City of Fire (45 page)

It was difficult to see with the entire room reflecting off the glass. And the quality of the print was so poor that she wondered if it wasn’t a counterfeit. Still, the mood of the piece broke through and emoted a certain violence. The longer she stared at it, the more certain she became that the artist had been working with real human skin.

She turned away, wishing she had time to smoke a cigarette. She walked back to the desk and sat down, her eyes focusing on the checkbook. Curiously, Fellows had selected a design that looked like graph paper. Returning to the drawer, she found a stack of canceled checks and studied the man’s handwriting. The machinelike precision that seemed so familiar now. Fellows wasn’t writing across the check the way most people would. He was filling in the boxes as if working a crossword puzzle.

She pulled her notebook out, paging back to Sunday and their meeting with Irving Sample from the Questioned Documents Unit. Sample had found an anomaly in the way Romeo formed the letter P. She remembered him calling the deviation as good as a fingerprint, but she couldn’t recall the details. After reviewing her notes, she sifted through the checks until she found the letter P. She wasn’t a document analyst, but the anomaly was so obvious, she didn’t need to be. Martin Fellows began at the bottom of the loop and finished the letter off in a single stroke. It was enough for an
arrest warrant. In the Ennis Cosby murder case it had been enough to win a conviction. There was no need to wait forty-eight hours on the lab.

“Lena,” Novak shouted. “Hurry.”

His voice had come from the master bedroom. She ran through the hall, saw Barrera rushing inside, and sprinted up the steps. Novak was on the floor between the twin beds. A rug had been pulled away and several floorboards removed. Two SID techs were standing by as Lamar Newton fired off three quick pics with his motor drive and strobe.

Novak shot her a look as she entered. Jazzed.

“The boards were loose,” he said. “There’s a file folder down there. Looks like it’s a couple inches thick.”

Lamar finally backed out with his camera. Then Novak reached inside for the folder and opened it on his lap.

“What is it?” Barrera said. “What’s he hiding?”

The first sheet of paper looked like a document. It was a photocopy of Harriet Wilson’s employment records and included her medical history. When Novak turned the page, Lena could see his fingers trembling with excitement.

The file contained a stack of pictures. Eight-by-ten photographs of women in their bedrooms. But the shots weren’t posed. And the women in the pictures had no idea that Fellows was even there. He had used a night lens, snapping off shots in the dark as they slept.

The horror settled in as Novak flipped from one picture to the next. The sheer number of faces without names. Sleeping. Dreaming. Alone in their beds.

When several pictures of Harriet Wilson turned up, Lena sat down beside her partner for a closer look. It was an entire series of shots, and Wilson was dressed in more than one nightgown. Fellows was infatuated with the woman and risked multiple visits. More than one break-in. As Novak came to the last photo of Wilson and tossed it on the pile, Lena turned to the next face and reached for the picture.

“You know her?” he asked.

“She was in the paper last week. She’s pregnant but claims she hasn’t had sex for two years.”

“The Jesus lady,” Lamar said. “It was in the paper last Friday morning.”

Lena nodded. She had started to read the article but stopped when the woman claimed it was an immaculate conception. At the time it seemed like just another L.A. story. Another American version of a religious fanatic no one wanted to admit was a problem.

A moment passed. Novak finally turned the page over to someone new. Someone both of them recognized. It was Avis Payton, the young woman with the electric maroon hair.

Lena looked at Novak. His eyes were glassy and he was trying not to show any emotion.

Fellows had used Payton’s credit card to access Burell’s Web site. The day they’d interviewed Payton, she was sick with something that resembled a stomach flu and claimed her purse was stolen. But now they knew what the young woman was trying to hide from them. What she didn’t want her cop father in Salt Lake City to find out. Lena could still see the new security bar the girl had installed on the sliding door. Martin Fellows had given Avis Payton the gift that keeps on giving. A wound that would never heal. He’d raped her. And now she was pregnant, carrying the monster’s child.

Novak flipped to the next picture without saying anything, but Lena could see him struggling with the revelation as he wiped something away from his eye. After reviewing the next ten photos, the shock was enough to bring them both back.

The women weren’t sleeping anymore. They were dead.

And the pictures looked more like Lamar’s work, rather than Martin Fellows’s. Crime scene photos of Teresa Lopez stretched out on a cross painted on the sheets with her own blood. Nikki Brant’s nude body lying on the bed with her face and hands packed up in grocery bags.

Novak stopped before reaching the end of the pile and turned to Barrera, his voice low and raspy.

“What do you want to do, Lieutenant? There’s no reason to wait for the lab.”

Barrera took a step back with his hands in his pockets. He
seemed to be having a tough time making the decision. Lena understood his dilemma and filled them in on the handwriting samples she’d found downstairs. Then Barrera turned away, considering his options. A bead of sweat hit the floor.

“The girl could still be alive,” he said finally. “He could lead us to her.”

Novak shook his head. “He’s a motherfucker from another planet. Harriet Wilson’s probably dead. We need to get him off the streets.”

“But we don’t know she’s dead.”

Lena remained quiet, thinking that this might be the first time she agreed with Barrera in the past two days. Every other woman had been victimized in her own home. For reasons that remained unclear, Fellows had taken Harriet Wilson away with him. Lena thought about Brant showing Fellows that Web site. Brant was essentially calling the woman a whore and probably laughing about it and teasing the man. But Fellows had feelings for her. So much feeling that he murdered Brant’s wife and waited around to watch Brant find the mutilated body. Harriet Wilson wouldn’t be like the rest. Killing her wouldn’t be as quick or easy. It was more than possible that she was still alive and that Fellows would return to her.

