Naked Addiction (18 page)

Paul slithered around the door and stepped outside, pulling the door closed behind him. Then he stood there, with his arms crossed over his scrawny, hairless chest. His jeans hung beneath his navel, exposing a path of black curls and a strip of blue boxer shorts.

“Why don’t we talk inside, Paul?”

“Okay,” he grunted in a raspy voice, “but don’t say I didn’t warn you. I haven’t had a chance to clean up in a while.”

That was an understatement. A waft of nasty air that smelled like cooked peas hit Goode in the face. Glowing purple socks lay on the floor at random distances, as if a dog had been playing with them.

“You don’t like doing laundry or what?” Goode asked. “And why are those socks glowing?”

“I told you, I’m sick.”

Goode looked around the dismal living room. It was dark and barely furnished. The black walls didn’t help. In the dim light, he saw a black light and understood why Paul’s socks were glowing. “Mrs. Lacey know you did the walls like this?”

“No. I paid for the paint myself. Pretty cool with the black light, don’t you think?”

“No comment.”

Paul settled back into the sofa, and pulled a worn red blanket over his bare chest.

“You ever ask Tania out?” Goode asked.

“I told you,” he said. “I didn’t even know the chick.”

“Yeah, well, I think that’s a lie. I know you knew her. I know you tried to get her to go out with you and when she wouldn’t, you followed her around. There’s a legal term for that. It’s called stalking.”

Paul looked at Goode with narrowed eyes and sighed. “You calling me a liar?”

“You tell me. If you look like a duck and walk like a duck, you’re probably a duck.”

“She didn’t give me the time of day.”

“Mind if I take a look around?”

“Yeah, just don’t go in the bedroom. If you don’t like the smell in here, you definitely don’t want to go in there.”

“I can take it. I’ve been in locker rooms before.”

Goode jumped when he heard a flick of a switchblade behind him. Whirling around, he saw Paul was cutting the lip off a candle.

“You mind putting that away while I’m in here? I don’t want to have to ask a doctor to pull it out of my back.”

“Here. Want it?” Paul asked, closing the knife and tossing it to Goode with a smile. It landed on the carpet at Goode’s feet with a thud. When he went to pick it up, he could see pieces of cracker and other assorted crumbs embedded in the rug. They were glowing. Paul was right, the black light did make everything look pretty cool. But Goode wasn’t about to compliment the little stalker.

“That’s very funny, Paul. But you know what? I don’t like your attitude. I don’t care whether you’re sick or not, we’re going downtown as soon as I’m done looking in your bedroom.”

“Fine, go ahead. I was just kidding. I can’t help it if you can’t catch.”

“Stay right there,” Goode ordered, pointing a finger at him. He headed into Paul’s bedroom, past more dirty socks, CD cases, and rock ‘n‘ roll and porno magazines strewn all over the floor. A dog-eared copy of
Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
lay open facedown on the bedside table, which actually was an orange plastic milk crate turned on its end. As soon as he turned on the bedroom light, he was horrified. Paul had covered an entire wall of snapshots, and all of them were of Tania.

“Oh, my God,” he whispered.

Tania was getting in and out of her car, wearing all sorts of different miniskirts, shorts, midriffs, her hair in a pony tail, her hair up in a knot, sunbathing. Getting the mail. Heading into her apartment with Seth.

Goode gasped. Asleep—or dead—there she was, lying on the same green and blue plaid blanket he saw on Paul’s bed, and wearing the same red pinstriped shirt he’d found her in. This was it, the break he’d been waiting for. As Goode was taking the incriminating photo off the wall for a closer look, he heard the front door open and Paul’s footsteps as he ran away.

Sick, my ass
.

He knew he couldn’t take any of the photos without a warrant, so he dropped them on the floor, turned tail and ran after his newest suspect. But the kid moved fast. Goode looked over the banister and saw that Paul was already in the parking lot sprinting toward a beat-up brown pickup truck. Goode tried but couldn’t quite make out the license plate.

He stumbled and almost fell as he raced down the stairs, holding onto the railing to keep his balance. As Goode got closer to the lot, he was able to see the plate. Paul revved his engine and took off, turning west down the alley. The sticky lock in Goode’s van held him up a few precious seconds, but he was soon in pursuit and calling for backup on the radio, which he kept in his cooler so as not to blow his cover. He gave the dispatcher Paul’s full name and a description, the color of his truck, and the plate number. He put the portable red light on top of his van and took off after Paul.

Goode’s tires squealed as he turned the corner, narrowly missing a kid on a skateboard. He kept meaning to get new tires, but he never seemed to have the time. Besides, he didn’t chase all that many suspects in his van; his best weapon was his feet. He’d run track in high school and still managed to run a half marathon every once in a while. His adrenaline was pumping.

“Bond,” he said. “James Bond.” Too bad his headlights couldn’t shoot missiles.

