“Jesus Christ.”
“They rushed him to the emergency room and the doctors stitched him up. The doctor who operated on him said she’d seen hundreds of suicides but she had never seen anyone try to cut their own throat let alone remove their own head. They had him on suicide watch. A few weeks later, he left the hospital and I never saw him again until tonight,” Reed said.
But that wasn’t exactly true. He’d seen Malcolm following him one day after school, soon after he’d left the hospital. He’d caught Malcolm’s familiar shadow trailing him onto the bus, glimpsed it briefly between the dozens of passengers packed in like human cattle. The image was so brief he could almost convince himself that he hadn’t seen it. But he had. Reed left the bus and tried to lose himself in the press of downtown shoppers, shoplifters, and pickpockets on Chestnut Street. Repeatedly, he glanced behind to see if Malcolm was following him, but the hundreds of bargain hunters formed an impenetrable curtain. A flash of dark clothing, black skin, a massive shape slipping between the human traffic pumped panicked adrenaline into Reed’s step. He crossed Market Street at a near sprint, headed toward the train station inside the huge Gallery Mall.
As Reed walked nervously into the Gallery and down to the station, he thought he’d caught a momentary glimmer of two furious eyes burning from a face the color of liquid night. A chill raked his spine. Reed never saw more than a second or two of his pursuer, but he’d known he was there.
Electric tendrils of fear had snaked beneath his skin, making him shiver and bounce nervously from foot to foot. He looked around in a near panic, wondering what direction the attack would come from. Then he’d seen Natasha. She was smiling and heading towards him, and Malcolm was still somewhere close by. Even if he couldn’t see him, Reed knew Malcolm was coming for him and he knew that if Natasha so much as hugged him within sight of Malcolm, he would’ve die right there on that platform. Malcolm would’ve torn him apart where he stood. He had to get away from her.
Reed looked around for an exit and finally retreated to a men’s room deeper within the mall. He’d been in there for less than a minute when Malcolm walked in. Reed’s whole body shook convulsively when he saw him. Malcolm, his very own boogie-man come to drag him to hell . . . in pieces. It wasn’t just the thought of dying. It was the way he would die. Reed’s eyes traveled from the feral scowl on Malcolm’s face, the flaming hatred roiling in his eyes, to the wicked looking switchblade in his right hand. Reed had seen the slasher movies. Most of them he’d watched with Malcolm. Reed knew what a determined man could do with a knife. He knew what Malcolm could do with one.
Reed remembered Malcolm moving toward him. He remembered feeling the big man’s rage traveling before him like onrushing storm clouds. The temperature seemed to rise in proportion to Malcolm’s anger. The bathroom grew thick and humid as if Malcolm’s fury were heating the very air, boiling off his skin like steam. Sweat rolled from Reed’s forehead into his eyes making them sting.
A tidal wave of emotions crashed down on his mind, guilt and fear gripped him like a physical entity, impregnating his whole body with an oppressive dread. He could feel its weight pressing down on him, rooting his Nikes to the piss-stained tile floor. The realization of his own eminent death froze his tongue to the roof of his mouth and drained the phosphagens from his muscles. His eyes locked on Malcolm’s and his emotions grew deeper and more confused. A profound sadness, sympathy for his friend’s pain, confused his self-preservation instincts. Fear morphed with his guilt and remorse and he found himself moving toward Malcolm, opening his arms to embrace him, waiting to feel the cold sting of the blade penetrating his skin, muscle, and organs, ripping him open. But he never felt the knife.
What happened next remained locked in the place where past pain hides from the conscious mind, a profound chasm half-filled with chimerical nightmares, nebulous impressions, and abstract sensations. A vague recollection of not being able to breathe, feeling Malcolm’s powerful arms crushing down over his throat. Mixed feelings of pleasure and pain, of vulnerability, of surrender, of sheer horror and something that he could not accept, could not believe. Even now his mind retreated from it. What he’d felt had been sexual excitement simultaneous with the certainty of death.
But those memories were all obscure, wisps and shadows, shreds of memory coming to him as if from a dream. He’d awakened crumpled on the floor in a bathroom stall, not quite certain why he was alive. Malcolm had not killed him.
That had been the last time he’d seen Malcolm until last night and now, as he had then, he had no idea why Malcolm let him live.
James got up from his chair and turned to leave. He felt woozy, needed air. This case just seemed to get more and more horrible.
“Renee’ and that other girl, Natasha, do they still live in Philly?”
“Probably. Nobody ever leaves Philly. It’s like a black hole, but I don’t have their addresses or anything.”
“Where did they live back then?”
“Renee’ lived in Frankford. Natasha lived in Germantown a few blocks from Malcolm. Her mom was one of those liberal hippie types.” Reed offered that last bit of information as a way of explaining why a white woman would live with her young daughter in a black ghetto. James tried his best not to be offended and failed.
“I’ll have Dispatch locate them for me. What were their last names?”
“Renee’s last name was Volare’.”
“Volare’? Like the song?”
“Yeah, like the song. Natasha’s name was something Indian sounding. I can’t remember it.”
