His pursuit was bringing him towards the corner of the building, and so Manny ducked his head behind it and kept his back against the wall. When he heard a flapping sound, he looked down and saw the sheet of paper Dave had been chasing. It was wrapped around his ankle.
As Dave’s pursuing footsteps grew closer, Manny shut his eyes and prayed.
***
Pierce was sitting out on his deck, drinking beer, his third. He had been so gung-ho to capture the men responsible for the assault on Valeria Mangieri, but after coming up with nothing new all week, he was beginning to feel as if his prey was slipping away.
He wondered if Val’s escape had sent the men into hiding. If so, it might be a good thing, because if they feared capture and incarceration enough to stop, then the streets would be that much safer, and, maybe, maybe someday their identities would come to light.
But Pierce knew that his best chance at capturing them would only occur as they hunted down another victim, the more they hunted, the greater the chance that they’d make a mistake.
Pierce shook his head. Someone had to be brutalized or killed; some other woman somewhere had to suffer so that the monsters he hunted could be brought to justice.
He reached over to a table and grabbed his laptop, to look once more through what little there was of the case. When he came upon the photo of Val, he smiled.
“Tough little cookie,” he murmured to himself, and then drained the bottle of beer.
***
Manny gave his leg a shake and the paper flew off into the night. Around the corner, Dave stood and watched as the errant sheet rode a gust of wind and traveled towards the next parking lot. Dave was so close that Manny could hear him breathing.
“Screw it!” Dave said, as he waved a dismissive hand, and then turned and walked into the building.
Manny had been holding his breath, but now he released it. He figured that he and Dave were evenly matched and that a fight could go either way, but he also knew that if they fought, and Dave won, that he might be joining Dunham inside the trunk of her car.
He peeked around the corner and saw that Dave had gone back inside. When he reached into his pocket for his car keys, he remembered. His car wasn’t parked in the back lot. His brother was coming to pick him up.
Manny started running. If Dave came out of the building he’d spot him for sure, but he didn’t have a choice.
He had to get out to the access road and flag down his brother before he pulled into the parking lot. If his brother pulled up in front of the building, there was no way that Dave wouldn’t hear the car. As far as Manny could tell, he and Dave were the only ones in the complex. It was nine o’clock on a Friday night and everyone else had left hours ago.
Manny reached the road and turned back to see if Dave had emerged from the building. He was nowhere in sight. Feeling relieved, Manny pulled out his phone and tried calling his brother.
“Hello?”
“Max, it’s Manny, where are you?”
“I’m coming, I’m coming, I’m entering the complex now.”
Manny looked ahead and saw no headlights, even though he could see out to the main road. He heard a noise behind him, and turned to see a car approaching from the other side of the complex.
“Max, is that you? Did you enter through the east gate?”
“Yeah, some dumb trucker flipped his trailer on the exit ramp and I had to take the next one, now stop nagging, I’ll be right there.”
Manny heard the call end. His brother had hung up on him.
He tried calling him back, but the phone kept ringing until the voicemail answered. His brother was ignoring him.
“Son of a...”
Manny ran towards the car as it came closer, as he passed the driveway, he looked into the parking lot and saw no sign of Dave.
He was about a hundred feet from the car when his brother drifted left, to cut across the empty parking spaces and enter his company’s lot.
“No!” Manny shouted. He opened his phone to call again, but decided against it, and instead, he activated the flashlight app on his phone and began waving it back and forth like a beacon.
Just as the car was about to turn the corner into the company lot, it slowed, and a moment later, it turned right and headed for Manny. He walked back past the driveway while waving his brother to keep driving, to get out of sight. When the car finally drove clear of the parking lot, Manny took one last look back for Dave, and luckily, he still saw nothing.
As he settled into the passenger seat, his brother pointed at his phone.
“I wouldn’t have spotted you if not for that; that thing comes in handy, eh?”
Manny smiled.
“You have no idea.”
CHAPTER 10
Dave Owens sat at the desk in his former manager’s office as he tried to decide what to do. The manager was a former manager because Dave had just strangled her to death.
He looked around and saw that Dunham’s computer was still on; the screen revealed that she had been looking at productivity reports. There was coffee on her desk and Dave touched the side of the cup and found that it was still warm. If someone else had walked into the office, they might have thought that she had just stepped out for a moment.
Dave powered down the computer, grabbed the coffee cup, and headed towards the break room. Once there, he dumped the coffee down the drain and washed the cup clean. When he returned to the office, he placed the cup back on the desk while handling it with a paper towel so that he didn’t leave his prints on it.
He took one last look around. Dunham’s laptop bag was sitting by the leg of a chair. He grabbed the bag, shut off the lights, then closed and locked the door. Whenever he touched anything, he used the tail of his shirt like a glove to do so.
He stared at the alarm pad by the front door. Before Dunham’s predecessor retired due to health reasons, and while Dave was still being groomed for the position, he was given the alarm code by the former manager and shown how to set it. That had been on his first visit to the building, before the cubicles had arrived and the office looked like a carpeted football field.
