by Dianne Emley
Vining and her partner, Jim Kissick, were among the first to arrive at the murder house. Only Pasadena police officers were there. A PPD helicopter circled above. The grisly deaths were still the PPD’s secret, but not for long. News of the double homicide in the Linda Vista neighborhood was dispersing like a toxic spill at sea. Oliver Mercer’s and Lauren Richards’s corpses, at least the idea of them, would not only enter the lore of this street, this neighborhood, this police department, and this city, but would belong to the world.
They strode through a mass of blue uniforms in the street near the house.
“What up, T?” Kissick greeted Sergeant Terrence Folke, an African American whose size and muscle mass made him stand out among the patrol officers.
Crime scene tape extended across the street end of the driveway. The gate was open.
Folke was terse, in contrast with his usual easygoing demeanor. “Kissick. Vining.” He led the detectives beneath the yellow tape onto the property. His style tended to be crisp, but his rundown today was a model of brevity.
“I’m setting up foot patrols for knock-and-talks. I’ve got the CHP en route to shut down the San Rafael exit off the freeway. No one’s been on the property except Pincher and Orozco, who were the first on-scene, and me. And no one’s going to get inside who doesn’t have a reason to be there.”
He pointed to a sobbing woman sitting on a stone bench being comforted by Officer Susie Pincher, a petite and athletic former high school cheerleader with an unfortunate surname.
Folke explained, “That’s the housekeeper, Rosie Cordova. She doesn’t usually work on Sunday, but came in because she’s going to a Labor Day picnic tomorrow.”
The big man was getting the job done, but his efficiency and control couldn’t hide that he was unsettled.
Kissick patted Folke on the shoulder. “Thanks, Terrence. Good job.” He called over Ray Orozco, the other uniformed officer, with a jerk of his head.
“Ray, how ya’ doin’?”
Orozco had twenty-two years on the force and a waistline that expanded with each anniversary. He’d never been promoted, nor tried to be, and he’d been around the block more than a few times. There was little he hadn’t seen. By his grave expression and the pallid tone of his normally bronze complexion, Vining guessed that today was the day he’d finally seen too much.
He shook the detectives’ hands, then pulled out a handkerchief and blotted his brow. It was mid-morning and already in the nineties.
“Hey, Nan. Jim. Bad scene in there. Nightmare stuff.”
Kissick squinted at a rustling noise. Two squirrels ran across the branches of a giant magnolia tree in the center of the vast drive. “What’s the housekeeper’s story?”
“She’s worked for Mercer for three years. Said she didn’t touch anything. She’s confident the male victim is Mercer. She recognized a scabbed-up spot below his left shoulder where he recently had a tattoo removed.”
“She can’t give a positive I.D.?” Vining asked.
Orozco huffed out a laugh but the source wasn’t humor. “You’ll see.”
“What else?” Kissick planted his hands on his waist and leaned his lanky frame forward, a pose he subconsciously adopted when speaking with people shorter than he.
“She said Mercer was having problems with his partner in some billboard company. Heard Mercer shouting at this guy on the phone, calling him an asshole and an idiot. Scoville, I think she said his name is. Regarding the female victim, name of Lauren Richards, Mercer had been dating her for two months or so. Rosie doesn’t know much about her except she’s divorced with a couple of young kids. As for Mercer, he was a lifelong bachelor. Born into money. Playboy.”
Orozco accompanied the sobriquet with an arched eyebrow toward the grand house and the new Lamborghini in the driveway. Parked behind the expensive car was a several-years-old Nissan Pathfinder.
Vining got his drift. Even with all of Mercer’s advantages, he wasn’t immune to a determined psychopath with cutting tools. Now it was the job of a group of civil servants to look after his interests and seek justice, the same as if he’d been a homeless man kicked to death on a sidewalk.
Vining took latex gloves from her slacks pocket and put them on. “Any idea about the number of perpetrators?”
