Deranged

by Jacob Stone

  “She wasn’t killed here. Forensics already determined that. The sonofabitch dumped her out here naked.”

  “Something sexual?” Morris asked Goodman.

  “Doubtful,” the FBI profiler said. “Most likely he got his DNA on her clothing.”

  “When Roger examines her, he’ll be able to tell us whether she was sexually violated,” Walsh said.

  Morris heard a couple of horn beeps, and looked up to see Roger Smichen pulling up in his new Prius. A minute later the ME gave them a wave as he jogged past them to get to the body.

  “SCK broke her nose,” Walsh continued. “There are other bruises, and abrasions that look like she was dragged over cement. Roger should be able to tell us more, such as any defensive wounds. Unfortunately, if she did struggle with SCK, forensics wasn’t able to find any of his skin under her fingernails.” She showed an angry, strained smile, and added, “A coyote got to the body and whatever SCK had clawed out from her skull wasn’t found at the scene. The animal did other damage to her. A cyclist spotted the coyote dragging her over to that tree, and chased it away.”

  Morris couldn’t help grimacing thinking about that. “Where’s the cyclist now?” he asked.

  “You know Charlie Dunlop out of West Hollywood, right? He interviewed the guy and told him he could go.”

  “That’s too bad,” Morris said. “I would’ve liked to have talked to him before he had a chance to regroup.” Morris then asked Goodman, “Any chance SCK could’ve been this cyclist? Maybe trying to get more of a thrill from this kill by being the one to call us in on it?”

  “No, that’s not why SCK’s doing this. He doesn’t care about credit for his murders, or playing mind games with the police. These killings are very personal to him, and performing the act is all that matters to him.”

  “Unless he’s changing his tactics,” Morris said. “Like taking off this woman’s clothing.”

  “I’m sure he did that out of necessity,” Goodman said.

  “This cyclist isn’t SCK,” Walsh argued stubbornly. “I got his particulars from Dunlop. Evan Goldberg. Twenty-four. Average height, skinny, full head of hair, and in not a single way matches the description you got from your Santa Monica parking lot witness. Dunlop did the right thing. Goldberg had nothing else to tell us.”

  “Okay, I’m not going to argue otherwise,” Morris said, although he still planned to talk to Goldberg in person. “Any traffic cameras on Mulholland?”

  Walsh shook her head. “I already called up the precinct about that. None.”

  “That’s a damn shame.”

  “If he was speeding, yeah.”

  Goodman cleared his throat to get Morris’s attention. “I had an interesting conversation with an FBI colleague, Julie Crasmore, out of New York. She told me about the lead your people are trying to track down, and unless I completely missed with my profile, I can’t think of any situation which would’ve had SCK cutting off that man’s head in Queens. Not unless something very unexpected happened.”

  “That’s what I’m betting on,” Morris said. “Something very unexpected happening that night that made SCK need to hide that he was involved in Black’s murder by getting rid of the head. The timing of it is suspicious. Two brutal crimes happening the night SCK was expected to strike next, and you have both victims matching his victim profiles, followed by SCK disappearing.”

  Goodman stroked his chin as he considered what Morris had said. “I guess it’s possible,” he agreed. “At least it’s not impossible.”

  “My gut’s telling me finding Sheila Jones gives us our best chance of finding SCK. I need to talk to Roger. Either of you willing to watch Parker?”

  Walsh volunteered, and Morris handed her Parker’s leash. Fifteen feet from where Smichen and a group of the forensics team were gathered, Morris saw a marker in the tall grass showing where the skull fragments were left. A thin trail of blood could also be seen from that spot leading up to where the body was eventually dragged. From the pictures he’d seen of Brenda Maguire and the description he’d been given, she weighed around a hundred and thirty-five pounds, and he was surprised that a coyote would’ve been able to move her.

  “Anything you can tell me that I don’t already know?” Morris asked as he approached the ME.

