“Are you going to text your girlfriend all damn morning or are we going to go do some detecting,” Conner asks with an impatient smile. I look over at him with a frown as I put my phone away.
“How’d you know it was Sam?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he mumbles. “Maybe that goofy grin on your face. Jeez, do you ever have it bad!”
His comment makes me frown all the more, and I wonder again if what I’m feeling for Sam is love. I push the thought from my head again. I don’t have time to deal with that right now. We pull out of the lot and begin making our rounds, hitting up all the shops we’ve already canvassed about ten times now. This is so fucking frustrating, it’s not even funny.
I pull up outside our third stop of the day, Self Expressions. It’s a little hole in the wall joint where they do tats and body piercings and even brandings, and I remember from our previous checks of this place that the owner of the shop, some joker named Bobby Z, only works on Mondays and Fridays and he was never here all the other times we’ve come in. Maybe today we’ll get lucky.
There’s a receptionist behind a counter and she looks very professional as she sits chewing on her gum and flipping through a magazine. She’s peppered in tattoos, has piercings in her dimples, and she’s dressed in what looks to me like some sort of a Gothic clown outfit but, she’s actually pretty, in a weird sort of way. If you can get past the bright pink streaks in her dyed black hair and the red contact lenses. She never looks up at us, even though the door chime alerted her to our presence.
“So if we said nothing,” Conner asks her finally, “how long would it be before you acknowledged us?”
“Hard to tell,” she mumbles with extreme disinterest, still looking at her magazine. “I guess until I got bored, but who knows how long that could take?”
I smirk her. She can’t be much older than 16 maybe. “I like you sweetheart, you’re funny.” She looks up finally, albeit with an attitude, but when she sees me her eyes widen a fraction and she smiles.
“I like you too, you’re hot,” she says, raising an eyebrow at me. Sorry, sweetheart. Twenty two is as young as I go. Besides … you are no Samantha Colby.
“Is your boss around?” Conner says, cutting through the bullshit.
She sighs heavily. “He’s over there,” she says disgustedly, motioning to a station at the back, and we head over to the chair where some scrawny kid is getting a tattoo from a big, burly, bear of a man with long black hair that’s tied back into a ponytail. He looks up as we approach and the recognition registers on his face immediately. He knows we’re cops before we even identify ourselves.
“What can I do for you gentlemen?” he asks, turning back to his human canvas.
“You Bobby Z?” I ask as I flash him my badge, and he nods.
“You know that I am. I run a respectable joint here fellas, what’s this about?” he asks, looking up at us.
“Detectives Pierce and Conner, SPD. You recognize this?” I ask, holding up Samantha’s sketch of the tattoo.
He looks at the image for only a brief second before he says, “Yeah, it’s mine.”
“It’s yours?” Conner asks, clearly surprised.
“Yeah. It’s my work.”
“You’re sure of that?” I ask, my voice sounding harsher than I mean for it to.
“An artist doesn’t forget his own work. They’re like your children,” he says to me. “Besides, that’s a one-of-a-kind design. This guy comes in here asking for a flaming heart, I drew that design and he fell in love with it. I inked it on his neck.”
“So you know who has this tattoo?” I demand.
“Yeah, I know him. I’ve done a few of his tats.”
“You gotta name?” Conner asks.
“Yeah … they call him Timber, but his name is Timothy Echols.”
“What do you know about him?” I ask, and this guy shrugs.
“Not much. I know he’s a chain-smoking dirtbag,” Bobby Z says, looking me in the eye.
“How so?”
“Let’s just say he’s the kind of guy you wouldn’t want to set your sister up with,” he says. “He likes to pay for sex and then he brags about how he beats the shit out of the whores afterwards.”
“You know where we can find him?”
“Yeah, he stays over in those apartments on Yesler.”
Finally, a fucking break! We walk out the tattoo parlor with a name and an address, and I feel like I’m fucking ten feet tall! “It’s about damn time,” I say victoriously as we climb back into the cruiser, and Conner takes out his phone and dials the Lieutenant, putting him on speakerphone. Once he hears that the owner of this tattoo shop identified the sketch immediately and claimed it as his own work, Marcos’ response is immediate.
