Killing Hope (Gabe Quinn Thriller) (2 page)

He nodded.

Make no mistakes, De La Hoya is a bulldog of a man. Like the canine in comparison, he is short and stocky in a sturdy kind of way. As such, it takes a bulldozer to move him.

He stared at me with distant eyes.

I cleared my throat.

‘So what we got here, Miguel?’

‘Damned weird is what.’ He said, snapping back to the present. ‘Your boy’s freaked out half my men. Some of the hardest, too.’

We ducked under the tape.

‘You sure it’s our boy?’

‘He got a fetish for funerals?’

I glanced at Jamie. She was looking directly at me. Had been all the while. Both our faces told the same horrified story. ‘Maybe.’

A girl from the CSU handed us each a pair of plastic slippers to go over our day shoes. Noisily, we slipped them on.

4

^{___________________________}

The victim was a little girl. No older than nine, or maybe ten. I am not good with ages. She was lying face-up on a small tartan blanket –the kind they sell in automobile accessory stores for protecting the velour against pet hair. She had a blaze of fiery-red hair. Porcelain skin. An ankle-length denim skirt with matching jacket. Barbie-pink baseball boots over stripy socks. Plastic kiddie jewelry – all intact. Nothing to show she’d been murdered or that she was even dead at all.

My stomach curled into a ball.
           

‘Who found her?’

‘Night patrol acting on an anonymous tip-off. Looks like the call came from a disposable cell somewhere in North Hollywood. No traceable number.’

I inched my way forward over loose gravel.

The child might have been sleeping, had it not been for the positioning of her limbs: her legs were dead straight, feet angled up on their heels, with hands clasped tight across the chest in the customary pose of interment. It was an uncomfortable posture for the living to hold. Fake. Added post-mortem. I’d seen it before – in the home of the killer’s previous victim less than twenty-four hours earlier. At both scenes, the killer had sprinkled red rose petals around the body. Smeared a rough cross of ash on the brow. Arranged the scene like a mock burial.

I caught sight of a patrolman quietly parting with his evening meal down by the water’s edge. That had been me, twelve months ago. Back when Miguel and I had last stood on this unholy ground.

‘This place is pretty isolated,’ I heard Jamie say. ‘Our killer could be local.’

Fact: killers tend to dump bodies in convenient places. In dirt ditches down the side of a desolate country road. In the backyard under three feet of topsoil. Or at the bottom of a reedy lake. Jamie was right: the killer must have known about this location beforehand. Known how to slip through the gap in the chain-link fence. Known to avoid the slippery, deadly drainage gratings spewing runoff into the river.

In the magnesium light coming from the portable lamps everything looked like the surface of the Moon: dead, bleached. But I knew it was pitch black here normally at this hour. The killer would have known that too. Known he could spend as much time down here as he liked, arranging the scene without the risk of being interrupted. Or caught.

I looked closer.

As with the previous victim, the child had no defensive wounds. No obvious signs of trauma. No ligature marks. Everything neat and tidy. No outward sign of an attack of any kind.

Even in death she was tragically pretty. But her lips were the color of her denim.

Now I could see why half of De La Hoya's men were spooked: it felt like we were intruding on a funeral in clumsy plastic slippers.

I forced air into my lungs.

‘How long’s she been down here?’

‘The Medical Examiner reckons less than a couple of hours. First responders got here within five minutes of the call.’

Still warm. Blood pooling. Suicidal cells.

I slipped off a glove and picked up one of the rose petals. It was a damp slice of black velvet between my fingertips. I rubbed at it, crumbling it up.

‘What about sexual assault?’

We all looked at Jamie. Every eye beneath the bridge. I saw a shiver run through De La Hoya’s tense expression; he was a father too. Most here were. It was one of those subjects everybody was thinking but nobody wanted to broach.

‘The ME doesn’t think so. Sweet Jesus, I hope not. But you’ll have to confirm it with him, later. The ME, that is. Not Jesus.’

Jamie snapped a hand inside a Latex glove. Went down on her haunches. She didn’t seem fazed at all. Still new to all this. Still in practical mode. I watched her place a rubberized thumb against the girl’s blue lips. Apply a little pressure. But the child’s mouth remained defiantly closed.

De La Hoya touched my arm, ‘Gabe. This was tucked under her hands when we found her.’

It was a transparent evidence bag. I peered at the contents through the cloudy polythene. Inside was a torn photograph – half of a larger print. Ripped right down the middle. I could just make out the image of a man in a tuxedo. He was smiling. Looked happy. I recognized his face.

5

^{___________________________}

I should have gone straight home. I didn’t. I headed north instead – through deserted streets crowded with shuttered stores. I was too pumped to think about sleep. Had been for months. I jumped on and off Highway 101. Followed illuminated signs for the Dodger Stadium. Traffic was light. A few garbage trucks doing the rounds. Shift workers. The usual insomniacs. I passed a billboard advertising courses at the USC: a man and woman with Colgate smiles. The ripped photograph was burning a hole in my pocket.

