“Hello,” she called, realizing she did not recognize the man. Must be new, she thought, but then she remembered she’d been off the force for over two years.
The man eyed them suspiciously. He looked like a big kid—round-faced with red hair and freckles. Lacey had palmed her PI license and held it up for the man to see.
“I’m looking for Tommy Belvedere. Is he here?”
The kid squinted at the license in the gathering dusk, then glanced from the photo to Lacey. He seemed satisfied until he noticed Sam standing behind her.
“Lacey,” a voice called out. Tommy Belvedere stepped from the dimness of the alley and waved as he walked over.
“Tommy, hi,” she responded. Without waiting for the kid’s dismissal, she put her license in her pocket and turned to the senior officer.
“Imagine meeting you here,” she said with a grin. Tommy, all six-foot-six of him, ducked under the tape and hugged her.
“It’s good to see you,” Tommy said. He gave her an extra squeeze, and she knew what that was for. Then he released her and immediately went to Sam with his hand out.
“You must be Sam,” he said, shaking heartily. “I’m glad to finally meet you. I’ve heard a lot of good things about you.”
Sam nodded a silent greeting. Lacey realized, watching them together, that it wasn’t often Sam had to look up at another man, but Tommy, for all his height, was not imposing. He was thin and baby-faced, and even in his late thirties, looked like a big kid.
“Well,” he said, turning back to Lacey, “let’s get you in there.” He held up the tape so Lacey and Sam could both duck under.
“It’s this one over here,” Tommy said, waving toward a dumpster in the middle of the alley. “We’ve sifted through and gotten everything we could out of it. Once you two are done, we’ll haul it down to the impound lot.”
Lacey pulled out her phone and set it on video. While Sam approached the dumpster, she held back and began filming. Tommy stopped beside her.
Sam approached slowly, placing his feet carefully. He stopped at the nearest corner of the dumpster and held his hands out, one on either side of the corner, just above the surfaces. The two lids were pushed back up against the brick wall behind it, leaving the dumpster open, but Sam did not look inside.
He stepped around the front of the dumpster, trailing one hand just inches from the metal wall. Halfway down, he stopped and stood quietly.
“You already know she wasn’t killed here,” he said, addressing Tommy although he didn’t turn to face him.
“Yeah,” Tommy said.
Lacey moved in closer.
“She didn’t know him. Had no suspicions. Was shocked when he stabbed her.”
He moved a few more steps down, stopped. “Crying. Can’t breathe. Choking on blood. It was fast, but not fast enough.”
He bowed his head, looking down at the ground, although Lacey was sure he wasn’t seeing anything there. His breathing was slow but shallow. In the waning light of twilight, it was hard to even detect.
Abruptly he turned and began to walk back toward Lacey. “That’s all.”
The three of them stood quietly in a loose triangle. Lacey switched off her phone.
“That’s all, huh?” Tommy asked in a low voice.
Sam nodded. “Yeah. Not much, I know.”
Lacey took a chance. “Any feeling about him? His looks, his age?”
Sam stared down at the ground again, his brow creased. “He looks… younger than he is.”
Lacey waited, hoping for more. Tommy, too.
Sam shook his head. “No. That’s all.” He raised his head and met Tommy’s eyes. “What did you guys find?”
Tommy pulled out a small notepad but didn’t consult it. “Twenty-five-year-old Nikki Latrice, administrative assistant at an accounting firm downtown. She’d gone out clubbing with friends Saturday night. Not seen after that. Guy here at Penney’s found her Monday afternoon when taking out the trash. We couldn’t find any prints anywhere on the dumpster, so either the guy was really careful or he wore gloves.”
“Any DNA on the body?” Lacey asked.
Tommy shook his head. “She hadn’t been sexually assaulted. Matter of fact, she was stabbed through her clothing. There were bits of fabric in some of the wounds. She was stabbed in the chest—heart, lungs.”
“The lungs first,” Sam said. “She was choking on the blood.”
“How many times was she stabbed?” Lacey asked.
“Eighteen times. But any of them would have been fatal.”
“So the multiple wounds weren’t necessary to kill her.”
“Right.”
Lacey had another thought. “Any defensive wounds on her arms? Any skin under her nails?”
“Again, no,” Tommy said. “It must have been very sudden.”
“It was,” Sam said. His voice was hard.
Lacey glanced around the alley. “Any surveillance video? Either here or at the club she was at?”
“Nothing here,” Tommy said. “Nothing definitive near the club.”
“What time do they put the time of death at?”
Now Tommy checked his notes. “Approximately two a.m. Sunday morning, give or take.”
“And what time did she leave the club?”
“Friends said about twelve-thirty or so. They weren’t sure; could have been later.”
Lacey frowned. What else?
“Can you give us the addresses of the places all the women were last seen?” Sam asked. “And the locations where all the bodies were found?”
“Sure,” Tommy said. He jotted a note to himself.
“And I’m assuming we can visit the other locations? No police presence there anymore?”
“Right.” Tommy nodded. “The other three areas have all been processed.”
Processed, Lacey thought. Such a cold word.
“And,” she said, “can you send us pics of all the women? Before their death.”
