Looking Glass (The Naturalist Series Book 2)

by Andrew Mayne

  “And you think he may have messed with Chris?” he says flatly.

  “It’s a possibility. Some of these guys like to groom kids. See which ones they can foster trust with.”

  He just sighs, then says after a long moment, “I wanted it to just be some random guy. You know, a drifter who just spotted him.”

  “I know. Maybe it was. It’s just a story.” I’m going to spare him Artice’s harrowing tale until I know that there’s more to it.

  We hang up with a promise from me that I’ll keep him up to date, which isn’t exactly sincere—considering the fact that I’m just a block away from the house where I think his son may have been murdered. I’ve driven around several times, watching the house until the scattered streetlights come on and bathe the neighborhood in a jaundiced glow.

  I noticed that all the other houses had yard lights triggered by photo sensors, but 17658 did not. With the exception of a faint light coming through the front curtain of the tan, one-story house, the property remains completely dark.

  That’s not the only peculiar thing: the tallest fence I could find in the neighborhood is six feet. The one at 17658 measures eight, preventing anyone from looking over. There were also lines of shade trees in the backyard visible from the front of the house.

  While being located in the middle of a suburb, it feels oddly remote and secure. The fence stretches from the sides of the house to the next property about ten feet away on either side.

  On the aerial view, the house sits on a long lot, going all the way back to a service road. The garage, perhaps the one Artice described, sits at the far end. The other garage, the one built into the house, has a lock on the outside and doesn’t look like it’s opened often.

  The biggest mystery to me is the identity of the owner. The house was sold in 2011 for about 20 percent under the going rate in the area, suggesting that it was a private sale—possibly from a homeowner in a hurry—or between two parties that knew each other. Maybe even the same individual.

  This is what is making the hair on the back of my neck stand on end: Jeffery L. Washington could still own the home. He could even be in there right now.

  Before I get out of my car, I consider my options, of which there aren’t that many. The first is to drive to the airport and call Corman with what I know.

  But unless the Toy Man answers the door buck naked and covered in blood with a knife in his hand, there’s not a lot Corman can do beyond a more wide-reaching records search.

  Chances are the Toy Man has erased anything that could connect him to the murders—if he’s smart. After Artice got away, that would have been the prudent thing.

  Of course, we’re talking about a serial killer. He may have a very different idea about what prudent means.

  I decide I just have to nut up and go knock on the door. I push my Glock and its holster into the back of my jeans under my jacket.

  Even after my altercation with Joe Vik, I’m not a big gun guy, but thanks to some clever legal interpretation of our Department of Defense security agreements at OpenSkyAI, I’m allowed to carry anywhere in the US—although a local judge might discourage it.

  The question is whether I’m willing to use the gun. Scratch that: it’s whether I’ll even be in a situation where I have to.

  I give the yard another check, then walk up to the door at 17658 and knock.

  From inside the house I hear a television being turned down and a dog barking.

  Well, at least somebody is home . . .

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  BLOODHOUND

  The door opens a crack, and a small gray ball of fur comes shuffling out of the house and plants itself at my heels, yapping a warning that I need to vacate the property immediately.

  “Eddie!” shouts an old woman from inside. “Leave him alone!”

  The dog darts back inside, satisfied that he’s done his canine duty. When the door opens wider, I see a short, elderly black woman with large glasses looking up at me.

  “Yes?” she asks.

  I catch a glimpse inside the house to make sure that there’s no naked serial killers ready to come lunging at me—other than Eddie.

  “Hi, I’m Theo Cray.” I show her my ID, which she grasps and holds on to for a closer look.

  “That’s not a very good picture, Mr. Cray,” she says after letting go.

  “I’m not very photogenic.”

  “Come in. Come in,” she offers, holding the door open for me. “Would you like some tea?”

  “Uh, okay.” I step inside, suspiciously glancing at the space behind the door, wary that I might be walking into something.

