The Kill Club

by Wendy Heard

  My brain races. I’m terrified the cops can see panic on my face.

  Without removing the phone from my purse, I open the phone and snap it shut.

  “You don’t need to get that?” Patel asks.

  “It’s no one important.”

  Nielsen peers at me with his faded denim eyes. “Going back to the attack, so you tried to catch him, but he got away. What happened next?”

  “He took off down Third Street, heading west, and I went back inside and we called the cops. Did you guys find the syringe? I think it fell under a produce island.”

  “Yes, we got it,” Patel says. “You got lucky. We have ten confirmed murders by this killer, and as I said, only two survivors including yourself.”

  “Who’s the other survivor?” I wonder if the murder club is mad at the person who let someone survive.

  “The other surviving victim was attacked at the Seventh and Metro station downtown. Do you know anything about that?”

  “No,” I say honestly. “I’ve only been hearing on the news about people who have died, not about any survivors.”

  “Well, he’s been the only one. Until now.”

  “I guess I am lucky.”

  “You’re also lucky there were so many witnesses to the Trader Joe’s attack. Without so much witness corroboration, you could have been sitting in that chair as a suspect, not a witness.” His eyes are piercing, penetrating, and I get chills at the words. I feel like he’s watching me for a reaction, like this was a test and I’m not sure if I passed.

  Patel asks, “Have you ever seen this man before he attacked you?”

  I lift my hands, helpless. “We’re one of the busiest Trader Joe’s in LA. A thousand middle-aged white guys come in every day.”

  Patel pulls a photograph out of her folder and slides it across the table to me. It’s a picture of the back of a playing card. It’s just like the one in my murder kit, vintage-looking with little blackbirds peeking out of a tangle of vines and flowers. The edges are yellowed and worn.

  Nielsen asks, “Have you seen anything like this? At work, at home, anywhere? Maybe that night at Villains?”

  I shake my head, willing my face to stay blank. It’s better to say as little as possible. “I don’t think so.”

  Patel asks, “Are you sure? This is very important. We’ve found these at the scene of every murder in this series.”

  I rack my brain, searching through those minutes with the kale. I think I would have noticed one of these cards if it had been lying on the floor or something, but I had been pretty deep in my own thoughts. At last, I say, “I didn’t see a card. But I could have missed it in the crowd.”

  Nielsen watches me for a second. I don’t know what he’s thinking, but I feel x-rayed by his too-light blue eyes. To Patel, he says, “Anything else?”

  She closes her notebook. “I think that’s all I need for now. Jasmine, we’ll be in touch.”

  Something occurs to me. “Do you think you can help me with something? I tried to get one of your front desk cops to help me with my ex-foster mother. She’s not giving my brother his insulin for his diabetes. That’s a crime, right? Can’t she go to jail for that?”

  She spreads her hands. “Honestly, I’m homicide. I don’t work with family services. Have you contacted DCFS? They’re really the ones to ask about this.”

  I slump back in my chair. Why did I even bother? Despair and impotent rage fill me up so strong, I almost can’t feel my extremities.

  Nielsen says to Patel, “Will you go ask someone to grab Gonzalez? I want to touch base with her before I leave.”

  She meets his eyes, they have a silent conversation, and then she gets up from the table and leaves. When the door swings shut behind her, Nielsen presses a button on the wall. The green light goes off. He turned off the recording? Why?

  He comes around to my side of the table and sits next to me. “You have a record. So you must not like the police much.”

  I fold my arms around my waist and grip my upper arms hard. Please don’t come any closer.

  “Would you say that’s true?” he asks, his voice low. “You’re not a huge fan of police, right?”

  I open my mouth and make myself say, “Police are the good guys. I have no problem with police.” My voice sounds far away from me, like it’s coming from the walls.

  “What I’m saying is, you’re in a different seat now. You’re not in trouble. We’re worried about you. If you know anything about these murders, you should tell us. We only want to protect you.”

