Cruel

by Jacob Stone

  It turned out that Jack wanted to ask him about the mask that looked like the police sketch of the Nightmare Man. Blount could’ve sworn he had gotten rid of the mask the night he cleaned out his workshop, but somehow his boy had gotten his hands on it. While Jack danced around the subject, what he really wanted to know was whether Blount had been the Nightmare Man. He gave Jack some cock-and-bull story about the mask, which Jack acted as if he believed, but Blount knew he really didn’t. That Jack might become convinced he was Nightmare Man ate away at him worse than the cancer. Even worse was knowing that Jack might share his suspicions with Lauren and his brothers. The only way Blount could make sure none of that happened was if the Nightmare Man were to kill again. That was why he needed to tell a sicko psychopath like Travis Smalley his secret. Besides, what difference would it make? He was damned either way.

  Smalley was waiting patiently for an answer about what Blount wanted in return, and Blount told him that he wanted his masterpiece to live on. It was a sicko deranged answer, total bull, but he knew it would make perfect sense to someone like Smalley. From the way Smalley smiled, it hit a bull’s-eye.

  Blount stared down at his heavily veined hands, the cancer leaving them gnarled and desiccated. He knew he deserved the worst hell imaginable for the decision he had made, and he accepted that.

  “I also want enough horse so I can check out tonight,” Blount said. “This whole suffering with cancer business has gotten old. You think you can arrange for that?”

  Smalley’s eyes were burning with an eagerness to learn the Nightmare Man’s secrets.

  “I’ll fix you up right,” he promised.

  Chapter 54

  Woodland Hills, 1999

  Travis Smalley accepted Joanne Krate’s offer for coffee, and while she busied herself, he sat at the kitchen table and munched on an oatmeal cookie she had offered him. She had already mentioned that she was divorced and living in the house with her teenage daughter. Smalley guessed she was in her forties. A plump, moonfaced woman with mousy brown hair who couldn’t shut her mouth if her life depended on it. Smalley smiled pleasantly as she rushed around the kitchen to get out her best china and add sugar to a bowl and two percent milk to a creamer, all the while blabbering away about all the hidden benefits of renting her guesthouse.

  “It’s such a safe neighborhood, Mr. Smalley. Or can I call you Travis?”

  His mind had wandered and he’d been imagining himself doing terrible things to this woman. He snapped back to attention. Somehow he played back in his mind what she had just asked.

  He gave her a naughty smile and said, “Joanne, I’d be insulted if you called me anything else.”

  She tittered. No exaggeration. She actually brought her hand to her mouth and tittered.

  “Travis, I can’t tell you how nice it is to have a clean-cut, respectable man in my kitchen for a change. My ex, well, all I can say is good riddance. And I’m being charitable at that.” She laughed, but bitterness soured her expression. “What was I talking about before? Oh yes, I remember. About how convenient we are to almost anywhere. You can get onto the 101 in less than three minutes, and that will take you right to downtown LA. Really, Travis, I can’t think of a better value anywhere in the valley.”

  She poured them both coffee and joined him at the table. She stopped talking long enough to take a bird-like sip, and then she was back at it, giving him the hard sell, breathlessly telling him how easily he’d be able to drive anywhere from the house. Goddamn, he’d enjoy shutting her up for good; well, after first having her scream for her life. But he had come here to rent a guesthouse that would give him the privacy he needed, and the pickings in his price range were slim. This one would do nicely. The cul-de-sac the house was situated on had little traffic, and the guesthouse provided a secluded entrance in the back—if you had the audacity to call the four-hundred-and-fifty-square-foot apartment added to the small ranch-style home a guesthouse. So as tempted as he might have been to unleash his hidden demon on this blathering woman, he had already decided he wouldn’t be killing anyone until the seventeen-year anniversary of when the Nightmare Man took his first victim. That was his own idea, not Blount’s. The symmetry seemed too perfect to do anything other than that. Besides, he had already waited this long, what was two more years? He accepted that for now he’d have to keep his desires tamped down, just as he’d been doing ever since Blount handed him this gift, and keep reminding himself that the anticipation would make the killings that much more delicious. The next two years were for planning only, even when he met someone like Joanne Krate who so badly needed to be tortured and killed.

