A Passing Curse (2011) (3 page)

Red Gloves yelled. The big soldier pawed at the Buck knife sticking out of his eye.

She rolled and kept rolling and praying and running, feeling slow and ponderous and stumbling and getting her feet right, finally, heading for the rifle and hoping it was loaded, hearing the heavy steps behind her.

Half expecting to be tackled, she jumped for the rifle, grabbed it, rolled over, checked the safety was off, and pulled the trigger. Nothing. She jacked in a fresh round and stood. Her head felt hot.

Ten feet in front of her, Red Gloves had tripped with his pants around his ankles. He sat in the snow fumbling with the pistol snagged in his jacket. She aimed from the hip and fired.

It looked, for a moment, as if she had missed, and then Red Gloves frowned and dabbed at the new blood on his chest. She reloaded and fired again, this time blowing off the side of his face. She walked around Red Gloves and gut shot the big soldier. He was so preoccupied with the knife sticking from his eye, gently touching the handle, that for a second he did not notice the hollow point hitting his body. The second shot was higher and ripped apart his padded jacket. Chicken feathers, she saw, red and clotting the snow. The big soldier cooed in astonishment, brought his hands down from the knife, and tried to push himself back in.

The third soldier was up and stumbling toward the Kalishnakovs leaning against the wall. She jacked the last shell in the rifle. She walked around the big soldier, who had tucked himself into a ball, softly crying. She reminded herself to retrieve the knife later.

She felt lightheaded and dizzy and hoped she could kill the last one cleanly.

Reese Tarrant dumped Melissa Cunningham’s purse on his desk. He ignored the flurry of detectives surrounding his cubicle. He ignored the atmosphere of sleep debt and caffeine panic: phones barely cradled before ringing again, reports of new killings as suspects in old killings, heavy-voiced, yelled for their phone call, their coffee, something to smoke, something to eat, some respect, a lawyer.

Homicide and its den of womanless men, he thought. Bachelors, mostly divorced, with hooker girlfriends or barmaids or strippers. Who else would want us? Nurses, yes, don’t forget the nurses.

He spread out Melissa Cunningham’s belongings: a package of Marlboro lights, diet pills, tubes and flat ovals of makeup, make-up brushes, a business card from a talent agency, a hastily scribbled number tagged “Mom.” There were pens and rubber bands and paper clips, a red brush with strands of raven hair wrapping the tines. A man’s comb. He found no rubbers, no vaseline, no joints, no rolled up crank or coke or smack, no hitter pipes, no needles, no bent spoons, no knives or ice picks, no tiny automatics. It was a clean purse in that respect. The purse of someone who still had hope.

Lieutenant Steve Carsabi walked up and slipped into the chair opposite him. He was snake thin, a dark face, bloodshot eyes. Reese wondered why he looked so glum. “I hear you caught a big break,” Carsabi said. “Hernandez kept the victim conscious until you finally showed with Bulow.” Carsabi raised his eyebrows to signal he doubted anything Hernandez might say.

“Hernandez?” Reese shook his head. “He carries three pistols. His service automatic, two compacts on each ankle.”

Carsabi bit the bottom of his lip and said, “Hernandez.”

Reese continued, “My big break, as you call it, is a sketch. Nothing at the crime scene, as usual. You read the report.”

Carsabi nodded. “She didn’t know the killer.” Not a question.

“Our boy’s too shy for that, but I asked.” He remembered nearly twisting her ear off. “Had to.”

Carsabi looked at him briefly and began. “The suspect follows the female victim home from a nightclub. When she opens her front door, he comes from behind and clamps a cotton pad soaked with ether over her nose and mouth. This puts her out. He drags her to the kitchen and stitches her mouth shut with baling wire. He pushes short pieces, pre-cut, through her lips and twists them tight with pliers. He removes her clothes with scissors. He inserts a number-eight needle in the jugular vein. The needle is connected with surgical tubing to a two and a half gallon water jug. The kind with the handle on top. The kind you buy at the store.”

“Any store.”

When Carsabi shook his head, tightening lips and eyes, as if sick of thinking about the case, Reese finished for him. “He lets the heart do its work. Then he finds a vein in the groin, inserts another number-eight, hooks it to the kitchen faucet. He’s in no hurry and eats fresh fruit if he finds it. We’ve found apple cores and banana peels but nothing to correspond in the victim’s stomach. He’s very careful and leaves no traceable saliva. Probably brings his own spoon. He once ate a large bowl of bran.”

