“Did we find the murder weapon? He usually leaves it behind, sticking out of his victim’s body.”
“No, no murder weapon.”
“The scene wasn’t secure when we arrived. There were people walking all through here. I can’t say one of them didn’t walk off with it.” Captain Kelly grumbled, looking like he was getting angry all over again.
“Great.”
“Detective? Can I speak to you for a moment.”
“Yes, sir.”
Captain Kelly and Detective Baltimore stepped around into the free-weight room, into the hamstring and quadriceps area and leaned up against the squat rack.
“Have you made any progress?”
“Well Captain, I haven’t gotten any leads on Malcolm’s whereabouts, but I think I might be close to some evidence that just might link Reed Cozen to the murders.”
“That’s just great, Baltimore. But right now, Reed isn’t the one on a murderous rampage! Malcolm Davis is our primary suspect. So far, he’s butchered Mrs. Cozen and her two kids, beat the shit out of Mr. Cozen, murdered this guy in broad daylight and mutilated his accomplice, plus who knows how many other murders he’s committed? Did you hear that James tried to track down one of Malcolm’s ex-girlfriends? He went to her house and there was no trace of her or her family, but CSU found blood everywhere. We’re pretty sure they’re dead. This Malcolm guy is out of fucking control. Fuck, Reed! You get me this Malcolm Davis guy!”
“But Captain, I . . .”
“Shut the fuck up. We need results! And we need ’em fast! Now I’ve already talked to James and now I’m gonna say it to you, too. You two are partners. You WILL work together. I don’t want to see you cruising around in your Mercedes while James is out doing god knows what. I don’t give a fuck if you don’t like each other. You put your heads together and you solve this thing. Did you know that we just found Malcolm’s accomplice? Yeah, James said he could be Reed’s twin. He found him trussed up in some kind of S&M contraption cut to ribbons. Finish up here and then you drive over there and take over.”
“What’s the location?”
“See? If you were in your damned patrol unit with your partner instead of that Mercedes you’d have heard it on the radio. It’s over on Eighth and South by that little gift store.”
Baltimore left, wondering if Captain Kelly would have been as adamant about him riding with James in the patrol car if he had pulled up in the old Mustang instead of his dad’s new Mercedes. Perhaps he was being too cynical. Maybe Captain Kelly only wanted to see him and James acting like partners instead of two teenagers competing for the same spot on the football team. Maybe he was just tired of getting his ass chewed by the Police Chief, the DA, the Mayor, and whoever else had their canines dug into his backside these days. Baltimore was smart enough to know that whatever pressure he was feeling to solve these murders was nothing compared to the pressure the Captain was under. He made his way back to his car, reciting his mantra at the ghouls. It wasn’t working and they surged forward, engulfing him in their insensitive and insipid questions. Baltimore pushed his way through and drove off in a hail of flashbulbs. Now, they had the pictures of him actually in the Mercedes. He’d probably be getting a call from IAD in the morning.
If the Atlas Gym scene was a circus, the scene at the Paul Cooper homicide was appropriately, if not excessively, funereal. There were more than a few officers still on the scene, two of whom were outside throwing up in the bushes. Another was regurgitating in the kitchen sink while James berated him about contaminating possible evidence. Still more were standing around, gawking at the swinging carcass gruesomely suspended from the ceiling like some kind of carrion stuffed scarecrow. The coroners had not arrived yet, but the crime scene techs were already busy reducing Paul’s entire existence to a few dozen zip-lock bags with serial numbers on them. The only two cops who did not appear to be in shock were filling a box with S&M paraphernalia and carting it and a huge box of violent pornography out to the squad car. More evidence. None of which was going to lead them any closer to Malcolm.
“Hey, Baltimore.” James started to stride quickly toward him. For the first time, Titus noticed how powerfully James was built. He looked into James’s angry bloodshot eyes and took an involuntary step back.
“Look Titus, let’s step outside. We need to talk.”