“Go straight over to see Claude Manning for an arrest warrant. Let’s bring this dirtbag in for questioning. With any luck, he’s our guy, and we can make the Colby family happy today. Keep me informed. I’ll let Captain Skinner know.”
“We’re on it, Lieu,” I say as I pull away from the curb and head for the courthouse, thinking about Samantha.
“Nice work, guys,” Marcos says before he hangs up.
We enter the courthouse and go in search of Claude Manning, the prosecutor. Conner and I have had to deal with him quite a bit in our jobs and he’s a pretty decent guy. Shoots straight from the hip. I like that. You always know where you stand with him. He’s sort of like Lee Parson in that way.
We get to his office and don’t even have to wait. As luck would have it, we walk right into him as he’s returning from court and he ushers in.
“What can I do for two of Seattle’s finest this morning?” he says, looking from me to Conner as he removes his suit jacket and starts to roll up his shirtsleeves.
“We were hoping for an arrest warrant, Claude. For Timothy Echols,” I tell him, getting right to the point.
“And Echols is…,” He squints at me, indicating his confusion.
“A suspect in the Samantha Colby case,” I reply, and I instantly see the name recognition. Manning’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise.
“I was told you kept hitting a wall in that case. Mayor’s not happy, so we have all been on high alert.”
“Yeah, we know,” I reply. “We’ve been beating our heads against that wall you mention. This is the first real break we’ve gotten in this case, and it’s a good one.”
“Well, tell me what you’ve got and I’ll see if I can get you a search warrant too,” he says taking a seat behind his desk and motioning for us to do the same. “Like I said, the Mayor is not happy; he wants this case solved yesterday. He is scared shitless at the Colby family getting any more upset than they already are. I guess Lucas Colby has been making quite a bit of noise about this.”
After days of just spinning our wheels on this case, I finally feel like we’re actually getting somewhere. By the time we leave the prosecutor’s office, Conner and I have an arrest warrant to bring Echols in for questioning and a search warrant for both his apartment and his vehicle. I feel bulletproof right now.
We drive over to Yesler Way and I’m pulling up outside Echols’ apartment complex when my phone beeps at me. I know that it’s Samantha, checking in, and it makes me smile. I park the cruiser and reach for my phone and I see Conner stifle a grin as he rolls his eyes at me. I ignore him and check the text message:
Heading into gallery now.
Wish me luck.
I shake my head slightly at her text. She really should have more confidence in her own talent. I text her back:
U don’t need luck, baby.
She’s going to love your work.
Her response is so sweet and innocent. It actually melts me a little bit:
Thanks for believing in me, Josh.
“Guy, do you want to play kissy-face with Samantha or do you want to catch the asshole terrorizing her?” Conner’s voice is dry and he sounds perturbed. It instantly pisses me off and I shoot him a glance that warns him to be care
ful. Then I reply to Sam’s text, making sure she hasn’t run Martin off by now. She assures me that Martin is still with her and then asks if everything’s okay. I tell her that I’m just distracted by work and tell her to keep Martin close. Then Conner and I get out of the car and head into the building.
We go to Echols’ door and knock, like the polite officers we are, but there’s no answer. No sense kicking the door in and damaging property needlessly, so we head down to find the superintendent to see if he has a key. Once the super of the building sees our badges and our search warrant, he’s only too happy to accommodate our request to get inside Echols’ apartment. He puts the key into the lock as Conner and I draw our weapons in preparation for entry.
“Seattle Police!” Conner calls out, making sure to identify ourselves as we barge in.
When the door opens, the first thing I notice is that Echols’ is not real big on cleanliness. There’s trash and old takeout cartons everywhere. And it’s not hard to tell he’s a chain smoker, like Bobby Z said. There are cigarette butts in ashtrays in every room and the stale odor of smoke everywhere, and it makes me think about my interview of Samantha back in the hospital when she remembered the smell of smoke in a nightmare about her attack.