Paul’s truck swerved around the corner and headed east on Garnet toward the freeway, weaving in and out of cars. Goode almost lost him after Paul turned onto a side street. Suddenly, a red truck backed out of a driveway in front of Goode, who barely had enough time to cut away and drive onto a neighbor’s lawn.

“Asshole!” he yelled.

By the time he maneuvered his van back into the street, Paul was long gone. “Shit!” Goode screamed, smacking the steering wheel with the heel of his hand.

Thankfully, a few minutes later he heard over the radio that a patrol car had stopped Paul a few blocks from the southbound onramp to the 5.

“Ask Goode what he wants us to do with him,” Goode heard the patrolman say to the dispatcher. Goode recognized his voice. It was that idiot, Bennett. Goode was not a religious man, but he prayed that Bennett would pick up a brain somewhere between Garnet and the lockup.

“Tell him to arrest Walters for murder,” Goode said into his radio. “I’ll meet him at booking. And tell him not to mess it up like he did that other one.”

“Tell the detective, thanks for the advice, and he’s a real honey pie,” Bennett replied. “Next time he’s pursuing a perp, maybe he shouldn’t lose him.”

“Maybe he shouldn’t lose him,” Goode repeated to himself, mockingly.

By the time Goode got downtown, Paul had been given a T-shirt and some standard issue flip-flops and they were taking his mug shot for booking. Goode and another detective were discussing how they wished the Chargers would get to the Super Bowl again someday when Paul slid off the bench onto the concrete floor of the detention cage.

“He’s not breathing. Get an ambulance,” one of the officers screamed before starting to perform CPR.

“Great,” Goode muttered. “That’s just great.”

After they worked on him for a few minutes, Paul was breathing, but very shallowly, and his heartbeat was irregular. His face looked pretty sallow.

When the ambulance arrived, they shipped him over to UCSD Medical Center in Hillcrest to get checked out and to do a drug screen. Goode made sure there was an officer stationed outside his door. Then, he called Stone and they went to work getting a search warrant allowing them to seize the photos and any drug evidence in Paul’s apartment.

The way Goode’s luck was going, Paul would claim the detective beat him until he collapsed. Goode would get written up for using unnecessary force, not to mention sexually assaulting a witness. His promotion to Homicide would be derailed and Paul would go free for Tania’s murder. If he did it, that is.

The snapshots confirmed Alison’s story about Paul stalking Tania, but they offered no link to Sharona Glass’ murder or to Goode’s drug ring theory. Later, when he went back to Paul’s apartment, he also intended to check for any link to his sister Maureen, who was still MIA.

Within a couple of hours, Paul was conscious and re-hydrated. He shook his head at Goode from his bed and had the same stupid smirk on his face until Goode told him they wanted to take a saliva sample.

“The doctor thinks you have hepatitis,” Goode told him. “We’re just waiting for the blood tests to check that before we send your ass to the county jail.”

“No way, man,” Paul said. “I can’t believe this.”

Paul tried to raise his chest off the bed, but couldn’t get far because he was handcuffed to the bed railing. “I go out for a little jog while you’re looking around my apartment without a warrant, and the next thing I know, I’m thrown into a police car, punched in the kidneys, and poked by nurses. And not in a good way. Now you’re here trying to test my saliva? I think you’re way out of line.”

“Calm down,” Goode said. “It won’t hurt a bit. Right, nurse?”

The nurse glared at Goode. Obviously, she had no sense of humor.

“No way, man,” Paul said.

“Fine. I’ll be back with a court order,” Goode said, using the movie voice of Arnold Schwarzenegger, California’s one-time governator.

Goode called Stone and told him what they needed warrant-wise, and said he would meet the evidence tech at Paul’s apartment to log in all the creepy stalker photos.

“This one is your baby, Goode,” Stone said. “Byron has his hands full.”

As he took the snapshots off Paul’s wall, Goode was relieved to see that none of them featured Maureen. And during a search through Paul’s bedroom drawers and bathroom medicine cabinet, he made a crucial find: a plastic bag of capsules that he thought he recognized as Flunitrazepam, otherwise known as Rohypnol, the date-rape drug.

He still hadn’t found a trace of Sharona, which left him at a loss for tying Paul to her murder, but he still felt in his gut that the two murders were linked. Something else was troubling him, too. When he looked more closely at the shot of Tania lying on the bed, he saw no purple marks on her neck. He wondered if the shots had been taken right before her death, or if they just weren’t clear enough to show what he was looking for. Perhaps Paul had knocked her out, carried her down to the alley and then strangled her. With that skinny body, it was hard to imagine that he was strong enough to carry anything but his own sorry ass down those stairs. Goode made a mental note to see if the nurse found any scratches on his body that could have resulted from the struggle that broke off Tania’s fingernails.

When Goode found a pair of women’s black nylon shorts crumpled up in a ball on the floor next to the closet, he stopped, took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“That rat bastard,” he said.

Chapter 28

Norman

N
orman sat, ruminating, in Denny’s for forty-five minutes while he put away a bacon cheeseburger, fries, a chocolate shake, and two cups of coffee. He ordered a piece of lemon meringue pie so the waitress wouldn’t give away his table, then walked outside to make a few calls on his cell. He tried the beauty school, but got a voice mail message saying they were temporarily closed.

