“What is that like inside your head?” Jessica said.
“That private moment inside your head?
“When you’re actually contemplating someone’s death.”
The room went silent for an instant.
The sisters looked at each other.
“Would anyone like some more champagne?” Susan asked.
“I’d love some,” Jessica said.
“I’ll get it,” Will said, and started to rise.
“No, no, let me,” Susan said, and took his glass and carried all three empty glasses into the kitchen. Jessica crossed her legs. Behind him, in the kitchen, Will could hear Susan refilling their glasses. He watched Jessica’s jiggling foot, her pump half-on, half-off, held only by her toes.
“So that stuff in the bar was all part of the exercise, right?” Will said. “Your suggesting we kill somebody? And then choosing your sister as the victim?”
“Well, sort of,” Jessica said.
Her pump fell off. She bent over to retrieve it, spreading her legs, the black dress high on her thighs. She crossed one leg over the other, put the pump back on, smiled at Will. Susan was back with the full glasses.
“Still some more out there,” she said, and passed the glasses around. Jessica held hers up in a toast.
“From this time such,” she said, “I account thy love.”
“Cheers,” Susan said, and drank.
“Meaning?” Will said, but he drank, too.
“That’s in the scene,” Jessica said. “Actually, it’s at the start of the scene. Where he’s beginning to waver. By the end of the scene, she’s convinced him the king must die.”
“False face must hide what the false heart doth show,” Susan said, and nodded.
“That’s Macbeth’s exit line. At the end of the scene.”
“Is that why you were dressed as a file clerk? False face must hide… whatever it was you just said?”
“What the false heart doth show,” Susan repeated. “But no, that’s not why I was in costume.”
“Then why?”
“It was my way of trying to create a character.”
“Maybe he hasn’t got it, after all,” Jessica said.
“A character who could kill,” Susan said.
“You had to become a frump?”
“Well, I had to become someone else, yes. Someone not like myself at all. But it turned out that wasn’t enough. I had to find the right place, too.”
“The place is here” Jessica said.
“And now” Will said. “So, ladies, if no one minds…”
“Ooo hoo, ladies again,” Susan said, and again rolled her eyes.
“… can we get off all this acting stuff for a moment… ?”
“How about your private moment?” Susan said.
“I don’t have any private moments.”
“Don’t you ever fart alone in the dark?” Jessica asked.
“Don’t you ever jack off alone in the dark?” Susan asked.
Will’s mouth fell open.
“Those are private moments,” Jessica said.
For some reason, he could not close his mouth again.
“I think it’s beginning to work,” Susan said.
“Take the glass from his hand before he drops it,” Jessica said.
Will watched them with his eyes and his mouth wide open.
“I’ll bet he thinks it’s curare,” Jessica said.
“Where on earth would we get curare?”
“The jungles of Brazil?”
“Venezuela?”
Both girls laughed.
Will didn’t know if it was curare or not. All he knew was he couldn’t speak and he couldn’t move.
“Well, he knows we didn’t go all the way down to the Amazon for any poison,” Jessica said.
“That’s right, he knows you’re a nurse,” Susan said.
“Beth Israel, you bet,” Jessica said.
“Access to lots of drugs there.”
“Even synthetic curare drugs.”
“Plenty of those around.”
“List them for him, Jess.”
“Don’t want to bore him, Sue.”
“You have to inject curare, Will, did you know that?”
“The natives dip their darts in it.”
“Shoot the darts from blowpipes.”
“The victims are paralyzed.”
“Helpless.”
“Death comes from asphyxia.”
“That means you can’t breathe.”
“Because the respiratory nerve muscles get paralyzed.”
“Are you having trouble breathing yet, Will?”
He did not think he was having trouble breathing. But what were they saying? Were they saying they’d poisoned him?
“The synthetics come in tablet form,” Susan told him.
“Easy to pulverize.”
“Easy to dissolve.”
“Lots of legitimate uses for synthetic curare drugs,” Jessica said.
“Provided you’re careful with the dosage.”
“We weren’t particularly careful with the dosage, Will.”
“Did your champagne taste a little bitter?”
He wanted to shake his head no. His champagne had tasted just fine. Or had he been too drunk to know just how it had tasted? But he couldn’t shake his head, and he couldn’t talk.
“Let’s watch him,” Susan said. “Study his reactions.”
“Why?” Jessica asked.
“Well, it could be helpful.”
“Not for the scene we’re doing.”
“Killing someone.”
“Killing someone, yes. Duh, Susan.”
Killing me, Will thought.
They are actually killing me here.
But, no…
Girls, he thought, you’re making a mistake here. This is not the way to go about this. Let’s go back to the original plan, girls. The original plan was to pop a bottle of bubbly and hop into the sack together. The original plan was to share this lovely night three days before… actually only two days now, it was already well past midnight… two days before Christmas, share this sweet uncomplicated night together, a sister act with a willing third partner is all this was supposed to be here. So how’d it get so serious all of a sudden? There was no reason for you girls to get all serious about acting lessons and private moments, really, this was just supposed to be fun and games here tonight. So why’d you have to go drop poison in my champagne? I mean, Jesus, girls, why’d you have to go do that when we were getting along so fine here?
