Prologue
Stepping out of the air-conditioned house to the covered outside patio was not unlike stepping into an oven, despite the shade. The killer was already sweating some from the heat, not simply the exertion and the sexual gratification as the two sets of gloves were snapped off, one at a time, and outer layers of clothing were removed. The killer checked carefully, though, and no perspiration had escaped those vital outer layers. A slight breeze brought a delightfully cooling evaporation to the sweat-moistened skin and gently ruffled the newly-freed hair.
As always, the outer set of gloves had turned inside-out as they came off. The blood on them made them appear dark purple in the center, grading towards the blue of their edges. The painter’s whites were pretty well splattered and in some small spots, even soaked with blood, but other than a few minor stains on the t-shirt, nothing had gone through.
The t-shirt would eventually go into the bag with the whites and the gloves for washing with plenty of bleach and, as appropriate, subsequent disposal in some safe location. Booties came off the shoes and were dropped into the bag as well. Despite their blinding appearance, unbloodied painter’s whites were actually in some ways superb camouflage, because the wearer became simply one more working person, and who bothers to look at a painter walking along? They were readily available, too.
There was no murder weapon to dispose of this time; the knives that had done the job here were still buried in the bodies. They’d come out of the kitchen in the house, so the police were not going to be able to develop any telltale information out of where and by whom they’d been purchased. There would be no information about the killer coming from them. Thanks to the gloves, there was not one single fingerprint on them to worry about, either.
Satisfied that the crime scene was as free of trace evidence and other clues as it could possibly be, or at least as close to that level of cleanliness as could be managed, the killer picked up the black plastic garbage bag with the stripped-off outer clothes and slipped quietly out through the gate in the back fence. Finding the quickest route through the desert out to the road was easy, since it had already been scoped out, the final exit from the scene as meticulously planned as every other step in the process.
The killer checked quickly for possible traffic and, finding none, started along the barely-visible path across the hard-packed soil threading between cactus and scrub trees until reaching the roadway. At that point the killer became simply one more civic-minded trash picker, calmly scouring the side of the road for a distance before reaching the car that had waited patiently.
Once in it with the air conditioning going full blast, it was the work of moments to strip off the slightly bloodied t-shirt, use it to scrub at a couple of bloody spots on the skin underneath and replace it with a clean one. The used one went into the bag with everything else, which included several pieces of roadside trash, both above and below the whites and other items.
The killer looked at the face reflected in the rear-view mirror and gave a small contented sigh. One or two small spots of blood, unnoticeable from more than ten feet away, that readily yielded to a spit-moistened fingertip. Another unfaithful pair down, and nobody in the police department or the sheriff’s department apparently even knew yet that there was a serial killer on the loose in the city. Of course, not taking souvenirs from the crime scenes, leaving no signature, and following no repetitious pattern helped, but the longer they failed to notice, the more that could be accomplished.
The killer, very naturally, found immeasurable personal satisfaction in the effort, but recognition by others for what was being done was not important. If anything, anonymity was more valuable than recognition, because it meant less official notice, hence less potential interference. With some imagination, some continued attention to detail, who knew how long the luck might hold? Even when they did figure it out, they’d be hard-pressed to find out who was actually committing all of these murders. That was a certainty. The car pulled away from the side of the road, bounced onto the pavement and drove off towards the center of town.
***
The cafeteria-style restaurant was more than a bit crowded, but Reesa paid no attention. What little attention she spared from her novel, the paperback she held braced open one-handed with the deftness of long practice, was devoted to making sure her fork didn’t miss the food on her plate. She was startled when a man’s voice interrupted her. “Excuse me, but do you mind if I share your table? The place seems awfully crowded at the moment.” She looked up to see a man who appeared to be, like her, in his late twenties. Clean clothes, dark blonde hair (almost in need of a haircut), a nice if undistinguished face (long oval, blue-gray eyes, high forehead, clean-shaven, chin strong but not dominant, average cheekbones, no lips worth mentioning, but that was a common failing among men – she couldn’t help taking down the description to herself), and he looked to be a little bit taller than she was. Probably about six feet or so. Decent musculature but not overdone, as far as she could tell in his slightly over-large t-shirt and tan jeans, probably about 170 pounds or thereabouts. Not a serious bodybuilder, then, but apparently fairly fit. Someone who probably paid a reasonable amount of attention to his physical condition. Good looking, overall. Might be interesting were she in the market for a partner – which she wasn’t. He was holding his tray and smiling pleasantly as he waited for her answer.
She glanced around, uncertain how much annoyance she should feel at being interrupted. Hers wasn’t the only table with an open seat, but the others all appeared to have either couples or families at them. If there were any others with single women, honesty compelled her to admit that she was probably still the most attractive choice he had in terms of both age and appearance. Reesa avoided being vain, but she could at least be honest about what she saw in the mirror each morning. She shrugged. “Sure. I won’t be here much longer anyway.” She gestured to the chair opposite.
She’d just gotten back into the plot of her book when he broke her train of thought again. “I’m Jeff,” he said, as he set his plate on the table.
“How nice for you,” she responded, just a bit more tartly than she’d intended. Then she felt a bit awkward about her manner. “I’m sorry,” she said as she put in her bookmark. One last bite from her plate and she really was finished. Picking up her small purse, she gave him a half-smile. “I’m Reesa.” Then she stood up. Tall, slender, rather attractive to his eyes, with slightly wavy dark brown, close to black hair hanging down almost to her shoulders, he began to smile. Then his smile faded just a bit when her embroidered denim vest flipped open as she turned and he noticed the pistol and badge on her belt. That usually cools them down, she thought as she walked away from the table. Her attention on where she was headed, she didn’t notice him still watching as she left, a thoughtful look on his face.
His smile didn’t return when he looked across the restaurant to see another table, this one with two women and a man, all of about the same age, engaged in animated discussion. The very striking platinum blonde, the one facing him and holding court, caught his eye and smiled, nodding at him. He nodded in response but didn’t return the smile. Hers got just a little bit broader when she noticed that. He bent to pay attention to his lunch and did his best to shut her out of his awareness, but no matter what he did, he couldn’t shake the memories of their times together. His memories of her body against his, his memories of …
Angrily he shut down the reminiscences. They weren’t all pleasant memories. Truth to tell, some of them were very unpleasant, and precious few of them were actually pleasant from his current viewpoint. He left more of his meal than he’d intended and departed abruptly.
***
This would probably be the last time they had to meet in someone’s living room. The last time they’d be able to. The group was beginning to grow with a life of its own; it was already to the point that this large living room was uncomfortably crowded and only the very earliest attendees could possibly have found seats. There wasn’t even enough floor space for people to sit there, regardless of how far back Bob and Mary Jones had pushed the furniture, and every chair and the sofa all had people perched precariously on the arms as well as jammed into the seats. Even the smallest chair had two people in it, the woman sitting on the man’s lap.
No matter. Based on experience, everybody would want to be on their feet sooner or later anyway. Henry made his way from the kitchen on a circuitous route through the crowd of people, pausing at virtually every couple he passed to greet them by name, clapping the men on the shoulder or arm, gripping the women’s hands, thanking them for coming and making sure that they were doing well as a couple. One of his talents was a real facility for remembering people, their names and faces, and he used it well.
The few couples along his way that he didn’t already know he made sure to introduce himself to and at least get their names. He tried hard to get more than that, but some people were too private for him, even here. There were more such new couples than there had been; the group was beginning to grow by word of mouth without Henry having to go pull people in himself. On the far side of the room, he stepped up on the hearth for its eight inches or so of elevation and waited until the majority of people were watching him. It didn’t take very long, and when they were, conversations faded to a background murmur. When he cleared his throat, even those few still talking fell silent.
“Friends, thank you – all of you – for coming.” He took a deep breath. The curtain was going up, and it was time to give the people what they had come for. Here came his invariable opening line. “It’s time for faith! Not just faith in the Lord, but the faith you keep with your partner! It’s time for your commitment, it’s time for your vows! WE ARE THE AVOWED.” He fell silent. A pin dropping would have made a noticeable sound. Then he asked, quietly, “Who are we?”
The group answered. “The Avowed.”
Louder. “Who are we?”
“The Avowed.”
“Let the whole world hear who we are!”
And dutifully they all shouted at the top of their lungs, “THE AVOWED!”
God, but it felt good to have found a niche. His blessings upon his benefactor, the wonderful heaven-sent person who had found him in the gutter and showed him a way out, a place to go with his life. A way to get back into the mold that he’d fit into so well way back when. Henry tucked that thought away as he launched into the meat of his service. The services were utterly predictable, even repetitive. The prayers were generic and non-denominational, and the few songs were all based on shamelessly appropriated tunes from popular music of decades earlier.
Beyond that, the service was mostly a paean to the virtues of being faithful to one’s spouse or partner – Henry didn’t attempt to judge either legal recognition or sexual orientation, there was no money in doing so – and fulfilling the vows one had made or implied in joining with that spouse or partner. It was a simplistic theme, and Henry understood that, but it was one that resonated with some people, enough people, and that was really what mattered.
