Deranged

by Jacob Stone

  Stonehedge had taken all this in stride and even managed a disarming smile. “Everybody convinced I’ll be behaving myself? We’re good to go now?” he asked.

  “Hold your horses,” Polk piped in. He waved a thumb at Stonehedge, and said, “I’m giving three to one that Hollywood here either faints or pukes before this briefing lets up. Any takers?”

  “Hmm,” Bogle murmured as he considered the wager. Then he shook his head, “Nah, he’s puking.”

  None of the Los Angeles detectives looked interested in wagering. Fred Lemmon, who was another of MBI’s investigators, and who took it as one of his job responsibilities to act as a foil to Polk, stared intently at the actor as he sized him up. “You got a strong stomach?” he asked.

  “Reasonably so.”

  Lemmon told Polk to put him down for twenty. “As long as you don’t do anything to encourage him.”

  “Done. Anyone else?”

  “Enough,” Morris ordered. Then to Goodman, “Go ahead.”

  “Hold on!” Polk left his chair so that he could bring the trash can over to Stonehedge. Once this was done he took his seat again.

  “Hollywood, when you puke, do it in the can. If you unload on our carpeting we’re going to have words later, understand?” Then to Goodman, “I said my piece. Whenever you’re ready.”

  “Thank you,” Goodman said dryly. “First of all, SCK murdered twelve people in New York, not nine as was commonly reported. We hushed up three of his murders hoping we could flush him out. While we manufactured for the newspapers different circumstances for how these victims died, SCK did not rise to the bait and made no effort to take credit for these murders.”

  Goodman then proceeded to talk about the pattern to the killings—how they were all done in groups of three; always a forty-something year-old man, followed by a woman around the same age, and finally a twenty-something blonde girl. He showed pictures of the first three victims, and explained how they were killed within four days of each other.

  “The first victim, an NYU psychology professor, murdered in his office on campus. The next victim was found in a back room at a boutique in Queens where she worked. The third, a student and part-time waitress, was found in her studio apartment in Brooklyn.”

  Goodman next showed crime-scene photos of each victim. While Stonehedge blanched at the sight of these photos, he held it together, leaving Polk still on the hook for possibly losing sixty dollars to Lemmon. After that, Goodman showed the next three victims, explaining how the first of these murders happened a hundred and thirty-four days after the last murders, and that these took place over three days. The next group were the murders that were hushed up, and there was a hundred and twenty-nine-day gap between these and the previous murders. As with the previous group, these victims were also murdered over three days. The final three murders happened a hundred and forty-one days later, and all these were done on the same day. While Goodman was showing the crime scene photos for these last murders, Polk commented that they’d picked the wrong name for the killer.

  “Forget that Skull Cracker business,” Polk said completely straight-faced. “He should be called the Pumpkin Smasher the way he left those skulls looking like smashed-up pumpkins. Am I right?”

  “You’re an idiot,” Lemmon said.

  “Nah, I’m a poet at heart,” Polk argued.

  “Idiot.”

  “Philistine,” Polk countered.

  “Enough,” Morris warned.

  Polk and Lemmon both swallowed back whatever it was they were about to say. Goodman waited several beats to make sure no one else had any additional comments before continuing with his presentation as if Polk hadn’t interrupted him, and brought up photos of the four male victims on the same screen.

  “All Caucasian, all close to the same age and size, all either with prominent bald spots or receding hairlines, all about twenty to thirty pounds overweight,” Goodman said.

  “They got different color hair,” Bogle commented. “But they’ve all got these chunky, squarish faces, and there’s something about their eyes also. Kind of smallish, squinty eyes.”

  “And they’re mostly fair skinned,” Morris noted. “And all white-collar guys.”

  Smichen pointed out that Corey Freeman was five feet eleven inches, which would be the right height, but that he was only a hundred and sixty-eight pounds. “He was trim and in good shape at the time of his death,” Smichen noted. “Certainly not overweight. And he had a full head of hair.”

