Murder 42 - A Thriller (Sarah King Mysteries Book 2) (14 page)

30

When Sarah woke, she was lying in a hospital bed. Someone had dressed her in a gown and taken her shoes off. The throbbing in her head was gone, but a trace of pain remained in her body, like an earthquake’s aftershocks. Her hand came up to her head, and she closed her eyes and took a deep breath before sitting up in the bed.

Gio sat in a chair across the room, his head lowered over his phone. He must’ve heard the rustling of the sheets because he looked up and gave her a weary smile.

“You okay?” he said.

“I’ve been better. How long was I out?”

“Not long. A couple hours. I was scared you’d gone into a coma. They wanted to give you drugs to wake you, but I wouldn’t let them.”

“Thanks.”

He stood up and approached the bed. “You passed out on the driveway. The doctor said there’s nothing physically wrong that they can see, but your blood tests haven’t come back yet.”

“I don’t need them. Let’s get out of here.”

She tried to rise, but Gio gently placed his hand on her shoulder. “Let’s hang out just for a minute. I don’t think your realize how much blood you lost.” He grabbed the chair he’d been sitting in and pulled it next to the bed. “You want anything? Water or juice or something?”

“No.” She paused. “Gio, I saw her.”

“Who?”

“Heather. I saw her in that place. She’d been to that house a lot. Bill used to drug her and rape her, him and his friends. When she drowned, he took her body to a canyon and dumped it into a stream. The rug she was in got caught on a branch, and her body rolled out and kept going. It’s probably in the ocean by now.” She noticed tingling in her fingers and opened and closed her hands to try to get some blood back into them. “Maybe we can still find the rug.”

“Did you notice anything else about the canyon or the stream? Anything that can help us find it?”

“Well, there was a radio tower on a hill nearby, maybe, like, a hundred feet away. It had T-467 on it in black.”

Gio thought a moment. “I don’t think we need the body, but it’d be nice to have the rug. Let’s have the doc clear you, and then we’re gonna pay a visit to Bill. I’ll call the field office here and see if they can identify the radio tower.”

The doctors didn’t seem too interested in Sarah’s case. After waiting for the blood results, which didn’t show them anything—least of all the use of narcotics, which was what they were looking for—they decided she had fainted from a combination of fatigue and dehydration. She went along with it and was discharged with instructions on rehydrating herself and getting enough rest.

Her shirt was unwearable. The front looked as if it had been sprayed with blood. Gio bought her an LA Dodgers sweatshirt from the gift shop, and she put it on in the women’s bathroom.

Once in the car, she laid her head back on the seat and closed her eyes. Every ounce of her ached and felt drained, as if she’d just run a marathon.

“I’ll need to eat something soon,” she said.

“We can get something now. The agent I spoke with says he found the tower and they’re heading up there. I wanna give them some time.”

They stopped at a burger joint, and Sarah ordered a chicken sandwich and a Coke. They sat at a table by the windows, and Sarah watched the way the dust swirled in the beams of light raining into the restaurant.

The first bite of food was the best, and she tried to relish it as long as possible by closing her eyes and tasting every morsel. When she opened her eyes, Gio had a smile on his face.

“What?” she asked with her mouth full.

“It’s cute when you’re starving.”

She grinned and took a sip of her drink. “I feel like all the energy in my body just disappeared in under a minute.”

“Does that happen all the time?”

“Only when I let it. I can open myself up sometimes, pick up on things I usually block.”

“What’d you see?”

She took a moment to chew and take another drink. “I saw decades in that house. Starlets and actors, producers, writers… everybody used to come to that house as some place to congregate and do drugs, have sex, meet people. The only difference I saw with Bill is that he lured Heather there and abused her in the worst ways possible.”

“Did he kill her?”

“I don’t think so. They were downstairs, and water leaked down from the overflowing tub. They seemed pretty surprised by everything.”

“So at most, we got negligent homicide. If he gave her the drugs, we might be able to make a case for involuntary manslaughter. In the federal system, that can mean ten years, easy. I’m sure an assistant US attorney would be willing to knock that down in exchange for information about the
Murder 42
video.”

She wiped her lips with a napkin. “All you have is what I saw. If he denies it, what’re you going to do?”

He grinned. “What else? Lie.”

