City of Fire (33 page)

She looked over at him and knew what he was trying to say. She felt the same way about him. When he turned back to the road, she followed his eyes to a low-riding Honda Civic doing eighty-five through the Cahuenga Pass in spite of their presence. The driver looked about twenty and had a shaved head. As they passed the car, the kid flipped them the bird. Ten minutes later, they cut through the press line, pulled past Burell’s house, and legged it down the street toward the front door.

THE CORONER’S VAN
was parked in the driveway. Crime scene techs were milling about as if on hold. As they signed in at the bottom of a long list, a detective stepped out of the house, met them on the steps, and introduced himself as Jeff Brown.

“Thanks for coming out,” he said, turning to Lena. “We were going through Burell’s office when I found your card. With all this stuff in the news about your boy Romeo, I thought I’d better shut things down and give you a call.”

“How long have you been here?” Novak asked.

“Long enough to get past go and figure out what this guy was into.”

Brown smiled and grimaced at the same time, and Lena knew instantly that she liked him. He was the size of a fullback, about forty-five, with skin the color of cocoa and close-cropped hair. His face was flat and wide and heavily creased by laugh lines, and he wore a light brown suit and a crisp white shirt with a patterned tie.

She glanced at the houses on the street. “What about the neighbors?”

Brown shook his head. “Nada. Burell thought he was keeping his lifestyle in the vault, but everybody in the hood knows this place is a fuck pad. The two people living next door got a telescope in that window aimed at the guy’s hot tub, but they’re over eighty and only good for matinées. Last night they went to sleep early. Everybody else around here has kids. They keep their blinds closed.”

She saw Novak fight off a grin, Brown glancing at the TV cameras perched on a hill at the end of the block.

“Let’s get downstairs,” the detective said. “I wouldn’t let them touch the body until you guys got here. This one’s kind of different and takes some getting used to.”

They entered the house. Lena glanced at the photo on the windowsill of Burell with his ex-wife and kids as they hit the kitchen and hustled downstairs. When she spotted Burell’s corpse on the hospital bed, she didn’t need a set of keys to know that Romeo had been here.

The mattress had been raised, Burell’s head propped up with pillows. He was dressed in a patient’s gown, and a fake IV had been taped to his arm. Cuts and bruises scarred his chin and much of his face. But what gave the crime scene its punch were the man’s eyes. Romeo had shut the right eye after Burell’s death and kept the left eye open. As Lena gazed at his face, it looked as if Burell were winking at her from a very still and lonely place on the other side.

She felt a chill roll down her back but took a step closer. Something was oozing out of the man’s mouth and nose, even his ears. A powdery blue foam. When she noticed the pool of blood below Burell’s waist, she saw the same powdery blue foam oozing out from beneath his buttocks.

Novak gave her a nudge and pointed to the shelf behind the bed. Twelve empty bottles of Viagra were lined up in a neat row. She looked back at Burell’s corpse, his face and that dead eye of his, playing out the murder in her head.

“Viagra,” Brown said. “Burell bought the shit by the case and had it shipped in from Mexico. But that’s only the half of it. You’re probably gonna want a look underneath that gown.”

His face lit up, his eyes pinned to Burell’s crotch. The
coroner’s investigator, a small Asian woman whom Lena had met once or twice, had the same look on her face as she lifted the gown. Lena followed her eyes to the wound. Burell had been castrated. Nothing remained between his legs but the wound.

Brown shook his head. “This guy didn’t die easy. This one went out like a champion. Gives new meaning to the phrase
dickless wonder
, huh?”

He smacked his lips and stepped away, his body shivering. Pockets of nervous laughter rose and died throughout the room.

“You search the house?” Novak asked.

“Inside and out,” Brown said. “All we found were his capped teeth over here on the floor.”

Lena spotted the bloodstain beside the detective’s foot, then turned back for another look at Burell’s corpse laid out on the bed. The wink and the stare and the Viagra oozing out of every orifice of the man’s body. She guessed that Romeo force-fed Burell until he could no longer swallow, then stuffed the rest of the pills anywhere they would go. Judging from the amount of blood, his penis and testicles were removed while his heart was beating, and probably while he remained lucid enough to know that it was happening.

Brown had been right. The way Burell ended up took some getting used to.

Her eyes drifted over to the Rolex on Burell’s wrist. Burell had everything in the world that money could buy, yet he didn’t possess anything worth living for. From the way he’d stared at his watch the other day, she figured that somewhere deep inside he knew it as well as she did. It was almost as if he needed the Rolex to convince himself that the lie he was living might be true.

But now the lens was smashed, just like his body. She thought about that picture of his family he kept in the kitchen. It told her everything she needed to know. What was worth living for in this man’s life had moved to Phoenix a long time ago.

MARTIN Fellows selected a knife from the drawer and drew the blade down the center of an apple, then flinched as the two halves split open. He looked around the lab to see if anyone had been watching. No. 3 was on the other side of the room. Harriet was doing paperwork at her desk.

His eyes slid back to the piece of fruit. He stared at it, felt a jittery lift as his blood curdled and took off for the moon.

The flesh inside the apple was black. Bright yellow crystals clung to the seeds. When he caught a whiff of sulfur in the air, he quickly sealed the apple in a plastic bag, dumped it in the wastebasket, and ripped open the greenhouse door.

