“Can you describe him?”
“Sure. He wasn’t much to look at. Five-eight, maybe five-nine, average build, black hair. Typical wop features—except for the eyes.”
“What about his eyes?” Castillo asked.
“When you looked into them, it was like a thousand souls looking back at you. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were, and it wouldn’t surprise me if a good number of them weren’t Vietnamese.”
“Did you ever notice anything unusual about him—other than the eyes?”
Gary laughed a wracking cough. “It’d be easier to say I never saw anything ordinary about him. I only saw one person stupid enough to pick a fight with him and that was enough that no one ever did it a second time.”
“Tell me about it.”
“There was this one marine. Biggest bastard I ever saw in my life. He and his outfit were new to the camp, and I guess they wanted to show us dumb grunts how tough they were. They picked a few fights, we rumbled a bit. One day, they see Leo strolling into camp as he did every week or two, usually only after he ran out of bullets. I warn them jarheads to leave him be. He wasn’t the type to play around duking it out to blow off some steam like the rest of us were.
“The big meathead, he figures we’re all scared of Malone, so he’s gotta show us up. Malone tries to ignore him, warns him to back off. Of course, that only encourages the jarhead. I never seen a man take a beating like that in my life.”
“Malone?”
“No, the marine! Malone didn’t so much as break a sweat, and he nearly killed him. Then he grabbed a couple boxes of ammo and headed back out into the jungle like it was just any other day.”
“Did anyone ever actually fight next to Malone? Did anyone see him killed or where he disappeared?”
Gary shook his head. “No one fought with him. He was a sniper and he refused to have a spotter. The brass, they kept trying to stick him with one. The new camp commander threatened to court-martial him if he didn’t obey orders. He and Malone had a long talk. The commander gave up and let him do as he pleased. As for when he disappeared…”
Gary’s face went slack as his mind traveled back to that day. “We should have died. All of us. My company was out on patrol. Brass said that the VC were pushing hard toward Da Nang from Laos. We were several days out when they found us. Whole goddam battalion or more. We retreated into these old ruins atop a hill. They had us surrounded. They could have stormed up and taken us at any time, but they wanted prisoners.
“Small groups of VC would sneak up the hill, take a few pot-shots, and skulk away. They did make one hard push, but we fought them off. By the time night came, we were down to half our fighting force and real low on ammo. If they came at us during the night, none of us was going to see the dawn. They taunted us, yelling up the hill that they were going to capture and torture us. They were going to send pictures of us back to the States as a warning to stay out of Vietnam.
“We all started to make peace with God. A lot of guys, they made pacts to kill each other before being taken alive. It was around midnight, I think, when the shots started. No one was shooting at the time and that old M1903 was unmistakable. The VC had crept so close to where we were at, that I could hear the bullets when they hit flesh. I swear, every one of them found their mark—in the middle of the fucking night! Shot after shot, these guys were dropping like flies. They were chattering away, trying like hell to find out who was shooting them.
“The shots stopped after about an hour. Malone, and we were sure it was him, could only carry so much ammo and he must have run out. We figured that was the end of it. There must have been close to three hundred of them little bastards out there, and even with Malone’s kills, there was still a lot more of them than us. Hell, there was probably more of them than we had bullets, by that time.
“Once he stopped firing, it got real quiet. Let me tell you, there is no silence more ominous than when you are surrounded by hundreds of guys, in a pitch-black jungle, who want to kill you, and not one of them is so much as breathing loud. Then it began.”
“What began?” Castillo asked, holding her breath like the men in the story.
“The screaming. God Almighty, I never heard such a thing in my life. It started slow. A VC or two would cry out every couple of minutes. Then it picked up. They started shooting, at what I couldn’t say. Trees, shadows, anything that moved. This carried on for hours. There would be lulls in the storm where no one was shooting, crying, or dying. Then it would start back up.
“Near morning, some of the VC started up the hill toward us. It was still pretty dark, and we thought they were finally going to try to take us, so we shot every one that ran at us. It wasn’t until it was all over, when I looked at the bodies, that I realized what they were doing.”
“What?”
“They were trying to surrender. When it was daylight, we went down the hill. The ones that had charged at us, none of them carried a weapon. Some had T-shirts torn into white flags still gripped in their hands. We didn’t know, but that wasn’t nearly as bad as what we found at the bottom.”
Gary took several deep breaths from his oxygen tube. “They were dead. Every goddam one of them was dead.”
“Shot?”
“The lucky ones. Close to a hundred looked to have been shot from a distance by an M1903 rifle. Single shot to the head or chest. Others had obviously been shot by their buddies firing blindly out of pure panic. Some had been killed by a knife or machete, their limbs or heads hacked clean off. The worst ones, the ones that put some of us into the psyche ward, they were just torn apart. Their bones were crushed, limbs all twisted up like pipe cleaners.”
“What about Malone, did you see him?”
Gary shook his head. “Naw, but I found a jacket, shot full of holes, covered in blood, and ripped to shreds. I almost wouldn’t have recognized it as a uniform top if the name tag hadn’t still been stitched to it.”
