Читать книгу Cruel - Jacob Stone - Страница 13

Chapter 5

Three years ago, Morris Brick was a star within the LAPD after solving three high-profile serial killer cases in a span of seven years. His last investigation as a homicide detective had him chasing down the Hillside Cannibal Killer, which not only made him a national celebrity but also almost made him the Cannibal’s last victim. When he decided to quit the department and start MBI, Police Commissioner Martin Hadley made only a perfunctory effort at best to talk him out of it. While that might’ve surprised others, Morris pretty much expected it from Hadley—after all, the two of them strongly disliked each other and had been butting heads since he made detective. Hadley, however, went ballistic when he found out Morris had arranged for three other LAPD homicide detectives—Charlie Bogle, Fred Lemmon, and Dennis Polk—to join him in his new venture. The police commissioner would’ve blown a gasket entirely if he’d known Morris also took copies of his cold cases with him on his way out the door.

Morris had no intention of actively working any of these unsolved crimes, but he wanted the files in case inspiration struck. Of all of them, the ones he prayed most to be solved were the Nightmare Man murders. He also dreaded the thought of ever opening the thick manila folder that held the sickening details and secrets of those killings.

It was a little after four when he returned with Parker in tow to MBI’s office suite on Wilshire Boulevard. He’d been coaxed by Stonehedge to have three le daiquiris (his actor friend was right—they were delicious), but he could’ve had half a dozen more and it wouldn’t have mattered. Thinking about the Nightmare Man sobered him up more than guzzling a thermos of black coffee or dumping a bucket of ice water on his head.

He was fourteen when the Nightmare Man first struck, but even though he had been almost a decade away from becoming a police officer, he was still connected with those murders since his dad, who was then an LAPD homicide detective, was the lead investigator. He didn’t see his dad much during the seventeen days that the killings took place, nor the four months that followed as his dad continued to chase dead ends. The times that he did see him, Sam Brick had tried to hide the horror of the killings from his family. He never talked about them. Not a word. But there were cracks in the façade he put up, moments when Morris caught a glimpse of the weariness his dad tried so hard to conceal.

It wasn’t as much a coincidence as it might’ve seemed when in 2001 he made detective at thirty-one and only a month later was assigned to the case when the murders started up again. All he ever wanted to do as a kid was follow in his dad’s footsteps and become a police detective, and somehow it seemed fitting that he’d finish the job his dad started and be the one to catch the Nightmare Man. But it didn’t happen. Just as in 1984, the Nightmare Man slipped away after seventeen days of bloody carnage, his crimes remaining unsolved.

Morris dug the Nightmare Man folder from its hiding place under a pile of boxes and other papers stored away in the back of his coat closet. He hadn’t been aware of it until then, but at a subconscious level he must’ve been trying to hide the file’s existence—that had to be why he’d buried it where he had. The other cold case files were kept in his bottom desk drawer.

Parker had accompanied Morris to the closet, making sure to stick his nose into things. The bull terrier followed Morris back to his desk and with a grunt lowered himself onto the carpeted floor. Within minutes he was lying on his side and snoring heavily. It was tiring work mooching as much as Parker had done that afternoon!

For several minutes Morris sat Buddha-like, staring at the folder. He hadn’t touched it since dropping it onto his desk, and the thought of doing so gave him an uneasy, hollow feeling deep in his stomach as if he had swallowed a peach pit. More a delaying tactic than actually wanting coffee, he left his office and walked to the kitchen area. He found the coffeepot holding an inch of cold, congealed, grayish sludge that must’ve been left over from yesterday. Before meeting with Stonehedge, he’d been out of the office tracking down several crates of stolen machinery parts for a client. Likewise, Lemmon and Polk were out on assignment. Adam Felger, MBI’s millennial computer and hacking specialist, whom Morris talked to briefly when he returned from his late lunch, drank only Red Bull and had an impressive collection of empty cans stacked up in his office, and Greta Lindstrom, MBI’s office manager and receptionist, eschewed coffee for bottled water.

Morris scrubbed the glass carafe clean and started a fresh pot brewing. Several times during the year he had considered replacing the antiquated coffeemaker with a single cup brewer that worked with individual-sized flavored pods, but he was old-fashioned when it came to coffee and liked the idea of always having a pot available.

The coffee finished brewing, and he stared at it, reluctant to pour himself a cup. Once he did, he’d be done with excuses for not opening the Nightmare Man folder. As he stood silently he thought about the approaching seventeen-year anniversary and how that number held a special significance for the killer. As with the killings in 1984, those in 2001 also took place over a seventeen-day period. The victims were all women. All of them were found naked in bed, and with each murder the killer pulled off seventeen finger- and toenails and used a hunting knife to slice off seventeen pieces of flesh, and then arranged all this at the foot of the bed into a grisly “17.” But that wasn’t all he did to the victims. There were the seventeen burn marks found on each of them. As painful and disfiguring as these wounds and burns were, none of that was what killed these women. It was the way he used a rat to end their lives that still made Morris queasy whenever he’d let himself think about it, and there wasn’t much else he had ever encountered as a homicide detective that made him queasy.