James rushed past him and out the door, not waiting to see if Titus was following or not. Baltimore followed, wondering if the big blow up that had been building between the two of them all year was about to happen. He knew James had once been a pretty good boxer, while he’d never been in a fight in his entire life. Titus’s only consolation was that James would be suspended if he beat him too badly and at least then they would no longer have to be partners. He felt like a punk when his legs began to shake and wobble slightly as he stepped out the door. He berated himself for not taking karate when his dad had suggested it. He’d be a black belt by now if he hadn’t wanted those damn piano lessons.
“Uh, what’s wrong, James?” He wanted to sound strong, but his voice came out hoarse and squeaky.
“Relax, Tight Ass. I’m not going to hit you.” Titus’s entire face turned red. James knew Titus would think that he was calling him out for a fight. He had made him think that on purpose and now he was laughing at him. Baltimore went from relief, to embarrassment, to anger.
“Okay, James! What the fuck did you call me out here like this for?”
“We need to get together on this case and we can’t do it by ignoring and working against each other. The Captain is right. Malcolm is out of control and we aren’t going to catch him like this.”
Baltimore calmed down. He hated the fact that James had done the right thing, the mature thing, before he had, but James was right and Baltimore couldn’t help but be impressed that the man actually seemed to care. He was beginning to think the old bastard didn’t give a damn about whether the case got solved or not and was relieved to discover he’d been wrong.
“Okay, so how should we start?”
“First, I gotta say you’re completely wrong about Mr. Cozen. I know you think he had something to do with his family’s murder, but you’re wrong. The only complicity he might have had in this was in pissing Malcolm off.”
“You have no idea what I’ve found out about that scumbag. Do you know he might have been molesting his daughter? Did you know that?”
James was shocked.
“Can you prove that?”
“Not yet, but if he was and the wife found out about it, that’s a strong motive for killing them. And he could have found out how to copycat the Family Man by talking with Malcolm, finding out all the juicy details we’ve been keeping out of the papers so that he could duplicate the crime well enough to fool even us. Malcolm may have even helped. Because one thing’s for sure, Malcolm is definitely the Family Man and the fact that he’s best friends with Mr. Cozen certainly makes things look suspicious.”
“Well, Reed was telling the truth about there being a guy who looked just like him working with Malcolm. We found this guy’s prints all over the crime scene.”
“That doesn’t prove anything. The guy could have been coerced into it. Especially considering how he ended up. And we’ve got a morgue full of guys who look like Reed courtesy of his buddy, Malcolm.”
“Okay, then we obviously can’t proceed until we eliminate Mr. Cozen as a suspect. But first I want to head over to Malcolm’s mother’s house and get a little more background info on our suspect. Perhaps she might be able to tell us something that’ll give us a clue to where he might be hiding. We’ve had her house under twenty-four-hour surveillance, but Malcolm may have found a way to sneak in past the stakeout. He might be sitting in there with his mother right now, eating biscuits and drinking tea. ”
Just as they were talking, the black ME’s van pulled up and Dr. Medoff popped out, looking harried and flustered.
“Two for one, aye boys?”
In a rare moment of serendipity,
both detectives had the exact same thought at the exact same moment.
I’ve been seeing entirely too much of that guy lately.
XVII.
Malcolm was running out of options and he knew it. The cops were all over Paul’s apartment. Malcolm knew that was inevitable. Even if they hadn’t tracked him down, the body would have started to decompose soon and the smell would have brought them. Now, Malcolm had nowhere to stay and cruising around all day and night in the Impala was dangerous. If a cop stopped him for so much as failing to use his turn signal, it could be all over and Reed would be off the hook. Besides that, he was tired and tired people made mistakes. He had to stay alert to finish this. Reed had betrayed him again. This time to the police. Of course, Malcolm knew he would, but he had warned him that it was between the two of them. That anyone else who got involved would wind up just like his family. He would make Reed understand the depth of his conviction. But first he had to rest.