The former manager died just a month after he retired, and he was the only one who knew that Dave had been given the code.
Dave stared at the keypad, hoping that nothing had changed regarding the company’s security measures.
Security!
He punched the air with his fist, while cursing his stupidity, he had nearly forgotten.
He headed for the back of the building. When he reached the door marked, Electrical Room, he tried the knob and found the door locked. The door was made of metal and the lock was a good one. He had seen the inside of the small room only once, but remembered that it had no windows.
He was running to the receiving department to look for something heavy that he could use as a battering ram, when he remembered that he had Dunham’s keys in his pocket.
The third key unlocked the door and Dave yelped for joy, afterwards, he entered the room to retrieve what he so desperately needed.
A month ago, someone, most likely kids, had spray painted a mural on one side of the building. The security cameras inside the complex caught nothing, because much to the dismay of Dave’s employer, there were no cameras. Apparently, each tenant was responsible for supplying their own, if they chose to do so. Dave’s company did.
Cameras had recently been set-up on the corners of the building and Dave even remembered seeing a few installed around the hallways. He’d seen a picture on a brochure of the digital recorder that would be used to sync and record from all the different cameras and angles.
He remembered thinking that the thing reminded him of his old VCR, only it was a hundred times more sophisticated, and it was to be housed inside the Electrical Room.
He found the rectangular box sitting on a metal shelf that had been screwed into the wall. When he followed the cord and bent down to unplug it, he found that he couldn’t, because there was no place to plug it. Wh
ere an outlet should have been, there sat only a hole cut into the wallboard. Apparently, when the complex was built, no one had ever put an outlet inside the Electrical Room.
Dave laughed from a mixture of relief and irony. He then relocked the door and headed back to the keypad. He shut off the lights, set the alarm, and locked the front door by using Dunham’s keys.
He then stood there waiting to see if an alarm would sound, but there was nothing.
He nodded to himself. Things were going good; he was going to make it out of this.
Dave climbed behind the wheel of Dunham’s car. He planned to dump her body, along with her belongings where he and Jack had disposed of all the others, and then drive back, leave her car sitting in the lot with the door wide open, and then pray that the cops would conclude that Dunham was abducted.
Although, who in their right mind would have ever wanted the mean ugly bitch, Dave couldn’t fathom.
He started the engine while wrinkling his nose at the strong odor of perfume in the car, and the dashboard glowed to life. Dave saw the time on the digital clock, 9: 21.
He had just placed his hand on the gear shifter when he remembered, and it made him groan.
The maintenance people.
His company had contracted with a janitorial service that came in at night to clean the building and empty the trash. Dave had seen them twice this week, and it was the two times that he had worked until ten. The maintenance people came in at ten.
Dave pounded on the dash, knowing that there wasn’t enough time to dispose of Dunham and come back for his own car. He could move his car somewhere else inside the complex and then come back for it, but if a cop on patrol spotted it, he might run the tags, and there would be a record.
Dave sighed. He needed help, and he needed it now.
***
Jack Murphy stared down into the trunk, at Dunham’s body.
“Jesus, do you know how much heat this will bring on us?”
“I know, but I couldn’t help it. Hell, you’d have strangled her too if you’d known her.”
They were on the outskirts of the city’s western side. Jack had met Dave at his job and went right to work on hitching Dave’s car to his van, by using the tow bar he kept in the back. As Dave followed behind in Dunham’s car, Jack towed Dave’s car to the parking lot of a hotel six blocks away, where he unhitched it from the van at the back of the lot.
They then drove together to the parking lot of an old factory where they had both worked as teenagers and that’s when Jack got his first look at Karen Dunham’s corpse.
“What about prints?” Jack said.
“I touched the crap in her purse, but I wiped it all while I was waiting for you. Now all I have to do is wipe down the car.”
“Are you certain that you didn’t forget anything?”
Dave thought for a second, but then answered, “Yeah, I took care of everything.”
“This is still bad, very bad. No matter how you slice it, you’re still the last person to see her alive.”
“I know, but I’ll have a witness who can swear that he saw Dunham alive when I left.”
“Who’s that?” Jack said, and Dave just stared at him.
“Oh fuck! Now I’m getting dragged into this too?”
“It has to go that way; don’t you see? They’ll know by my phone records that I called you. We’ll both just have to swear that she was alive when we left.”
“What about the car?”
“I was going to leave it at work, but that was before I remembered that the cleaning crew was coming, now, I guess we just dump it, and her, by the abandoned tracks behind the building here, they’ll think it was a bungled carjacking.”
“You mean you hope they’ll think that. Goddamn it, Dave, you may have really fucked us up here.”
“I’m sorry. It was a moment of passion thing; you know? After losing my mom, then that girl getting away from us the other night, all the shit going on at work, I... I snapped. I just snapped.”
Jack sighed.
“All right, we’ll deal with it, but tell me, will anybody miss her?”
“I don’t know, maybe her parents, either way, the cops won’t do anything for a few days, and that gives us time to think.”
