Everyone Pays
Authors: Seth Harwood
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Police Procedural, #Women Sleuths, #Thrillers, #Psychological
ALSO BY SETH HARWOOD
Jess Harding
In Broad Daylight
Jack Palms
Jack Wakes Up
This Is Life
Young Junius
Triad Death Match
Stories
A Long Way from Disney
Fisher Cat & Other Stories
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2016 by Seth Harwood
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503935143
ISBN-10: 1503935140
Cover design by Christian Fuenfhausen Design.
For Kelly
CONTENTS
“Wash me throughly from my wickedness and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my faults and my sin is ever before me.”
—
Psalm 51,
Book of Common Prayer
john (noun): “A prostitute’s client. Origin early 20th century . . . from the given name
John
, used from late Middle English as a form of address to a man, or to denote various occupations, including that of priest (late Middle English) and policeman (mid 17th century).”
—
New Oxford American Dictionary
PROLOGUE
It wasn’t enough that she was with me. What woke me at three in the morning were her sins. Original and then some.
She had been with men. Her secrets—what they did to her, the things she had endured—I knew they were hidden. The scars I could see. The secrets I couldn’t.
What they did to her body.
I listened to her breathe as she slept, the subtle wheeze of her rest, until I couldn’t stand it any longer. I got up, felt the cold stone floor under my feet, poured water for coffee.
The window let in a damp breeze from the rain, so I tucked her in tight.
Outside, all was dark. The street above our basement room was quiet, for the time being.
During the day I hear confessions, save souls.
But I did things in my past that would shame a heathen. All the atoning in the world wouldn’t save me.
Then she came to me, the innocent I might still save.
I saved her body, not her soul. Treated her and nursed her back to health. Protected her.
But her soul wasn’t clean yet, wasn’t ready to greet Him. Not yet. All she had done needed cleansing. Erasing. The things she did. The men who did them to her. I would work back through these sins, start where they began.
These men needed to be brought to Him. To judgment. Only in this way could she be absolved.
First, the men.
I started with two names.
PART ONE
SUNDAY TO TUESDAY
CHAPTER ONE
DONNER
Our first call of the week took us to a man’s apartment in the Marina—not the nicest place on the block, even a little on the small side, but that had no bearing on the extent of what we found.
The building was a four-story walk-up with the victim’s place on the third. Small black-and-white squares tiled the downstairs hall, reminding me of the floors in lower Manhattan buildings where I’d grown up.
I climbed the stairs with Hendricks behind me, neither of us dragging. It was only our first day on call.
When we arrived at the apartment, uniformed officers in blue stepped aside to clear our path. I could see by their eyes that they were ready to turn this one over, get as far away from the scene as they could. A rookie I didn’t recognize gave me a double take, confused about a woman working homicide, thinking I shouldn’t walk into this kind of mess.
Or maybe he could tell I didn’t mind and that’s what caused his confusion.
And I didn’t mind. It was my job.
I was a homicide investigator like my father before me. Just on the other coast. It would have driven him mad to see a woman working these cases, and maybe that’s why I got involved. At first.
Now I wouldn’t give this up for the world.
As we walked in, my favorite medical examiner met us in the hallway: Dr. Marlene Ibaka, who always wore a smile, even in the worst situations. This was that rare occasion when she didn’t.
We all have our weaknesses, the things that get to us.
God knows I have mine.
“Guy has his own dungeon in here, Donner. A real sleazebag.” She pointed at a bookcase just inside the entry. “You’ll want to check out this vic’s pics.”
I found myself facing a shelf of Polaroids featuring skinny young blondes tied up and mostly nude or in various states of undress. A few had fresh cuts, blood dripping.
Bondage, S&M, torture: these could be bought in San Francisco like bread and milk. The Rice-A-Roni of the streets.
Hendricks leaned in over my shoulder. “Lovely citizen we got here, Donner. The kind of turd you like to bag and tag.”
“Careful,” I said.
He was right: the guy who lived here, our victim in this case, was the kind of perp I loved to take down during my four years on vice. Now homicide put me on the other side of the line, investigating his killer, walking into a job I might have fantasized about doing myself. But I couldn’t talk about that here, not even as a joke.
“One pic is missing,” I said. There was a gap in the middle of the shelf, just the right size for another photo.
“Already in my notes,” Ibaka said. “Come on. You got to see this.”
She led us off the hall into a side office that had been fitted with pads covering the walls and floor. A padded cell, his dungeon. No windows. One wall had handcuffs mounted high, medium, and low. The high ones had held the wrists of the women in his photos. With their arms raised, they’d have barely toed the floor.
Thick black blood pooled in a corner.
“That his?”
“Your lucky day.” Ibaka pointed at more of the mess. “All this came from the owner of this nice little enclave.”
I clapped my hands. “Well, I’m done here. Hendricks?”
He laughed his fake laugh. “Ha-ha. Now we work this.”
“You bet.” I hit him on the shoulder.
“How old is the blood?”
“We put the body at eight hours.” Ibaka tilted her head toward the back of the apartment. “Perp left him in back, on his bed, but it looks like he did the business of it in here.”
