Sons of a Brutality

by Daniel Jeudy

  “The serial killer part looks to be in the bag,” Coniglio asserted.

  “Yeah, sure seems so.”

  “That didn’t take very long.”

  “Not long at all.”

  “Did the perp call it in again?”

  Addison wiped away a thin film of perspiration from his brow, the sweet aroma of chaparral replaced by the harsh tones of stale piss and human shit. “No one’s said anything to me at this stage.”

  “You gonna stick around?”

  “Like I got a choice.”

  “I’ll get her moved once the photographer is finished, then I’ll take a closer look at the body and see what it tells us. In the meantime, if you’ve got anything else you want to ask me, you know the drill.” Coniglio looked up, smiling, her eyes sparkling in the light.

  “I need to locate my partner.”

  “The young ones, huh?”

  Addison looked across at two cops standing on the other side of the tape who flashed in blue and amber with the lights on their cruiser. “He’s thirty-one, so the justification of youth doesn’t stand. I guess he can still act like one, though,” he replied.

  “Oh, come on, Mowbray. What were you getting up to at thirty-one?”

  Addison considered the question but decided to disregard it. He watched Coniglio’s assistant again and saw how the kid’s ambiguity remained; it seemed his approach was to just stay out of everyone’s way. Addison took a knee and pointed toward the end of the victim’s arm. “Do I have to ask what you think he cut them off with?”

  “Almost certainly a butcher’s bone saw. The wound is fairly straight, and the skin around the surface of the arm indicates a sawing motion.”

  The rumble of a V8 engine rolled over the crest of the hill behind them. Addison watched as his partner’s Chevrolet Silverado pulled in beside his F100.

  “Mister thirtysomething has finally decided to grace us with his misunderstood presence,” he griped while straightening to shake the dust from his trousers.

  “Play nice, Mowbray.”

  Addison raised a thumb in the air as he made his way back to the parking lot, where the two uniforms stood by, disinterested, passing the time in conversation and cigarettes. He ducked beneath the tape and ambled up the moderate slope on tired legs, moving in behind the coroner’s van to remove the hip flask from the pocket of his blue linen coat.

  He unscrewed the cap like a hooch hound before taking a healthy swig of whiskey. Addison quickly returned the flask to its place of concealment and rounded the corner, where he saw Jed climbing out of his truck.

  “Hey, kid,” Addison said irritably. “Nice of you to show up.”

  A sheepish grin came over his partner’s face while he watched Addison trudge over to his Ford in search of a cigarette.

  Two

  The sound of Katherine’s screeching reverberated inside Edward’s mind like a withering echo as he placed her hands inside a snap-lock sandwich bag. He’d been trying to recall the touch of Linda’s lips, but his memories diffused like smoke in the breeze, so instead he thought back to the way she looked when they first encountered one another.

  Her dress had been patterned with miniature lavender roses, while her sandals had displayed her perfect toenails sparkling in green. He had loved the way her blond hair underscored the color in her eyes and how her breath smelled like an infusion of sandalwood and raspberry. It was difficult to comprehend that six years had passed by since he’d run a blade across her throat at the Adelanto Compound. “We’ll be together again before long,” he whispered, looking down at the bloodied goat’s head pentagram on the floor.

  Dark purple veins had begun to branch along the back of Katherine’s hands, which caused Edward to smile as blinking candles continued burning around the room. The cold blood inside the brass canister shimmered like liquid rubies; its fragrance resembled freshly poured iron, and Edward chuckled while he considered its taste.

  Katherine’s eyes were filled with horror when she released a final breath, her face frozen into a soundless scream as her tongue dangled out of the side of her mouth. When he carved away her wrists with a bone saw, his passion burned like a fever. For now, the flames had subsided. Edward’s throat felt dry and abrasive as though he’d spent the evening feasting on sandpaper. He raised the canister to his lips and supped the blood, grinning red as it soothed his gullet on the way down into his stomach.