“He needs the fiber if he’s drinking all that blood,” Carsabi said.

“He puts a rope around the victim’s neck to control her if she comes awake. While the girl is draining, he finds something handy and shoves it inside of her. In Melissa’s case it was a salt shaker. In other bodies he put other things.”

Carsabi said, “The FBI used the term ‘inanimate objects’. Seems an odd way to describe it. Would they consider a dildo an inanimate object?”

“It’s a sex toy. It’s different. Some of them move quite a bit. They have knobs, buttons. Various sizes,” Reese said. He had no idea why he was explaining the functions and mechanical aspects of a dildo.

“Our man was using the salt shaker as a sex toy.” Carsabi scratched his cheek, as if to say that was enough talking about people’s reliance on mechanical contrivances.

“Maybe a sex toy,” Reese said. “Maybe not. He might of been making a statement.”

Carsabi shrugged. “I’ll bet a lot of gals out there consider men inanimate objects.”

“Especially FBI men.” It bothered Reese when Carsabi got philosophical. He didn’t know whether Carsabi was trying to solve the case or appear a deep thinker. He cleared his throat. “When the heart stops he turns on the water to flush the blood. And then he cleans up the kitchen, spotless. He takes her clothes with him. He wipes down the body in case he’s left a strand of hair or a fiber from his own clothes. A very tidy boy.”

“But this time he left Melissa Cunningham alive,” Carsabi said. “Something made him run before he was finished draining her.”

“She might have slugged him,” Reese said. “I don’t know. Kicked him. There was nothing under her fingernails, so she didn’t scratch him. She couldn’t scream. Maybe he thought she was dead. Who knows? The fact is he left a live witness, barely alive, and I have a sketch. I’ll take a break anyway I can get it.” Reese pulled the sheet of heavy art paper out of Melissa’s murder book and slid it across to Carsabi. “On the other hand, it may be nothing.”

Carsabi looked at the sketch and whistled softly. “Looks like my neighbor, an insurance salesman, stays up till two in the morning reloading shotgun shells. Belongs to a skeet shooting club is the explanation.” Carsabi kept looking at the sketch and nodding. “Doesn’t look like a killer, but they never do. They always look so damn normal. What’s it say about us when we can’t tell the good from the bad?” He slid the sketch back to Reese. “Unless Bulow is slipping?”

“No,” Reese said and touched the face Bulow had drawn, wanting to ask Carsabi why he was spying on his neighbor at two in the morning. “It’s what Melissa described.”

“The media’s calling him ‘The Anaheim Vampire.’ Since he started in Anaheim and takes all the blood….”

“Catchy.”

Carsabi bit his lower lip, looked away. “The Mayor’s office has been getting pressure from the city supervisors and the people.”

“The voters, you mean.”

“The voters want containment,” Carsabi said. “They don’t know what containment means, probably, but they want it. They didn’t care about the first eleven girls, they were hookers, but now that our boy has switched to more respectable types….”

“Victim twelve managed an IHOP, single mother of one. Melissa Cunningham was a model. Clean record, still, not even a ticket, no hustling. She wanted to be an actress.”

“My grandmother wanted to be an actress,” Carsabi said, almost wistfully. “Anyway, Miss Cunningham wasn’t a prostitute, yet….”

It was a strange way to say it, he thought. Carsabi seemed distracted. “What is it?” he asked the lieutenant.

Carsabi cleared his throat. His face looked gray. “Word is they want you off the case. More FBI involvement. Bigger scale. You know how it is.”

“I have six men, Steve.”

“We have seventy-six detectives in Robbery/Homicide. That’s nearly 10 percent. If the FBI wants to help, fine. I wont turn it down.”

“A movie star in this town loses his dog he gets six men.” Reese shook his head. He’d been waiting for this. The heave-ho. “Another seven guys, Steve. Thirteen men. One for each victim. That’s all I’m asking.”

“They want a fresh perspective.” Carsabi looked down. “This is coming from Parker Center.”

“We’re in Parker Center.”

“We’re on the seventh floor.” Carsabi now looked at the ceiling as if he could see through the successive floors shielding them from management and Carsabi’s once held dream of becoming a captain. “I’m talking up high. From the top.”

So, they’d sent Carsabi to tell him he was out. That’s why Carsabi had been moping around all morning. They’d probably picked Hernandez to take over. His perspective on police work - cover your ass at all times - now considered fresh. Word was that Hernandez might be the FBI’s stringer, their inside man, one of many on the force angling for a Federal job. That might explain his inertia last night. Why help a man if you wanted his job?