  Morris dug out a photo of Freeman that the realtor had used in an ad six years earlier. In the photo Freeman looked heavier and showed a receding hairline. “He must’ve gotten hair plugs and dropped twenty pounds since this photo was taken, but if I found it on the Internet, the killer might’ve also.” He passed it over to Goodman who asked Morris if he had any recent photos of the victim. Morris passed one over, and Goodman looked preoccupied as he studied both photos.

  “Anything wrong?” Morris asked.

  Goodman looked unsure of himself as he shook his head. “You might be right, Morris,” he said. “The killer could’ve latched onto the victim from this first photo, although I would’ve thought he’d abandon the killing once he realized his victim no longer matched his profile, but maybe not. Let me continue on with the presentation, and give this more thought later.”

  Goodman next brought up on screen pictures of the four women in their forties who were killed, all of them also Caucasians. One was blonde, two were redheads, and one had sandy brown hair. Two of them had their hair down to their shoulders, another had her hair cut in a short bob, and the fourth had tight, curly hair. The two ways they were alike were that they were all tall, and that they had thin, longish faces. Polk pointed out the obvious; no one else in the room bothered to do that.

  When Goodman brought up the photos of the four girls in their twenties who were killed, the similarities among them were more pronounced. All had curly blonde hair that fell past their shoulders. All had slightly upturned noses and wide mouths. And all were what Morris’s grandparents would’ve called zaftig. Not fat, but full-figured girls. As irrational as it was he couldn’t help feeling a bit of relief seeing those photos together. Whether or not Rachel dyed her hair blonde, she’d never look like those girls. Natalie would be safe also. While she was slender like those other fortyish-year-old women, she was a good deal shorter than they were, and her face was shaped differently. More of a heart-shaped face than the longish ones these women had.

  Goodman pointed out that the four young blonde victims were all between five feet six and five feet eight inches in height, and between a hundred and forty and a hundred and sixty-eight pounds in weight. No one felt the need to comment about their obvious physical similarities, not even Polk.

  Goodman had one more screen to show them—a map of where the murders took place. Five of them had happened in Manhattan, three in Queens, and four in Brooklyn. The murders were numbered on the map, and they were scattered around with none of the three in any group occurring near each other.

  “We weren’t able to find any discernable patterns with the locations of the murders other than that they all took place within a mile of a subway station, although seven different subway lines,” Goodman said. He took off his glasses so that he could rub his eyes. When he put them back on, he showed the room a grim smile.

  “Now that I’ve gotten these preliminaries out of the way, let’s dig into the meat,” he said.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Succinylcholine, or sux, is a muscle relaxer. Hospitals use it when they perform tracheal intubations. Veterinarians sometimes use it in the euthanasia of horses. This is not a sedative. It does not produce unconsciousness or anesthesia. Someone injected with a fairly small dose will suffer temporary paralysis. If his skull is then broken open, he’s going to feel a tremendous amount of pain, and he’s going to know exactly what is being done to him.”

  Goodman paused for effect. “Sux metabolizes quickly, and can be difficult
to detect, but we got lucky with our first victim. He had a genetic abnormality that caused the sux injected into him not to fully metabolize, and because of that we found it in his blood. Since we were later looking for it, we were able to find traces of it in four other victims. We also found needle-sized puncture marks on all the victims; all of them were either injected in the arm, shoulder, throat, behind the ear, in the back of the neck, and in one case, under the left eye.”

  “Where would SCK get his supply of sux?” Morris asked.

  “A hospital or surgical clinic, a racetrack, or a veterinarian office that handles large animals would be the easiest places, assuming that he doesn’t purchase it directly from one of the manufacturers. We looked at all the possible sources in the city, but it didn’t get us anywhere. It’s not a class A substance, like an opiate, although it’s far deadlier, and should be better controlled since it’s a nearly perfect murder drug. The records we found were shoddy at best, and it’s doubtful any of these places would’ve noticed if a package of sux had gone missing.”

  “Here’s where we have a significant difference,” Smichen volunteered. “The toxicology report came up clean on Freeman. I also didn’t find any needle-sized puncture marks, and I checked carefully for that. As you said, if sux were injected into him, we might not have found it, but what I did find was that our victim was hit hard from behind with an iron pipe and that his wrists were taped together.”

