After three months of that single investigation, Jill had to tell the sheriff that the FBI couldn’t help him unless the rapist left something more behind.
Eventually, the rapes stopped. Jill suspected the man had been arrested on an unrelated charge and was incarcerated but that the rapes would begin again when he got out. That would make it easy to check prison and jail records to see who was released around the time the rapes began again. But when she called the sheriff to tell him, he wouldn’t take her calls. The sheriff blamed her somehow, even though she’d worked hard. The FBI had a mystique around it, and local police departments expected miracles.
Then again, Stefan had also seen agents treat detectives as though they were yokels and disrespect them at every turn. Maybe in the end, it was just basic tribal fear and distrust of outsiders.
“Excuse me,” Stefan said, walking up to the reception desk. “I’m supposed to be meeting Detective Lunds. My name’s Stefan Miles—I’m with the FBI.”
“Hold on.”
The receptionist typed into her computer, and it dinged a second later.
“He’s comin’.”
“Thanks.”
Stefan wandered around the lobby for a minute and then decided to sit down. Then he stood up because he thought it might look unprofessional, but he realized how ridiculous that was so he forced himself to sit back down. He caught a glimpse of himself in a window with his rolled-up sleeves and thought he looked like Justin Bieber, so he put on his jacket again. Detective Lunds walked up as he pulled out his tie, so he slipped it back into his pocket.
“Agent Miles, nice to meet you.”
“You as well,” he said, shaking hands. “Thanks for the call.”
“Thanks? You like extra work you don’t get any credit for?”
Stefan grinned and hoped he wasn’t turning red. “I meant, thank you for trusting us enough to call. I’ve heard there’s some tension between our two agencies, and I hope that’s not us.”
“Not at all. I’m a simple man. You help me catch this bastard, Agent Miles, and I’ll dance at your daughter’s wedding if you like. Well, in your case, your wedding. How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”
“Twenty-seven.”
He shrugged. “Well, gotta start sometime, I guess. Come on back.”
“Thanks, and just Stefan is fine. Agent Miles is my father.”
The detective chuckled as he led Stefan back through the detectives’ bullpen—a multitude of desks and cubicles were crammed together to fit as many police officers as possible. Another staple was the murder board—usually a whiteboard listing every active murder the division was handling. Here, the murder board was transparent, and they used bright red marker. He did a quick count as they walked by, and he estimated about twenty-four open murders. Not too many but enough to keep the detectives busy.
Stefan was led past the bullpen and into a side room. A table was set up with a television on it and a DVD player with several stacks of DVDs next to it.
“You’re gonna wanna sit for this,” the detective said.
Stefan, now a little concerned and intrigued at the same time, sat down in front of the television. The detective queued up the DVD player and then said, “It’s… it’s about the worst I’ve seen, Stefan. I’m sorry you have to watch it.”
The screen came on. Stefan watched for a few seconds and couldn’t make out exactly what was happening, not at first. But then everything came into focus. Thirty seconds passed, then a minute.
His stomach churned, his mind raced, and he was transported back to some primordial mental state in which nothing existed but pure emotion.
“Fuck me!” he shouted.
He got up from the table and turned away. He leaned over a garbage can against the wall and hurled what was left of his lunch into it. After a few violent dry heaves, he could’ve gotten up, but he didn’t want to.
“Turn it off, please,” he said.
“It’s off.”
Stefan rose and wiped his mouth with a pocket square he had in the breast pocket of his jacket. He breathed deeply a few times and then ran his hand through his hair. “You must not think much of the FBI after seeing that,” he said without turning around.
“That’s about the reaction I had,” Detective Lunds said sadly. “I… I, ah, had to take a personal day after seeing this.”
“ID on the child?” Stefan said, turning around, flinching as he glanced at the screen and saw that it was paused but not off.
“No. We guess the age around nine or ten.”
