Chapter 3
The imagination is the spur of delights . . . all depends upon it, it is the mainspring of everything; now, is it not by means of the imagination one knows joy? Is it not of the imagination that the sharpest pleasures arise?
—M
ARQUIS DE
S
ADE
S
omething woke her.
She had no idea what it was, only that something yanked her up from the depths of fitful sleep and left her lying there, completely awake, staring into the darkness. Something made her heart thud heavily, suddenly out of sync.
Something
was such a big word. A scary word that held the possibility of every conceivable horror and a vast, yawning uncertainty that could swallow her whole.
She could not move, only lie frozen there and hope that the
something
would go away. That if she held very, very still, it would not see her. Would not smell her. Would not
find
her.
When she was little, she would sometimes wake in the dead of night like this, with an absolute certainty that someone—
something
—was in the room with her. Her mother said she had too much imagination.
“It’s all those horror movies you kids like so much,” her mother always said.
Only now she was twenty-six years old, with a job and an apartment and bills to pay. She knew that there were no monsters under the bed or in the closet . . .
At least, not the kind of monsters she had feared as a child. No vampires, no werewolves, no Freddy Kruger. But there were monsters of another sort out there. She had the bruises to prove it.
If only she could sleep. In daylight she felt fuzzy and out of focus; at night, she was wound tight as a bowstring. She was going to lose her job if she didn’t get this under control. Maybe Marla was right and she should see somebody.
She lay there, listening hard and hearing only the faint electric whir of the air conditioner and the static burst of crickets outside. Her eyes strained, seeing nothing but the usual dim outlines of furniture, window, and door.
Cherry didn’t see how she could ever tell. They would only say it had been her fault. That she had—literally—been asking for it.
A dark shape moved, and the bed bounced on its springs. She yelped, springing upright—
“Oh, Jesus, Gunther! Oh, shit, you scared me half to death, you stupid cat!”
The big gray tabby pressed his head against her forehead, then sniffed at her face.
She lay back down, and Gunther settled on her chest.
Everything is all right. Breathe . . . just breathe . . .
The doors are locked and bolted. He doesn’t know where I am now . . . I’m safe.
He had seemed so perfect in the beginning. His e-mails and phone calls, always saying the things she’d dreamed of hearing. She had wanted so much to be his.
Until the first time she screamed, “Red!” and he didn’t stop.
Chapter 4
Tragedy delights by affording a shadow of the pleasure which exists in pain.
—P
ERCY
B
YSSHE
S
HELLY
T
om Hanson and his partner, John Griggs, arrived on the scene just after six a.m. Both were still working on their first cup of Starbucks. Hanson couldn’t decide what to do with his coffee; he didn’t want to take the cup over to the body, but he didn’t want to leave in the car, either. He needed every ounce of the caffeine.
“Jesus,” Griggs grumbled, tossing his cup into the backseat of the unmarked car. “You’d think dead bodies could wait for a decent hour to be found. It’s not like they’re going anywhere.”
“That cup had better be empty,” Hanson said, leaving his cup in the console and getting out of the car. Bad enough that Griggs didn’t know how to use a trash can, but Hanson would be damned if he’d clean up spilled coffee along with the fast-food wrappers and empty soda bottles.
“Of course it was empty,” Griggs said, straightening and smoothing his awful tie. “I pay five bucks for a cup of coffee, I’m gonna drink every damned drop.”
Hanson was nearly forty-two, of a respectable height and slender build. His best features—so women told him—were his soulful, puppy-dog brown eyes, and a head full of shaggy brown hair that promised he would escape the humiliation of balding as he grew older. Women were drawn to him, as often to mother him as to seduce him.
The harsh overhead lights of the parking garage gave a surreal edge to the great, looping arcs of cast-off blood spattering the grimy cinderblock walls and the oily black pools spreading from the body.
Hanson was relieved to see his preferred medical examiner, Miles, hunkered over the victim. It was way too early in the morning to deal with Creepy Carl, who never seemed to wash his hair and always reeked of morgue chemicals. Or Tyna, who was just too damned perky for both the job and the hour.
He fished a pair of gloves from his coat pocket. He had none of the little paper booties to place over his shoes—he could see the black pools sucking at the ones on Miles’s feet—but decided to just try to stay out of the blood.
Griggs stood with his hands on his hips, squinting down at the body. He was forty-seven, and still looked a bit like a pit bull in his expensive suit and necktie of questionable taste. Today’s specimen was a nightmare of red, purple, and orange stripes.
At least, Hanson thought, Griggs’s tie was nowhere near as ugly as the body in front of him.
