The Darker Side sb-3

by Cody McFadyen

  "Ned and I will take a look and I'll call you."

  When Alan was being trained for homicide, his mentor told him that a notepad was a detective's best friend and that a friend should have a name. Alan gave his pad the name Ned. It's stuck to this day. I've seen many incarnations of Ned pulled from an inside jacket pocket. Ned's been a faithful friend.

  "Okay."

  "You sure you're fine?"

  "I'm sure. Keep doing what you're doing."

  "MY, MY, MY," CALLIE MUSES after I fill her in. "Our very own crazy Hansel, leaving us a trail of bloody bread crumbs."

  And James had been right, I think. He is taking something from his victims. He told us he is.

  "How is it going there?" I ask.

  "We finished vacuuming for trace. I won't know how helpful that is until I get it back to a lab. I haven't found any prints, but I did find some smudged areas on the arm rest where prints should have been."

  "He probably wiped them down."

  "Not a stupid Hansel, but then, we expected as much."

  "I bet it means he's in the system."

  "Why?"

  "He's leaving us clues, Callie. He wants us to know he's there and that we should chase him. Why bother wiping his prints? I think it's because he knows they would lead us right to him."

  "Hm. If so, it's not immediately probative, but helpful. It means he either has a criminal record, is a government employee, or has been in the military or law enforcement."

  "It's something. What else?"

  "Nothing, yet. We're about to remove the seat cushions. I still need to print the overhead luggage compartment and then we're done."

  "I want you to come over here next. We need to process this condo."

  An overdramatized, long-suffering sigh. "No rest for the brideto-be, I see."

  I chuckle. "Relax. Marilyn is still working on the wedding logistics, right?"

  Marilyn is Callie's daughter.

  "It's not Marilyn I'm worried about. It's her helper."

  I frown. "Who?"

  "Kirby."

  I raise an eyebrow. "Beach bunny Kirby?"

  "Is there any other?"

  Kirby Mitchell is an eccentric bodyguard I'd hired a few years back to help protect a potential victim. She's in her early thirties, about five-seven, blonde, with all the plucky personality and chipper talk you'd expect from a California stereotype. The truth of Kirby is something a little different, however. Kirby is ex-CIA "or something like that" as she likes to say. The rumors are that she spent many years down in Central and South America as an assassin for the U.S. government. I have zero doubt about this. Kirby, for all her thousandkilowatt smiles and "gee-whiz" exclamations, is as deadly as they come.

  She's also loyal and funny and has managed to insinuate herself into the lives of the team.

  "Why'd you pick Kirby?"

  "She's got wonderful taste for a killer, Smoky. Exquisite, actually."

  "I see."

  "But she needs supervision, you know?"

  "Oh yeah, I know."

  Kirby is unapologetic about satisfying her impulses, and her moral compass needs a little nudge sometimes.

  Callie sighs. "Oh well, I'm sure it'll be fine. I told her not to hurt anyone too much if they tried to overcharge me."

  " 'Too much'?" I query.

  I can almost hear Callie's smile. "What's the use of having an assassin help with your wedding planning if you can't use her to scare the vendors a little?"

  I PLACE A CALL TO Rosario Reid and fill her in on what I found. She's silent for a moment.

  "He--he was there? The man who killed my Lisa?"

  "Yes."

  More silence. I know what she's feeling. Grief, rage, violation. An impotent desire to destroy the man who did this, who not only took her child from her, but walked through Lisa's condo, Lisa's life, with impunity.

  "Rosario, I have to ask--do you have any idea what Lisa was talking about in her journal? The big secret she mentions?"

  "I haven't the slightest, I really don't."

  Is that true? Or are you lying to me?

  I let it go, for now.

  She sighs. "What are you going to do now?"

  "When my team is done with the plane, they'll be coming over here. They'll be processing the condo from top to bottom."

  "I see." Yet more silence. "Thank you for keeping me up-to-date, Smoky. Please call me if you need anything."

  She hangs up, and I realize that she hadn't asked me what else Lisa had written in her journal.

  Perhaps you're capable of dishonesty after all, Rosario. Maybe you know you'll find that Lisa wasn't as happy as you told yourself she was.

