Pure Hate (6 page)

A shiver slithered up Reed’s back and scampered
across his neck and shoulders. He stared at the detective, his eyes widening in
fear. He swallowed hard and tried to speak, but he had nothing to say.
What
could he say?
He wanted the detective to say something, to say that he
would stop Malcolm, that he would keep him from ever hurting anyone again.

James, feeling guilty, like maybe he had been a
little too harsh, offered Reed a few comforting words.

“Look, I don’t know if it helps any, but I think
Malcolm was deeply disturbed long before you came along.”

“Yeah, but would he have become what he’s become?
Would he be a killer if it weren’t for me?”

James didn’t know and he hated to think that
there might be any justification for the horrible things that had been done to
this man’s family, but he also believed that friends didn’t steal each other’s
girlfriends. Bros before hoes. That’s what he’d always preached and practiced.
This man had violated that male code and destroyed a man in the process. He had
paid with the lives of his family.

“I don’t know.”

James left without another word.

Renee’ Volare’ lived with her husband and three
boys in Fishtown, the white trash district. James found the entire neighborhood
depressing, pitiful, and just plain bizarre. Growing up in a black ghetto,
watching white people on TV who seemed to have everything except problems,
seeing these white people living like rats in this type of filth made no sense
to him. White folks in America had a four-hundred-year head start on black
people yet somehow this entire neighborhood had not just fallen behind, but
seemed to have failed to even get out of the blocks. The houses were not only
old and dilapidated, but they seemed to be
falling apart, covered in garbage. The hollow-eyed people who ambled through
the filth-strewn streets looked like holocaust victims: depressed, angry,
malnourished, defeated. G-town’s citizens looked optimistic in comparison.

Every teenager James passed was
either drunk or high. Every couple he passed was fighting, some of them
physically. Every elderly person he passed looked to be on the verge of tears.
And here he was, about to bring more bad news into this neighborhood that
already seemed to know too much. He could imagine the conversation to come.

“Mrs. Volare’,
there’s a very good possibility that a homicidal psychopath that you used to
date is on his way to murder you and your family.”

He hated it.

There were two patrol vehicles behind him,
escorting him to Ms. Volare’s house just in case Malcolm happened to be there. James
pulled up in front of the withered two-story shack and let out a deep, heavy
sigh. The house looked like shit. He doubted if it had been painted for
decades. What little paint still clung to the building’s crumbling brick face
was cracked and peeling. One of the second floor windows was been shattered and
had been covered in plastic rather than repaired. The veneer on the front door
was warped, splintered and water-stained. The concrete steps that led up to the
door had huge chunks missing, and most of the corners were broken off. There
was an old sheet that had once been white hung over the living room window in
lieu of drapes. As he stepped out of his vehicle and up the crumbling steps, he
saw what was perhaps the only thing that could make this whole miserable trip
worse. There was blood on the sheet. Lots of blood.

James pulled out his weapon and called for the
officers to follow him as he kicked in the door. The old weather-beaten door
split down the center and caved in on itself. James stepped through it into the
Volare’s living room. He waved the two officers in and they fanned out into the
house like commandos. They were apprehensive, scared. None of them wanted to be
the first one to confront the Family Man or the gruesome aftermath of one of
his rampages. They had their weapons drawn and their eyes were darting
everywhere at once. James mentally prepared himself for another scene like the
one at the Cozen’s house.

The living room was in a shambles,
but the house was so dirty and choked with clutter that it was difficult to
tell if the overall chaos was due to a struggle or merely bad housekeeping. The
remains of a spaghetti dinner were strewn all over the floor amid broken
dishes, empty beer cans, newspapers, old sports and fashion magazines, a
spilled ashtray, broken toys, and baby bottles half-filled with spoiled milk. A
child’s highchair lay in one corner on top of a plastic tricycle and there was
a long orange and yellow food stain down the wall where the chair had
apparently been thrown, splattering a plate of baby food.

The other officers were going through
the house, checking it room by room with their guns still drawn. It was empty.
All the rooms were in the same state of disarray. Much of the mess could’ve
been attributed to slovenly tenants, but the only thing that could not be
explained away was the stained sheet that hung from the window. There was blood
saturating the bottom half of the cloth with splatters as high as six feet.
Curiously, a large area on the carpet was completely clear. It looked as if it had
actually been scrubbed and vacuumed.