Barrera wiped his forehead. “As long as SIS is following him, he can’t hurt anyone.”

“Sounds good on paper,” Novak said. “But how can you take the chance?”

“I think we should keep things as they are, Hank. Give SIS a couple of hours and see where he goes. If Fellows doesn’t lead us to the girl, then we’ll bring him in and hope we can get him to talk.”

Novak grimaced, slamming a fist at the remaining photos in his hand. When they scattered across the floor, he looked at them and let out a yelp. Lena followed his shaky gaze to the pictures. Everybody did. She tried to focus, but it took a beat before the images rendered in her brain. Then her chest tightened and the room began to spin.

There were three photographs of another woman sleeping
in her bed. Another series of snapshots taken by a madman in the dark.

Lena eyeballed the pictures, spotting the gun on the table. The ID and badge. As her eyes finally came to rest on her own face, she saw Novak take her hand but couldn’t feel it.

MARTIN Fellows, aka Mick Finn, aka Romeo, a true lover of women, and for the moment star of both print and screen, turned from his workbench in a small room off the basement and looked at Harriet Wilson’s wild eyes staring back at him. She was stretched out on a cot, her wrists and ankles handcuffed. Her blouse had been ripped open, her dress, torn.

“Why are you doing this, Martin?”

“Stop calling me Martin. That’s not my name anymore.”

“Then what do people call you?”

He didn’t say anything because he wasn’t sure. All he knew was that something significant had happened in his life. For the first time in a long time he was one person, one voice, a single entity on a historic mission. The epiphany had occurred after lunch as he drove to the mall. A clarity he’d never experienced before. He could see the cops following him, almost as if they were wearing neon signs. As he headed toward West Hollywood, he could predict their every move. And when he entered the parking garage, found a dark spot to park, made a quick purchase at Williams-Sonoma, and doubled back on foot, what had become a nuisance was finally gone. Two dead cops were resting easy in the front seat of their parked car.

He hoped the vision would last. He thought just maybe he’d reached what a Zen monk spends a lifetime yearning for. A Christian version of nirvana. The view from the cross and nothing less.

“Why are you doing this?”

Her voice wasn’t much more than whisper.

“Because they know,” he said. “Everybody knows.”

“Everybody knows what?”

“Who you really are, Harriet. What you do when you’re not at work.”

Something flared up in her eyes. He could see her chewing it over. The door opening on her secret and letting the panic in.

“They’ve known for months,” he said. “You’re not the cute little blue-eyed girl from Nebraska you pretend to be. How many guys at work jerk off every night watching you get laid by that old man wearing the wig? How ’bout everybody?”

She turned her head away. He could hear her weeping. She was doing it quietly, but he could hear it.

“We work together every day,” she said. “We’re friends. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I was the last to find out. Everybody knows I dug you.”

She turned back to him. “I knew it, too. I knew it from the beginning.”

He didn’t say anything. Instead, he played back the memories in his head. There was Harriet, but there was his sister, Tilly, as well. He could see her tangled blond hair strewn through the clean sand at the beach. He could hear her giggling. See her face splashed with warm light as the sun slipped into the ocean. They were planning to run away. Talking it over at their secret hiding place on the beach. It had been a long time ago. An image from his childhood that had somehow become lost until he reached this view from the cross.

“Who told you?” Harriet asked.

The memory vanished, and he looked at the woman chained to the bed.

“James Brant,” he said. “Now do you know who I am?”

He could see her connecting the dots, and he was surprised when the tears stopped flowing and she pulled herself together. Moments passed before she finally spoke again.

“We’re a lot alike,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“I haven’t hurt anyone, but I know what it’s like to have a secret life. An imaginary life.”

“I guess you do,” he said.

“I’ve lived two lives for a long time. One runs this way, the other runs back.”

“I did my best for you, but that’s all over now.”

“Why does it have to be over?”

He didn’t say anything. He looked at the bruises on her body from the fall down the stairs. The push. He couldn’t protect her anymore, not even from himself. He couldn’t change her into something she wasn’t. This was the only way.

“Why does it have to end?” she repeated. “We share so many things together. Our jobs. Our interests. If everyone knows about my double life, then no one would believe what you’ve done to me. All you’d have to say is that she wanted it. She’s a bitch and she wanted it.”

He thought about Burell and her birthday present he was trying to keep fresh in the freezer. The timing seemed right.

“Is that the kind of talk that turned Burell on?”

She didn’t answer. Instead, she rattled the handcuffs against the bed, twisting her wrists and ankles.

“Is there any way you could loosen these?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Then could you at least do me a favor?”

“That depends on what it is.”

“I’ve got an itch and it’s driving me crazy.”

“Where?”

“My cheek.”

He moved to the cot and sat down beside her. Until Lena Gamble, Harriet Wilson had been the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. As his eyes drifted over her gorgeous body, he could smell her skin. Her essence wafting in the air from between her open legs. And there was something about her face. A glow that beckoned.

“Where’s the itch?”

She turned her head into the light. “Just below my left eye.”

He leaned closer and saw the tearstains. Wiping the residue away, he stroked her skin with his thumb. Gently. Evenly. Acknowledging her sigh and the relief in her eyes.

“Keep going,” she said. “Don’t stop.”