  “Interesting.” Goodman rubbed his chin as he considered this. “Obviously the killer used a different method to immobilize this latest victim, but that’s not necessarily significant. It could be simply that he hasn’t been able to locate a source of sux. Was the victim knocked unconscious?”

  “If he was, he recovered consciousness before death. The killer didn’t bother gagging him, and from the way he bit his tongue, gums, and lips, he was struggling.”

  “Then this still fits,” Goodman said, relieved. “The serial killer I’d profiled whom you know as SCK needs his victims to suffer. After he had immobilized his victims by temporarily paralyzing them, he broke apart their skulls with a chisel and hammer, and then used the claw end of the hammer to dig out clumps of their brain. This is every bit as cruel a way to kill someone as it sounds. SCK could’ve used an animal tranquilizer if his goal was to leave a message with the way he murdered his victims, but it was important to him for his victims to suffer emotional trauma, fear, and great physical pain that would be made even more acute by the sux. If this latest victim had been unconscious during the killing, then there’d be no doubt that we would now be dealing with a different person.”

  “In some of the photos you showed I counted eight clumps of brain matter dug out. Was that consistent with each of the New York victims?” Morris asked.

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Ours had six clumps dug out.”

  “That’s true,” Smichen said.

  “That might not be that significant,” Goodman said. “This is over five years later and twenty-eight hundred miles away. SCK could’ve altered his signature for either a personal reason or to try to confuse us. As I’d hinted at earlier, he doesn’t care about getting credit for his murders. He kills because the pressure builds to an unbearable level and then he needs to destroy victims who remind him of people he holds a tremendous amount of anger against.”

  Morris asked, “Who, parents and an ex-wife or girlfriend?”

  “Possibly. Whoever they are I suspect they’re dead now, and it wouldn’t surprise me if SCK murdered them, or at the very least, severely injured them, although probably not in anywhere near as brutal a way as he did with these victims who’ve been serving as fill-ins.”

  “So he’s looking for do overs,” Lemmon said.

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  Morris asked, “Why’s he been quiet the last five years?”

  “The million-dollar question.”

  “Could it be a copycat?”

  Goodman shrugged. “It’s possible,” he said. “There are notable differences with this killing. I’ll have the victim’s remains shipped to the FBI lab, and we’ll be able to tell if the same chisel and hammer were used, not that that would eliminate this killer being SCK if they weren’t. It’s been over five years, it would make sense if he had to ditch his other tools and buy new ones.”

  “Could this be a fluke killing unrelated to SCK?”

  “Doubtful. We should be assuming it’s either SCK or a copycat. There had never been a reported murder anywhere in the United States like these before SCK struck in New York, and none afterwards until this one. That two individuals could share this never-before-seen psychopathy seems highly unlikely.”

  The same dull throbbing Morris had felt earlier when Gilman had informed him that Stonehedge was going to be tagging along started up again as he appreciated what a mess this investigation was becoming.

  “Let’s see if I can clarify this,” Morris said. “We could be dealing with SCK even though he killed Freeman differently than his other victims. Or we could be dealing with a copycat, which means someone in New York—either FBI, police, a witness, someone from the ME’s office, or possibly dozens of other potential sources, leaked the particulars of the SCK killings to our new SCK. Or this could be totally random. Some very angry psycho holding a grudge against Freeman who just happened to stumble on the same bizarre method of murder that SCK used.”

  “Again, your last choice has a very low probability,” Goodman insisted

  “But not impossible.”

  “No, not impossible.”

  Philip Stonehedge spoke up then, “Pardon my interruption, but the original SCK could be the source of the leak, if it is a copycat. Let’s say he got arrested five years ago and is now rotting in prison. He could’ve confided in a fellow prisoner who has since been released and is carrying out SCK’s murders for him. Or it could be any number of similar scenarios.”

  “Not bad, Hollywood,” Polk grudgingly admitted.

