JF Gonzalez - Fetish.wps (24 page)

He tried to scream, but the first cut had been precise, severing the carotid artery, jugular vein, and the larynx. He had leaned into him, holding him in position over the toilet as he flayed weakly beneath him, his lifeblood running out of him and into the toilet. A minute later he stopped moving.

After the man was dead he went into the kitchen and brewed a strong pot of coffee. He was almost falling down drunk, but thankfully he didn't feel sick or dizzy. Just off kilter, his equilibrium shot to hell. He had to sober up if he wanted to continue without the smell of blood making him sick.

So he had sat in the kitchen drinking coffee and thinking back on the man in the bathroom he had just killed.

He had been doing some grocery shopping when he saw him. His victim had made eye contact with him and smiled, and that smile was recognizable. It was a smile of flirtation. He had smiled back and engaged the man in conversation. After they had made their purchases and were standing outside the grocery store he had made his pitch: come on over to the house. We'll party. It was the perfect opportunity and his victim had taken it.

The minute they had gotten to the house, his victim had made a fumbling advance to him. He had engaged the man in light foreplay, rubbing his crotch as they kissed. The man's beard stubble rubbed against his cheek, feeling rough and grainy on his skin. When the man tried to remove his shirt he had backed off, suggesting they drink a little first.

The man had been only too eager to comply.

Between drinks they had paused for more light foreplay. They had given each other oral pleasure. They had kissed some more. And they had drank some more. And the more they drank, the easier it became to control his victim.

Except for the two hours it had taken to get his victim intoxicated enough to let down his guard, the evening had gone perfectly. All he had to do now was sober up and continue.

He drank two cups of coffee before attempting to go back into the bathroom and deal with what he had started. When he rose to his feet he did so with a steady gait. He didn't wobble or lurch drunkenly, although he still felt drunk. He felt strong enough to continue, so he walked back into the bathroom and started to work.

Now with the body stripped in the bathtub, he paused to survey his handiwork. He had stripped down himself and had already cut his victim's head off, which rested in the sink. Most of the man's blood had splashed into the toilet, which he flushed away.

Therefore, when he began cutting there wasn't much blood to deal with.

The need to take some more drinks while he engaged in his fantasy hit him and he indulged. He brought the almost empty bottle of Tequila in the bathroom and took swigs from it as he worked. It helped tip him back into drunkenness as his mind and body swam with lust.

His vision blurred from the effects of alcohol, he nonetheless began to get aroused.

He continued to be fully aroused as he bent down over the bathtub and immersed himself in his fantasy.

Daryl Garcia sat in front of his desk with two big files in front of him. It had been a long day, but his work was far from over.

It was two days after the Echo Park raid and his talk with Sergeant Dickinson. He and Steve Howe had just wrapped up their preliminary investigation into the latest discovery of the Eastside Butcher case, which was already making headlines on the local news broadcasts. The raid from two days ago and the evidence taken from it, had amounted to nothing except jailing three of the individuals rounded up on various parole violation charges, including Rodrigo Arroyo. Reporters from all over the country were now calling Parker Center begging for information on the latest murder. Public Relations held them off for as long as possible; all they released was that another body was found near the vicinity of the Los Angeles River and that it was still too early to tell if it was the work of the Butcher. Daryl, of course, knew differently.

The body that they found was no doubt the work of the Butcher. He was sure of that, despite the curious mutilation that had been performed on the corpse.

A little before seven o'clock this morning, a warehouse worker had called the police to say that he saw two burlap bags resting along the runoff of the LA River. The river, which cut a wide swath through the middle of Los Angeles and ended at the harbor in San Pedro, was dissected by numerous smaller flood channels that cut through various parts of the city. Most of the water ran through underground pipes and currents, but some were constructed deep into the floor of the Los Angeles basin, their concrete walls high and running wide. Most of the time the bottom was barren in the summer, but on occasion there was enough water running down to allow for it to run along at a brisk pace. The water was at this level when the warehouse worker, suspicious of two burlap bags at the bottom of the river, phoned the police.

Upon arriving at the scene, officers fished the bags out of the drainage ditch with the help of two employees from the Department of Sanitation. When they opened the bags they called Parker Center to have somebody from the Butcher Task Force be sent out pronto.

Daryl had been driving to the office when the call came through. Hank Wilkson called Daryl on his cellular phone and told him to get his ass over to Seventy-first and Avalon immediately. Daryl was the first detective from the Butcher Task Force on the scene.

What the officers had pulled out of the drainage ditch was the remains of a man in two burlap bags. Each bag contained one half of the man's torso, minus the arms, legs and head. One of the torso halves was wrapped in pages from the
Los Angeles Times
from two weeks ago.

When Steve Howe joined them thirty minutes later, the area was already being scoured by other members of the Task Force and other police officers. A search was launched immediately for the missing body parts, and when the drainage ditch was found to contain no further remains, orders were issued to begin searching the drainage ditches that fed into the one on Eighty-First and Avalon. A search of the LA River was launched as well, since it was initially surmised that the killer might have dumped the remains into the river where they would have drifted downstream and eventually into one of the drainage ditches. Or so the theory went.

The press descended on the scene like vultures to a kill made by a lion. Daryl found himself scouring the faces of reporters and television news people for Rachael, but he didn't see her. She was probably at her office. No doubt she had heard about the discovery on the police scanner but she was staying away. He hoped it was still out of respect for him and their relationship and not because she was slipping away from him as he feared.

He knew that he was slipping back into a quagmire of self-defeat. It was a familiar pattern whenever he became romantically involved with a woman; he began thinking about his life with Shirley and he would start missing her something incredible. Then inevitably, his mind would start tracking on the current relationship he was in:
suppose
she is taken from me the way Shirley was? Suppose I fall wholly and completely in love
with this woman and she leaves me, or betrays me somehow? Suppose I get hurt again
? It was these fears of being hurt which was what made him retreat from the intimacy in the relationships until they eventually burned themselves out. He thought he had the problem fixed from the therapy he endured and the lessons learned from his marriage to Diana, but apparently that wasn't the case.