“Are all these DVDs…”
“Not like this, no. These are child pornography. This is the only one that’s… well, where the victim is killed.”
Stefan nodded. “Does he ever—”
“No,” Lunds said, reading his thoughts. “I’ve watched the whole thing, and he never makes an appearance. Not his face. He doesn’t have any tattoos or anything like that. The only thing we can guess from the video is that he’s in his thirties and white.”
Stefan swallowed, the taste of bile still in his mouth. “Can I get some water?”
“Sure.”
He stepped out and came back with a paper cup and set it on the table. Stefan took several sips before setting the cup back down and staring at the still image on the monitor.
“Where’d you get this?”
“The home of Virgil Mendoza. Far as we can tell, he only watches the porn—he doesn’t make it. He said he bought the video from some guy in a porn shop downtown. We’re running with it right now but haven’t turned up anything. I thought… we’re a decent-sized police department, Stefan, but this is beyond us. In twenty-two years of law enforcement, I’ve never seen anything like this. Never anyone killed in that way. I thought we could use the help.”
He nodded. “I’m going to have to watch the entire thing.”
“I know. I have some paperwork to catch up on. Take your time.”
Stefan watched the video several times, hoping the shock of it would go away. It dimmed drastically by the third time, but it never really went away. Something in his hind brain told him this was the worst thing he would ever see, and his mind rebelled against it.
He stopped the video and sat quietly. Closing his eyes, he tried to think of something positive, something that would erase what he just saw, but nothing came to him. Nothing would erase it. It would always be there now, a part of him.
When he rose, he rested his hands on the table and just stood there a moment, as though afraid he would lose his balance, and then he headed out. Detective Lunds sat at his desk typing. Stefan came up and leaned against the desk.
“Those are copies of the originals,” Lunds said. “We can get you some copies if you need them, too.”
He shook his head. “I don’t need it. I’m going to bring in someone more experienced. He’ll probably want a copy.”
Lunds leaned back in his chair. “What I was hoping was that we could get the vic’s face out there and someone would recognize her. A teacher or a parent or someone.”
“That’s a good place to start. The Center for Missing and Exploited Children has a database, too. We should get some stills over to them.” Stefan paused. “We’re gonna need to talk to Virgil Mendoza, too.”
4
Sarah screamed.
The sound startled her awake. She flung herself out of bed, tripped, and hit the floor hard. She lay there a moment, breathing deeply, until she rolled onto her back and felt the sandy tongue of Biggles licking her face.
She chuckled, an instant release of all the tension and fear bubbling in her gut. She frequently had nightmares. Most of her life, they’d come only once every couple of months, but now they came every week. Waking, horrific night terrors that would cause her to fall out of bed. Once, she even made it to the living room before tripping over her coffee table and face-planting on the rug.
She sat up. Her sweaty shirt clung to her, and she stripped it off along with her panties before climbing
into the shower. Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, she noticed the white streak that ran down her otherwise raven hair. It seemed to surprise her every time; she would forget it and only remember when she saw her reflection.
Two months ago, she’d dyed her hair to get rid of the streak. When she woke the next morning, it was back.
The water heated quickly, and she faced away from it, letting it run down her back. Tipping her head back into it, it ran through her hair, and over her face, down her breasts, and over her stomach. She felt its warmth on every part of her… and just like that, the fear and tension were gone, vanished into whatever darkness they’d come from.
It was only five in the morning, but she didn’t work that day, so she’d have to find something to do. Since her breakup with Special Agent Gio Adami, she hadn’t gone out once, not on a single date. It wasn’t because she hadn’t been asked. It seemed like men were always throwing themselves at her, and she wasn’t sure why. To her, it seemed the baggage that followed her could be seen a mile away. Or maybe men didn’t care about all that.
