Dark Heart

by Margaret Weis;David Baldwin

  Benny shrugged.

  “It beats going into the office, I suppose,” she said. “Damn. I think I’ve got another lead if I can just find that redheaded punk. But if I can’t, and Dawes can’t help, then I’m at a standstill with this case. I just—”

  The ringing of the phone interrupted her sentence. Sandra looked down at her scrambled eggs, half eaten and cooling quickly.

  “You want me to get it?” Benny offered.

  She shook her head. “No. It’s probably for me.” She crossed the room and picked up the phone.

  “Yeah?” she answered.

  “Bruce?”

  “Hey, Mac. What’s up?”

  “We got another one.”

  Her body went cold. “Another ripper? Shit!”

  He paused. “You okay, Bruce?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. It’s the same MO?”

  “Mostly,” McKenzie said. “We don’t have access problems this time—it’s pretty obvious how our psycho got to the victim—but there’s a kid with a hole in his chest the same size as the others. The crime scene guys are still looking for the heart. The evidence seems to indicate the killer tossed it to the ground, just like always, but that some scavenger, probably a dog, made off with it.”

  “The victim’s a kid? Jesus, Mac…how old?”

  “Eighteen.”

  Sandra swallowed. “Why a kid?”

  “I don’t know. Who the hell ever knows? Not till we nail some bastard—and maybe even not then, huh?”

  “Who was he?”

  “Name’s Zachary Miller. The killer got him with his pants down. Literally. Kid was humping a girl in a parking lot in Burnham Park down near Soldier Field. The killer hauled him out of the car and did him right there, right in front of his own car. It looks like the killing was slow this time, like it lasted for a while. Both Baxter and Madrone were pretty much instantaneous, but it looks like this kid got thrown around some first. There was blood on the car and all over the blacktop. Maybe our guy is starting to get a taste for—”

  “Wait, in Burnham Park?” she said.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “What time, do they think?”

  “Early. Just after sundown. About seven o’clock, why?”

  “Jesus, Mac, I was right there last night!”

  “You were there?”

  “I mean, close. I was at a blues club a few blocks from the entire thing.”

  “No kidding! What were you doing there?”

  “Blowing off steam.”

  Sandra swallowed, thinking of the redhead she and Justin had chased.

  Into his thoughtful silence, she said, “Any witnesses?”

  “Kind of. Well…it’s strange, Bruce. We got someone who saw the whole thing…and then some. The girl our victim was trying to boff. A girl named Tina Danforth. Seventeen. A nice, normal kid—good student, caring parents, no signs of substance abuse. She and the victim were dating. But her story’s just too fucking weird. I mean bad weird.”

  “Why?”

  “She says she knows who the murderer is, but every time she starts talking about it, she starts raving about monsters and angels or something. I think you need to talk to her. You’re a woman, and maybe…”

  Sandra’s blood went cold. “Monsters?”

  “I don’t understand it, either, Bruce. Like I said, you’re going to have to talk to her.”

  “Who called the cops?”

  “A waitress at a cafe near the park. She heard screams, but didn’t see anything. So the uniforms took their sweet time getting there. They found the girl nearly naked, beat up, covered in blood, just standing there on the street waiting for them. She led them back to the car where the murder took place. The crime scene’s a zoo. We got footprints everywhere, at least five different sets in the victim’s blood. Strange thing is, they tally with the girl’s story. Well, sort of.

  “By the way, our witness says the victim was the one who trashed her, not the killer. She says the kid was trying to rape her, and the monster yanked him out of the car and killed him.”

  Silence stretched on the phone line.

  “You still there?” McKenzie asked.

  “God, Mac.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you think it could be her? Could she have killed the kid?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Mac said. “She’s a flyweight. Monsters would be more plausible than that.”

  “Yeah? I know some girls who could put up a pretty good fight. I could.”

  “Maybe so. But the victim looks like he got put through a meat grinder before his heart got ripped out. Cut up, choked, beaten, tossed at the car hard enough to half mash it, then thrown all over the place. No way the girl could pull that off. You see her, you’ll know. No way.”

