A Last Act of Charity (Killing Sisters Book 1) (8 page)

Nothing doing. Tapping the space bar with the tool produced nothing; the machine was shut down. He thought about this.

‘Excuse me, m’lady, I’ll just shut down my computer before we do that sex thing.’

It didn’t ring true. Nor did an alternative vision in which ferocious murderer, having just ripped at least one eye and a few desperate fingernails from his victim, paused before his emergency
exit to power down a nearby computer. Computers turn themselves into a sleep mode; prodding a key, any key, wakes them up. It’s universal. A mystery. He could reach the On switch without wading through the bloody carpet, but only just, and there was always a risk of an embarrassing slip. The carded track through the swampy carpet was not the most stable pathway in the world, and placing lateral loads on the card itself could produce an unwanted surfing effect, which easily resulted in brave investigator on bloody knees and a future explanation to his masters which would be more than a little embarrassing.

But it felt important. If the netbook’s screen was open, it suggested that its operator had been using it while his guest was in the room. If he’d finished whatever task had been in hand he would not only have switched it off but would also have closed the lid. So it seemed to Stoner, who risked collapse and embarrassment by reaching to his limit and pressing the On button. The power light lit . . . but only briefly. One very flat battery was the likely reason, then. OK. The netbook would have been inventoried by the SOC team so needed to stay where it was. Time, then, for a mental note.

For no reason he could explain, Stoner stared through the room’s window. He may have felt a need to let his eyes rest on something further away, relaxing focus often reveals otherwise lost details. Details like the whole-palm print dead centre on the main pane.

Stoner pulled his cell phone from the leg pocket of his cargoes, flipped it open, took three pics of the print at maximum zoom, such as it was, and sent the least poor of them to the Hard Man along with ‘Anyone we know?’ which might stimulate a response at some point. There was no sign of fingerprint powder on the glass, so far as he could see . . . not that this meant much. Forensic science moves and improves rapidly.

He also sent an image of the netbook and, entirely to be
irritating, of the lonely drying eye. And then he left the room, a man with thinking to do, and maybe a long walk over which to do it. He dropped the keycard back at the reception, eliciting a ‘Thank you, Mr La Forge . . .’ said without a trace of humour. Star Trek was a seemingly endless source of worknames.

‘Thank Mr Riker for me, please.’

The Hard Man always liked to be Number One.

8

PAST TIMES

‘Do you remember .’

The Hard Man was drifting into whimsy, it seemed.

‘Do you remember the pornographer?’

‘Yes. Of course. How on earth could I forget?’

‘It would not be easy. She was an unforgettable person. So few persons you meet in this life are like that.’ He stopped. Looked a little lost. Stoner had seen this expression before. It was never genuine, never an honest representation of the way the Hard Man was feeling. And in any case, he remembered the pornographer very well, too well for good sense, probably. ‘Do you think there’s a connection?’ A polite question. Stoner could see one way in which the current case could be connected to that earlier episode, but only in that both cases involved violent death. Which in itself and given their line of work was not particularly remarkable.

‘I always felt that she was an unusual woman. It was unfortunate that she ended what should have been a fine career in the way she did.’ The Hard Man was still looking faintly sorrowful. Hang-dog expressions were strangers to his generally and falsely genial features. ‘And I don’t know about any serious connection.
You know how I never place any value at all in hunches, even when they’re my own hunches and therefore probably worth no more than anyone else’s. Well, I just have a hunch.’

The lady both gentlemen referred to as ‘the pornographer’ had been exactly that. But with the unusual twist that the co-stars in her take on the very old and very human game of let’s make babies were usually unaware of their starring status. It had been an earlier, possibly a more innocent internet age, a time when much of the interconnectedness of the ethers was new and when squalid exploitation of the information hyper-highway was in its youth. Unlike most of the pornographer’s willing participants, who were rarely particularly youthful but often shared a tendency towards wealth.