Morris decided he wasn’t in the mood for coffee after all. Without any further procrastination, he walked back to his office, sat down behind his desk, and opened the Nightmare Man folder. The first page was a police drawing from 1984. The witness lived in the same apartment building as the victim and saw the suspected killer when the man was leaving through the building’s back door at three a.m. carrying a large gym bag over his shoulder—a bag large enough to hold a rat cage. The parking lot behind the building was poorly lit, and the witness, a twenty-three-year-old man by the name of Levi Bergdahl, was standing in the shadows and wouldn’t have been seen by someone leaving the apartment building. The suspect’s face, however, would’ve been lit up enough by an exterior doorway light for Bergdahl to have gotten a clear view of him and be able to provide the details he’d given to the police sketch artist. Bergdahl had been drinking that night for several hours before coming home, but he insisted he wasn’t drunk, and Morris’s dad decided he was credible. The sketch was shown to the other residents in the building, and nobody knew the man, so he had either broken into the building late at night to kill Denise Lowenstein—the Nightmare Man’s fourth victim—or to burglarize another apartment, except none of the apartments other than Lowenstein’s were broken into that night.

It had been over fifteen years since Morris had last looked at the police sketch, but the image was still vivid in his mind. A long, narrow face lined by deep grooves. No beard or mustache. In the darkness of the night, the witness couldn’t tell whether the suspect’s hair was black or a shade of brown, or even whether it had any gray, but insisted it was cut short and that some kind of hair gel had been used to slick it back against the skull and keep it from touching the suspect’s ears, which were long and had thick lobes. The nose, like the man’s face, was long and narrow, and possibly bent as if it had once been broken and never set properly. The drawing looked to Morris like the face of an ex-convict who’d done hard time. Bergdahl further claimed the suspect wore a dark gray jacket, dark pants, and gloves. He had watched quietly from the shadows as the suspect left the building and fled down an alleyway to an adjoining street. While Bergdahl thought the man was suspicious, and was in fact frightened by him, he didn’t contact the police until after he found out Denise Lowenstein had been murdered by the Nightmare Man.

Morris’s dad had had the same thought about the police sketch looking like an ex-convict and had gone through stacks of prisoner mugshot books without any luck. The convicts he found who resembled the sketch were either still in prison when the murders took place or had airtight alibis.

The next sheet of paper in the folder was a drawing Morris had made that aged the 1984 suspect by seventeen years, and like his dad he had spent dozens of hours looking at mugshot books and prisoner photos without any luck. Morris gave this drawing only a cursory look before moving on to the police and medical examiner notes and the profiler reports. He read all of these carefully—both the notes and reports from 1984 and 2001. When he was done, he picked up the crime scene photos, his jaw muscles tightening as he steeled himself to look at them. Carefully, methodically, he studied each of the photos, even the ones that showed how the rats were used, as he hoped to glean a nugget of useful information that might’ve escaped him and the other police and FBI investigators over the years. It was as painful this time as it had been every other time he had seen them, and as in the past, no hidden secret was revealed.

Once he was done, he arranged the thick stack of pages into a neat pile and placed them back into the manila folder and, instead of hiding it in the back of his closet, he left it on top of his desk. If Levi Bergdahl’s witness account was worth a damn and the person he had described was the Nightmare Man and not a random burglar, the killer would be in his eighties today. And that would only be if he were still alive. But what if Bergdahl was wrong? Or even if he was right? Couldn’t an eighty-year-old psychopath still kill, especially one as depraved as this killer and who’d been waiting seventeen years to take more lives? The odds were the Nightmare Man was gone forever. Logically Morris knew that, but he still couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling deep in his stomach that they weren’t done with this maniac yet.

He absently drummed his fingers against the surface of his desk, then made a phone call. After four rings, Hadley answered, his voice gruff and exasperated as he demanded to know why Morris was calling.

“Do you know what day it will be a week from today?”

“I’m busy,” Hadley grumbled. “If you got something to say, spit it out.”

“October second.”

“You don’t think I’ve got a calendar and can see that?”

“It will be the seventeen-year anniversary of when the Nightmare Man started killing again.”

There was a fat second of silence, then Hadley’s frog-like voice croaking, “So?”

“You don’t think you should be doing something about it?”

“Like what?”

“How about warning the public? Or maybe sending out extra patrols and checking alleys for anyone collecting rats?” Morris could hear his voice growing harsher as he added, “Or following up on the idea my dad was working thirty-four years ago, and what I wanted to try seventeen years ago.”

“You won’t give up on that, will you? Forget it, Brick, I’m not wasting departmental resources chasing a ghost. If this maniac is still alive, he’s a feeble old man rotting away in either a prison cell or a nursing home. And if you think you can use this to drum up business for your pissant little firm, forget that also. I swear, Brick, if you start showing up on TV worrying the public about this, I’ll find a way to pull your license and shut you down. And don’t even think about calling your slick Boy Scout friend at the mayor’s office.”

“Martin, women could be dying soon. In the worst possible way.”

“Yeah, well, that’s my headache if it happens, not yours.”

Hadley disconnected the call from his end.

A soft groan came from the floor. Morris looked down to see Parker stretching all four legs, the bull terrier’s eyes open as he waited to see what Morris would do next.

What he wanted to do was forget all about the Nightmare Man, but he didn’t think that was possible, at least not entirely. Maybe if October second came and went without the murders starting up again.

Morris checked his watch. A little before five. He got Greta on the phone. Two more insurance fraud cases had come in that day. They still had their share of corporate investigations, divorces, and occasional missing persons, but the insurance fraud cases were becoming their bread and butter. Not the worst thing in the world, and much better than thinking about serial killers. But the work could wait until tomorrow. He used the point of his shoe to lightly rub Parker’s chest. The bull terrier lifted his head to give Morris a questioning look.

“What do you say we cut out early and I take you to the dog park?” Morris asked. “See if we can work off some of that rich food you mooched off me?”

Parker answered by flipping himself onto his feet, his thick, ropy tail wagging steadily.