When Henry called on anyone in the group to testify, at least one couple could usually be depended on to be willing to get up and talk about past infidelities and how they had found renewed vigor and joy in their relationship by cleaving again to each other (once he had even had a pair of former swingers come forward, and boy, had that testimony been riveting), and as always, just in case, he had two shill couples planted in the group. Well, not really shills. Both were really couples, were really adherents to the group and its tenets, and they had actually been unfaithful to each other in the past, so what they had to say was honest, but they knew ahead of time what was coming and were at least primed to speak up if nobody else did.
Henry’s gatherings were always interesting, and he worked hard to keep them that way. Just as he had worked hard to gather the people for them in the beginning. All it took was hearing a couple exchanging harsh words in public, or giving each other ‘that look,’ or even just pointedly avoiding looking at each other.
Henry’s other real talent was being able to talk to people like that. Get involved with them, reassure them of the validity of their feelings, promote keeping their relationship going, and offer them the chance to become involved with the group to help them along.
Occasionally Henry had to resort to agility in order to keep from having his lights punched out, but rarely. He could come up with a great line of patter entirely off the cuff, and it was rare that he couldn’t either convince people to join or at least to simply blow him off without making a federal case out of it.
And what a group it was becoming! How engaging the services were by now! It kept people coming, it kept new people joining, and most importantly it kept them filling up the collection baskets. Next week he’d find a hall instead of crowding into somebody’s living room. Just not too big a place. Not yet. In the meantime, he’d be about God’s work. Everything he did now was God’s work, and there was a lot of it to be done. Not just in these meetings, either.
But it sure felt fulfilling to see the collection baskets filled up after the service was done and the people had left. Put on a good show, get their money, give them something in return, leave them wanting more, and everybody was happy. And because it was a religious service, at least after a fashion, and he wasn’t trying to sell them anything or promise them anything, nobody was going to say boo to him about it. Nothing wrong with that, either.
***
Bob and Mary Jones stood in the kitchen of the borrowed house and just listened. When the group reached the point of shouting out “THE AVOWED,” they slipped out of the kitchen and took their places at the back of the crowd. They exchanged a silent glance when they realized how crowded the room was, but nobody had noticed their entrance.
Just as colorless and unnoticeable as their names suggested, they were retiring people by nature, and it had taken some persuasion on Henry’s part to get them to agree to come to these meetings to help out. Of course, persuasion was really Henry’s stock in trade. Now, having assisted Henry as he’d rearranged the furniture for the meeting, they stood in the back of the room, holding the collection baskets. When the time came, they’d make their way through the crowd, sliding between knots of people to present the baskets to as many people present as possible, and then standing on either side of the front door, making sure that those few they hadn’t been able to approach with their baskets previously couldn’t escape without at least having to walk past them.
Afterwards, nobody who’d been there would have been able to describe either Bob or Mary. Somehow, they not only didn’t stand out, they were almost impossible to notice. Your eyes just somehow slid right over them, and without some sort of conscious effort, they made no impression on either the retina or the brain. That was fine with both of them; they had no interest in being noticed.
Quite the opposite, in fact, and their usual mode of dress, in drab earth tones of no particular color or pattern, contributed mightily to that lack of impression. Henry was delighted that they faded into the background so readily, too. If nothing else, it helped him stand out that much better, and after all, these services were really all about him, weren’t they?
Not that he was in any way denigrating the couple. He had come out of a homeless shelter, freshly washed and wearing clean clothes (almost new) for the first time in ages – longer than he could actually remember, although that was more a matter of alcoholic fog rather than the actual passage of time. He’d been walking along when he encountered them outside a grocery store, radiating fierce anger with each other, and made the snap decision to try putting his newly-conceived plan into action. It paid off. Some time, of course, was spent countering the anger both tried to turn on him to drive him away, but again, Henry was good at that. By the time he was done talking, they’d not only made up with each other, they’d invited him to come live in their little guest apartment. And they helped him run his services.
They believed. And they brought friends.
Chapter 1
Detective Reesa Malloy stepped out of the car and simply looked at the outside of the house and its surroundings for a few minutes. One more tan stucco house in a sparsely-populated neighborhood of such southwestern-style, mostly flat-roofed homes, there was nothing to make this one stand out. Unless, that is, you considered the uniforms, the patrol cars, the crime scene investigators’ van, the morgue van, the crime scene tape circling the yard, and now the detectives.
Chuck Palmer, Reesa’s partner, used to her ways by now, just waited patiently. She’d go in shortly, after she’d gotten a sense of the setting, the neighborhood, the surroundings. She always preferred to look at the crime scene from the outside in. There was no way to hurry her, but, even young as she was, her closure rate was the envy of the division. For all that he was several years older than she, he was still the junior man in the division, so he was more than willing to let her do things her way.
Occasionally he learned something just from tagging along behind her, and even when he didn’t, it was rarely dull (besides, she was easy on the eyes – not that he’d ever tell anybody else that, especially not his wife Pat. But you can’t get someone for thinking, can you?). He spent the time looking around for himself, trying to see what sort of appreciation for the neighborhood she was getting while he waited.
She looked at the surrounding houses, though not all that closely, merely trying to get a feel for the area. Apparently a rather large property, most of it left natural with innumerable prickly pear and cholla cactus. There were also a few little clumps of the low-growing hedgehog cactus, the one that bloomed first in the early spring in a riot of either electric red or fuchsia, a couple of good-sized barrel cactus, one majestic saguaro with several arms that had to have been here long before the house was built, several mesquites and palo verdes scattered about and the inevitable clumps of grass.
A small lizard darted across the driveway in front of her, ignoring her in its frantic heat-driven search for prey. A chipmunk twitched its tail from its vantage point next to the shelter of a prickly pear off to her right. As soon as she moved, it would turn and flee into the safety of the cactus patch.
Neither of them noticed the scruffily-dressed man two houses down, crouched in the shadow beside the house, watching her. Slowly he pulled a small monocular from his pocket and held it to his eye. He watched her until she lifted the crime scene tape over her head and walked into the front door of the house.
Then he stood, turned and, keeping to the shadows as much as possible, made his way around the house and slipped away, working hard to avoid the barbed spines of the cholla and prickly pear that littered the landscape as he carefully made his way cross-country until he was out of sight of the house. At that point he paused to pull a multi-tool from the pouch on his belt, unfold the pliers, and carefully pick a couple of cholla spines and one complete cholla joint from his jeans before going the rest of the way.
His car was parked a half-mile beyond, but the twelve-year old Honda was a weathered buff color that faded into invisibility in the desert at any distance over a hundred yards or so. He made sure that it ran like a top, but he deliberately paid very little attention to the outside, wanting it to be the sort of car that normally went unnoticed, just the way he tried to be himself when he was working. At least in this dry climate, body rust wasn’t likely to be much of an issue, and the inevitable weathering made the car dull, drab, and all but unnoticeable.
Reesa stood just inside the front door for almost a minute, letting her eyes adjust to the dimmer light. Tucson houses tend to minimize the amount of light they allow in during the heat of the day, especially from the south or west, given how brutal the summer sun can be in the desert.
The room was simply decorated, mostly in a southwestern theme. There were some average to less-than-average examples of Pueblo Indian pottery (inevitably, one or two would have ‘Made in China’ or elsewhere on the bottom) scattered about on tables interspersed with leather and wood chairs and a sofa facing a good-sized but older projection TV. The medical examiner was busy with one body, a man’s, that lay in a large pool of blood soaking into an Indian-patterned rug, and a crime scene tech was walking the grid around the room. Reesa looked at him as he approached her. “Getting anything?”
He shook his head. “Smudges, blank footprints and shit like that. Nothing that I can see so far that’s likely to offer me any usable evidence. A whopping three hairs, only one with a root bulb, and while I’ll run it, my best bet from the color and length is that it’s probably hers.” He nodded towards the female victim, who lay on bare tile. “No sign of any skin impressions anywhere, no drops of anything except what should by all rights be the victims’ blood, no prints other than what you’d expect from them and precious few of those, nothing of any value. Honestly, it looks like the room was just cleaned by someone I’d love to have cleaning my place, at least if this isn’t the price.” He nodded towards the victims again. “Whoever did this was either luckier than hell or else knew exactly what he was doing. Either way, he left us diddly for trace.” He moved off, still looking.
Reesa turned to one of the officers watching the work in progress. Indicating the second body, the woman’s, she asked, “Hey, Romero, has the ME worked that one yet?” The body’s hands were bagged, just as were the man’s, to retain any trace evidence in the skin folds or under the fingernails, but that was the only sign that anyone had done anything to it yet.
“I don’t think so. Her purse is there, on the table.” He gestured at one of the occasional tables dotting the room. “Wife’s out on the patio with Wilson, calming down. She’s the one who phoned it in, and she was having hysterics when we got here.”
Reesa’s eyes darted to the windows at the back of the house. A couple of figures outside were dimly visible in silhouette through the heavily-tinted glass. “So who’s this? The girlfriend?”
The officer just shook his head. “Don’t know. She’s dead, I know that much.”
The ghost of a smile flitted across her face. “Yeah, I can see that. Quit bucking for detective, Romero. You’re not ready yet.” He just chuckled in response. Reesa remembered her own days in uniform. Coming to the crime scenes and coming up with suspects in a couple of high-profile cases before the detectives assigned to the cases – one homicide in particular, up in Country Club, where the detectives had focused on the wife when Reesa found it obvious that the traces of makeup left by the killer were utterly unsuited to the wife’s coloration (but fit his mistress to a ‘T’) – had spurred her rapid advance to detective status.
