They pulled up to one of those little two hundred plus-year old, post-Revolutionary War row homes that the tourists think are so adorable and quaint, but the residents hate because of the poor insulation, rusted plumbing, and walls so thin that neighbors could hear each other fart. There were gray-haired Italian grandmothers pushing their grandchildren around in strollers, dogs locked behind fences yapping at shadows, and normal nosy spinsters sitting on their front stoops, keeping their eyes on everyone’s business because they had none of their own. However, just as she’d predicted, CC’s husband was already gone. They sat in the car for a few minutes before she went in.
“I had a great time, CC. You are an incredible woman.”
“You sure you don’t think I’m a slut? I don’t usually cheat on my husband.”
“I believe you,” he lied. ”And, no, I don’t think you’re a slut. I think you are something truly special and I hope that man of yours appreciates what he’s got.”
“He doesn’t,” she stated flatly. She kissed him deeply then slid from the car.
“I hope you come to see me again, James.”
“I don’t think I could stop myself if I wanted to,” the detective replied, meaning it a little more than he was comfortable with.
James made it to the office at nine and was surprised to find his normally punctual partner had not yet arrived. He sat down at his desk and allowed his mind to go back into the case.
Where are you, Malcolm? What are you up to? What is it you really want?
“Never leave an enemy behind or it will rise again to fly at your throat!”
Something told James that Malcolm Davis was not done yet. There would be more murders. Unless they could catch him, there would be a lot more.
XIII.
Titus barely slept all night. His mind was wrapped around the case like a boa constrictor, but he couldn’t digest it, couldn’t make sense of it. A man the entire city had been hunting for years had stepped out of the night, slaughtered a family, practically autographed the crime scene, and vanished back into the night. They should have had him in custody an hour after they received the 911 call, but somehow he had eluded them.
He had been all over the Cozen’s house inspecting every bit of evidence as fast as the crime scene techs gathered it.
He followed the medical examiner’s van to the city morgue and sat through the preliminary autopsy. Afterwards, he went back to the precinct and pulled out all the files on the three murder investigations, covering twenty-seven separate homicides. Malcolm Davis had been a busy boy. So far, they had been unable to turn up an address on the suspect, but they had his mother, grandmother, sister, and all three of his aunts under surveillance. At five a.m., Detective Baltimore finally crawled into bed, confident that when he awoke it would be to a phone call telling him they had located their suspect.
When Titus’s head rose from the pillow it was nearly ten in the morning. He was late for work and no suspects were in custody. His lazy dinosaur of a partner hadn’t even bothered to wake him. Of course, they hadn’t picked each other up for work since they first partnered up two years ago. They rarely even rode together in the same car. Titus knew the Captain hated it when he drove his own car on duty, but so far he hadn’t said anything. The only way Titus could work with James was separately. Not as partners, but as two individual investigators working simultaneously on the same case.
Titus didn’t understand James. He couldn’t relate to his lackadaisical attitude, his lack of enthusiasm for the job. He would bet anything that James got a good sleep. The fact that there was a madman running around hacking up women and children probably didn’t stop him from getting his eight hours in. If he just wanted to collect a paycheck every week, there were easier jobs than homicide detective. No one waded through blood and guts everyday unless they were truly committed to the cause and Titus was committed. Titus was a crusader. James didn’t make sense.
“Baby, are you up? I made you some bacon and eggs and your favorite French toast!”
“Okay, I’m up, Mom!”
The smell of fresh bacon drifted up to Titus, pulling him from the bed and into the shower. It was time to begin the day. He needed to get over to the hospital to talk to Reed. If they couldn’t locate Malcolm, maybe they could find his accomplice. Titus showered, shaved, and slipped into a gray Brooks Brother’s suit and a pair of black Stacy Adams. He considered his new Armani silk tie and felt foolish as he turned it down in favor of a blue polyester tie from Jeans West, but he wasn’t up to dealing with the whispers of “spoiled rich kid” from his fellow officers.
