In other words, Jarsdel quietly admitted to himself, Morales was generally right about the most important stuff.
And so, grudgingly, Jarsdel decided to take his former partner’s advice to absorb a little cinematic pop culture. He’d heard Morales rattle off the titles often enough that they were easy to recall. Zodiac, Manhunter, Frenzy, Peeping Tom, Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, M, and a dozen others. In most cases it’d been cheaper to buy the movies than stream them. In they came, day after day, horror and death cinched in sober, mustard-yellow mailers. Jarsdel would sit in his wingback chair with his dinner and a glass of wine, and suffer through them. No, that wasn’t fair—some were very good. On offer that night, however, was Maniac, the tale of a suety, lumbering psychopath who went around scalping people and stapling the trophies to the heads of his mannequins. Jarsdel’s dinner, a takeout container of capellini, went for the most part uneaten.
Jarsdel had never been a movie lover, hadn’t seen the point in surrendering the entirety of the creative process to someone else. With books, it was just him and the words, and he could determine—to some extent—where they’d end up taking him. His own mind was the movie screen, and he prided himself on its richness, its subtleties, its perfection. No film could touch the excellence of the images he’d already crafted inside his head.
On screen, the titular character stalked a woman through a subway station. Jarsdel had to be up early if he wanted to beat the morning traffic, and decided his filmic education would simply have to make do without this particular masterpiece. He turned off the TV, but as he was setting the remote back on the coffee table, his stitches pulled and he dropped it. The pain was sudden and startling, and he gasped.
Before he knew what he was doing, he had his phone out and was calling Morales. He picked up on the first ring.
“It’s eleven o’clock.”
“And I’ve been watching Maniac. Misery loves company.”
“Hang on,” Morales grumbled. “Signal’s shit this side of the house.”
Jarsdel waited. About a minute later, Morales came back on. “Okay, what is it?”
“Maniac. Wanted to extend my gratitude.”
“You got the original, right? 1980?”
“Oh, it’s as 1980 as you can get. Probably the foulest, grimiest thing I’ve ever seen. You can practically smell the movie through the TV screen.”
Morales laughed. “Yeah, that’s the one.”
“So how’s it going with Haarmann?”
A pause. “Haarmann?”
“Your new partner.”
“He’s not my partner. Just temporary.”
“Does he talk about me at all? About what he did to my hand?”
“Nope.”
“Wait, really?” Jarsdel was surprised. “Not even an off-hand remark or anything?”
“Yeah, nothin’.”
The Cro-Mag was capable of greater restraint than Jarsdel would’ve thought. Which made him even more dangerous.
“Tully, you there?”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Got quiet on me there. Okay, man, I ought—”
“What’s he like? As a detective?”
A longer pause this time. “Shit, man. I don’t know. He’s okay, I guess. Nothin’ special.”
“You make it sound like he’s not all that bad.”
“He’s—don’t get me wrong—he’s definitely got his annoyances. Real tac whore, gotta have every shiny little toy within department regs. And he’s got like two or three badge bunnies. Extra-long lunch breaks, almost every day.”
“Huh.”
“Comes back smelling like those samples of perfume they put in magazines. They still do that? Have the perfume on that little paper strip inside of magazines? My sister used to save those. Never bought a bottle all through her teens.”
Jarsdel grunted. “Well, I hope you’re washing your hands a lot.”
“Hey, there he is. There’s the Dad I know and love.”
Despite himself, Jarsdel smiled. “Just don’t let your guard down. Around the Cro-Mag.”
Morales yawned. “Okay. Gotta get some sleep.” He hung up.
Badge bunnies, Jarsdel thought. Extra-long lunch breaks.
He looked down at his hand. Most of the dressings were off now. Three large Band-Aids were all that covered the stitches. He tried bending his fingers, and the stitches pulled right away. It felt like he’d just grabbed an oven rack.
Before he could change his mind, he had the LAPD website up on laptop. It didn’t take long for him to find what he was looking for, and he began typing.