  Is the door locked? Am I locked in? If it’s unlocked and he comes at me, I can make a run for it. But I’m in scrubs. They’ll think I’m a criminal; they’ll tackle me in the lobby. Then I’ll get in trouble for running, and he’ll be hot with rage. He’ll bring me back to a room like this and it will be twice as bad.

  “Jasmine? Is there anything else you want to tell me? Anything at all? I promise I can help you. Even if there’s one little thing, something you think is no big deal, or maybe something you’re afraid will make you look bad, you can tell me. I’ll make sure you’re safe.”

  “I don’t have anything else to tell you.”

  I feel his stare gouging a hole in the side of my head. Don’t come closer, don’t come closer, don’t come closer.

  He gets up. My chest expands. I haven’t been breathing right. He says, “I’m going to give you my card, and Patel’s. Please call us if you think of anything. Are you going home tonight? Do you need a lift?”

  “No, I’m good. I can Uber back to my truck. I’m going to try to stay at a friend’s house.”

  My eyes are on his hand, which is on the doorknob. Open it. Open it. Open it.

  He turns the handle and opens the door, and I grab my purse and get the fuck out of there. As I clear the room and make it into the hallway, my purse starts buzzing again.

  21

  NIELSEN

  NIELSEN PRESSES THE up button impatiently. He’s lost in thought. He’s thinking about three people.

  The first person on his mind is Jasmine Benavides, grown-up foster kid from East LA, and the only person to be connected to two different Blackbird crime scenes.

  He doesn’t believe in coincidences. Maybe she saw something at Villains, something she doesn’t know is important. Maybe Blackbird needed to get rid of her.

  The attack on Jasmine seemed sloppy, though, like Blackbird had expected her to be an easy kill. But that can’t be. Look at that girl. How could Blackbird be so amateurish? Unless the Trader Joe’s attack was faked and she killed the victim at Villains. But, if that was the case, why draw attention to herself? She wasn’t a suspect. She wasn’t even interviewed. There’s no motive. It’s a circular puzzle, each question bringing up a handful of other questions.

  The second person Nielsen is thinking about is Greg McCadden, Greg with the red hair and the full sleeve of temporary tattoos who was killed at Costco. There is something very strange about that sleeve of temporary tattoos...

  The third person on his mind is the reason he’s here at the USC Medical Center: gray-haired Keith Manzano, midlevel management at a real-estate brokerage downtown, victim of attempted murder at the 7th and Metro station.

  Gonzalez appears at his side. “You didn’t wait for me!” She’s out of breath from rushing here across the parking lot.

  “You knew where you were going—why did I need to wait?” He knows he’s mean to her, but he can’t help it; there’s just something about her that bugs him. She can’t be under forty; the way she bleaches her hair and hairsprays her bangs makes him think of the pathetic older women he’s seen trying to lure younger men home in bars.

  Gonzalez looks up at Nielsen and smiles. “Two survivors. This is good, right?”

  “How so?”

  “It could mean he’s getting overconfident. He tried to inject Manz
ano in the leg? And then of course Manzano kicked the syringe away. It seems...”

  “Sloppy,” Nielsen finishes.

  And it does. The two survivors are alive because of mistakes, mistakes of...well... If not for the other ten spotless murders, he’d call these mistakes of inexperience. How can a killer be so cunning one moment and so clumsy the next? Does he have split personalities or something?

  A Filipino family approaches, flowers and balloons in hand, to wait for the elevator. They cast him nervous looks.

  The elevator dings and the doors slide open. Nielsen holds them open and waves Gonzalez inside. The gesture pulls his suit jacket open to reveal his gun and badge, and the elderly woman carrying a teddy bear gives him a fearful, wide-eyed look as she hurries into the elevator.

  The family presses the button for the third floor, and Gonzalez presses number six. The family rides in stifled silence. He can almost feel their relief when they get off on the third floor, leaving him behind.

  Gonzalez watches them go, an unreadable expression on her face. It’s the NICU floor, and he wonders if she’s thinking about her own dead child, the one that got her six months of leave. She’s only just come back, and her performance has been mediocre at best. He feels a twinge of guilt. She’s been through a lot. He should cut her more slack.