James stared at the huge clean spot,
remembering how the Family Man always cleaned up his crime scenes to destroy
evidence. This one, too, had been cleaned—but sloppily. James got on the radio
and called for the Crime Scene Unit. There was no doubt in his mind that
Malcolm Davis had been there.

But where were the bodies? Why had he
taken the bodies away? Was this some change in the pattern or was there some
special reason why he didn’t want these particular bodies found? Was he trying
to conceal this crime for some reason? Had there even been a crime here?

Detectives Tony Vargas and Mike
Willis, who were also assigned to the taskforce, showed up at the same time as
the Crime Scene Unit. Vargas, who seemed to change styles and fashions like a
chameleon, was wearing a black suit with gray pinstripes that was tapered at
the waist with big wide collars like a zoot suit. On his feet he wore black and
white Stacy Adams with tassels. His hair was slicked back and his moustache had
been shaved to a thin line tracing his upper lip. He looked like a gangster
from the roaring twenties. Willis, with his
big feet, big ears, pointy-head, glasses, long neck, and oversized Adam’s
apple, looked like Gomer Pyle. James was so overwhelmed by the case that he
couldn’t even think of anything sarcastic to say. Still, he couldn’t resist
shaking his head like an amused parent watching two slightly dimwitted though
well-meaning children.

“Okay, so what the fuck’ve we got
here?” Vargas drawled, with a Newport 100 dangling from his lip, dropping ashes
onto the carpet.

“I’m not sure. See all that blood on
the sheet? That’s not from no nose bleed.” James casually removed the cigarette
from Tony’s mouth and tossed it out the door. He didn’t feel he needed to explain
to him that a good defense attorney could convince a jury that those few
cigarette ashes had contaminated the entire crime scene, calling into question
the validity of anything they found there. If it was the detectives themselves
who brought in the cigarette ashes, who’s to say how much more of the evidence
was in fact left by them? It was an old argument that had fucked every
detective at one time or another.

“No shit!” Willis said, looking at
the gory sheet tacked to the upper corners of the window. “And look at this. It
looks like somebody’s been doin’ some cleaning and it sure as shit wasn’t the
slobs who live in this dump.”

Willis had the remarkable knack for
looking like a complete moron while in fact possessing one of the finest
investigative minds in the department.

“Let’s wait and see what the CSU boys
come up with,” James said

The two Crime Scene guys, one
Filipino and one black, were busy taking pictures, dusting for fingerprints,
and bagging and tagging anything that looked like it could possibly be
evidence. The last thing they did was spray everything with Luminal. The whole
room seemed to turn green. There was blood everywhere—on the walls, the floor,
the ceiling. A massacre had taken place here.

But where were the bodies?

“That much blood, I’d say we were
definitely looking at a murder scene,” the effeminate looking Filipino offered,
though his observation was hardly needed. The way the blood was splattered
floor to ceiling suggested an arterial spray that could only have come from
mortal wounds.

“Could one body have produced this
much blood?” Vargas asked.

“Not even if you drained every last drop of blood out
of it,” the technician replied. “See the way the blood sprayed all the way
across the room here and almost hit the ceiling?”

He pointed to the glowing trail of Luminal begun at
the larger puddle in the middle of the room, trailed across the floor, and
climbed the far wall.

“That had to have been a powerful blow and most likely
one of the first. But after awhile, there
wouldn’t have been enough blood left in the body to spray like that. It would
have just kind of dripped, but there is blood sprayed in every direction. That
indicates to me that we are looking at multiple victims. Multiple casualties.”

“The Family Man.” Vargas said, almost
to himself

“Yeah, but where is the family? Where
are the bodies?” the CSU tech asked.

It was a rhetorical question. Nobody
in the room had a clue what happened to that family, and probably never would
unless they caught Malcolm and he led them to the bodies.

James was exhausted when he finally
left Fishtown. The last thing he wanted to do was head to the station and toil
over paperwork. He needed to lose himself for a while. He needed a place where
the drinks, the thrills, and the women were cheap and plentiful. The Star Bar
fit two of the criterion, and two out of three ain’t ever bad. He cruised down
Market Street slowly to make sure none of the vice cops he knew were hanging
around. Even though every red-blooded American boy occasionally visited the local
titty bar, he didn’t want his fellow officers to see him out creepin’. He
didn’t want it getting around the department that he was some kind of
degenerate. The bright red, white, and blue neon that surrounded the huge
marquee, featuring names like Misty Towers and Tawny
Peaks, illuminated his car as he drove by the gaudy little strip club. James
turned the corner onto Tenth Street and guided his Intrepid into the alley
behind the club. James briefly wondered if it was
against policy to use an official vehicle to cruise for pussy, but then
he dismissed the thought. After all, he was just going to look at the pussy. It
wasn’t like he was buying a taste. If confronted, he could always say he was
looking for leads or an informant.

