And felt it again.
Corrina looked up and down the street until her eyes settled on a vehicle fifty yards away.
A van.
A silver GMC Savana. She’d know that vehicle anywhere, having stared at it day after day in the task force room.
Corrina put the milk on the ground and started walking toward the vehicle, her heart racing, her right hand on her hip, resting on the butt of her Glock. The van was facing away from her, but Corrina could tell that there was someone inside. Movement reflected in the side mirror. She couldn’t make them out, just a dark silhouette.
She got to within thirty yards and the van’s engine started up. Corrina broke into a sprint, but she was still fifteen yards from the van’s tail when the tires screeched and it shot away from the curb. Corrina dashed back to her car, hitting the entry fob as she ran. She jumped in, and slammed into reverse as the engine roared to life. She cranked the wheel, spinning into the street, and slammed the accelerator to the floorboard.
The van had a good lead. She saw it turn a few blocks ahead, onto 22nd Street. Corrina raced after it, blasting through a stop sign. The tires squealed as she took the corner. Again, she glimpsed the back of the van as it took a left onto Washington. She followed, ignoring the blaring horns of other drivers as they slammed on their brakes to avoid hitting her.
The van was gone.
Corrina continued straight, looking left and right down the side streets, but there was no sign of it.
She swore at the top of her lungs, took a left and doubled back to where she’d started.
She’d lost the van.
Worse, she only had a partial plate. 15S. The rest was covered with mud, whether by luck or design. Probably the latter, she suspected.
If it was the killer, what was he doing outside her home? Was he hoping to snatch Connor? A shiver went through her at the thought, but she dismissed the idea. If Jess was right, and the killer chose his victims because of the sins of their families, Connor was safe. Corrina had never owned a business, never fabricated evidence to put someone away, never even had a speeding ticket. In short, she’d done nothing to bring herself to the killer’s attention.
Unless Jess was wrong.
Corrina knew she couldn’t take any chances. She parked in front of the house once more and went inside. Kat stood as she entered, while Connor ran to Corrina and threw his arms around her.
“Is everything okay?” the babysitter asked. “I saw you pull up, then moments later you sped off.”
“Everything’s fine,” Corrina lied. She gave Kat two twenties from her purse. “I’m not going to need you for the rest of the week,” she said. “Connor’s going to stay with his dad for a few days.”
Kat looked nervous. “Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”
“I’m positive,” Corrina said, ushering her toward the door. She handed Kat her coat, then watched the teenager walk across the street to her own home. Once she was inside, Corrina locked the door behind her.
“Am I really gonna stay with Dad?” Connor asked.
“Yes,” she said. “Just for a few days. I’ve got to go to New York for a conference.” Better the white lie than to traumatize him by telling him he could be chopped into little pieces if he stayed here. “Go pack a bag. I’ll be ready to go in a minute.”
Connor disappeared to his room, and Corrina called her husband.
“I need you to take Connor for a few days,” she said when he answered.
“Is it work?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Whenever you want to skip your parental responsibilities, it’s always work related.”
What the hell ever attracted me to this asshole? “Yes, I suppose it’s work related,” she sighed.
“Thought so. What is it this time? Gotta spend a few days investigating a hotel room with McCrae Loney?”
“Mike, just for once, don’t be a prick. This is important.”
“I bet it is. Must be at least a week since you guys last screwed.”
Corrina was glad they weren’t in the same room. The temptation to put a bullet between Mike’s eyes would have been too hard to resist. At the same time, she didn’t want to unduly worry him about his son’s safety, but she had no alternative but to give it to him straight.
“I take it you’ve seen the news about the serial killer, Fifteen-X.”
“Are you gonna tell me you’re sleeping with him, too?”
“Mike! For Christ’s sake, pull your head out of the gutter and listen for once!”
There was silence on the other end, and she hoped her outburst had brought him to his senses.
“I think he was outside the house when I got home,” Corrina continued. “There was someone in a van, and when I went to speak to him, he drove off fast. I just need you to take Connor for a few days, just until we catch this guy.”
She expected her husband to realize the severity of the situation and agree to her request.
Once again, he disappointed her.
“How dare you drag our son into this?” he growled.
“You think I’d knowingly put Connor in danger? Is that what you think of me?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore.”
Corrina had had enough. “Forget it. I’ll take him to stay with his grandpa.”
“No. If someone’s after Connor, you’re not leaving him with an old man. I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
The phone went dead in her hand, and Corrina resisted the temptation to hurl it across the room.
“What’s wrong?” Connor asked. He was standing in the hallway, hugging his Spiderman onesie. “Are you and Daddy fighting?”
“No, honey,” she said, leading him back to his bedroom. “I just wanted him to hurry, that’s all. Come on, let’s get you packed. You need clothes for six days and all your schoolbooks. You choose what you want to wear and I’ll come and fold them in a minute.”
She left him to make his selection and went to the den, where she logged in to her laptop. She recorded the encounter with the van on the system, then left a note for Josh to sift out owners whose plates started with 15S. That should narrow the search considerably. Corrina then called McCrae and told him what had happened.
“Are you okay?” were his first words.