“Damn,” Griggs said. “What the hell happened to this guy?”
“BFT,” Miles said. “Baseball bat, maybe. Maybe a tire iron.”
BFT: blunt force trauma. No shit, Hanson thought.
Hanson had seen dead bodies, but this one catapulted easily into his top five of all-time bloody messes. He and Griggs stayed back: Hanson out of respect for the evidence splattered all over the place, Griggs no doubt in fear for his Italian tasseled loafers.
More blood streaked the car. A handprint was clearly visible, as if someone had groped for purchase and found none. Some of the pooled blood had been stepped in, smeared across the concrete, evidence of a struggle.
The crime scene techs were gonna have a field day with this one, and Hanson didn’t want to listen to Louise Fortner bitch about them having stepped all over
her
evidence.
“Found these under the body.” Miles held out a set of keys.
“Bet one of those keys fits this Lexus,” Hanson said, taking them with two fingers, careful to grasp the chain from the key fob.
Building security had found the body around five a.m. and had shut down that end of the parking garage. Hanson gave silent thanks that the rent-a-cops had had the sense not to fuck things up.
The Lexus was the only car within a hundred feet. A few business-types stared over at the little party as they waited for the elevator to open. Hanson wondered if they were curious or just pissed that they hadn’t been able to nab one of the prime parking spaces inside the crime scene tape.
“Can’t even tell what color his tie is.” Griggs straightened up abruptly and turned away. “Aw, Christ, I don’t wanna see that . . .”
Hanson was about to break his balls for being squeamish, but when he saw where Griggs was looking, his own bile rose.
The corpse’s fly was open. Something ragged and bloody lay there like the product of a sausage grinder.
He studied the keys rather than dwell on what might or might not have happened to the victim’s equipment.
Six, no seven keys on a ring with some kind of round metal tag. There was something on the tag; initials, maybe? He couldn’t tell for the blood. But he could make out the Lexus logo on one of the keys.
“Yep, it’s his car. Check the glove box for the registration, will ya, Griggs?”
Hanson dropped the bloody keys into a paper bag and turned back to Miles.
“He still got his wallet?”
“Yeah.” Miles grimaced at Hanson’s ancient Thom Mc-Cann’s. “Let me hand it to you.”
Hanson opened the wallet and took out the driver’s license.
“Roger Andrew Banks,” he read, passing it to Griggs.
“Hazelwood Lane.” Griggs whistled. “Nice neighborhood.”
Hanson flipped through the cards: American Express, MasterCard, a Blockbuster card, and a discount coffee bar card.
“So, he’s leaving the building, late, after everybody else has gone home.” Griggs was thinking aloud. “He’s at the car, he’s got his keys out . . .”
The coffee bar card had four little holes punched in it; Roger only needed one more. Poor bastard was never gonna get that free cappuccino now.
“So it wasn’t a robbery.” Griggs was eyeing the cash and cards.
“Muggers don’t usually beat the hell out of someone like this.”
Or filet their dicks, either.
“Maybe a homo thing gone bad?” Griggs asked as he took out a notebook and began to write. “I mean, the pants being unzipped and all—”
Hanson sighed. Gina had once called Griggs “a knuckle-dragging, equal-opportunity bigot.” He wasn’t a bad cop, just an asshole. Still, Griggs was his partner now and Gina was history.
“Possible, I guess. We’re looking at a perp with a hell of an anger management problem. Strong, too.”
“Yeah,” Griggs agreed, then grimaced. “Not your usual hundred-and-forty-pound faggot, anyway.”
Roger had a bit of a beer gut, but he must have been close to six feet, 250 pounds easy.
“The killer hit him a good one to the head,” Hanson said. “Doesn’t look like Roger ever made it to his feet after going down the first time.”
“Yeah, all the blood smears on the door. Either the killer snuck up on him, or it was somebody he knew.”
“Possible.” Hanson shrugged. “But the perp had to be carrying a fairly large weapon. If my own mother came up to me in a parking garage at night, carrying a tire iron, I wouldn’t turn my back on her. Would you?”
“My mom or your mom?” Griggs snorted. “I wouldn’t turn my back on my mom if she was holding a box of animal crackers. Your mom, I dunno the woman.”
He squatted, grunted, reached under the car, and came up with a briefcase.
“Musta gotten kicked under here. Don’t see any blood on it.” Griggs carefully snapped the case open and peered inside. “Papers and shit.”
“We verify that he works in this building yet?”
“Yeah, he works up on twelve. Wilmer, Banks, and Cohen,” came a thin, male voice. “I mean, uh . . . I can’t say a hundred percent if it’s him, but that’s Mr. Banks’s car and his parking space.”