  I can't blame her for this. I want to remember my Alexa as perfect too.

  My phone rings. Alan.

  "Not only is Richard Ambrose dead," he begins without preamble,

  "his body is still here."

  I curse to myself. This is getting out of hand.

  "Give me the address," I say. "I'll find a cab and meet you there."

  8

  IT'S NOW NEARING TEN IN THE MORNING, AND I'M STARTing to feel like someone who has missed a night's sleep. My eyes are gritty, my mouth tastes bad, and I have aches I'm not usually aware of.

  I concentrate on the weather and the sky to shake myself awake. The cold has cleared the air and the sky is incredibly blue. When I step out of the cab the wind bites into me, not unpleasant. The sun burns cold, nothing more than a source of light.

  Richard Ambrose lived in a medium-sized older home. It's built with the sloping roof houses have in places that get snow. The exterior is mostly gray stone, lightened in places by blue and white trim. It sits on a large yard that's covered with the leaves of fall. It's a quiet neighborhood, very charming. I have visions of hot apple cider on Halloween, kids raking those leaves into a pile so they could jump into them. I'm not one of those Californians who think California is superior, or the only place to be. I can understand the draw of a place like this, the character of it. I could even consider living here, if it weren't for the snow. I don't do snow.

  I pay the cabbie and send him on his way. I crunch through the leaves until I reach the concrete porch, noting the neighbor on the left peeking through a curtain. The front door is cracked. I open it and am assaulted by the sweet and sour smell of death.

  "Jesus," I mutter. I swallow hard, forcing down something wet and gooey that's trying to climb up my throat.

  I force myself to enter, closing the door behind me. The inside of the home is warm--warmer than it should be, like the heat has been cranked up.

  Is this a little present you decided to give us? Turn the house into a sweat lodge so that the body would get nice and stinky?

  I breathe in deeply through my nostrils, fighting the urge to gag as I do. I don't have a mask to put on or any menthol to rub under my nose. This is another trick; draw the scent in deep and overwhelm the olfactory receptors. Nothing really works one hundred percent, other than a gas mask. The smell of death is too profound. The inside of Ambrose's house matches the outside, rich in its oldness. I see dark hardwood floors everywhere, and although the wood shines, it's scuffed and worn in a way that makes me think it's original. The walls are actually plaster and the light fixtures are old enough to be authentic as opposed to tacky.

  "Alan?" I call out.

  "Upstairs," he answers.

  The stairs to the second floor face the front door. They're narrow, walled on each side. I walk up, clacking and squeaking all the way, more of that old wood. The smell of rotting flesh keeps getting stronger.

  I reach the top landing and find myself facing a wall. A hallway stretches to the right and the left.

  "Where are you?" I ask.

  "Master bedroom," he calls out, his voice coming from the left. I turn left and listen to the wood protest being walked on. It sounds like a cranky old man, or maybe a mother laying on a guilt trip. I pass a print on the wall, a Picasso sketch, a study of Don Quixote on his horse.


  I reach the master bedroom and turn in.

  "Wow," I say, grimacing.

  Alan is standing at the foot of the bed, staring down at something that used to be a living person.

  Ambrose was laid on his back, his arms arranged next to him. He's past the point of being bloated. His skin has a creamy consistency in some places, is black in others, and body fluids have run over the mattress on both sides to drip onto the floor. The smell in here is overwhelming. I struggle to keep my mouth from filling with saliva. Alan seems unaffected.

  "State of decay, he's been dead between ten and twenty days," Alan notes.

  I nod. "Alone too. No insect activity to speak of means this house has been locked up tight. Any obvious cause of death?"

  Alan shakes his head. "I don't see any bullet holes, and there's been too much slippage and decomp to tell if he was strangled or had his throat cut."

  "This was purely functional," I murmur. "There's no joy here. The killer needed his identity, that's all."

  "Speaking of that, check this out."

  Alan hands me a photograph in an eight-by-ten frame. I see a good-looking man in his mid-forties with dark hair and an easy smile. Ambrose was not movie-star handsome, but I doubt he had many problems attracting women. Most interesting, however, is the fact that he sports a full moustache and beard. I hand the photo back to Alan.