Not that most of the women on the force couldn’t have done that analysis just as quickly, but she had already taken the civil service exam for detective, she was in the right place at the right time, and given the opportunity, Reesa had made the most of it. After that, she merely spent her time making sure she lived up to her billing, especially the billing she kept in her own mind.
Reesa picked up the purse and looked inside for the woman’s wallet. Finding it, she set the purse back down as she flipped it open and her partner readied his notebook. “Sarah Johnson, age 24, five-six, 126, blonde and blue, lives in what’s probably a fifth-floor apartment between downtown and the university.” She spelled out the address for him. “No pictures, no sign of any family to speak of.”
Reaching down to feel through the paper bag covering the victim’s left hand, she added, “And no wedding ring as far as I can tell. Tentatively single.” Sarah’s body lay on its back, with a kitchen knife protruding from her chest wall below her left breast. There were no other obvious wounds.
Like the man’s body, hers was in a pool of blood, although a much smaller one. Her puddle had largely clotted on the sand-colored tile floor. Setting the wallet down by the purse for Chuck to bag, she walked over by the man’s body just as the ME stood up. “Talk to me, Doc.”
The ME shook his head slowly as he handed over the wallet from the body. “Hi, Reesa. What we’ve got here, as you can see, is a male Caucasian, at a rough estimate in his early thirties. TOD about three hours ago, give or take a couple of minutes. Say between 10:30 and 11 this morning. Cause of death, well, I quit counting the stab wounds at 25, and there are a whole bunch beyond that. From what I can tell before doing the autopsy, they all seem likely to match the knife that was still stuck in him when I got here. Something like half of them would have been fatal all by themselves. That’s not counting cutting off his genitals.” Those, and the pieces of fabric that had been cut away to give access to them, lay between his legs, almost a foot from where they’d originally been attached.
Reesa winced to herself, although she let almost none of it show. “That must have hurt.”
“Probably did. He hadn’t finished dying when that was done to him. Then the killer just stuck the knife into him one last time before leaving.”
“Somebody was definitely unhappy with him about something.” She turned to her partner, who had yet to utter a word. “So, Chuck, what do you think? Do we like the wife for this?”
He shrugged. “Spouse is often the one when there’s a girlfriend involved. On the other hand, she’s out there with hysterics.”
Reesa arched an eyebrow at him. He was just about her height but stocky enough to give the impression of being noticeably shorter. “And she’s having hysterics … why? Chuck, if the hysterics are real, she may not be the one. May not be. On the other hand, sometimes people get hysterical after doing in their victims. But regardless of whether they’re real or faked, she’s still suspect number one at this point. We need to talk to her at length and check out any alibi she may have before we decide she’s not good for it, hey?” He looked a bit sheepish as she went on. “And while we’re at it, just how do we know this one was his girlfriend? Aren’t you jumping to a couple of conclusions here? For all we know at this point, she was here collecting for dog rescue or some such.”
“Sorry.”
“Not that it seems like the sort of neighborhood you’d do that in, and if you did, you probably wouldn’t do it in the middle of the morning. But let’s take it one step at a time here. So far, assuming he’s who we believe he is, they’re simply two people of opposite sex killed in the residence of one of them. If they were involved with each other, we need some sort of proof before we presume it.”
Chuck looked just slightly abashed and shrugged his shoulders. “I calls ’em as I sees ’em.”
Reesa smiled patiently at him. “Just don’t call them before we know. Until then, it’s just a suspicion. Or a possibility. And yes, in this case it’s certainly a reasonable possibility. We just don’t know yet.”
She flipped open the man’s wallet as she was talking. Nathan Bridgton, address the same as the house she was standing in, basic description matching the deceased. Driver’s license picture confirmed it was him, as much as it could before his identity was confirmed more positively with fingerprints, if they were on file anywhere, or dental records. She scanned the remainder of the wallet’s contents. The usual mix of credit cards, accumulated business and frequent-buyer cards. He was due a free coffee at Krakatoa, East of Java (a decent coffee shop, in her opinion; she went there herself from time to time). Nothing special. She handed the wallet to Chuck for him to bag and headed for the back door to talk to the wife.
A bit later, when she and Chuck led the wife out to their car to transport her downtown for more formal interrogation, she found a news crew already setting up outside. Channel 12 news, according to the colorful paint job on the side of the brilliant white van, and that almost certainly meant their star outside crime reporter, Lynne Fox. The very noticeable, even striking, allegedly blonde Lynne Fox, Reesa thought. Shit.
When Reesa saw Ms. Fox herself step out of the van, microphone in hand, she merely nodded to herself. As Reesa and Chuck helped the newly-minted widow into the car, she heard the reporter’s voice behind her calling, “Detective! Detective Malloy!” She ignored it as she walked around to drive back to the main police station downtown, thinking several more uncomplimentary things about the reporter. There’d be someone senior to her on scene soon enough who would make public statements and spare her the trouble, as well as the temptation, to say something to Fox, either something about the case in violation of department policy, which she’d wind up regretting, or something indicating her opinion of Lynne Fox, which was not only also against department policy, it was something she’d definitely wind up regretting (although it would sure feel good for the moment).
She did note to herself that however they did it, Lynne Fox and Channel 12 news were always the first ones on the scene. Somebody had to be paying close attention indeed to their police scanner, because they always beat the other channels there by at least five and usually as much as fifteen minutes. The ratings race was a bitch. Of course, so was Lynne Fox, in Reesa’s opinion. At least the reporters for the other channels weren’t as obnoxious. The guy who usually covered such cases for Channel 5 was actually downright cute, to Reesa’s eyes. Unfortunately, he also came across to her as gay. Oh, well. She wasn’t in the market for anyone anyway. And no matter which way he swung, she could always look.
***
The tan house was older, in a northwest Tucson neighborhood that assured privacy with its high walls and abundant overgrown vegetation. The walls around the back yard were, in fact, high enough to conceal all but the tops of the Catalina mountains to the north and the Tucson mountains to the west. Even then, unless you were quite tall, to see them you had to be standing under the patio roof, back by the house.
The privacy had been one of her primary considerations when the house was purchased; Reesa wasn’t concerned with the view. In fact, Reesa realized, it was the sort of neighborhood where, were she conducting an investigation, she could go to the house next door and tell the homeowner she had some questions about his neighbors. His response in turn could well be, “I’ve got neighbors???”
Reesa smiled at the thought as she unlocked the door. John Gorham, her neighbor to the east, was a friendly old bear of a man who cooked outside most of the year and always sent either his wife or his youngest son (the one with the painfully-obvious crush on her that she never encouraged, but never failed to treat most carefully) over to invite Reesa to join them at least once every other week.
He’d lived there for something like twenty years when Reesa bought the house and made sure she knew it (as well as, with a sly but endearing smile, how little he’d paid for his place).
There was undoubtedly a neighbor on the other side, since there’d been a moving van at the house a couple of years ago, but they had yet to introduce themselves. She stepped inside and allowed herself one long sigh after the door was again locked behind her and the alarm system was set. This was her private sanctuary, the one place she allowed herself to be herself, unguarded and undefended except by the alarm.
Other than her parents, on their infrequent visits, and the cleaning lady every other week, nobody else ever came here. Hardly anybody even knew where it was.
She set her purse down on the credenza in the dining room and began her evening ritual. Vest laid over one chair back. Flashlight into the charger, phone plugged into its charger, handcuffs off the belt, holster unsnapped from her belt, the big Glock Model 22 pistol drawn and cleared, magazine and the lone .40 caliber chamber round laid all together in a well-established pattern, ready to be reassembled in the morning. Magazine pouch with spare magazine unclipped from the opposite side of her belt and set close to the pistol.
Then she put her left foot up on the closest chair of the Scandinavian-pattern dining room set, right where the wear mark on the teak showed she’d been doing for years (thanks to her mother’s periodically switching the chairs around whenever she came to visit, five of the six chairs displayed the same mark), hoisted the leg of her slacks and unstrapped the ankle holster. After briefly rubbing the spot on her leg where the holster had rested, she drew and cleared the little Kahr PM40 backup pistol she carried in it and laid it and its holster alongside the Glock, also with magazine and chamber round arranged just so.
Finally she unbuttoned her blouse and hung it from the back of another chair long enough to let her remove her body armor, which she hung over the back of the adjacent chair as she picked up her blouse to put back on.
Feeling lighter and cooler, she headed for the kitchen and the inevitable drink. Just one. Hanging up the vest could wait, and after the crime scene she’d gone to, tonight was definitely going to be a night when she would want a second drink. Her rigid control, though, would hold her to the one drink she always rationed herself. Just like with the way she arranged her guns and ammunition on the credenza, some things had to be kept just so. But it was certainly a treat to be able to work normal hours instead of having to keep after an investigation until all hours and then still have to come in at her usual time the next morning.
Sitting in her well-broken-in Eames chair, she debated turning on the TV, but the early local news had just ended, and the prime time choices these days were mostly either inane comedies, idiotic cop shows, or idiotic lawyer shows, none of which interested her. All of which she studiously avoided, in fact.