Sarah wanted to be there when Gio confronted Bill with what she’d seen, but the energy just wasn’t in her. She decided to stay in the car outside the precinct and see if she could possibly get some sleep. Even ten or twenty minutes would be heaven at the moment.

But her brain had other plans. Thoughts came and went in a flash. Bill, Stefan, Gio… Heather. All of them appeared in her mind’s eye and then disappeared again. As she tried to calm her mind, she saw a sedan pull up with two men in suits. They got out of the car and went to the trunk, pulling out a crimson rug wrapped in plastic wrap and marked with an evidence tag. The men carried it inside.

Sarah tried to go in but didn’t have the strength. She reached for the door handle, pulled it halfway, and then let go. Gio didn’t need her now. She’d done her part. In fact, all she wanted to do now was go home and lie in bed with her cat. But as she thought about it, she realized that that actually didn’t appeal to her. In comparison with the sunshine and palm trees of southern California, Philadelphia seemed gloomy and dirty, with too many memories stored there.

The worst of them were the memories of her being thrown out of the Amish community—the only thing she had known her entire life—and the death of her mother and sister.

Sarah closed her eyes and kept them shut, counting slowly in her head to occupy her mind. Only when she felt the jolt in her neck did she realize she had fallen asleep. Checking the clock on her phone, she saw she’d slept for over an hour and a half. A long time, but it hadn’t brought any sort of recuperation. She was as tired as before and felt as though she could sleep for days.

Gio came out of the precinct. She looked at him and mouthed the word, “What?”

He just smiled and nodded.

31

The morning sunlight streamed through the windows. Farkas preferred his home cold, and the sun warmed it gently every morning. He lay in bed and watched it, lifting his hand and letting the beams illuminate it. He put his finger over his eyes and stared directly into the light. At just the right angle, he could see the red outline of arteries and blood.

He rose, noticing the paint and blood stains on his nude body. Fatigue slowly washed away with the movement as he got up and stretched his back then his neck and arms. The kitchen beckoned him, and he made a fresh pot of coffee, leaning over the counter and rolling his neck around as it brewed. When it was finished, he poured it into a black mug and then strolled into his studio.

The canvas stood complete: a whirling mass of black and red on a white canvas as though the two colors were at war and neither side won. Etched across the corner on the bottom right, his name stood out as part of the war. It was chaos… it was entropy… it was beautiful. Everything Farkas believed about the universe and man’s place in it was represented in that painting, an unconscious representation of his philosophy.

He had hoped, early in his career, that his art would draw likeminded others to him, people who would see the cold and the black that existence was. And out of that cold and black, man made himself by a conscious act. Chaos was beautiful, because out of that chaos man could choose to impose order… or add to the chaos: the volitional animal.

He sat in his chair in the front room, the sunlight pouring over him and warming his cool skin. He picked up the
Times
and saw something that caught his attention on the first page. The headline read:
Feds Make Biggest Child Porn Bust In Los Angeles History
.

The article was well written and had first-hand accounts of what had occurred. A man named William Davidson, better known as California Bill, in exchange for leniency on a case involving a young porn star whose death he attempted to cover up, had led them to a cache of child pornography the likes of which the agents working the case had never seen. Over half a million videos. California Bill was one of the biggest child pornographers in the world.

Farkas couldn’t help but smile.
What a damned fool
.
He would’ve served less time keeping his mouth shut and taking a murder charge than he’s going to serve with that amount of child pornography.
No matter. He was a worm, and he deserved what he was going to get.

But the most interesting part of the piece was buried about halfway down. The FBI, when asked how they discovered the death of a girl from over a year ago, stated that they had outside help from a previous consultant. They wouldn’t release the name of the consultant.

Farkas lowered the paper and thought a moment. What kind of consultant did the FBI turn to when they needed help? He would certainly be interested in finding out. Regardless, he wasn’t worried. He had taken all the necessary precautions. When he’d sent California Bill the disc, he made certain there was no information there that could lead back to him. Bill wouldn’t be able to give the authorities anything.

He smiled inwardly and decided to reward himself for the hard work of the completed painting with a massage.

32

When Gio and Sarah walked into the FBI’s field office in Phoenix, they were met with applause. A banner saying
Great Job!
hung on the wall. Sarah got the impression from how worn it looked that it had been used before.