  The smell of Katherine’s fatality saturated the ether. He could sense the gray entity he’d unintentionally conjured up during the final stages of his ritual. Did the demon represent Linda’s consciousness? Edward kept his gaze directed away from the baleful figure smeared in congealed plasma, not wanting to meet the awful contest he felt coming from its existence. To do so might result in his brain melting like jelly on a pile of hot embers, so he concentrated on what he intended to do with the girl still caged in the dark.

  Griffith Park was situated on the eastern point of the Santa Monica Mountains and consisted of four thousand acres of parkland. The ideal site to unveil his corpses without the likelihood of having to encounter waves of people. He provided the LAPD with the location of the body once he was back on the freeway to ensure Katherine was put on ice, just as he’d done with Emma Paul four days earlier.

  After all, these women were his offering to Baal to gain assistance in luring Linda’s spirit home. It didn’t feel right to leave them inside a dumpster or conceal them out in the desert like most of the trash he’d butchered over the years. Nevertheless, his charity toward their remains was entwined with a crooked purpose. Everything he staged was soaked in conceit, but hey, that was just the Californian posture.

  Edward wasn’t impeded by conventionality. His actions were always determined by what layer of himself he chose to feed. Modern society was hinged on the middle classes remaining enslaved within its system of deception. Most citizens existed like fish in a bowl, content with acquiring their ridiculous values from adulterated sermons on morality. Even the revolutionaries had become insignificant as they recited existentialist philosophies without having any understanding of what it was they needed to resist.

  America’s youth were duped into spending money they didn’t have by corporate dictators who peddled their wares into the subconscious. Then there were the colleges that absorbed updated versions of yesterday’s knowledge and labeled it an education. It was all such sheer fucking mindlessness. Edward pursued his immoral practices whereby he answered to no one, and as such, he was free to do anything his black heart desired.

  He raised himself from the vintage leather couch and walked across the living room, where he studied his reflection in one of the many mirrors mounted inside. His smoothly shaved skin appeared incandescent as his eyes gleamed like two black pebbles. Every muscle on his naked body was sinewy and lean, and the razor-sharp features of his elongated face gave an impression they had been etched from granite. Katherine’s blood had colored his teeth a soft shade of cherry, and his impeccably curved scalp was akin to polished glass.

  Edward’s house remained under a constant shadow. The boarded windows encouraged flickering candlelight to sway among the photographs of mutilated corpses on the walls, performing a funeral waltz with the dead and rotting. His occultist literature collection was stacked on the floor like a twisted little shrine—providing another doorway to Satan.

  He wanted the bodies to spawn intrigue as each new corpse produced more energy than the one before. Exposing them in the hills added to their mystique and engendered the kind of extravagance he required. Every component needed prudent consideration if he were going to resurrect the only person who’d ever come close to fulfilling him.

  Linda represented a promise of always from the moment they first met. In the end, they would get to spend an eternity among the flames, but for now, the infernos could wait. After all, forever was a long time in which to be burning. Her face was a sun in the corridors of his memory as the demon began to slowly fade away, and he was determined to b
ring as much of her back as was possible.

  Three

  Addison gazed aimlessly at the panoramic picture of Dallas hanging on his bedroom wall. He felt exhausted, yet sleep remained out of reach—as if its location were hidden somewhere on a map he didn’t know how to read. His insomnia began soon after his father’s homicide, and the condition had only worsened over time.

  Every detail from that tragic night continued to haunt him. The final words his father spoke when walking out the front door, not to mention the Godawful sounds he heard coming from his devastated mother as she shrieked her soul away the next morning. Addison recognized the permanence riding upon the crest of her cries the moment they’d awoken him. Carter Mowbray was shot twice by a drunk he’d pulled over for a busted taillight, and he died alone in a ditch by the side of the road.