There were a few – very few – comparatively good cop shows, but even with most of them she wound up annoyed at the detectives as they went about their business, and she’d proven to her satisfaction many years before that no matter how she spoke or even yelled, the people on the screen couldn’t hear her. So she usually didn’t watch those, either, except for one reasonably realistic SWAT drama out of Canada which wasn’t on tonight.
The news would eventually come on, and at least those were real cops, real incidents. Often people she knew. Idly she scrolled through the movie and documentary channels, but still found nothing to hold her interest. As the screen returned to black, she rolled the partially-full glass across her forehead, enjoying the cold moisture on her skin. Low humidity meant it would be dry in minutes, but for that brief time, the cold felt so good.
It took perhaps twenty minutes before she finished the last of her drink, dumped her remaining ice noisily in the sink and opened the freezer to consider supper. Maybe tomorrow she’d buy another toy for the stash in her private room. Or maybe not; perhaps a set of Harry Potter books might be better this time. She’d gotten a set last year and they had been very well-received by the Marines, come their Christmas toy drive.
Closing the freezer, she walked down the hall to that spare bedroom, which she unlocked with one of the two keys she wore on a chain around her neck. The room was empty except for a half-dozen or so good-sized boxes, all unopened toys.
There was one frame on the wall, a copy of a sonogram. Written on the mat, in carefully-done but clearly amateurish calligraphy, was the legend “Noli Me Tangere,” Latin for ‘Touch Me Not.’ No, I’ll never touch you, will I, baby? But you still touch me each and every day, don’t you? Just you and me, since your daddy wouldn’t even stick around to take responsibility for his own dick. Reesa closed her eyes for just a moment. Boy or girl – she had never found out which flavor – her child would have been nine this year.
The psychological pain of the miscarriage she had suffered in college had diminished over the years, but it had never quite disappeared. She appeased it, and her irrational (she admitted it to herself) sense of guilt, with the toys and such she bought from time to time. Every December, she delivered the whole year’s pile to the Marines’ Toys for Tots drive. They were invariably delighted, although the check she delivered (approximately the remainder of one Family share’s dividend) along with the toys certainly never hurt that response. Then she started over, the toys, when they were age-specific, bought for a child just a year older than before.
She let the memory and its associated pain take her over for more than a minute before closing and relocking the door and returning to the freezer. Mentally she tucked the pain down and gently covered it over. That was her allotment for the day. Some days it was before supper, some days after, but she’d never skip it. She’d also never ever let that pain show, not to another living soul. In fact, other than her mother, with whom she was still very close, nobody even knew.
After supper, she shelved the book she’d finished over her meal and debated what to read next. Her library was mostly science fiction and history, some historical fiction, and a number of professional books. None of those last were on her list of possibles right now; she wanted recreation, not education.
She finally settled on an old classic science-fiction book, one of her favorites, and carried it to the bedroom. She changed into her robe before going back to the living room to read until it was time for the evening news. As she read, she nibbled her dessert – one Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Her private joke, just to herself, was that they were really ‘Reesa’s Peanut Butter Cups.’ She allowed herself two of the treats per week, and here it was Tuesday and she was just having her first. Nibbling slowly at it, she made it last for almost twenty minutes. The memory, when it was all gone, was good for at least another ten.
***
The killer took a few minutes to treasure the memory of a job well done. The terrified look on the woman’s face, well, that was perhaps a bit unfortunate, at least for her, but she’d gotten the easy way out. Been given the easy way out. The knife had gone in just so, a quarter twist to help her bleed, and then let it go so she would fall with it still in her. The man … he’d tried to bluster his way out at first, but the killer took advantage of his shock when the woman had been stabbed, and by the time he’d been stabbed three or four times, he wasn’t fighting any longer.
The most delicious moment, the incredible sexual release …. After almost two full minutes of savoring the memory, the killer carefully packed all of the memories away in a mental file. There would be plenty of time to dwell on those memories again later. Now there was more … legitimate work to be done. Plenty of time later to do more of God’s work. And there was just so much of it to do.
***
Jeff folded his long legs into position as he sat down in one of the chairs in front of Amy’s desk. “This is not the way I like losing cases,” he said. “Not to mention how hard it is on the subjects, even if the clients themselves come out of it okay.”
Amy shook her head in sympathy. “No, it’s not nice. And this is … what? The second one to go like this?”
Jeff nodded. “Yeah. That one up in the foothills three months ago was the first for me. But you remember that detective I mentioned the other day? The one I encountered at lunch? I saw her arrive at the house today while I was still watching. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that she’s working homicide. Seems kind of young for it, if she is.” Now he stretched his legs out in front of him, crossing his ankles.
Amy regarded him as his friend, not simply his boss, for a moment. “You thinking of getting to know her?”
Jeff shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt, I figure. She’s easy on the eyes, as a cop she’s connected in ways I’m not, and what the hell, it gets lonely sitting in that little house all alone. And trust me, there’s no way in hell I want to repeat the last relationship I had.” He snorted. “Maybe this would be different.”
Amy shook her head. “I know exactly what it’s like being alone in that place. I lived there a lot longer than you have yet, remember. If you want my advice, get a dog. Or two. It’s safer, at least judging by your last relationship. Remember, I tried to warn you about her, and you wouldn’t listen. Too much thinking with the wrong head, if ‘thinking’ is the right word to use for that. Oh, by the way, I’ll be going to Golondrino for a long weekend again. It’s board meeting time.”
Jeff shrugged again. “When the Family board meets, I guess the head of the Family kind of has to be there. I’ll hold down the fort while you’re gone. Are all of you going? And just by the way, didn’t you have Alec there in that house with you? Most of the time, anyway?”
Amy nodded. “Without me, there is no meeting. But yes, we’re all going, as usual. We’ll be back late Monday, and I’ll be back in here on Tuesday, barring the unforeseen. And in response to your other question, no, he didn’t sleep there, not until we were married. After Becky and I moved out of here, I spent my nights alone there until then. Several years’ worth.”
“Okay, I’ll concede the point. Would you mind locking up? I think I’ll head out now. Oh, and say hi to Dad for me, would you?”
“Sure. See you when we’re back.” Jeff walked out the back door and across the alley to the little house on Helen Street.
Once inside the house, Jeff pulled a bottle of beer out of the fridge. Popping the top, he carried it out into the living room, sprawled on the couch, and turned on the TV. Watching some stupid game show, or whatever else he could find, would at least help pass the time until hunger drove him to the fridge to see what leftover was on the menu for dinner. Unless he just skipped it again tonight.
***
Henry Blodden sat on the well-worn and badly-sprung sofa in his little apartment, hardly more than an efficiency, behind the garage of the Joneses’ house. He was eating a frozen dinner, still almost too hot from the microwave, but his attention was focused on the early evening local news on his TV. Mostly he watched Channel 12 for the news, but tonight he had wound up on Channel 5, and the broadcast was halfway to the weather before he realized his error. At that point, he figured he might as well leave it.
The crime-scene reporter, a reasonably good-looking young man (if you went in for such things – Henry didn’t), made a decent report on the Bridgton house murders, but Henry wasn’t concerned. It was far more important to look forward to God’s work, not back on what had already happened. He had more work to do, and starting tomorrow he was going to spend much of the day out looking for the next target of his attention. It might take him more than simply tomorrow to find the right target, but he was supremely confident that he would, almost certainly by the end of the week, locate another appropriate target.
He definitely had to get started, though. Doing God’s work just felt so good, and how could God possibly not allow him to find the next recipient of his attentions when God so obviously wanted His work done? For that matter, how could it possibly not be God’s work when it just felt so good? Assuming there really was a God, that is. Like that mattered, either.
***
In the house proper, Bob and Mary Jones went about their normal evening ritual. It was so well-established between them by now that their conversation even in this was minimal, and by the time the late evening news came on, they were both lying in bed, watching the Channel 8 broadcast. When the weather forecast was done, Bob slid a hand up under Mary’s nightgown, along her thigh. No words were necessary. Nor were any used when Mary reached down, took Bob’s wrist and gently but firmly lifted his hand off her leg and put it back on his side of the bed.
After pulling her nightgown back down, she got up on one elbow to kiss him goodnight. She turned off the light on her nightstand and, without waiting to see if he was going to turn off his own or read for a while, rolled over and was asleep within minutes, or so Bob presumed from her soft, regular breathing. It was another twenty minutes before he put up his book and turned off his own light.
***
Lynne Fox was still at the studio. Unless she had to be live at a crime scene, she normally tried to be home by the time the 10 pm news came on. Tonight, however, she had some details she had to get taken care of before she could leave. Nothing she wanted to entrust to her staff, but also nothing earth-shaking. Just some things that she wanted to do herself. Needed to do herself.
While she worked, she mused over where she could have to go tomorrow. The news editor, who might as well be God in the news section of the station (if you didn’t believe that, just ask him), would undoubtedly have some really nasty sort of assignment for her. That was fine. No matter how difficult, how distasteful, how downright shitty the assignment she got, she always delivered, always produced excellent quality work, and she was known for that.
Sometimes, with a bit of sarcasm, because of whom the assignment came from, she even thought of it as God’s work. It was that sort of dependability, though, (along with her looks) that had gotten her as far as she was already, and that dependability along with a bit of luck – which she fully intended to either cultivate or create – would take her all the way to the top in the news business, a national anchor slot.
Where she clearly deserved to be. Just ask her.
