“Sure.”
*****
No one answered their phones at first so Stanton had to leave messages. While he waited for return calls, he tried to busy himself by reading the newest issue of Scientific American and going through some profiles of known sex offenders that were released from prison around the time of Tami’s death. He wasn’t sure what he hoped to see, but he studied every face, every expression. He wished that something would scream to him, or at least give him an uneasy feeling in his gut. He needed something to follow up on, some goal to be working toward rather than treading water and wasting time.
Slowly, as the day wore on and people began leaving work, the calls came in. Pamela’s cousin was the first to call. She worked at the make-up counter at the local mall and hadn’t seen Pam for at least a year. They had exchanged a few messages on Facebook but nothing substantive. She didn’t know anything personal about her or who she might’ve been dating. The one thing the cousin knew for sure was that Pamela was a drug addict. That her family had spent their savings to get her into the best treatment facility in the state located in Palm Springs, and that Pamela had convinced one of the other patients to steal a car and take off with her.
One time, she was certain, Pamela had prostituted herself for a thousand dollars.
It was chilling for Stanton to speak with the cousin, not because of anything she said but because of how normal she and her family were. There was a disconnect somewhere between the life Pamela should have had and the life she actually had.
Stanton talked with the friends next and they were even less help than the cousin. Both of them spoke in the whirlwind unintelligible speech of meth addicts and Stanton guessed one if not both were dealers for Pamela. Towards the low-end of the addiction, addicts believe their dealers are actually their friends.
As he hung up the phone and knew he had no one else to call, a heavy melancholy came over him and he hoped Jessica had fared better. Pamela’s family had given up and abandoned her; she had no friends and no one that really cared about her. He prayed that they would not be another in a long line of people that had failed her.
“Hey,” Tommy said, poking his head in, “they found him.”
Stanton’s heart jumped. “Who?”
“The homeless guy at the factory. They’ve got him at Salton City. Jessica’s heading down there right now.”
50
Jessica walked in to the Imperial County Sheriff’s Department with an ipad under her arm. She was greeted by a large uniformed officer with a handlebar mustache and tattoos on his forearms. This was the Salton City branch rather than the main branch and it was a small building joined to the fire station. It reminded her of the small town caricatures of police departments she would see on old television shows like The Andy Griffith Show and Perry Mason. In the back of the space there was even a drunk tank with an old man sleeping on a bunk.
“What do you need?” the uniform said.
“I’m Jessica Turner with SDPD, I called earlier about interviewing a Mr. Hood.”
“Sign in here and leave your gun with me.”
She signed the sheet and handed her .38 special over the desk. The uniform took it and stuffed it into a small box behind him and gave her a laminated badge that said “Guest.” He led her to the back and they opened a door that led down a corridor and to another metal door that he unlocked. In a small room with a desk and three chairs sat an older black man wearing an orange beanie though it was over ninety degrees outside.
She saw bruising around his eye and a scuff mark on his cheek.
“Hi Darrell, my name’s Jessica. I’ve driven up from San Diego to see you.” He didn’t respond and she sat down across from him. “I’m just here to show you some pictures, Darrell. Would that be okay?”
He shrugged. She took out her ipad and placed it on the table facing him and flipped it on. A screen shot of eight photographs came up.
“I want you to tell me if you see the man that you told Jon Stanton about. The man that told you he had a message for Jon. If at any time you get tired or want to stop for a little bit, you tell me okay?”
He nodded.
She began flipping from page to page, eight at a time. They sat for over an hour and flipped through seven hundred photos, but he didn’t recognize anyone. She told him she would be right back and she stepped outside and called the SDPD dispatch.
“Dispatch.”
“This is Jessica Turner, CCU, number 28546. I need a sketch artist down at the Imperial County Sheriff’s Office, Salton City Department as quickly as possible.”
“We’re gonna need authorization from a captain and a request form filled out and faxed over to us.”
She hung up without saying a word and called Tommy. He said he would have a sketch artist down to her in half an hour.
Jessica went back into the room and asked if Darrell needed anything. He said he would like a Sunkist orange drink and she went to the vending machine and got him one. When she came back in she sat down and scanned the room for cameras or audio recorders; there were none.
“Darrell, I know that somebody hit you, and I would like you to tell me who it was.”
“Don’t matter.”
“It matters to me. Would you please tell me?”
“Cops round here, they ain’t too friendly. Don’t want no homeless in their town. Whole town’s goin’ to hell cause’a them tweekers and they tryin’ to run us out for sleepin’ in their parks.”
“Was it one of the cops here that hit you?”
“I don’t want no trouble.” He popped open the Sunkist and took a long drink. “I’ll take a sandwich if you got one though. Ain’t eaten since yesterday.”
She rose and went back out to the vending machines. There was a large rotating one with various items and she bought a ham and cheese sandwich, chips and a slice of chocolate cake and took them to him. As he ate, she checked her emails.
“So why you need to find this dude?” he said with a mouthful of food.
“He’s done some very bad things. He’s a bad person, Darrell, and you could be saving some lives by helping us find him.”