“Take my card and call me if you remember it. If Malcolm went after you, he might go after them. I’m placing you under protective custody. There’ll be an officer posted outside your door.”
“You think he’ll come after me again?”
James thought about everything he’d heard tonight and considered lying but instead he gave it to him straight.
“I think that a man who slit his own throat and tried to blow himself up isn’t gonna stop until he feels he’s avenged whatever wrong you’ve done to him or until we stop him.”
Never leave an enemy behind or he will rise again to fly at your throat!
A shiver slithered up Reed’s back and scampered across his neck and shoulders. He stared at the detective, his eyes widening in fear. He swallowed hard and tried to speak, but he had nothing to say. What could he say? He wanted the detective to say something, to say that he would stop Malcolm, that he would keep him from ever hurting anyone again.
James, feeling guilty, like maybe he had been a little too harsh, offered Reed a few comforting words.
“Look, I don’t know if it helps any, but I think Malcolm was deeply disturbed long before you came along.”
“Yeah, but would he have become what he’s become? Would he be a killer if it weren’t for me?”
James didn’t know and he hated to think that there might be any justification for the horrible things that had been done to this man’s family, but he also believed that friends didn’t steal each other’s girlfriends. Bros before hoes. That’s what he’d always preached and practiced. This man had violated that male code and destroyed a man in the process. He had paid with the lives of his family.
“I don’t know.”
James left without another word.
X.
Renee’ Volare’ lived with her husband and three boys in Fishtown, the white trash district. James found the entire neighborhood depressing, pitiful, and just plain bizarre. Growing up in a black ghetto, watching white people on TV who seemed to have everything except problems, seeing these white people living like rats in this type of filth made no sense to him. White folks in America had a four-hundred-year head start on black people yet somehow this entire neighborhood had not just fallen behind, but seemed to have failed to even get out of the blocks. The houses were not only old and dilapidated, but they seemed to be falling apart, covered in garbage. The hollow-eyed people who ambled through the fil
th-strewn streets looked like holocaust victims: depressed, angry, malnourished, defeated. G-town’s citizens looked optimistic in comparison.
Every teenager James passed was either drunk or high. Every couple he passed was fighting, some of them physically. Every elderly person he passed looked to be on the verge of tears. And here he was, about to bring more bad news into this neighborhood that already seemed to know too much. He could imagine the conversation to come.
“Mrs. Volare’, there’s a very good possibility that a homicidal psychopath that you used to date is on his way to murder you and your family.”
He hated it.
There were two patrol vehicles behind him, escorting him to Ms. Volare’s house just in case Malcolm happened to be there. James pulled up in front of the withered two-story shack and let out a deep, heavy sigh. The house looked like shit. He doubted if it had been painted for decades. What little paint still clung to the building’s crumbling brick face was cracked and peeling. One of the second floor windows was been shattered and had been covered in plastic rather than repaired. The veneer on the front door was warped, splintered and water-stained. The concrete steps that led up to the door had huge chunks missing, and most of the corners were broken off. There was an old sheet that had once been white hung over the living room window in lieu of drapes. As he stepped out of his vehicle and up the crumbling steps, he saw what was perhaps the only thing that could make this whole miserable trip worse. There was blood on the sheet. Lots of blood.
James pulled out his weapon and called for the officers to follow him as he kicked in the door. The old weather-beaten door split down the center and caved in on itself. James stepped through it into the Volare’s living room. He waved the two officers in and they fanned out into the house like commandos. They were apprehensive, scared. None of them wanted to be the first one to confront the Family Man or the gruesome aftermath of one of his rampages. They had their weapons drawn and their eyes were darting everywhere at once. James mentally prepared himself for another scene like the one at the Cozen’s house.
The living room was in a shambles, but the house was so dirty and choked with clutter that it was difficult to tell if the overall chaos was due to a struggle or merely bad housekeeping. The remains of a spaghetti dinner were strewn all over the floor amid broken dishes, empty beer cans, newspapers, old sports and fashion magazines, a spilled ashtray, broken toys, and baby bottles half-filled with spoiled milk. A child’s highchair lay in one corner on top of a plastic tricycle and there was a long orange and yellow food stain down the wall where the chair had apparently been thrown, splattering a plate of baby food.
The other officers were going through the house, checking it room by room with their guns still drawn. It was empty. All the rooms were in the same state of disarray. Much of the mess could’ve been attributed to slovenly tenants, but the only thing that could not be explained away was the stained sheet that hung from the window. There was blood saturating the bottom half of the cloth with splatters as high as six feet. Curiously, a large area on the carpet was completely clear. It looked as if it had actually been scrubbed and vacuumed.
James stared at the huge clean spot, remembering how the Family Man always cleaned up his crime scenes to destroy evidence. This one, too, had been cleaned—but sloppily. James got on the radio and called for the Crime Scene Unit. There was no doubt in his mind that Malcolm Davis had been there.
But where were the bodies? Why had he taken the bodies away? Was this some change in the pattern or was there some special reason why he didn’t want these particular bodies found? Was he trying to conceal this crime for some reason? Had there even been a crime here?
It made no sense.