‘I can’t see a connection here, not a real one . . . a valid one.’ Stoner decided to push the Hard Man into continuing. The business with the pornographer was one of the few occasions on which the Hard Man had visibly struggled; Stoner had enjoyed the case, not least because of the Hard Man’s evident dis comfort. So he continued. ‘Mean to say. The pornoperson shot her victims only with a camera. She didn’t slice them up and scatter bits of their bodies all about the place. Don’t think anyone actually died, did they? They might have been in pain, distress, but she didn’t in fact actually stop anyone’s heart beating. Put up a few pulse rates, but stopped before actual coronary failure. Put up your own rate, didn’t she? At least a little?’

‘You’re an idiot,’ said the Hard Man without animosity, said without heat; said without any indication of intelligent thought behind the mouthwork; on autopilot. ‘You mostly are.’

‘And thank you for those few kind words.’ Stoner’s attempt at reactivating the Hard Man had been less than one hundred per cent effective, then.

‘She was clever. She misled. She dissembled with symbols everywhere.’ The Hard Man was really drifting now. It was an
unusual sight; a sight to be relished, enjoyed, appreciated. ‘Like this one. This is clever. I don’t believe any of it. Apart from the poor sod who’s been clipped I don’t see any of the truth before me. You?’

Stoner pulled himself away from his gentle amusement at the Hard Man’s unusual distraction and dragged his thoughts back to the crime scene. Even in its state of bodylessness it was as close as he had been to the killer.

‘I just saw a murder scene. Really messy. Damage done by someone stronger than average. Someone with rage, too.’ Stoner remembered. Went silent.

‘Come along, JJ. This isn’t the first scene you’ve looked at, and I doubt it’ll be the last. You’re not a kiddie. Give me something.’ The Hard Man was plainly feeling benign, his manner almost gentle.

Stoner looked up. ‘Next time, leave the rest of the body at the scene for a while? Give me more to look at than bits. That might be useful.’

The Hard Man ignored him, drifting back to his hunch.

‘It’s not the body, JJ. It’s not that. Not exactly. Bodies is bodies; dead is just that . . . dead. It’s the filming. I’m unsure why that seems so important, but it does. Something inside says that the filming is more important than the killing. Hence my thoughts on the pornographer.’

He paused. Stoner prompted him, quietly.

‘Heather, wasn’t it? Heather’ . . . he paused . . . ‘someone.’

The Hard Man nodded. Caught Stoner’s wandering glance before it escaped.

‘You know full well it was. Don’t play games. Not about her and not about the thing she did and not,’ he paused for power, ‘not now. That is unamusing. And I would not like that lack of amusement to cloud my thinking or my respect for your competence and your suitability for this . . . this job to become in any
way infirm. Do not fuck about with me on this, JJ. Do not play any games. We would have a fight. You would lose the fight and I would retire you from my very short list of professional friends. Retirement in this case would be permanent. In the same way as the pornographer’s retirement was permanent. She cannot recover from it, and neither would you.’

Stoner smiled at his companion.

‘Bloody hell, I’d no idea it hurt that much.’

‘It did. You should accept that fact and move on. An ability to learn from understanding and from experience is what distinguishes us superior humans from a sack of shit on the sidewalk, JJ, and I for one remember that.’

The pornographer had been a lady of considerable appetite. She had two major attributes which assisted her relentless aim to fulfil that appetite; she was both wealthy and she was stunningly attractive. She did what she did with men – and occasionally with women – entirely for amusement. For personal power. Because she enjoyed it.

She fucked wealthy men and she filmed them enjoying themselves. Not for her the single static lens. These are digital days, the age of the cheap camera and the cheap operator. She set up an ever-increasing number of recording devices around her bedrooms and bathrooms, kitchens, gym and living rooms, and she filmed lots of physical exercises in them all. When she was exercising with a particularly interesting person or two, she would employ the services of a camera operator, who could zoom and pull focus while the players zoomed and pulled things of their own. And afterwards she would sit down and edit her movies into something less like a home video and more like a blue movie. She became the pornographer when she sent the first of these to one of its more affluent participant co-stars and suggested that he keep it as a memento. She said no more than that, and she needed to say no more.

