She stopped suddenly.
“Uh, Kerry?” she called down to me.
I tensed at the sound of her voice. “Yeah, what is it?”
“Um, blood,” she said.
I raced up the stairs and found her on the third-floor landing, Hattrick’s floor. She was looking down at a splatter of dark viscous fluid, smeared where someone had stepped in it.
“Holy shit! Did you step in it?”
She turned over her foot to look at the sole of her black leather boot. “Uh-huh.”
“Are you sure it’s blood?”
“Only one way to find out.” She started to pull the boot off her foot.
“Don’t you dare touch it!” I said.
She sniffed the sole. “Smells like boot.”
“Great.”
She got down on her knees and sniffed the liquid on the concrete. Finally, she looked up at me and smiled. “Taco sauce.”
“Are you sure?”
“I don’t think you want me to tongue it to find out, do you?”
“What’s taco sauce doing in the stairwell?”
She got to her feet, shrugging. “We’ll see if Janice has a flashlight in the office, then we’ll come back for another look, okay?”
She pushed open the door to the third-floor hallway and walked into the pitch blackness.
This didn’t feel right.
“Ter?”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe we’d better go back downstairs and get someone to turn on the lights.”
“Forget it. Janice is waiting.”
“It doesn’t look like anybody’s here,” I said, my voice taking on a shaky timbre. All I wanted to do was run back down the stairs and find a warm, well-lighted place and stay there.
“If she said she’d be here, she’ll be here,” Terry said, hustling down the hallway toward the office.
The door to the stairwell closed behind me and the ambient light disappeared. I forced air through my constricted throat and followed the sound of Terry’s footfall on the carpeting, a muffled sound that spoke of creeping hatchet murderers.
“Here we go,” she said, turning the knob on the office door. I ran toward the sound of the squeaking hinges. It, too, was unlocked, the office as dark as an underground cave.
I followed Terry inside and she felt around for the light switch. I heard the rasping of her hands on wallpaper, then all at once she exclaimed, “Got it!”
The lights went on and I covered my eyes. I told myself I was protecting them against the sudden brightness of the lights, but actually I was terrified of what I was going to see.
“Hey chicken drawers,” Terry said. “I think you were right. Janice blew us off.”
I peeped out between my hands and saw nothing out of the ordinary. The office was clean and professional-looking. No hate language scrawled on the walls in blood, no body parts lying around. I felt like the world’s biggest idiot. This reminded me of a childhood incident when Terry and I had let our imaginations run away with us. “Hey, this is like the time when we were kids, and we convinced ourselves that aliens had landed in the hallway in the middle of the night ’cause we heard their spaceship creaking, remember? And it turned out to be the hamster running in his wheel?”
Terry rolled her eyes dramatically. “I seem to remember that the alien theory was yours. I thought it was the rusty garden gate making the noise.”
She was full of it, of course. We had both been convinced we were about to be sucked up in an electromagnetic beam and used as twin guinea pigs in unspeakable alien experiments. But she’d never admit it.
“Janice?” Terry called through the glass of the reception window. “Janice, it’s us!”
Obviously, Janice had had a change of heart. She’d sounded confession-minded when we spoke to her, but she’d thought better of taking us into her confidence.
Still, it didn’t seem likely that she’d leave the front door of the office unlocked. Terry pushed on the door to the inner office. “Come on,” she said.
“That’s not locked, either?” I said, wary. “That’s strange. I mean, what about all the drugs? It seems odd that someone would leave the door to the office . . . Hey, wait for me!”
I followed her into more darkness. The odor of antiseptic permeated the white linoleum floors and walls, the sterility of the inner office contrasting sharply with the lush waiting room outside. And the shadows in the hallway made me think of any number of horror films I’d seen that were set in hospitals and mental institutions. Funny thing about those places, no one ever worked there at night. Just like this.
In real hospitals, of course, there’s more noise and activity than in an airline terminal. And someone’s always barging in every two hours all cheerful and apologetic about waking you up out of a sound sleep, poking you in the butt with a needle the size of an electric drill bit. Who needed Chuckie or Jason or Leatherface when you had nurses and doctors licensed to stab, maim, and kill?
