And it was true—whatever it was, it did look like blood.
“We need to go in,” said Banning.
“Don’t you think we should wait for backup?”
“No, I do not. Could be a citizen in there needs our help.”
Porter didn’t have anything to say to that, and the two of them hurried to the back door. It didn’t look as stout as the one in front, and there was a little window centered at eye level. This, however, was barred with wrought-iron curlicues, so smashing the glass wouldn’t do any good. They’d have to kick in the door.
“Ever had to breach?” Banning’s voice was low, quiet, and fierce. She was ready.
“In Afghanistan,” Porter whispered. “GREMs off my M4.”
“With your foot, Porter.”
He considered, then shook his head. Banning herself had no desire to wager her knee against the door’s integrity. On a recent drug raid, a friend of hers in SWAT had come up against what appeared to be a flimsy slab of hollow-core composite, only to find—after driving his heel into the panel above the knob—that he’d challenged a fire door armed with three Schlage dead bolts. It would be months before he’d be able to walk without a limp.
“Now’s your chance.” Banning drew her firearm. Porter, following her lead, did the same. He looked to his supervisor, got a final nod of approval, and positioned himself in a fighting stance—a boxer about to deliver a knockout punch. He took a breath. Then, his gun hand trained at a downward angle, he hurled his weight at the door, concentrating the whole force into a single tactical boot.
The door didn’t so much open as explode inward, shearing off an arm’s-length chunk of jamb as it went. The wood spun off into darkness, joined by a glinting chunk of metal—probably the dead bolt—along with a spray of glass from the inset window.
“LAPD!” Porter charged in blindly, his Glock gripped far in front like a talisman. Banning followed him, brushing the wall with the back of a hand to find the light switch. The room filled with the mellow glow of a single shaded bulb, revealing a stacked washer and dryer, an ironing board piled with folded clothes, and a red Craftsman tool chest.
Porter blinked, swept the barrel of his weapon from side to side, and shouted “Clear!” before stumbling through the doorway and into the hall beyond.
“Porter!” Banning might not have liked him, but she didn’t need to see him get killed. “Porter, wait your ass up!”
“Clear!” he called again, and Banning heard his footfalls hammering their way up the main staircase. She sprinted to catch up with him and knocked something with her hip. There was a tremendous crash but she ignored it, cutting through the unfamiliar hallway until she emerged into a wide, drafty foyer.
She stopped, listening. Her pulse roared in her ears, making it impossible to work out any other sounds. The beam of her Maglite skipped over a sofa, a low coffee table, a baby grand piano. Sensing movement behind her, she spun, lining up her gunsight with a slowly rocking shard of pottery. If the homeowners were still alive, they certainly wouldn’t be cheered by the knowledge that one of the responding officers had demolished what appeared to be the world’s largest decorative vase.
She then realized the house had fallen totally silent, no Porter blundering through, yelling that everything was “clear.”
“Porter!” She pointed the Maglite to her left, and a staircase emerged from the black. The banisters were mahogany, the newel posts anchoring them topped with carved finials of sleepy-eyed cherubs. There was a smell now, too—foul, penetrating high into her sinuses. The smell of old shit.
“Porter!” Banning took the stairs two at a time, wrists crossed so both the Glock and the Maglite moved in sync. She thought of this configuration as her death ray, like the lethal blast from a Wellsian spacecraft. Anything that landed in the path of her Maglite’s beam was as good as dead if she so chose.
Past the first landing, she slowed. Ahead were more stairs, a second small landing, then the last flight before she’d reach the body they’d glimpsed from outside. The one with the wide, unblinking eyes.
Banning crept forward, picking her way carefully along on the balls of her feet. A worn burgundy rug ran down the length of the staircase, fastened in place with brass rods, and she hardly made a sound as she ascended.
She came to the second landing, turned, and aimed her light toward the top step. From so steep a downward angle, she couldn’t see the body—just the crown of its head and a tuft of hair the color of dryer lint. The smell, however, was much worse.
