Ogrodnik

by Gary Coffin

  The impersonal monotone of Elliot’s Bluetooth voice interrupted his train of thought just as he pulled into the office parking lot.

  “Hello.”

  “Elliot, Sammy here.”

  “Sammy? What’s up?” Sammy didn’t answer for a moment, and Elliot sensed something was amiss.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “I saw three suits going up to the office like you owed ’em money. I knew you weren’t there, so when I heard them stomping around, I went upstairs to see what they wanted.”

  “And, what did they want?”

  “They were looking for something. They must have picked the lock, and they were rifling through your files. I confronted them. They beat me up pretty good, and their leader cut off my thumb with a cleaver as a warning.”

  “You OK?”

  “I’ll live. I’m still at the hospital. They just sewed it back on. They think it’ll take. “

  “Did you phone the police?”

  “Yeah, I talked to a couple of badges about a half hour ago. They took my statement and will get back to me. They’ll want to talk to you.”

  “What did the suits say?“

  “They didn’t say anything. These guys were pros, Elliot. They meant business.”

  “Damn, I’m sorry, Sammy. Do you need anything? Is there anything I can do?”

  “Just be careful.”

  “Can you describe them?”

  “The leader was a bald headed prick with a toothpick hanging out of his mouth.”

  “Yilmaz,” muttered Elliot.

  “You knew him? There was also a guy with short hair and a moustache and a big guy with a thick neck.”

  “I don’t know them, but I know of them. I’m sorry you got involved, Sammy.”

  “Who are they? I got some friends who can handle themselves, if you know what I mean. Should I call ’em?”

  “Stay away. These guys were probably involved in my father’s death. Let me handle them.”

  Ogrodnik parked in back of an abandoned building in Griffintown next to the warehouse where Kulas had led his tail. Previous visits to this site had supplied him with a lay of the land, so his initial drive-by was used to locate the ex-cop’s stakeout spot.

  He parked down the street out of sight and quickly formulated his plan. The big man reached into the backseat to get a small furry bundle that would easily be mistaken for a real dog and proceeded to walk to the canal edge, still out of sight of where he knew the tail was parked. If the intel on the tail was accurate, he would not be caught unawares. A direct approach was required.

  His plan was simple. Sometimes simple was best. He would wander along the canal edge, carting his faux dog until he came into the ex-cop’s sightlines. The tail would see him coming into his view from a direction that was not the warehouse and would not be overly suspect. A good tail was always suspicious, so the big man would assume that Girard would be wary but would also be reticent to take any unwarranted action. It was easy for the big man to be mistaken for a halfwit using the usual big man bias to his advantage. Most people saw what they expected to see. Even a trained watcher would be fooled.

  Ogrodnik turned away from the canal and ambled alongside an old warehouse toward Girard’s parked car without looking up. He kicked through the windblown garbage that gathered in the eddies at the base of the old building that ran toward Frank's vehicle. When the big man reached the point closest to the vehicle, he looked up feigning curiosity in the car and wandered over with a stunned look on his face and drool on his lip from a partially open mouth.

  * * * * * * *

  Frank watched while the large man picked his way along the building wall that ran toward his car. His immediate thoughts were that this was a simpleton who offered no threat, but he had enough experience to tell him that not all things can be taken at face value. He slowly pulled his gun from the holster and placed it on the passenger seat underneath a paper just in case. He kept a watchful eye on the halfwit as he slowly made his way along the wall toward his car.

  When the halfwit turned off the wall and took an interest in Frank’s car, Frank intentionally ignored him thinking that if he didn’t establish eye contact, the simpleton would just go away. He did not.

  A tap on the window forced Frank to look up into a massive, slack jawed face. He saw what he expected to see—drool on the lip, rheumy eyes, and a general sense of not being all there. He kept the gun out of view and lowered the window.

  “Can I help you?” Frank asked with indifference.

  It was then he noticed something odd about the dog. Was it asleep or dead?

  The hand holding the dog shot forward, and before Frank could react, the spasm of neuron overload took him and swept him away.

  Ogrodnik reached into the car, took the ex-cop's head in his hands and gave a violent twist to the right. He liked the popping sound that the vertebrae made when the bones snapped. To him, it sounded like finality.

  He leaned further into the car and uncovered the gun on the passenger seat. He had no interest in the gun. A check of the inside jacket pocket found what he was looking for, the phone. A quick scan of recent activity showed him the correspondences with the son and his partner. The last text identified Kulas’s location in Griffintown and was sent to Elliot Forsman and Rivka Goldstein.

  “Fate is a beautiful thing,” he mumbled as he sent a text to Goldstein alone stating that something had come up, and he needed to be relieved for a short while.

  Rivka’s first pass-by showed her where Frank was parked. She parked down the street and texted Frank that she was close by and ready to take over and waited for a response. None came.

  She was reluctant to phone him in case he was in the middle of a delicate situation: a situation that demanded total silence, a situation where even the buzzing of a muted cell phone might be too loud. It was time to take a walk.

