by Nick Keller
Heller shut the folder and picked up the phone. “Captain Pruitt. Yeah, this is Heller. Right. I got your information. Uh-huh, looks like it. She’s definitely a pro. Send it to your office? If you want it, you can come pick it up. I don’t care, Dobbs is a good cop. Because it’s true! Well, next time do it yourself. Escort girl or not, Bernie’s not going to be your example, and if there’s a God, Pruitt, he won’t go quietly, either. I don’t give a shit what you think. Well, do it yourself next time, goddammit.” He pounded the phone into its cradle and sat rubbing his knuckles, grinding his teeth.
Fucking Pruitt and his rotten Internal Affairs bullshit, man.
39
THE DOBBS RESIDENCE
A couple layers of Teflon had stopped a few nine-millimeter rounds at point blank range. But just barely. Bernie inspected himself in the bathroom mirror. They might not have been puncture wounds on his chest, but they sure as hell were big, ugly, yellow-blue hematomas glistening with medicated cream. And they went deep, too, probably half way to his spine. It had been enough to crack a few ribs. At least he wasn’t dead.
He was glad to be home. Three days in a hospital bed over a few bruises had him scoffing at himself. What a pansy? Now it would be a few weeks of doing nothing at home. Well, there’d be pain pills and a few sympathy blowjobs from Iva. He could handle that.
When Captain Heller called to inform him he was stopping by, he got out of bed and hobbled to the couch. It took him ten minutes. But now he sat trying not to move while Heller warned him about Captain Pruitt and the I.A. department.
“Fuck Pruitt,” Bernie said.
“Yeah, that’s kind of the popular sentiment.”
“Beside from that, I don’t know what to tell you, Captain,” Bernie grumbled from his couch. Heller was in his living room looking as nonplussed as ever. He’d been to Bernie’s before, several times in fact. But only when some trouble was on its way. This visit was no different.
“And what’re you going to tell I.A.? Pruitt’s going to come down on you, Bernie,” Heller said sipping on a cup of this morning’s coffee.
“Fuck off, maybe,” Bernie said.
“And when they march you in front of a grand jury, take your badge, get you off the force altogether, what then?”
“Then I’ll tell the grand jury to fuck off, too.”
“And Homicide?” Heller asked.
“What about it?”
“You’re going to lose your career over her.” Heller started to sip again, but didn’t.
Bernie shrugged looking bitter. “Something’s got to give, I guess.”
Heller put the coffee mug down on the table and sat on the edge of the adjoining couch, thinking. “Look, Bernie, I want to help you. I want to get you back in Homicide Investigations. That’s where you belong. Everyone knows it, even Mark, believe it or not. But I can’t as long as I.A. knows you’re shacking up with a…” he made a crooked face trying to be gentle with his words, “… an escort.”
“She ain’t no escort no more.”
Heller looked at him ridiculously flapping the report at him. Once the P.D. deemed somebody an escort, they were always an escort.
Bernie took a big breath, controlling his reaction. “So, you want me to just leave her?”
“I left mine. Hell, I left two of mine. Every cop does sooner or later. It’s part of the job.” The look on Heller’s face reflected an eerie truism. Girlfriends, wives and mistresses, even escorts, were all the same in this business.
Bernie just shook his head slow and angry. “I can’t do that.”
Heller leaned forward, put his hand on Bernie’s elevated foot. “You sure about that?”
“She’s—she’s mine, Captain.”
“You actually love her, don’t you?”
“I guess I do. Yeah.”
Heller leaned back eyeing him, seeing Bernie in a way he’d never fathomed. “So, Bernie’s got a heart after all, huh?” He got to his feet. “Well, you’re a bigger man than me, Bernie. What’re you going to do?”
“I guess I’ll play their little game. I’ve played it before.”
“Then what?”
Bernie shrugged. “Who cares? Pruitt wants my badge bad enough, well he can take it. I got Iva. He can’t take that, the motherfucker.”
40
COMFORTING ARMS
In the mirror, everything cleared for William. Today was the day. Thursday. The Better Letter Lotto. Someone’s fate was going to be called. Then, he would know all he needed to catch the killer.
Questions haunted him. What if he failed? What if his formula was wrong all along? What if he was powerless against this adversary?
No. No!
He wasn’t powerless at all. He held all the cards. He knew who, when and how. All he needed was the trigger device—the Better Letter Lotto.
He wanted his answers now. Patience was slipping. This killer had killed once or twice a year since his spree began. It made William shake. He couldn’t wait that long. He needed resolution; he wanted it today.
If there’s a god, let them call it soon, let them call it tonight…
But just as William had always suspected, God was often a disappointment. He would have to navigate his feelings for another week, always nauseous to his stomach, always leaning on Ruthi for her touch to ease his sickness. The first letter called was not an I.
RUTHI HAD TO WORK LATE, so William waited outside the clinic. He felt fidgety. His nerves were slowly being pulled apart like diaphanous taffy, always on the verge of utter failure.
He perked up. It was still bright when she came walking out. The sun never seemed to go down in L.A. William sidled his car up next to her as she strolled along. “Hey you.”