Banning went on, eyes scanning left, right, then left again. Only when her chest began to ache did she realize she’d been holding her breath. She let out a long, shaky exhale as quietly as she could, and her next step brought the rest of the body’s head—which she presumed belonged to Mr. Lauterbach—into view.
She saw now why the corpse’s eyes had looked so large from outside. Someone had cut the eyelids from the man’s face. Both the upper and lower lids were excised from the left eye, while a few gray lashes told her that the lower lid remained on the right. The nostrils and mouth bulged with a black, mud-like substance that she quickly realized accounted for the terrific stench.
Banning vomited, doing her best to aim the stream over the railing so as not to contaminate the crime scene. For the most part she succeeded. She spat, wiped her mouth on her sleeve, and continued onward.
As she made her way past Lauterbach, her death ray once again making quick, sure slices through the fetid air, she snuck glances at the man’s body. In addition to the outrages she’d already noted, the man had been stripped naked. Dozens of bruises and irregular, dime-sized circles—cigarette burns, probably—mottled the corpse’s flesh. The body lay on its belly in a pool of congealed blood, but Banning couldn’t see the wound that’d produced it. Femoral artery, maybe? Or…oh God.
From between the man’s buttocks protruded a pale, pruned thing, like a boneless thumb. The end of it, where it had been cut off, was a chewed purple stump. The amount of blood, Banning knew, indicated he’d been alive when emasculated. Perhaps still alive when his own penis had been forced into his rectum.
“Porter,” she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper. No more than thirty seconds had passed since her trainee had kicked in the door, but there was a sense she’d traveled somewhere very far away, farther from home than she’d ever been. This wasn’t a house anymore; it was a forgotten outpost on a moon, a moon spinning around a lightless, lifeless planet. Part of her was certain that were she to retrace her steps and find her way outside, it wouldn’t be into the chill of Los Angeles in January but into a silent, black desert, with sand like talcum powder and a sky of cold, strange stars above. She’d be able to see for a little while, at least as long as the batteries in her Maglite lasted. After that—
A soft moan pulled her back to herself. She listened, unsure whether or not she’d been the one who’d made the sound. But then it came again, like wind in an attic, low and mournful.
“Police!” called Banning. “Identify yourself!”
Nothing. The moan, or whatever it was, had fallen silent.
“I am armed and backup is on the way. Step out slowly, with your hands raised, and identify yourself.” As she spoke, her death ray made its sweeps along the upper floor, prodding at every shadow.
“Porter! You okay, partner?” A few minutes ago it would’ve been unthinkable to call him that, but whatever uneasy relationship they shared, they were still on the same side. And the person who’d done those things to the old man was definitely not.
The moan rose again, and Banning followed it into a narrow hallway whose floral-print wallpaper sagged and bubbled against the weight of time. An oil painting of a shaggy black dog bounding across a foggy steppe hung crookedly to her left. Of the hallway’s three doors, two were shut. The last, which stood ajar at the very end, bore a smeared crimson handprint on its glossy white
paint. Only a slice of the room beyond was revealed, but it was as black as a well.
“Porter, you in there?” Banning trained her death ray on the door as she approached. Anything that broke that beam of light, anything that wasn’t Porter, would get a pair of jacketed .45s crashing through its skull.
She nudged the door with the toe of her boot, and it swung silently away on oiled hinges. Porter lay at the foot of an unmade bed, but Banning wouldn’t have known it was him if not for his uniform. The right side of his face was grotesquely swollen, the skin domed and taut over the trauma beneath. His eye was buried somewhere under the outraged flesh, which the hematoma had stained a bright red. His good eye squinted in the glare of Banning’s death ray.
“Unh,” Porter grunted. A vessel burst somewhere in his nose as he tried to speak, and it was as if someone had turned on a tap. Blood streamed from his puffy nostrils. Some also must have been going down the back of his throat, because he began to gag.