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Stepping out of the air-conditioned house to the covered outside patio was not unlike stepping into an oven, despite the shade. The killer was already sweating some from the heat, not simply the exertion and the sexual gratification as the two sets of gloves were snapped off, one at a time, and outer layers of clothing were removed. The killer checked carefully, though, and no perspiration had escaped those vital outer layers. A slight breeze brought a delightfully cooling evaporation to the sweat-moistened skin and gently ruffled the newly-freed hair.
As always, the outer set of gloves had turned inside-out as they came off. The blood on them made them appear dark purple in the center, grading towards the blue of their edges. The painter’s whites were pretty well splattered and in some small spots, even soaked with blood, but other than a few minor stains on the t-shirt, nothing had gone through.
The t-shirt would eventually go into the bag with the whites and the gloves for washing with plenty of bleach and, as appropriate, subsequent disposal in some safe location. Booties came off the shoes and were dropped into the bag as well. Despite their blinding appearance, unbloodied painter’s whites were actually in some ways superb camouflage, because the wearer became simply one more working person, and who bothers to look at a painter walking along? They were readily available, too.
There was no murder weapon to dispose of this time; the knives that had done the job here were still buried in the bodies. They’d come out of the kitchen in the house, so the police were not going to be able to develop any telltale information out of where and by whom they’d been purchased. There would be no information about the killer coming from them. Thanks to the gloves, there was not one single fingerprint on them to worry about, either.
Satisfied that the crime scene was as free of trace evidence and other clues as it could possibly be, or at least as close to that level of cleanliness as could be managed, the killer picked up the black plastic garbage bag with the stripped-off outer clothes and slipped quietly out through the gate in the back fence. Finding the quickest route through the desert out to the road was easy, since it had already been scoped out, the final exit from the scene as meticulously planned as every other step in the process.
The killer checked quickly for possible traffic and, finding none, started along the barely-visible path across the hard-packed soil threading between cactus and scrub trees until reaching the roadway. At that point the killer became simply one more civic-minded trash picker, calmly scouring the side of the road for a distance before reaching the car that had waited patiently.
Once in it with the air conditioning going full blast, it was the work of moments to strip off the slightly bloodied t-shirt, use it to scrub at a couple of bloody spots on the skin underneath and replace it with a clean one. The used one went into the bag with everything else, which included several pieces of roadside trash, both above and below the whites and other items.
The killer looked at the face reflected in the rear-view mirror and gave a small contented sigh. One or two small spots of blood, unnoticeable from more than ten feet away, that readily yielded to a spit-moistened fingertip. Another unfaithful pair down, and nobody in the police department or the sheriff’s department apparently even knew yet that there was a serial killer on the loose in the city. Of course, not taking souvenirs from the crime scenes, leaving no signature, and following no repetitious pattern helped, but the longer they failed to notice, the more that could be accomplished.
The killer, very naturally, found immeasurable personal satisfaction in the effort, but recognition by others for what was being done was not important. If anything, anonymity was more valuable than recognition, because it meant less official notice, hence less potential interference. With some imagination, some continued attention to detail, who knew how long the luck might hold? Even when they did figure it out, they’d be hard-pressed to find out who was actually committing all of these murders. That was a certainty. The car pulled away from the side of the road, bounced onto the pavement and drove off towards the center of town.
***
The cafeteria-style restaurant was more than a bit crowded, but Reesa paid no attention. What little attention she spared from her novel, the paperback she held braced open one-handed with the deftness of long practice, was devoted to making sure her fork didn’t miss the food on her plate. She was startled when a man’s voice interrupted her. “Excuse me, but do you mind if I share your table? The place seems awfully crowded at the moment.” She looked up to see a man who appeared to be, like her, in his late twenties. Clean clothes, dark blonde hair (almost in need of a haircut), a nice if undistinguished face (long oval, blue-gray eyes, high forehead, clean-shaven, chin strong but not dominant, average cheekbones, no lips worth mentioning, but that was a common failing among men – she couldn’t help taking down the description to herself), and he looked to be a little bit taller than she was. Probably about six feet or so. Decent musculature but not overdone, as far as she could tell in his slightly over-large t-shirt and tan jeans, probably about 170 pounds or thereabouts. Not a serious bodybuilder, then, but apparently fairly fit. Someone who probably paid a reasonable amount of attention to his physical condition. Good looking, overall. Might be interesting were she in the market for a partner – which she wasn’t. He was holding his tray and smiling pleasantly as he waited for her answer.
She glanced around, uncertain how much annoyance she should feel at being interrupted. Hers wasn’t the only table with an open seat, but the others all appeared to have either couples or families at them. If there were any others with single women, honesty compelled her to admit that she was probably still the most attractive choice he had in terms of both age and appearance. Reesa avoided being vain, but she could at least be honest about what she saw in the mirror each morning. She shrugged. “Sure. I won’t be here much longer anyway.” She gestured to the chair opposite.
She’d just gotten back into the plot of her book when he broke her train of thought again. “I’m Jeff,” he said, as he set his plate on the table.
“How nice for you,” she responded, just a bit more tartly than she’d intended. Then she felt a bit awkward about her manner. “I’m sorry,” she said as she put in her bookmark. One last bite from her plate and she really was finished. Picking up her small purse, she gave him a half-smile. “I’m Reesa.” Then she stood up. Tall, slender, rather attractive to his eyes, with slightly wavy dark brown, close to black hair hanging down almost to her shoulders, he began to smile. Then his smile faded just a bit when her embroidered denim vest flipped open as she turned and he noticed the pistol and badge on her belt. That usually cools them down, she thought as she walked away from the table. Her attention on where she was headed, she didn’t notice him still watching as she left, a thoughtful look on his face.
His smile didn’t return when he looked across the restaurant to see another table, this one with two women and a man, all of about the same age, engaged in animated discussion. The very striking platinum blonde, the one facing him and holding court, caught his eye and smiled, nodding at him. He nodded in response but didn’t return the smile. Hers got just a little bit broader when she noticed that. He bent to pay attention to his lunch and did his best to shut her out of his awareness, but no matter what he did, he couldn’t shake the memories of their times together. His memories of her body against his, his memories of …
Angrily he shut down the reminiscences. They weren’t all pleasant memories. Truth to tell, some of them were very unpleasant, and precious few of them were actually pleasant from his current viewpoint. He left more of his meal than he’d intended and departed abruptly.
***
This would probably be the last time they had to meet in someone’s living room. The last time they’d be able to. The group was beginning to grow with a life of its own; it was already to the point that this large living room was uncomfortably crowded and only the very earliest attendees could possibly have found seats. There wasn’t even enough floor space for people to sit there, regardless of how far back Bob and Mary Jones had pushed the furniture, and every chair and the sofa all had people perched precariously on the arms as well as jammed into the seats. Even the smallest chair had two people in it, the woman sitting on the man’s lap.
No matter. Based on experience, everybody would want to be on their feet sooner or later anyway. Henry made his way from the kitchen on a circuitous route through the crowd of people, pausing at virtually every couple he passed to greet them by name, clapping the men on the shoulder or arm, gripping the women’s hands, thanking them for coming and making sure that they were doing well as a couple. One of his talents was a real facility for remembering people, their names and faces, and he used it well.
The few couples along his way that he didn’t already know he made sure to introduce himself to and at least get their names. He tried hard to get more than that, but some people were too private for him, even here. There were more such new couples than there had been; the group was beginning to grow by word of mouth without Henry having to go pull people in himself. On the far side of the room, he stepped up on the hearth for its eight inches or so of elevation and waited until the majority of people were watching him. It didn’t take very long, and when they were, conversations faded to a background murmur. When he cleared his throat, even those few still talking fell silent.
“Friends, thank you – all of you – for coming.” He took a deep breath. The curtain was going up, and it was time to give the people what they had come for. Here came his invariable opening line. “It’s time for faith! Not just faith in the Lord, but the faith you keep with your partner! It’s time for your commitment, it’s time for your vows! WE ARE THE AVOWED.” He fell silent. A pin dropping would have made a noticeable sound. Then he asked, quietly, “Who are we?”
The group answered. “The Avowed.”
Louder. “Who are we?”
“The Avowed.”
“Let the whole world hear who we are!”
And dutifully they all shouted at the top of their lungs, “THE AVOWED!”
God, but it felt good to have found a niche. His blessings upon his benefactor, the wonderful heaven-sent person who had found him in the gutter and showed him a way out, a place to go with his life. A way to get back into the mold that he’d fit into so well way back when. Henry tucked that thought away as he launched into the meat of his service. The services were utterly predictable, even repetitive. The prayers were generic and non-denominational, and the few songs were all based on shamelessly appropriated tunes from popular music of decades earlier.
Beyond that, the service was mostly a paean to the virtues of being faithful to one’s spouse or partner – Henry didn’t attempt to judge either legal recognition or sexual orientation, there was no money in doing so – and fulfilling the vows one had made or implied in joining with that spouse or partner. It was a simplistic theme, and Henry understood that, but it was one that resonated with some people, enough people, and that was really what mattered.