  “Okay, but that leaves us with another problem. This doesn’t track with the other two our psycho’s killed.

  “I know. So he’s nuts. Freaks do freaky things.”

  “I mean, you’ve got to figure he went after Baxter for reasons of his own, then went after Madrone because Madrone stumbled onto something that might lead to Baxter’s killer. Or because he hates cops. So why go after a kid?”

  “Beats me, Bruce.”

  “Mac?” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  “Yeah? What’s that?”

  “Where you at?”

  “I’m at the scene. The forensics guys are just getting started.”

  “Okay, I’ll meet you there.”

  The crime scene had been cordoned off and uniformed officers were doing their best to keep the rubberneckers back. Fucking ghouls. People bitched about crime and violence, but they couldn’t resist a bucket of blood.

  And there was blood everywhere. Sandra squatted, getting a better look at the scuff marks on the blacktop, the blood, the footprints both in the pooled blood and leading away from the site. Five sets, just like Mac said. The congealed blood was still thick and faintly sticky in the damp morning air.

  She looked at the dents in the Camaro. That little cheerleader type might be strong for her size, but there was no way she was up for smacking around the victim hard enough to put deep impact craters in the sheet metal of the car.

  She moved to the edge of the parking lot, where the blacktop gave way to rough grass scrub along a slope that descended to the water below. Lake Michigan was dark under the gray sky.

  Mac wandered back from where he’d been chatting up one of the forensics techs, a young woman with a nice rack and dancing blue eyes.

  Men.

  “You shoulda let me know about Madrone’s snitch last night, Bruce,” he said seriously. “Maybe there’s some kinda connection. Same general neighborhood and all, where you ran into him…”

  She shrugged, walking along the edge of the dirt, “No way, Mac. That eaten-out junkie probably isn’t even in as good shape as the girl.”

  Narrowing her eyes, Sandra knelt by a couple of marks in the mud. They were tracks—like an animal’s footprint. A damn large animal. Something with three splayed toes. Damn large toes. And they looked a lot like that unexplained print in Jack Madrone’s carpet.

  “I wonder how he left the scene with no one seeing him. After doing the Miller kid, he had to be covered in blood,” she mused aloud.

  “Dark out, Bruce. And the park’s usually pretty empty. Wouldn’t be that hard.”

  She looked around. About a half block down the street there was a big storm sewer pipe. Given the weather the past few days, it was—not surprisingly—gushing water in a steady stream. If he was willing to risk five or six major diseases, the killer could have washed off in that. A man soaked head to toe wouldn’t seem very out of place in Chicago, what with all the rain lately. And these tracks seemed to be heading right for the pipe.

  “Take a look at these,” she told her partner, pointing at the imprints in the mud. “What do you think?”

  He crouched down next to her. “I don’t kno
w. What do you think?”

  Sandra swallowed and looked around. She suddenly felt as if she was being watched. Was this the same kind of discovery Madrone had made before he died? “Shit, I don’t know. Looks like the same thing we found with Madrone. But like an animal track, you know?”

  She peered around at the shadows beneath the trees, at the thickets and shrubs. Lots of places to hide. “Something maybe wandered down from the ’burbs? Or further?”

  “Yeah. And climbs the sides of condos and unlocks windows.”

  “Well, the girl claims she saw something. Dragons, right?”

  Mac shook his head in disgust. “Yeah. Dragons. You know what, Bruce? This whole case stinks,” he said as he stood up. His knees made sharp popping sounds. His eyes never left the animal tracks. “It just keeps getting creepier.”

  “Yeah. Gets your blood pumping, doesn’t it?” Sandra said, still feeling the chill. She couldn’t believe some of the things she was thinking. “You want to be the one to tell the captain that we’ve maybe got a man-shaped reptile running around stalking people and ripping their hearts out?”

  “Oh, man, that’s not funny at all. And you know what, Bruce? It worries me. I feel like we’re stumbling around, blind, in a mess that just keeps getting bigger and uglier.”

