Pure Hate (3 page)

“Are you watching, Reed? Are you
watching?”

The blade went straight through
Jennie, cracking through her ribcage and out through her back. Pulling it out
nearly ripped her in half. Blood erupted from the wound, sending a bright red
arterial spray across the room. Malcolm’s eyes gleamed with a kind of ecstasy,
an almost religious fervor, as he drove the knife in again and again, hacking
her tiny body to pieces. Her screams were deafening but mercifully short,
settling into a gurgle and rattling wheeze, bubbling up from her ruptured
lungs. Reed made one more effort to save his daughter. He staggered to his feet
and charged at Malcolm who smiled and promptly deposited the heel of his
designer boot into Reed’s solar plexus, forcing all the wind from his lungs and
sending him crashing over the stained glass coffee table. Malcolm stepped over
him, still carrying the little mutilated corpse of Reed’s daughter dripping
blood all over the new carpet.

Linda was screaming. Reed was
coughing up blood. Jennie was dead. Malcolm . . . was enjoying himself . . .
and just getting started.

“Reed! Reed!” Linda screamed, as her
husband writhed on the floor.

“Oh, I’d almost forgotten about you,
dear.” Malcolm discarded the empty Jennie carcass on top of her battered father
and stalked across the room to where Paul still held onto Reed’s beautiful
Barbie-doll wife. Linda began struggling and crying, screaming out for help.

“Don’t tire yourself out, sweetheart.
This might take awhile and you’re gonna need all your strength. I’m gonna fuck
you to death!”

“Pleeeeeeeeease.” Reed whispered
hoarsely, vainly, from beneath his daughter’s corpse. Her heart was still
pumping blood out of a dozen wounds. The grief, the horror, overwhelmed him and
his mind shut down, staring as the man with his face handed his wife over to
Malcolm, but really seeing only a wall of gray
with eerily familiar shadows doing a bizarre and disturbing pantomime. Then
everything went black.

Reed struggled desperately to free
his mind from the dense miasma that had descended over it, to stay in the
present, but his mind kept retreating into the safety of the past, of playing
in the sandbox, climbing the monkey bars, singing old pop tunes. It was a
peaceful place, a safe place, a place where Linda wasn’t screaming.

Linda? Where is Linda?

Reeds’s mind shook free of the cloud
and his eyes rolled around the room in a panic. In between Linda’s screams and
sobs, he could hear animalistic growls and
grunts. When his eyes locked on the source of the pandemonium, his heart
dropped and his stomach lurched. Malcolm was raping his wife and staring right
at him. He wasn’t just raping her. He was mutilating her, ripping into her with
those bizarre silver fangs. Reed struggled to rise but something pushed him
back down and he felt cold steel press against the back of his skull along with
the unmistakable sound of a shotgun round being chambered.

“Don’t move! You have no idea how
much I’d love to kill you.” It was the man with his face.

On the other side of the room the
savagery was escalating. Linda’s screams were horrible as Malcolm tore chunks
out of her breasts with his teeth, tearing off and spitting out each nipple. He
was snarling and growling, still thrusting himself deep inside her, when he
ripped her throat out with his teeth and began to chew. He was cannibalizing
her—eating her alive. He brought the knife up . . .

“Nooooooooo!”
Reed weakly screamed.

. . . and slashed open her chest,
sawing through her sternum. He reached in and cracked her ribs open like an
oyster shell, grabbed her heart in his fangs and savaged it free from her
chest. Reed was in shock. This was the most horrible thing he had ever seen and
he knew why it was happening. He knew that he had brought this horror down on
his family. This was all his fault.

The black vampire was grinning at him
again. Blood was dripping from his fangs, down his chin, neck, chest. He was
still chewing on Linda’s heart, then, horribly, he swallowed.

“Are you still my best friend, Reed?
Are you still going to look after Renee’ for me? You going to be my
brother-in-law?”

Malcolm was undoubtedly a monster and
Reed was certain that he had created him.

Dr. Frankenstein I presume?

Detective Titus Baltimore refused to let the old timers
see him gag. He knew that his partner was watching him, waiting to see if the
tacky, red-black blood that formed a huge stain on the salt and pepper Berber
carpet, the meaty copper smell, the children, the woman, would be too much for
him and he would have to pray to the porcelain god. True, he had never seen a
murder this horrible up close. Not one this . . . grotesque . . . this savage and barbaric. The unsub who did this bore scarcely any resemblance at all
to the rest of humanity. But Titus choked back the scalding bile that was
rising in his throat and focused his eyes to clear away the spots, forcing
himself to check the little girl’s mercilessly butchered corpse for fibers,
hairs, any clue to the man who had done this.