  In a forced-soft voice, he asks, “You sent the swabs off Jasmine Benavides to the lab?”

  “You know it. She gave me an earful about taking her Doc Martens, but I thought we should take any chance at getting Blackbird’s DNA we can get. She’s a fighter, hey? He bit off more than he could chew with that one! He’ll pick someone easier next time.”

  “He’s killed grown men. There’s more to this failure than bad judgment.”

  She’s quiet, chastised.

  He says, “We’re going to catch this fucker through DNA. Watch.”

  “We have too much,” she protests. “Each crime scene has thousands of profiles.”

  “Eventually two will match, and then we’ll have him.”

  The elevator dings. He leads the way out, and Gonzalez says, “Good luck taking that to the DA. All you’ll prove is that one person was in the same two places.”

  Nielsen wants to yell at her, but there’s no denying the truth in her words. He knows he needs a lot more than DNA, but it’s not on Gonzalez to point that out to him. She’s lucky to be invited along.

  The sixth-floor nurse station is chaos. Women in scrubs swarm the computers, exchanging shorthand arguments about room numbers and patient charts. He and Gonzalez show them their badges. “What’s up? Why the commotion?” he asks.

  A woman his mom’s age snaps him a stern look. “We’ll be with you in a moment, Detective.” To a young nurse, she says, “Try checking six-fourteen. Then six-twelve.” The nurse rushes off.

  “Hey,” Nielsen says. He snaps his fingers in the older woman’s face. “What’s going on?”

  She glares at him. Her eyelids sag like a basset hound’s. “Someone mixed up the patient charts and we’re tracking them down.”

  “That’s weird. Do you have new staff?”

  “No. It looks like a prank, and I’ll figure out who’s responsible.”

  Nielsen digests the gnawing feeling in his stomach. “Where’s Keith Manzano? Six-ten?”

  “Yes.”

  “My officer’s on duty?”

  “Yes!” She throws the word at him and trots off down the hallway with two women at her side.

  He leads the way toward the room he’d visited this morning. A pair of nurses hurries out of room six-fourteen, clipboards in hand. One of them says to the other, “These charts are out of order, too. They’re all mixed up, and they’re from, like, four different people.”

  “She’s gonna freak out,” the other girl says. They push past Nielsen and hurry down the hallway toward the nurses’ station.

  Nielsen stops to consider this.

  Four charts mixed together? Pages out of order?

  He picks up his pace. As his left foot hovers over a square of yellow linoleum, a rough, desperate scream echoes and bounces around the hallway.

  He freezes. His foot lands on the yellow tile. Gonzalez’s hand drifts to her gun.

  Another scream, a shrill shriek of lingering, agonizing pain.

  Shouts from the nurses’ station.

  He throws his feet forward. Gonzalez runs behind him.

  Another scream gurgles into silence. He follows the echoes. They lead him to a door.

  Six-ten.

  He bursts in. Two nurses are right behind him. They shove him out of the way.

  The figure on the bed, the gray-haired man in a hospital gown, is twisted into the fetal position, his mouth stretched into a grimace of pure pain. A trickle of blood from his mouth is smeared onto the pillow and around his cheek like face paint. The uniformed officer and nurses shout at each other—“He just started screaming!”

  “Help him lie still!”

  “Is this—”

  Nielsen pulls the officer toward him by the sleeve. Officer Johnson’s eyes are stretched wide with fear so that the whites are visible all around the brown irises. “Did anyone come in here?” Nielsen asks.

  The officer shakes his head. “No. I mean, nurses, doctors, but no one else.”

  The nurses.

  Nielsen whips around and looks out into the hallway. A pair of women pushes a crash cart toward him, and he and Gonzalez step out of the way to allow it to pass. Another cluster of people rushes from one end of the hallway to the other.

  To Johnson, Nielsen says, “Tell me if any of them gave him an injection.”