* * *
Jarsdel’s phone buzzed on his nightstand, rattling against the varnished wood. The sound pierced straight through to his dream, in which a Valentine’s Day picnic with Pliny the Elder was suddenly interrupted by the arrival of a giant bee. The phone buzzed again, and Jarsdel snapped awake, flinging out his hand to catch the damn thing before it could make that noise once more.
The screen told him it was Goodwin Rall. Had they caught the Creeper?
No. More likely another crime scene. He braced himself for the news, and answered.
“Yeah, it’s Jarsdel.”
“Hey, Tully. We need you, man.”
Jarsdel was already out of bed and stepping into a pair of jeans. “Sure, on my way. Where am I going? Where’d he hit?”
“It’s bad, man. Gonna change everything. Nothing like this ever…” Rall exhaled shakily.
“What is it? I need to know where to go.”
“It’s the LT’s old lady, man. Sponholz’s wife.”
14
Jarsdel added his own blue and red lights to the vehicles gathered outside the police barricade, and more cars continued to arrive behind him. Thankfully, the house was tucked down a remote Northridge cul-de-sac, so they didn’t have to worry too much about crowd control.
Jarsdel stepped out of his car, felt how muggy and thick the air was already, and tossed his sport coat back onto the passenger seat. After putting on a pair of nitrile gloves, he approached the patrol officer guarding the tape and signed his name on the crime-scene log. The officer lifted the yellow banner, and Jarsdel stepped through.
The sky was streaked with hints of peach and blue, but it still wasn’t light enough yet to see much detail, so he got out his Maglite and examined the pavement in front of Sponholz’s house. There was no blood, not that he could see. He edged closer, paying careful attention to the mailbox and the area nearby. The best print he’d ever found had been a bloody palm on a mailbox, left by a suspect when he’d tripped during his panicked flight from an assault. He was hoping he’d have similar luck this time, but the box was clean.
“Hey, Tully.” The voice was low and husky with emotion. Jarsdel turned to see Rall standing at his side. Before he could think of anything to say, he’d been seized in a crushing hug.
Jarsdel struggled to breathe. “Yeah, I know,” he managed.
Rall released him, then clamped a hand on each of his shoulders. “I knew Amy ten years. This motherfucker…”
“Where’s the lieutenant?”
Rall let him go. He furrowed his brow, then shook his head. “The lieutenant. Oh man, yeah. They got him out of here. He was…as you’d expect.”
“He found the, uh… He found his wife? He was the one who discovered her?”
“Don’t know. I’m guessing one of the first, yeah. Couldn’t get a whole lot out of him. The initial responder was the alarm company. Guy set it off when he broke in.”
Jarsdel glanced toward the open front door. “Through there?”
“Nah, in the back. Off the kitchen.”
“We’re sure it’s him? The Creeper?”
“What do you think? Who else? Jesus, man.”
“Right,” said Jarsdel. “Of course.”
“Place is covered in prints anyway. We got the best fingerprint girl in the Valley on her way. Gonna eyeball ’em, compare with what we already got—just to confirm—but you know it’s gonna be our guy.”
“Very likely. Yeah.” Jarsdel hardly knew Rall, but now their boss’s wife had been murdered, and that meant they were, in a sense, comrades in arms. At war. “Anything you need, sir, please let me know. We’ll get him, you know. We’ll get him for sure.”
To his surprise, Rall gave a sad smile. “Think so? Fucker’s a ghost.” Twin tears spilled down his cheeks, and he rubbed them away with his wrist. “Better go in. Want you to see what he did.”
Jarsdel nodded and headed up the brick walkway. The plot was typical of the neighborhood: a two-story, single-family detached home of uninspired, early ’80s architecture, and a small fenced-in yard. He slipped a pair of booties over his shoes and stepped inside.
