Chapter 17
I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,
The more you beat me, I will fawn on you:
Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,
Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,
Unworthy as I am, to follow you.
What worse place can I beg in your love,—
And yet a place of high respect with me,—
Than to be used as you use your dog?
—W
ILLIAM
S
HAKESPEARE
,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
T
he house was a run-down ranch in a middle-class neighborhood sliding downhill. A couple of patrolmen were standing in the street, keeping a few gawking neighbors behind the tape.
Hanson saw Griggs on the edge of the lawn. He was staring over the shoulder of one of the CSU techs. Hanson didn’t recognize the tech, but he could see that she was making a mold of a shoe impression in a patch of dirt.
“Bet it belongs to the fuckin’ neighbor who called it in,” Griggs said.
Hanson waved him away from the tech. Griggs gave him a quizzical look.
“We need to bring Gina in on this,” he said. “She identified the key chain and the tattoo—”
“You’re jerking my dick, right?” He looked around at Gina, who was making her way toward them, and his tone was jubilant. “I knew this was a sex thing! I
knew
it!”
“We need her help. Try not to be as big an asshole as you are. I’m begging you.”
“Hey, you’re hurting my feelings,” Griggs said with mock pain. “But you know we could both get fucked over this, bringing her in. She’s not a cop anymore. She’s a civilian.”
“She’s a resource. Just play nice, all right?”
“I’ll be as sweet as a sixteen-year-old pussy.” Griggs leered, then turned toward Gina, calling out in a jolly voice. “Gee, you picked a hell of a day to drop in! Sure you’re up for this? It’s a doozy!”
“Fuck you, Griggs.” She nodded toward the truck parked at the curb. “What’s with Animal Control?”
“Well.” Griggs scratched his head, doing his bad Columbo impersonation. “We couldn’t figure out how to bag and tag the little fuckers.”
He handed them both a pair of booties.
“You’re gonna need these. And this.”
He tossed a small bottle of wintergreen oil at Hanson, who managed to catch it against his shirtfront.
“Come on,” Hanson groaned. “I didn’t know you even had this stuff—”
“I borrowed it from Creepy,” Griggs said. “Believe me, you’re gonna need it.”
Hanson threw it back to him. Real cops didn’t need that stuff.
“Fine, have it your way,” Griggs grunted.
Hanson and Gina slipped the booties over their shoes, though Hanson thought, as always, Gina performed the maneuver with much more grace. He fished gloves out of his pocket and put them on as well.
“You got an extra pair?” Gina asked.
“Whoa, you ain’t touching nothing,” Griggs said. “You shouldn’t even be here.”
High-pitched barking—and the most God-awful stench—grew as they approached the front door. Hanson raised a hand to his nose and tried not to gag.
“What the
fuck
? What
is
that? It’s not just decomp—”
He’d had a body once, left for three days in a car trunk in summer heat, that didn’t stink this bad.
Human decomposition is the worst smell in the known universe, almost beyond description: like raw meat gone rancid; a hot, cloying smell of sour rot. But this smell was more and worse.
“Christ,” Gina croaked, looking a little green. “Do I smell dog shit?”
“Dog piss, too.” Griggs smirked. “You want the wintergreen now?”
“Yes,” Gina and Hanson said at the same time.
“If you’re gonna puke, go ’round the side of the house,” Griggs said, handing over the bottle. “That’s where everybody else tossed their cookies. Everybody but Creepy.”
Hanson was nearly knocked over by a guy in an Animal Control uniform.
“Close the door! Don’t—Aw, shit, stop him!” the uniform shouted. “Catch that little bastard!”
He ran after a small mop of matted fur that darted between Hanson’s legs and then shot down the driveway.
“No way to contain a scene this fucked-up,” Griggs said. “So don’t bust my balls over the dogs.”
Hanson tried to avoid a mostly shredded plastic bag spilling garbage just inside the front door, and stepped in a wet pyramid of feces instead. The wintergreen helped the smell a little, but it did nothing about the flies buzzing everywhere.
“Jesus Christ,” Gina gasped quietly, sidestepping another pile of dog shit.
An ACU officer was attempting to lower a wriggling, yelping dog into a cage. Two other dogs, carbon copies of dirty reddish hair, were already in one cage, barking their ugly little heads off.
“Fuckin’ Pekingese,” ACU growled. “I
hate
fuckin’ Pekingese.”
“Yeah, we got five of these little ankle-biters,” Griggs said. “I think it’s five, we mighta missed one. I’m not even sure, are they evidence? Are they witnesses? Or accomplices? What do you think, Gee?”
“Accomplices?” Gina asked, waving a fly from her face.
They threaded past another pile of garbage: empty pizza boxes, used take-out containers, wadded-up clothing, soda cans and bottles . . .
“I don’t think our vic was much into housekeeping,” Griggs said. “Some of this is from the dogs playing in the bags of garbage, but most of it is just . . . well, shit.”
Another dog charged into the room, jumping frantically against Hanson’s legs and yapping. He grabbed it, while trying to keep its sharp little teeth out of his wrist. But as the dog wriggled in his arms, he noticed that the matted hair was moist.
“This is blood,” Hanson said suddenly, dropping the dog. “The dogs have been into the blood.”
“That ain’t all they been into,” Griggs said. “They freakin’
chewed
on both victims.”
“Both?” Gina asked.
“Yeah. We got two bodies this time.”
The next-door neighbor had smelled something really,
really
bad.
“I thought maybe a skunk or something had crawled under the house and died, you know?” Mrs. Hernandez told the police. “It smelled so
bad
.”
