymous sessions to know that he also had a problem. He’d talked to enough murderers, rapists, and child molesters to know that his problem was a little too similar to theirs. He was a sexual predator just as they were, only he used smooth talk instead of coercion and violence to trap his prey. What he did was not a crime. The women he’d seduced and told that he loved to get between their legs, had come to him willingly. Still, he’d left them just as emotionally scarred as if he’d raped them, and the passion he felt when he was with them was a little too close to the passion he saw in Linda Cozen’s mutilated corpse. He needed to know that he would never, could never, become that. He needed to know what made Malcolm tick.
James pulled up outside of University Hospital, squealing his tires as he pulled into a handicapped-parking zone. An overweight nurse with the 2010 version of a bouffant hairdo, started toward his car looking unnecessarily irate. James backed the Intrepid out of the handicapped zone before Henrietta Hippo could initiate an argument. He had to cruise the lot for another ten minutes before he found another parking spot. He sat in the car for another five minutes, taking deep breaths and trying to clear all of his own problems out of his head so he could appropriately commiserate with the victim. When he finally stepped from the car, a nervous tremor went through him and he gritted his teeth against it, sucking the fear down deep in his guts where stomach acids would dissolve it. As he walked through the doors of the emergency room, he could feel his stomach acids at work.
IX.
Reed sat and thought. His family was dead, murdered by a man he hadn’t seen or thought of in over a decade, but who had obviously been thinking of him. The police would catch him. They had all the information they needed. Something about that troubled him. He knew that Malcolm wasn’t a stupid man. Why had Malcolm left him alive knowing that Reed would identify him and lead the police right to him? He knew Malcolm was crazy, but Malcom had always been crazy—smart, cunning, deadly, crazy. It didn’t even surprise him to hear that Malcolm was the Family Man. The only thing unusual was that Reed was still breathing. Malcolm had to be planning something else. He remembered how Malcolm used to always quote from the movie Shaka Zulu.
“Never leave an enemy behind or he will rise again to fly at your throat!”
Well, Malcolm had left him behind but Reed was in no condition to fly at anyone’s throat. He hated Malcolm, wanted him dead, but he feared him too much to go after him himself. His own feelings of guilt kept getting in the way of his anger. He knew that Malcolm was no doubt crazy before Reed took his girlfriends from him, but was he this crazy? Would he have killed all those people if it weren’t for what Reed had done to him? Would he have murdered Linda, Jennie, and little Mark? Had Reed pushed over the first domino that knocked over dozens of lives and came back around to crush the lives of his family?
Reed began to daydream about his wife. He dreamed about Jennie’s birth. He had been scared to death when all of a sudden, in the middle of the delivery, his wife had stopped dilating and had to be rushed into surgery for an emergency Caesarian section. He held her hand and they sang children’s songs while waiting for the anesthesia to take effect. He would never forget the sound of his first child’s cries. The smile on her face, on his wife’s face, on his own face. He had a family now . . . then. Now he had no family. He was alone again. Reed began to weep quietly into the pillow.
A soft, respectful knock proceeded James’s entrance into Reed’s hospital room. Reed was almost thankful for the distraction. The silence was full of ghosts and demons.
“I’m Detective Bryant from the Philadelphia Police Department, Homicide Division. May I speak to you a moment? I know it’s been a long evening, but the sooner we get some facts from you the sooner we can catch this guy.”
“Come on in. I can’t sleep anyway.” Reed pulled himself upright, wincing in pain.
“Thank you.” James sat down in a chair by Reed’s bed, looked thoughtfully at Reed’s battered face, and got right to the point.
“Who is Malcolm Davis and how do you know him?”
“Detective Bryant . . .”
“James. Just call me James.”
Reed considered the old detective. In his crumpled old Botany 500 suit, he looked like a stockier black version of Colombo. The chewed up, unlit cigar that hung from his mouth completed the effect. He looked kind, harmless, like someone’s father or grandfather. But, if you looked closely, you could see the thick sinuous arms and chest bulging through the suit—you could see the hard, determined look in his eyes.
Detective Bryant—James—was more than he appeared.
“Okay, James. Where should I begin? You want to know who Malcolm is? He’s my very own Frankenstein monster. I made him and now the chickens have come home to roost, so to speak.”
“I wouldn’t think a novelist would be so quick to mix metaphors.”
Reed laughed, then winced in pain, curling into a ball and holding his sides.
“Please. Don’t make me laugh or I literally will split my sides.”
“Okay, so what do you mean you created him? What is it between the two of you?”
Reed continued to hold his sides. He rocked back and forth and stared at the television set which had never been turned on. The pain in his ribs had subsided. The pain in his mind raged.
“Malcolm was my best friend in high school and I betrayed him. I slept with his first girlfriend. The first woman he’d ever loved, maybe the first human being he’d ever loved besides, maybe, his mother.”
“And what did Malcolm do? Did he know?”
“Malcolm suspected it but he wasn’t sure. He wanted to believe me. He trusted me. I think, maybe, he loved me.”
“Loved you?”
“Not in a sexual way.” The memory of Malcolm attacking him in the men’s room of a train station long ago crept its way past his defenses. “I don’t think. I . . . I think he just thought of me as an intellectual equal. His only peer in a world of morons. Without me he would have been alone.”
“Is that how you thought? That you were alone in a world of morons?”
“I never had Malcolm’s ego. I never sh
ared his contempt for everybody and everything. He found that charming. He thought I was naive and weak. He treated me like a pet.”
“And so you fucked his girlfriend to prove to him that you were as much a man as he was?”
“To prove it to myself. I was jealous of Malcolm. He was the meanest bastard you ever met and the girls loved him. They loved him! They always go for the assholes. I was too nice. I was the kind of guy girls dated because they knew I’d never have the nerve to ask them for sex. I was their best friend. They called me their little brother and talked to me on the phone about how much they wanted to fuck guys like Malcolm, but of course Malcolm was obsessed with Renee’.”
“Malcolm’s first girlfriend?”
“He thought she was perfect, flawless—goodness and innocence personified. He had her on a pedestal so high she was dizzy. It was like he thought that if an angel like her could love him then maybe he wasn’t completely evil. But she was no angel. I proved that. His suspicions eventually led to their break up. Then, after he and Renee’ broke up, he started dating this girl named Natasha.”
“Did Malcolm love her?”
“He thought he did. All he ever did was torture her by telling her how she would never measure up to Renee’. See, he still thought Renee’ was some type of angel.”
“And what happened to Natasha?”
“I slept with her, too. That’s when Malcolm found out. He caught me over at Natasha’s house, in her bedroom. I thought he was going to kill me right then. I was trying to talk my way out of it and he was trying to believe me. He still wanted to believe that I hadn’t done it. I was amazed when he let me walk out of there alive. When I left he went into Natasha’s kitchen, blew out the pilot lights on her stove, and turned up the gas. He brought her down there in the kitchen with him and sat while the kitchen filled up with gas. He had a pack of matches on the table. She lasted maybe five minutes before she told him everything. She even told him about Renee’ and I. Malcolm lit the match. There was a small explosion, but only the stove was destroyed. She had cracked too quickly and there wasn’t enough gas to level the house and kill them both like Malcolm wanted. They only suffered a few minor burns and bruises. The kitchen got burnt up pretty bad but the firemen put out the blaze before it took the rest of the house. Malcolm walked back home during all the commotion of the fire trucks, police cars, and nosy neighbors. When the police came to arrest him for arson, he took a knife and slit his own throat, cut right through his esophagus and tried to saw through his cervical vertebrae. He was trying to decapitate himself.”
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