When Henry called on anyone in the group to testify, at least one couple could usually be depended on to be willing to get up and talk about past infidelities and how they had found renewed vigor and joy in their relationship by cleaving again to each other (once he had even had a pair of former swingers come forward, and boy, had that testimony been riveting), and as always, just in case, he had two shill couples planted in the group. Well, not really shills. Both were really couples, were really adherents to the group and its tenets, and they had actually been unfaithful to each other in the past, so what they had to say was honest, but they knew ahead of time what was coming and were at least primed to speak up if nobody else did.
Henry’s gatherings were always interesting, and he worked hard to keep them that way. Just as he had worked hard to gather the people for them in the beginning. All it took was hearing a couple exchanging harsh words in public, or giving each other ‘that look,’ or even just pointedly avoiding looking at each other.
Henry’s other real talent was being able to talk to people like that. Get involved with them, reassure them of the validity of their feelings, promote keeping their relationship going, and offer them the chance to become involved with the group to help them along.
Occasionally Henry had to resort to agility in order to keep from having his lights punched out, but rarely. He could come up with a great line of patter entirely off the cuff, and it was rare that he couldn’t either convince people to join or at least to simply blow him off without making a federal case out of it.
And what a group it was becoming! How engaging the services were by now! It kept people coming, it kept new people joining, and most importantly it kept them filling up the collection baskets. Next week he’d find a hall instead of crowding into somebody’s living room. Just not too big a place. Not yet. In the meantime, he’d be about God’s work. Everything he did now was God’s work, and there was a lot of it to be done. Not just in these meetings, either.
But it sure felt fulfilling to see the collection baskets filled up after the service was done and the people had left. Put on a good show, get their money, give them something in return, leave them wanting more, and everybody was happy. And because it was a religious service, at least after a fashion, and he wasn’t trying to sell them anything or promise them anything, nobody was going to say boo to him about it. Nothing wrong with that, either.
***
Bob and Mary Jones stood in the kitchen of the borrowed house and just listened. When the group reached the point of shouting out “THE AVOWED,” they slipped out of the kitchen and took their places at the back of the crowd. They exchanged a silent glance when they realized how crowded the room was, but nobody had noticed their entrance.
Just as colorless and unnoticeable as their names suggested, they were retiring people by nature, and it had taken some persuasion on Henry’s part to get them to agree to come to these meetings to help out. Of course, persuasion was really Henry’s stock in trade. Now, having assisted Henry as he’d rearranged the furniture for the meeting, they stood in the back of the room, holding the collection baskets. When the time came, they’d make their way through the crowd, sliding between knots of people to present the baskets to as many people present as possible, and then standing on either side of the front door, making sure that those few they hadn’t been able to approach with their baskets previously couldn’t escape without at least having to walk past them.
Afterwards, nobody who’d been there would have been able to describe either Bob or Mary. Somehow, they not only didn’t stand out, they were almost impossible to notice. Your eyes just somehow slid right over them, and without some sort of conscious effort, they made no impression on either the retina or the brain. That was fine with both of them; they had no interest in being noticed.
Quite the opposite, in fact, and their usual mode of dress, in drab earth tones of no particular color or pattern, contributed mightily to that lack of impression. Henry was delighted that they faded into the background so readily, too. If nothing else, it helped him stand out that much better, and after all, these services were really all about him, weren’t they?
Not that he was in any way denigrating the couple. He had come out of a homeless shelter, freshly washed and wearing clean clothes (almost new) for the first time in ages – longer than he could actually remember, although that was more a matter of alcoholic fog rather than the actual passage of time. He’d been walking along when he encountered them outside a grocery store, radiating fierce anger with each other, and made the snap decision to try putting his newly-conceived plan into action. It paid off. Some time, of course, was spent countering the anger both tried to turn on him to drive him away, but again, Henry was good at that. By the time he was done talking, they’d not only made up with each other, they’d invited him to come live in their little guest apartment. And they helped him run his services.
They believed. And they brought friends.
Chapter 1
Detective Reesa Malloy stepped out of the car and simply looked at the outside of the house and its surroundings for a few minutes. One more tan stucco house in a sparsely-populated neighborhood of such southwestern-style, mostly flat-roofed homes, there was nothing to make this one stand out. Unless, that is, you considered the uniforms, the patrol cars, the crime scene investigators’ van, the morgue van, the crime scene tape circling the yard, and now the detectives.
Chuck Palmer, Reesa’s partner, used to her ways by now, just waited patiently. She’d go in shortly, after she’d gotten a sense of the setting, the neighborhood, the surroundings. She always preferred to look at the crime scene from the outside in. There was no way to hurry her, but, even young as she was, her closure rate was the envy of the division. For all that he was several years older than she, he was still the junior man in the division, so he was more than willing to let her do things her way.
Occasionally he learned something just from tagging along behind her, and even when he didn’t, it was rarely dull (besides, she was easy on the eyes – not that he’d ever tell anybody else that, especially not his wife Pat. But you can’t get someone for thinking, can you?). He spent the time looking around for himself, trying to see what sort of appreciation for the neighborhood she was getting while he waited.
She looked at the surrounding houses, though not all that closely, merely trying to get a feel for the area. Apparently a rather large property, most of it left natural with innumerable prickly pear and cholla cactus. There were also a few little clumps of the low-growing hedgehog cactus, the one that bloomed first in the early spring in a riot of either electric red or fuchsia, a couple of good-sized barrel cactus, one majestic saguaro with several arms that had to have been here long before the house was built, several mesquites and palo verdes scattered about and the inevitable clumps of grass.
A small lizard darted across the driveway in front of her, ignoring her in its frantic heat-driven search for prey. A chipmunk twitched its tail from its vantage point next to the shelter of a prickly pear off to her right. As soon as she moved, it would turn and flee into the safety of the cactus patch.
Neither of them noticed the scruffily-dressed man two houses down, crouched in the shadow beside the house, watching her. Slowly he pulled a small monocular from his pocket and held it to his eye. He watched her until she lifted the crime scene tape over her head and walked into the front door of the house.
Then he stood, turned and, keeping to the shadows as much as possible, made his way around the house and slipped away, working hard to avoid the barbed spines of the cholla and prickly pear that littered the landscape as he carefully made his way cross-country until he was out of sight of the house. At that point he paused to pull a multi-tool from the pouch on his belt, unfold the pliers, and carefully pick a couple of cholla spines and one complete cholla joint from his jeans before going the rest of the way.
His car was parked a half-mile beyond, but the twelve-year old Honda was a weathered buff color that faded into invisibility in the desert at any distance over a hundred yards or so. He made sure that it ran like a top, but he deliberately paid very little attention to the outside, wanting it to be the sort of car that normally went unnoticed, just the way he tried to be himself when he was working. At least in this dry climate, body rust wasn’t likely to be much of an issue, and the inevitable weathering made the car dull, drab, and all but unnoticeable.
Reesa stood just inside the front door for almost a minute, letting her eyes adjust to the dimmer light. Tucson houses tend to minimize the amount of light they allow in during the heat of the day, especially from the south or west, given how brutal the summer sun can be in the desert.
The room was simply decorated, mostly in a southwestern theme. There were some average to less-than-average examples of Pueblo Indian pottery (inevitably, one or two would have ‘Made in China’ or elsewhere on the bottom) scattered about on tables interspersed with leather and wood chairs and a sofa facing a good-sized but older projection TV. The medical examiner was busy with one body, a man’s, that lay in a large pool of blood soaking into an Indian-patterned rug, and a crime scene tech was walking the grid around the room. Reesa looked at him as he approached her. “Getting anything?”
He shook his head. “Smudges, blank footprints and shit like that. Nothing that I can see so far that’s likely to offer me any usable evidence. A whopping three hairs, only one with a root bulb, and while I’ll run it, my best bet from the color and length is that it’s probably hers.” He nodded towards the female victim, who lay on bare tile. “No sign of any skin impressions anywhere, no drops of anything except what should by all rights be the victims’ blood, no prints other than what you’d expect from them and precious few of those, nothing of any value. Honestly, it looks like the room was just cleaned by someone I’d love to have cleaning my place, at least if this isn’t the price.” He nodded towards the victims again. “Whoever did this was either luckier than hell or else knew exactly what he was doing. Either way, he left us diddly for trace.” He moved off, still looking.
Reesa turned to one of the officers watching the work in progress. Indicating the second body, the woman’s, she asked, “Hey, Romero, has the ME worked that one yet?” The body’s hands were bagged, just as were the man’s, to retain any trace evidence in the skin folds or under the fingernails, but that was the only sign that anyone had done anything to it yet.
“I don’t think so. Her purse is there, on the table.” He gestured at one of the occasional tables dotting the room. “Wife’s out on the patio with Wilson, calming down. She’s the one who phoned it in, and she was having hysterics when we got here.”
Reesa’s eyes darted to the windows at the back of the house. A couple of figures outside were dimly visible in silhouette through the heavily-tinted glass. “So who’s this? The girlfriend?”
The officer just shook his head. “Don’t know. She’s dead, I know that much.”
The ghost of a smile flitted across her face. “Yeah, I can see that. Quit bucking for detective, Romero. You’re not ready yet.” He just chuckled in response. Reesa remembered her own days in uniform. Coming to the crime scenes and coming up with suspects in a couple of high-profile cases before the detectives assigned to the cases – one homicide in particular, up in Country Club, where the detectives had focused on the wife when Reesa found it obvious that the traces of makeup left by the killer were utterly unsuited to the wife’s coloration (but fit his mistress to a ‘T’) – had spurred her rapid advance to detective status.