The five days after the arrest and before they’d been able to get back to Arizona had been a blur of interviews. The investigators needed to know Sarah’s exact role in the case, as they were preparing reports to be sent to the U.S. Attorney’s office. Gillian Hanks covered for her and made sure no one really knew her exact role. “Consultant” seemed to describe it well enough when it came from high in the Bureau.

Charges would be filed. Sarah had been told that California Bill would be cooperating in locating the manufacturers of the child pornography he possessed and sold in exchange for something called a 5-K Letter, which was apparently a letter to the judge asking for leniency. Gio said he would still serve about fifteen years in prison, even with his cooperation, but that it was better than a life sentence.

Everyone gathered around Gio and asked for details of the bust and the investigation. Everyone except Stefan, who walked up to Sarah with his hands in his pockets and a smile on his face.

“You did awesome. This is the biggest child porn bust I’ve ever heard about. Tens of thousands of children are going to get some sense of justice because of you. Especially if they can find the people who made the videos.” He paused. “No closer to
Murder 42
, though. I got someone who’s testifying against Jay and Naughty Nancy’s that they’ve been distributing child pornography for about eight years now, but I couldn’t get anything from Jay about that disc.” He shrugged. “It’s a monstrous video, but it was only one out of half a million California Bill had. Maybe sometimes we just gotta take the wins where we find them.”

“Maybe. I couldn’t do what you guys do—be an agent or a detective.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know if there’s ever a sense of accomplishment. It feels like there’s always more work to do. Always worse people out there that you need to find. I like closure.”

“No, there’s no closure in this.” He sat on one of the desks, keeping his eyes glued on hers. “I’d like to do something really lame tonight. I’d like to take you to dinner and a movie. Just a good ol’-fashioned date.”

She looked back at Gio. Gio had not asked her anywhere. In fact, since they’d been back in Arizona, he hadn’t really talked to her. “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

“I’ll pick you up at your hotel tonight.”

As Stefan walked away, she turned back to Gio. A cold feeling gripped her guts when she looked at him, and she knew why: she was worried that he had only been nice to her because he knew she could help him on this case. Now that it was over, maybe he didn’t want anything to do with her? She told herself Gio wasn’t like that, that despite their differences, he was one of the good ones. But the feeling wouldn’t go away.

Gio sat on a desk, sipping sparkling apple cider out of a paper cup as the other agents and staff hung on every word. He described how California Bill’s face had lost all its color when they brought the rug into the interview room, how he began to weep and told them everything they wanted to know. Half a million videos involving about twenty thousand children. Some of the videos were twenty-five years old, transferred to digital from VHS tapes. Some were as new as a few weeks. And Bill knew who had made a lot of them. If he didn’t know, he had email addresses, and IP servers could be subpoenaed to find out who they were.

Sarah knew this was a big deal, even if she didn’t understand the legal aspects of it. Not only was it the biggest child porn bust in recent history, it would lead to a massive number of arrests of people who made the pornography. But Stefan was right—she was no closer to finding the man who had made the
Murder 42
video than when she had first been brought in to help with this case. Though she never liked to give up hope, she knew deep down that he was going to get away with it.

She wanted to tell Gio that she was leaving. She would go back to her hotel room, go out with Stefan tonight, and then be on a plane back to Philadelphia tomorrow. But Gio was joking and celebrating. His face was creased with the amount of laughing and smiling he was doing, and for some reason, she thought that he would stop if she interrupted. So she left without saying anything.

Once outside, she looked up at the sun and grinned. The sky was so blue and clear she could make out the different shades of color reflected in the clouds. Some were light orange, some purple, some a hint of red as the sun began to set. In some parts of Philadelphia, there was so much smog she could hardly see the sky, much less the sun, on some days.

She took a slow walk up the sidewalk and stopped at a little coffee shop near a bookstore and a boutique clothing shop. Ordering hot tea and a chocolate biscuit, she then sat down near a table of some students studying.

She had never gone to college and felt insecure around those who had. The kids were discussing the impact of corporations moving operations overseas to avoid taxes, and she was somewhat lost. She didn’t understand terms like “tariffs” and “oligarchies,” but it was nice to listen to kids who were interested in ideas and thought ideas could change the world. Or maybe it was just nice listening to people who hadn’t seen the darkness that waited for them out there.