Detectives Tony Vargas and Mike Willis, who were also assigned to the taskforce, showed up at the same time as the Crime Scene Unit. Vargas, who seemed to change styles and fashions like a chameleon, was wearing a black suit with gray pinstripes that was tapered at the waist with big wide collars like a zoot suit. On his feet he wore black and white Stacy Adams with tassels. His hair was slicked back and his moustache had been shaved to a thin line tracing his upper lip. He looked like a gangster from the roaring twenties. Willis, with his big feet, big ears, pointy-head, glasses, long neck, and oversized Adam’s apple, looked like Gomer Pyle. James was so overwhelmed by the case that he couldn’t even think of anything sarcastic to say. Still, he couldn’t resist shaking his head like an amused parent watching two slightly dimwitted though well-meaning children.
“Okay, so what the fuck’ve we got here?” Vargas drawled, with a Newport 100 dangling from his lip, dropping ashes onto the carpet.
“I’m not sure. See all that blood on the sheet? That’s not from no nose bleed.” James casually removed the cigarette from Tony’s mouth and tossed it out the door. He didn’t feel he needed to explain to him that a good defense attorney could convince a jury that those few cigarette ashes had contaminated the entire crime scene, calling into question the validity of anything they found there. If it was the detectives themselves who brought in the cigarette ashes, who’s to say how much more of the evidence was in fact left by them? It was an old argument that had fucked every detective at one time or another.
“No shit!” Willis said, looking at the gory sheet tacked to the upper corners of the window. “And look at this. It looks like somebody’s been doin’ some cleaning and it sure as shit wasn’t the slobs who live in this dump.”
Willis had the remarkable knack for looking like a complete moron while in fact possessing one of the finest investigative minds in the department.
“Let’s wait and see what the CSU boys come up with,” James said
The two Crime Scene guys, one Filipino and one black, were busy taking pictures, dusting for fingerprints, and bagging and tagging anything that looked like it could possibly be evidence. The last thing they did was spray everything with Luminal. The whole room seemed to turn green. There was blood everywhere—on the walls, the floor, the ceiling. A massacre had taken place here.
But where were the bodies?
“That much blood, I’d say we were definitely looking at a murder scene,” the effeminate looking Filipino offered, though his observation was hardly needed. The way the blood was splattered floor to ceiling suggested an arterial spray that could only have come from mortal wounds.
“Could one body have produced this much blood?” Vargas asked.
“Not even if you drained every last drop of blood out of it,” the technician replied. “See the way the blood sprayed all the way across the room here and almost hit the ceiling?”
He pointed to the glowing trail of Luminal begun at the larger puddle in the middle of the room, trailed across the floor, and climbed the far wall.
“That had to have been a powerful blow and most likely one of the first. But after awhile, there wouldn’t have been enough blood left in the body to spray like that. It would have just kind of dripped, but there is blood sprayed in every direction. That indicates to me that we are looking at multiple victims. Multiple casualties.”
“The Family Man.” Vargas said, almost to himself
“Yeah, but where is the family? Where are the bodies?” the CSU tech asked.
It was a rhetorical question. Nobody in the room had a clue what happened to that family, and probably never would unless they caught Malcolm and he led them to the bodies.
James was exhausted when he finally left Fishtown. The last thing he wanted to do was head to the station and toil over paperwork. He needed to lose himself for a while. He needed a place where the drinks, the thrills, and the women were cheap and plentiful. The Star Bar fit two of the criterion, and two out of three ain’t ever bad. He cruised down Market Street slowly to make sure none of the vice cops he knew were hanging around. Even though every red-blooded American boy occasionally visited the local titty bar, he didn’t want his fellow officers to see him out creepin’. He didn’t want it getting around the department that he was some kind of de
generate. The bright red, white, and blue neon that surrounded the huge marquee, featuring names like Misty Towers and Tawny Peaks, illuminated his car as he drove by the gaudy little strip club. James turned the corner onto Tenth Street and guided his Intrepid into the alley behind the club. James briefly wondered if it was against policy to use an official vehicle to cruise for pussy, but then he dismissed the thought. After all, he was just going to look at the pussy. It wasn’t like he was buying a taste. If confronted, he could always say he was looking for leads or an informant.
The back door was locked so James walked all the way around to the front of the building, an inconvenience that almost made him call the whole adventure off. He was still paranoid about being spotted by another cop, especially those gossipy hens in Vice. They’d once chased a cop out of town by letting it be known around the department that he’d been spotted cruising Pine Street where the transvestite hookers ply their trade. No one had actually witnessed him propositioning any of them, but the suspicion alone was enough for his fellow peace officers to make his life hell. They put dildos on his car seat along with AIDS awareness pamphlets and gay magazines. Finally, the poor guy had enough and transferred to some New Jersey PD. Apparently that wasn’t far enough because his first day on the new job, someone taped a huge glossy picture of a penis clipped from a porno mag on the back of his squad car. The dishonored officer didn’t even know it until some sweet old lady nearly had a heart attack and called in to report him for obscenity. He was let go soon afterward. James didn’t need that kind of drama in his life.
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