Conner’s at the back of the apartment while I’m checking out the living room/kitchen area. Man, this guy is a pig. The trash is overflowing in the kitchen and the sink is piled up with dishes. I’m about to head to another room when Conner speaks up, and I can tell from the sound of his voice that it ain’t good.
“Uh, Guy … you gotta see this, man.”
“What is it?” I ask as I see him standing at the door of the bedroom. His face looks like he’s just seen something he’s not quite sure how to process, and I frown. I follow him into the room and it doesn’t take me long to understand. I stand frozen in my tracks as my eyes focus on the most beautiful face I’ve ever seen. Samantha’s face. Everywhere!
“What the fuck?” My voice is a confused whisper.
Fear grips my heart as I realize that one wall of the bedroom is plastered in photographs of Sam. A few of them are pictures ripped out of newspapers or tabloids, but most of them are photos that Echols had to have taken himself. Pictures of Sam in her car, walking out of the market where she was attacked, standing outside the salon she goes to every Monday morning, inside the museum where she works. There are even pictures of her in the parking lot outside her building, getting into my Charger this weekend.
“Get on the phone, Conner,” I manage to say, though my voice is deathly quiet. “Have dispatch run Echols.”
“I’m way ahead of you, Guy,” Conner says, and I look over and he already has the phone to his ear. “Yeah, this is Detective Dave Conner,” I hear him say as he exits the room and I look back at the wall of Samantha, feeling a wave of nausea wash over me. I take a deep breath as I struggle to get my bearings back.
This crazy fucker is obviously obsessed with Sam and now, I am desperate to find him. I take out my own phone and call for a CSU to come go over this place with a fine-toothed comb. I want all these pictures of Sam properly cataloged and collected. I won’t leave anything to chance with this case, not now that we are so close to catching up with this scum.
Once I’ve secured the evidence technicians, I head back out to the door of the apartment where the super still stands, waiting for us. Time to find out how Mr. Echols spends his days. I feel a small wave of relief at the knowledge that I insisted Sam take Martin with her on her errands today. If I’m lucky, we can get Echols off the street and behind bars before Samantha even knows the difference.
“You know where Echols works?” I ask the super as I motion him inside the door.
“I think he washes dishes at some restaurant downtown. What did he do, anyway?”
I ignore his question and ask another of my own. “Which restaurant?”
“No, I don’t know. Sorry.”
“What about his car?” I ask gruffly, and I know my steady gaze is unnerving him a little. It’s a technique I’ve perfected over the years.
“It’s a piece of junk,” he says. “Four door, beat up, ’84 Impala, mint green with two black front fenders. Thing’s covered in rust and has bumper stickers all across the back of it. It’s loud and it smokes like a chimney. A few of the other tenants complain about it a lot.” I nod at him and remember Samantha’s description of the beat up old car the smoking man was driving right before she was attacked. All she could tell me was that it was a light green four door. She wasn’t able to give me a make or model so we had nothing to pursue.
Conner ushers the CSU inside and once they get to work we leave them to it and head back to the station. When we get there, we hear back from dispatch about the illustrious Mr. Timothy “Timber” Echols. Turns out he’s a career dirtbag with a rap sheet for assault, breaking and entering, and rape. In fact, he’s wanted for two rapes in Portland, Oregon, two more in San Jose, California, and he’s wanted for questioning in a murder case in that city as well. And according to the records, it seems he’s not content to just rape his victims and leave it at that. He torments them first. Attacking them out of nowhere and then proceeding to stalk them for a while before he rapes them. Like it’s some kind of sick game for him. That knowledge makes me want to punch his fucking lights out, but I’ll have to wait until we actually track him down. We also learn that one of the two cars registered to him is indeed a four door ’84 Impala, so we issue a BOLO on the car.