“Yeah. A little shaken at first, but I’m fine now.” She told him about the partial plate, and he promised to act on it immediately.
“Want me to come over?” her asked her.
Corrina very much wanted to say yes, but with Mike on his way, it would only make things awkward.
“No, I need to—" Her laptop pinged, and Corrina noticed the new email icon. “Hang on.” She clicked it open. The message had been forwarded from Jess Duffey’s account.
Hello Jess.
Have I given you enough clues yet? Do you know why I’m doing this? I’m sure you do, but just in case, I spell it all out in the next chapter of my story. They have to know why I did what I did. There are too many people like this, Jess. The world is full of them. They’ll do anything for money, and they don’t care who they hurt. They think a few grand in compensation will make things right, but it never does. It just perpetuates the cycle. Someone has to stand up to them and say enough is enough.
I think they’re getting the message now.
Here’s where to find number six: ///knock.reversed.flanks
Until the next one,
15X
“He’s sent another one,” Corrina said. “I’m forwarding it to you now.”
A moment later, McCrae told her he’d received it. “If what he says is true, it should clear a few things up.”
“Let’s hope so,” Corrina said. “I’ll call you back in ten.”
Chapter 21
Chapter Six
I won’t bother telling you how I captured Sarah Veldman. It’s an interesting story, but not as interesting as what her husband did to put her in my sights. His name is Conrad Veldman, and he’s a pretty wealthy
guy. Not Forbes Rich List wealthy, but he’s got enough to buy that nice place up in Westwood. And how did he make that money?
From the suffering of others.
You see, Conrad Veldman is a landlord. He owns nearly two hundred properties in LA and his portfolio alone is worth close to eighty million bucks. He charges a minimum of two grand a month, almost five million a year. That’s not all profit, though. Oh, no, he has to pay for the upkeep of his rentals.
But Conrad doesn’t like spending money. If a tenant complains of a broken boiler or lack of running water, Conrad tells them to fix it themselves. It’s hidden deep in his contract with them, but they don’t know about it until something breaks. That’s when he gives them the bad news. Not only that, he gives them just seven days to make the repair, or they’re kicked out!
Conrad also doesn’t like going through the proper court process.
Let me tell you about one eviction that made the newspapers. Ingrid Harding was a 63-year-old who rented one of Veldman’s properties out in Compton. She lived alone and worked at the Walmart. Ingrid had arthritis. She’d worked through the pain for years, but it got so that she couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. She had to leave her job and claimed disability, and she was waiting for an assessment and her payments to start. That meant she was without money for a few weeks, because Walmart only paid her twelve lousy bucks an hour, and that’s not enough to save anything. So Ingrid told Conrad Veldman about her situation and asked for a little time to make rent. This was two days before payment was due.
Conrad said no. Not because he needed the rent immediately or his own family would starve, but because rent controls meant he couldn’t hike Ingrid’s monthly fee to the levels he wanted to. He’d already got other renters lined up who were willing to pay $250 a month more than the poor, elderly Ingrid, but Conrad needed an excuse to get her out.
She’d unwittingly provided him with it.
Two days later, Conrad served her with an eviction notice. Ingrid immediately called around, and her friends raised enough for her rent and then some.
Conrad didn’t care. He was only interested in getting her out so that he could maximize his return. Five million bucks a year wasn’t enough for Conrad. He had to have an extra three grand by upping the rent on her apartment.
It went to court, but Conrad had been through the process so many times, he knew it inside out. He and his lawyer, his brother, Elias, got the right to throw Ingrid out. She had just 24 hours to pack her stuff.
She couldn’t afford to rent anywhere else in the neighborhood, so she had to go to a local shelter until she could get back on her feet. Her family was either dead or back in Jacksonville, so she had no-one to turn to in LA.
Unable to work, unable to support herself, unable to sleep in her own bed, it all became too much for Ingrid Harding. On January 3rd, 2015, she died of an overdose. She took her entire supply of Oxycontin, washed down with a fifth of gin.
As I said, her story made the papers. Conrad was asked for his response to the tragedy.
Do you know what he said?
I’ll tell you. He said, “No comment.” Ingrid’s life was worth just two fucking words to him. Two words and an extra three grand in the bank each year.
I told all this to Sarah Veldman as she lay naked on my table. I told her what her husband had done, but she swore he was a good man. “Maybe good to you,” I said, “but not to anyone else.”
I told her about the others, too.
About Anthony Swanson. Did you know that he’d once made car seats that weren’t properly tested? He claimed they were, obviously, and he was right to some degree. The law stated that crashes only have to be survivable in a front-impact scenario. Anthony could have tested for side-impact, too, but he didn’t, because it would have cost money. He chose to save his cash, and three children died because of it.
And Vincent Perry. He was another. He wanted to demolish an entire neighborhood and rebuild it from scratch, only this time he wasn’t going to build cheap housing. No, he wanted to cater to the high end of the market. He engaged in guerrilla warfare with dozens of families, having his men sabotage the water supply to the area, then the power, then the water again when it was fixed. He had punks drive around at two in the morning, music blaring and firing guns into the air. In short, he made life hell for the residents. And do you know why? Because if he’d paid them market rates for their properties, it would have cost him two million dollars. Instead, he forced the people to leave, and then offered them 60 cents on the dollar for their homes.