  She was still going on about what a great deal the guesthouse would be for someone like himself when she was interrupted by the kitchen door swinging open. An awkward-looking teenage girl walked in. This had to be Joanne Krate’s daughter. Smalley guessed she was thirteen. Skinny as a stick in her jeans and T-shirt, but she had her mom’s round, puffy face that was made even puffier thanks to a mouthful of braces. Also like her mom, she had a slightly upturned nose and mousy brown hair, except hers was pulled into pigtails. She stopped when she spotted Smalley and looked timid as opposed to shy as she glanced down at her feet as if she’d die of embarrassment if she didn’t. Smalley smiled seeing how self-consciously she pulled at her fingers, as if she had no idea what to do with her hands.

  “Rosalyn, honey,” Mrs. Krate said. “This is Mr. Smalley. He’s thinking about renting our guesthouse. Wouldn’t that be swell?”

  Smalley got up from the chair and extended a hand. “Pleased to meet you, Rosalyn,” he said, grinning like the cat who’d swallowed the canary.

  Her blush deepened. When she took his hand, Smalley noticed that she had especially slender and delicate fingers. His smile broadened as he imagined using needle-nose pliers to rip out her nails. He could only imagine how small her toes would be. But this was only a nice fantasy. If he rented the guesthouse he wouldn’t be able to make her one of his victims, at least not in 2001. He could perhaps keep track of her and choose her when the Nightmare Man struck again in 2018. The anticipation of that would be quite something.

  “I hope you rent our guesthouse, Mr. Smalley,” Rosalyn said softly. She peeked up at him, and he realized she wasn’t as timid as he had first thought.

  “Please call me Travis.” He laughed. “All my friends do.”

  This time when she peeked at him her lips were twisted into a secretive little smile. Yes, not so timid at all, are we?

  “Okay, Travis,” she said.

  “Travis is a security expert,” Mrs. Krate said, beaming.

  “I don’t know if expert is the right word,” Smalley said with a modest, aw-shucks grin. “But I will be managing security for five apartment buildings here in the valley.”

  “He used to be a prison guard!” Mrs. Krate said. “Imagine the stories Travis could tell us!”

  Smalley said, “They’d curl your toes.”

  Both mother and daughter gasped at that. He was exaggerating. He had stories of his own little cruelties that would sicken them, but he only had one story that would curl their toes, or at least curdle their blood, and he was keeping that one to himself.

  Mrs. Krate put down her coffee cup. It was time to get serious, and so she put on her serious face. “Travis, dear, I’d feel so much safer having a man of your character and expertise staying here, enough so that I’m willing to drop the monthly rent to four hundred and twenty-five a month if that will help you make up your mind.”

  “I’m sold,” Smalley said. He got careless and let his smile become something wolfish. He quickly corrected it. Mrs. Krate didn’t notice, and if Rosalyn did, she kept it to herself. He added, “How could I pass up the opportunity of living in the vicinity of two such lovely ladies?”

  Mrs. Krate tittered again. Rosalyn smiled in a way that showed he had completely misjudged her earlier. She wasn’t timid at all
. He also realized he had to be careful with her.

  He decided then he would someday kill her. He would let the anticipation build into something nearly unbearable, but when the day finally came, it would be pure, unadulterated bliss.

  Chapter 55

  Los Angeles, October 8, 2001

  Detective Martin Hadley took the call, and when he got off the phone he growled at Morris to get his ass in gear—they had the murder of a housewife in Beverly Hills to investigate. Morris held his tongue. When Hadley peered across Morris’s desk at a recent photo of Natalie and Morris’s seven-year-old daughter Rachel and wisecracked that he couldn’t see why a pretty gal like Natalie would have anything to do with any ugly squirt like him, Morris shrugged it off and admitted it was a mystery.