At that point she asked for nothing in return. Free home movies, shared with consenting participants.

Her client base grew steadily. She was expert at what she could do with a man, particularly with an older man, where skill and its application are particularly useful in extracting maximum performance from flesh which had already seen it all, and done it all too many times for just another bed-buddy to be arousing in itself. Many of her men friends recommended her to their own friends. Stoner had found it particularly interesting that even when her men had been the surprised recipients of her feature films many of them still suggested that their friends and colleagues paid her a visit. Unity in numbers, perhaps.

Inevitably, she asked for a favour or two. Eventually she asked for a favour too far from a man who was less of a friend than he pretended, and the Hard Man was asked to take an interest. Possibly predictably, the Hard Man was already in possession of a couple of movies in which he was the star, and one in which he played an atypical supporting role to more stellar performances. A subordinate position which he felt did not reflect well on his hard man image, and which he felt would be embarrassing if made more public.

More embarrassing yet was that the Hard Man plainly suffered from feelings for the pornographer herself. He knew what she was and he knew what she did, although the scale and variety he discovered when he sent operators – Stoner among them – to retrieve ever more of the movies was at least a small surprise.

In the end, as pressure on him mounted, as more of his governmental colleagues and commanders suggested ever more firmly that their problems be resolved, he took Stoner into his confidence, and asked that Stoner fix the situation in a permanent way. Which he did.

No one had asked him how, where or even when, but the pornographer’s sudden silence talked louder than any obituary. Her impressive movie collection was somewhere in the Hard Man’s private archive, mostly. Stoner’s relationship with the Hard Man had improved from his own perspective after this case, not least because of the suggestion that he might have retained copies of some of the more adventurous movies, such is the ease of duplication in the digital age. Untraceable duplication. It was a non-subject from the moment of the pornographer’s sudden and complete silence and disappearance.

But a connection with the hotel murders? That had been provided by the revelation that the last task of the computers left at the most recent scenes had been recording the bodies they shared the room with. Large movie files, not that there was actually any movement, because the only visible actor was a dead actor. And the movie – the still death movie – had been streamed live to a website; one site among the many sicko sites frequented by those strange souls who were fans of crime, crime real and crime imagined.

The Hard Man had connected the two. The pornographer who filmed her bedmates and a killer who filmed his victims. Stoner was unconvinced, and a little surprised at the alleged connection.

‘I’m unconvinced,’ he remarked to the Hard Man. ‘I can’t see any connection at all here. The pornographer is long gone, and she never was a killer. She might have broken a few hearts and damaged a few wallets’ – the Hard Man glowered at him – ‘but she was no killer.’

‘Fool. I’m not suggesting she was the killer. My thought is that if someone’s filming the crimes then there’s a reason for that, and I doubt it’s to keep some sick fansite happy. You make a movie for a reason. Only for a reason. They make good levers. I
can’t see what it is. Open your mind, JJ. Look at more than the method. We need to find this guy, and soon.’

‘You want to offer him a job?’

No humour in Stoner’s question.

‘Who knows, my friend? Who knows . . .’

9

WHERE SHADOWS RUN FROM THEMSELVES

‘Why do men get murdered in hotels?’

The dirty blonde was plainly getting well into this.

‘It’s like, y’know, if I wanted to kill someone, not that I would, much, but like you always say, given the right, thing . . . incentive, um, need . . . then I might. If I did, I’d do it long away, long distance, long range. What’s that you called it?’

‘Long gun. You’d use a long gun.’

Sometimes I do believe that I am the only person who knows what she’s talking about. Including herself.

‘Right. The long gun. Why are they always long guns? Do you get short guns also? I’ve never heard of a short gun. I read a story about a lazy gun once, and there was something . . . oh I dunno . . . something about a smart gun which could speak and aim itself. That would be superb, wouldn’t it though?’

Reality, like food, wasn’t always a necessary requirement for the dirty blonde.