CSU already had the entire room
covered in silver latent print dust and the forensic photographer was flashing
pictures so fast it created a surreal strobe-light effect that gave the crime
scene the look of a carnival horror show. But these weren’t wax dummies. The
grotesque wounds were not made with latex and stage blood.

The CSU boys kept glowering at him as
they vacuumed for hair and fiber and picked buckshot out of the drywall with
tweezers, carefully placing them in plastic zip-lock bags. Titus knew they had
a pretty good Crime Scene Unit, but he still
wanted to check the scene himself in the hope that he might catch something the
lab boys missed. He knew they hated anyone else working the scene but them.
They always bitched about contaminating evidence, but this was his case and he
probably knew as much about forensics as they did. Besides, there was more than
enough evidence to go around. The place was littered with it.

At twenty-five, Detective Baltimore was the
youngest homicide detective in the Philadelphia Police Department. He was a
prodigy who graduated from high school at thirteen, received a Ph.D. in
Forensic Psychology from Princeton at eighteen, and made detective by the age
of 21 after only two years on the street. After this case was over, the FBI
would no doubt recruit him to investigate serial murderers full-time. It was
what he had always wanted. He just knew everyone resented him. They called him
a kiss-ass, a brown-noser, said he hadn’t paid his dues, that he had risen to
the top off a high-powered education paid for by his rich daddy, and by knowing
the right people and saying the right things. They were right . . . and he
didn’t give a fuck. Why should he walk a beat rousting teenaged hookers and
drug dealers when he didn’t have to? He closed just as many cases as they did
without their years on the street getting shot at and beaten up by crazed
junkies and he would close this one, too.

Titus couldn’t believe
his luck. He was about to solve one of the worst serial killer cases in
Philadelphia history. If what he was hearing was correct and all three cases
were linked, the man who had savagely beaten, raped, murdered and mutilated the
Cozen family was responsible for more than two dozen murders dating back
fifteen years. The frenzied over-kill, the stabbing, the cannibalism, the
sexual assault, it was the same signature he had seen over and over again. The “Pine
Street Slasher” who had murdered fifteen gay men between the summers of ’90 and
’95. The sadistic butcher they called the “Chaperone” who had raped and
vivisected young women and their boyfriends between ’95 and ’99. And now the
killer who beat, stabbed, and partially cannibalized six entire families who
the press had dubbed the “Family Man.”

Could they all be the same man?

Ifthis new information was correct, they were all the work of one psychopath. The same
monster shot little Mark Cozen with a shotgun at point blank range. The same
sick fucker who hacked little Jennie Cozen to pieces while her mother and
father watched then raped and vivisected Linda Cozen and ate her alive.

The crime scene was scattered with
enough physical evidence for a dozen convictions. Footprints, teeth
impressions, semen, pubic hair, even bloody fingerprints on the murder weapon
still sticking out from what was left of Mrs. Cozen’s chest. And he had a
witness, a survivor, who could not only give a description of the murderer but
the killer’s name as well . . . Malcolm Davis. This case was solved, and “Tight Ass” Titus Baltimore was certain that
he was about to be a hero.

“How can you be sure it was him? I mean, you
hadn’t seen him in fifteen years before tonight?”

“We were best friends in high school. I remember
him.”

“Well, you’ll excuse me for saying this,”
Detective Baltimore surveyed the carnage that surrounded him, “but this doesn’t
look too friendly.”

“We had a falling out. Years ago. Back in high
school.” Reed was in shock. The EMS technicians were trying to explain to him
why they couldn’t tape his shattered ribs while they bandaged his busted nose
in place and pumped him full of painkillers. Detective Baltimore was trying to
pump him for details.

“So he kills your family but leaves you alive?
Did he say anything to you? Besides confessing to having killed all those
people?”

“He told me that I’m the only one he’d let catch
him. He told me not to get the cops involved because they couldn’t stop him.
That it was just between him and me.”

“Well, like it or not, we’re involved and we’re
going to catch this bastard. I promise you. There will be justice for your
family.”

Detective Baltimore was the worst kind of
asshole, the kind that knows he’s a little shit but doesn’t care. He could see
that Reed didn’t trust him. That was going to be an obstacle. If he couldn’t
get Reed to trust him, getting information from him would be difficult.

Titus was used to distrust. He dealt
with it every day on the job. There was too much swagger about him. His clothes
looked too expensive and he was too young and cocky. To most people he looked
like a con man, a politician, or a stand-up comedian rather than a cop. He was
a pretty boy, and it was obvious that Reed hated pretty boys, especially pretty
boys with authority. But Titus didn’t care. He didn’t care that Reed’s entire
life had been ruthlessly undone. He was only interested in making a name for
himself in the department by solving the crime of the century. Reed knew it and
Detective Baltimore knew he knew it and didn’t give two shits.