Jack slammed the trunk shut.
“Let’s do this.”
***
The next morning, Saturday morning, Manny was parked at a diner not far from the job.
He sat there for ten minutes going over in his mind all the things he wanted to say. What he planned to do was dangerous, but he figured the risk was worth it. If everything worked out right, he would have his life back.
He punched a number into the disposable cell phone he paid cash for, and listened as the phone rang. When a woman answered, it surprised him so much that he nearly hung up.
“Hello?”
“Yes... ah hi, can I speak with Dave, please?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, he’s still asleep, can I take a message? This is his wife.”
“No, no message, but it’s urgent that I speak with him. Could you please wake him?”
“Hmm, is it truly important? He had a really rough week at work.”
Not as bad a week as Dunham, Manny thought.
“Yes ma’am, I’m sorry, it’s that important. He’ll thank you for it.”
“All right then, who should I say is calling?”
Manny had planned for this question, just in case someone else answered the phone.
“Oh, he doesn’t know me by name; just tell him that I found the piece of paper that got away from him in the parking lot last night. He’ll know what I mean.”
“Okay, but I hope that this is as important as you say it is. Hold on.”
Manny heard shuffling sounds that were followed by soft thumps. She was walking up the stairs while carrying the phone. Moments later, he heard muffled voices, this was followed by Dave saying, “Thanks Hon, I’ll be down in a little while.”
A door closed, and then Dave came on the phone.
“...Who is this?”
“Is anyone else listening?”
“No, now who is this?”
“Come to the Pannycake Diner on route 215. Once you get there, I’ll find you.”
“Manny?” Dave said.
Manny covered the phone and cursed. He’d spent an hour last night with a tape recorder, working on a phony voice, and Dave figured out who he was in ten seconds.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Shit man, you were there? Where the fuck were you hiding?”
“Forget that, just come to the diner.”
There was a long pause, and Manny wondered what Dave was thinking.
“Listen, Manny, dude I don’t have much money. If it’s blackmail you’re thinking of—”
“Just come to the diner, Dave. We need to talk.”
More silence, but then, “Give me twenty minutes.”
***
Manny didn’t spot Dave until he sat across from him at the table, and it was no wonder. Dave was wearing a pair of mirrored sunglasses with a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes.
“Good morning,” Manny said.
Dave didn’t say a word. He just passed a folded slip of paper across the table. When Manny opened it, he saw three words.
ARE YOU WIRED?
A waiter came then. Manny already had a cup of coffee in front of him, and Dave pointed at it, indicating that he would have the same. Once the waiter left, Manny spoke.
“I’m not wired and I can prove it, but let’s wait until after the waiter brings your coffee.
They didn’t have to wait long, as the young man returned in seconds.
“So guys, what’ll you have to eat?”
“Nothing,” Manny said.
“Oh, okay, just let me know if you change your minds.”
“Right,” Manny said. He watched the waiter walk off and then took out his phone. “I need to show you something. Once you see it, you’ll know I’m not we
aring a wire.”
He held up the phone and the video he had taken the previous night began playing. When he saw Dave’s shoulders slump in defeat, he knew he had him.
“If I had shown that to the cops they wouldn’t send me here with a wire, they’d have dragged you out of your house in cuffs.”
“All right, what is it you want?”
Manny smiled.
“Dave, it’s me, Manny. We’re buds, dude. I’m not looking to jack you up. Hell, I hated Dunham too; I just would never have had the balls to do what you did.”
“How many copies are there of that video?”
“Besides the one on the phone? There’s only one copy on a USB stick, hand to God, and if you help me, I’ll give you the stick and erase the video.”
“What is it you want me to help you do?”
“My wife, Dave, I want you to kill my wife.”
CHAPTER 11
Pierce was also at a diner, but it was the one nearest his house. At home, he had a kitchen that would be a chef’s dream, and had just finished changing all of the cabinet hardware with the vintage pieces he had bought in Vermont.
The cabinets were mostly empty, as too, were the refrigerator and freezers. Pierce didn’t know how to cook and had no desire to learn, it was one of the reasons he rarely ate.
However, on this Saturday morning he found himself unusually hungry and had just devoured a stack of pancakes, with ham, toast, and scrambled eggs. The coffee he was sipping was his third. The first cup had been purchased at a convenience store near Amy Lowe’s house at 6:17 a.m.
He had been watching her again.
After stopping for coffee, Pierce had gone to his stalking post and taken out his binoculars. To his surprise, Amy was already up and awake. She was also angry.
He watched for twenty minutes as she and Lowe went back and forth about something, until they either left the kitchen or sat down somewhere that he couldn’t see them.
Ten minutes later, he saw Amy walk over to the sink. When Lowe came up behind her and put his hands on her shoulders, Amy shrugged them off. Lowe then hung his head and walked out of view. It seemed the lovebirds were having problems.
Not long after that, the lights went out in the kitchen. Pierce had left there with a smile on his face and a growing hunger in his belly.
Monsters (A Detective Pierce Novel Book 1) Page 5