With his all-American good looks, Titus looked more like a model in a men’s apparel magazine like “GQ” or “M.” Well, except for the tie and the fact that he was a good three inches shy of six feet and was showing the beginnings of a spare tire around his mid-section. His face was quite handsome however, almost pretty. He had high cheekbones with thin lips and dimpled cheeks, ice blue eyes, and dark brown hair that he slicked back the way the Italian gangsters did in the movies. He would never be pegged as a homicide detective. Although on those special occasions when he wore his black Armani Tux, he did look a little like James Bond.
Titus walked downstairs and smiled. Mrs. Janet Baltimore sat at the kitchen table sectioning a grapefruit half with a paring knife. She was wearing the red flannel pajamas he’d bought her for Christmas along with the blue and white terry cloth bathrobe and slippers that he’d given her for her birthday. Her long silver hair was cinched into a tight bun and her glasses hung off the tip of her nose as she carefully prepared his meal. She had looked exactly the same for the past twenty years. Titus couldn’t remember her ever being young. The gray hair, the wrinkles, the fifty or sixty extra pounds, the extra chin, the loose flesh that hung from her triceps, the varicose veins that crisscrossed her legs, all seemed to have been there since his first birthday. Looking at pictures of the young, vibrant, sexy woman she had once been was like looking at a stranger. To him, she had always been the same woman she was today—a hard-working, church-going, house-cleaning, home-cooking mom.
Detective Titus Baltimore was a mama’s boy. He had always been and probably always would be. His dad had never been around. Fitzgerald Baltimore was always too busy with his art gallery and borderline-legal import/export business that dealt mostly in ancient artifacts plundered from various sacred burial grounds around the globe and smuggled into the U.S. from the same private airstrips the cartels used to fly out Columbia’s most popular export.
Baltimore’s dad was two thousand dollar suits that hung in the closet, the smell of expensive Cuban cigars that lingered in the air, the ninety thousand dollar Mercedes sports car in the driveway, a ten thousand dollar a month trust fund account supplementing the paycheck that cared for his son and his wife when Fitzgerald was away on one of his seemingly endless business trips. Baltimore’s dad had never been there to tuck him in at night. That had always been Mom. His dad had never been there to show him how to throw a football or shoot lay-ups. Instead, he’d learned to play piano and ballroom dance. He’d had girlfriends, had even gotten engaged and moved out on his own. But those relationships had always failed, and when they had, Mama had happily been there for her little boy. Baltimore was a real mama’s boy, and he was proud of it
After finishing his breakfast, Baltimore kissed his mom goodbye and headed for the station. Feeling a little gutsier, he decided to take Dad’s Mercedes instead of the ’65 Ford Mustang he normally drove.
“Fuck those jealous assholes!” Baltimore yelled as he gunned the engine and pealed out of the driveway. He wasn’t going to feel guilty just because he was rich and they weren’t. He’d lost years of quality time with his father to the pursuit of money, so he felt owed it to himself, and, perhaps, to old Fitzgerald as well, to enjoy some of the luxuries his father had abandoned him to obtain.
As he drove, Baltimore went over the case again in his mind. How could a six-foot-five, 230-pound, black vampire in a designer
suit disappear? He decided to skip the station and head straight for the hospital. He needed to talk to Reed and find out more about Malcolm’s sidekick.
XIV.
Veins and cords bulged through his skin. His back and bicep muscles ached from the super-set of seated row and military style pull-ups with a twenty-five-pound plate dangling from a chain around his waist. Malcolm walked over to the water fountain, wiping the sweat from his brow and smiling appreciatively at the well muscled but still pleasantly voluptous ass attached to the gym’s sales manager. She was also some kind of fitness model or something. She seemed to live at the gym. Her breasts were perfect—implants, but natural looking. She obviously had large breasts in the first place and probably lost them when her body fat dropped below 10%. She had just filled the void with silicone. She was short but tough looking, and her eyes were jet black like her waist length hair.