  The house looks like the furnishings haven’t been changed since Clinton was in office. Wood paneling covers the walls of the living room. A large couch sits in front of a big-screen television that appears to be from the Toy Man’s era.

  As she shuts the door, I notice three rows of locks and one on the inside requiring a key. This sets off an alarm in my head. That’s the kind of lock you use to keep somebody inside.

  I watch as she goes into the kitchen and pours two cups of tea. The floor is scratched up and the carpet bare in spots.

  “I was about to go sit on the back porch,” she says, pushing past me with two mugs.

  I follow her out to a small concrete pad overlooking a weedy lot of uneven dry earth. She sits and motions for me to take the rusty chair across from her.

  “Are you the man from the church they said they’d send by?” she finally asks.

  “Uh, no . . . Ms.?”

  “Mrs. Green,” she says, not at all bothered by the fact that I’m a complete and total stranger who just entered her house.

  Eddie sniffs around my feet, then leaves the porch to inspect a patch of dry grass and growl at something. I nervously glance over my shoulder, afraid Mr. Green is about to garrote me.

  “Is Mr. Green home, ma’am?”

  “Mr. Green is in the Lord’s arms now. Bless his heart.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Did you both live here?”

  “Oh, no. Mr. Green and I lived in Lynwood. I moved here shortly after he passed.”

  She seems utterly uninterested in why I’m here, but I need some kind of in to ask questions. “I work for the government. I’m doing a background check on somebody who was applying for a job. I was wondering what you could tell me about the man who lived here before you.”

  Eddie finds something new to attack and scuffles around in the dirt before dragging his prey to her feet. She reaches down and scratches behind his ears, taking an eternity to answer my question.

  “I didn’t know the gentleman. I just spoke to a Realtor. He’d moved out when we bought the place.”

  “I see. Did he leave anything?”

  “Just the television.”

  “Did your neighbors ever mention him? Say anything interesting about him?”

  “Not that I recall. I think they said he was hardly ever here and were surprised when I moved in.”

  That’s interesting. It could mean the Toy Man was using this as a kind of safe house—assuming this was ever his house. Maybe this was just where he took his victims.

  Eddie jumps up and darts back into the yard to chase after something else he’s decided is very important.

  “Did the police ever stop by here?”

  “What for?”

  “To ask questions about the man who lived here before.” I still don’t know his name, unless it’s Jeffery L. Washington.

  “No. Not that I recall. Is the man in trouble?”

  “They don’t tell me much. Was there anything odd about the house? Maybe you found something unusual?”

  She gives me a sideways look. “You certainly ask peculiar questions, Mr. Cray.”

  Eddie marches back to her feet with a stick to chew on.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Green. They give me peculiar questions.”

  She waves it away. “It’s no matter. People on the news are doing all sorts of peculiar things. Don’t ge
t me started about our president.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t.” I look across the yard to the shed. “What do you keep in there?”

  “Just old things. Some of Mr. Green’s belongings.”

  I’d love to have a look but can’t think of way to ask that doesn’t sound weird. “What did Mr. Green do?”

  “Twenty years he was in the Marine Corps. Then he worked for the post office. A good man. A good provider.”

  “You have any children?”

  She shakes her head. “No, sir. Just Mr. Green and I.” She gives Eddie a pat. “And Eddie.”

  The dog drops his snack and rubs his jaw against her hand.

  I lean over to get a better look at the object covered in saliva, and I’m struck by an observation a paleontologist once made to me: we have far more dinosaur species in the books than there probably actually were.

  The problem stems from the era in which we thought of dinosaurs merely as giant reptiles. Lizards have pretty linear life cycles. A baby crocodile looks almost exactly like a full-grown one.

  When paleontologists would come across two very different sets of bones, based on the reptile assumption, they’d deduce that this meant that there were two very different species of dinosaur—when in fact it may have just been one, an adult form and a juvenile form.