  Smichen shrugged. “Other than that the coyote made a mess of the crime scene? How about that she’s been dead for at least four hours? Does that help?”

  Morris glanced at his watch. “She was abducted around one last night, so SCK killed her within two hours of taking her, which is about what I would’ve expected. Any defensive wounds?”

  “Some of her nails are splintered. Abrasions on her hands and fingers look like she was dragged over a cement surface. If you find the location, we might find forensic evidence there if he didn’t scrub the area carefully enough.”

  “Was she sexually assaulted?”

  Smichen shrugged again. “No obvious signs, but I won’t be able to tell you for sure until I complete my examination, which will be done in my lab. I’ll call you as soon as I have anything.”

  Morris saw that Greg Malevich had arrived at the scene and was talking with Walsh. He left Smichen so that he could divvy up among Walsh, Malevich, and himself the restaurant customers they needed to check out from the list that the owner, Conway, had made from his credit-card receipts over the last two nights.

  Chapter Fifty-four

  “What are you doing here?” Claudia Franzetti asked Natalie after the two of them ran into each other in the office building’s lobby. “Friday’s supposed to be your day off.”

  Natalie smiled guiltily. “I thought I’d catch up on some paperwork.”

  Claudia wagged a finger at her. “That’s not it. I’ve been watching TV. You’re worried about Morris. This is what you do every time you’re worried about him. You hide out here.”

  Natalie laughed. “You should be a detective yourself.”

  The elevator arrived, and both women got in it. Their offices were both on the seventh floor. As the elevator got underway, Claudia asked, “This creep your husband is looking for, is he going to find him?”

  “Morris always finds them.”

  “Jesus, I hope so. What this creep is doing to these poor people gives me the shivers.” Claudia smacked her forehead. “I almost forgot, tomorrow’s your birthday.” She smiled impishly. “What’s it going to be, number thirty?”

  “Ha! You’re sounding like Morris.”

  “Lucky man, your husband.”

  “Although he claims I look thirty-five.”

  “He needs his eyes examined.”

  The elevator arrived on their floor and the door opened. As the women separated to their respective offices, Claudia called out, inviting Natalie to lunch later. “My treat,” Claudia said with a big grin, “the least I could do given that tomorrow is your big 3-0.”

  “Deal,” Natalie agreed, smiling, but by the time she unlocked her office door and walked inside, her smile had faded. Claudia was right. She was worried about Morris. It was bad enough hunting the last serial killer, that twisted monster Vincent Rubosto, almost killed Morris, but last night she had to find out he was almost shot to death in a Beverly Hills jewelry store. Of course, she knew logically that that had nothing to do with his investigation, but still, she had every right to be upset about it. And of course, when Morris told her about it, he downplayed the event, making it sound as if he were never in any danger. It wasn’t until she saw an in-depth report about it on the news that she realized how deadly the situation had become, with the store owner and others telling the reporter that the robbers were about to murder everyone in the store before Morris took charge. And then after that he had to run out of the house at two in the morning after not sleeping the night before. Even though he was perhaps the toughest and most capable man she’d ever met, she had every right to be worried!

  Her phone rang almost the second she sat behind her desk. When she answered it, a man’s voice asked if she
were Natalie Brick.

  “Yes, speaking,” she said, her guard up, thinking this might be a reporter.

  “Thank heavens I got you,” the man said. “Erica Pines has been telling me you’re the absolute best therapist in LA, and that’s what I need. If you could squeeze me in, I’d be eternally grateful. Insurance isn’t an issue, I’ve got money.”

  Natalie hesitated. She wasn’t taking on new clients, but seeing someone that day would help take her mind off worrying about her husband, and Erica was one of her dearest clients.

  “How long have you known Erica?” she asked.

  “Years. Great gal. The absolute best.”

  “What would you like to see me about?”