He had started feeling them again with Rachael. Almost two months ago.

He had finally told Rachael about what had happened with Shirley because she sensed there was something he was hanging onto. And she had come up with a suggestion: why don't they cool off from each other for a few weeks? Not cut each other off completely, just stop seeing each other for awhile. The suggestion came as a total surprise to Daryl, and he immediately thought that Rachael was ending their relationship.

She had assured him that she wasn't, but it took him a while before he realized that not all was lost. He had reluctantly agreed, and the more he thought about it, the better he felt.

He needed to get his shit together. He loved Rachael very much and he had to deal with the problems that continued to drag him down. He had to get help. Somehow.

For the first week of the separation he was a nervous wreak. All he could think about was Rachael. Paranoid thoughts crept into his brain: she was seeing another man, she hated him, she was planning on leaving him. But the thing that blew those theories out of the water was her efforts at staying in touch with him. She called him every other day just to say hello. And a week into their self-imposed separation she had sent him a bouquet of flowers and a card. The card was in her handwriting. It read
I miss you and
think of you every day
. That simple sentence made his heart swell, and he knew that he had really found love again. He wasn't going to let anything destroy it.

He was more confident now that maybe their little separation was helping their relationship after all. In the last week he wasn't as stressed out as he had been.

Daryl smiled. Things were looking bright indeed.

“Detective Garcia?"

The sound of his name being called snapped him back to the present and the case at hand. He turned toward the sound of the voice. It was FBI Agent Bernie Haskins, one of the Butcher Task Force members. He had been back at the FBI Headquarters in Virginia for the past week and had been due back in Los Angeles sometime that week.

Guess today was that day.

“Haskins, how's it hanging?” Daryl asked, straightening up in his chair.

“Not bad.” Haskins found an empty chair, pulled it out and sat down, facing the back of the chair, arms over the top of it. He looked at Daryl wearily. “Heard you found another one today."

“Yeah,” Daryl said, motioning to the stack of paperwork on his desk. “Steve is helping me with this paperwork. I swear, the thing that gets to me the most about this goddamn thing is the paperwork involved."

“It's an annoying part of the job,” Haskins said, sighing. “So what's the scoop? All I heard was that it's pretty much the same ol’ same ‘ol. That the guy was pretty much found scattered in pieces along a drainage ditch."

“Well it's not that cut and dried,” Daryl said. He gave him a brief re-cap of his day, Haskins nodding along at all the appropriate parts. “As of now no word has come in if the rest of him has been found."

Haskins whistled. “Damn. Any I.D. on the body yet?"

“None. But he looks like a gang member. His chest and torso sport gang tattoos."

Haskins nodded. “Yep, he's really following his pattern. We pretty much thought he'd strike again after the body of that woman was found last week."

Daryl's mind flashed back to last week. On the warm Sunday morning of July 6, a fourteen-year-old boy walking to his grandmother's house in Echo Park stumbled over a skull in the middle of a well worn path in the field. The boy had run to his grandmother's house and told her of his find. The woman phoned the police. When officers arrived they found the skull exactly where the boy said it was. Approximately twenty yards from the skull, partially hidden in some bushes, was the rotting remains of a burlap bag and the skeletal remains of a woman inside it. Pages from the
Los Angeles Times
dated June 5, 1996 and the
LA XPress
were wrapped around portions of the corpse (rotted flesh still clung to some of the body parts, causing more than a few officers to lose their lunch when they found her). Fragments of a black leather mini-skirt and black fishnet stockings were found twenty feet away, along with tangled strands of black hair.

The remains had turned out to be that of an African American woman named Rosie Williams who had disappeared a year earlier around July 19. She had been a call girl who advertised in the
LA X-Press
. A check with the advertising department of the paper discovered that Rosie had been a client for over a year. At the time of her disappearance, investigators attempting to trace her whereabouts had gone through her normal client list and interviewed them about a dozen times, also going through the list of friends and acquaintances and fellow call girls. Every lead had turned into a dead end.

Her friends and relatives hinted that she might have skipped town; at the time of her disappearance, she had been the subject of harassment from several johns who were stalking her and she had spoken about dropping out of sight for awhile and relocating.

But even if she had done that she would have let her close family and friends know where she had gone. After awhile they had begun to suspect foul play on the part of these intimidating johns, but a thorough investigation of her client list exonerated all the men she had done business with. Attempts to trace her the night she was last seen went nowhere. A neighbor recalled seeing her leave her apartment around 9:30 on the evening of July 17, dressed in a tight black mini-skirt and black fishnet stockings, black high heel pumps and a white halter top, hair and make-up done up for business. The neighbor knew what Rosie did for a living and figured she was simply on her way out to earn some money. Nobody saw where she went.

Nobody saw her come back.

Cause of death was uncertain, but it had been determined that Rosie had been neatly dismembered. Traces of lime were also detected that might have hastened the corpse's deterioration. The bones of the legs and arms were missing, but the rest were present except for a single rib. None of Rosie Williams’ other remains were found.

When the remains were initially identified, the hierarchies of the LAPD refused to include Rosie Williams in the murder cycle. Daryl and Bernie Haskins demurred and insisted she be included in the murder cycle. Rosie Williams had no ties to street gangs, which differed from the MO thus far, but the rest of the evidence was overwhelmingly that she had been a victim of the Butcher. Plus, Rosie Williams’ remains were disposed of in a vacant lot in Echo Park, within the same twenty block radius of the other murders and discovery sites.