  “So what have we got so far, Mac? One scale, two sets of very weird footprints, and a missing redheaded snitch. All somehow connected. Maybe. If the snitch wasn’t lying in the first place.”

  “Not much,” Mac said.

  No, it wasn’t much. She knew that. But it didn’t matter. Shit like this was why she’d become a cop in the first place, spent the long years working her way from the academy to patrol and finally into investigation and homicide.

  She knew she needed to test herself, to see if she was tough enough to take down the worst the city could throw at her. If she couldn’t prove herself—and keep on proving herself—she was afraid that her fears would catch up with her, that she’d hide from the world forever. She’d done it for a while after her husband nearly killed her. She knew that darkness was still with her, waiting to fill her up again.

  The only way out of that arena was to take a path straight through the things she feared the most. To do it anyway. Turn her face to the fire and believe she’d live through it.

  So she would rather die than turn away. It kind of limited her options. Not that they were all that wide to begin with.

  Mac twisted uneasily. “One more thing,” he said.

  “Yeah?”

  “This freako scrags Baxter. Who was a rent-a-cop. Then he guts Madrone, who was a cop. And now we’re investigating Madrone. Does that…?” His voice trailed off.

  “Does it put us number one on his hit parade? I dunno, Mac. What do you think?”

  He stared at her. “I think I’ll be real careful for a while. Watch myself, you know? And maybe you should think about it, too.”

  “Oh, I have been, Mac.”

  “Well, keep it up, Bruce. You keep it up, hear me?”

  She nodded. “I hear you.”

  fourteen

  Looking at Tina Danforth was like looking into a mirror, a mirror into her own past. In more ways than one. Physically, she looked like Sandra once had looked. But the mirror was an emotional one as well. How many times after Chuck had slammed her around had she looked just like this, tattered in spirit, battered in the flesh?

  Sandra shivered as she watched the girl who lay hunched in on herself in the hospital bed. Bad, bad shit.

  Tina was trying her damnedest to curl up, to occupy as little space as possible. The girl’s mother perched on the edge of the mattress, sobbing quietly into a wad of tissues.

  Tina was wearing one of those ridiculous hospital gowns with a single tie in the back. Her legs were tucked up against her chest, her ankles crossed, her naked feet looking curiously vulnerable where they peeped beneath the end of the sheet, tiny blue veins prominent against shock-pale skin.

  Sandra knew what she was thinking, because she’d had the same thoughts herself. Tina was pretending that she was all alone in this room. Mac had been right. Sandra knew she could understand Tina better than anybody else, because she’d been there, too.

  Tina’s expression was as familiar to Sandra as her own skin, even though it was a skin Sandra had shed long ago. She let the memories flow over her, memories of a time when she, too, had suffered at the hands of a man, and had had to tell a policeman the awful story.

  And there was something else bothering Sandra. Now that she looked again, ignoring the bruises and the bandaged scrapes, Tina really did look a lot like her. It wasn’t just the defeated, wary aura surrounding the girl—the look she thought of in her own mind as the Chuck look—that caused goose bumps to rise on Sandra’s arms. If Sandra had been several years younger, she and Tina could have been identical twins. Damned close to it, at least.

  It was a weird déjà vu feeling to see herself as she’d once been. Then she shook off her uneasiness and stepped to the bedside. Tina looked up quickly, then shrank back from her. After what she’d been through, Sandra couldn’t blame her.

  Tina would not look at her.

  “I’d like to talk to you, Tina, if I could, about last night.”

  Tina shook her head violently, her lips compressed.

  “It’s important. Please?”

  Tina closed her eyes.

  Sandra tried again. “I can get you something to eat or drink. You need something in your stomach. It’ll make you feel better. Believe me, I know. And you don’t have to talk to me unless you want to.”

  Apparently Sandra’s calm, patient voice hit a chord with the girl. She nodded.

  “Okay. I’ll be right back.”

  Sandra left the room, went down the hall to a tiny lounge, and bought five bucks’ worth of sodas and chocolate bars. She brought them back and watched as Tina ate in tiny, microscopic increments. Finally, when the girl was looking a little calmer, Sandra tried again.