  She eyed his car upon approach and could clearly see his silhouette in the driver’s seat. Could he be asleep? she thought. Rivka threw caution to the wind and approached the car, her hand resting on her hip just above her .38. Frank certainly looked to be sleeping as she walked up to the open driver’s side window. She called his name and reached in to shake his shoulder. Rivka whipped around to meet a rustle from behind but was too late. The Taser had already found its mark, and she was taken.

  She woke up with a gasp. Pain racked her body as she opened her eyes to see the leering face of an ogre not inches from her own. Waves of pain coursed through her body when she tried to reposition herself only to realize that her arms were behind her back and pinned underneath her body. The enormous beast held her in place using a knee across her thighs and a hand pushing her shoulder into the ground. She was hopelessly pinned down.

  “Hello, my little star of David,” he hissed into her face. “I’m so pleased we finally got to meet face to face. It’s been much too long. “

  Riv gasped as he applied more weight to her shoulder.

  “As much as I’d like to stay here and play with you, my employer would rather you and your man-friend be spared. I wasn’t supposed to engage you at all, but after dispatching your fat lackey, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to say hello, in my own way.”

  Ogrodnik halted for a second as a thought crossed his mind. “How rude of me. I have not properly introduced myself. You can call me Ogrodnik. Everyone else does. When my employer approached me to dispatch your corpulent comrade, I decided to take the job on the off chance we would meet, and...” said the big man as he paused for effect. “...now we have. Had I brought my torch, I’d be tempted to finish my job here and now and to hell with my spineless associate. But alas, there will be no release for me today.“

  The effects of the Taser were wearing off and through the pain, Rivka wondered at the incongruity of what her senses were telling her. The man above her was a giant. The sheer size of his features was disorienting to be near. His nose, the size of a man’s fist, the gnarled teeth beneath
, like yellowed piano keys crammed into an orifice. The stench of rotting meat and sour milk pouring from his mouth when he spoke sickened her. Most confusing of all was his voice. It had the same soprano pitched tone one would expect from an adolescent boy, and his speech flowed with a melodious sing-song quality that might be considered beautiful if one could discount the repulsive nature of its source. On top of that, his vocabulary would have rivaled that of any English professor, which only underscored the monstrous intelligence of the beast on top of her.

  Rivka was hard as nails when she needed to be, but fear had taken hold of her this day. 

  “Until we meet again, Officer Goldstein,” he said, and with that he moved his face close to Rivka’s as if to kiss her. Instead, he extended a tongue like a skin mitten and slowly licked her face from chin to forehead while an unseen hand re-applied the Taser. During the subsequent convulsion, Rivka slid down a gun barrel until the void caught her and swept her away.

  The pain bit into her when she opened her eyes. Even the slightest movement sent spikes of agony up through her body and into her skull. An immense exhaustion enveloped her, so she lay still, eyes closed, letting the Taser-induced miasma disperse until she could muster enough resources to reach into her pocket and get her phone. She considered calling 911 but instead dialed Elliot.

  “Riv. How goes?“

  The trauma of the events was catching up to Rivka. The adrenalin that got her safely through the ordeal was now receding, and when she reached for the boost that kept her strong and thinking straight, it was no longer there. Rivka had every intention of re-telling Elliot in a straightforward and factual manner what had happened. All that came from her mouth was a hollow moan. 

  She heard Elliot’s frantic discourse over the phone and in time gained enough composure to tell him where she was and, no, she was not hurt. 

  By the time Elliot arrived, the emergency teams were already on site. The first thing he saw when running toward the scene was Rivka sitting in the back of the ambulance being administered to by a paramedic.

  He slowed as he approached and was hesitant to interrupt the medic/patient process. When Rivka saw him, she brushed the paramedic aside, stood up stiffly and gave him a hug. Elliot knew Rivka and understood that this was not a hug of affection but an appeal for support. Whatever happened to her had shaken her to the core. Rivka put on a brave face and tried to act normally, but all Elliot saw before him was a frightened little girl. The brashness was gone, replaced by fragility that he didn’t even know existed in her. He sensed her battle to maintain composure while in their clutch, against his every want, he did not question her. He held her tight and gave her the time to get past the moment.

  “You OK?” he whispered.

  “I’m fine,” she said quietly. “My muscles are sore, and I’ve got a few scrapes and bruises, but Rene over there says with a full night’s sleep, I’ll be as good as new,” she said tilting her head toward the paramedic.

  “You don’t look OK. What about Frank?” asked Elliot as he looked at the beehive of police activity over by a car on the other side of the parking lot. He already knew the answer.

  Rivka shook her head and buried it further into his shoulder; Elliot thought she was going to cry. “Frank’s dead,” she managed.

  “What happened? “ he said in low, flat voice. This voice was Elliot’s defense mechanism when he needed to detach himself and think logically in times of stress.

  “I don’t know. I found him in the car, and it looked like his neck was broken. Before I could even reach for my gun, a man tased me from behind.“

  “Did you see him?” he asked in the same monotone voice.

  “Yes, he talked to me. He wanted to introduce himself. He said his name was Ogrodnik. I think it was Kulas’s partner. ”

  “Not now, Riv. We can go over this later. Have they taken your statement?“

  “Not yet.”