  Morris took a deep breath as he made a decision. “We’re going to have to investigate this on both ends,” he said. He nodded at his MBI investigators—Bogle, Lemmon, and Polk. “You three take the first plane you can to New York and try to find out where SCK’s been the last five years, and if it’s a copycat, who leaked what to whom. Myself and our esteemed LAPD colleagues will investigate things from this end.”

  “What about Hollywood?” Lemmon asked. “You want us to take him with us?”

  Morris shook his head. “No, Phil will stick with me.” Then to Sam Goodman, “My guys are going to need full case folders so they know who to talk to in New York.”

  “Won’t be a problem.”

  Morris gave his men who were still sitting at the conference table a quizzical look.

  “I thought you three had a plane to catch?”

  Bogle chuckled as he pushed himself away from the table. Lemmon reminded Polk that since Hollywood neither lost his lunch nor fainted he now owed him sixty dollars. Polk acted as if he didn’t hear this, and as he reached the door, he belted out to the tune of New York, New York, “If you can kill them there, you can kill them anywhere.” Lemmon commented that Polk was no Sinatra, no Bette Midler either, although in his opinion Polk looked more like Midler than Sinatra. Lemmon closed the door behind him, cutting off from those still in the soundproofed conference room what would surely have been a biting comeback from Polk.

  For the next half hour, Morris strategized with the four LA police detectives. Roger Smichen was able to give them a four-hour window for when Freeman was killed, but it would help to narrow the window down, and it would especially help to know what time Freeman showed up at the house in Venice, and Malevich was going to keep digging for that information. The crime-scene specialists were able to lift over a dozen different fingerprints from inside the house. Given that the inside front doorknob had been wiped clean and that the only fingerprints lifted from the outside doorknob belonged to the realtor who had followed Freeman, there was little chance that a
ny of these fingerprints belonged to the killer—but Walsh and the other two Los Angeles detectives were tasked to match the fingerprints with names, which meant fingerprinting every realtor and potential buyer who had entered the house. Once the Los Angeles detectives had left with their assignments, Morris asked Goodman, “When are you going to know whether we’re dealing with the original SCK, a copycat, or something else?”

  Goodman didn’t need any time to think about his answer. “After the next two murders.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Henry was really beginning to love social media. What a great way to stalk someone you want to kill, he thought. Of course, that was only if they announce every little thing they do, like this Gail Hawes was doing.

  Last night when he went to Susan’s rented town house he snuck a look at her address book and got Hawes’s address while Susan was off in the kitchen pouring them both snifters of cognac. She didn’t invite him over just to snift cognac, but to see if he was feeling up to doing the dirty deed, as she liked to call it. It turned out to be a lot more difficult the second time to stay strong and resist the temptation she was offering, and he came within a heartbeat of giving in, but he meant the vows he made to Sheila. As much as his wife might like to claim otherwise, he did truly love her. Besides, what good is a man if he can’t live up to his promises? So after their snifts of cognac (which to Henry tasted no better than lighter fluid) and a few smooches on the sofa while Susan maneuvered his hand so that he copped a feel of one of her plumlike breasts, Henry told her that he didn’t think his heart was strong enough for them to continue down the path they were on, but given a few days to recuperate he was sure he’d be up to it. And so he left with Susan frustrated and unsatisfied, but alive, and himself with Gail Hawes’s address.

  After he cleaned, dressed, fed, and put his wife to bed for the night, he investigated Hawes because he decided he wanted her to be his next victim. Even though he’d only met her for a minute, she had rubbed him the wrong way, and it just seemed to make more sense to choose as his victims people who rubbed him the wrong way. As he thought about how that made a world of sense, he was hit by inspiration of how he’d be able to get her alone. His plan was still hatching in his mind and not yet fully formed, but one thing he knew for sure was that, for it to work, he’d have to be able to watch for when she left her apartment building. With that in mind, he performed some virtual spying by entering her West Hollywood address into Google Earth, and the satellite photo that popped up and all the subsequent “street view” photos showed that she lived in an attractive apartment building with extensive landscaping on a street filled with similarly attractive apartment buildings, all with extensive landscaping. Nice location, he had to give her that, but he couldn’t see any good hiding spots to watch her building from, at least not without him sticking out like a sore thumb.