Reese wiped the sweat off his lip, thought about his slowly diminishing future. “The FBI will fuck this up. They’ll scour county jail looking for snitches and tips. They’ll post a reward, set up a command post, and answer phones. They’ll hold press conferences. They might even find someone to convict, but it wont be the right someone. They won’t do police work. They won’t hit the streets. They never do.”

Carsabi inspected his fingernails. “Nobody, from the mayor on down, cares about the dead girls, or your ass or my ass, except how it affects their careers.” Carsabi looked at him, closer now. “Go home, get some rest.”

“Rest? Tell that to Melissa Cunningham. Tell that to Audrey Baker, the first victim. Arrested fifteen times for prostitution, sure, but she went to night school in Compton. Studying to be a paralegal. And then there’s Rita Chambers….” He suddenly couldn’t remember who Rita Chambers had been and massaged his brow to cover himself. “I’m close.”

Carsabi flexed his eyebrows as if to say the only thing he was close to was a nervous breakdown or a two-week binge. “One week.”

“I need more time,” he said and suddenly felt very tired. “You’ve got your thirty in. They can’t hurt you. They can’t put you out on the street.” Reese wondered if he himself even cared anymore. If he’d reached his due date.

“Even so,” Carsabi said, “One week.”

After Carsabi left, Reese dialed the mother’s Kansas City number. A message informed him that the phone was no longer in service. No longer in service. It had a ring to it. It was how he’d been feeling for a while.He smoothed the edges of the art paper and considered the sketch of the Anaheim Vampire. The suspect looked almost benign. Was Bulow slipping? What had Melissa said? A doll?

At the copy machine, he put the sketch face down on the glass. On a nearby counter, he saw a greasy box of pizza, half full. Someone had stubbed out a cigarette in one of the slices. He closed the copier’s lid, set the counter to a thousand, and pushed the start button. The machine hummed, cloning the face of death. He selected a fairly clean slice of pizza, ham and pineapple, and walked back to his desk. Melissa Cunningham had been dead three hours.

3

The day was clear, almost warm. The steady breeze brought soap and licorice from the manzanita and wind-broken stalks of fennel. Ajax Rasmussen sat at his walnut and ebony desk. With a crimson glass he toasted the new day. Through bronze windows, slightly open, he searched the Pacific’s horizon for a sign of change but saw none. The town of Santa Marina huddled before him, caught between mountains and endless sea.

The canyons were dusty green with chaparral and spotted ocher red from the poison oak. The horseshoe shape of the harbor and the long stick of the wharf pointed past the horizon to the other side of the world.

The blood he now drank, like his life for many years, countless years, was sterile, homogenized and tasteless. To quote Masefield, he had become a eunuch of time.

He picked up the nearly deflated vinyl bag and squeezed the last drops from the 500cc plasti-pak made at his plant in Mexico for a mere fifty cents. His bags were a special blend of various poly-vinyls that could withstand inside pressures of 100 psi. He recalled jumping on a bag filled with blood to show a group of U.N. doctors working in Africa how strong his bags were. He’d given the U.N. a few free cases. He could afford it, especially the good will. He sold the fifty cent bags in the U.S. and Europe for $30.95, more if it was a government contract.

His desk held one plain black phone and one studio print, circa 1936, sepia tinted and encased in a silver frame, a Twentieth Century Fox publicity still of Raul Pavoni, erstwhile leading man of a long chain of forgettable films. Seventeen, to be exact.

Pavoni posed in the fashion of the time, oily black hair, his sharp aquiline features obscured by the smoke of a cigarette held casually, a man mocking destiny.

Several Hollywood agents, movie producers, directors, and a handful of movie critics had considered him the natural successor to Valentino. His star had been rising.

Unfortunately, before reaching any prominence, Pavoni had disappeared off Santa Catalina Island, his tiny motorboat swamped during rough seas. What he’d been doing out in such bad weather had never been explained. Neither had the brutal deaths of five Hollywood starlets, their throats slit, all rumored to have been recent triumphs of Pavoni.

Newspapers at the time claimed the starlets had been drained of blood. Headlines screamed: STARLETS OR STRUMPETS? BUTCHERED AND BUMPED OFF!

A Los Angeles detective, square jawed and square headed, as he now remembered, had been close to arresting Pavoni for the five killings. That the detective had disappeared before he could jail Pavoni was a fact vastly overshadowed by Pavoni’s death.