Italian? Sicilian maybe? Possibly Spanish.
She was obviously down with the brothers whatever her ethnicity. She always stared at Malcolm when she thought he wasn’t looking and was constantly trying to make small talk. Malcolm liked her. That’s why he hadn’t fucked her yet. Let her enjoy life for a while longer.
Malcolm bent over the water fountain to get a drink and saw her staring at his ass out of the corner of his eye.
I guess what’s good for the goose . . . he thought. She sighed longingly and he knew she had meant for him to hear it. She keeps this shit up and I will haul off and fuck her!
Malcolm went back to the free weight area and began to load up the bar on the preacher curl bench. He knew he shouldn’t be out in public with all those cops after him, but he had lost the capacity to process fear anymore. He couldn’t envision anyone possibly stopping him. He knew that would be his downfall eventually, but for right now, it was his strength.
Half the gym’s muscle-bound troglodytes were staring at Malcolm and snickering derisively as he slid two forty-five-pound plates on each end of the twenty-five- pound bar for a total of two-hundred-five pounds. Malcolm snickered back. He knew they thought he was crazy, trying to curl so much weight. He knew they were waiting to see him tear a bicep muscle just trying to lift it from the rack. But what they didn’t know was that he was insane, stark raving mad, and he could easily toss this weight up for at least eight reps thanks to a stack of Deca, Clembuterol, and the latest legal growth hormones that had swelled his biceps from eighteen-and-one-half-inches to a Herculean twenty-one-inches in just the past two months. The thick, tentacled roots that were Malcolm’s fingers wrapped around the curl bar and easily hoisted it into the air. His arms strained and burned with lactic acid, but the weight curled steadily upward, reaching its apex just below Malcolm’s collarbone and then slowly lowering back down to mid-thigh twelve times. The snickering had turned to gasps of astonishment.
Showed those fools!
Malcolm slammed the bar back down on the rack and stretched his massive arms, smiling at his reflection in the mirror. He may not have been able to bench-press five hundred pounds like some of the juiced-up Italians that seemed to spend all day everyday doing the same three exercises—squats, bench presses, and shoulder presses—but he knew he had the strongest arms in the Atlas gym.
The Atlas gym was hardcore, for serious weightlifters only. There was no sauna or Jacuzzi, no pool, no aerobics room, only a handful of cardio equipment, and no juice bar. What the Atlas had was weight, massive weight. Each bench could hold up to a thousand pounds and there was at least that much weight in iron plates stacked on weight trees beside each one. Even the dumbbells went all the way up to one-hundred-fifty pounds each. No one but hardcore bodybuilders and power-lifters, mostly professionals, worked out there.
Malcolm glanced around the room at the grossly over-muscled clientele, groaning and straining beneath impossible stacks of weight, and thought that if he got his arms around any one of their necks they would never get away until their lifeless husks slumped to the floor.
Malcolm looked at himself in the mirror again, pleased with the way all eight sections of his rectus abdominus were as clearly defined as his obliques and serratus muscles forming an armor-plated waistline that was only 31 inches around. He liked the way his lats fanned out under his arms, but not so much that he couldn’t lower his arms to his sides like some of those other muscle-bound freaks. Malcolm smiled as he flexed his bulging pecs, admiring their crisscrossed striations and how the pectoralis major was clearly separated from the pectoralis minor. He liked his rounded delts and the way his traps rose like a cobra’s hood when he rolled his shoulders forward but not so much that they made his neck disappear. With the exception of his disproportionately large arms, he had the body of a supremely well-conditioned prizefighter, similar to Evander Holyfield or Lennox Lewis with Lee Haney’s arms. Unlike the bodybuilders who spent just as much time in the tanning booths and hair salons as they did in the weight room, Malcolm’s muscles weren’t just for show. They were more than cosmetic. They had crushed, bludgeoned, beaten, and stabbed the life from twenty-seven innocent people that the police knew of and another seventeen they had no clue about. His body was a perfect killing machine.