“Got it.” Another note. “What else?”
She glanced at Sam. He gazed at her thoughtfully for a moment, then shrugged.
“I guess that’s it for now,” she said. “If we think of anything else, I’ll let you know.”
“Okey dokey.” Tommy flipped his notebook closed. “Good luck. We’re sure not having any.”
Lacey and Sam walked back to the car, both lost in thought. The lack of clues was distressing. She started the car while Sam got his phone out and ran a search.
“Whatcha looking for?” she asked.
“Maps,” he said. “Turn right here. There’s a store not too far away.”
As soon as they got home, Sam unfolded the large map of Los Angeles County and looked for a suitable place to tack it to a wall. Lacey started dinner and didn’t chime in on the location of the map until Sam brought it into the kitchen and held it up against the back wall.
“There?” she asked. They’d talked about putting some shelves there for knickknacks.
“I think so.” He held the map with one hand and pressed some of the folds out. “I don’t want it in any of the rooms where we spend our relaxing time. Hand me a pushpin, would you?”
Lacey rummaged in the junk drawer for a box of pushpins and gave it to him. He tacked the map to the wall, then got a marker and circled the location of the dumpster in Echo Park. Finally he stood back and just stared at the map.
“What are you thinking?” Lacey asked. She stood at the counter and tore up lettuce for a salad.
Sam crossed his arms over his chest and didn’t turn to face her. “I don’t know,” he said. “I just…” He stepped closer to the map and perused the west half of it.
Lacey had seen him zero in on a map before. He’d done that in Vegas when they were looking for the body of his former brother-in-law. She had no idea how that worked, but only knew that it did.
“It’s here,” he said finally, waving a hand over that half of the map.
Lacey frowned. On the one hand, that narrowed the sea
rch area down by half of the county, but on the other hand, that left the other half of the county wide open. No small area to search.
“We need more,” he said. “As soon as we get the addresses from Tommy, I want to go to the other dumpster locations.”
“Sure,” she said. “But why don’t you want this map anywhere else in the apartment?”
He turned to her then. His dark eyes were troubled. “I don’t like this. This is bad. I just don’t want it anywhere that we spend the majority of our time.”
Lacey still didn’t quite understand how a murderous presence could leak through a map, but she recognized the uneasiness in Sam’s eyes.
It gave her goosebumps.
~~~
FOUR
The next day while Sam was at work, Lacey got the email from Tommy with all the information. She put blue pins on the map for the dumpster locations, then switched to red pins for the last known location of each woman.
Right off she noticed a pattern. The red pins were closer to each other, and the blue pins were further away. She wondered what Sam would make of that.
Next she used green pins to mark the women’s home addresses. Those were scattered about and seemed to have little relation to any of the others.
She went back to Tommy’s email. He’d answered one question before she’d asked it; none of the dumpster locations had any surveillance cameras in place. Some of the bars and nightclubs where the women were last seen did, but the PD had found nothing conclusive after review.
This guy was either really careful or really lucky. She’d guess the former.
Finally she looked through the pictures Tommy had sent.
Joyce Augustine was a thirty-one-year-old waitress. She lived and worked in the Los Feliz area, but was last seen in a bar in central LA. Her photo—a selfie—showed a brilliant redhead who wore too much eye makeup. She looked more haggard than her age suggested, and Lacey remembered the old line: it’s not the years, it’s the miles.
Stephanie Haise was a nineteen-year-old UCLA student, a communications major. She was slender, almost model-thin, with long dark hair and beautiful blue eyes. She’d been last seen at a techno-club on the south side of Hollywood. She lived in Westwood, near campus, but obviously didn’t stick close to home.
Paloma Garcia was a twenty-eight-year-old real estate agent from Crenshaw. She was a tad on the plump side with dark hair shot through with red highlights. She had a wide smile and sparkling dark eyes. She was last seen in a nightclub north of Crenshaw near midtown.
And finally Nikkie Latrice, a twenty-five-year-old administrative assistant from the MacArthur Park area. She had gone pub-crawling with friends, and as the evening wore on, the group of friends and the clubs they went to began to blur. No one could quite remember exactly where they lost Nikki; there were a couple possibilities, all within a block or two in central LA. She was tall and willowy with strawberry-blonde hair and freckles.
Lacey printed out the photos and went back to the map. She put each photo up close to the woman’s home address, then got some string and tied a line from the home pin to the disappearance to the dumpster. She did this for all four of them, again noting how the strings started out further afield, coalesced in midtown and then scattered again to the dumpster sites.
Midtown. No doubt about it.
Sam agreed totally.
“This is good,” he told her after studying the map for several minutes. He held one hand up over the map, not touching it, but just inches away. Lacey watched as he moved his hand outward from the central area, then brought it back. Like a stud-finder trying to zero in on the stud behind a wall, she thought.
“Yes,” he said finally. “This is definitely the area. This is where they die.”
Lacey noticed, and didn’t particularly care for, the fact that he put that in present tense.
He turned to her. “You up for checking out another dumpster site?”
“I am if you are,” she said.
“Okay. Let’s go.”