“Malone,” Castillo breathed.
“Leo Fucking Malone. As far as I know, no one ever saw him again.”
Castillo retrieved her phone and brought up Leo’s mugshot. “Gary, is this the man you knew as Leo Malone?”
Gary took the phone and held it close to his face. “Sonofabitch. He’s a dead ringer. The hair is different, and he’s a couple years older, but yeah, that’s him. I mean, of course it isn’t. Leo was near thirty back then. He’d have to be over seventy years old by now. His son maybe? Then again, if anyone could give both Death and Father Time the finger, it’d be Malone.”
Castillo took back her phone. “Maybe. Thank you, Mr. Knotts.”
She closed the door behind her when she left and returned to her car. Her trembling hands struggled with the seat belt latch, and she sat for a full minute gripping the steering wheel to collect her thoughts and nerves. Castillo hit the Contacts button on her phone.
“Frank, Detective Castillo again.”
“Hello, Detective, you’re lucky you caught me. I was just clocking out. What can I do for you?”
“I need you to run that name against any other military conflicts. Can you do that?”
“Sure, you mean like the Gulf War and such?”
“That, but can you go back as well?”
“Like Korea and World War II? How freaking old is this guy you’re looking for?”
“I think he may be using former soldiers’ identity. Can you do it?”
“Sure. How far back do you want me to go?”
Castillo swallowed the knot tightening in her throat. “As far as you can.”
“All right. We have decent records going back to The Deuce, but they get a bit sketchy before then. How soon do you need it?”
“If you care about my sleep at all, you’ll put in some overtime for me.”
Frank sighed. “Lucky for you it’s exotic night for dinner, so I’m looking for an excuse to miss it.”
“Exotic night?”
“Yeah, the wife watches that goddam Anthony Bourdain on TV and cook
s whatever third-world crap he ate, for dinner.”
“That sounds exciting,” Castillo quipped.
“Only for my colon. This shouldn’t take long. Lucky for us, that’s not a common name. If it were Williams or Smith I’d tell you I hope you have cable, because you’d be in for a long night.”
“Thank you, Frank.”
Castillo guided her rental car onto the freeway, back in the direction of New York. Her brain fought to make sense of what she had learned. There was no way the Malone Gary spoke of was the same Malone she wanted for a host of unsolved crimes and accusations. It simply was not possible, but what he described matched what she had seen Malone do.
Her phone chimed and she pushed the Bluetooth button on the car’s radio. “Castillo.”
“I hate to cut your vacation short, but I’m calling for all hands on deck,” Captain Starks said.
“What’s going on, Captain?”
“We’re getting more bodies than I have cops. I think we have a serial killer on the loose.”
“Jesus. I was on my way in anyway. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”
A serial killer in one of the most populated cities in the world was not a good thing. At least it got her back on the job. She hated the selfishness of the thought, but she was a realist. If someone was going to go around murdering the citizens of her city, she would be there to try to stop them.
She had just crossed the bridge onto Staten Island when her phone chirped again. “Castillo.”
“Detective, it’s Frank Worthen.”
“What do you have for me, Frank?”
“I have a couple dozen names going back to the Civil War. Different socials and middle names, but same first and last. I dug up as many photos as I could to try to put a face with a name. Most of them are just unit photos and such. I don’t know if that will help in an identity theft case, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.”
“Thank you, Frank. That’s perfect. Do you have my email information?”
“Of course I do. I’m the government,” Frank said with a laugh.
“Great. Send it to me and I’ll look it over when I get to my desk.”
“You aren’t going home?”
“Nope. It’s looking like an all-nighter for me.”
“What’s the address? I’ll have the wife send you some fried monkey brains or whatever the hell she made tonight.”
Castillo chuckled. “I’ll pass, but I appreciate the thought. Thanks again.”
“Anytime, Detective.”
Castillo parked the rental in the station parking lot and headed inside. She threaded her way past the usual perps and complainants filling the booking station and went upstairs. Captain Starks had not lied. The department was fully staffed despite the hour.
“Hey, Castillo, I got another story about your boyfriend,” one of her fellow detectives called out.
“Louis, if this is a dead battery joke, I’m going to shoot you.”
“Naw, I mean your other boyfriend, Malone.”
“What about him?”
“You heard of a guy named Nathan Taylor?”
“From the Giants?”
“That’s the one. He says he caught Malone taking pictures of him banging his girlfriend, so he broke his camera and kicked over his motorcycle.”
Castillo cocked her head, confused. “So? Is Malone pressing charges?”
“Naw, Taylor says Malone tossed him through his bedroom window. Is that crazy or what?”
“Why is it crazy?”
“Malone kicking the crap out of a guy Taylor’s size? Besides, Taylor’s bedroom window is on the second floor. He was drunk and I bet there was more in his blood than alcohol if you know what I mean. Besides, he ain’t pressing charges.”
Her partner waved her over the moment he spotted her. Castillo wound her way through the desks and took a seat at Angel’s station.
“Did the captain call you?” Angel asked.
“Yeah, he said we might have a serial killer. What do you have?”