“Are you feeling anything?” Susan asked.
“No,” Jessica said. “Are you?”
“I thought I’d feel…”
“Me, too.”
“I don’t know… sinister or something.”
“Me, too.”
“I mean, killing somebody! I thought it would be something special. Instead…”
“I know what you mean. It’s just like watching somebody, I don’t know, getting a haircut or something.”
“Maybe we should have tried something else.”
“Not poison, you mean?”
“Something more dramatic.”
“Something scarier, I know what you mean.”
“Get some kind of reaction out of him.”
“Instead of him just sitting there.”
“Sitting there like a dope and dying.”
The girls leaned over Will and peered into his face. Their faces looked distorted, so close to his face and all. Their blue eyes looked as if they were popping out of their heads.
“Do something,” Jessica told him.
“Do something, asshole,” Susan said.
They kept watching him.
“It’s not too late to stab him, I suppose,” Jessica said.
“You think?” Susan said.
Please don’t stab me, Will thought. I’m afraid of knives. Please don’t stab me.
“Let’s see what’s in the kitchen,” Jessica
said.
He was suddenly alone.
The girls were suddenly gone.
Behind him…
If he could not turn his head to see them.
… behind him he could hear them rummaging through what he guessed was one of the kitchen drawers, could hear the rattle of utensils…
Please don’t stab me, he thought.
“How about this one?” Jessica asked.
“Looks awfully big for the job,” Susan said.
“Slit his fuckin’ throat good,” Jessica said, and laughed.
“See if he sits there like a dope then,” Susan said.
“Get some kind of reaction out of him.”
“Help us to feel something.”
“Now you’ve got it, Sue. That’s the whole point.”
Will’s chest was beginning to feel tight. He was beginning to have difficulty breathing.
In the kitchen, the girls laughed again.
Why were they laughing?
Had they just said something he couldn’t hear? Were they going to do something else with that knife, other than slit his throat? He wished he could take a deep breath. He knew he would feel so much better if he could just take a deep breath. But he… he… he didn’t seem to be… to be able to…
“Hey!” Jessica said. “You! Don’t poop out on us!”
Susan looked at her.
“I think he’s gone,” she said.
“Shit!” Jessica said.
“What are you doing?”
“Taking his pulse.”
Susan waited.
“Nothing,” Jessica said, and dropped his wrist.
The sisters kept looking at Will where he sat slumped in the easy chair, his mouth still hanging open, his eyes wide.
“He sure as hell looks dead,” Jessica said.
“We’d better get him out of here.”
“Be a good exercise,” Jessica said. “Getting rid of the body.”
“I’ll say. I’ll bet he weighs at least a hun’ ninety.”
“I didn’t say good exercise, Sue. I said a good exercise. A good acting exercise.”
“Oh. Right. What it feels like to get rid of a dead body. Right.”
“So let’s do it,” Jessica said.
They started lifting him out of the chair. He was, in fact, very heavy. They half-carried him, half-dragged him to the front door.
“Tell me something,” Susan said. “Do you… you know… feel anything yet?”
“Nothing,” Jessica said.
Dangerous Women - Penzler, Otto Ed v1.rtf
CIELO AZUL
MICHAEL CONNELLY
O
n the way up, the car’s air conditioner gave up shortly after Bakersfield. It was September and hot as I pushed through the middle of the state. Pretty soon I could feel my shirt start to stick to the vinyl seat. I pulled off my tie and unbuttoned my collar. I didn’t know why I had put a tie on in the first place. I wasn’t on the clock and I wasn’t going anywhere that required a tie.
I tried to ignore the heat and concentrate on how I would try to handle Seguin. But that was like the heat. I knew there was no way to handle him. Somehow, it had always been the other way around. Seguin had the handle on me, made my shirt stick to my back. One way or the other that would end on this trip.
I turned my wrist on the steering wheel and checked the date on my Timex. Exactly twelve years since the day I had met Seguin. Since I had looked into the cold green eyes of a killer.
The case began on Mulholland Drive, the winding snake of a road that follows the spine of the Santa Monica Mountains. A group of high schoolers had pulled off the road to drink their beer and look down upon the smoggy city of dreams. One of them spotted the body. Nestled among the mountain brush and the beer cans and tequila bottles tossed down by past revelers, the woman was naked, her arms and legs stretched outward in some sort of grotesque display of sex and murder.
The call went to me and my partner, Frankie Sheehan. At the time we worked out of the LAPD’s Robbery-Homicide Division.
The crime scene was treacherous. The body was snagged on an incline with a better than sixty-degree grade. One slip and a person could tumble all the way down the mountainside, maybe end up in somebody’s hot tub down below or on somebody’s concrete patio. We wore jumpsuits and leather harnesses and were lowered down to the body by firemen from the 58th Battalion.
The scene was clean. No clothes, no ID, no physical evidence, no clues but the dead woman. We didn’t even find any fibers that were going to be useful. This was unusual for a homicide.