  “No! None of them.”

  “Did any of them come near him?”

  The officer says, “Someone came in to check his IV, but they never touched him.”

  Gonzalez asks, “When did they check the IV?”

  Johnson’s hands fly up. “Five, ten minutes ago? Right when they started panicking because they had the charts wrong.”

  Gonzalez says, “It’s in the IV!”

  Nielsen leaps back into the room. To the nurses manning the crash cart, he yells, “It’s poison in the IV! Disconnect it!” Frantic hands grab at the needle in Manzano’s hand. His eyes stare unblinking at the ceiling now, his face slack. A trickle of blood sluices languidly down the white plane of cheek.

  Gonzalez turns and runs down the hallway to the nurses’ station. She yells, “Lock the floor down! Call security. Full lockdown!”

  Frantic grabbing of phones, yelling into them, alarms resounding, doors slamming. Gonzalez’s voice becomes one in a tangle of female voices yelling.

  Five or ten minutes is plenty of time to get away.

  He leans against the wall. People rush by him, doctors now alongside the nurses, stethoscopes bumping chests.

  So much for two survivors. Make that one.

  22

  JAZZ

  KEVIN LIVES OFF Adams and La Brea in a suburban pocket south of Mid-Wilshire. He obviously can’t afford this place with his Trader Joe’s paycheck; I think his dad owns it. A lot of the houses here are bungalows with bars on the windows, like Carol’s, but they look cleaner, more lovingly maintained, than the houses in her neighborhood. None of the driveways have old cars rusting in them; no ruins of play structures rot on any of these fresh green lawns.

  Kevin’s house lights are blazing. The curtains shine bright and cheerful through the bars on the windows, and the quiet street is jammed with cars. It’s Saturday night; of course Kevin’s house is lit.

  I check outside the windows of my truck to look for anyone who might be following me. I’m so paranoid right now. I took the most circuitous route here, zigzagging through side streets and making at least ten U-turns. I don’t think the cops would be tailing me, but I don’t know that for sure, and I don’t know if the murder club
might have someone watching me. I have to assume they plan to send someone else to finish the job, although it does seem more likely that they’ll simply get me at Trader Joe’s again, since they like crowds.

  They don’t only do things in crowds, I remind myself. They’d sent me to Charles’s parking garage. So I need to keep my eyes open.

  My iPhone buzzes in my purse. It’s funny; now I can tell the difference between the two phones’ vibrations.

  I hustle to get the phone out. I hope it’s Sofia, but then I also worry—what will I say to her?

  It’s a 213 number I don’t recognize. I check the clock. It’s not going to be DCFS, not at 9:00 p.m. I silence the phone. A small part of my brain worries it’s Joaquin, but a larger part worries it’s the police. I don’t have it in me to answer any more questions, and I think it’s smart to stay away from them as much as I can without seeming guilty. I watch the phone until the voice mail lights up, and then I press the button to make it play.

  “Jasmine, this is Detective Gonzalez from the Los Angeles Police Department,” a chirpy female voice says. “If you could call us back at your earliest convenience, that would be great.” She recites a phone number.

  Knew it. I think I’ll pretend I didn’t get that voice mail yet. If asked, I’ll just say I was already inside the house and didn’t hear my phone ring.

  I pull the flip phone out. It’s silent, but it’s not disconnected. No calls have come through since the police station.

  A part of me wants to page the murder club, to see if they’ll call me back—but no. What good would that do?

  I hunt around in the cab of my truck for my bag of extra clothes and heave a frustrated sigh when I find it. All I have left is a set of workout clothes. That’s what I get for not doing laundry.

  I can’t believe the cops took my Docs. Now I have to buy new ones and break them in from scratch. Assholes.

  The thought makes me mad at myself. What a stupid thing to worry about right now.

  I slip out of the prison scrubs and pull leggings on over my underwear. I yank on a tank top and shove my feet into my old hiking Nikes. I fix my bangs in the mirror, let my hair out of its ponytail and grab my purse.