  “Oh, jeeze, my marriage. Things have gone completely nuts with my wife. I am so desperate to talk to someone about it. If you can squeeze me in, I’ll be there at the drop of a hat.”

  The desperation in the man’s voice helped Natalie make up her mind. “Sure. How about two o’clock today?”

  “Oh, wow, thank you. That’d be swell. I’ll be there.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Howard Donner.”

  Chapter Fifty-five

  “This Sheila Jones has been like a ghost since she left New York,” Bogle told Morris over the phone. “Not a trace of her.”

  “What about tax returns?”

  “She never filed any. IRS has nothing about her in their system.”

  “That’s odd,” Morris said after chewing and swallowing a mouthful of his chicken salad sandwich. At that moment, he was sitting in a booth at a downtown diner that allowed him to bring Parker along, and the bull terrier was trying to guilt him into giving up some of his sandwich, acting as if he hadn’t just gobbled down an order of meatloaf.

  “Tell me about it. Whatever credit cards she had expired with her New York address as her last known address. FBI’s helping us with the banks, but so far no luck, and they haven’t been able to get as much as a whiff of her. No forwarding address when she left New York, and she didn’t tell any of her neighbors where she was moving. From what I can tell, nobody in the building knew her. I tried getting a look at her apartment application, but they tossed it years ago. I did get a Key West address for the apartment manager who took her application, but haven’t been able to get a phone number for him. We might have to have a face to face with him. Okay if Polk flies down there?”

  “Sure. If nothing else, it gets Polk out of your hair.”

  “That it does. One of the nurses at the hospital where she was sent after her attack thinks she was married, but she wasn’t able to tell me more than that. New York hasn’t computerized their marriage licenses, and it’s a shot in the dark, but Lemmon’s been at City Hall since they opened this morning going through them one by one. If she’s married and we can get the husband’s name, maybe he’ll be easier to track down. But other than that, I’m out of ideas.”

  “What about her hospital records? Were they sent anywhere?”

  “No such luck. She carried them out with her when she was discharged.”

  “It sounds like she went out of her way to make sure no one could find her after she left New York,” Morris said. “Maybe she knew her attacker and didn’t want him coming after her again.”

  “Maybe it’s something like that,” Bogle said, sounding unconvinced.

  “Keep digging,” Morris encouraged.

  “Yeah, that’s what I love doing. Digging a hole that goes nowhere. How about on your end? What have you been up to?”

  Morris broke down and tossed Parker the rest of his sandwich. The dog was a champion moocher. He had to just accept that. With about the same enthusiasm that he’d heard from Bogle, he said, “First thing this morning I saw SCK’s latest handiwork up close. Since then I’ve been chasing after leads that are going to the same place as that hole you’ve been digging.”

  Chapter Fifty-six

  “This is a nice office,” Henry said, nodding approvingly. “Really pleasant. And this easy chair, so comfy. I’d like to thank you again for squeezing me in. Very nice of you.”

  “Happy to be able to do so, Howard.” Natalie sat in an identical easy chair arranged at a forty-five-degree angle to her client’s. Earlier, she’d worn jeans, polo shirt, and sneakers to her office, but after lunch with Claudia she swung by her house so that she could put on a blouse, skirt, and shoes, and be in a professional attire for seeing a client. “Let’s discuss your issues with your marriage.”

  “I need to fill you in about my history so this makes sense.” Henry took a sip of the chamomile tea Natalie had made for him when he first arrived, and then held the cup so that it warmed both his hands. “I like this,” he said. “I never had chamomile tea before. Heck, I don’t think I ever had any tea other than what they serve at Chinese restaurants. But I’m procrastinating, which doesn’t make much sense since my history is staring you right in the face. It’s no secret that I’m an ugly guy, and I was just as ugly a kid.”

  Henry smiled inwardly as he waited for her to argue with him about that, but she didn’t, and he appreciated it. He guessed most therapists would’ve tried convincing him that beauty and ugliness were subjective and that inner beauty was what really mattered, and he would’ve just found that condescending as well as a lie. This one, though, just looked at him in a caring and empathetic way that seemed sincere, and waited for him to continue, and he liked that.