Terry found a light switch and flipped it on. A buzzing accompanied the blinking fluorescents, which formed a pool of unnatural green light next to the reception desk. But the rest of the clinic remained dark. Further down the hallway, we could make out an examining room, its door open a crack.
“Janice?” Terry called again, walking toward the open door.
I heard a rustling at the end of the hallway. I grabbed the back of Terry’s jacket. “Did you hear that?” I whispered.
“Nuh-uh,” she said, straining to listen.
“There’s someone there, and they’re not answering. That’s not good.”
She looked at me, gauging the extent of my fear. “Stay here,” she said, turning. I grabbed her again.
“What if someone’s in there, waiting for us with a scalpel? Or a needle? Or a chainsaw?”
She reached down to the reception desk and picked up a stapler, hoisting it like a cudgel.
“Oh, great. That’s great,” I said, looking around for a weapon of my own. I chose a round Lucite paperweight that bore the legend, “Zancutrol. When Nature Isn’t Enough.”
Armed for battle, we tiptoed down the hallway. It seemed to stretch longer into the shadows beyond, the walls curving into the floor in a trick of perspective that turned it into a funhouse terror tunnel.
Terry scanned the wall for more light switches. I saw one glowing like a night-light at the end of the hallway, next to the cracked door. I pointed to it and she nodded, creeping toward it on silent cat’s paws.
She pantomimed to me that I should flick on the lights. She lifted her foot, and I understood that she was going to kick the door open, surprising whoever might be inside.
She held up her fist, then popped up her fingers, counting silently.
One! Two! Three!
We simultaneously flipped on the lights and kicked in the door, then Terry jumped into the breach. The door hit something inside and bounced back, slamming into her forehead.
Bam! She was knocked on her ass.
I ran to her, kneeling at her side. “Are you okay?”
She sat on the floor rubbing her head. I glanced inside the examination room and saw that it appeared empty. Thank God for that.
Then I heard the sound of rubber soles squeaking on the linoleum. Someone was running toward us. I spun around to see who it was.
A large shadowy figure kicked me in the jaw. The back of my head hit the wall, I saw fireworks, then everything went black.
I didn’t know how much time had elapsed. Maybe a minute, maybe three hours. I sat up and felt the back of my aching head. There was a lump the size of a grade AA cage-free egg, and my jaw felt like someone had kicked it into Sunday with a metal-toed boot.
But it wasn’t a boot. It was a rubber shoe on a large dark person. A man? Had to have been.
Although, Janice was an awfully big girl, now that I thought of it.
I heard a rustling and turned my stiff neck to see an old Vietnamese man brandishing a mop. His waved it in the air, his eyes bugged.
<
br /> “Porreece coming! Now!”
“What?” Terry’s voice sounded like it was echoing at the bottom of a drum barrel. “Oh shit,” she said, looking down at her arm. There was a needle mark in the pale, fleshy part of her forearm, with a trickle of dried blood. “Someone drugged us!” she yelled.
It was impossible to focus. My head was swimming, my vision shot. I forced my eyes to look down at my own arm and saw the telltale prick of a needle, along with a spot of red. And to make matters worse, I was holding an empty syringe in my other hand.
“Ugh!” I tossed it away, but it didn’t fly down the hallway as intended. Just flopped onto my leg, stabbing me in the thigh before bouncing to the floor.
In spite of my mashed-potato brain, I was able to put it together. We had been ambushed and drugged. The Vietnamese man was the night janitor, who had found us lying there unconscious and called the police.
Terry dragged herself to her feet, using the wall for support. The janitor wielded the mop like a lance, swishing the dirty top as if to ward off fanged animals.
“Porrreece, coming now!” he shrieked, his voice eunuch-like from terror.
“Don’t worry, we’re not dangerous,” I tried to say, but the words came out jumbled and thick. Na flurry, wee da dangus.