That she was in danger, too, didn’t occur to Banning immediately. She saw a badly injured officer, and her training told her the next step was to keep him safe. She lurched forward, then froze, realizing suddenly that she hadn’t secured the room. Her death ray flashed left—a teak armoire and a built-in bookshelf—then right.
Banning sucked in her breath and squeezed the Glock even more tightly. Between the bed and the wall lay a heap of…something. She didn’t know what it was, couldn’t make sense of the mass of fabric and limbs and—what? Teeth? Yes, teeth, and that helped her figure out where the face had been. But it was collapsed, mashed in, and the matted hair framing it was soaked in blood. So too was the silk nightgown, which in rare spots shone powder blue. Banning was reminded of what doves or pigeons looked like after they got run over.
Porter’s gagging had resolved into violent wet coughs and the occasional “Unh” as he tried again to speak. But Banning couldn’t take her eyes from the body. She noticed that the floor all around was stamped with dozens and dozens of shoe prints. They were small, hardly bigger than a child’s. Size sixes, sevens at the most. One, which lay across a broken, misshapen hand, was so well detailed it might have been stenciled on. It was impossible to tell exactly how Mrs. Lauterbach had died, but there was no doubt her murderer liked to kick. The mauled remains of a breast, along with crescent gouges in the woman’s neck and along her thighs, told Banning that he also liked to bite.
She heard—faintly, but rising—the most beautiful sound in the world. The keening of approaching sirens.
Thank God. Thank God, thank God, thank God.
“Unh huh.”
Banning tore her gaze away from Mrs. Lauterbach and turned to her trainee. Porter had managed to prop himself on his knees and elbows, and fixed Banning with his single blue eye. “Unh huh,” he repeated. “Unh huh beh.” He choked, spat a cord of bloody mucus onto the floor, and looked back up at Banning. He gestured at the bed, then at Banning’s gun, then at the bed again. His eye rolled in its orbit and he lost his balance, slamming onto his chest with a heavy wheeze.
Banning skipped the death ray over the mattress—sheets bunched, pillows stained with an array of bodily fluids—then to Mrs. Lauterbach, then back to Porter. He shook his head, though she could see it was agony for him.
Unh huh beh.
Then she understood, and her understanding seemed to call it, because now it came, out from under the bed, just as Porter had been trying to tell her. Came the way a shadow might, the way it moved, but when it hooked itself around her legs, she felt its weight and its strength. The room cartwheeled as Banning went down.
Pain rocketed through her head as she slammed to the floor. If the fall had stunned her, if she’d grayed out, it was impossible to tell. It was all so dark, and her Maglite was spinning away, her Glock too skittering out of reach. The death ray, broken.
A shadow materialized from the others, rising until it stood over Banning’s supine body. She was enveloped in a stomach-churning funk. It was the smell of rotting things, of yawning dumpsters, of the grave, and she wouldn’t have believed a living person capable of producing such a stench.
The shadow held a claw hammer.
“Please,” said Banning. “Please, I’ve got kids. Please don’t.”
The shape didn’t answer, just stood, waiting. There was something strange about the way its body was posed, as if it were a robot going through a systems upload. Banning couldn’t see its expression, and was glad. What would the face of such a creature look like? Evidence of its nature, of what stoked its passions, surrounded her. Why should she want to look in the eyes of the thing that’d done this? Even if she were only to live a few more seconds, she didn’t want to give any of them over to the shadow staring down at her.
Banning closed her eyes. She couldn’t control the last sounds she’d hear—her heartbeat, the shadow’s low, husky breathing, Porter’s hitching coughs, and the gathering sirens outside—but she could control the last things she’d see. She imagined her children, two and seven, curled asleep on the living-room couch one afternoon last summer.
She had been returning home from a shift. She entered as she always did, calling out their names, aching for them to run up and throw themselves into her arms. But her husband, who sat reading a book in his chair by the door, held up a quieting hand. He smiled and pointed to the children nearby. Banning went over to them. Lily, little Lily, had one of her perfect toddler’s hands resting against her brother’s cheek. The other lay draped over his chest, which rose and fell in the pure, untroubled sleep of the young.