  Morris had earned his detective’s shield and joined LAPD’s Homicide and Robbery division almost a month ago and, as he was learning, it wasn’t all milk and honey. He’d been assigned to work with Hadley, or more specifically, Hadley had arranged for him to be his partner so he could ride him and break his chops whenever possible. Morris hadn’t known the man before joining the force and had had nothing to do with him when he was a patrolman other than catching Hadley’s dirty looks. Because of that, it didn’t take a genius to know that whatever Hadley had against him was really directed against his dad, Sam Brick, who had retired six years earlier. When he asked his dad about it, the senior Brick told him he’d just have to grin and bear it for the time being.

  “Sins of the father, I guess,” Sam Brick had said with a hard smile. “I chewed him out once in front of the precinct for sloppy police work that forced us to cut a suspect loose. A man like Martin Hadley doesn’t forget something like that. But I don’t suspect he’ll be your partner for long. He’s a political animal if there ever was one. Even six years ago I could see him laying the foundation and working angles to finagle his way into a command position, and it’s only a matter of time before he succeeds. Son, in this job you’ll be learning it’s not only cream that rises to the top.”

  “He doesn’t let me do detective work,” Morris complained.

  “Give it a full month,” Sam Brick said. “That’s enough time for the other detectives to get used to you and think of you as one of their own. Then stand up to the blowhard. Punch him in the jaw if needed. Hadley’s all bluster and noise, but he doesn’t have the stones to go toe-to-toe with you if he knows you mean business.”

  * * * *

  When Morris and Hadley arrived at the Beverly Hills home, another detective, George Landrigan, was waiting for them outside and filled them in. The husband, Michael Buchalla, age forty-two, had come home that morning after a week of traveling to find his wife, Silvia Buchalla, age thirty-six, brutally murdered.

  “The wife was found in the bedroom. Sicko stuff like you wouldn’t believe.” Landrigan’s hard exterior softened if he were reliving the murder scene. “I just might’ve become a vegetarian today.”

  Hadley asked in his gruff, raspy voice, “Where’s the husband?”

  Landrigan checked his watch. “As of three minutes ago, he was in the kitchen sobbing his guts out, or at least putting on a good act. Hutchings is talking to him. I came out here for some fresh air and to wait for you.” He leaned closer to Hadley and Morris and lowered his voice. “Here’s the kicker: According to the ME, the wife could’ve been dead for as long as a week. He won’t be able to give us anything more definitive until he does an autopsy. This Buchalla is gone a week and doesn’t once call his wife.”

  Hadley asked, “He have a reason?”

  “He claimed he and his wife would go on separate vacations, and when they did, no phone calls. Something about absence making the heart grow fonder. Christ on a stick. No way my wife would ever let me get away with that.”

  Hadley laughed. “My ball and chain would skin me alive if I even hinted at it.” His thick, rubbery lips twisted into an ugly smirk and he waved a fat thumb toward Morris. “I wouldn’t bet against Brick’s hot little number paying him to disappear for a week, ain’t that so, Brick?”

  Landrigan joined in, chuckling at Hadley’s jibe. Morris smiled good-naturedly.

  “You’re a funny man, Martin,” Morris said. He asked Landrigan whether there was any other indication the husband might be involved.

  Both Hadley and the detective looked taken aback, as if neither of them expected any questions from a freshly minted detective. After all, he was just supposed to keep his mouth shut and stay out of the way of the real detectives on the job. Hadley recovered enough to glower at Morris and his jowl began quivering, but before he could work up enough steam to shut down Morris’s question, Landrigan consented to answer him.

  “No visible signs of a break-in,” Landrigan said. “Buchalla not calling his wife for a week sounds fishy, and what was done to her was so demented it makes me wonder whether it was staged to look like a sicko serial killer. His sobbing act appeared genuine, but a psychopath can fake that, and someone would have to be a flat-out psychopath to think of the things that were done to the victim.”

  Hadley made a harrumphing noise as if Landrigan’s answer put Morris in his place. “Who do we got in there?” he asked Landrigan.