Her smile was radiant, on the verge of flattery when she noticed him. “You been waiting for me?”
“All my life.”
“Awe, babe…”
“You want an adventure?”
“Where are we going?”
“I’ve gotten nowhere. I’m running out of leads. So, I’m starting over,” he said. Ruthi could hear the frustration in his voice. It reminded her of fatigue. “We’re going back to the beginning,” William said.
“What does that mean?” she said, looking interested.
“We’re going to visit ground zero. Scene of the crime.”
Her face melted into a look of terror. He could see the chills move up and down her back. “You mean—where someone was killed?”
“That’s correct.”
“Oh—I don’t know, William.”
He hadn’t expected her reaction. Perhaps he should have. He thought she’d be excited to go, but she was a civilian lab technician, not a forensics investigator. Crime scenes took a certain grit. Maybe he’d assumed too much about their relationship at this point. He bit the inside of his lip, feeling stupid. He should have considered her feelings a little more, not followed his own counter-intuitive need to be near death, to visit and revisit its home.
“I’m sorry, Ruthi. Maybe it’s a bad idea.”
She approached his open window and leaned on his door. “I’ll make a deal with you.”
“Anything,” he said.
“Get me drunk first.”
His face turned into a smile, big and anxious. This girl’s spirit was endless. “Deal,” he said.
IT WAS dusk once they knocked down the first bottle of wine, a pinot. It reminded him of their first date—Fusion. It had been his first experience with pinot.
Ruthi looked to the west allowing dusk’s golden-red light to wash her features in hot beauty. She insisted on another bottle. William talked her down, suggesting they each get only another glass. It would be dark soon, and the crime scene he intended to visit was in the woods. She agreed.
A half-hour later he tooled around the curve on Mulholland Dr. at just after 9:30. The crime scene was still demarked by strands of yellow crime tape wiggling in the breeze.
They pulled well off the road a block up and gave each other
an anxious look. William got out first fanning his cell phone light back and forth across the shoulder of the road. She followed. He could sense her resignation as she came up behind putting her hands on his arm, letting him lead her.
The ground fell away sharply where Chrissie Newton’s Mercedes went hurling into the sky. In the darkness, he could see where the smaller trees had been bulldozed out of the way in her plummet. He hesitated a second before beginning the descent into a dark and eerie unknown. Ruthi never released her grip on his arm, in fact the further they crushed through foliage the harder she gripped him. The scream of nature was all around them. Cicadas chirped in the trees. The occasional animal rustled around, just out of sight. William thought he heard a distant hoot owl sing its curious, melancholy song.
Using his light, he navigated toward the point of impact. The tree where Chrissie Newton’s car met its final revolution, and where she herself had drawn her final breath, was still scarred dark and broken in the night.
William squatted down spotting something in the light beam and came up rolling a rubber washer back and forth in his fingers.
“What is that?” Ruthi whispered.
“Car part,” he muttered.
“Is this where it happened?” she asked.
“Yes it is,” William said, putting the light up on the tree trunk. He moved to the tree, but Ruthi grabbed him hard enough to stop him. He turned.
“William, I don’t…”
“We’ll leave,” he assured her and turned back toward the tree. He ran his hand flatly over its surface searching for the knife mark which had pinned Chrissie Newton’s face to the tree.
There…
He probed the gash with his finger. It was at eye level, much higher than he expected. He’d assumed it would be at waist level. This was too high for a man to masturbate on. “Odd,” he whispered, shivering against the idea a woman had been mutilated to death, her entire identity slathered across the rough-hewn bark of this very tree, in this very spot.
“It’s actually kind of beautiful out here, isn’t it?” Ruthi’s words unfolded from the night shadows, privately.
William turned to face her, surprised by her observation.
“I mean, listen,” she said. Pure, dark silence was all around them, save the chorus of the woods. They locked eyes. “You don’t ever hear that anymore, do you?” she whispered.
He shook his head, captivated suddenly by the solitude around him. It was inside her, whispering out of her.
She took a step toward him never leaving his gaze. “William?”
“Huh…”
“I want you to make love to me. Right here.”
The thought of it repulsed him at first. A woman died in this spot. All her moments came to an end here in the woods. Ruthi wasn’t talking about making love on her grave. No—it was an even grizzlier concept. She wanted to make love on Chrissie Newton’s actual deathbed.
And why not…
It teased his demon. He’d never considered coming this close to death. He’d always wanted what he couldn’t have. He needed what could never be his. He wanted to kill. But this—expressing life’s purest joy at the scene of a murder was like dancing with the devil, conspiring with the reaper himself. And this woman—Ruthi Taylor, she wanted it too. She saw it in William, and she loved it.
Yes—why not?
He took her in his arms dropping the cell phone to his feet and brought her down on the dirt and grass ripping her clothes off, biting her neck, biting her nipples, feeling himself melt all over her, inside her.
41
GAME TIME
The next Thursday, like a miracle, they called it.
“The first letter…” the radio announcer paused for effect.