After her shower, she lay in bed with Biggles until the sun came up. She watched it through the window in the bedroom. The light reflected off the old glass, illuminating the swirling cones of dust in front the windows, and finally landed across her face. She closed her eyes a moment and just felt the warmth of daylight. For most people who suffered from nightmares, daylight meant a reprieve. But not for her. For her, daylight could hold just as many monsters.
Most of the day was spent on the mundane. Groceries first, which she had to carry so she could only get two or three bags at the most. But she didn’t eat much, and the heaviest item was always the cat food. Then she attended an hour-long yoga class and afterward took a nap with Biggles lying at her feet. The day was going to be a pleasant one, she decided.
It wasn’t until she stepped out of her apartment complex that evening to get some dinner before meeting up with Kelly that she saw the first one. A young boy, standing on the side of the road.
She was actually going to walk right past him. He didn’t look out of place, other than the fact that he was standing on the curb just staring out into the street. But then she noticed his legs. They were mangled and bloody, the black blood long since crusted onto the flesh, the cloth torn away in huge patches from his jeans. The boy’s skin looked like chalk, and even from behind, she could see the massive dark circles that engulfed his face and neck.
She stopped and closed her eyes. Opening them again, he was still there.
Sarah approached him. Some of them didn’t acknowledge her, some attacked, some spoke, and some didn’t. It seemed random, and she wondered if there was a pattern there somewhere that she wasn’t seeing.
A frail body accompanied the bruised and battered face. Sarah stood next to him quietly and watched the cars as they passed. One minivan full of children rode by, the occupants staring at her but none of their eyes going down to the boy, and then she was certain that they didn’t see him.
“I want to go home,” the boy said softly.
Sarah swallowed and turned to him. “Where is home?”
“I want to go home,” he said again in the same tone.
She bent down to eye level with him. “Sweetie, where is home?”
The boy didn’t respond. From the tattered clothing and the limbs that seemed bent at odd angles, she knew he’d been killed in a car crash.
“Were you hurt right here on this road?”
“I want to go home.”
Sarah tried to touch him but didn’t feel anything except a slight coolness as her hand passed through. She sighed and rose. What could she do for him? Nothing… except maybe try to let him know he wasn’t alone.
First the headache came, then a stream of blood ran from one nostril. She felt it as a tickle and wiped at it with the napkins she always had to carry in her back pocket. When the bleeding stopped, she sat down on the curb next to him and watched the cars in silence.
5
The precinct had emptied by late evening. Stefan waited in a coffee shop across the street. Something about the fall of night made him think people were more willing to open up about the darkness inside them—the part they wouldn’t share with anyone else during the day.
The barista wore a beret, and he remembered when, briefly, he’d worn one as an undergraduate. Majoring in French philosophy could do that to people. What he planned to do with that degree he couldn’t say now, but at the time it seemed like a good idea. That and a law degree led him to the Bureau, so it must’ve been a good choice.
Once the sun set and it was nearly dark, he finished his coffee and rose. The people in the shop were mostly college students, young and debating ideas—something that didn’t seem to happen once people got out into the working world.
The temperature had lowered but not to anything near what someone outside of Arizona would consider cool. His first week at the Phoenix office, Stefan had experienced temperatures over one hundred twenty degrees. He remembered wearing shorts on a Saturday and burning his thighs on the leather seats of his car.
Crossing the street quickly, he had to remind himself to slow down. That was something his TAs—training agents—were always telling him: slow down and take your time. Think things through. But the excitement was too much, sometimes. It worried him that he might make mistakes because of it.
The precinct was quiet. He passed reception and found Lunds still on his computer. The guy had put in a twelve-hour day and looked exhausted. His sleeves were rolled up, and on the underside of his forearm was a tattoo of a skull with a knife through the eye and an inscription above it.
“That’s pretty wild,” Stefan said, leaning down for a closer look.
Lunds rolled his sleeves back down. “Just youthful indiscretion. You ready?”
“Yeah.”