The locks on the door looked good. Both the knob and dead bolt were Medeco—pretty much tamper-proof unless you were a pro. There was an alarm-system panel immediately to his right. A rectangular display gave the time, date, temperature, and the day’s weather forecast in the form of a grinning yellow sun. A block of text read System not ready—FRONT DOOR OPEN. Jarsdel pushed the door shut. The text now read System ready. Jarsdel reopened the door for the forensic technicians and began walking the ground floor.
He took his time, moving slowly through the entryway, living room, and kitchen. The Sponholzes had installed a small wet bar off the dining room. Above it hung a custom neon sign, and though its coils were now dark, he could still read the words.
LIFE IS A CABERNET! ED & AMY FOREVER.
An FSD tech slipped past him with a hushed “Excuse me” and mounted the stairs for the second floor. Jarsdel waited a moment, then followed, taking each step as silently as possible. The Sponholz house was a tomb now, a place of the dead, and demanded a certain deference.
At the top of the stairs, he glanced around and caught sight of the tech stepping into a room branching off the main hall.
Jarsdel took a breath. Certain aspects of the job became easier over time, and these differed for every detective. For him, the bodies themselves weren’t so bad anymore. At first they’d tormented his dreams, his waking life too. He’d see their split faces and swollen, purple hands every time he closed his eyes. But that had faded. Now, aside from the rare, truly astonishing cruelties, like those visited upon the Lauterbachs, there remained few things that could elicit true visceral revulsion. Sadness, yes—a deep, twisting, grinding sadness—but that was different.
Others weren’t as lucky. They had an internal threshold, a limit on the sheer quantity of horror they could tolerate. They’d be on the job twenty, thirty years, and seem to be fine. No meetings with the department shrink, no breakdowns, no crises. Then one day a scene would come along—and not necessarily the grisliest or most depraved—and that would be it. Transfer or retirement or, more often than those law-enforcement recruitment pamphlets cared to admit, suicide.
But not everything grew easier. He was reminded of that fact as he stood outside the room. Because for Jarsdel, the suspense was the hardest part. In that, nothing had changed since his first crime scene. The knowing that he was about to see the body, those endless moments just before he turned that last corner or opened that tent flap or shone his Maglite into that trunk. To finally be forced to see what he’d been called there to see, what it was his job to see, induced the most heart-slamming terror. Sometimes he moved quickly, forcing himself forward so he could put the feeling behind him as soon as possible. Other times he was unable, frozen as he was now. Still other times he let the reveal happen gradually; first a foot or a set of curled fingers, or maybe he’d start with the smallest bloodstains and slowly work his way toward the bigger ones until he finally reached their source.
He knew it didn’t make sense, how he could remain crippled by the anticipation of looking upon the bodies while, simultaneously, becoming more or less inured to actually seeing them.
The technician poked her head into the hallway and spotted Jarsdel. “Detective? You can come in if you’re ready.”
Jarsdel, who’d been holding his breath, let it out in a ragged wheeze. He told his legs to move, and they carried him dutifully onward into the master bedroom.
Amy Sponholz lay naked across the bed, left arm tucked somewhere behind her back, her right bent far above her head—palm facing outward—in the manner of someone hailing a taxi. From between her splayed legs jutted a broom.
The FSD tech—gloved, masked, and wearing a hairnet—glanced over from her examination of blood spatter on a lampshade. She seemed to consider saying something, then returned to her work. Jarsdel approached the body, checking the carpet as he did so to make sure he wasn’t stepping on any evidence. He made it to the side of the bed opposite the technician and returned Amy Sponholz’s vacant, milky stare. Even in death, the nose was a distraction, rising defiantly above the rest of her features—an assertion of selfhood, one final protest against the anonymity of death.
It was Jarsdel who broke the silence. “Anything you can tell me?”
The tech once again looked up from her work. “She fought him, and that helps us out. She’s got some blood on her teeth—you can see if you look—but I didn’t notice any wounds anywhere in or around her mouth. That’s not to say they’re not there. Even a small cut in the mouth bleeds a lot, but—”
“She bit him?”