They’d been so beautiful, so overwhelmingly beautiful, and she’d begun to weep in her love for them. Manny had come up behind her then, holding her around the waist, and they’d just stood there—she couldn’t say how long—in total awe of what was surely the greatest thing she would ever create.
There, Banning thought. There was a thought she could die with.
A terrific crack sounded, and Banning yelped, shielding her face. She heard footfalls, but these quickly faded, and then there was nothing but the sirens. They were right outside now.
She risked a peek from between her fingers and saw the claw hammer on the floor. The shadow had dropped it before he’d fled, and it’d cracked the parquet.
Porter groaned and got up on his hands and knees again. Banning pushed herself to her feet, fought a wave of dizziness, and went over to her partner.
I can still smell it, she thought, helping Porter balance himself on the bed’s heavy wooden frame. Like poison in the air.
There was a crash downstairs as their backup came through the front door. Shouts followed, along with the familiar calls of “clear” as the team secured the ground level. Porter had thought things had been pretty clear, too, and now he’d need someone to put his face back together.
“Gone?” he asked.
“It’s gone.”
“Oh. He…”
Banning waited for Porter to finish, but the man only hung his head.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of again.” She was surprised to hear herself speaking. She hadn’t intended to; the words just tumbled out. “Nothing to be afraid of, because nothing can be worse.” She wasn’t sure if she was consoling Porter or herself, or if perhaps her brain was simply trying to make sense of what it had felt. No—what her soul had felt. She hadn’t really believed in God until then, but she did now. Because Banning now knew that revulsion could be so deep it touched your spirit, and you couldn’t have a spirit if there wasn’t a God to put one in you. Just as a force always produces a counterforce, the presence of the shadow had woken something within her that had pushed back, something that had screamed out—
I don’t know what I am, but I know I am not you.
1
Tully Jarsdel hated the arm-wrestling table. Loathed, despised, and detested it. And not just because he’d already barked a shin on one of the 14-gauge s
teel legs, but because it sat right in the center of the break room, turning what had been a generally peaceful place to eat lunch into an aural hell of shouts, grunts, and whoops.
It was a squat thing, the size of a card table. A custom logo—stressed red typeface against a background of fractured concrete—read “Eat. Sleep. PULL,” and in smaller print, “Hollywood Station Patrol.” At each end was bolted a vinyl elbow rest and a knurled handle. The combatant would plant his arm on the rest, seize the handle with his free hand, and—making as much noise as possible—try wrenching his opponent’s limb to one of the touch pads.
Will Haarmann, a patrol officer with rippling forearms and a flat, blandly handsome face, had brought the table in one day, and no one had objected. On the contrary, Lieutenant Gavin was the first to throw his support behind the idea. Maybe if there was enough interest, he announced at roll, Hollywood Division could put on a local championship and open it up to the public. It was just the sort of thing that could take off, become an annual event, even spread department-wide. Just imagine—the LAPD Arm-Wrestling Open, followed by a community-outreach barbecue. A spirited fund-raiser for the families of fallen officers. Over which he would of course preside.
But more importantly, according to the lieutenant, arm wrestling in the break room would foster a spirit of healthy competition and spur a boost in morale. Even Gavin, who put little stock in recent departmental trends like resilience training, sensitivity seminars, and whatever the chief meant by “organizational climate,” recognized the importance of morale.
And morale at Hollywood Station was very low indeed.
* * *
After the third murder, Angelenos began repainting their houses. Bill and Joanne Lauterbach, the Rustads, and the Santiagos had all lived in white homes. Practically overnight, every professional painting company in Southern California—along with a robust showing of Craigslist amateurs—were booked two months out. Before long, anyone who could haul a ladder and a can of paint was desperately throwing color onto their walls. That lasted until July, when the killer hit the Verheugens in Eagle Rock. The Verheugens’ house was blue. You could almost hear him saying—
What Waits for You Page 2