I studied the victim closely and realized she was barely a woman-probably still a teenager. Mexican, or of Mexican descent, she had brown hair, brown eyes and a dark complexion. I could tell that in life she had been beautiful to look at. In death she was heartbreaking. My partner always said the most dangerous women were the ones like her. Beautiful in life, heartbreaking in death. They could haunt you, stick with you even if you found the monster that took everything from her.
She had been strangled, the indentations of her killer’s thumbs clear on her neck, the petechial hemorrhaging putting a murderous rouge around her eyes. Rigor mortis had come and gone. She was loose. That told us she had been dead more than twenty-four hours.
The guess was that she had been dumped the night before, under cover of darkness. That meant she had been lying dead somewhere else for twelve hours or more. That other place was the true crime scene. It was the place we needed to find.
When I turned the car inland toward the bay the air finally began to cool. I skirted the east side of the bay up to Oakland and then went across the bridge into San Francisco. Before crossing the Golden Gate I stopped for a hamburger at the Balboa Bar & Grill. I get to San Francisco two or three times a year on cases. I always eat at the Balboa. This time I ate at the bar, glancing occasionally up at the television to see the Giants playing in Chicago. They were losing.
But mostly I rolled the old case back and forth in my head. It was a closed case now and Seguin would never hurt another person again. Except himself. His last victim would be himself. But still the case stuck with me. A killer was caught, tried and convicted, and now stood to be executed for his crimes. But there was still an unanswered question that stuck with me. It was what put me on the road to San Quentin on my day off.
We didn’t know her name. Fingerprints from the body matched no prints contained in computerized records. Her description matched no description on an active missing persons case anywhere in Los Angeles County or on national crime computer systems. An artist’s rendering of her face put on the TV news and in the papers brought no calls from a loved one or an acquaintance. Sketches faxed to five hundred police agencies across the southwest and to the State Judicial Police in Mexico drew no responses. The victim remained unclaimed and unidentified, her body reposing in the refrigerator at the coroner’s office while Sheehan and I worked the case.
It was tough. Most cases start with the victim. Who that person was and where she lived becomes the center of the wheel, the grounding point. Everything comes from the center. But we didn’t have that and we didn’t have the true crime scene. We had nothing and we were going nowhere.
All that changed with Teresa Corazon. She was the deputy coroner assigned to the case officially known as Jane Doe # 90-91. While preparing the body for an autopsy she came across the lead that would take us first to McCaleb and then to Seguin.
Corazon found that the victim’s body had apparently been washed with an industrial strength cleaner before being discarded on the hillside. It was an attempt by the killer to destroy trace evidence. This in itself, however, was both a solid clue and trace evidence. The cleaning agent could help lead to the killer’s identity or help tie him to the crime.
However, it was another discovery made by Corazon that turned the case for us. While photographing the body the deputy coroner noticed an impression in the skin on the rear left hip. Post-mortem lividity indicated the blood in th
e body had settled on the left half, meaning the body had been lying on its left side in the time between the stilling of the heart and the dropping of the body down the hillside off of Mulholland. The evidence indicated that during the time that the blood settled the body had been lying on top of the object that left the impression on the hip.
Using angled light to study the impression, Corazon found that she could clearly see the number 1, the letter J and part of a third letter that could have been the upper left stem of an H, a K or an L.
“A license plate,” I said when she called me to the autopsy suite to view the discovery. “He put her down on a license plate.”
“Exactly, Detective Bosch,” said Corazon.
Sheehan and I quickly formed the theory that whoever had killed the woman with no name had hidden the body in the trunk of a car until it was nighttime and safe to take it up to Mulholland and dump it. After carefully cleaning the body the killer put it into the trunk of his car, mistakenly putting it down on part of a license plate that had been taken off the car and also placed in the trunk. That part of the theory was that the license plate had been removed and possibly replaced with a stolen plate as one more safety measure that would help the killer avoid detection if his car happened to be spotted by a suspicious passerby at the Mulholland overlook.
The skin impression gave no indication of what state issued the license plate. But the use of the Mulholland outlook gave us the idea that we were looking for someone familiar with the area, a local. We began with the California Department of Motor Vehicles and obtained a list of every car registered in Los Angeles County that carried a plate beginning 1JH, 1JK and 1JL.
The list contained over one thousand names of car owners. We then cut forty percent of those names by discounting the female owners. The remaining names were slowly fed into the National Crime Index computer and we came up with a list of thirty-six men with criminal records ranging from minor to the extreme.
The first time I studied the list of thirty-six I knew. I felt certain that one of the names on it belonged to the killer of the woman with no name.
The Golden Gate lived up to its name in the afternoon sun. It was packed with cars going both ways and the tourist turnoff on the north side had the lot full sign up. I kept moving, into the rainbow-painted tunnel and through the mountain. Soon enough I could see San Quentin up on the right. A foreboding-looking place in an idyllic spot, it housed the worst criminals California had to offer. And I was going to see the worst of the worst.
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