Not that most of the women on the force couldn’t have done that analysis just as quickly, but she had already taken the civil service exam for detective, she was in the right place at the right time, and given the opportunity, Reesa had made the most of it. After that, she merely spent her time making sure she lived up to her billing, especially the billing she kept in her own mind.
Reesa picked up the purse and looked inside for the woman’s wallet. Finding it, she set the purse back down as she flipped it open and her partner readied his notebook. “Sarah Johnson, age 24, five-six, 126, blonde and blue, lives in what’s probably a fifth-floor apartment between downtown and the university.” She spelled out the address for him. “No pictures, no sign of any family to speak of.”
Reaching down to feel through the paper bag covering the victim’s left hand, she added, “And no wedding ring as far as I can tell. Tentatively single.” Sarah’s body lay on its back, with a kitchen knife protruding from her chest wall below her left breast. There were no other obvious wounds.
Like the man’s body, hers was in a pool of blood, although a much smaller one. Her puddle had largely clotted on the sand-colored tile floor. Setting the wallet down by the purse for Chuck to bag, she walked over by the man’s body just as the ME stood up. “Talk to me, Doc.”
The ME shook his head slowly as he handed over the wallet from the body. “Hi, Reesa. What we’ve got here, as you can see, is a male Caucasian, at a rough estimate in his early thirties. TOD about three hours ago, give or take a couple of minutes. Say between 10:30 and 11 this morning. Cause of death, well, I quit counting the stab wounds at 25, and there are a whole bunch beyond that. From what I can tell before doing the autopsy, they all seem likely to match the knife that was still stuck in him when I got here. Something like half of them would have been fatal all by themselves. That’s not counting cutting off his genitals.” Those, and the pieces of fabric that had been cut away to give access to them, lay between his legs, almost a foot from where they’d originally been attached.
Reesa winced to herself, although she let almost none of it show. “That must have hurt.”
“Probably did. He hadn’t finished dying when that was done to him. Then the killer just stuck the knife into him one last time before leaving.”
“Somebody was definitely unhappy with him about something.” She turned to her partner, who had yet to utter a word. “So, Chuck, what do you think? Do we like the wife for this?”
He shrugged. “Spouse is often the one when there’s a girlfriend involved. On the other hand, she’s out there with hysterics.”
Reesa arched an eyebrow at him. He was just about her height but stocky enough to give the impression of being noticeably shorter. “And she’s having hysterics … why? Chuck, if the hysterics are real, she may not be the one. May not be. On the other hand, sometimes people get hysterical after doing in their victims. But regardless of whether they’re real or faked, she’s still suspect number one at this point. We need to talk to her at length and check out any alibi she may have before we decide she’s not good for it, hey?” He looked a bit sheepish as she went on. “And while we’re at it, just how do we know this one was his girlfriend? Aren’t you jumping to a couple of conclusions here? For all we know at this point, she was here collecting for dog rescue or some such.”
“Sorry.”
“Not that it seems like the sort of neighborhood you’d do that in, and if you did, you probably wouldn’t do it in the middle of the morning. But let’s take it one step at a time here. So far, assuming he’s who we believe he is, they’re simply two people of opposite sex killed in the residence of one of them. If they were involved with each other, we need some sort of proof before we presume it.”
Chuck looked just slightly abashed and shrugged his shoulders. “I calls ’em as I sees ’em.”
Reesa smiled patiently at him. “Just don’t call them before we know. Until then, it’s just a suspicion. Or a possibility. And yes, in this case it’s certainly a reasonable possibility. We just don’t know yet.”
She flipped open the man’s wallet as she was talking. Nathan Bridgton, address the same as the house she was standing in, basic description matching the deceased. Driver’s license picture confirmed it was him, as much as it could before his identity was confirmed more positively with fingerprints, if they were on file anywhere, or dental records. She scanned the remainder of the wallet’s contents. The usual mix of credit cards, accumulated business and frequent-buyer cards. He was due a free coffee at Krakatoa, East of Java (a decent coffee shop, in her opinion; she went there herself from time to time). Nothing special. She handed the wallet to Chuck for him to bag and headed for the back door to talk to the wife.
A bit later, when she and Chuck led the wife out to their car to transport her downtown for more formal interrogation, she found a news crew already setting up outside. Channel 12 news, according to the colorful paint job on the side of the brilliant white van, and that almost certainly meant their star outside crime reporter, Lynne Fox. The very noticeable, even striking, allegedly blonde Lynne Fox, Reesa thought. Shit.
When Reesa saw Ms. Fox herself step out of the van, microphone in hand, she merely nodded to herself. As Reesa and Chuck helped the newly-minted widow into the car, she heard the reporter’s voice behind her calling, “Detective! Detective Malloy!” She ignored it as she walked around to drive back to the main police station downtown, thinking several more uncomplimentary things about the reporter. There’d be someone senior to her on scene soon enough who would make public statements and spare her the trouble, as well as the temptation, to say something to Fox, either something about the case in violation of department policy, which she’d wind up regretting, or something indicating her opinion of Lynne Fox, which was not only also against department policy, it was something she’d definitely wind up regretting (although it would sure feel good for the moment).
She did note to herself that however they did it, Lynne Fox and Channel 12 news were always the first ones on the scene. Somebody had to be paying close attention indeed to their police scanner, because they always beat the other channels there by at least five and usually as much as fifteen minutes. The ratings race was a bitch. Of course, so was Lynne Fox, in Reesa’s opinion. At least the reporters for the other channels weren’t as obnoxious. The guy who usually covered such cases for Channel 5 was actually downright cute, to Reesa’s eyes. Unfortunately, he also came across to her as gay. Oh, well. She wasn’t in the market for anyone anyway. And no matter which way he swung, she could always look.
***
The tan house was older, in a northwest Tucson neighborhood that assured privacy with its high walls and abundant overgrown vegetation. The walls around the back yard were, in fact, high enough to conceal all but the tops of the Catalina mountains to the north and the Tucson mountains to the west. Even then, unless you were quite tall, to see them you had to be standing under the patio roof, back by the house.
The privacy had been one of her primary considerations when the house was purchased; Reesa wasn’t concerned with the view. In fact, Reesa realized, it was the sort of neighborhood where, were she conducting an investigation, she could go to the house next door and tell the homeowner she had some questions about his neighbors. His response in turn could well be, “I’ve got neighbors???”
Reesa smiled at the thought as she unlocked the door. John Gorham, her neighbor to the east, was a friendly old bear of a man who cooked outside most of the year and always sent either his wife or his youngest son (the one with the painfully-obvious crush on her that she never encouraged, but never failed to treat most carefully) over to invite Reesa to join them at least once every other week.
He’d lived there for something like twenty years when Reesa bought the house and made sure she knew it (as well as, with a sly but endearing smile, how little he’d paid for his place).
There was undoubtedly a neighbor on the other side, since there’d been a moving van at the house a couple of years ago, but they had yet to introduce themselves. She stepped inside and allowed herself one long sigh after the door was again locked behind her and the alarm system was set. This was her private sanctuary, the one place she allowed herself to be herself, unguarded and undefended except by the alarm.
Other than her parents, on their infrequent visits, and the cleaning lady every other week, nobody else ever came here. Hardly anybody even knew where it was.
She set her purse down on the credenza in the dining room and began her evening ritual. Vest laid over one chair back. Flashlight into the charger, phone plugged into its charger, handcuffs off the belt, holster unsnapped from her belt, the big Glock Model 22 pistol drawn and cleared, magazine and the lone .40 caliber chamber round laid all together in a well-established pattern, ready to be reassembled in the morning. Magazine pouch with spare magazine unclipped from the opposite side of her belt and set close to the pistol.
Then she put her left foot up on the closest chair of the Scandinavian-pattern dining room set, right where the wear mark on the teak showed she’d been doing for years (thanks to her mother’s periodically switching the chairs around whenever she came to visit, five of the six chairs displayed the same mark), hoisted the leg of her slacks and unstrapped the ankle holster. After briefly rubbing the spot on her leg where the holster had rested, she drew and cleared the little Kahr PM40 backup pistol she carried in it and laid it and its holster alongside the Glock, also with magazine and chamber round arranged just so.
Finally she unbuttoned her blouse and hung it from the back of another chair long enough to let her remove her body armor, which she hung over the back of the adjacent chair as she picked up her blouse to put back on.
Feeling lighter and cooler, she headed for the kitchen and the inevitable drink. Just one. Hanging up the vest could wait, and after the crime scene she’d gone to, tonight was definitely going to be a night when she would want a second drink. Her rigid control, though, would hold her to the one drink she always rationed herself. Just like with the way she arranged her guns and ammunition on the credenza, some things had to be kept just so. But it was certainly a treat to be able to work normal hours instead of having to keep after an investigation until all hours and then still have to come in at her usual time the next morning.
Sitting in her well-broken-in Eames chair, she debated turning on the TV, but the early local news had just ended, and the prime time choices these days were mostly either inane comedies, idiotic cop shows, or idiotic lawyer shows, none of which interested her. All of which she studiously avoided, in fact.