Orozco sucked in his full cheeks. His eyes grew veiled as he mentally revisited the interior of that house. He came back to them and shook his head. That would be the last time he’d force himself to go to that place. However, he’d unwillingly revisit it at unguarded moments for the rest of his life.
“Want us to take Rosie to the second floor?”
Orozco was referring to the second floor of the Pasadena Police Department, where the detectives worked.
Kissick also put on gloves. “Thanks, Ray. Make her comfortable. Let her call her family. We’ll be there as soon as we can.”
Vining and Kissick walked up the long driveway, which was composed of paving stones in variegated hues of gray.
She looked back toward the driveway gate. “If I were him, I would have driven my car up to the house.”
They knew nothing concrete about the killer, yet they could begin building a profile based upon experience. The killer was likely male and between eighteen and forty-five years old.
“It would be more secluded than parking on the street and hopping the fence. He either came in on someone else’s tail or had the gate code.”
Kissick tried the door to the Pathfinder. It was locked. Women’s clothes wrapped in dry cleaners’ plastic were hanging from a hook above the passenger’s window.
The Lamborghini’s door was unlocked. The registration and proof of insurance Vining found in the glove compartment showed Mercer Investments as the owner.
They continued toward the house, stopping at a patch of paving stones a few yards from the front door that were smeared with blood.
“Transferred from something else,” Kissick observed.
“Maybe he stripped off his bloody clothes here,” Vining said. “Wonder if he brought something to change into. Was this planned or random?”
Kissick leaned over, put his hands on his knees, and pointed at the ground. “A long blond hair right there. Looks synthetic. Was Lauren wearing a wig?”
Bent over, Vining examined a mark on the ground. “Bloody footprint, made by a woman’s high heel.”
“Lauren’s?”
Vining placed her foot, clad in cushioned flats, beside it. “My feet are big. The shoe that made this was huge.”
They looked at each other.
“Either Lauren is a big lady or our bad guy likes women’s clothing,” Vining speculated.
“Maybe Mercer had an appointment with Helga?”
“Helga?”
“Big strong Russian masseuse,” he said with a fake Slavic accent.
“Something you know about?”
“Mmm … strong hands.”
She gave him a peeved look and continued to the front door.
It was ajar. Blood was smeared on the polished brass handle.
In a flowerbed was a placard from a security company. On the porch, a sign by the front door instructed guests that this was a shoe-free house, implying there were acres of pristine white inside. A teak shoe rack and a collection of slippers were helpfully provided. In a grotesque twist, Oliver Mercer and his girlfriend had created the worst, ineradicable stain.
They took paper booties from their pockets and slipped them over their shoes. Kissick produced a small bottle of Vicks VapoRub. They dabbed some beneath their nostrils.
With a shove of his index finger, Kissick pushed the heavy door.
It silently swung open on well-oiled brass hinges. The metallic yet sweetly organic odor of blood was carried out on a blast of refrigerated air.
Vining felt screams escaping, rushing past, rustling her hair, seeking release in the open. As she stood on the threshold of that house, she knew the horrors within would leave their mark on her. That was part of the Job. She t
ook in a shuddering breath.
The sight of blood, even buckets of it, no longer bothered her. After she had crawled through her own blood, spilling from the fatal wound in her neck, had felt its intense heat and velvety texture, fresh from her arteries, after she had felt it oozing around the knife that jutted from her flesh, a stranger’s blood was academic. What bore down on her now was the terror of those attacked in that house. That was as palpable to her as a thick fog.
The dead did tell tales. Three months ago, when Vining had looked upon the battered face of LAPD Vice Cop Frankie Lynde, the dead woman had conveyed more information than Vining wanted to know. Vining hoped these new corpses held no such surprises. She didn’t assume anything anymore. She sometimes felt she was following an agenda penned by an unseen hand. She hated it, but there it was.
“You okay?” Kissick grasped her upper arm and gave her a squeeze.