Malcolm drove deep into North Philadelphia, headed toward the Raymond Rosen housing projects where police fear to tread. He passed rows and rows of burned out, ill-kept, and plain old run-down homes. The worse the neighborhood got, it seemed the more people were out in the street. By the time the Impala rolled cautiously past the Raymond Rosen projects, it looked like he was in the middle of some kind of street fair. Teenaged prostitutes were everywhere, trying to raise money for the next hit of crack or heroin. Drug dealers of the same age strolled up and down the street, brazenly selling their product to their somnolent consumers. Young kids were all over the place with basketballs, making jump shots in milk crates nailed to telephone poles and playing handball against heavily graffitied brick walls. Malcolm went almost unnoticed as he cruised to a stop in an empty lot that was the community trash dump. He lay back in the Impala’s long bench seat and rested his head on the passenger door’s armrest. He began to dream about Reed before his eyes had even fully closed.
In Malcolm’s mind, Reed was the cause of his madness, the one who stole the twinkle of hope and wonder from his eyes. Not the stepfather who filled his head with horror stories about the Vietnam War, who made his pre-adolescent years basic training for an imaginary invasion he was convinced was just around the corner. The man who woke him up at five o’clock in the morning to run military drills in which he shot live rounds at his stepson and punched and kicked him mercilessly to toughen him up. In his mind, he had been a good kid before Reed, a shy, sensitive kid who read horror and sci-fi novels and daydreamed most of the day. Not the kid who, at age ten, tortured a cat in his stepdad’s basement, imagining that he was a Vietnamese soldier interrogating captured GIs. Not the kid who, at age twelve, would expose himself to the old ladies at the nursing home around the corner from the house where he grew up and who, at age thirteen, burned it to the ground, masturbating as he watched the flames engulf it, imagining the old ladies burning alive inside.
He didn’t remember setting fire to a homeless man at the train station on Tulpehocken Street, dousing him with lighter fluid as he lay passed out drunk on a bench and tossing the match just to see what it would look like when his skin melted off his bones, watching as the man writhed and cried out in agony to see how long he would scream before he died. He didn’t even remember stalking a female jogger in Wissahickon Park, dragging the frightened woman into the woods and raping her at knifepoint, telling her, “You should be honored. You’re my first.” as she struggled. He only remembered the poor, awkward, oversized black kid that everyone picked on in junior high before he got smart and started to fight back, before he learned to walk, talk, and dress like the superior human being he always believed himself to be. Malcolm was one sick puppy long before Reed, but that was not the way he saw it.
Malcolm saw Reed as the villain in his tragedy. Reed had ruined him, shattered the safe illusion of karmic balance and order the rest of the world enjoyed. Reed had shown him that life was a cruel and capricious bitch.
So how could he not flirt with death?
Now, Reed was the famous novelist and he was . . . a monster. Malcolm used to dream of being a novelist just like Reed. It seemed ridiculous to him now, like he must have been someone else entirely, the dreams of another man in another time. But once, Malcolm had wanted to be an author, a poet, a philosopher. Back then, Malcolm believed he had a lot to say to the world that it needed to hear. Now, it had no choice but to hear him. He was telling his story in blood, a story that was nearing its climax, Reed’s denouement.
For as long as he could remember, Malcolm had thought of life as something that had been done to him, inflicted upon him against his will, something to be endured like the torture his stepdad had told him about and inflicted upon him. Life was what people did before they died. His stepdad had taught him that. He had taught him about survival. And that is all living was about. Survival and domination. Renee’ and then Natasha had been the only things in his life to ever contradict that philosophy. Then their actions had quickly reinforced it. Life was cruel, capricious, and pointless and no one got out of it alive. The best anyone could hope for was to take their abusers out with them.
Malcolm thought about his mother, the only person who had never let him down and never betrayed him. He knew the cops would be putting her through hell. Especially that white GQ sonuvabitch who was on the news talking about how the cops would have Malcolm in custody by the end of the night. Malcolm knew that guy was probably the one knocking on his mother’s door with a search warrant, tearing her house apart. In all of this, that was the only thing Malcolm regretted or felt any guilt about, putting his mother through the hassle of dealing with the gang in blue.