I left the turnpike after a couple of miles and crossed quiet intersections until I came to Carroll Avenue. I wasn’t exactly sure what I hoped to find here. The neighborhood looked asleep. No surprise at this hour. I slowed the car to a crawl. Passed darkened homes hidden behind subdued street lighting. Pulled up outside a property with an old Datsun rusting on the driveway.

In the dark, the place wasn’t much to look at: a Victorian two-floor clapboard affair. Porch. Pitched roofs. Leaning back from the roadside on a slight elevation of grass and azalea. A long flight of stone steps. It looked like the Norman Bates house. A little rain and lightning and you’d expect to hear a few screams coming from that tiny attic window. I hadn’t noticed the similarity yesterday, in broad daylight. Darkness has a way of making the mundane look monstrous.

In the photograph, the man’s face looked suddenly less happy, like he was wearing the smile for somebody else’s benefit. Not mine. Maybe it was the sodium street lamps. I turned on the interior light for a better look. Took out my reading glasses. Peered closer. The picture had been taken in a TV studio; I could see big TV cameras and boon microphones in the background. There was a guy just over his shoulder. A grey-haired guy with a short grey beard. Pointy face. He was looking at our man in the tux. At the back of his head. Not the camera taking the shot. Pointy Face was wearing a frown from ear to ear.

I switched off the light. Got out of the car. Pulled up my collar. Took a moment to see if anyone was watching. There was no sign of the crowd that had jostled in this street less than a day earlier. No curtains twitching. No morbid fascinations behind zoom lenses. Everything ordinary. But police tape still crisscrossed the front door of the old Victorian dwelling. In just a few words it said that something terrible had happened here, recently.

I ventured up the stoop. Used a pocket knife to break the black-and-yellow seal. Again, made sure no one was watching. Then cracked open the door and slipped inside.

The place was dark, quiet. There was a smell of musk or damp wood. A pine forest after rainfall. The gentle, hypnotic heartbeat of a clock somewhere deep inside. Could be an ordinary home anywhere, with the family tucked up tight upstairs. A faithful hound curled at the foot of the master bed. Sweet dreams. No idea that an intruder was standing with his back pressed against their front door. No such luck. Not in the house from
Psycho
. Slowly, my eyes adjusted to the gloom. I didn’t put on lights. I don’t know why. Respect, maybe. Privacy? I stayed there a minute or two, heart pounding. Listening. Wondering what thoughts had coursed through another man’s mind as he’d stood in this same spot early Sunday morning.

I got out a Maglite. Ran the narrow beam across the hallway. Dust motes danced. Mahogany stair rods popped in and out of view. A hand rail with traces of fingerprint powder. Ivy green walls. Some of those painted wooden face masks allegedly from Africa but really from China. More chalky dust around a brass light switch. Traces of it all the way up the stairs.

Nothing had changed since the last time I’d been here. Disregard the latent dust on the door jambs and the handles and it didn’t look like a crime scene. Like I say, an ordinary home. Yours or mine. No real clue pointing to the fatal events which had played themselves out here up those very stairs. No evidence that the place had been swarming with cops, the CSU, the clean-up crew, half the Department. Everything ordinary.

6

^{___________________________}

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t make a habit of creeping around in the dead of night – especially in other peoples’ houses. I have my job like you have yours. It’s just that mine involves that sort of thing.

I snapped hands inside Latex gloves and followed the Maglite into the living room. It knew the way. Wooden flooring creaked against my weight. Heels clacked, then turned to soft thuds as I crossed onto thick carpeting.

This was the home of the killer’s first victim: Professor Jeffrey Samuels – a singleton in his late fifties – found dead as a doorknob by his cleaning lady early Sunday morning. So far, I knew three definite facts about Professor Jeffrey Samuels of Carroll Avenue:

One – he’d had an ear for Mozart.

And two – he’d had a taste for fancy French wine.

To my unrefined ear, the classics all sounded the same. But I could tell the difference between a merlot and a chardonnay, mainly by their color.

The third fact probably had no bearing on the case whatsoever.

I moved deeper into the living area. Scanned the flashlight over the everyday bric-a-brac that fills our homes. Shadows scurried to hide themselves in alcoves and behind furniture. There were books on shelves. Leather-bounds mixed with paperbacks. A few trinkets – souvenirs from vacations outside of the States. More wooden carvings of African witch doctors. Droopy-breasted Ethiopian women. Genderless figurines entwined in dance. Carved from mahogany or some other hardy rainforest resource. I kept scanning. I knew what I was looking for. Light glinted off glass – framed certificates in among framed photographs, hung above a faux fireplace that had a large bowl of plastic geraniums where hot coals should have been.