Next, he called the number for the paper to try to get Tommy, one of the editorial assistants, to bring him some gas. But he kept getting Tommy’s voice mail too.

Finally, he called the auto club. The dispatcher said it should take about twenty-five minutes for the truck to arrive—just enough time to eat the pie and walk back to meet the truck. He reached for his wallet, but couldn’t find his keys. He must’ve locked them in the car. He was doomed. Doomed with a capital D.

As he walked back to the car in the late afternoon sun, his belly was so full he had to undo the top button of his jeans. Just as he’d feared, his keys were sitting on the car seat in plain view. After climbing up on the hood, he leaned back against the windshield. He was starting to get woozy, lying there in the sun. Two hours later, the auto club driver roused him out of a sound sleep. Claimed the dispatcher had given him the wrong address.

By then it was too late in the day to follow through on his plan to crash the beauty school, so Norman headed back to the office with a nasty sunburn.

Maybe this is a sign I’m not supposed to be a reporter.

Norman sat dejectedly at his computer. He had the basic facts from the cops, but no good color. He’d tried to make some more calls, but that got him nowhere. He had nothing from the beauty school and no quotes from the Glass family. He didn’t dare tell Al that this was all because he’d run out of gas.

Al had given him ninety minutes to get something up on the website. With an hour to go, Norman broke through his writer’s block and pecked away at the keyboard with his two index fingers.

Don’t back into the lead
, Al’s voice said in his head.

His fourth try was good enough. Al could fiddle with it. It almost didn’t matter what he turned in, he hardly recognized his stories in the next day’s paper.

With ten more minutes to go, an email message from Al popped up at the top of his screen: “What’s your ETA, Klein?”

When Norman didn’t answer, Al gave up on the subtle approach and yelled at him from across the newsroom: “I need that story, Klein. The readers are waiting and I want to go home.”

Most of the dayside reporters had already turned in their stories. Several from the government team were gossiping with Jerry, the City Hall reporter, and trading dead-baby jokes. They smirked in Norman’s direction.

“What’s the matter, Klein?” Jerry said. “Too many cheeseburgers at lunch slowin’ you down?”

Norman didn’t even look up. Jerry would get his. What goes around comes around. “I’m almost done,” Norman yelled.

Who did they think they were anyway? It wasn’t like any of them had won a Pulitzer for Christ’s sake. Jerry was always telling people that it was only a matter of months before he’d get hired by the
Los Angeles Times
and there he was, still working at the same paper that had hired him right out of college.

Norman bore down and finished what turned out to be a twelve-inch story. He’d busted deadline by fifteen minutes, but it could’ve been worse. Then came the next stage of anxiety: Editing by Al, who gave the story a cursory read before calling him over.

“You’re in past deadline and there isn’t much of a story here, but I think it’s salvageable, kid,” he said. “Next time, take a company car if you’re short on gas, and don’t miss deadline.”

“Okay,” Norman said as good-naturedly as he could, wondering how the hell Al found out what had happened. “See you at the Tavern later?”

“Yeah, maybe,” the editor snapped.

Al was fifty going on sixty-five. The few greasy strands of a comb-over were all that was left of his hair. Marcy, the executive editor’s secretary, said Al used to be a good-looking man, but he drank too much. Couldn’t handle the stress. That got him a bleeding ulcer, a tire of flab that hung over his belt, and permanent bags under his eyes. Not to mention an off-and-on irritability that went unmatched in the newsroom. When it was on, reporters called him Al the Hun, or Al’s Evil Twin. Other times, he’d be perfectly charming. You never knew which one you were talking to until it was too late.

Norman headed over to the Tavern after the story had cleared the copy desk. He watched the door all night, waiting for Al to come in. It wasn’t until he was nursing his fourth beer that he finally felt the weight of the day slide off his shoulders. The story was done and he still had his job. He’d tucked his cell phone into the waistband of his jeans, thankful he didn’t have to remember to call the desk. But he spoke too soon. The damn thing rang at ten o’clock.

Al was still on the Metro desk when Norman called in. He’d ended up staying late to help out Big Ed because one of the city council members had suffered a heart attack in the middle of a council meeting. Meanwhile, they’d heard about another murder in PB on the scanner.

“The shit never stops,” Big Ed said. “You’d better get over there. Cops said it could be related to the beauty school killings.”

Norman paused. His reaction time was a little slow.

“What’s the matter, kid?” Big Ed said. “We’ll pay you OT.”

That wasn’t it, but Norman didn’t want to tell him the truth. Four beers do not a good reporter make. But who knew, maybe this would help his anxiety level, and solidify his concentration. The day wasn’t turning out so bad after all. This time, he was determined nothing would go wrong. Norman tripped over the curb in the parking lot and fell on one knee, but he recovered quickly and shook it off. After all, the hole in his pant leg was pretty small.