The back door was locked so James walked
all the way around to the front of the building, an
inconvenience that almost made him call the whole adventure off. He was still
paranoid about being spotted by another cop, especially those gossipy
hens in Vice. They’d once chased a cop out of town by
letting it be known around the department that he’d been spotted cruising Pine
Street where the transvestite hookers ply their trade. No one had actually
witnessed him propositioning any of them, but the suspicion alone was
enough for his fellow peace officers to make his life hell. They put dildos on
his car seat along with AIDS awareness pamphlets and gay magazines. Finally,
the poor guy had enough and transferred to some New Jersey PD. Apparently that wasn’t far enough because his first
day on the new job, someone taped a huge glossy picture of a penis
clipped from a porno mag on the back of his squad car. The dishonored officer
didn’t even know it until some sweet old lady nearly had a heart attack and
called in to report him for obscenity. He was let go
soon afterward. James didn’t need that kind of drama in his life.

No one that he recognized
from the force was around so he scurried inside. His guilty expression and body language
screamed “perp.” It annoyed him that the wrangler who stood out front, tempting
sex starved perverts like himself with promises of the world’s most exotic
erotic dancers, knew him by name. It annoyed him to think about how much money
he’d wasted in these types of places since the divorce. It annoyed him that the
scandalous hoes that worked there charging twenty dollars a lap dance knew he
was an easy mark.

The moment he walked in, his eyes
zeroed in on an average looking young blonde with a remarkably above average
ass. In fact, it was the most perfect ass he could ever recall seeing. A Prince
song was playing as she dry humped the air. The Purple One wailed out
“Irresistible Bitch” to an infectious driving bass beat and the blonde bent
over and did that little booty shake thing then went into the butterfly. James
loved T&A but he was particularly partial to A. He found himself
irresistibly sprung. James went straight to the ATM machine by the coat check,
withdrew two hundred dollars, and immediately asked the cocktail waitress for a
hundred one-dollar bills. He plopped down in a chair by the stage, still
transfixed by the bounce and wiggle of that most perfect ass.

It annoyed him how easy it was to
access and be parted from your money in these places. He hadn’t had one sip of
alcohol and he was already stuffing fifty one-dollar bills in the dancer’s
g-string. It was starting to look like a grass skirt. But she was smiling and
bouncing that ass in his face and for once the Family Man murder case was the
furthest thing from his mind.

The more he looked at her, the more pedestrian her appearance became to him.
She would never be called beautiful, but there was an aura of raw animalistic
sexuality around her . . . or maybe it was just the ass. The song ended and
she stepped down from the stage. She suddenly looked shy and self-conscious.
She was new at this. James waved her over.

“Hi, you . . . uh . . . you want a
dance?”

He wondered if the shy, innocent
thing was just an act. If it was, it was working.

“Certainly.”

She slid onto his lap and straddled
his growing erection. A hip-hop song featuring a rap artist named DMX came on
and she began to gyrate her hips to the beat.

“What’s your name, gorgeous?”

“Candy . . . um . . . CC. My friends
call me CC.”

“How long have you been working
here?”

“I just started on Monday. Whoa, you’ve
got some serious muscle under there.” She ran her hands over his arms and
chest, nodding and smiling her approval.

“I used to box. I still hit the gym
every now and then.” Actually, he spent about two hours every morning lifting
weights, skipping rope, and pounding the heavy bag.

“What do you do now?”

Now it was his turn to hesitate. “I .
. . uh . . . I’m a Homicide Detective.”

He waited for the awkward pause in
the conversation, the sudden chill in her mood. Being a policeman to most
people was like being a wife beater or a child abuser. It brought to mind
images of cops in riot gear siccing attack dogs and fire-hoses on peaceful
demonstrators or, more recently, of racist assholes clubbing black motorists
half to death. Being a homicide detective was like being a mortician or worse,
a grave robber. To the average citizen, he was some kind of sadistic
necrophile. But CC seemed different.