by phuc
But the damage was too far gone. Diana divorced him. He tried to reconcile with her, but she wouldn't even attempt it. She had tried to help him, tried to work with him for three years. She had had enough.
Daryl glanced at the clock that sat on the bookshelf on his right. It was only eight-thirty. The night was still young.
He walked to the kitchen and poured himself another beer.
And spent the rest of the evening drinking, watching TV, and thinking about Rachael Pearce and wondering if he'd ever find love again.
Rachael Pearce was peddling at a steady forty-five miles per hour on the lifecycle when Daryl Garcia came into her mind without warning.
Her evening until then had been spent in virtual “routine mode"—out of the office at 5:00, home by 6:00, a quick dinner of pasta and chicken and then up in her office by 7:00 to work on her notes for the book she had thought of a few days before. The Eastside Butcher piece she had written for the Los Angeles Times had inspired her to begin keeping a working diary of the case for a possible book. She had always wanted to write a true-crime book but had never found a particular case that interested her despite all her years of journalism. She had come close a few times; five years ago she had an idea to do a book on the plight of child sex offenders after running a two-part story in the paper, but after three days of research the subject had depressed the hell out of her. The thought of delving further into the minds of ten-year-old boys who took perverse pleasure in raping four-year-old girls had been so alien, so horrifying, that she had abandoned the project. It was simply too disturbing for her.
And the Eastside Butcher case isn't? She thought to herself as she pedaled away.
After all, you're dealing with the same kind of sickness, only the perpetrators and victims are adults. For all you know our anonymous butcher might have been very much like that lost, sick, nine-year-old boy you interviewed for that aborted book that got his jollies by sticking pins in little girls.
She shuddered at the thought. And made a note to mention that correlation in this evening's writings.
After she had written for an hour or so, she headed straight to the third bedroom of the two-story condo where she kept her workout equipment. In this room, the smallest of the three bedrooms, she kept a stair master, a lifecycle, and a multi-purpose weight machine. A small stereo system was erected in the corner of the room. She liked to work out a minimum of forty-five minutes every evening, minus weekends.
Iron Maiden's Killers was blasting out of the CD player. She loved working out to heavy metal music. The fast beat, the heavy drumming and bass lines, the loud guitar riffs, all seemed to lend an energy which created the perfect atmosphere for working out.
It was muscle music, providing perfect adrenaline spurts for her evening work-outs. And to think she thought she would grow out of listening to the stuff when she graduated from high school. As it turned out she wound up buying the latest Metallica CD's the week they were released.
The CD's title track was beginning its thunderous assault. The song's lyrics, which were ironically about a serial killer stalking the London tubes, made her think about the Butcher case, and then Daryl. She had called him the night after the interview with the gang members under the Eight-first Street bridge and they had wound up talking for twenty minutes. They had talked about the case for awhile, trading their different theories, and Rachael found that she really liked Daryl. He had wit, a sharp intellect, and a genuine, caring personality. And he had a great sense of humor. Their conversation on the Eastside Butcher led to comparing him to other serial killers, and before she knew it he was cracking jokes in the same vein Victor and Joker from Los Compadres had a few days ago under the bridge. “Why wouldn't you want to play poker with Jeffrey Dahmer?
He might come up with a good hand.” Despite the crude nature of the joke, she found herself laughing.
There were other things she was beginning to like about Daryl as the days went by. In addition to being very handsome he was nice and he listened to her. She could tell he was attracted to her, but unlike most men, when he talked to her he talked to her; his eyes remained focused on hers, never straying to other parts of her body. Most men kept their eyes glued to her breasts during conversations. Not Daryl. Both times they had been together he had paid attention to her as a person, not as a pair of tits. Another thing that was nice about Daryl was that he was closer to her own height of six feet tall. Daryl was a tad shorter, but that was okay. With the exception of her ex-husband, all the men she had ever dated or slept with had been shorter than she, in one case by a full eleven inches.
The thought of her ex-husband created a black cloud and she quickly banished it.
It was no good to dwell on that crap. She had been young and stupid when she married Bernie Jackson, who had been an up-and-coming basketball player for the UCLA Bruins when she was a student. She married him upon completing her Master's degree. The man that she dated—who was kind, considerate, sweet, incredibly sexy and a great lover—
turned from Dr. Jekyl to Mr. Hyde shortly after they said “I do". No sooner had they returned home from their honeymoon in the Caribbean than he was chasing other women, running up their credit cards on expensive toys, sticking most of the salary he made as an assistant sportscaster on a small television station up his nose, and using her as a verbal punching bag for his frequent and unpredictable outbursts.
She filed for divorce the day after he graduated from using her as a verbal punching bag to a physical one.
But through it all, she stayed with him. For two years. She killed herself over it the two years following the divorce, continually asking herself why she could have been so stupid to have stayed with him for so long. But the simple truth of the matter was that she loved him. Or thought she'd loved him. She had loved him, and by loving him she had hoped that staying with him through whatever hard times he was going through would see him—would see them—through this terrible, rocky time.