  The sudden heartbreak shepherded a quietness into his life he’d been entirely unprepared for. A manifestation of silence so deafening and final there was no way to escape its vacuum. Losing his father at such a young age caused a chasm of disparity to develop within Addison’s mind as time leached the memories he tried holding onto. Nowadays, he would often find himself questioning whether any of it was real because the only thing he had to depend on were the faded photos inside his mother’s albums.

  Addison checked his clock radio while he straightened the tightness behind his knees, thinking how it sucked to be aging. He snatched a bottle of Irish whiskey off the floor, unscrewed the top, and drank, appreciating the trail of warmth as the liquor flowed down inside his belly.

  It was after five am by the time he finished writing up the report for Griffith Park. The first fingers of dawn had started peeling away the darkness when he pulled into his driveway. Addison had gone straight to bed after walking through the front door. He’d considered whether there might be a secret meaning to life while he lay there on his back and how a man’s days could start to feel a lot like treading water.

  When he took away all the hours spent at work, what was left? If a person was lucky, they might get to view their world through a pair of rose-colored glasses for a period, pretending everything was dandy. Then something unanticipated crept in a back window to burst their bubble of contentment, shoving them toward a place of irrelevance alongside everybody else, entirely demoralized while imploring God for an outpouring of purpose to justify the point of their existence.

  Addison had long given up on self-actualization ever landing on his doorstep, and he sure as hell didn’t have many expectations of finding some deeper sense of fulfillment. He believed the world was broken all right, and destiny would eventually take most people down a path of disappointment and straight into the bitter embrace of sorrow.

  He’d also reflected on the occultist symbol the perpetrator was branding onto the victims and considered how the burns might influence the investigation. At first glance, the inverted cross might appear to be nothing more than a swipe at Christian morality, but Addison understood the unprincipled darkness behind the satanic doctrine. He’d seen more than enough wickedness in his time and could usually anticipate when something horrible was closing in. Imagining what each girl went through roiled his stomach, yet the concept behind the symbology unnerved him even more.

  Addison returned the bottle to the floor and cast his eye around the bedroom. So, this is what the good guys look like. Two mounds of dirty clothing were piled in the corner, and he couldn’t recollect the last occasion when the place was orderly. Addison purchased the Valley Glen bungalow one year after his ex-wife moved to Phoenix with their son. The suburb predominantly consisted of low-income households and racial minorities, a noticeable step down from the three-bedroom home they’d owned in Eagle Rock.

  Still, it scarcely concerned him whatsoever because, apart from missing Nate, his life felt no different here. Certain things within the neighborhood were kind of cool, such as parking next to The Great Wall of Los Angeles, where he would numb his mind with liquor, striving to make sense of all the colors and various shapes with a belly full of booze. The artwork was over half a mile in length and portrayed the history of California as seen through the eyes of women and subgroups. A night spent at the Tujunga Wash provided a momentary reprieve from the tendrils of hostility inside his head. Some days Addison would sit at home questioning everything he thought he’d already known about himself, applying the blowtorch to his character as a way of passing the time until his shift began.

  He’d encountered every kind of human filth while sifting through the abattoirs of the city’s most depraved killers. Examined the fruits of wickedness from a personal distance and seen things ordinary people only hope to experience from within the pages of a book. Justice had a face, and it didn’t come muscled up with a purity of heart. Regular was just a portion size for any detective who worked homicide in a big town like LA. Normal gets snatched away, and there isn’t much chance of getting it back.

  Addison lit a cigarette as he stretched for an ashtray on the floor with his foot, cussing when some old butts spilled onto the carpet. He inhaled deeply and looked at the photograph of his son by the window. It seemed like an age since he’d last seen the boy, and it would likely be a good while until he saw him again.

  He blew a thick plume of smoke up at the ceiling as he began making his way toward the bedroom door, where an onset of lightheadedness nearly floored him. When Addison stepped out into the hallway, he leaned against the wall as a way of maintaining his balance. He waited until everything stopped spinning, then continued into the bathroom, where he raised the toilet seat and closed his eyes, thinking of the dead woman on the carousel with the two missing hands.

