Unleashed

by Jacob Stone

  “You should type up the essay now while what you want to write is fresh in your mind.”

  “You can be a cruel woman sometimes.”

  Julia laughed. “Show a little patience. Good things come to those who wait.”

  She scooted off his lap and positioned herself the way she was earlier on the couch and picked up her book again. Duncan made a show of his unhappy grumbling, but opened the laptop and went to work fast and furiously on the essay. He figured if he applied himself, he could have it done in an hour, and afterwards he’d be racing Julia to the bedroom. That was motivation enough to buckle down. He was ten minutes into it when someone knocked on their door, and then a man’s voice saying, “It’s Dave. Open up.”

  His boss at work was named Dave Connelly. The voice was muffled, but it could be him. Duncan was old-fashioned for a millennial in that he relied on a watch. He gave it a quick look. Almost 10:30 on a Tuesday night. It was possible there was a boiler emergency, maybe a water heater in a building nearby blew up, but would Dave really drag him out of his apartment at that hour? There were other workers on call for that.

  More knocking and that same muffled voice calling out, “Open the door already. It’s important.”

  The last thing Duncan wanted right then was to leave Julia so that he could instead spend hours repairing a busted boiler. He mouthed to Julia that he thought it was his boss. He whispered, “Should we pretend we’re not home?”

  Julia showed him a helpless gesture.

  Duncan, resigned to the situation, pushed himself off the couch, but he couldn’t help feeling annoyed at the situation. He’d go out on the job—this was the life he signed up for, after all—but he was still going to give Connelly a piece of his mind. They had him scheduled at work to be on call two nights that week, and this wasn’t one of them!

  He opened the door prepared to complain bitterly to Connelly, but it wasn’t Connelly at the door. Instead, it was a guy hiding his face with a ski mask. Before Duncan had a chance to react, he caught a glint of metal flashing toward him, and then something much harder than knuckles smacked him in the jaw.

  * * * *

  Before waking up, Duncan’s consciousness ebbed in and out like an ocean tide. At some level he was aware of how badly his jaw and shoulders ached, and that his arms felt numb and disconnected from him. With a start, he remembered a stranger wearing a ski mask who punched him in the face with brass knuckles.

  He tried screaming out for help, but only a muffled, whimpering noise escaped from him. He couldn’t move his arms or legs, and as he struggled to open his eyes, he realized he was sitting on one of the wooden chairs he and Julia kept by the table, his arms pulled behind him, his wrists tightly bound with duct tape, and his ankles tied to the chair legs. With a concentrated effort he forced his eyes open, and the light in the room hit him like broken glass slashing deep into his corneas, the pain driving all the way into his brain. He fought through the pain and soon he could focus and see that Julia was sitting naked in a chair opposite him, also gagged and bound.

  He tried again to scream, but the gag had been shoved into his mouth and it once again stifled him. He fought to bolt from the chair, but the duct tape wrapped around his wrists and ankles refused to let him budge even a fraction of an inch.

  “Settle down there, champ, or you’ll give yourself a stroke.”

  Duncan turned toward the voice. The guy in a ski mask from earlier was standing off to the side, holding something behind his back. Duncan fought again to break free, but only accomplished exhausting himself and making his head hurt even more.

  “You’re not too swift, are you, champ? There’s not a damn thing you can do to help your sweet little thing, not the way I got you tied up. But let me tell you something—if I had found a decent score here, I would’ve left you two with only that little love tap to the jaw. But thirty-eight stinking dollars? A worthless laptop I can’t fence? Nothing else here but junk? It really pissed me off, enough so I decided to get my money’s worth another way.”

  The creature (because that was how Duncan thought of him) showed what he was a hiding behind his back: A carving knife he had taken from the kitchen. Duncan tried again to scream and break free before slumping back in his chair. The creature made a tsking noise as he moved over to Julia.

  “I want you to remember this is all your fault. If you had kept a few hundred dollars in your apartment, sweet little thing here would’ve been left untouched.”

