by David Levien
“What?” Behr asked.
“Prilo. Dead,” Breslau said, while Behr’s mind struggled to put the information in place. “Took a header out his hospital room window. Last visitor was a ‘hulking man’ who didn’t sign in but got Prilo’s room number from a nurse and sounds a fuck of a lot like you. Who am I going to see when I pull the hospital security tapes?” Breslau asked.
“You’re gonna see me,” Behr said, resigned.
“Motherfucker!” Breslau said through a clenched jaw. “I help and help you and you grease me up and cornhole me—”
“Nah, Bres,” Behr began.
“Did you toss this shitheel out his window?”
“Hell no.”
“You liked this guy for Crawley, or your Gibbons girl or Quinn or all of ’em, and you went in and it went bad and you sent him.”
“No,” Behr said, unnerved by how close Breslau actually was to the truth of it. “I did like him for all of it. You’re right about that. But then I didn’t, but I thought he might know something. So I went to see him, but it was blanks.”
“And now?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. But go check the tapes. They’ll have me exiting well before Prilo took his flight. I guarantee it.”
“Oh, you guarantee it? How the fuck can you guarantee that?” Breslau grabbed the front of Behr’s coat and yanked him forward. Behr felt his anger surge and thought they were headed for a fistfight. He’d scrapped with cops before and things had stayed hand-to-hand, but whenever armed men were in a fracas, the possibility of guns being drawn and shots being thrown was always there. Behr got his footing and broke Breslau’s grips, he didn’t want to strike or take him down. He didn’t want to escalate things at all, so he merely shoved Breslau back with a two-handed blast to the chest.
“Because I didn’t do it,” Behr said, as evenly as he could. “I didn’t kill him.”
All he saw coming back was molten fury in Breslau’s eyes. Behr regretted it, because despite the cop being half a prick to him at various times, he liked him and the man had been trying to help him.
“So I’ll see someone else coming into the room after you?” Breslau pressed. “Is that what you’re telling me?”
“Maybe …” Behr considered the kind of enemies a guy like Prilo could have collected over his lifetime—relatives of victims, people he’d hurt, perhaps—and whether there was a possibility that one of them came to exact payback. Then Behr considered the condition Prilo was in when he left. “But maybe not.”
“Suicide?” Breslau said, the anger seeming to boil down a bit as Breslau struggled to regain his sense of procedure. “Preliminary word from the hospital is that there were no entries after you left. You think he did himself?”
“I think he could have,” Behr said. “They’ll find a hell of a drug cocktail in his system. He was in a state of extreme distress.”
“You help put him there?” Breslau demanded.
Behr didn’t answer this. He and Breslau just stared at each other. “Gary, this guy was a murdering piece of shit. And I’m not just talking about Mary Beth Watney.”
“The one he served time for?”
“Right.”
“You got other cases against him? Gibbons maybe?”
“None that I can make, especially now, and not her,” Behr said, and saw the disappointment in Breslau’s eyes. “It may be a messy situation at the moment, but this world’s better off.”
“Who are you to fucking decide?” Breslau asked.
It was a hell of a question and Behr just gritted his teeth, unable to find words to answer. Breslau dug his feet into the concrete, ready to leave.
“Did bleach chemicals come up in the bodies?” Behr asked.
Breslau looked up. “Yeah … it was present in tissue samples from inside Crawley’s mouth, vagina, and rectum.”
“Jesus,” Behr breathed.
“Same with the Northwestway Park victim. There were even traces inside the body cavity on that one.”
The implications of that, of why the killer would need to douse the inside of the body, sickened Behr.
“Any more detail will call for an exhumation.”
“Prilo gave me that piece, you know. Told me just what to look for and where. So even though no one likes him for these murders … well, like I said.”
“Yeah, like you said … I’ve gotta go. I’ve got a fresh bag of crap over in a house on North Talbot.” Every day was a fresh bag of crap on a big-city police force. Everyone’s problems washed up onto your shoes, and nobody’s good news ever did. It was something Behr didn’t miss.
“What’s today’s?”
“A strangled eleven-year-old girl and a missing persons on the aunt she was staying with,” Breslau said, and started walking off.
“Hey, if anyone comes up on that tape going in to see Prilo after me, let me—”
“I’ll be fucking sure to,” Breslau said, and crossed to his car without another word.
Behr went inside, feeling beaten and confused, which was about the only way he could remember feeling lately. All the dead women and all the suspects and all the information tacked to his walls were swirling around his brain in a hopeless morass. He took out a bottle of Wild Turkey and got a glass of ice and considered doing some serious damage. There was no more case and no money and no tomorrow. The last thing he remembered after his first big pour was sending a text to Mistretta telling her things looked okay, that with Prilo gone she was probably safe. She invited him over but he didn’t respond. He fell asleep on the couch only to be awoken by his phone’s angry buzzing on the coffee table.
“Yeah,” Behr said. The screen on the phone said 3:40, and only the “A.M.” made him sure it wasn’t the next afternoon.