Angel pointed to a stack of folders on his desk and flipped open the one on top. “Four dead women, all prostitutes. Each one had their throat cut prior to the killer opening them up and taking out some of their organs.”
“Jesus, what a fucking monster.”
“Yeah, but that’s not all. We also have two men with a variety of wounds suffered moments before someone cut their heads off.”
“What kind of wounds?”
“Cut, stabbed, shot, and some other things we’re waiting on the ME to identify.”
“What’s the timeline?”
“Four women in a week. The two men were murdered four days apart. One was killed on the same night as one of the women. One man was killed on Staten Island, the other in Manhattan. The four women are all over the place.”
“Doesn’t sound like the same killer. Can we link either of the men to the dead women?”
“Not yet. Steven Spicer worked at a bank and Ryan Wendlen sold high-end cars. Neither of them had been arrested for solicitation before. One had a couple of misdemeanor batteries, but they were otherwise clean.”
Castillo rubbed her forehead. “Great, so we probably have two killers with some serious anger issues. We can assume that one hates prostitutes, but what’s the angle on our two men?”
“Both dealt with money,” Angel offered. “Maybe the guy got screwed on some investments, lost all his money, and they repossessed his fancy new car?”
“It’s as good a theory as any. Pull up a list of repos at Wendlen’s dealership and see if any names match Spicer’s client list. Let me know if anything correlates.”
Castillo sat at her desk and logged onto her computer. She sighed at the number of emails flooding her inbox as she searched for the one Frank sent. She found it near the top of the list and opened it. The document contained only two dozen names but numerous photos. Most were unit pictures with anywhere between twenty and thirty men standing or kneeling in formation. She started with the individual pictures, but none of them were of Malone—at least not the one she was looking for.
She opened the first of several unit photos, starting with the most recent. She doubted Leo would be in any of the most recent since she had known him since the war in Iraq and Afghanistan began. The pictures from the Gulf war did not reveal anything either.
She started to doubt herself and felt stupid for entertaining the thought that Malone could have fought not just in Vietnam, but even earlier and still be the same man she had arrested numerous times over the years. Her breath caught in her throat and her heart skipped a beat as she scanned the faces of the men in the photo. Leo Malone’s face looked at her from the second row of a group of soldiers just days from shipping out to fight in the Korean Conflict.
It was not possible, but she knew that face as well as any in her family. It was a few years younger, but there was no doubt in her mind it was the same man. Castillo continued to scroll through the pictures, searching for the face that had no logical reason for being there. She gasped loud enough to draw attention when she found it again. It was a news correspondence photo of a group of soldiers who had participated in the liberation of the Philippines in World War II. Malone stood in the background, seemingly trying to avoid the camera, but his name was amongst those credited in the picture.
He could not have been more than twenty years old in this picture, but there was no disguising his identity. While the face had aged over the decades ever so slightly, the haunted eyes looking out at her were the same ones she had stared into right here in her station.
“Who are you, Malone?” she whispered to herself. “What are you?”
CHAPTER 5
The sun and I do our best not to exist in the same location at the same time, so I’m already in a bad mood. Vampires don’t turn into big, flailing bonfires if the sun touches them, but we still don’t like it.
I open my fridge and stare at the blood bags for half a minute before slamming the door shut. They have all
the culinary appeal of two-day-old truck stop sushi. I need to feed. A partial feeding, one where my target doesn’t die, will hold me for a few more days, but I really need a full feeding soon before I start getting itchy and very unpleasant.
Thanks to the mutual disdain sleep and I share, I have a couple of hours to kill before I meet with the doc. I press the hidden button on the wall; a section of floor lifts up a few inches and rolls back to reveal my hidden workshop and armory. I select a few of the weapons from the racks, break them down, and give them a good cleaning.
Picking through my selection of electronics, I see that I am getting low on a few key components. I’ll have to make a stop at my supplier’s shop. I could order the stuff online and save myself the hassle and some money, but I’m not a fan of computers, and I don’t like the idea of the NSA and FBI tracking my purchases. Individually, they wouldn’t raise much suspicion, but if someone took the time to put together the pieces, it could draw some unwanted attention.
I manage to kill some time, one of the few things in this world I have a hard time executing. I grab my sunglasses despite the overcast day. To my sensitive eyes, it approximates the comfort of night, but I know the sun is out there and it still bugs me.
After fiddling with my mirror for five minutes, I navigate the late morning traffic, occasionally using the sidewalk to get past the worst of the jams. Dr. M’s office occupies the bulk of the first floor of his brownstone residence. I brace myself for whatever waspish comment his secretary has waiting for me, as I enter the reception area.
“Mr. Malone, in a civilized world, we have a thing called an appointment. Would you like me to make you one sometime?” Jeanine says when I walk in.
I smile politely at the wrinkled old crone. “Oregon has a thing called assisted suicide. Would you like me to get you a plane ticket?”
“I doubt you could afford the cab ride to the airport.”
“I would be happy to take you there myself.”
“I don’t ride on motorcycles, especially ones driven by insufferable, self-centered, narcissists.”
“It’s a one-seater. I had planned to drag you behind it.”
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