  Julia had small breasts, but as far as Duncan was concerned they were beautiful and perfect. He watched in horror as the creature sliced off her right nipple and then her left. Blind rage exploded inside him. He fought like a wounded animal to free himself, but it was futile and accomplished nothing but draining the little energy he had.

  “Champ, you’re one stupid muthafucka, aren’t you? Get it through your thick skull you ain’t moving.”

  The creature said this as if it were something funny. Duncan stared into the creature’s eyes and saw only cruelty. Whatever hatred he might’ve once felt toward Wainwright was only a drop in the ocean compared to what he felt for this person.

  What happened next was worse than any imaginable nightmare. Duncan watched helplessly while the creature repeatedly stabbed and cut Julia. The creature stopped after a while and came back to him. His shirtsleeve had crept up enough so that Duncan saw the tattoo on the underside of his right wrist. He tried to keep that fact hidden, but the image of the snarling wolf’s face would forever be burned into his memory.

  The creature crouched in front of him so their eyes were level.

  “I’m making you a once-in-a-lifetime offer. No matter what you do, your sweet little thing is dying tonight. But if you agree, I’ll cut you free and let you end her suffering by choking the life out of her. I gotta warn you though, champ, if you don’t live up to your end of the deal, I’m going medieval on her, and she’ll die so much uglier than otherwise. So what will it be?”

  What he was asking was impossible. Duncan couldn’t possibly agree to something like that, not while there was a chance someone could rescue them. But if he were cut free and tried fighting off this creature and failed, he knew this creature would keep his word and ramp up the torture. Forget that he had a broken jaw—what chance would he have when he couldn’t even feel his arms anymore? Little to none? Was that even too high?

  God help him, he shook his head, turning down the offer.

  The creature’s eyes showed his disappointment. “Don’t say I didn’t give you a chance.”

  The creature moved back to Julia and used the knife in even crueler and more disfiguring ways. Over and over again, until it became a mantra running in Duncan’s head, he made silent promises to a God he didn’t believe in about what he would do if Julia could be spared any further pain, but there was no divine intervention. It took hours before she finally succumbed.

  Before the creature left the apartment, he told Duncan, “Now you have yourself an especially wonderful rest of your life.”

  Chapter 57

  Boston, the present

  Charlie Bogle was not having a particularly good day. First, it was announced that his flight to Boston was delayed forty minutes, then the plane was stuck on the tarmac for an additional fifty minutes while he was stuck in the middle seat between two beefy alpha males who were determined to take control of the shared armrests. After they landed, he found himself in thirty-eight-degree weather with freezing rain slashing into his face as he waited in line for a taxi. He didn’t care how good the chowder was here—if this was what the locals had to deal with in April, they could keep it! Finally, or what he thought was the final cherry on top of a craptastic day, he was stuck in what seemed like interminable traffic for what should’ve been a four-mile ride to the New Sudbury Street police station so he could meet with Detective Lloyd Bracken.

  “This is worse than driving on the LA
Freeway,” Bogle observed, trying to be philosophical about it. “Is it always this bad here?”

  “Russia, yeah. Always,” the cabdriver mumbled in a mushed-mouth Slavic accent.

  That answer made no sense to Bogle, and he puzzled over it until he realized the cabdriver said rush hour instead of Russia. His phone dinged to notify him about an incoming text message, and he saw that Morris had sent him a photo of the suspect. Bogle thought the man looked like Kurt Russell from Escape from New York, except with shorter hair and no eyepatch. He called Morris and asked how certain he was this was the Cupid Killer.

  “He’s got a wolf’s-face tattoo on his wrist and he likes to pose as a hit man so he can blackmail suckers who hire him.”

  “That’s all?”

  “I got a feeling,” Morris said.

  “A feeling you can’t hide,” Bogle said, slightly altering a line to the same Beatles song.

  “Are you okay?” Morris asked with concern. “You’re sounding a bit loopy.”

  “Just all the traveling. Do you have a name for this suspect?”