She was glad for Kissick’s tall, solid presence beside her, unable to deny that she found it comforting. Still, she looked at the hand on her arm, then up at his eyes, perhaps too coldly. They’d crossed the fine line between camaraderie and intimacy before. She was giving him, she thought, a subtle reminder of her boundaries. He would have gotten the message with less.
“I’m fine. Thanks.”
He released her, his expression and the atmosphere between them now strained in a way that no outsider would detect.
“Look.” He pointed at her shoulder, a winsome smile erasing the pinprick.
A butterfly had lit there. She craned her neck to see. It slowly opened and closed its wings, which were yellow with black spots and rimmed in black. It leaned away when Vining blew at it, but nothing more. She blew again. It canted leeward on delicate legs but still did not budge.
When Kissick flicked at it, it took flight, only to again land on the same spot.
“Guess it wants to see,” Vining said.
“Does it have a tiny camera attached to it?”
“Probably. In one of the black dots.”
The simplicity and beauty of the butterfly calmed Vining. It made her remember that there was more to the world than the Job and their sworn oath to put right to the extent that it was humanly possible what had gone wrong in that house. Bearing a delicate token of the natural world on her shoulder, Vining followed Kissick inside to witness horror that belonged to the domain of humans.
The first thing they saw was blood but they heard the soothing sound of water burbling.
“Fountain somewhere,” Vining said.
They wove a story from the grisly artifacts.
“Arterial blood spray.” Kissick drew his hand in an arc, tracing the path of the blood against the white entryway wall. The blood added a splash of unexpected color to a black-and-white painting of a nude female. “One of them got it right here, opening the door.”
The entryway bore testimony to a massive struggle. It looked as if gallons of blood had been tossed onto the white marble floor prior to a wrestling match. A woman’s strappy, high-heeled sandal lay beneath a narrow table of off-white granite against the wall. Parallel tracks of blood trailed across the foyer and disappeared down steps to the living room. Someone had lost the battle and the war.
“That didn’t make the footprint we found outside,” Vining said about the lost sandal. “Too small.”
Kissick pointed at an indentation on the front door. Holding the door with his gloved hand, he swung it back and forth to catch the light.
“Maybe forced open by a stick or a poker.”
Vining looked at the small round mark. “Or kicked open by someone wearing high heels.”
He closed the door, revealing a cocktail glass that had shattered against the marble floor and the contents that had spilled from it. Bending, he stuck his finger into clear liquid, and brought it to his nose. “Gin. Looks like a martini with two olives and a twist.”
“Last call,” Vining cracked.
The house was modern—glass and chrome, white and beige, circles and angles. The décor was as unobtrusive as an art gallery, designed to set off the paintings and sculpture displayed throughout.
While making their way down the entryway, Kissick nudged Vining and tilted his chin toward the living room wall. The words scrawled there fit in oddly, like another piece of art:
ALL WORK
No PLAY
A large abstract painting was on the floor, leaning against the wall. It had apparently been removed to provide a grand canvas for the killer’s message. Recessed lighting, intended for the abstract painting, brilliantly illuminated the graffiti.
Kissick completed the adage: “Makes Jack a dull boy.”
The letters were two feet tall. There was plenty of blood to do the job. It had soaked the pale area rugs and pooled into puddles on the marble floor. The puddles, now many hours old, had grown sticky. Yellow plasma separated along the edges, like oil pulling apart from vinegar.
The detectives’ silence was almost reverential. Gallows humor was common among those whose work involved the dark side of life. Whistling past the graveyard. But this carnage had the power to mute any therapeutic wisecracking. Nothing would mitigate this horror.
On the opposite side of the room, a sheet of water, like a transparent wall, flowed from the twenty-foot-tall ceiling and burbled into a shallow bed of smooth white pebbles.
Vining’s eyes flashed on the bodies and quickly moved to the fountain, unable to process the mound of body parts at once, as if easing into a cold swimming pool.
Kissick cannonballed in and moved closer.