  Although my specialty is computational biology, I know enough human anatomy to suspect that the bone Eddie is chewing on isn’t from something that was on a kitchen table or wandered into the backyard after getting hit by a car.

  It looks a lot like a child’s rib.

  I pull a glove from my pocket and reach for the bone. Eddie growls at me but gets pulled back by Mrs. Green.

  I hold the dark-brown shard under the dim porch light for a better look as cold water rushes through my veins.

  “I kept calling the city,” says Mrs. Green. “I told them bones were coming up from my yard after every rainstorm.”

  I gaze back into the shadows of her yard and see jagged shapes poking out of the ground.

  Everywhere.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CONCERNED CITIZEN

  When I was on the hunt for Joe Vik—a man whose name I only discovered an hour before he nearly killed me—I learned that life was not like the movies. Law-enforcement investigations take a long time. You can spend hours or days waiting for someone to even talk to you. And even when you have all the pieces of the puzzle and have laid them out for everyone to see, it can take months for them even to acknowledge that they’re there.

  I had to break some laws to get Vik and do some things I’m not particularly proud about. At one point, Montana prosecutors, frustrated that their suspect was dead and they didn’t have anyone to try, seriously considered building a case around me with the idea of making me a scapegoat, claiming I interfered with a nonexistent investigation. Thankfully, pressure from both the family members of the victims I discovered—who were all over television thanking me for bringing them closure—and the governor’s office made it clear that I couldn’t be painted as the bad guy. But even so, bad blood remained. I’d embarrassed agencies and made more than a few enemies among Joe Vik’s friends—of which he had many. Some even in law enforcement, who couldn’t reconcile the brutal serial killer with the man who sat at their dinner table.

  All of this is going through my head as I dial Detective Corman’s number. He’s treated me like a nuisance, but not an antagonist. Heck, he even gave me all those other case files, in case I could find something he hadn’t.

  I’ve asked Mrs. Green to take Eddie inside in order to keep him from ruining any more evidence. God knows how many human bones he’s already gnawed on.

  Corman’s voice mail picks up. “This is Corman—you know what to do.”

  I’d run the conversation through my head a half dozen times. I wasn’t prepared for this.

  I try dialing again. It still goes to voice mail.

  Afraid he’s shut his phone off for the night, I call 911.

  “Nine-one-one, how may I assist you?” asks a woman.

  “Hello, I’m at 17658 Wimbledon. There are bones coming out of the ground. Can you send a police car by?”

  “Seventeen six fifty-eight Wimbledon?” I hear the sound of typing.

  “Correct.”

  “Okay. It looks like you’ll need to take that up with Animal Control. I can redirect your call.”

  “Wait? What?”

  “If you’re having a problem with an animal, you need to call Animal Control,” she replies.

  “Who said anything about an animal?”

  “According to our files, there have been eight calls about a nuisance animal at 17658 Wimbledon dragging bones into the yard.”

  I look down at Eddie and his nose smushed against the glass. Mrs. Green is giving me a knowing look.

  I lose my shit. “So you’re not bothered that these are human remains? You’re totally okay with the fact that I’m looking at enough material for at least three or four bodies?”

  She changes her tone, but not in the way I hoped. “Sir, we’ve sent a squad car by before. Unless you’re qualified to make a forensic analysis, I’d appreciate it if you didn’t take that tone with me.”

  My shit loses its shit. “Does a fucking doctorate in biology from MIT qualify me? How about four goddamn papers published in Human Origins?” I shine my flashlight on a small jawbone sticking out of the earth. “Unless you take a very species-ist definition of what’s a human and a tribe of goddamn Neanderthal children got really, really fucking lost, we’re looking at human remains! Unless the LAPD wants to come down here and tell me otherwise.”

  Mrs. Green is nodding her head and giving me a thumbs-up.