~~~
FIVE
Sam, with a smaller map in hand, directed her back to Silver Lake, his old stomping grounds. The address was for a strip mall, an older one with small, run-down stores: a locksmith, a shoe repair, a vacuum cleaner store. Not a heavy traffic place. Lacey pulled in behind the stores where back doors, loading docks and dumpsters were draped in darkness. Nowhere on the back wall of the conjoined businesses did she see any surveillance cameras.
“It’s the last one,” Sam said, cross-checking Tommy’s email.
She drove up slowly and parked in front of the dumpster. They both got out, and Lacey started recording right away.
Sam approached the front of the dumpster, but stopped about five feet from it. He held his arms loosely at his sides, hands open. After a moment, he moved to the left, to that end of the dumpster, then back to the right end. Finally he came back to the left, and stood frowning at the large metal box.
“Very little,” he said. Lacey could hear frustration in his voice. “A sense of fun, of… excitement. That turns to shock. Pain. The spider became the fly.”
He crossed his arms over his chest and glared at the dumpster as if he could coerce more from it. The dumpster, apparently, was not forthcoming. It squatted in silence.
Sam turned toward the car. “There’s more there, but I can’t get it. Come on. There’s another one not too far away.”
He dictated directions to Little Armenia, just a bit northwest. This dumpster was in a vacant lot near a recycling outfit. Junk store, Lacey thought, was more apt. The place was surrounded by a chain link fence with razor wire on top, and plastic slats in the fence cut off the view except where slats had broken or fallen out. From the looks of the “good stuff” inside the fence, anything tossed in the dumpster would be beyond useless. Again, no cameras anywhere near the dumpster.
Lacey pulled up and parked and Sam did a quick walk. Lacey could tell by the pace of his steps and the shake of his head that he wasn’t getting much.
“Very similar,” he said. “Shock, surprise. No indication beforehand. This one was… kinder. But it didn’t matter.” He turned to Lacey. “I need to find the place of death. There’s just not enough here.”
She nodded, putting away her phone. “How do we do that?” she asked. They slid into the car and she turned the key in the ignition.
“Remember in Vegas when we drove to all the storage places?”
“Yeah. So we need to get you in the general area? You’ll know when we’re getting close?”
“Exactly. We’ll have to drive midtown.”
Lacey turned the car back out onto the street. “We could concentrate on the places where the women disappeared first,” she said.
“Yeah, that would be good. Let’s do that Saturday morning before we get the kids. This is just… no good.”
“Okay.” She piloted the car back toward home, but not before stopping at their favorite Chinese place. “Fuel,” she said. “I didn’t have anything planned for dinner, anyway.”
Back at home, Lacey set plates on the table and unpacked the bag of delicious-smelling cartons. Sam, however, refused to sit, and snagged the box of chow mein—which Lacey didn’t care for—and ate standing up right from the box. He paced the dining room.
“Who was the one in Silver Lake?”
Lacey consulted her notes. “Joyce Augustine, the waitress. She was thirty-one, the oldest of the four.” Lacey thought back to his walk there. “What did you mean when you said ‘the spider became the fly’?”
Sam chewed thoughtfully, carton in one hand, fork in the other. “It was like she was playing a game, having fun with him. Maybe… teasing him? I don’t know. But he turned the tables on her so fast, she just had no time to react. She thought she was totally in control right up to…”
He stopped in mid-sentence, his eyes staring sightlessly at nothing.
Lacey just waited.
“He does that,” he said finally. His voice was soft, more
to himself than to Lacey. “He… lets them think they’re in control. That’s the trap. And the trigger.”
Lacey grabbed her notebook and copied down his words. She didn’t understand them, but knew they were important.
“Like a cherry boy.”
Lacey looked up. “A cherry boy?”
For the first time, Sam met her eyes. “Yeah. You know, a virgin, or at least very inexperienced.”
“Yeah, I know what a cherry boy is. So that’s what he is?”
“Um, not… not necessarily,” Sam said. “But he acts like one. That’s how he draws them in.”
He took another bite of chow mein and chewed slowly, staring at the ceiling.
“Sam,” Lacey asked, “are you getting this from the victims, or… from the guy?”
His head swiveled toward her, surprise in his eyes. For some reason she couldn’t articulate, Lacey didn’t like that at all.
She could see Sam struggle, reaching with his mind, but not too far. He abruptly jammed his fork in the chow mein and came to sit beside her on the couch.
“I’m not sure,” he said, and she could see this shook him. “I thought it was from them, but it feels like it started to bleed over some. I went from their point of view to his. I didn’t even realize it at first…”
He trailed off. Lacey sat back and stayed quiet, biting her lip with unease. She told herself this was a good thing, and would enable them to catch this guy quicker, but just the thought of Sam’s mind somehow connected to this guy gave her the willies.
Finally Sam drew in a deep breath and looked over at her. “I think it is him,” he said in a low voice. “I don’t know why, or how, but… it feels like that.”
Lacey forced herself to think logically. “I remember when Kyle came to you in dreams, we talked about whether or not you could read the mind of a person still living.”
Blood Walk (A Lacey Fitzpatrick and Sam Firecloud Mystery Book 8) Page 2