You’re a fucking monster! he thought as he stared at himself in the mirror and that predacious smile split open his face once more.
Malcolm had just finished his last set of curls when the twelve TV sets positioned above the treadmills and lifecycles began to broadcast the morning news. As Malcolm expected, it featured a headline story about the murder of the Cozen family with a surprisingly accurate description of him, along with a police artist’s sketch that was also remarkably accurate. He was flattered that Reed remembered him so well. He regretted that he would not be able to workout at the Atlas anymore, but he did not regret neatly crushing the throat of the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, pumped up aryan with the squeaky voice who shouted, “That’s him!” as Malcolm attempted to exit the premises peacefully and quietly. He did regret not being able to stay and watch him drown in his own blood.
XV.
Titus Baltimore had one more question for Reed.
“Describe Malcolm’s accomplice for me.”
“I already did. He looks exactly like me . . . or rather like I looked fifteen years ago. He even has my old heavy metal/ hippie haircut. You could take one of my old yearbook pictures and put it out there. That’s how much he looks like me.”
The answer was unbelievable. Detective Baltimore didn’t know whether it was Mr. Cozen’s shock over losing his wife and kids confusing things in his head, or if the man was just flat-out lying. Mr. Cozen seemed eager to help catch the killer, but then why make up such an absurd story? He seemed perfectly lucid, but what he was saying went way beyond creepy to become something else altogether, something perverse.
“His accomplice looked just like you? Identical? Like some kind of twin?”
“Yes.” Reed replied with conviction, looking Tight Ass right in his smug little eyes.
“First a giant black vampire and now your evil twin? What is this—a creature double feature?”
“Fuck you, Detective! Those are the bastards that murdered my family! I ain’t making this up!”
Detective Baltimore stared at Mr. Reed Cozen for a long moment before he spoke again. He wasn’t sure about this story. Something about it just didn’t click for him. In fact a lot of things about it made no sense to him.
Why would a man wait fifteen years then suddenly reappear and savagely murder a man’s entire family because he’d messed around with his best friend’s high school sweetheart?
Even as violent as kids were today, he’d never heard of a teenaged romantic rivalry resulting in mutilation murders. Maybe a drive-by or ambush shooting, but never after more than a decade had passed.
Titus had only been thirteen when he graduated from high school, a child prodigy with the highest SAT scores in his little private academy, and he couldremember very little about the girls he dated at the academy or even later at Princeton for that matter. Th
ere had been too damned many of them. He couldn’t imagine still being strung out on one of them after all these years. Certainly not enough to kill.
And why would he leave Mr. Cozen alive as a witness if he were really the target of Malcolm’s vengeance? Why would Malcolm Davis confess to Mr. Cozen about a series of homicides he had so far gotten away with and then not kill him? It made no sense! And why did Reed seem to be acting so guilty, so defensive, as if he was hiding something?
As far as Titus was concerned, Mr. Cozen had just topped the suspect list.
“Please forgive me, Mr. Cozen, but I am just terribly confused by all this.”
Reed’s eyes searched Baltimore’s face in helpless frustration. It was obvious that he wanted to strangle the detective and probably would have tried if he wasn’t injured and Baltimore wasn’t armed.
“What the hell is so confusing? I told you who did it. You just go get him. Lock him up! Shoot him! Anything! Just do your fucking job and leave me the fuck alone! While you’re in here fucking with me that sonuvabitch is probably out there killing another family!”
“I assure you, Mr. Cozen, we have half the Philadelphia Police Department kicking in doors all over town, searching for Mr. Davis right now. We’ll have him in custody soon. In the meantime, you get some rest. I understand you might be released later today or tomorrow. I may need you to come down to the station and answer a few more questions.”
“What fucking questions? There’s no more I can tell you.”
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