  Detective Corman is not going to be too happy with me when the press get ahold of this 911 call and the transcript is released. I sound like an asshole, but the emergency dispatch comes across as incompetent.

  “Sir, we’re sending a patrol car over now. In the meantime, I suggest you calm down.”

  It takes every bit of effort not to hurl my phone into the next yard.

  I’m still standing in the backyard, taking photos of the bones, when blue and red lights splash over the house and onto the tops of the trees.

  I’ve been careful not to step on anything that might break, but I want to be extra sure that I get as many pictures as I can before the crime lab takes over.

  The shed is calling to me, but I don’t even dare enter the structure until the police have had a chance to examine it thoroughly.

  All I need is some trace DNA of mine to fall on the floor of the garage and the Toy Man’s attorneys will squeal with glee when it shows up in a report.

  I already went through hell with the attorneys representing Joe Vik’s estate. The man had a lot of assets and people eager to protect them and his reputation. A friendly prosecutor told me that Joe and his pals might have actually been the center of a methamphetamine ring in the area. Which surprised me not in the least. There were so many weird things going on there.

  The sliding glass door opens behind me while I’m squatting down, examining the edge of a pelvis jutting out of the earth. It looked like the last several weeks of rainstorms eroded away the yard—which had probably not been watered since California started curtailing water during the drought, which has me wondering how long it’ll be before other secrets start unburying themselves.

  “Are you the one who called?” asks a young officer.

  White, short blond hair, he looks like he should be in a Boy Scout uniform and seems dangerously malnourished for a cop. Eddie might even give him a good fight.

  “Yes, Officer,” I reply as I stand up.

  He flashes his powerful beam on the bone I was inspecting and stares at it for a moment. “Hmm. Looks like it might be a pig bone. We get those calls all the time.”

  Not. Again.

  He can’t see me close my eyes and count to ten. “Officer, with all due respect . . .” Fuck it. “Does that look like the
extended ilium you’d find on a quadruped?”

  I point to a round shape in the weeds. His flashlight drifts over and casts a blinding glare against the small, dull-yellow dome of a skull with one orbital socket visible.

  “Holy shit,” he mutters, then starts to walk forward.

  I gently grab his forearm before he steps on evidence. “Officer, look down.”

  He spots the sharp rib bone stabbing out of the dirt. “Fuck . . .”

  “No kidding.”

  He takes a large step back and calls into his radio, “This is 4421. I need Homicide and an ME down here ASAP.”

  “Affirmative,” says a dispatcher.

  A moment later a male voice squawks over his radio, “Long Beach, this better not be a quinceañera pig they buried in the backyard.”

  Officer Russell, according to his name tag, turns to me and shakes his head. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

  I have one hell of a story to tell him while we wait for everyone else to arrive.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  ANONYMOUS

  Who is the Toy Man? Three days after I snatched Eddie’s gruesome snack from his mouth, I’m sitting at a conference table in LAPD headquarters as the lead detective, Cheryl Chen, explains the case to me as a courtesy, with an assist from Craig Sibel, an FBI agent out of their Los Angeles office. Corman is nowhere to be found because the discovery at Wimbledon is being treated as a new case.

  Projected onto the screen at the end of the room is what I assume will be a horrifying slide show of what they’ve found so far.

  Chen clicks a remote to the first image. Mrs. Green’s backyard is sectioned off like an archaeological dig as forensic specialists in white suits stand and kneel on metal platforms, carefully extracting the remains.

  “We’ve found seventeen bodies so far. Many of them are mixed together, so we’ll need DNA forensics to confirm that, as well as to identify them.

  “The suspect buried them under about a foot of dirt, which was then covered with sod. The problem, as you pointed out in your notes, was that over the last several years, Mrs. Green’s not watering the grass and the fact that the house sits on a slight elevation led to gradual erosion as the grass died and seasonal rain fell. This exposed the upper layer, which then was exposed even further as her dog decided to investigate the decomposing bodies.”