City of Fire (26 page)

But not this morning. Not right now.

She slipped on a pair of gloves and followed Sweeney and Banks through the front door. Although the furniture remained in place, packing cartons stacked to the ceiling blocked much of the view.

Sweeney gave her a nudge. “Nice place, huh? The stairs are down here.”

Lena noted the wood-plank floors and richly detailed moldings. Reaching the stairs, she glanced through the doorway into the kitchen and spotted a sandwich set beside an open bottle of beer. Someone had obviously made a snack last night before being interrupted. As she climbed the steps and reached the landing, she heard something and stopped.

“It’s the TV,” Banks said in a low voice. “We didn’t go in.”

Banks seemed more than a little anxious. Sweeney pointed to the bedroom door and they moved in for a closer look.

A moment passed. Then another until Sweeney cleared his throat.

“Like I said, Lena, it’s seriously fucked up in here. You tell me if it’s your guy and we’ll back out. No hard feelings out of Hollywood. We’ve already got a full plate.”

She nodded, grabbing hold of the doorjamb and trying to compose herself while the hosts from a TV morning news show spewed their meaningless banter into a room in which two people were better than dead. Lena gritted her teeth and stepped through the doorway.

Joe Garcia’s body sat in the chair by the window, his left hand still clutching the revolver he’d used to blow his brains all over the ceiling and wall. Sally Garcia was sitting up in bed, her naked corpse posed to look something like a marionette dangling from the headboard. But her arms weren’t bound with strings. Instead, her body was drawn upward by a sheer, black stocking pulled over her face and tied around a bedpost. Over the stocking a garish smile was painted in with red lipstick. Two holes had been cut through the nylon, revealing the woman’s eyes, which remained open and were hard to look at.

Lena checked the floor before taking a step closer,
then zeroed in on the knife wounds in search of the keys—Romeo’s signature that would never be released to the public until they had a suspect in custody and went to trial. The wounds were an exact copy of the trauma Nikki Brant had endured. A through and through just below the collarbone, followed by a second cut in the young woman’s belly. Although she couldn’t see Sally Garcia’s face, she knew that the woman was young. Her skin was gray but appeared supple, her breasts remained unusually perky, and her stomach and thighs appeared toned. Even more telling, her bikini line revealed that she was still able to wear a thong.

But there was a significant difference here. A significant lack of blood. Lena took another look at the woman’s head, pointed toward the television, sensing that the angle was odd, even severe, and wondering if Romeo hadn’t snapped her neck before using the knife.

Her eyes flicked back to the young woman’s vagina, noting visible traces of seminal fluid. And then down to her feet until she spotted the missing toe.

The keys were here, neatly locked in a ring. Romeo had repeated his MO in almost every detail. An MO that remained his alone and seemed to be evolving.

“What do you think?” Banks asked from the doorway.

“It’s him,” she said. “It’s Romeo.”

Sweeney stepped into the room. “The other two were like this?”

“Variations on a theme,” she said. “It looks like Sally Garcia went quicker though.”

“Okay, so she was lucky,” Sweeney said. “What about Joe over here?”

She turned to look at the husband’s body and what appeared to be a single shot through the roof of his mouth. High-velocity-impact blood spatter stained the white wall behind his head.

She took another step closer. The gunshot residue dusting Garcia’s left hand was visible to the eye, and Lena guessed that the .38 revolver was old and worn-out. She couldn’t make out his face because the exit wound appeared to be just
above the forehead. Considerable bleeding had followed the gunshot, cascading down the man’s face and forming a thick crust that had blackened as it dried. His eyes remained open, but appeared dislodged and unnaturally bugged.

“The second body’s a first,” she said.

Sweeney shook his head, crouching down for a better view. “He found his wife like this and took himself out. Plenty of guys might do the same thing if the love was still good.”

She nodded, but that feeling of impending doom was back. That feeling that they were missing something. She shook it off and turned toward the landing. Romeo could easily have watched Joe Garcia blow himself away from the stairs without being seen. She remembered her conversation with Teddy Mack last night. Experiencing the husband’s grief and anguish was just as important to Romeo as the rape and murder. It might be the very reason he made the kill.

If Mack was right, then last night had been a grand slam. A command performance for someone lurking in the shadows who fed on heartbreak.

The noise from the TV was back and Lena could no longer filter it out. The hosts were laughing at something. When she glanced at the tube, the chatter appeared scripted. One more reason on the list of every other reason why she still subscribed to a newspaper.

She turned off the TV and scanned the room. Although it appeared in disarray, the Garcias hadn’t started packing yet, and she found what she was looking for on the bedside table. The radio CD player was one of the best. A Bose Wave player. Stepping around the bed, she opened the lid and read the label on the CD without much surprise. Beethoven’s Symphony No. 8. The Garcias hadn’t moved. They were screwed in F Major.

Someone called out her name and she took a step back. It sounded like Novak, shouting from the entryway. As Sweeney and Banks left the room to direct him upstairs, her eyes drifted down to the telephone. A digital answering machine was attached, the message light blinking.

She glanced at the empty doorway, then turned back to the answering machine and hit
PLAY.

“Tim, it’s me,”
she heard the caller saying.
“Sorry I wasn’t here when you called. I’m working on something right now, but maybe we can get together next week. I’ll try calling you back tomorrow around lunchtime. If not, let’s talk this weekend.”

Time appeared to stop. Her chest tightened, the dread seizing her by the back of the neck and snapping her spine as if it were a bullwhip.