William leaned forward on his couch with his elbows on his knees, fingers locked together, knuckles pressed against his chin.
“The first letter is—”
He could hear the dust motes in his apartment settle. This is what it had come to every Thursday now—his heart stopping, everything going cold, breath catching inside him, waiting for the next letter to be called, feeling his bloodlust rise up in him knowing death was near, it’s shadow falling over him.
And the announcer blurted “I! The first letter is I!”
William choked. Dizziness took him. It was real this time. This was it. The trigger had been pulled. The hammer was dropping. Someone was going to die.
Holy shit!
He grabbed the phone placing his thumb over Bernie’s speed dial. He waited for the next letter. And waited. And waited. Until…
“And the second letter is… C!”
Before his thumb rested on the speed dial button, his cell phone rang. Shocked at its suddenness, he looked down to see his caller ID.
Bernie Dobbs.
“Bernie!” he said.
“Who’s it going to be?” Bernie said.
“Hold.” Will leapt to his work desk kicking the chair out of his way and began mousing through his files, standing up. His spreadsheet opened. Every known, young actress he’d researched from e-zines and industry Trades sections popped up. He had them listed alphabetically. Only one had the I and C initials.
Ingmar Cantrell.
“Ingmar Cantrell. She lives in the Mountain View area. Rush St. It’s got to be her.”
“I’m on my way to you now,” Bernie shouted.
BERNIE’S new car screamed up just outside the security gate to William’s warehouse apartment. After the old Crown Vic was totaled out, he’d gotten a new Chrysler 300. Nice car. Didn’t quite have the same novelty. It did, however, have the same police scanner radio and a hell of a lot of horsepower.
William jumped, in laptop in lap, and they hauled ass off toward Mountain View. He had her information uploaded from a dozen public mainframes, all cross-referenced.
“What’s the address?” Bernie said, his eyes on the road.
“Seven-twelve Bay St. Door two-sixteen.”
“What apartment?”
“Looks like Palm Harbors.”
“I know that place. It’s close enough.”
He slammed on the brakes shoving William forward in the seat, his laptop slipping to the floorboard. Bernie hissed against his bruises as he banked the Chrysler into a gas station, tires squealing, and came to a stop next to a parked squad car. One of the cops, a short Hispanic guy, spun around startled, hand on his gun. Bernie thrust his badge out the window. Just the motion of it sent a spike of pain down his busted ribs, but he ignored and said, “Detective Bernie Dobbs, L.A.P.D. Central. What’s your names?”
The cop looked at his partner, then back and said, “I’m Martinez. This is Slackens.”
“Okay, Martinez and Slackens, I’m pulling you off your route. We’re going to need some backup. Follow us.”
The cop said, “Uh—okay.” He looked across the top of the car at his partner who merely shrugged, eager to go.
THE PALM HARBORS apartment looked like an old motel renovated into living space—two levels, a communal walkway, railing. When they pulled up Bernie sharked around the complex until they came to door 216, both of them looking up through the windshield. The exterior light was on over the door. William scanned the lot for a 1999 Red Toyota hatchback, license number and all. Ingmar Cantrell’s car. It wasn’t here.
“Shit, not home,” Bernie said.
William scanned the spreadsheet, scrolling it up and down. He separated Ingmar Cantrell’s information out into a separate window. Everything was listed—two part-time jobs, her talent representation, hometown, parents’ names, everything. “She works nights at Lorento’s, some Italian restaurant.”
“Where?” Bernie said.
“Paramount, off Highway Forty-two.”
“That’s Downey.”
“Correct.”
Bernie reversed it back to the squad car and slammed to a stop, his window down. The cops watched with curious eyes. “See that door up there, number two-sixteen?”
Martinez looked up
, then back. “Yes, sir.”
“That belongs to an Ingmar Cantrell. Say it.”
“Ingmar… uh.”
“Cantrell.”
“Cantrell. Got it.”
“You two stay here and wait for her to come home. She’ll be in a red Toyota. A hatchback. If you see her come home alone call me on channel eight. If she’s with somebody, approach immediately. Don’t let whoever it is get away, understood? Detain them. They might try to flee. Use your judgment.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Okay.”
WILLIAM EYEBALLED their progress toward Lorento’s Restaurant on his GPS maps program as they hauled ass down the 605, then up Firestone Blvd. He was surprised his maps’ feature had only been interrupted once when an incoming email notification window popped up. It was from Celebrity Pop Mag, an online e-zine. It was one of the online magazines he’d subscribed to during his investigation and research. They had been sending him current pop-culture Hollywood stories in his inbox ever since. He made a crooked face and closed it away.
As they pulled into Lorento’s Restaurant, he shut down the laptop, and got out of the car followed by Bernie. The big man was still moving slow and tender, grunting and clutching his left side. This was more activity than he’d seen in weeks, ever since getting shot. His determination to save a life tonight had outweighed his agony, and it seemed a part of him was happy to be back on the streets.
They passed an outdoor patio area full of patrons and the usual hubbub, and stepped into the front door. A hostess greeted them with pearly, light-colored eyes and a big smile.