  “Not yet. We’ve got a stakeout going on. Hopefully he shows. If he doesn’t, we’ll blast his photo tonight all over the internet and TV.”

  Bogle could understand Morris hoping he wouldn’t have to do that. Not only could it cause the guy to rabbit, but other than the tattoo, they didn’t have anything yet connecting him to the Cupid Killer, and there had to be more than one person in LA with that tattoo. If Bogle were setting odds, he’d give it no more than fifty-fifty at this point.

  He asked, “Did you send his photo to the Oakland PD?”

  “Yep, and I talked to the detective in charge of the Markin homicide investigation. OPD will be showing it to their CIs to see if anyone knows him.”

  “I’ll try to get the Boston PD to do the same here. Right now, I’m in a taxi creeping along at one inch per minute.” Bogle squinted as he tried to look past the cabdriver to see what was in front of them. He groaned. “It looks like there are five lanes merging into two, so I’ll be sitting here for a while. If you get a handle on your Cupid Killer suspect and he confesses, call me so if I’m still stuck in this godforsaken traffic, I can bail from the cab and walk back to the airport.”

  Bogle had gotten an earful earlier from Bracken when he called him about his plane being late. After he got off the phone with Morris, he called the Boston homicide detective again to tell him he would be even later, thanks to this horrendous airport traffic, and Bracken cut him off in mid-sentence to give him another earful.

  “Bad enough you ratted me out to my bosses, now you’re going to keep me at my desk all night!”

  “First of all, I didn’t rat you out to anyone,” Bogle said, his temper flaring. “I’m working a serial killer case in which four people have been murdered so far and two other victims brutalized. An FBI agent assigned to the case called her office for assistance. Second, it’s only five-thirty. You cops in Boston have pretty short days, huh?”

  “I’ve been on the job since five a.m., asshole.”

  Bogle had to count to three before he trusted himself to speak. It had been that kind of day so far.

  “How about we start over?” he suggested. “I’ve been traveling all day, I’m hungry, and I don’t want this ending with us having a fistfight, which is the way we’re heading—”

  “I’d kick your butt if that’s how it turns out.”

  Bogle took a deep breath. This guy was more irritating than Polk. “That might or might not be true,” he said. “Regardless, how about we meet at a nearby restaurant. You pick the place as long as we don’t need a reservation and I can get lobster, and I’ll pick up the tab.”

  There was a distinctive change in Bracken’s attitude when he asked if drinks were to be included.

  “Hell yes,” Bogle said.

  * * * *

  With a shaved square-shaped head, thick neck, and body to match, Detective Lloyd Bracken looked like a Marine drill sergeant. He had chosen an Italian restaurant in Boston’s North End, and after several beers and littlenecks sautéed in garlic and Pinot Grigio, he had become downright chummy. He also brought a copy of the Julia Swan homicide file, and handed it over to Bogle without any fuss. Bogle thumbed through it, stopping when he got to the crime-scene photos. Swan had been stripped naked and her body suffered the same grotesque injuries as the LA victims. He flipped past the photos and found the witness statement from Swan’s fiancé, Duncan Moss. According to Moss, the killer had a wolf’s-face tattoo on the underside of his right wrist, and Bogle let out a short whistle when he read what the killer told Moss before leaving the apartment.

  Bracken was in the process of tilting back a bottle of Sam Adams. He made a face as if he thought Bogle couldn’t possibly be serious.

  “It’s the Cupid Killer,” Bogle volunteered. “Same wolf-face tattoo, and what he said to the witness—now you have yourself an especially wonderful rest of your life—matches what he said to one of our witnesses. This guy also killed Suzanne Markin in Oakland twelve months ago.”

  “The perp in Oakland had that same tattoo?”

  “We don’t know, but he called the poor guy he was tormenting champ, same as he did Moss. Why’d you think Julia Swan’s murder was drug-related?”

  “We got a tip that an apartment in Jamaica Plain was about to be hit for a heavy amount of coke. Word was five or more kilos, but we weren’t given an address. Then this happened and when I looked into Moss, I found out he was all wrong.”