  “It might surprise you to know that my parents weren’t ugly,” he said. “My pop was sort of doughy and lumpy like me, but he was also this strapping tall man. Big, wide shoulders, someone who looked like a brawler. He might’ve been one in his younger days, I don’t know, I only knew him as a gentle and decent man, a guy who worked as an assistant dispatcher for the New York subway system. If you made a life-sized clay model of him, and squashed it down about ten inches, you get me, but with him, he looked like he could’ve been a movie star. My ma was a dainty thing. Petite and slender, like you. Different than you in that she was fair skinned and a redhead, and not as beautiful as you, but still very pretty. With them as my parents, somehow I ended up like this.”

  “You used weren’t to describe them. Are they still around?”

  “No. My ma died of cancer when I was twenty-two, and my pop, well, even though he wasn’t even fifty and I always thought of him as being as strong as an ox, he dropped dead of an aneurysm only a month after she was buried. I guess he didn’t want to live without her, and I can’t blame him for that.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Thanks, I appreciate it. They were good people, both of them. But I brought them up more so you could understand my background. As a little kid, you don’t think of yourself as ugly, even when all the other kids are always teasing you about it. You still think that someday you’re going to grow up and be at least okay looking, at least enough so that a nice woman falls in love with you, especially when you got parents as good-looking as mine. The old ugly duckling growing into a swan story. But with me that never happened. As I grew older, I only got uglier, and it didn’t take me long to learn that women found me physically repugnant.”

  Henry took another sip of his tea, more to see if she’d try arguing with him about the last thing he had said. Maybe he would’ve preferred an argument this time, but she wasn’t about to demean herself by lying to him about something so obvious. He could understand that, but still, he breathed in deeply and let out a hurt sigh before continuing.

  “After a while I became okay with that, and accepted that I would live my life alone. About six years ago I let my best friend convince me to lose weight, get a better haircut, yada yada. This was back when I lived in New York, and I ended up dropping about seventy pounds, all of which I’ve since put back on. I also bought new clothes, saw a hair stylist, and used a tanning salon. After all that, I went on a few blind dates, and each of these women when they met me looked as if I was pulling some sort of cruel joke on them. So on the very night that I was about to give u
p for good and accept what fate had dealt me, I met my future wife. The most gorgeous woman I ever could’ve imagined. My best friend Joe who pushed me into doing all this used to tell me there’s someone for everyone, and I used to think he was full of it until I met Sheila.”

  Henry put his tea cup down on the table next to his chair and held his hands out in a what-are-you-going-to-do kind of gesture. “If I had never met Sheila, I’d be okay living out the rest of my life alone, but I can’t go back to that now. It’s not just the loneliness part of it, but that she’s the one and only person in this world who was meant to be with me, and somehow I found her. I can’t lose her now. I can’t.”

  “You’re afraid she’s going to leave you?”

  Henry’s expression turned dour. “Yeah, but not the way you think. She can’t walk out on me. After we were together only four months she had an accident that left her a cripple, not that I’m holding her hostage or anything. But I’m afraid she might die if I don’t do the things she demands of me. It’s more than I’m afraid. She threatens to die if I don’t do these things, and I believe her. And her demands are so unreasonable, but what choice do I have? Whew! I’ve been keeping all that bottled up. It feels better than I would’ve thought to let it out.”

  Natalie tensed, her voice stilted as she asked how he knew Erica Pines.

  “I don’t know her,” he said. “That was a white lie on my part. She left you a Yelp review. A lot of your clients have. They seem to really love you, and I can understand why. You’re good at what you do.”

  “Leave my office immediately!”

  Henry made a face at that. “Or what? You’ll scream? I don’t think so, especially not after you see a photo I took a couple of hours ago.”