Hellfire and lightning. His experiment had been a complete failure.

Why?

He ran down the aisle and examined the tree he had picked it from. The specimen was part of a lot grafted three years ago. One of six trees that were the foundation for his experiments now. His mind was buzzing. His ears ringing. All six plants were brimming with ripened fruit and looked healthy.

“Dead fruit,” he heard himself whispering. “Devil’s candy.”

He reached down to check the soil and gasped. It was bone-dry. The entire goal of the project was to mimic a tropical environment. To produce apples where they had never grown before. He yanked the irrigation tubes out of the soil and noticed that the nozzles were clogged again. Cheap fixtures maintained by an outside firm he considered totally incompetent. The last time they screwed up, he told
the company rep that they were in way over their heads. When she called him cute, he stopped barking at her but couldn’t put the fire out. His plants needed water, and that stupid bitch with her pipe wrenches was a fucking moron.

Bristling with anger, he picked one apple from each tree and scurried back into the lab. He cut them open and smelled the fumes. The flesh inside all six apples was black.

He opened his notebook, trembling as he thought through his computations. Every formula. Every step. None of it added up to black.

And then his eyes crossed the room to Harriet’s desk. She was whispering to someone on her cell phone. Wiping her eyes and trying to hide her face beneath her shiny blond hair. He knew that she was getting the news and hearing it for the first time. It was official. They’d found the piece of shit. Charles Burell was en route to the morgue.

He kept his eyes on her, grabbed a piece of graph paper, and started writing everything down. The time and place. What he heard and what he only thought he heard. She was on the phone with a friend, that much was clear. A girlfriend who didn’t have her number at work and called her cell phone. Probably someone from her double life. Another victim of the late and nasty Charles Burell.

It suddenly occurred to Fellows that he needed to prepare himself for consoling Harriet after she got off the phone. It seemed obvious that she would need a shoulder to cry on. Someone to listen to her sorrow, perhaps even hold her. With Burell on ice and No. 3 smelling like fish tacos, she would undoubtedly turn to him.

He looked at the six black apples on his lab table, wondering if he should postpone his lunch with Finn at the Pink Canary. Harriet might want to go out and talk.

He bagged the apples and threw them away. Then he straightened the papers on his table and sauntered over to his desk. He timed his move perfectly. Harriet had just switched off her phone and was placing it in her purse. He gave her a look. Gentle. Even. The kind that said
I’m ready when you are
mixed with
Even though I cut off your boyfriend’s dick,
I’m a true friend.
When she turned toward him, he could see her wheels turning.

“I’m not feeling well,” she said.

He waited for her to make the next move. Coffee for two at the Ivy. Fellows didn’t drink coffee because it dehydrated his body. Given the circumstances, he decided to make an exception and sip at least half of one cup before switching to mineral water.

“I’m going home,” she said. “See you in the morning, Martin.”

He tried to speak but couldn’t find the words. He watched her gather her things. Watched her get up and rush out of the room. When the door swung closed, he caught No. 3 staring at him.

“What happened?” the little heathen asked. “Is she okay?”

Fellows shrugged off the questions and tried to get a grip on his emotions. Tried to ignore the smell of fish tacos and sulfur wafting about the room. That feeling deep inside that he was a loser. The world’s biggest fool.

She hadn’t come to him. She’d run away.

THEY were still going through Burell’s basement office. Keith Upshaw from the Computer Crime Section was giving them a tour of the Web site.

As Lena watched with Novak, she couldn’t help but think of a pyramid. The top was the front door. Once you gained access with a password, you had a choice of viewing the movie-of-the-day or watching a rerun from the archives. Reruns were listed by date and categorized by the model’s popularity. Candy Bellringer, the woman with black hair and blue eyes Lena remembered seeing on the couch, was listed first with fifteen hundred more hits than anyone else.

But more to the point was Romeo’s history with the Web site.

Logging on as Avis Payton, Romeo visited the site only three times. Once to establish a membership with Payton’s credit card. Then three days later on the afternoon before Teresa Lopez was murdered. His third visit, lasting an hour and forty-five minutes, came on the night Nikki Brant was killed. When Upshaw went into the archives and found the movie-of-the-day that played that night, Burell had been with a young blonde calling herself Barbie Beckons.

Lena thought it over. The timing was important. And Burell knew that they were working a homicide case. He could have shown them the statistics he kept when they were here the other day but chose to keep everything hidden. Instead of offering assistance, it looked as if all he did was
close the account under Avis Payton’s name once he figured out the credit card was no good.

Lena followed Novak over to Burell’s desk, taking another look at the file they’d found in the bottom right drawer. Burell kept records on the twenty-three women he was paying to have sex with. Eight-by-ten head shots were included, along with their contact information and up-to-date records of their HIV status. Each of the twenty-three women drew paychecks every three or four weeks, some more often than others. Each was listed as a
consultant.
The fee for spending an hour with Burell on camera came down to an even grand. Although the addresses seemed righteous, each woman was listed by her stage name. After searching the entire office and combing through his checkbook, it was clear that Burell didn’t keep or use anyone’s legal name. Each woman received a check from Charles Burell Enterprises made out to cash.