“Don’t worry, Mom I’ll make sure that bastard pays for any pain he causes you.”
The activity in the streets became more hectic as two rival drug dealers began arguing in the street in front of Raymond Rosen. They both reached for their guns, spitting out a vituperative stream of truncated English and brutal profanity. Malcolm fell asleep to the sound of gunfire, police, and ambulance sirens and screams. He was home.
XVIII.
“Alright, what leads do we have so far?” Titus tried to sound gung-ho. They had just finished talking to the ME and watching the crime scene techs catalogue every possible scrap of evidence. The body was on its way downtown and they were on their way to Malcolm’s mother’s house. They made a quick stop to drop off Baltimore’s Mercedes at the station. Baltimore was thinking what sweet revenge it would’ve been to drive the Mercedes into G-town and then explain to his dad how crack addicts had stolen it.
“Honestly, I ain’t got shit. We know who the motherfucker is. We know where every damn member of his family lives. We have pictures of him all over the place and enough sightings to fill an entire filing cabinet. The whole city’s been chasing down leads all day and not one of them has turned into anything.” James said.
“Well, even though it looks like Reed was telling the truth about his look-alike, I still think there’s more going on that he ain’t telling us. I think if we squeezed him we might even find out where Malcolm is hiding.”
James looked at Baltimore with hard serious eyes, recognizing in him the beginnings of a potentially hazardous obsession, hazardous to their case.
“Look, Titus. That might be possible, but I doubt it. I think this is all about Malcolm. Period. Mr. Cozen just probably feels guilty for fuckin’ Malcolm over when they were kids. He told me he thinks that his betrayal might be what pushed Malcolm over the edge. He feels like maybe he brought all this down on himself and his family. Forget about him. Tell me about Malcolm. I want to know what insights your Ph.D. in psychology has given you on this type of psychotic.”
“Malcolm’s not a psychotic. He’s a sociopath, an anti-social personality type. See, the rest of us have developed altruistic emotions that help us get along in society together, emotions like sympathy, empathy, compassion. Malcolm doesn’t have these. He’s extremely paranoid, a ‘the world is out to get me’ type, but he isn’t crazy. There
are no voices in his head telling him to kill. He knows the difference between right and wrong, but he justifies doing wrong, rationalizes his acts. That’s all Reed Cozen is for him. A justification to do all the evil shit he’s probably been dreaming about doing since long before he ever met Reed. He probably feels about as much connection with the human race as a wolf feels with sheep.”
James nodded his head slowly, digesting everything Baltimore said.
“Whatever happened to that profile we got from the FBI on the Family Man?”
“I still have it, but I think we can pretty much discount it. They said he would be a white male between twenty-five and thirty-five and Malcolm is black. They said he would drive a van or a pick-up truck with a shell on it. Malcolm drives an Impala. They said he would be a reclusive, anti-social nerd with homosexual tendencies who has trouble meeting women and may even fear them. Malcolm definitely does not fear women, regardless of his tendencies, and he may be anti-social but he is not reclusive. They said he would probably live out in the suburbs and Malcolm definitely does not . . .”
“Okay, okay so they were wrong, but that profile was done before we knew all the cases were connected. If they knew about the Pine Street killings and the Chaperone killings maybe that might change the profile.”
“I’m certain it would. The Pine Street slashings would indicate a very confident person, out-going, who can easily get people to trust him because the victims were lured away from public places without anyone noticing anything suspicious, and then murdered in their homes. The repeated stabbing would indicate sexual frustration and rage, perhaps even a hatred of homosexuals, an attempt to deny those tendencies within himself. The fact that the men were all young and healthy would lead us to assume we were dealing with someone very strong and very confident in his strength. See, the men were not ambushed and rendered unconscious, as one would expect.
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