“Yo, man,” an unfamiliar voice said. “You told me to call you.”
“Who’s this?”
“Jonesy, man. You remember me?”
“I remember.”
“You told me to tell Shantae to call me if she saw the dude.”
“The dude—”
“That wrong dude from the night when Kendra went gone.”
“Shantae saw him? When?” Behr asked.
“A little while ago,” Jonesy.
“How’s that possible?” Behr said aloud.
“The fuck does that mean, bro? You told me to put out word, to call if she spotted the motherfucker. That’s what she did, now I’m calling you.”
“All right, I was half asleep. I’m up now,” Behr said, standing, his adrenaline obliterating the liquor and fatigue. “Where can I find her and what does she look like?”
63
Happy Wok near Sherman Commons was far from happy at just after 4:00 in the morning, though the all-night Chinese spot did indeed smell like a greasy skillet. Behr walked in to find two wrung-out kitchen workers sitting at a back table playing cards, and no customers besides Jonesy, who was looking like all kinds of bad news, sitting with Shantae Williams, a broad, strong-bodied African American woman in her late twenties or early thirties. She had long, twisted hair that could have been a weave, and when she gazed up at Behr it was with rheumy eyes that said she was on something.
As Behr reached the table, Jonesy blocked the other chair before he could sit, and he saw it wasn’t going to be a long or friendly chat.
“Tell him what you told me,” Jonesy commanded Shantae.
“I saw that freaky white dude,” Williams said, a cigarette rasp to her voice.
“Okay,” Behr said, “why was he freaky?”
“He just is.”
“What’s he look like?”
“Plain. Just a face. A hat. But weird, you know?”
Behr didn’t know. “Where?”
“Up on Tenth, east of Sherman, I think. I’s walking.”
“What was he doing?”
“Sitting.”
“Sitting?”
“In his car.”
“You talk to him?”
“Hell no.”
/> “License plate?”
“Nope.”
“What kind of car?”
“Blue one.”
“Color was blue. The kind?”
“Four doors. American style. Kind of nice.”
“Model, make?”
“Don’t know, I ain’t in the detective squad. I ain’t fucking five-oh.”
“When was this?”
“Couple hours ago.”
Behr gritted his teeth. Those hours were most likely very costly.
“What happened in between?” he asked.
“I had things needed doing. I forgot, then I remembered.”
Behr looked to Jonesy.
“Don’t eye-drill me,” Jonesy said. “She called me and I had to track down your number. Now you know what she knows, and I can forget all about your irritating ass, right?”
“I’m gonna miss you too,” Behr said, then turned to Shantae Williams.
“Anything else?”
“Not unless you wanna go somewhere and give it a try.”
“What?”
“Go for a roll, big boy,” she said, and half laughed. “Fitty-dollar ticket to heaven.”
“Tempting,” Behr said.
She shrugged and Jonesy piped up again.
“Pay for her shrimp-fried rice. Least you can do.”
Behr sighed and reached for his money.
“It was a long time ago, you’re sure this was the same guy you saw near Kendra Gibbons that night?”
Shantae’s eyes momentarily cleared and her jaw set.
“I’m a hundred percent sure this is the stock-same motherfucker.”
Behr had his window open, cold air slapping his face, as he drove the streets in a grid pattern searching for a kind of nice, American-style, four-door blue car piloted by a freaky white dude. It was fairly hopeless. Oncoming cars were just glaring headlights until they passed. Almost everything was closed for the night. Very little life or activity of any kind was taking place at this hour. Even if this guy was the guy and he had been out, why wouldn’t he be home in bed or just generally gone by now?
He kept up the grid though, wondering what he’d do when he’d exhausted the bordering streets and had nothing else to try. That’s when he turned onto 10th just east of Sherman and saw some motion in a strip center. Any type of action was too much at this time of night, so Behr drove toward it. He saw two cars pull out—neither one of them blue or American made. And just as he got there he saw a squat Asian man get out of an SUV and enter a business, which was open, and happened to be a massage parlor. Behr got out of his car and followed him in.
Bells on the door chimed and canned Asian spa music greeted him when he walked in, but that was the only thing soothing about the place. Two young Korean tough guys with rooster-like haircuts and bad skin leapt toward him the minute he was inside. One grabbed him by the arm with one hand, and Behr saw he held a rusty five-iron in the other. The other guy held a putter, though they weren’t looking to play eighteen holes. Behr pummeled his arm free from the first guy’s grip and shoved him, sending him toppling to the floor.
The guy with the putter raised his weapon, and Behr charged him before he could swing. They crashed into the wall as the first guy got up and rejoined the fray. Behr slammed the putter wielder into his friend and used their momentary imbalance to drop and reach for the Mag Pug on his ankle, when an aged woman behind the counter screamed out in frantic Korean. The guy with the putter lowered the club and stepped back, the one with the five-iron squared up with the club still raised while Behr stood straight and opened his hands at chest level.
“Is that him?” the squat man, in his fifties, asked of Behr.