His reaction struck me as over the top, but I guess we did look like a couple of desperate junkies who had broken into the office and thrown ourselves a party. I tried to stand, too, but I put my foot on top of a plastic drug vial and slipped, falling back on my butt, landing hard on my coccyx bone.
“Owww!”
The janitor swung his mop in my face, granular dirt and lint flying into my eyes. I was blinded by dust bunnies.
“Stop it!” I yelled.
“Oh my God!” Terry shrieked. “Kerry, over here!”
I got to my knees and started to crawl in her direction. But the mop slammed down on my back and I sprawled on top of hundreds of drug capsules that were scattered all over the floor.
“Cut it out!” I yelled at the janitor, who took advantage of my prone position to jump in the middle of my back, springing over me to get to the exit.
“Don’t do that!” I coughed into the linoleum, but he was long gone. Probably halfway back to Saigon by now.
I pulled myself up into a crouch, wiping capsules from the palms of my hands, where they’d stuck like pebbles after a schoolyard tumble on the asphalt. Where had all these pills come from?
I looked up to see Terry in the door to the examination room, her hand covering her mouth. She stood perfectly still, barely breathing. I got unsteadily to my feet and shuffled down to see what she was looking at.
“What is it?” I asked, then I stuck my head in the door and gasped.
I felt my stomach churning and fought hard not to vomit.
Inside the formerly empty examination room a body lay sprawled across the vinyl-covered table.
Dead, by the looks of him.
Hattrick, if I wasn’t mistaken.
He was in his forties, with a thick head of black hair. Dressed in khakis and running shoes, a cotton shirt, a maroon V-neck sweater. The V-neck was drenched a darker maroon and his cotton collar was bright red with arterial blood. Sticky, but not yet dry.
His throat had been cut. Jagged white cartilage shone in the gaping maw of a wound.
But the killer hadn’t stopped there.
After the fatal wound had been delivered, and as Daniel Hattrick lay there bleeding to death, the murderer had plunged two hypodermic needles into Hattrick’s staring eyes. Red-tinged ocular fluid ran from the needles down the sides of his temples, giving him the appearance of a crying saint.
“Jesus,” I said.
“Joseph and Mary,” Terry said.
“Police!” a voice said from the doorway. “Don’t fucking move!”
The cops had permitted Terry a cigarette even though it was against the law. She was milking the situation for all it was worth, blowing smoke through her nostrils, her chin thrust out for a Fuck-you-I’m-so-tough look.
“What happened to good cop, bad cop,” she said.
Detective John Boatwright turned on a smoke-eating fan.
“We’re all bad in LA, didn’t you know that?” He smiled with what I had to admit was an adorable creasing of the lines down the side of his face, and his blue eyes actually twinkled in the overhead light of the interrogation room.
He was in his mid-to-late thirties, and horrifically sexy. I wished I’d had time to freshen my lip gloss before they cuffed me. When did they start making cops so cute? I wondered. How’s a girl supposed to keep her mind on preserving her constitutional rights with such a hottie putting the questions to her?
We had been taken all the way down to Parker Center. The grisly murder was probably too big for Beverly Hills, requiring hard-core downtown talent. But this cop wasn’t hard core. He was nice. He was polite. And as we sat there, I even began to realize he was kind of funny.
I felt an undeniable tingle of attraction, but caught myself. Don’t get hot for the cop. I told myself. He’ll send your fanny straight to the slammer!
“I’ll take out the thumbscrews, if you ask real nicely,” Boatwright said, giving me what I could have sworn was a flirtatious look, the word “nicely” getting a little extra thrust.
I was trying to think of a clever reply when I was interrupted by the arrival of Detective Hank Stedman, an older, more comfortably soft-around-the-middle guy who looked the way LA cops were supposed to look. He had oily skin and a bulbous nose with spidery red veins on the corners, and his gray irises didn’t twinkle so much as float in the rheumy yellows of his eyes.
He dumped an armload of takeout food on the table, fishing around in a paper bag. “Great timing,” he said. “Got there just before they closed. Now, who had the avocado and jack on whole wheat?”