They turned to look at a thin black male in a gray security uniform. He was in his early twenties and smelled slightly of vomit.
“Antone?” Hanson read his nametag. “You found the body?”
“Uh-huh. And it’s An-to-NEE. Not AN-tone.”
“Jesus,” Griggs muttered. “Like it’s our fault you people can’t spell your own names right.”
Antone gave Griggs a sullen eye roll, then looked back at Hanson.
It turned out that Antone had come on at four forty-five to open up. There was no night security, just a couple of cameras aimed at the doors. Griggs went off to find the tapes, but Hanson doubted they’d find any joy on them. The Lexus was too far from either the lobby door or the elevators, but maybe it had caught something or somebody worth checking out.
“I saw Mr. Banks’s car still there,” Antone went on. “Thought maybe his wife had picked him up or something. People sometimes leave their car here overnight.”
Antone was losing some of his ashy pallor as he warmed to his subject.
“But then I saw the blood. First, I thought it was oil, you know? Didn’t look like blood, it looked
black
. But I thought, that’s too much oil for a leak. Even if somebody had changed their oil in here—you wouldn’t believe the shit people will do—it was still too much—”
“Did you touch anything? Step in anything?”
“Hell, no!” Antone looked offended. “You think I’m stupid or something? I didn’t want to get close enough to touch
nothing
. I just called nine-one-one and sat my ass back in the office ’til you guys showed up.”
“Where’d you throw up?”
Antone looked at his feet.
“I made it ’round the corner,” he admitted.
“Okay,” Hanson said. “You did good. Thanks, Antone.”
The crime scene unit had arrived. Lenny was taking pictures, and Hanson was happy he could leave his shitty camera in the car. Fortner was walking slowly around the Lexus, no doubt deciding where to dust for fingerprints first.
Griggs came back with a brown bag, and opened it to reveal a stack of videotapes inside.
“Probably taped over the same ones a hundred times,” Hanson said with a grimace. “The picture will be shit.”
“What gets me,” Griggs said, “is that the perp must have been spattered pretty good with blood, too. But I don’t see any trail. Did he just walk out of here? Jump in his car? Either way, it’s gotta help us find him.”
“We can hope.”
They took the elevator up to the twelfth-floor lobby to have a little talk with Wilmer, Banks, and Cohen, Attorneys at Law.
By the time they got to the morgue, Miles had already undressed and washed the body. Roger looked worse, if that were possible.
“That was fast,” Hanson said as he approached the table.
“Slow day,” Miles said. “I’m probably not even going to need the bone saw to get the brain out. His skull is fractured all over the place.”
The face didn’t look much like the one on the driver’s license in Roger’s wallet. The skin hung loose on his left temple, exposing bone underneath. The nose had actually slipped to the left, as if Roger had turned his head too fast and left his nose pointing in the wrong direction.
“One blow here.” Miles pointed to a gash in the top rear of the skull. “Linear fracture. Over here, diastatic fracture along the suture lines, but then it looks like another blow to the same area caused a depressed fracture—”
“Crushed like a walnut,” Griggs volunteered, crowding in for a better look.
“Definitely going to be a closed casket,” Miles said grimly.
“Skull fractures what killed him?” Hanson asked.
“Nope.”
“No?” Both of the detectives looked at Miles with raised eyebrows.
“Oh, he probably would have died from one or all of them, especially the depressed fracture, but I don’t think he lived long enough.”
“So what killed him?”
Hanson couldn’t handle looking at the corpse’s face any longer, so he glanced at the rest of the body. The story it told wasn’t pretty. Roger’s heart had been pumping long enough for angry blossoms to have already begun spreading over his fishy-white flesh.
“He’s got a broken collarbone, at least three broken ribs, both kneecaps dislocated, and both arms broken—”
“Jesus.” Hanson closed his eyes. Griggs whistled through his teeth.
Both kneecaps? So the perp had taken Roger down with the first blow to the head, then stood over him and busted both kneecaps. Or maybe he’d done the knees while Roger was still going down, trying to hold on to the car. No one could run with two dislocated kneecaps.
So the perp had specifically wanted him incapacitated, on the ground. The arms had been broken as Roger tried to shield himself.
“He was hit in the larynx, too. There’s some swelling, so it happened early in the attack.”
“Keep him from screaming for help,” Griggs said, a statement rather than a question.
Miles nodded.
“It’s not final, but what I’m seeing is consistent with a baseball bat. But here’s where it gets
really
nasty.”