She steeled herself and took a good look. She was relieved. Thank God I can’t see their faces.
Once she had looked, it was impossible to tear her eyes away. It was like trying to figure out an optical illusion. Was she looking at a goblet or two women in profile facing each other?
In the background, the fountain sounded like a babbling brook.
Kissick broke his trance and marched across the room, flicking off a switch on the wall, taking a guess. The water stopped. The room fell into a suitable silence.
He returned to the bodies and dabbed on more Vicks. He held the container out to her and she did the same.
“There’s just one word for this. Sick.”
She was surprised that she felt slightly light-headed. The menthol aroma of the Vicks didn’t help. Talking did. “When I rolled out to my first homicide, Bill Gavigan told me, ‘Think of them like dolls. They’re just dolls.’ ”
“That work for you?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
“But I have to say, I’m having a hard time processing that these are people.”
The bodies had been arranged with childlike whimsy, the combinations displaying adolescent prurience.
Lauren Richards still wore tight jeans. Her blouse and brassiere had been cut open, exposing her breasts. One foot was bare. A high-heeled sandal matching the shoe lost in the entryway dangled from one foot. Her body was intact, resting on its back against Mercer. Her head and neck were twisted at unnatural angles. Her face was pressed into his crotch.
Mercer was nude. His clothes had been cut off and strewn around the floor and atop the furniture. His limbs had been hacked into pieces. Nothing was where it was supposed to be or logically oriented. His severed head was laid into the V of her crotch. One of his legs, dissected at the knee, was bunkered up to his left shoulder. His right hand was butted against the ankle and rested atop her head, as if holding it against his genitals.
“Female’s neck looks broken,” Vining said. “The M.O. between the two victims is completely different.”
Not using the victims’ names was a way for the detectives to keep emotional distance.
“There was rage against the male,” Kissick said. “Overkill. The mutilation probably took place postmortem. No surgical precision. The way the skin’s chewed up, I’d guess he used a chain saw. But the female’s murder looks efficient. More like an execution. I don’t know who he did fir
st, but I don’t think she was the target.”
“Where’s the dog?” Vining pointed at a thick braid of multicolored string on one of the white couches. “He’s a big one, based on the size of that toy.”
She picked up a woman’s wallet, lying open on the floor. She read the driver’s license. “Lauren Richards. Caribeth Avenue, South Pasadena. Credit cards are here. Cash is gone.”
She looked through photographs encased in plastic sleeves, stopping at one of Lauren with a boy of about ten and his younger sister, who looked to be seven or eight. The three of them were wearing red sweaters and were posed in front of a Christmas tree. She slipped it from the sleeve and shook her head.
“She’s got two kids. They’re wondering where she is.” Vining hoped they never found out the details, how the psycho had snapped Lauren’s neck like vermin that had invaded his party. At some point, when they were adults, they would seek the truth, wrongly assuming that knowing would bring peace.
There was evil in the world. It left young children motherless and with grief that time would numb but never obliterate. Thinking time healed all was a feel-good delusion. A fantasy of those who’d never endured profound tragedy.
Vining returned the wallet to where she’d found it. Giving a wide berth to the gore on the floor, she unlocked a glass door and slid it open. She walked onto a terrace, leaving the cool house for the mounting heat. Leaning over the edge to look at the garden below, she saw a large doghouse. She didn’t see bowls for food or water.
She looked at the 210 freeway where it traversed the Arroyo Seco Wash on what locals called the new bridge. The old bridge, the Colorado Street Bridge, was south of it. To the east was the area of restaurants and retail establishments called Old Pasadena. It was bisected by Colorado Boulevard, which cut across the city, disappearing into haze and smog. To the north were mountains, their presence hinted at by a slight darkening in the distance through the brownish air.
Something on her shoulder drew her attention. The yellow butterfly was still there. She blew at it again, seeking to release it outside. Again, it weathered the onslaught and stayed put.