Mrs. Hernandez, unable to locate the odor, had knocked on her neighbor’s door and realized right away that the smell was coming from inside.
“I don’t know her so well,” she said, shrugging. “I went in her house once and it was nasty. Something wrong with that woman, if you ask me. Who lives like that? But this smell was so much worse than ever before. And the dogs, always barking! Yap-yap-yap!”
“You didn’t hear anything else? Screams, shouting?”
“I always hear stuff from over there. Loud music, mostly, sometimes screams,” Mrs. Hernandez said, shrugging. “I call the police the first couple of times, but they just tell me it’s her TV too loud. Then they tell me not to call no more.”
Griggs led Hanson and Gina to the back of the house, where Creepy Carl was a white ghost in coveralls, booties, and mask. His gloves were already smeared with blood.
“Does that mask help at all?” Hanson asked him.
Carl’s perpetually bloodshot eyes blinked once, like an owl, and he shrugged.
“Keeps the flies out,” he said in his usual monotone.
Hanson couldn’t say anything. He just stared, trying not to breathe through his nose and waving the flies away.
The room wasn’t very big, maybe ten by twelve at the most, but the odd mixture of furniture made it feel like a closet. All of it was old, antique perhaps, but shabby.
The walls of the room were paneling painted over—badly—in a shockingly bright primary blue. One wall held a large piece of pegboard—also blue—on which hung a variety of instruments, only some of which he recognized. Rope. A feather duster. Leather cuffs. Two whips.
Someone had pulled back the heavy drapes to open the windows, and dusty shafts of sunlight fell onto a male body.
At first, the naked man seemed to be standing upright with his eyes open. The effect was unsettling until Hanson realized the body was cuffed ankles and wrists to a big wooden X. He wasn’t standing so much as just . . . sagging. Like a sack of meat gone bad, complete with squirming maggots in his eyes.
He was completely naked but for the pink stripper shoes crammed onto his feet, two metal clamps dangling from his nipples, and a red rubber ball gag in his mouth. Blood had dried in streaks down his chest from a deep slash in his throat.
The other victim, a woman, was lying on the floor. Her blue satin kimono was open, revealing deep cuts in both breasts in addition to the mess the killer had made of her genitalia.
Gina squatted near the body, studying the corpse’s face.
“Aw, shit,” she breathed softly. “This is
not
good.”
“What? Do you know her?”
“Yep.” Gina straightened up and ran a hand through her hair. “This is Lady Cassandra.”
“What’s that mean to us?” Griggs wanted to know.
“It means, boys,” Gina grimaced, “that the proverbial shit is about to hit the fan.”
Another Pekingese ran into the room and went straight for his mistress.
“No, no!” Gina shooed the dog away. “Aw, shit. Have they really been
eating
her?”
Hanson looked down at Lady Cassandra’s left leg, which indeed showed signs of chewing.
“You’d think they’d be put off by the maggots,” Griggs said. “But I guess protein is protein.”
Hanson felt his stomach drop and suddenly Gina was gesturing wildly at the door.
“Take it outside!”
Hanson didn’t think he would make it to the door, so he stumbled to the open window. He punched out the screen and hung his head out just in time for a second look at his breakfast.
“It looks like they’ve been dead four, maybe five days,” Creepy Carl said. “I guess the poor dogs got hungry.”
The three of them turned to stare at Carl, then glanced at each other.
“Miles is gonna be so pissed he didn’t catch this one,” Griggs mumbled.
“
I’m
pissed that Miles didn’t catch this one,” Hanson grumbled.
“The dogs have stopped barking,” Gina said. “They must have finally gotten them all in the truck. Thank God.”
In the end, Miles was called in anyway, along with four more CSU. They all crowded into the little house.
“I don’t even know where to start,” Louise Fortner said, one hand rubbing across her mouth. “With all this clutter and garbage, I can’t tell what’s important and what’s just crap.”
Hanson was digging through the piles on the kitchen counters. Newspapers from yesterday . . . the day before. . . Magazines, junk mail, receipts, scribbled notes . . .
“Grocery list,” he said, reading: “Dog food, milk, tuna, Preparation H—”
“Oh, I so did
not
want to know that,” Griggs groaned. “I got six carry-out menus from the same Chinese place. Didn’t this bitch throw anything away?”
“This is interesting,” Hanson said, pulling a scrap of paper from underneath a magnet on the fridge.
“What? Another Taco Bell wrapper?” Gina asked.
“I got some Mickey D’s over here if you wanna start a collection,” Griggs said.
“It’s a phone number,” Hanson said. “Important enough that she put it somewhere she couldn’t lose it. And the initials
MD
.”
Griggs snatched it from Hanson’s hand and squinted at it.
“Could be her doctor,” he said.
“Could be.”
Hanson took the cell from his pocket and dialed the number: 555-7286. Then he hit the button for speakerphone, and held it away from his ear.
“This is Milton Daubs,” said the familiar voice. “I’m not available to take your call but if you—”
“Damn.” Hanson clicked off, and lowered his voice. “What’s she doing with the chief’s private cell phone number?”
“Holy shit,” Griggs said. “You think he’s one of her customers?”
Gina laughed loudly.
“What?” Griggs demanded.
“He’s not a customer,” Gina said, rubbing her eyes. “She’s a snitch.”
“Huh?” Griggs said.
“I’ll explain to you over dinner,” Gina said. “I need to eat something.”
Two hours ago, Hanson hadn’t thought he’d ever eat again, but now his stomach was demanding to be fed.
“There’s no way we can go into a restaurant with this stink on us,” he said. “Even Waffle House would throw us out.”