I waved, limp-wristed. He handed me the sandwich with a stack of napkins and a small plastic container.
“I got the herb mayonnaise on the side,” he explained. “Didn’t know if you were counting calories.”
“Thanks.”
“And I guess you’re the broiled chicken breast with roasted pepper,” he said to Terry. She gave him a curt little nod. “Hope French roll is okay. Here’s a little honey-mustard dressing. It’s real good, try it.”
I reached over and grabbed a plastic knife for my mayonnaise.
“Where the fuck’s Eli?” Terry said. The more solicitous the cops were, the bitchier she got. That’s Terry all over, I thought.
“Well, according to his secretary, Priscilla,” Stedman said, “he’s incommunicado. She says he had a hot date.”
“Yeah, a hot date with his foot soaker and a fifth of scotch,” Terry said. “Try him again.”
Stedman shrugged. “That’s what she said. But she left him a message, and she promised to get through eventually.”
Well, it was better than nothing, I thought, but we’d already been stonewalling the detectives for hours, and it seemed too much to hope that we could keep it up until Eli got back from the sports bar or wherever he really was. He might have been bailing one of his clients out of jail, or giving him a ride home from the scene of a double homicide.
“So why don’t you girls give us a hint what you were doing at the doctor’s office tonight?” Boatwright cajoled. “We’re not interrogating you. We don’t think you murdered anyone. And we can’t get you for possession again, Terry, since you weren’t in possession of the drugs. They were just scattered around your feet.”
So they’d run us through the system and come up with Terry’s prison record. Maybe these cops weren’t as harmless as they appeared.
“But wait,” Stedman said. “They did have drugs in their systems—”
“We didn’t take those drugs voluntarily!” I said, before a piece of red lettuce slapped wetly onto my cheek.
I looked over at Terry, who was aiming her sandwich at my head. I clamped my mouth down on a bite of avocado.
“Wh
at was that?” Boatwright said to me. “Want to say that again, into the camera?” He pointed to a tripod holding a top-of-the-line Super-8 video camera. The red light winked at us cheerily.
“Got any salt?” I said.
Stedman rummaged through the bag again, then tossed me a tiny bag of salt. “Here ya go.”
“Thanks.” I tore it open, and sprinkled it over the sandwich.
Terry hadn’t even taken a bite. She was still fake-inhaling the cigarette and scowling. “We’re not saying nothing till our lawyer gets here.”
“And we wouldn’t want you to,” Boatwright said. “We wouldn’t want you to say anything you don’t want to say, or anything that isn’t true. We just want to know why you were passed out in the office of a plastic surgeon who was brutally murdered tonight. I’m sure there’s a good explanation,” he added reasonably.
He was right, dammit. There was nothing improper about our being there. We’d been invited by the office manager herself, and had walked in through an unlocked door. We had stumbled onto a gruesome murder, it’s true, and someone had apparently made a crude attempt to frame us for it, but these were intelligent men. They’d see through all that.
“I showed you my credentials,” I said, dodging the toe of Terry’s boot. She kicked the leg of the wooden table, instead. “I’m a licensed private investigator. Doesn’t it seem reasonable to you that we were there in a professional capacity, investigating a case?”
“Your credentials don’t say you’re licensed to shoot up,” Stedman said, his mouth full of turkey. He and Boatwright got a good chuckle out of this.
Aha. The bad cops were beginning to surface.
“You won’t find our fingerprints on those syringes,” I said, and instantly regretted it. I had been in such a haze when I woke up, I completely forgot about tossing the syringe away.
“We won’t?” Boatwright said. “Well, that’s a relief. We had thought we might. But hey, if you tell us those syringes full of morphine just jumped up and stuck themselves in your arms, we’ll have to accept that, won’t we?”
He looked at Stedman, who gave him an exaggerated nod of agreement.
“Obviously I’m not telling you they stuck themselves in our arms,” I said, sarcasm dripping from my mouth. Oops, that was herb mayonnaise dripping from my mouth. Very unflattering. I wiped it off with a napkin.
The Butcher of Beverly Hills Page 19