Vincent Perry made thirty-six million from the new development. It would have been thirty-four if he’d done things the right way, and Joanne Perry would probably still be alive today, but he made his choice. He’ll have to live with it.
Who’s next? Oh, yes, Miriam Crane. She ran a hospital that decided not to help a pregnant woman who didn’t have health insurance. She was admitted with a condition that was life-threatening for her and her unborn son, but once it was discovered that she couldn’t pay, they changed her chart to something trivial and sent her on her way. An investigation revealed that it was hospital policy to do so, but no charges were ever filed against the staff. Instead, “lessons were learned,” which translates as “we fucked up, got caught, but don’t want to be punished in any way. Oh, and we’ll do the same thing again, because, you know, we can get away with it.”
You all know what happened to Miriam’s husband, Thomas. My only regret is that Miriam died a few days before I could share my exploits with you. How I wish she could have suffered, if only for a few days.
Craig Madden was a little different. Most companies provide a service or make things and sells them. FMT Group doesn’t do any of that. It buys companies, makes “efficiency savings” and then sells them for a profit. Sounds innocent enough, but when they bought Carrick Marketing Solutions back in 2013, they immediately outsourced the call center functions to India and the Philippines. That left 1500 people without work. These people were tossed onto the scrap pile just so Craig Madden’s company could make a few million in profit. This to add to the four BILLION they already had. Nothing manufactured, nothing sold, no service provided, just more people out of work in the most expensive state in the country. Who knows, maybe some of those who were shit-canned rented from Conrad Veldman at the time. If they did, I bet that didn’t end well.
Last in the catch-up stakes is Orville Lewis, everyone’s favorite council member. Remember that harsh winter a few years ago, the coldest one we’ve had since records began? Orville thought that would be a good time to withhold funding from some of the city’s homeless shelters. A dozen were closed down, and nineteen people died in the following few days. Of course, that prompted a U-turn, the shelters were re-opened, and—of course—more lessons were learned.
As for the ones to come, I’ll give you my take on them and let our intrepid reporter Jess Duffey fill in the blanks. Suffice to say, they all got what they deserved.
And now to Sarah Veldman. The first thing Sarah did when she came around was to soil herself.
Dirty bitch.
So I gave her a bath. Oops, was that caustic soda I added to the water? Sorry, Sarah.
Remember in a previous chapter, when I told you I’d had an idea? Well, it was a doozy, especially for Sarah. It was a clear plastic tube, about the width of the average erect penis, maybe an inch and a half in diameter. If I press a button at one end, the other end opens. It also had a plunger, so I can push the contents out the end.
I inserted it into her vagina. She wasn’t keen, I could tell, but I stuck to it. In, out, in, out. She didn’t seem too distressed by it, which was good.
Because I was just messing with her.
I opened one end of the tube and inserted a Dolichovespula maculate. That’s a bald-faced hornet, for those who didn’t know. They live here in the good ol’ US of A. They aren’t really hornets, just wasps, but they sure are big, nasty fuckers.
Turns out, one thing
they don’t like is being stuck up some rich bitch’s pussy. I got it up there nice and far, the pushed the plunger all the way in. As soon as she screamed, I pulled the tube out—making sure it was empty, obviously—and stuffed a rag into her so it couldn’t escape.
Sarah’s screams were the loudest so far. To take her mind off things, I did the usual digit thing. Snip! Snip! Snip!
Sadly, she didn’t last long. Either bald-faced hornets are more toxic than I’d read, or she was allergic to the stings, or maybe she just wasn’t a fighter. I only got halfway through peeling her face off when she expired.
Not even three hours.
What a bitch!
Never mind, she suffered. And I want Conrad Veldman to imagine every second of those hundred and seventy minutes, because she screeched the entire time. She cursed your name, Conrad. Cursed you for putting her through the agony, cursed you for caring more for money than you did for your fellow man.
Does it hurt, Conrad?
I do hope so.
And if anyone out there had a loved one go missing in the last few years, ask yourself: did I do something to get on his list? If you didn’t, you’ll be fine.
But nine of you did.
Maybe you know it, maybe you don’t.
You’ll find out soon enough.
Chapter 22
Josh’s early appearances were becoming a habit. He ambled in just after six in the morning, put a cup of coffee on his desk and booted his computer.
“Shit the bed again?” Corrina asked as she snuck up behind him.
Josh jumped. “Jeez, Corrina. Not what I need first thing.” He got himself back under control. “What are you doing here so early?”
“I’ve been here all night,” Corrina told him.
After reading the latest chapter, she’d called McCrae back and they’d discussed their next move. Mike had turned up while they were on the phone, walking into the house unannounced and accusing her of making plans with her lover while their son was in danger. Corrina hadn’t even bothered trying to explain the situation. She’d kissed her son, handed him over to his father and shooed them both out of the house. After watching Mike drive away, she decided to go to the office. McCrae had said he was going to pull an all-nighter, so she opted to do the same in case anything came in.
Fifteen Times a Killer Page 17