Lunds stood up, stretched, and led Stefan to the back interrogation rooms. Stefan did a quick count of the murder board as they passed: no cases had been cleared today.
The rest of the precinct looked modern, but the interrogation room looked like a warehouse with a desk and some folding chairs set up. It was the only room he’d seen that looked as though it hadn’t been changed in decades.
Lunds sat in one chair, and Stefan sat next to him. Lunds leaned back, setting his arm on the backrest, and exhaled with his eyes closed. “So what made you want to be a fed?” he asked.
“9/11, I guess. I was in high school, and I knew that I’d be doing something related to terrorism.”
He smirked. “Well, this is about as terrorism as it gets.”
Stefan was still trying to figure out what Lunds meant when the door opened and a uniformed officer brought in the prisoner. The man was shackled and looked defeated, unable to lift his eyes from the floor. He was led to the table and sat down, his chains rattling against the tabletop.
“Mr. Mendoza,” Lunds said, turning to him, “this is Special Agent Miles with the FBI. He’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“I told you everything,” the man said, his voice cracking.
“Well, you haven’t told Agent Miles here everything.”
Mendoza finally raised his eyes. Stefan thought he looked like the kind of guy who would sit behind a computer all day and not want to venture out into the world. He was maybe a hundred ten or a hundred twenty pounds, with arms as thin as sticks. Glasses sat on a thin nose, and he looked as though he was having trouble breathing. Stefan could hear the faint, raspy sound of asthma with each exhalation.
“Virgil,” he said in the friendliest voice he could muster, “tell me everything about that video.”
He swallowed. “The one where the kid—”
“Yes,” he said a little too quickly.
“I bought it from Naughty Nancy’s. It’s that store down there on Seventh, next to the gym and the hair salon.” Virgil paused as though he were waiting for Stefan to say he knew the place.
Since Stefan didn’t, he just remained q
uiet and stared at him.
“Anyways,” Virgil said, looking down at the table, “that’s where I got it.”
“How?”
“I was just there, and the dude workin’ there asked if I wanted some crazy porn and I said sure. So he pulled that out from the back and brought it out. It was in, like, a black case. No pictures or nothin’ on the cover. And he said it was the craziest shit I was ever gonna see. He said it was two hundred bucks but that it would be the best two hundred bucks I ever spent.”
“Just like that?” Stefan asked. “He just offered some random customer a video like that?”
Virgil shook his head. “Nah, man. I been in there a lot. They get me porn that ain’t legal—”
“Child porn, you mean.”
“Yeah, man. Yeah they get that for me. For a lotta dudes. But he said this was the craziest shit I ever seen.”
“So what’d you do then?”
“I said I wanna see some of it. And he said I couldn’t. That I had to take his word for it and just buy it. So I did.”
“So you took it home and played it?” Virgil nodded. “Then what?” Stefan said. “After you saw it, and you knew what it was, what’d you do?”
He shrugged and looked down at the table. “Nothin’.”
“Nothing. You saw that, and you didn’t think you should call the police?”
“That shit was crazy, man. Too much for me. I just put it away and never touched it again. On my mom’s, bro. I never watched that shit again.”
Stefan leaned back. “How much child porn have you bought from Naughty Nancy’s?”
“I don’t know. A lot.”
Stefan looked at Lunds, who rose slowly. The two men stepped outside and shut the door behind them.
“What’s going on with that place?” Stefan asked.
“Everybody’s tight lipped. We executed a search warrant. Tore the place apart from top to bottom. Nothing illegal, just porn and sex toys. The guy he’s talking about is one of the owners, who also works there. He said he didn’t recognize Virgil though he’s probably come in before. Doesn’t recall anything about selling him a DVD, of course.” Lunds leaned against the wall. “So one of them’s lying, but I couldn’t say which one—the scumbag who sells child porn or the scumbag who jerks off to it. Take your pick.”
Murder 42 - A Thriller (Sarah King Mysteries Book 2) Page 2