  “Tina, we need your help. You wouldn’t want what happened to you to happen to someone else, would you? We want to find the man who killed Zack. We want to stop him before he does it again.”

  Tina looked up and Sandra got the eye contact she wanted.

  “Can we talk, Tina? Just for a while?”

  Slowly Tina’s eyes took on a haunted look.

  “I know you don’t want to talk about what happened with Zack.”

  Tina shook her head.

  “But you’ll have to, and if we do it now, then it will be over with. I want to ask you some questions about before and after you were in the car with him. Did you notice anyone hanging around the parking lot when you drove in?”

  Tina hesitated, then shook her head no.

  “No one parking their car and pausing, seeming to do something, maybe check the trunk or the tires or something?”

  Tina barely shook her head, as if the question meant nothing to her.

  “Tina—”

  Tina mumbled something, too low for Sandra to hear.

  “What was that?” Sandra asked.

  “I-it wasn’t human,” Tina whispered.

  “What?” Sandra said. “What do you mean not human?”

  “I think I’m going crazy…” Tina said. “I must be going crazy.” Tears welled in her eyes and spilled over. She looked up, trying to keep her chin from quivering. “I want to go home. Can I just go home?”

  “Tina, don’t you think—”

  “Please, how can I make you believe something I don’t believe myself?” Tina said. “I don’t know what it was. It was big and green and it had claws and wings. It spoke my name, and it said it…it said it…had ‘punished’ Zack.” The girl began crying. Through her sobs, she continued speaking, although now completely to herself, not to Sandra at all.

  “He said he was my guardian angel, but he wasn’t…he punched the back window out. He grabbed Zack. He just tore Zack apart. He…had blood…Zack’s blood on his claws…” The soft words became in
coherent sobs; Tina retreated into herself, closing her eyes and clasping her legs tight against her chest.

  Sandra sighed. The story was not going to play well with her boss. The MO of the murders was bad enough. Add in a story about inhuman monsters, and if the media got hold of it, the whole city would go nuts. Not that it mattered. It wasn’t her story, and it was the only story she had.

  She sat back in her chair and watched Tina rock back and forth on the bed. The girl had seen something, but she was so shell-shocked by the ordeal that she wouldn’t make a good witness. Even if what Tina was saying was the absolute truth—and Sandra was starting to think there might be something to it—they were going to have a hard time convincing anybody based on this testimony.

  She did have some corroborating evidence. The claw prints Sandra had seen in the mud—she’d had the crime scene guys take plaster casts of the tracks. She had a photo of the print in the carpet at Jack Madrone’s apartment. She had the scale that nobody could identify. But it was all too thin to hang a wild story of a lizard man stalking the streets of Chicago on.

  Maybe something more ordinary was going on…Did the killer maybe get a kick out of wearing some kind of bizarre costume when he pulled people’s hearts out of their chests? That actually might make sense—Sandra had seen weirder stuff in her years with the force. But why embark on a series of murders in a costume? Still, psychos did do psycho things. John Wayne Gacey, the Clown-killer, had murdered young boys while wearing a clown costume.

  So far all they’d gathered were a few tracks, a single scale, and the strong smell of Chinese food. And a snitch…

  “Tina, did you smell an odor like burnt sesame oil? Sort of an Oriental food kind of smell?” Sandra asked.

  Tina looked stunned, nodded, and burst into uncontrollable sobs.

  Great, Sandra thought.

  Sandra let out a slow breath. Where to now? She could press the girl, pump her for more information, but she doubted it would do any good. More stories of clawed, winged men? Guardian angels bent on murder? Where was she supposed to go with that kind of crap?

  Sandra turned to the door, saw Mac trying to hover unobtrusively just beyond the doorway. A hard thing for a guy his size to accomplish. She nodded at him and he winked. Then she turned around and looked at the girl. Tina was still huddled in a tight, quivering ball. “We’re going to get someone to come in and take care of you, okay, Tina?”