I wanted to spit, get the stench and taste of the place out of my mouth, but couldn’t contaminate the scene. The last thing I wanted was some tech picking up my DNA and submitting it, throwing a lawyer grounds for dismissal if we ever got into court. That, and the jokes I’d hear about being one of this idiot’s tricks.
Instead, I hawked a greener into a coffee napkin from my pocket. That cleared the taste but not the smell.
Hendricks started back over the particulars. I’d read them out loud in the car, but sometimes going over them again at a crime scene helped us develop our process.
“Victim is a white male. Last of Piper, first of Jay. Thirty-four. Lived alone. No criminal record. Employed by tech firm downtown. Never married, no kids, blah, blah, blah.” He scanned the notes.
“Upstairs tenant comes home, sees the vic’s door open, pokes his head in to make sure everything’s okay. It isn’t. He finds the blood in here, gets upset, runs home, and calls the Northern. When they get on scene, they find the body and call us.”
“Neighbor didn’t stick around to see the body?”
“Apparently not.”
Ibaka and I shook our heads. Our kind of curiosity was definitely not universal.
Hendricks said, “Did I miss anything?”
“That.” I pointed to the floor beneath the cuffs.
“What is it?”
Ibaka and I answered at the same time. It was one of the vic’s little toes.
“Jesus,” Hendricks said. Then he crossed himself in apology. As a recovering alcoholic, he had only recently come to find religion.
“Looks like a left toe, if I had to guess.”
Ibaka said, “I was going to bag it but figured you’d want to see the placement, get a sense for where it fell. You know the pictures don’t do these details justice.”
I winked at her. “I know. Live in the flesh.”
We smiled at one another: two women on a job we loved, in departments that grudgingly acknowledged our existence. We had each other though, which was nice.
I crouched to get a better look. “Clean cut.”
Hendricks said, “Maybe our perp’s a butcher.”
“Not for this much meat,” I said. “Throw it on rice, this’d barely qualify as a nigiri.”
Ibaka said, “Maybe a maki roll. One piece.” She laughed, then went on. “More of a torture sadist is my thinking. Likes turning the tables on his vic.”
She knelt down by the wall, shining her flashlight on something small and pink. “Check this out.”
I came over, saw what looked like a piece of a tongue.
“Took him apart in pieces,” I said. “Bloody lovely.”
“That’s nasty,” Hendricks said. “What is it?”
I pointed. “See the taste buds there?”
“Butcher.”
I looked up at him, shrugged. “It’s a theory.”
Around the tongue was more blood, by now half dried.
“This guy’s trying to do something else with his cuts. He likes it. This is personal.”
Hendricks followed me around the room, taking notes as I ticked off what I saw: blood spatters; footprints in socks, a lot of them from the same feet; the lack of a scuffle; blood and skin fragments left on the highest handcuffs; several kinds of whips and ticklers, unused, along with a series of gags in varying sizes and shapes in a corner; as well as a few pairs of extra handcuffs and some thick rope.
Ibaka gestured toward the hall. “Ready for the body?”
“Most definitely.”
She led us to the back and inside Piper’s bedroom. Three young male techs stood around our victim, who was laid out like he’d been taking a nap—except his throat was cut. The techs huddled over his face, shining little flashlights into his mouth. Something human stuck out of it.
One said, “Looks like tendon.” He held a forceps
and
a flashlight, leaned in even more over Piper. “I got twenty says it’s from an Achilles.”
Just hearing that word turned my blood cold. I felt my palms tingle as I remembered the pain and weakness I’d felt when my own Achilles had snapped in the state basketball finals against Chabot College. All I did was plant my right foot, then I heard a pop! I was never the same player again. Next thing, I was transferring from City College to Berkeley on the strength of my academics,
not
my jumper.
The second tech said, “You’re on.” They bumped fists, and I wanted to strangle each of them.
From where I stood, all I could see was about an inch of flesh sticking out of Piper’s mouth.
Ibaka stepped in. “How about a little respect for the deceased.”
They laughed. “Right on. We got you.”
To them we were just old-school. Just dinosaurs following rules that no longer existed.
Hendricks stepped up to see what the techs had going. I could tell he still wanted to develop his butcher theory.
With the forceps, the first tech removed the meat. By its length and thickness, I could see it was an Achilles. He’d been right, and I hadn’t taken anatomy for nothing.
The other tech held up his twenty. “Double or nothing it’s his.”
“
Who else
would it belong to?”
“Fine.”
They exchanged the bill. Ibaka frowned.
“Where do you find these kids?” I asked.
She shrugged. “You know how this is. They all think they’re on an episode of
CSI
.”
As the tech slid his finding into an evidence bag, I saw the bite marks on it that struck me cold. Our guy had done this when Piper was
alive
.
“You okay?” Hendricks asked.
I nodded, never wanting to show weakness. But he was barely aware of me. He stood transfixed by what he was seeing. “Someone wanted this pervert to bleed. Bad.” He coughed into his hand, and I could see him getting a little squinty around
his
eyes. I hadn’t seen him like this in years. Not since the birth of his daughter.