  Even though Addison hoped the scumbag responsible might one day get what they deserved, he also understood they likely never would. He took one final drag on his cigarette and dropped it into the bowl, doing his utmost to disregard the bottle of Valium on the ledge of the window. Three or four of those blue babes with a big glass of whiskey, and everything went quiet for a few hours.

  He often considered the prospect of whether he might be a little crazy but never arrived at a conclusion either way. If he was losing his mind and then somehow located it again, it would never be the equivalent of the one that went missing. Just like if a busted truck door were banged out and resprayed—scratch away the exterior, and all the original damage could be found patched underneath.

  Addison hitched up his track pants and walked over to the sink, conscious of the morning sun transforming his house into an oven. He turned on the faucet and splashed cold water onto his face, dropping his head to restore his balance. The sound of his phone filtered down from the bedroom, and he began making his way up the hallway on unsteady legs.

  Addison stumbled across the room and dropped onto the bed, snatching the Samsung with his left hand. “Mowbray,” he croaked.

  “Hey, Mowbray.” It was Lieutenant Jevonte Collins.

  Addison didn’t react right away, as he waited for his head to stop twirling.

  “You there, Mowbray?”

  “Yeah, Lieutenant, I’m here.”

  “We’ve managed to hook ourselves a break on the body.”

  “Oh yeah … which body and what break might that be?”

  “The one from last night. We got a name and an address. The victim’s partner just walked into the Hollywood station house two hours ago. Apparently, her girlfriend hadn’t been home since Monday morning, so she decided to come in after hearing about the murder on the news. The detectives took her over to the coroner, where she gave a positive ID.”

  Addison plucked a pen from the jacket he’d worn the previous night, automatically reaching for the notepad he kept inside his bedside drawer.

  “Girlfriend, you say?”

  “That’s right, Mowbray, she’s gay.”

  “I see.”

  “The victim’s name is Katherine Schneider. She comes from a wealthy Jewish family; her daddy owns a big fancy law firm on the East Coast.”

  “Swell,” Add
ison replied, thinking how that fact could become a pain in his ass.

  “So, the address is one-eight Elmer Avenue, North Hollywood, and the girlfriend’s name is Angela Brown.”

  “Okay, Lieutenant. I’ll get right on it. Has anyone called Jed?”

  “Nope, I thought you might do that.”

  Addison was well accustomed to the department’s penchant for cutting corners.

  “I want you and Perkins to swing by and see if you can extract anything more than what she’s provided already. She was extremely distraught when the detectives spoke with her earlier, and they may have missed something. Have you had an opportunity to listen over the call yet?”

  Collins was referring to the killer’s MO of directing them to the victims’ bodies.

  “Yeah, I played it through a few times when I got back in this morning.”

  “What can I say? You were right on the money about the first victim being the work of a potential serial murderer, which means we’ve got ourselves another one. As of this moment, you and Boy Wonder can clock as much time as you need to get this done. Did you finish writing the crime report when you got back here last night?”

  Addison stifled a yawn. “Yeah, I did.”

  “Great, I’ll have a look at it shortly. The toxicology results will be back sometime in the afternoon. If her blood shows traces of ketamine, then we’re gonna need to start digging around to see if we can find where the cocksucker is getting it from. Maybe he works at a healthcare facility, or he’s tight with somebody who does.

  “I’ve already informed the sergeant that you and Perkins will be reporting directly to me, so there’s no need to check in with the big prick unless you require something. I’m anticipating the mayor will soon start shouting about how these homicides are impacting the city’s trade, and the captain wants to set up a hotline for anybody who might have relevant information. Which means you’d best be preparing yourselves for all the whack jobs. Keep me in the loop with everything as it unfolds, Mowbray, and make sure you shave, ’cause we’re going live to press at five-thirty.”