‘But. Hotels? Why in a hotel? Why not be like that Russian? Kick the guy with a poison shoe in a crowded street, make with the apologies and then clear off quick before he falls over. No
one could ever catch you then. Why a hotel? Jesus. It wasn’t even a nice hotel. I go to loads better hotels than that one. Didn’t even have a minibar. Jesus. I can’t see that anywhere would be a great place to die, exactly, but some are less worse than others. Was he pissed up? How could he be? No minibar. Jesus. That is cheap. If I die in an hotel, it needs to have a bar. A big bar. I want a wake before I die. No point afterwards. Why would anyone choose to die in a cheap pit? Why would anyone choose to, y’know, off someone in a cheap pit?’

There are moments when it is OK to take time for a little explanation. This was one. Maybe.

‘Hotels are convenient. Hotels are convenient for lots and lots of things. And it’s not too difficult to get guys to go to hotels. They do it all the time. Some guys just about live in hotels. Setting up a hit is only an inexact science if you’re an amateur, if you’re just doing it the once. I think this guy, our guy here, is a pro. So, if you arrange to meet a guy in a hotel, it’s not too hard to get into his room. Particularly if you’re a girl. OK? You know this better than me.’

I can feel myself wince inside at this, but it’s true. The dirty blonde never flinches about what she does. It’s just a job. Like decorating or fixing cars. Her wallpaper would peel, her paint would flake and her cars would always break down. And some clown would always be there to fix them for her. In her world there is always some handy guy to fix everything, pay for everything. That’s what guys do in the dirty blonde’s world. It must be the same for everyone. That’s what she thinks. And what she thinks is true . . . for her.

‘Yeah, yeah. What you’re saying then, JJ, is that the john, the mark, yes, gets invited to his own room by a lady he’s just met, or by a lady he knows and is meeting, and then just as he thinks Christmas is about to come early and he’s going to do a little of the premature rubber stocking filling thing, zap. Lady pops out
for a moment to . . . to do what? . . . and in pops the hitter. Bango bingo, and goodnight gay Lothario? Is that how he’s doing it? It would be easier, less unreliable, if the lady was a hitter. Is she? Could I do that? Is it murderous, murder? It always seems easy enough on the TV, in the movies. Although it would be crap if you knew the mark.

‘Hey look. I’ve been to hotels . . . yeah yeah, I know you’re uncomfy, but . . . I’ve been to lots of hotels with lots of guys and afterwards, when they’ve done what they pay to do, well I could off them. Some of them. Some of them are ass. Really ass. Next time . . . next time I get sweaty with some really hideous ass I’ll work my thoughts around the idea of killing him. I have to think of something unless the john’s actually useful in the sheets anyway. Most of them have no clue. Not a simple clue. Some take bloody ages. You wouldn’t believe this, but . . .’

I interrupt. I need to interrupt.

‘I’d doubt that, really. There are very few female hitters. I’ve only ever met the one, in fact. And she was retiring at the time. And shy . . .’

The dirty blonde switched from reminiscing to considering. I carried on before she started with more of the sweaty sheet stories.

‘But hotels? They’re good. You can arrange for the room to be booked for a few days and hang a Do Not Disturb notice outside so that you are really long gone before the victim gets discovered by an eager public. Not very nice if you’re the employee doing the discovering, but you can fix that by calling after you’ve left and telling the constables that there’s a body awaiting their immediate attention. That works well.

‘There’s almost no danger of being disturbed by soon-to-be-grieving relatives, either. Not in a hotel. Can’t imagine that it’s very great, having the front door open just after you’ve offed some fine chap, and his wife, mother, daughter, lover come
wandering in, expecting . . . well . . . whatever folk expect when they go see their dad, boyfriend. Whatever. It’s . . .’

‘Has that happened to you? Has some relative, y’know, strolled in while you were banging away? It’s happened to me more than once. Oh yes. First time you think you’re going to die of shock, but your shock is nothing like their shock, and . . .’

‘What?’ Sometimes the dirty blonde’s concentration lapses can be amazing; truly they can. ‘You’ve what, been interrupted while offing some clown? You have actually killed someone?’ Amazing. Amazing if true. I had no idea. But it was possible. I know very little of her younger days. Surprisingly little.