It hadn't worked. The Mr. Hyde part of Bernie Jackson had been a part of his personality. He had merely kept it well hidden during their initial courtship.
Either that or I was too enamoured to notice, she thought, pedaling furiously. The sweat that had built up like a sheen over her shoulder blades and down the small of her back spread to her arm pits, her forearms, her neck and throat, built up further like a second skin. It dripped down her forehead. She had another quarter of a mile by the lifecycle's odometer. There was no reason to beat herself up for past mistakes now. She had gone past them. She had survived. And perhaps that was really the best revenge of all.
Because let's face it, she thought. No sooner did our relationship start hitting the rocks then I dived into my work at the paper to escape the pressures. And it was when I put myself into my work that I started succeeding at what I really wanted to do, which is investigative journalism. So my marriage fucked up my credit rating and knocked me down a few levels on the ladder of love. Big deal. I got something out of it. My self esteem. And professional recognition.
She gladly kissed a healthy good riddance to Bernie Jackson and her marriage. It had been six years since they split up. She hadn't seen him since. Nor did she care or wonder about him.
For a long time she didn't date. She felt she had to heal from the destructive nature of her marriage and repair the wounds, and the only way she knew how to do that was to get back into the martial arts training she had studied briefly when she was in college.
That, and her usual workout, was what brought her back into shape, and once she achieved brown belt status in Kung Fu, her attitude began to change. She took on a healthy attitude at work and dived into it with a new found zeal. Two years later when she was recognized as a major journalist on the Time's staff, she found herself at a nightclub one night after work with a couple of old friends. They had promised to get together for Friday night happy hour drinks and she had obliged them. It wasn't until she was on the dance floor moving to the beat of Gloria Estefan with an incr
edibly handsome Latino man who had asked her to dance, that she realize that she was completely over the hurt and anger of her broken marriage. And that she was ready to date again.
She had taken the Latino man home with her that night and it had been one of the best fucks she'd ever had. When he found out she wasn't interested in jumping into a relationship, he seemed more than eager to continue the relationship on a purely carnal level. They saw each other sexually off and on over the next several months. It was what she felt she needed.
Rachael slowed down her pedaling, nearing completion of her mileage. Since her affair with Robert Sanchez, she had dated a few other guys, bedding exactly three. She felt no incredible spark of attraction from these men other than the purely physical. She had nothing in common with any of them. In conversation she found most of them downright dull.
But Daryl Garcia was different. She found him both intellectually stimulating, attractive, kind-hearted and good-natured. She tried to remember the last time she had ever met a man who possessed those qualities whom she had gone completely ga-ga over, and found that she hadn't. She had thought that Bernie Jackson had been intelligent, but he had merely used his wit and charm to create the illusion that he was. His true nature had showed itself when they got married. Rachael got the impression that Daryl Garcia wasn't like that; what she saw now in Daryl was exactly the kind of man he was. He was a very straightforward, no bullshit kind of guy.
She stopped pedaling and climbed off the lifecycle, rubbing a sweaty forearm over her brow. She reached for a towel draped over the weight machine and wiped the sweat from her face. She sat down on the weight machine bench and took her shoes and socks off slowly. A plan was formulating in her mind; she could sense that Daryl was interested in her, and she would have thought by now that he would have asked her out. She was used to men asking her out who displayed even half the interest Daryl showed her. Maybe he was shy. If that was the case it could take him forever to muster the nerve. The next time they spoke she was going to ask him out.
She thought about that for a moment, her breathing slowing down. She smiled to herself. She liked that idea just fine. What could it hurt in asking him out? A night on the town in each other's company would give her the opportunity to get to know him better.
And if a romantic relationship didn't blossom from it, maybe they would wind up friends.
That surely wasn't too much to ask for.
After showering and putting on a nightgown, she crawled into bed thinking of Daryl Garcia.
Chapter 8
The neighborhood they were staking out was a relatively lower, middle-class one in Alhambra. Five blocks ahead of them the hum of Huntington Boulevard could be heard as Detectives Daryl Garcia and Steve Howe sat in their unmarked sedan at the edge of the curb. The neighborhood consisted mostly of apartment complexes ranging from small six unit buildings to two massive ones that sported security systems, swimming pools and weight rooms, and underground parking. Both of these large apartment complexes were across the street from each other, both with signs staked in the front advertising that units were available to rent. Must be some competition.
“Are you sure he's coming down here?” Steve asked Daryl, bored. It had been three weeks since he'd escorted Rachael Pearce to the Eighty-first Street bridge, and the amount of leads pouring into Parker Center hadn't slowed down.
“I'm sure,” Daryl said. He glanced at his watch, annoyed at Steve, who was growing less interested in the case as the weeks went by. “Judy Butler over at Florentine Gardens said that he comes here every Friday evening around this time. He has a standing appointment."
Steve chuckled. “A standing appointment? Shit, you make it sound like what these girls perform is a legitimate medical service."
Daryl ignored the comment. “These girls take their work seriously. They make good money at it, and they have to treat it as a legitimate business if they want to avoid trouble with the law."