“No,” came the answer from the older woman.
“No,” echoed another female voice from behind the older pair. Sitting on a stool was a petite Asian girl with dyed blond hair. The hair color wasn’t her distinguishing feature at the moment. Rather it was the swollen cheekbone and black eye she sported.
“We closed now,” the squat man said firmly to Behr, “you get out, come back some other time.”
“I’m not a customer,” Behr said. “What happened here?”
The old lady spoke in Korean, but the squat man seemed to ignore her.
“You not a cop,” he said. “We know the cops around here.”
“Not a cop,” Behr said. “What happened?”
Now the young tough guy with the putter spoke. “A asshole beat our cousin and we gonna crack some fucking skull.”
“I think I may be looking for the same asshole,” Behr said. “Can I talk to her?”
None of them answered for a moment, then the girl spoke in Korean and slid off the stool.
“I talk to you,” she said, and crossed to a couch in a sitting room. Behr followed.
“You might want to get some ice on your face,” Behr offered.
“I already did that,” she said in a sad voice that made Behr feel for her.
“What’s your name?”
“Jasmine,” she said. He doubted it was her real name, probably the one she worked under.
“How’d it go down, Jasmine?” Behr asked.
“Guy come in right after my shift start. I don’t see him come in, I in back. He ask for me.”
“By name?”
“He ask for blonde,” she said. “I the blonde.”
“You ever have him before?”
She shook her head. “Most white guys his age okay. Not him.”
“Then?”
“We go in back. He no want to take off clothes. He no want nothing. He say he want to hit me. He say he pay me,” Jasmine said.
Behr suddenly felt the bit in his teeth. The guy had probably spotted Jasmine in an online ad, or on the street or someplace else and followed her, thinking she was his type—which she was, albeit not a natural blonde, and that’s when Shantae Williams had seen him.
“What’d you say?”
“I say: you joking. He say: this no joke. I say: fuck no. He say: it gonna happen, I pay. I say no. He say he gonna do it.”
“How’d he expect to get out of here clean?” Behr wondered aloud.
“I don’t know. I scream, my cousins kill his ass. But he knock me out,” Jasmine said. “He a asshole. He a motherfucker.”
“Did you call the police?” Behr asked, doubting it due to the nature of their business.
“No police,” a male voice said.
That’s when Behr noticed the two tough guys and the squat man had drifted over. They weren’t menacing him now. They were just interested.
“Can you describe him?” Behr asked. “Was he plain looking, wearing a cap? What color hair?”
“He don’t got no hair.”
“No hair,” Behr repeated, feeling an excited stab in his lungs at a piece of potentially strange information. “So he was bald, or …?”
“No hair, man. None. He got this weird wig under the hat. He draw on eyebrows with a pencil.”
Behr didn’t speak for a moment, as he felt possible understanding washing around him like an insistent tide. There had been no DNA recovered on any of the scenes, and he had already found a potentially logical reason for how that could be thanks to Prilo. But no hair fibers belonging to a perpetrator had been recovered either, on any of the victims, at any of the sites, even from Quinn, on whom victims’ hair had been found. Now Behr felt he knew why.
“He wear a rug, like he have cancer or some shit, but he don’t seem sick,” Jasmine went on. Behr wondered if the guy had that medical condition that caused hair loss—he couldn’t recall the term at the moment—then one of the tough kids spoke up.
“Why you looking for him?”
He turned and considered the kid. Would it do more good for Behr to pretend he had a girlfriend or sister who had been beaten up by the guy he was looking for? Without much thought, Behr abandoned the idea of a pretext and just told him:
“I’m a private investigator tracking a missing girl. I think this guy may be kill
ing women. I’m trying to catch him.”
There was the sound of Jasmine crying out in fear at what might’ve been, then it went quiet for a beat, before a burst of a staccato Asian dialect between the men filled the room and a decision seemed to be reached.
The squat man was the one who spoke next. “You come.”
He crossed the sitting room and disappeared through a door into the back. Behr followed, and the two young guys followed him, and he wondered if he was walking into some kind of ambush. But the door led into a cramped office dominated by a desk that was completely covered in an avalanche of paperwork and a battered computer.
One of the young guys sat down and his fingers flew over the keyboard, bringing up split-screen images of several security cameras.
“These no supposed to be here. Very illegal. For safety of girls, to protect from entrapment,” the squat man said.
Or to blackmail patrons, Behr thought.
“You don’t say nothing,” the squat man cautioned. Behr nodded his assent.
The images came from half a dozen small rooms and showed a few massages, of varying states of legitimacy, in progress. Most of them had taken place earlier and had been digitally logged. It was possible one or two were happening live. There were even cameras rigged in the bathrooms, and in one an Asian woman with long black hair was in the shower copiously washing her crotch. As the kid typed, the images from one room were played back with highspeed scrubbing, and Behr recognized Jasmine entering her space, which had Chinese restaurant give-away calendars stuck all over the walls, a burning incense stick and candle, and a single pink vinyl massage table with a pillow on it.