‘Soft lad. Banging for me and banging for you are different beasts. Not that I bang animals. Much. Ho ho. Laugh with me. Hold my hand. But no no; I meant that being caught on the job is a hazard which transcends occupations, at a guess. Although when some third party wanders in it’s usually been planned in my world. Some smart ass wants to invite a friend. Takes all sorts. Happens a lot. But usually, usually I know about it beforehand. Y’know?’

I’m not comfortable with this. I say so. Not for the first time. She smiles at me. The dirty blonde winds me up. She enjoys winding me up. She tells me that she only winds up folk she cares about. Why would she wind up someone if she didn’t care about them? There’s no answer to that. She manages serious sex, sucks and fucks all manner of folk she cares nothing at all about. Why would she be bothered about a little humour at their expense? Quite serious expense, from what I know of her. I try to picture caring so little about someone that you’d sleep with them but not provide humour to stroll alongside the sex. I fail to picture this.

I am no prude. Believe me on this. I know many many girls of the game. It is impossible not to if you are a creature whose paid professions drag you through the long nights, whose
preferred occupation finds you sitting in the dark smoky clubs waiting for inspiration and release to descend into your lap. Boredom produces many strange bedfellows, in every sense. Random bedfellows; every shade and preferred delight. It’s inevitable

‘And if it’s a woman hitter . . .’ I stop to think about this a little. There is a connection. A chap should never ignore connections. Coincidences are always there for a reason. Few events are truly random. ‘If it’s a woman doing the hitting, she would have trouble ditching the corpse. Bodies are big lumps. They are inconvenient. These hits get left. Hmmm. A woman. Worth thinking about.’

The dirty blonde glows a little. So little flattery. So little effort is required to make her feel better. A tiny appreciation of more than just her physical attributes. It is so easy to see, so simple to understand why I am so attracted. And of course why so many other men are likewise.

‘What do you do with your bodies, then, JJ?’

‘I have no bodies. There are no bodies. Once upon a time there may have been bodies for which I was in some way responsible, but no more. Not for a while.’

‘Yeah yeah, and if you say it, then it must be true. But what if there were? What if there were bodies. What if you’d offed them? What then? What do you do with them?’

‘It depends.’

‘Depends on what? Oh come on, JJ, this is fun, tell me lots and lots! I mean. It’s always great when you talk about your playing. When you talk about the guys down at the Blue Cube. Some of them are OK. Not all of them are my customers, y’know? OK! OK! That was a joke. I know nothing. I know nothing of them . . . professionally.’

She rolls out the word ‘professionally’ like it’s a long, wet, red carpet.

‘But you don’t talk about your work. What your work is. Your
real work. Killing works for you. That twat comes and asks you to take a job with him. You go away. You disappear. You come back a bit and then you go away again. You go away more often than it is possible for anyone to go away unless they’re the queen or a rock star on tour. Then you’re back and then you’re in the heavy money for a bit.

‘You say you solve things for that twat. But what? What do you solve? Why do you solve things? The police do solving. I reckon you kill folk for the twat. I reckon you kill them and he pays you to kill them.’

She draws breath.

I feel sad. Very low-down internal sadness. We talk and we talk and we talk, and OK if she likes the music. And OK if she gets a cheap place to live and to hide away when she wants to forget the life for a while. And she likes the bikes and she likes spending the money. But when she decides that I swan about killing things, then she gets almost excited. She’s always comfortable if I’m forced to sort someone out. Always likes that. It turns her on. Sexually, I mean. Real wetleg stuff. She’s straight about that. Not much gets through to her sexually – and there is little surprise at all in that. But downing someone? She likes that. She does.

I tell her about the previous evening’s undynamic duo. She rolls from the bed, floats over to my Caterpillar boots and lifts one. Gazes at its sole. Really intent stare. ‘Is this blood?’ She wipes her fingers along the sole. Looks at them closely.