“So why isn't somebody from sex crimes vice down here with us? I mean, even if the guy who's supposed to show up here tonight isn't the Butcher, we can at least make some arrests."
Daryl wanted to respond with a smart-assed remark, but he held his emotions in check. Frankly, he wasn't interested in busting chicks that gave over-priced massages to their male clients and capped them off with hand jobs afterward. He gestured at the apartment complex, the larger of the two big ones that sported a tan coat of paint and a better topography. “Our only objective is to nab this guy when we see him. He should be arriving any minute. You got that?"
Steve looked at him with the beginnings of a spoiled brat pout on his face, then turned toward the apartment complex and sighed. “Yeah, whatever."
“Good.” Daryl resumed his stance, silently wishing Steve would be taken off this case. He liked the guy fine, but he was so law-and-order that sometimes it really got on his nerves.
“What is it about this guy that has you so worked up anyway?” Steve asked. “I mean, we've got hundreds of tips about suspects in the last few weeks and we've checked out quite a few of them, but of all the others that I think are good solid leads, why this freak?"
Freak was an accurate description for George Van Patten, the man they were waiting to take in for questioning. Daryl had gotten a tip on George while investigating a tip on another suspect, an older Hispanic man that kept a home in the East L.A area who was an alcoholic and a paranoid. The Hispanic man had an arrest record, mostly of public drunkenness and DUI, but had once been arrested for carrying a knife and for misdemeanor assault. When he drank too much he liked to harass the neighborhood kids with a big butcher knife and threaten to cut them up. The fact that he had gotten into a recent tiff with members of the Los Compadres Mafia over graffiti they had painted on his garage door and that his most recent arrest had been for soliciting the services of a prostitute (one of those streetwalkers that was actually male rather than the females they were impersonating), he had come across as a good suspect. And it was through questioning the people who knew the Hispanic man they had arrested—neighbors, gang members, family, and the whore he had been caught with—that they learned about George Van Patten. In fact, they had learned about George from the whore.
Apparently George's fetish was to solicit the services of a prostitute, either from a massage parlor or from one of the many whores that advertised their services in the many sex papers in Los Angeles. He would show up at their place of business carrying a chicken in a bag and a very large butcher knife. After stripping nude, he would instruct the hooker to strip. Then he would instruct her to decapitate the chicken with the knife.
He would masturbate while she performed this act, which usually took no more than five minutes. If this failed to bring him to climax, he would instruct the girl to rub the bloody blade along his neck until he achieved orgasm. Due to the extremity of his fetish, few prostitutes were willing to accommodate him, but there were some that were willing to do anything for money.
They were at one of those places tonight. The transvestite that had given them the tip told them she used to work as a masseuse at this massage parlor, which was run out of a luxury apartment in Alhambra. George Van Patten had been one of the clients and none of the girls would work with him except for one, a middle-aged Hispanic woman named Maria Perez. The other girls were afraid of him.
Why? Daryl had asked the transvestite.
The transvestite nervously crossed her legs in the interrogation room and took a hit off the cigarette she had been allowed to smoke. Her Adam's apple bobbed when she spoke. He's a big guy. Weird. I don't know how to describe it. All the girls have that feeling about him.
The fact that all the girls had an uneasy feeling about him was enough for Daryl to check this character out. Daryl was a firm believer in a sixth sense, and his told him that this George Van Patten guy was a likely suspect. If these women had an eerie feeling about this man, then there was probably something wrong with him. Jacking off to decapitated chickens notwithstanding.
“I agree that he certainly shows the potential to have committed these murders,”
Steve said. “I mean, you gotta be warped to yank your crank as a hooker cuts off a chicken's head. Jesus."
Daryl said nothing, focusing instead on looking out for their man. They had obtained a driver's license photograph from the DMV—since he lacked a criminal record—and sized him up. George Van Patten appeared to be in his early forties with brown hair turning gray that flopped over his ears and forehead. He had a chubby face, a pug nose, and beady little eyes. He looked like he could be a truck driver or a longshoreman. His driver's license stated that he was six foot seven and weighed two hundred and seventy five pounds. Judging from the photo not all of it had to be fat.
Daryl felt Steve tap him on the shoulder and he looked to see Steve motioning down the street. “There's our man."
Fifty yards ahead of them a large man had just emerged from a battered Chevrolet pick-up truck and was trudging to the apartment complex where the massage parlor operated. He cradled a large burlap sack beneath his right arm. He was dressed in a blue ski jacket, a plaid shirt, and blue jeans. He headed for the stairs of the apartment complex and punched the massage parlor's phone number on the gate keypad to be let in.
“Let's go.” Daryl opened the door and got out of the car, Steve following suit.
They headed down the street toward the complex, not wanting to rush their suspect and scare him off, but not wanting him to slip away from them either. By the time they reached the top of the steps that led to the lobby, the massage parlor had activated the buzzer and George was opening the double glass doors, heading inside. Daryl and Steve trotted up the stairs after him and caught the doors just shy of shutting them out. Daryl paused for a moment and nodded at Steve. “What apartment is it again?"