An old mugshot reveals that Samantha’s memory of him wasn’t that far off the mark. He does have a shaved bald head, and I notice that her rendering of the flaming heart tattoo was right on the money. It looks just like her sketch. And now that we’ve got a picture of him, I get to work on putting together a photo lineup so that we can take it over to Samantha’s apartment for her to look at, while Conner tries to find out where Echols works and hangs out so that we can pick this piece of shit up and bring him in.
“Got it,” Conner says triumphantly. “Well … sort of. He works at Montalloni’s downtown, but he called in sick this morning. They got no idea where we can find him but, I was told he likes to hang out at the local pool hall.”
“That’s great,” I answer him, feeling a sense of accomplishment as I turn back to my computer screen and my photo lineup. “Just give me a sec to save this and we can head to Sam’s and then try to track this asshole down.”
“You sure you want to go to Samantha’s first?” Conner asks with a frown. “Wouldn’t it be better to do a little more foot work first instead of showing her a picture of a guy we don’t actually have in custody yet?”
“No.” My response is definitive and I look up, fixing him with a serious scowl. “I think it would be better to get her to look at this guy. Maybe it’ll spark something more in her memory and she can tell us something useful.” I can tell that he disagrees with my call but, I don’t care. Everything in me is telling me to head to Samantha’s first, but I’m distracted from Conner’s skeptical frown when my cellphone beeps at me again. I take it out and read Sam’s latest update, letting me know that she’s home now and that Martin is checking out her place. The fact that she’s safely back home seems like confirmation to me that we should definitely go there first. I don’t know why. I just need to physically see her right now and reassure myself that she’s all right. Then I can concentrate on finding this fucker. I text her back, telling her to stay put and that I will be there soon.
As I close out the program on my computer, saving the photo lineup, I get her response:
I’ll be here. Miss u.
I smile slightly. After all we’ve learned today about her attacker, all I want to do right now is wrap my arms around her.
Miss u 2.
Be there soon, baby.
Don’t move.
I quickly text her back and then I stand, grabbing my jacket, as Conner and I head out to the cruiser. I feel a sense of urgency as I slide behind the wheel and then pull out onto the street.
/> “I can’t believe this cat is wanted for four rapes and a murder investigation,” Conner says as we speed down the road.
“Yeah,” I mumble, not really wanting to think about the implications of that. I know that this creep is fixated on Samantha, and now that I know his record and his M. O., I can’t help but think about what he plans to do to her. I feel my jaw clench as my hands tighten around the steering wheel involuntarily. No good son of a bitch!
Conner rambles on about this dirtbag and about the highlights of his rap sheet and I’m only half listening as my mind is flooded with images of Sam. As we near Sam’s apartment building and I drive through a fairly busy intersection, I glance off to my left and do a double take.
“Hey Conner,” I speak up, interrupting his verbal stream as I glance back in my rearview mirror. “What kind of car does this fucker drive again?”
“Beat up, mint green ’84 Impala with two black fenders and a bevy of bumper stickers. Why?”
“Because we just passed it,” I say though gritted teeth, and without warning him, I make a quick U-turn back toward the car where it’s parked on the side of the road.
As we approach it, we can tell that it’s empty, but as we’re still in possession of a warrant to search the car, I pull in behind it and park.
“That’s Echols’ vehicle all right,” Conner says after checking the plate number. He gets on the phone then and calls for a uniform to come sit on the car until a tow can come pick it up, as I get out and head over to check it out. As luck would have it, the car’s doors are unlocked and I pull out one latex glove from my pocket and, without putting it on, use it to carefully open up the passenger side front door.
I can see what looks like mail and junk papers laying on the passenger seat of the car and now, I do slip that glove onto my hand so that I can get a closer look. Conner heads over to me as I go about my task. Lifting a comic book that’s laying on top I discover several pictures, and it takes me a split second to realize that they’re more photos of Sam. I pick them up and study them. Something about them puzzles me, but I can’t put my finger on it. I stare at them for what feels like forever and suddenly all the air leaves my lungs as I realize what’s wrong with these photographs. I can feel the blood drain away from my face and Conner must be able to see it too because his voice sounds full of dread.
Pierced: Pierced Trilogy Boxed Set Page 45