“Okay, do you mind if we go over the whole
sequence of events step-by-step so I can get it clear in my head?”

“Yes, I do mind! My family is dead! Fuck your
report. Just go catch that bastard!” Reed nearly passed out from the exertion
of screaming. Titus leaned forward to catch him but Reed shrugged him off then
winced and swooned again.

“Jesus! My fucking ribs.” His eyes
looked dazed and unfocused. He blinked several times and shook his head as he
doubled over and held his ribs with both arms. Titus was certain the man was
about to either lose consciousness or lose his dinner. He had to lean on one of
the EMTs to keep from falling off the gurney into a pool of his wife’s blood.
Titus sighed and tapped his foot, not sure if the man was really in that much
pain or just putting on an act so he wouldn’t have to talk anymore.

“Sorry, Detective. We need to get this man to a
hospital. He may have a concussion and his blood pressure is dropping. There
may be some internal bleeding.”

“Yeah, yeah,
okay. I guess this can wait until tomorrow. We’ve got enough to go on so far
anyway.”

The EMTs laid Reed back onto the gurney and
wheeled him outside. Reporters were already crowding the sidewalk, swarming
like flies over carrion. Titus followed the EMTs out to get his moment in the
media spotlight. When Titus walked out, the first person he saw was Lieutenant
Woo, the official head of the Family Man Task Force.

Woo was a figurehead. His job was
mostly to handle the media and give them clever sound bites that painted the
PPD in the best possible light. He hadn’t stepped one foot onto the crime
scene, but he was out there talking as if he personally had the whole case
wrapped up. He made repeated references to
his
team and
his
taskforce.
The press looked bored and annoyed. Apparently, they didn’t buy his act either.
Baltimore had been running the investigation long before the task force was
established and, in spite of the so-called task force, it was still his show
and everyone knew it.

“Detective Baltimore! Detective Baltimore! What
happened here? Are they all dead? Is it the Family Man again? Do you have any
suspects?”

“You can get rid of that Family Man
tag. I’ve got a better name for you . . . Marcus Davis. He has been positively
identified and we will have him in custody before the sun rises. I promise you
that. Now if you’d excuse me, I have an investigation to conduct.”

He turned and strode back into the
house, ignoring all the questions and secretly patting himself on the back for
how well he’d handled the ghouls. Always leave them hungry for more. And there
would be more. There was still the arrest and the trial. Titus would make
certain that neither Lieutenant Woo nor some hot shot DA would steal his glory.
He would make sure the press knew what an airtight case he’d handed the
District Attorney’s office, a case that a monkey could win.

Yeah, he would put it just like that,
“a case that a monkey could win.” That should
make sure that credit went where it was due. He laughed to himself. They had
given him this case because no one had been able to solve it so far, and they figured the hotshot detective would do no
better. They were all standing around waiting for him to fall on his face. He
showed the fuckers.

The eight-man task force that was
assigned to the “Family Man” murders, led by Lieutenant David Woo, who everyone
called Big Bird because he was Chinese and nearly 6’8”, had not done a damn
thing. Officially, Titus and his partner, Detective James, were part of the
task force. Unofficially, they were the task force. The others were just
legmen, gophers, and backup in case they needed it. They were good for running
down leads, cataloguing phone tips, and doing follow up research, but when it
came to the crime scene investigations and interviewing suspects and witnesses,
Titus wanted the other detectives as far away as possible. Lieutenant Woo
wasn’t a problem, either. He only showed up to
do TV interviews and get daily progress reports on how the investigation was
going. He was still out there with the press, trying to put in the groundwork
for a run at the Police Commissioner’s office. Titus understood the man’s ambition.
He had ambitions of his own.

After nearly a year of work on these
killings, the case had solved itself and two other serial-killer cases still on
the books. Malcolm Davis. As Titus thought about the cases, he began to see the pattern. It was a downward
spiral, a degenerative cycle. The increasing number of victims, from single men
to couples to entire families, was a sign of control loss. It was like a drug
addict progressing from smoking weed to snorting speed to smoking crack. The
killer had developed a tolerance and needed more and more violence to satisfy
his addiction. That explained the multiple victims and the increasing savagery
of the attacks, progressing from stabbing to cutting to dissection to biting
and, finally, to cannibalism. The killer was out of control and making
mistakes.

In all the other murders, he had been careful to leave no physical evidence.
He wore gloves to hide his fingerprints, and wore a condom to avoid leaving his
DNA traces in his semen. He cut up the bite wounds to make it impossible for
the police to cast the indentations to match against dental records; a remote
possibility, but one that proved “our boy” was careful. They even suspected he
vacuumed the crime scene to remove hair and fibers. But now he had left more evidence
then they knew what to do with, had attacked someone who knew him and could
identify him, and then left that victim alive. It was too good to be true.