He nodded. “Lot’s a bad people in this place. Why’s he so special?”
“He’s a rare type of person. One that we need to catch right away.”
Darrell ate another ten minutes and then they sat in silence until the sketch artist arrived. He was tall and slim with wire-frame glasses and Converse sneakers. He looked annoyed and didn’t say hello.
“They have sketch artists here,” he said as he sat down and placed his pad on the table.
“I wanted the best I could get.”
He mumbled something and then began asking Darrell questions.
“What can you tell me about what he looked like?”
Darrell began describing the man and the artist made a rough outline before pulling out a thin album that was underneath his pad. He opened it up to stock photos and began pointing to them and asking if his nose looked more like this photo or this photo, if his eyes were this shape or this shape.
Within half an hour, and after only a handful of erasings, he was done. He handed the pad to Jessica.
“Shit,” she said.
“What?”
“I know who this is.”
51
Stanton, Jessica, Chin Ho, Harlow and Tommy sat around the conference room table and each looked at the composite drawing. It had already been uploaded into the VICAP database and a search was running to match facial features with mugshots. Sherman had not been transported from the local jail this morning on Harlow’s orders.
“It’s fucking him,” Harlow said. “No doubt about it. Jon?”
“There’s definitely a resemblance, but, I don’t know. He doesn’t meet the profile. He’s successful, comes from a good family, is highly educated. I think the person we’re looking for is a loser, heavy drinker, going from job to job … but there is rage in him. I can see it whenever I talk to him. I just don’t know.”
Ho interrupted, “We pulled his rap. There was nothing on there but just to be sure, we did a check for expungements too. He has a forcible sodomy on a child charge from eight years back. The case was dismissed from lack of evidence and he got the charging documents expunged and sealed.”
“Jessica, what’s your take?”
“He’s a slime ball. The first time he met me he asked me out and when I said no he asked if there was any amount of money he could pay me to have anal sex. He offered me fifty thousand dollars.”
“Wow,” Tommy said, “for fifty grand he could have anal sex with me.”
There was an awkward, subdued, laugh, more a relief from tension than a response to humor.
“Well,” Harlow said, “unless we got something better we’re following up on this. There’ll be two teams on him but I don’t want any of you involved in the actual take-down.”
“Chief,” Ho said, “maybe we should surveil him first? We’ve got enough for an arrest warrant but not enough for a jury. We need more.”
“You don’t think he’ll crack?”
“No.”
Harlow pointed to Stanton. “I once saw him break open the toughest son of a bitch I’ve ever seen. Three hundred pound Hell’s Angel that raped and killed his girlfriend’s sister by smashing her head in with a rock. Refused to talk, even to tell us his name. Jon came in to the interrogation room and put the rock on the table and just leaned back in the chair and waited. He waited for seventeen hours, and didn’t say a thing. The guy broke down and started talking, he couldn’t take anymore.”
“I’d still like to tag him for awhile.”
“There’s no guarantee, Mike,” Stanton said. “He’s clever. He might not talk.”
“Well, there’s only one way to find out. I want him picked up. He’s got money and friends. If he gets a whiff that we’re on to him he might be in Guatemala by the time we get our act together. I’ll email Judge Hilder and get the arrest warrant and warrant for his house. You guys get ready to make him talk. Anything else? No? All right, let’s make it happen.”
As everyone filed out, Stanton picked up the composite drawing. Add about twenty pounds with a bigger forehead and there wasn’t a doubt: it was Hunter Royal.
52
Stanton sat in a black Mustang with tinted windows. Jessica was next to him and a plain clothes officer from SWAT was in the driver’s seat. They were parked at a meter downtown in front of a strip-club called The Bush.
It was nearly ten at night and the lights of the city flickered around them. This was when the real residents of the city came out, the ones that never left, never transferred jobs, never vacationed. They were the blood of the city that kept it open and kept it functioning. During the day, they cleaned its streets, threw out its trash, served its food, mopped its floors and fixed its broken parts. But at night they were here, feeding on the youthful energy and bodies of young women and men that had been abandoned by life and thrown in a pit of vipers.
Stanton counted twenty-six prostitutes. Among them were nine young men, dressed in jeans and tight shirts. The rest were women dressed in little more than underwear.
They stood on corners in groups and waited for the cars to pull to a stop. There would be a brief conversation through the passenger side window and then they would get into the car and go to some hidden alley or parking lot. The smart ones had a motel room rented for the night around the corner, splitting their revenue with the motel owner or desk clerk.
He could see the progression of the career. On the last corner, farthest from the street lamps and the most out of the way for passerby in cars, were the newest and youngest ones. Their faces and bodies were flawless and they worked with an exuberance based on the perception that this was a temporary job to earn some cash and move on to what they really wanted to do.
On the other end of the block, taking up the prime location to make it easy for johns to pull up and pull away, were the experienced ones. The ones that had realized there was no leaving this life and had given up. Their faces were scarred and worn and their bodies sagging and unkempt. In between the two of them were the ones just beginning to realize what they had done to their lives.