“I think so.” She pointed a gloved finger at the spatter she’d been examining. “Here on the shade you’ve got a directional tail on this blood, like he jerked his hand away. And on the floor by the bed you’ve got a few more drops, straight down onto the carpet. I don’t think any of these came from her. She’d have been fighting, trying to get away, but these are like I said, straight down. Like he’s not moving, just holding his injured hand.”
“Good for her,” Jarsdel said. “Gave us another way to ID him.” He bent close and studied Amy Sponholz’s neck, which was bruised and swollen. “Strangled?”
“Yes, but I’m not supposed to confirm—”
“I know. Not asking you to sign anything.” He looked down at the broom. It had a blue plastic handle and ended in a clump of dirty yellow bristles. He couldn’t tell how much of it the killer had shoved inside her, but it was enough to keep it from slipping out on its own.
“If you’re wondering about the, uh, the broom,” the tech said, “it looks like it was done postmortem. There’s no indication she tried to stop anything happening down there. All the perimortem trauma’s around the throat. You can see the scratches. I think he broke her hyoid bone.”
Jarsdel saw what she meant. There were no defensive wounds whatsoever around her thighs or pelvis, no sign she’d fought off an attacker. Instead, as the tech had said, the attention was focused on the neck area. Deep troughs had been raked across her throat, chin, and sternum. It had been a brutal fight for each breath.
Was the broom a kind of revenge? Because she’d made the killer work so hard to take her life, he’d found it necessary to defile her corpse?
“Any idea how long he was in the house?”
The tech looked up from the bloodstains on the carpet. “Sorry?”
“How long was he here? Anyone know?”
She thought it over. “Far as I know, he broke in while she was asleep.”
“Wouldn’t the alarm wake her up?”
“I’m not sure about any of that. But listen, I don’t think I’m the one you should be asking these things. Have you spoken to Detective Rall? He can tell you more. I’m just here for the physical evidence.”
Jarsdel looked down at the broom again. “How long do we have to keep that there like that?”
“Hmm? Oh.” The tech faltered. “I’m assuming it stays until we finish photographing the scene. Maybe take a 3-D scan of it, since the, the husb
and was a, uh, lieutenant. Our unit has a Deltasphere,” she said with a hint of pride.
“Okay.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s upsetting. A little upsetting.”
“Yeah. It is.”
Silence returned. Jarsdel wasn’t sure how much time passed, but eventually Al-Amuli appeared.
“Hey.”
Jarsdel glanced at him, nodded, and bent to take a closer look at Amy Sponholz’s fingers. Al-Amuli joined him, craning his neck to see over Jarsdel and blocking the light.
“What do you see?”
“Not much, currently. Can you move?”
“Sorry.” He stepped back. Jarsdel lifted the corpse’s wrist and turned it toward him. The nails that’d been so exquisitely manicured at the LT’s party looked like they’d been bent with pliers—a few at ninety-degree angles. She’d fought and clawed him as ferociously as she could.
Mailander arrived. She said nothing, passing Al-Amuli without a glance and going to the foot of the bed. She stared at the body, almost as if waiting for it to speak.
“I’m going outside,” said Al-Amuli. “Too many cooks in this kitchen.”
“No, I’ll go,” said Jarsdel. “Give you guys some room to look around.” He squeezed by the two of them and paused at the door. There was a simple push-button lock on the bedroom side of the knob. He bent down to examine the latch and strike plate. No tool marks or scratches, and all the hardware was intact. On the exterior knob, a small hole allowed for the insertion of a slim tool to disengage the lock in case of emergency. An eyeglass screwdriver or even something as simple as a straightened paper clip would do the trick.
The alarm had gone off, that they already knew. So did Amy Sponholz lock the bedroom door? True, it wouldn’t have slowed the Creeper down much at all, but it would’ve been an obstacle nevertheless. And how people overcame obstacles said something about who they were, about their state of mind.
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