  "He chose Ambrose because they're roughly the same age, height, and appearance," I say. "He knew he'd be on a plane, in an enclosed environment. He couldn't afford to get too clever or complex with his disguise. I'm betting he went clean shaven to the airport and used Ambrose's driver's license. He'd tell security personnel that he'd just shaved the moustache and beard." I shrug. "If he was confident and charming enough, and the basic physical similarities were there, he could pull it off."

  "I don't know. Seems risky. What if he got a really alert attendant, someone that did a double take?"

  "He killed on a plane, mid-flight. I don't think risk is an issue for him."

  "Good point."

  "Besides, the truth is, with adequate social engineering, it's just not that hard."

  The problem with decent people is that they are decent people. They tend to assume decency in others by default. If he says he's a plumber and he's in a pair of coveralls, then he's a plumber, not a serial killer in disguise. Ted Bundy wore a cast on his arm and asked a girl for help moving a couch into his van. He was handsome, charming, and she, being decent, helped him without a second thought. He, being evil, killed her without a second thought. I'm sure she still couldn't believe it, even as it happened.

  The funny thing is, people assume we're more careful now, that Bundy's broken arm trick wouldn't work today. They're wrong. It would work today, and it will work a century from now. It's just the way we are.

  "What's the plan?" Alan asks.

  I sigh. "We're getting spread too thin. We have the plane as a crime scene, and now Lisa's condo and this house. Callie and James aren't going to be able to handle it all." I shake my head. "I'm calling AD

  Jones."

  "IT'S TIME TO START PLAYING this by the book, sir," I tell him.

  "We've got three crime scenes now. Legally, the Ambrose murder belongs to the locals. If I try and contain it I'm not only getting into sketchy legal territory, I'm putting the need for confidentiality above the need for a speedy investigation. I can't do that."

  Investigation of murder is a full-court press, always. It's a blitz, no finesse. You pull out all stops, use every resource available, because if you don't come up with something in the first forty-eight to seventytwo hours, it's unlikely you're going to come up with anything at all. I had remembered this as I stared down at the rotting corpse of Richard Ambrose and realized I was solving someone else's problem. Like I told Rosario--I work for the victims. Not her, not her husband, certainly not political expedience.

  I hear AD Jones sigh. "Any other way around this?"

  "Not ethically, no, sir. We've got a murder scene here, a pretty big one. The whole house needs to be gone through. We've got identity theft, interviews still to be done of plane passengers, ticket counter personnel, flight attendants. Not to mention the distinct possibility that other past victims are going to pop up and his promise to kill again until we catch him. If we're going to do a good job of this, we need to bring in local law enforcement."

  A long pause. "Agreed. But we hold on to the Lisa Reid murder directly. We have legal reason to do so. I don't want anyone else in her condo, and I want the ME report to continue being suppressed. If the details about the cross leak, it'll impair your investigation."

  "Right."

  "Before you call in the cavalry, though, I want you to arrange a little air cover, Smoky."

  "Such as?"

  "Call Rosario Reid. Explain to her that keeping this in-house is no longer practical or feasible. Get her to understand that it'll impede finding Lisa's killer. Appeal to her as a mother and the wife of a politician. I'll deal with the Director."

  "Yes, sir."

  "You made the right call on this, Smoky."

  I'M IN THE FRONT YARD, leaves blowing around my ankles, that crisp, cold wind numbing my cheeks and hands. I welcome it for now; it's clearing the smell of death from my nostrils.

  "I trust your judgment, Smoky," Rosario tells me. "I meant what I said in the car--Lisa is your priority."

  "I appreciate that. I didn't think otherwise, but you deserve a heads-up. Also . . ." I hesitate.

  "Yes?"

  "To be honest, it would be helpful if you conveyed your confidence in my decisions to the Director."

  "I'll talk to him personally."

  "Thanks. I ran into his assistant, and she made me a little nervous. I'm not used to this particular playing field."