She had been playing phone tag with her brother’s best friend. She made the call at a time when she thought Tim Holt wouldn’t be in. She remembered feeling guilty about it.

Her eyes darted over to the dead man slumped in the chair, her mind spitting out a quick reconstruction of the face hidden behind the mask of dried blood. The shape of his jawline and what was left of his nose. The color of his hair. She could feel the heat radiating through her body. Everything burning up from the inside out as the dots connected and the face evolved into someone she knew.

The Garcias had packed up their boxes and taken them away. The new owners were just settling in for what turned out to be only a short stay.

A shadow passed over the death house as she stared at what was left of her brother’s best friend. Through the fallout she thought she could hear Novak entering the room ahead of Banks and Sweeney. They were shouting something at her. They were rushing toward her. She could feel her knees buckling. Her hands slipping away. The sound of the wind in her ears as her soul collapsed into the abyss.

SHE looked tired. Withdrawn. The circles beneath her eyes visible despite the makeup. But when she smiled at him from the other side of the lab, Fellows melted as he usually did, then caught himself and nodded at her from his desk.

It had been a private smile. A special smile that meant more than all the rest. The one she only used when No. 3 was out of the lab and they were alone.

He watched Harriet step around the other side of the table, still trying to hide that limp. He wondered if it hurt and knew that despite everything that had happened, despite his anger and rage, he still loved her. He still needed to protect her. After a few moments, he returned to his notebook and made a new entry beside the time and date.

Fellows kept two sets of lab books. One for his experiments, which always sat on the counter beside his microscope. And another devoted entirely to his observations regarding Harriet Wilson, kept safely locked away in his desk and carried home every night for careful review. Fellows liked to write things down to clarify his thoughts and feelings and ponder new ideas. Besides, he’d noticed over the past year or so that his mind liked to wander more than usual. If he didn’t
get his thoughts down on paper, sometimes they ran off and never returned.

He reread the last sentence, drew a line through Burell’s name, and replaced it with the words
soon to be dead.
While the revision may have been more accurate, he noticed a disturbing shake in his penmanship, took a deep breath, and tried to relax some.

It was difficult. For the past twelve hours his mind had been rolling through different scenarios of how Charles Burell might spend his last few minutes on earth. And as he thought it over, not one of his fantasies required the help of his friend and spotter, Mick Finn.

There was the guillotine dream in which Fellows played the part of a henchman fulfilling the wishes of his king. Fellows liked this one because it always ended with a crowd cheering as Burell’s head rolled down a long ramp into a basket. But there were other dreams. Some drawn from his favorite Bible stories. Others rooted in his past that remained less formed and less desirable because sometimes it wasn’t Burell taking the abuse. More times than not, it was him. He could remember his grandmother telling him that little boys who touched themselves received black marks from the Virgin Mary. The marks were tallied up at the end of each month and sent by angels directly to God. If his score was high enough, the naughty boy might be fed to the lions or even that angry dog chained to the tree next door. Fellows spent years keeping an eye on that dog from his bedroom window and throwing treats over the fence. Countless hours estimating how high a score might need to become before he received a thumbs-down from the Almighty. In spite of the risk, he couldn’t help himself and continued to masturbate once or twice a day. But over time the act became more of a need than a pleasure, mixed with fear and terror and the idea that he would one day tip the scales and be eaten alive. As his grandmother used to say while pointing a shaky finger, Martin Fellows was the only kid in the world who liked to jerk off.

The lab door opened, the memory collapsing as No. 3
returned from lunch and launched another of his stupid grins across the room.

Fellows checked the time, trying to ignore the smell of fish tacos in the air. He was meeting Finn at the Pink Canary in fifteen minutes. Hopefully, his friend had come up with a scenario of his own. Something with more realism that didn’t require a crowd or historical detail. After locking his notebook in the drawer, he got up and stopped by Harriet’s lab table.

“You want the usual?” he asked.

She winked at him and pulled a menu from the drawer. “Em,” she said, “I’m in the mood for something different. What are you having, Martin?”

She slid the menu between them and moved closer. When she inadvertently moistened her lips with her tongue, Fellows turned to the menu and tried to regain his composure.

Deciding what to eat had become more difficult ever since mad cow disease was discovered in Washington State a few years ago. Although the brain-wasting disease had been found in only one cow, the animal was from a lot of more than eighty cattle that couldn’t be located, were lost in the system, and by now, had probably been consumed. In five years, Fellows estimated that pets would begin dying. In about seven, young children. Two or three years after that the horror would strike adults. Fellows found it astounding that no one cared. When the government sided with the beef industry instead of public safety, when the Department of Agriculture suggested that only one-tenth of one percent of all cattle be tested, no one spoke up. Instead, people still lined up on Lincoln Boulevard to eat their burgers like cows hoofing their way to slaughter.

Fellows had always liked eating cows. Even though the Pink Canary only used organic ingredients, he still shied away from the meat. For a while he couldn’t even eat chickens for fear of contracting bird flu and was forced to feed on lambs and pigs. The food supply was obviously in flux, a fact that made life for a bodybuilder particularly difficult. Since beginning training, he measured his consumption with scientific
precision: 40 percent protein, 40 percent carbohydrates, and 20 percent fat, usually in the form of two tablespoons of flaxseed oil taken after each meal. Worrying about the tainted food supply only made his regimen more difficult.

He looked at Harriet, gazing at the menu with those gentle blue eyes. Her hair was pulled back the way he liked it.