  “Are you up to it?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Rivka, let’s not tell them anything more than they need to know. You were assaulted and tased, and that was the end of it. You didn’t see who assaulted you. I don’t know whom to trust anymore.”

  “I have no problem with that. I just want to get out of here and get back home.”

  “Can you drive?”

  “I’ll manage. See you back at my place?” she said more as a plea than a question.

  “I’ll meet you there.”

  Elliot decided he’d not tell the onsite officers that Frank was working for him. He had no stomach for an interview session at the moment.

  Elliot entered the house without knocking and found Rivka sitting on the couch with a freshly brewed pot of tea. He approached her with concern. “You still look pretty shook up, Riv. Can you talk about it?”

  Rivka started at the beginning and told him everything she could remember. She had to stop a couple of times but managed to tell the entire story in sequence.

  After a moment, Elliot broke the silence. “I want to apologize for dragging you into this. This is not your fight,” he said quietly. 

  “Elliot, this is my fight,” she shot back stressing the ‘is.' “There’s something else. He said something else,” Rivka squeaked out.

  Elliot said nothing and just looked at her.

  “He said, he said, ‘if I’d had brought my torch, I’d be tempted to finish the job here and now.'”

  The significance of this was lost on Elliot. “Yeah, so… What does that mean?”

  “The torch, Elliot! You remember the Stungun Killer. The Stungun Killer never left any evidence. He used a torch on his victims. He didn’t want to leave trace evidence behind, so he burned the hair from the victim’s pubic area after he raped and killed them. This information was never released to the public. The only thing we know about Stungun is that he used the same MO for all his killings and that he was an extremely large man. It fits. Frank was tased and his neck broken, just like the Stungun victims. Elliot, I think the big man is the Stungun Killer!“

  “Anyone could have a torch, Riv. I don’t know if being a big man and mentioning a torch makes this guy the Stungun Killer,” he said with more than a little doubt in his voice.

  “He called me Officer Goldstein, Elliot. The first thing he said to me was, ‘I’m glad we finally get to meet face to face. It’s been much too long.’

  “Finally, get to meet? Much too long? We’ve only been working this case for four days now. Why would he say that if we’ve only been working the case for four days? Why would he know me as Officer Goldstein?”

  Elliot watched the veins on Rivka’s neck distend as she was making her case and was worried.

  “I don’t know, Riv. I don’t know.”

  “I never told you what happened. I never told you about the Stungun case and why I left the force.”

  “You’ve had a tough day. You have your reasons for doing what you did, and I don’t need to know them. “

  Rivka ignored him, sat back on the couch and stared up at the ceiling.

  “I walked the downtown beat for twelve years. I loved that job. I knew every business owner and vagrant from St Laurent to Atwater, and they knew me. I felt I’d found my calling,” Rivka said distantly.

  “After eight or nine years, I’d paid my dues and started being noticed within the department as someone with a future. I guess I caught the eye of the Brass, and they got it into their heads that it would be good for the force if I were more visible, so they sent Captain Andrea Brebouef to recruit me. I was good in front of a camera; I was a woman and a Jew: a Triple Crown winner in their eyes. They wanted to make me the face of the force, the new police. That was all flattering, but I had no intention of being a poster child for the law enforcement. I wanted to serve and protect, not rub elbows with dignitaries and smile for photo ops. After I declined Captain Brebouef for a couple of years, they changed their tactics and offered me a spot in the high profile, major crimes division as a detective. Even thou
gh this was more appealing than being just a face, I was quite happy where I was. I told Brebouef politely that I wasn’t interested at this time. And that was the end of it; until the Stungun Killer.

  “In February of 2012, a woman was found raped and murdered in the east end. She had been tased, raped, her neck was then broken and her body dumped in an alley about a kilometer east of Olympic stadium. The press reported it, but it was just another murder and didn’t attract much attention.” 

  “I remember,” Elliot said quietly.

  “Three days later, another body was discovered, this time, south of downtown, in the Pointe. Like the first, tased, raped, neck broken and dumped. When the press got hold of this one, they made the connection immediately and put it on the front page of every newspaper in the country. Nothing makes headlines like a serial killer. Different papers used different names for the killer, but the name that stuck was the Stungun Killer. It rolled off the tongue well and sold lots of papers. I took an interest in the story, as did every cop in the area, but my involvement was limited to being on the lookout for anything or anyone who caught my eye. The third victim was six days later. She was a seventeen-year-old student on her way home from a late class. The same MO. Tased, raped, killed and found in a dumpster at a construction site in Hampstead. The only difference was, she was my niece. I got the call at 10:30 p.m. From my captain. He knew we were related and gave me a heads-up before it hit the media. First thing I did was call my sister and then, on the way over to her house, I called Brebouef from the car. I was still shaking from the news and told Brebouef that I’d take the detective job on the condition that I was put on the Stungun Killer case. Usually, they’ll cite conflict of interest to have a cop investigate a relative’s death, but they were horny to get me, so they rationalized the situation by stating that I’d be an assisting detective and wouldn’t be responsible for any decisions. I’d do whatever got me closer to the case. The next day, I was reassigned.”