  The detective counted with his fingers that inside the house were Hutchings, the ME, the two uniformed officers who took the call, and five members of the crime scene team.

  “You heard him,” Hadley snapped at Morris. “Go out and get eleven coffees.” He magnanimously suggested Morris make it a dozen if he wanted one himself. “And two dozen donuts. Make sure to get a couple lemon crème.”

  “I better check inside so I get the orders straight,” Brick said. He winked at Hadley. “You never know, someone might prefer tea.”

  Hadley hadn’t expected this insubordination and was too slow on the uptake to stop Morris from steamrolling past him and leading the way into the house.

  The interior was expansive. Rich cream-colored wall-to-wall carpeting, large rooms, fifteen-foot-high ceilings, expensive furnishings. From the back of the house Morris heard the faint sounds of what must’ve been the husband sobbing. From behind, he heard Hadley barking out an order for him to do as he was told. He pretended not to hear him, nodded at a crime scene specialist collecting dander and hairs from the carpet, and continued to the staircase to the second floor. He wanted to get a look at the husband in the kitchen, but that would give Hadley a chance to catch up to him.

  He smiled as he imagined Hadley red-faced and breathing hard chasing after him. He heard noises coming from the first room on the left, and when he entered it he saw the murder scene. The grisly “17” left in front of the bed stopped him for a heartbeat. As he continued toward the dead woman lying on the bed, he blanched seeing the damage that had been done to her. His movement became almost dreamlike, and he wondered if that was really a rat’s tail hanging out of the victim’s mouth. Hadley was making noise behind him, but he stopped when he stepped into the room and saw the carnage.

  Morris had seen his share of dead bodies during his eight years as a patrolman. Shooting and stabbing victims. Bodies pulled from auto wrecks. Motorcyclists smeared across roads after wiping out. Pedestrians struck by speeding vehicles and split open like cantaloupes. Shut-ins found weeks after death, their bodies streaming with maggots. But this was different. This was depraved, and the thought of what the woman must’ve gone through during her last hours of life sickened him.

  “Is that a rat?” he asked the ME, Dr. Joel Katzenberg.

  Katzenberg turned to offer him a grim look. “Yes,” he said. “The animal was pushed deep into her trachea.”

  “Is it alive?”

  “Not now. But it was when it was forced into her. I’ve found a number of bite marks.”

  Hadley had caught up to Morris and stood beside him. His bulldog-like face had turned chalky white.

  “Jesus,” he murmured, his small, pale blue eyes bulging.


  Katzenberg said, “I assure you Jesus had nothing to do with this.”

  Hadley was too stunned to notice the ME’s crack. Morris recovered enough from his own shock to tell the ME that he was making a coffee run, and asked whether the ME had a special request.

  “The largest size of high-octane they offer,” he said without much enthusiasm. “This is going to be a long day.”

  Morris’s stare fixed on the woman’s death mask. The killer had been more than cruel. He not only used a sharp blade to sever flesh from her torso, but he cut off most of her nose and gouged out a large chunk of flesh from her cheek, and from what he could tell, the killer used something red-hot to brand both wounds. There was either a tremendous amount of hatred at work, or a sadism that knew no bounds.

  Morris asked, “The victim’s been dead a week?”

  “Could be five days, could be as much as a week,” Katzenberg said. “I won’t know until I do some tests.”

  Morris turned to head out for a coffee run, and Hadley was hot on his heels, mumbling to no one in particular that he wanted to talk to the officers who took the call.

  Once Morris was outside, he used his cell phone to call his dad. Before he could say more than “hi,” the senior Brick asked whether Hadley was still pushing him around.

  “He is, but that’s not why I’m calling. We picked up a murder where it’s either a husband trying to fool us into thinking it’s a serial killer at work, or it’s the real thing.”

  When Morris had gotten his dad on the phone, the senior Brick sounded like he was spoiling for a fight, like he wanted an excuse to seek out Hadley and kick the man’s ass. This changed immediately, and his voice sounded tired as he asked whether a message had been left.