‘More likely to be street shit,’ I say, suddenly keen on cleaning my boots. I resolve to get myself some stout brushes. She drops the Caterpillar boot. Walks into the bathroom. A tap rushes water. There are the sounds of hands being washed. She saunters back through the door. Her gaze is straight ahead; straight at me. She leans on the door frame, staring at me. Reaches over with her right hand and hefts her left breast. It is impossible to remain unmoved by this. Her left hand’s middle finger pushes slowly
but a surprisingly long way into her navel. Her right hand squeezes the breast it clasps.

‘Weapons,’ she breathes. ‘What weapons?’

Speechlessness is unbecoming. I feel ominous, piling, climbing, darkening rage. I know what is likely to happen. I need to walk. I need to walk far and I need to walk fast. I will need to hit someone. I will find a fight to finish or I will start a fight if I must. I sit up, back against the bed’s headboard. I aim to think. Aim to think of something to say. I don’t want to leave. I don’t want to spoil the party.

The dirty blonde lifts from the door frame. Her left hand’s middle finger is down to its second knuckle in her own navel, her own soft stomach. I can see the luminous sweat on her skin. It shines. Her right hand presses her left breast flat against her ribs, then releases it. Then lifts and squeezes, squeezes so the nipple leaps proudly, hard darkness against a lesser darkness. She rolls spit from her tongue and drips it onto her nipple. Again. Then again. Eyes smiling and lips snarling back into her cheeks, she walks towards me. It is hard not to rise, harder yet not to reach for her. She aims her nipple at my lips. I close my eyes but the nipple never lands. Instead I feel it rest against my sex, I feel the drops transferred from her to me. I wait shaking shuddering for what comes next.

The dirty blonde bounces on the mattress next to me.

‘Weapons!’

She laughs. The air is ripped from me.

‘What does this guy use for weapons? Guns? Knives? There was bloody crap everywhere, so was the vic carved up? You can’t do that with a gun, so knives?’

I stand and walk towards the door, towards the way out. My level of arousal is painful as it is embarrassing. I drag on pants, jeans, shoes. The dirty blonde is talking, calling out. I hear sounds. No words. Drop keys into pocket, snag jacket, leave.

Walking is the answer to everything. If I got paid a penny a mile I would be a rich man. But I don’t. Walking needs to be its own reward. Walking is not like playing music. Walking is not like fighting. Walking is not like fucking. Walking is pure and simple walking. It frees the mind and it wears me out. Walking lets me sleep. If I could walk far enough I doubt that I would need to fight. Probably I wouldn’t need to play. Maybe I could just play because I wanted to play, not because someone I don’t know who lives with me, inside me, drives me to do it and will not rest until the legs ache and the breath comes harsh, when the toes start to blister and all of the sweat has dried. When the pounding twelve-bar beat of the feet and the endlessly repeating verses of the walker drive the screaming, scratching, itching, fighting demon back into its dark little cave.

And of course cities are great places to walk. Cities provide pavements. They provide a million lonely pointless people to hide behind. They provide invisibility and anonymity. City pavements go up, they go down, they pass through canyons and caverns, they lead everywhere and nowhere, they have an endless purpose and no purpose at all. There are tunnels to dive into, stairs to climb. There are alleys and boulevards, wide parades and narrow passages. Not all pavements lead to the Blue Cube, although a surprising number of them do. I always walk the same walk, although start and end points are infinitely different. All of my life is one long interrupted walk. There are always pauses, there are always interludes, always stops along the way, but the walk will always start over. I doubt that it will end until I end, and some days I would welcome that day. Some nights would never end without the walking.

Tonight is not a night for the Blue Cube. Not even for the opportunity to be agreeably unpleasant to the folk who know me there. This is not a night for relaxation. I relaxed once tonight already and it was one relaxation too many. This is a night for
tension, which would make the strings sing, but if I picked up the guitar now I would maim someone with it. Maybe myself. A man needs to understand the limits of his self-control. Mine are infinite. A man of my mind can do anything. Of this I must endlessly and always remind myself.