  Bracken took a long pull on his beer, emptying it. He waved over the waitress and ordered another round, and this time added bourbon shots. When the waitress walked away, he told Bogle he heard on the street that Moss was well-known for pulling off serious heists.

  “He built himself a nice cover working a nine-to-five job, but that was only to scout out more robberies. He must’ve found the five kilos that way and someone figured out he took it and wanted those kilos back. A shame about Julia. A beautiful young woman, and by all accounts a good egg. But that’s the type of collateral damage someone like Moss can cause.”

  The story made sense to Bogle. The same guy tortured and killed Suzanne Markin in Oakland and Julia Swan in Boston for no other reason than to rip off kilos of coke from their boyfriends, and now he was doing the same in Los Angeles purely for kicks. A shiver ran down his spine. This psycho discovered with Markin and Swan just how much he enjoyed using a knife on a helpless woman while her significant other was forced to watch. He texted Bracken the same photo Morris had texted him earlier.

  “It’s not a hundred percent, but we think he’s our Cupid Killer.”

  Bracken peered at the photo before looking up at Bogle. “What odds would you give it?” he asked.

  “Earlier I was thinking fifty percent, now I’m closer to ninety-nine.”

  “You got a name for this asshole?”

  “We’re working on it.”

  Bracken gave the photo another look. “I’ll make sure this gets passed around to our CIs, see if anyone knows him.” Somewhat accusingly, he asked, “Anything else you’re holding back?”

  “Not a thing.”

  The waitress returned with their food and drinks. Bogle had ordered the Lobster Fra Diavolo and Bracken the veal chops. Bogle took a bite of his food and had to admit it was damn good. Maybe not quite good enough to make up for dealing with this nasty April weather, but still very tasty. For the next forty minutes the two men concentrated on their food, drinks, coffee, and small talk about Boston weather and the odds of the Red Sox and Dodgers meeting next fall in the World Series. When they were done with dinner, Bracken offered his hand and told Bogle he wasn’t as big a jerk as he thought earlier.

  “Same here,” Bogle said, grinning. “Now that I’ve gotten to know you, I’m only slightly tempted to kick your ass.”

  Bracken returned the grin. “Which I’
m sure is just that much less than I’d like to kick yours.”

  Before separating, they promised to keep each other informed about any developments, and Bogle caught a taxi to take him to a hotel near the airport. He called Morris, who told him they were still waiting for the Cupid Killer to show.

  “We’ll give the stakeout another hour and then go to plan B,” Morris said.

  “Plastering the guy’s photo everywhere.’

  “Exactly.”

  Traffic to the airport flowed easily, and in less than ten minutes the cab was pulling up to the hotel. Charlie Bogle had a change of heart. It wasn’t even 7:30 yet, 4:30 LA time, and he felt like doing a little exploring—namely, find Julia Swan’s fiancé and see if he formed the same opinion of him that Bracken did.

  Bogle told the cabbie that he wanted to go someplace else and to keep the meter running. He searched through the file Bracken had given him and found Julia Swan’s Jamaica Plain address.

  * * * *

  On one side of the street was a large cluster of fairly ugly four-story brick buildings that looked like they were constructed in the sixties, and on the other side was what looked like the boundary to a small forest, which had to be why the street was named Forest Hills. Bogle found within the cluster the building that matched Swan’s address. The front door was left unlocked and he climbed the stairs to the third-floor apartment. After a knock on the door and no answer, he tried again, this time banging harder. A white-haired woman in her seventies stepped out of a neighboring apartment and gave Bogle a bug-eyed stare before asking if he was police officer. Bogle told her that he was.

  “Is this about what happened to poor Julia?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “That was terrible,” she said, her face aging a decade as she reflected on Swan’s fate. “She was such a nice, young woman. If you’re looking for Duncan, he hasn’t been home for at least a week.”

  That was a surprise. “Do you know where he went?”