“Angel One, I don’t have the target. Over.”
The driver picked up the sleek black walkie-talkie. “Copy. Witness on scene says he’s in the back getting a private lap dance. Over.”
“Copy that.” There was silence a few minutes. “Negative, Angel One. Two lap dances, neither is the target. Rest of the rooms are empty. Over.”
“Copy that. Hang tight.” The driver turned to Stanton. “Can you go in there and point him out?”
“He knows me too well. If he sees me in a strip-club he’ll know something’s up. We want to take him as quietly as possible.”
He exhaled loudly as if in protest of being asked to do something ridiculous. “Angel Two be advised I’m staking the first floor. Check the bathrooms and the bar on the second floor. There may be some private rooms up there that weren’t in the blue prints submitted to City Hall. If you can’t ID him let me know. Over.”
“Roger that.”
“All right,” he said, pulling his jacket on, “you guys wait here.”
Stanton watched as he left and went into the strip-club. He was not used to undercover work and it showed. He glanced around too much, looked at people just slightly too long. SWAT was a hammer and was not used to the razor blade work required in an undercover operation.
“I worked prostitution for awhile,” Jessica said. “Did I ever tell you that?”
“No.”
“I was a uniform fresh out of the academy in Los Angeles and they needed new faces. New female faces. I was stuck pretending to pose as a prostitute at a Motel 6 near a Mexican bar. The bar would get people drunk and the bartender would set them up with the hookers across the street at the motel.”
“Did you enjoy it?”
“No.”
“Then why do you want to go back to that?”
“Because there were no victims, not in any real sense. Nobody got hurt. Even the johns usually just got a fine.” She looked out the window at the people passing on the sidewalk. “There was one time though where there was a young girl on the corner with me. She was maybe fourteen. I gave the arrest signal to get her off the street but they didn’t catch it. Some trucker stopped and picked her up before I could alert anybody and no one saw her again. I like to think she was just dropped off somewhere else, but I don’t think so. I talked to the other girls later and they said she disappeared.”
“What was her name?”
“I don’t even remember. How awful is that of me?” She pulled out a piece of Nicotine gum and unwrapped it. “Sometimes I don’t think it’s even worth it, Jon. The darkness is so thick. It’s like a blanket that covers us up and won’t let us out. And it just seems to get worse instead of better. I remember when I was growing up I had so many good people to look up to. Neighbors, teachers, local cops and firemen … I think now I could count how many good people I know on one hand.”
“They’re out there. They just don’t get as much attention as they used to.”
“Not sure I believe that.”
Stanton was watching the front entrance when he saw a man in jeans and a black sports coat leave. He turned and said something to the bouncer and they both laughed. It was Royal.
“Wait here,” Stanton said.
He jumped out of the car and caught up with Royal as he was walking through the parking lot next to the strip-club.
“Hey, Hunter.”
“Jon? What the fuck are you doing here?”
“I needed to talk to you.”
“Now? Why didn’t you just call me?”
“No, not over the phone.”
“What is it? What’s the matter?”
There was only the slightest hesitation. A single moment in which Stanton’s mouth opened but no words came out. It was enough.
“Shit!”
&nbs
p; Royal sprinted in between two cars and out of the parking lot and into the street. Stanton started running and shouting toward the Mustang for Jessica to call it in, but she wasn’t paying attention.
Royal ran into an alley and there was a chain-link fence behind a dumpster. He climbed up the fence and tore a cuff on his pants as he hopped over. He dashed for the intersection out the other side.
Stanton hopped the fence and felt the burning in his hands as he scraped the top on the way down. He saw Royal run through the intersection on a red light and two cars screeched as they tried to stop but both rammed into a large SUV coming from their right, the first one knocking it sideways and the second rear-ending the car and battering it into the SUV again. Horns were still blaring when Stanton got there. He maneuvered past the mess and got to the sidewalk on the other side and saw Royal run into an apartment high-rise.
Stanton ran in and instantly recognized the building. It was low-income housing and the cheap red carpet and tacky wallpaper of the hallways screamed government contractors. He’d been here several times previously on various calls.
There were a set of stairs at the end of the hall past the elevators and Royal was bounding up them two at a time. Stanton got there just as he was rounding a corner to the second floor. Stanton reached the top of the stairs to the second floor and looked down the hallway to his right and then his left. It was empty.
He closed his eyes and listened and all he could hear was his own heavy breathing. And then, almost as softly as the patter of mice, there was the quiet sound of shoes on carpet.
Stanton ran down the hall and came to a utility closet. He opened it and Royal bashed him in the face with a janitor’s mop bucket.
Stanton heard a crunch in his nose as blood instantly began to pour. He stumbled back as Royal tackled him. He felt his hands searching him for his gun and it gave Stanton just enough leverage to twist him off and onto his back. Stanton climbed on top of him, cradling him with his thighs and smashed his fists into his face until they were coated in blood, small droplets raining over his face and clothing.
The White Angel Murder Page 18