  "Rachael Hinson?" She sounds amused. "She's formidable, true, but so am I. And I have ten years on her. Do whatever you need to."

  "I will."

  She disconnects and I turn to Alan, who's waiting on the front porch, hands in his jacket pockets. I nod. "Call in the locals."

  9

  I'M BACK AT LISA'S CONDO WITH CALLIE AND JAMES. ALAN IS coordinating with local law enforcement at Ambrose's home. I don't feel a need to be there. Ambrose was used and thrown away; he wasn't important to the killer. As callous as it sounds, that means he's not immediately important to me.

  James is walking through the condo. Doing the same thing I had done, I imagine, soaking in Lisa's personality. She was important to our madman. Know the victim, know the doer.

  Callie looks tired. I watch as she pulls a bottle of Vicodin from her jacket pocket and pops a pill dry.

  "Yummy," she says, rolling her eyes in faux joy and rubbing her stomach with exaggerated motions.

  "How are you doing with that?"

  "Still addicted," she quips. "But then, that's something you're going to help me with before my wedding. You and I locked in a room together, sweat and barf."

  "Sounds fun."

  "Monkeys, barrels of them. So, what do you want me to do?"

  I explain about the diary, what I'd found.

  "He spent time here, Callie. I think he stole some pages from her diary. I want you and James to go through this place with a fine-tooth comb."

  "Do you think we'll find anything?"

  I hesitate, then shrug. "I don't know. Maybe. He wanted us to know he was here, and he left the cross in Lisa's body as a clue. He's pulling us down a trail, but he hides his fingerprints . . ." I shake my head. "I can't quite pin him down. I don't have enough to work with yet."

  James has reappeared and has been listening.

  "I agree," he says. "All I can really tell about him, so far, is that he's older, he's organized and accomplished, fearless without being insane about the risks he takes, and that he wants us to know he's out there."

  And that he's going to kill again, soon, I don't add.

  "Anything else from the plane?" I ask.

  "No," Callie says. "We still have to go
through the trace we vacuumed up, and we have the bloody cushions, but that's all."

  "The most telling evidence then," James says, "continues to be the fact that he wiped down his prints. He's in a database somewhere."

  "Yes. That and his behavior are the best leads we have." I sigh.

  "Which isn't saying much."

  "Pish," Callie says. "We're only twenty-four hours in. He's already made the biggest mistake of all--he attracted our attention."

  James shakes his head. "Yes, but it's not looking like we'll catch him before he kills again."

  Callie shrugs. "Not under our control. This is. So let's get to work."

  I'm about to chime in with agreement, but my phone rings. Alan.

  "Bad news," he says.

  "What?"

  "Remember you told me to put out a search for similar crimes?"

  My heart sinks. "Uh-huh."

  "I did that before I went to Ambrose's place. We've already got a hit. Get this--it's a fresh crime. Happened ten days ago."

  "Are you kidding me?"

  "Wish I was. He's on the move. Man with a plan."

  I close my eyes, rub my forehead. This bad news seems to bring all my exhaustion crashing down on me.

  "Give me the details," I say.

  Interlude:

  THE DEATH

  of

  ROSEMARY SONNENFELD

  10

  ROSEMARY WAKES UP AT SIX-THIRTY TO THE SHRILL BLAST OF her alarm. She considers turning it off and going back to sleep. It's Saturday, after all. The thought is seductive, but the rebuke is instant and fierce.

  No, that's not how this works. Not how you work. Discipline, day in, day out, from now till death. It's the only way. So she forces herself to a sitting position, legs dangling down from the side of the bed. Her feet touch the wood floor once, tentative, curling away from the cold as a reflex. Coffee. I need coffee.

  She stretches once and marvels, as she often does, that she could feel this achy and sluggish. She's only thirty-four and it's been four years since she straightened her life out.

  That's the price you pay for the wages of sin.

  She glances out the window of her apartment. She's living in Simi Valley, California, has been since she fled here four years ago to restart her life. It's a nice apartment, two bedrooms, decor that's comforting in its absolute lack of edginess. Beige carpets and off-white walls, wood floors in the bedroom and kitchen, she could be happy with that forever.