There were a few – very few – comparatively good cop shows, but even with most of them she wound up annoyed at the detectives as they went about their business, and she’d proven to her satisfaction many years before that no matter how she spoke or even yelled, the people on the screen couldn’t hear her. So she usually didn’t watch those, either, except for one reasonably realistic SWAT drama out of Canada which wasn’t on tonight.
The news would eventually come on, and at least those were real cops, real incidents. Often people she knew. Idly she scrolled through the movie and documentary channels, but still found nothing to hold her interest. As the screen returned to black, she rolled the partially-full glass across her forehead, enjoying the cold moisture on her skin. Low humidity meant it would be dry in minutes, but for that brief time, the cold felt so good.
It took perhaps twenty minutes before she finished the last of her drink, dumped her remaining ice noisily in the sink and opened the freezer to consider supper. Maybe tomorrow she’d buy another toy for the stash in her private room. Or maybe not; perhaps a set of Harry Potter books might be better this time. She’d gotten a set last year and they had been very well-received by the Marines, come their Christmas toy drive.
Closing the freezer, she walked down the hall to that spare bedroom, which she unlocked with one of the two keys she wore on a chain around her neck. The room was empty except for a half-dozen or so good-sized boxes, all unopened toys.
There was one frame on the wall, a copy of a sonogram. Written on the mat, in carefully-done but clearly amateurish calligraphy, was the legend “Noli Me Tangere,” Latin for ‘Touch Me Not.’ No, I’ll never touch you, will I, baby? But you still touch me each and every day, don’t you? Just you and me, since your daddy wouldn’t even stick around to take responsibility for his own dick. Reesa closed her eyes for just a moment. Boy or girl – she had never found out which flavor – her child would have been nine this year.
The psychological pain of the miscarriage she had suffered in college had diminished over the years, but it had never quite disappeared. She appeased it, and her irrational (she admitted it to herself) sense of guilt, with the toys and such she bought from time to time. Every December, she delivered the whole year’s pile to the Marines’ Toys for Tots drive. They were invariably delighted, although the check she delivered (approximately the remainder of one Family share’s dividend) along with the toys certainly never hurt that response. Then she started over, the toys, when they were age-specific, bought for a child just a year older than before.
She let the memory and its associated pain take her over for more than a minute before closing and relocking the door and returning to the freezer. Mentally she tucked the pain down and gently covered it over. That was her allotment for the day. Some days it was before supper, some days after, but she’d never skip it. She’d also never ever let that pain show, not to another living soul. In fact, other than her mother, with whom she was still very close, nobody even knew.
After supper, she shelved the book she’d finished over her meal and debated what to read next. Her library was mostly science fiction and history, some historical fiction, and a number of professional books. None of those last were on her list of possibles right now; she wanted recreation, not education.
She finally settled on an old classic science-fiction book, one of her favorites, and carried it to the bedroom. She changed into her robe before going back to the living room to read until it was time for the evening news. As she read, she nibbled her dessert – one Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. Her private joke, just to herself, was that they were really ‘Reesa’s Peanut Butter Cups.’ She allowed herself two of the treats per week, and here it was Tuesday and she was just having her first. Nibbling slowly at it, she made it last for almost twenty minutes. The memory, when it was all gone, was good for at least another ten.
***
The killer took a few minutes to treasure the memory of a job well done. The terrified look on the woman’s face, well, that was perhaps a bit unfortunate, at least for her, but she’d gotten the easy way out. Been given the easy way out. The knife had gone in just so, a quarter twist to help her bleed, and then let it go so she would fall with it still in her. The man … he’d tried to bluster his way out at first, but the killer took advantage of his shock when the woman had been stabbed, and by the time he’d been stabbed three or four times, he wasn’t fighting any longer.
The most delicious moment, the incredible sexual release …. After almost two full minutes of savoring the memory, the killer carefully packed all of the memories away in a mental file. There would be plenty of time to dwell on those memories again later. Now there was more … legitimate work to be done. Plenty of time later to do more of God’s work. And there was just so much of it to do.
***
Jeff folded his long legs into position as he sat down in one of the chairs in front of Amy’s desk. “This is not the way I like losing cases,” he said. “Not to mention how hard it is on the subjects, even if the clients themselves come out of it okay.”
Amy shook her head in sympathy. “No, it’s not nice. And this is … what? The second one to go like this?”
Jeff nodded. “Yeah. That one up in the foothills three months ago was the first for me. But you remember that detective I mentioned the other day? The one I encountered at lunch? I saw her arrive at the house today while I was still watching. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that she’s working homicide. Seems kind of young for it, if she is.” Now he stretched his legs out in front of him, crossing his ankles.
Amy regarded him as his friend, not simply his boss, for a moment. “You thinking of getting to know her?”
Jeff shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt, I figure. She’s easy on the eyes, as a cop she’s connected in ways I’m not, and what the hell, it gets lonely sitting in that little house all alone. And trust me, there’s no way in hell I want to repeat the last relationship I had.” He snorted. “Maybe this would be different.”
Amy shook her head. “I know exactly what it’s like being alone in that place. I lived there a lot longer than you have yet, remember. If you want my advice, get a dog. Or two. It’s safer, at least judging by your last relationship. Remember, I tried to warn you about her, and you wouldn’t listen. Too much thinking with the wrong head, if ‘thinking’ is the right word to use for that. Oh, by the way, I’ll be going to Golondrino for a long weekend again. It’s board meeting time.”
Jeff shrugged again. “When the Family board meets, I guess the head of the Family kind of has to be there. I’ll hold down the fort while you’re gone. Are all of you going? And just by the way, didn’t you have Alec there in that house with you? Most of the time, anyway?”
Amy nodded. “Without me, there is no meeting. But yes, we’re all going, as usual. We’ll be back late Monday, and I’ll be back in here on Tuesday, barring the unforeseen. And in response to your other question, no, he didn’t sleep there, not until we were married. After Becky and I moved out of here, I spent my nights alone there until then. Several years’ worth.”
“Okay, I’ll concede the point. Would you mind locking up? I think I’ll head out now. Oh, and say hi to Dad for me, would you?”
“Sure. See you when we’re back.” Jeff walked out the back door and across the alley to the little house on Helen Street.
Once inside the house, Jeff pulled a bottle of beer out of the fridge. Popping the top, he carried it out into the living room, sprawled on the couch, and turned on the TV. Watching some stupid game show, or whatever else he could find, would at least help pass the time until hunger drove him to the fridge to see what leftover was on the menu for dinner. Unless he just skipped it again tonight.
***
Henry Blodden sat on the well-worn and badly-sprung sofa in his little apartment, hardly more than an efficiency, behind the garage of the Joneses’ house. He was eating a frozen dinner, still almost too hot from the microwave, but his attention was focused on the early evening local news on his TV. Mostly he watched Channel 12 for the news, but tonight he had wound up on Channel 5, and the broadcast was halfway to the weather before he realized his error. At that point, he figured he might as well leave it.
The crime-scene reporter, a reasonably good-looking young man (if you went in for such things – Henry didn’t), made a decent report on the Bridgton house murders, but Henry wasn’t concerned. It was far more important to look forward to God’s work, not back on what had already happened. He had more work to do, and starting tomorrow he was going to spend much of the day out looking for the next target of his attention. It might take him more than simply tomorrow to find the right target, but he was supremely confident that he would, almost certainly by the end of the week, locate another appropriate target.
He definitely had to get started, though. Doing God’s work just felt so good, and how could God possibly not allow him to find the next recipient of his attentions when God so obviously wanted His work done? For that matter, how could it possibly not be God’s work when it just felt so good? Assuming there really was a God, that is. Like that mattered, either.
***
In the house proper, Bob and Mary Jones went about their normal evening ritual. It was so well-established between them by now that their conversation even in this was minimal, and by the time the late evening news came on, they were both lying in bed, watching the Channel 8 broadcast. When the weather forecast was done, Bob slid a hand up under Mary’s nightgown, along her thigh. No words were necessary. Nor were any used when Mary reached down, took Bob’s wrist and gently but firmly lifted his hand off her leg and put it back on his side of the bed.
After pulling her nightgown back down, she got up on one elbow to kiss him goodnight. She turned off the light on her nightstand and, without waiting to see if he was going to turn off his own or read for a while, rolled over and was asleep within minutes, or so Bob presumed from her soft, regular breathing. It was another twenty minutes before he put up his book and turned off his own light.
***
Lynne Fox was still at the studio. Unless she had to be live at a crime scene, she normally tried to be home by the time the 10 pm news came on. Tonight, however, she had some details she had to get taken care of before she could leave. Nothing she wanted to entrust to her staff, but also nothing earth-shaking. Just some things that she wanted to do herself. Needed to do herself.
While she worked, she mused over where she could have to go tomorrow. The news editor, who might as well be God in the news section of the station (if you didn’t believe that, just ask him), would undoubtedly have some really nasty sort of assignment for her. That was fine. No matter how difficult, how distasteful, how downright shitty the assignment she got, she always delivered, always produced excellent quality work, and she was known for that.
Sometimes, with a bit of sarcasm, because of whom the assignment came from, she even thought of it as God’s work. It was that sort of dependability, though, (along with her looks) that had gotten her as far as she was already, and that dependability along with a bit of luck – which she fully intended to either cultivate or create – would take her all the way to the top in the news business, a national anchor slot.
Where she clearly deserved to be. Just ask her.
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