Sarah sat in the coffee shop much longer than she had anticipated and then had to hurry back to her hotel for a quick shower before Stefan picked her up. As she was getting out, she heard a knock on her hotel room door. She threw on her clothes and went out to the front door. She answered without looking through the peephole first and was about to ask Stefan to wait when she saw another man standing in the hallway.

The man wore a denim jacket and had long hair that came down to his shoulders. He looked skittish and glanced down both sides of the hallway before looking at her.

“Can I come in and talk?” he said.

“Um, no. Who are you?”

“I’m someone who knows who you are, Sarah. I know all about your abilities and what you can do. I also know you don’t know who made the
Murder 42
video… I do.”

Sarah hesitated. “Someone from the FBI is coming in a few minutes. Let’s go down to the lobby and wait for him, and you can—”

“No, no feds. This is just for you.”

Sarah waited a beat. “Okay, come inside.”

He brushed past her and took in the hotel room quickly before sitting on a chair across the room. Sarah left the door open a crack by placing the metal lock between the door and the frame. Then she sat on the edge of the bed, scanning the room for weapons in case she needed one.

“What do you want to tell me about that video?” she said.

“Have you seen it?”

She nodded.

“A man who can do that,” he said, “can do anything.” He paused. “I’m an addict. My particular drug is child videos. People don’t see it as a drug, but it is. I’ve tried to stop watching them, stop masturbating to them, and I can’t. It’s too cemented in my mind. I can’t stop.”

“There are counselors that can help you.”

He shook his head sadly, his eyes moving to the window. “They have an obligation to turn you in for stuff like this, if it’s an ongoing crime. I got no one to talk to about it.” Another pause before he inhaled deeply and said, “Anyway, that’s not why I’m here. I just told you that to give you some context about what I’m doing. I love children. I would never harm them.”

Sarah withheld her disgust. The fact that this man thought raping children wasn’t harming them showed he was detached, and anything she said wasn’t going to persuade him, so she remained silent.

“I saw that video, too… and I cried. I cried because I couldn’t believe the amount of pain that child went through before death, and then what he did after death…” The man’s eyes welled up, and he took a moment. “It was sent to me. It was sent to two places in Arizona: one was Naughty Nancy’s; the other was my place, a dance club. I don’t know how he knew I was connected to this community, but he did. He sent me that video to distribute for him.”

“Who?”

“I don’t have his name, but I do have his address.” He paused. “I don’t know why he sent this out. He put himself at risk unnecessarily. Doesn’t make any sense. He could’ve just posted it online or on the file sharing websites, but he didn’t. I don’t know why he’s doing this.”

“How do you have his address?”

“The video was sent to me through a mail forwarding service out of Las Vegas. I needed to know who sent it, so I called a friend of mine who works at the Post Office. He got me the address the video was sent from.” The man took out a slip of paper and placed it on a small table next to him. “That’s where you’ll find him.”

Sarah stared at the slip of paper a long time. “How do you know who I am?”

“I was a bit of a… I don’t know what you’d call it, not ‘fan,’ maybe ‘fascinated connoisseur’ of the Blood Dahlia case last year. I followed it pretty closely. It was just so weird and intriguing. So I read all the articles about it, and they said the FBI had brought in a psychic to consult for them. And then I saw you on the news standing next to the FBI talking about this video. I know you’re not law enforcement and that you won’t turn me in for helping you.”

Sarah thought, for a moment, that she could. She could call Gio right now or stall until Stefan got here and have this man arrested. But she wouldn’t. The man had tried to help her; no matter how vile and disgusting he was, she couldn’t just betray someone who tried to help her get the creator of that video off the streets.

“I want you to find him, Sarah. I want you to find him, and I want you to kill him. People like that can’t be allowed to live.”

“There are some people who feel that way about you.”

“I don’t care. All I know is this guy is not a human being. You have to rid the earth of him.” The man rose from his seat. “I have to go.”

He scuttled out of the room and was gone. Sarah stayed on the edge of the bed and gazed at the slip of paper. Finally building up enough courage, she rose and walked over to it. It was an address in Los Angeles.