Night bait, page 2
So, Dignazio's language wasn't the least bit impressive, but his departmental record was, and he seemed the prefect complement to the procedural excellence maintained by the Metropolitan Police Homicide Squad. The squad had nearly a flawless reputation, unlike the three-ring circuses common to most big city departments, and for the years that Dignazio had captained its homicide squad, he had seen that its reputation remained intact.
Until now.
Now there was a killer in town, and ordinarily this would have been no big deal to Dignazio; he dealt with killers every day—that was his job. Knife slayings happened in Washington around the clock. But this particular killer bore no semblance to anything Dignazio had ever been exposed to. This killer's method of murder was distinctly different. And it was probably the grossest m.o. he had ever heard.
So far, three girls had been killed in an identical manner. Cause of death was cardiac fibrillation due to electrocution.
That was the obvious link. No blood and guts here, no hacked limbs, slit throats, or multiple-stab wounds that were so common with the usual psycho killer. This killer was electrocuting his victims to death.
Electrocuting them.
Since the McKeever girl, it had become the talk of the town. There hadn't been this much of an uproar in the East since Son of Sam.
But there was something else, something worse.
The method of murder was not the only thing which made this case unlike any other. It came as no surprise to learn that each of the three murdered girls had been sexually assaulted. But according to the pathologist of D.C. General Hospital, the killer did not rape the girls until after they were dead. He was killing them, then raping them. So that brought another uniqueness under the spotlight.
Necrophilia.
Dignazio had always thought of necrophilia as something that only happened in eighteenth century French novels—never in real life. But now one of the most nefarious sexual aberrations in history had become a reality. A necrophile murderer was stalking the streets of Washington, D.C.
And to take the whole jaded mess one step farther, local newspaper reporters were now referring to the killer as THE ELECTROCUTIONIST, turning urban murder into an undisciplined gesture of sensationalism.
At his office, Dignazio slumped down in the big cushioned chair behind his desk, the aftertaste of his orange juice still bitter in his mouth. He sighed.
The Electrocutionist. Everything about the case stank, even the name. The Electrocutionist, he thought. I could do without that. That's the kind of name that causes people to panic. Shit, people are already panicking, all because some fucking hothead reporter gets a wild hair up his ass.
There were other things about the killer's m.o. that equally disturbed him because they all indicated calculation and precise forethought. The bodies of the three girls were all in the same condition, and they had been disposed of in the same manner. Each of them had been gagged brutally—a tennis ball had been crammed into their mouths, and a length of heavy-gauge duct tape had been girded around their heads to seal their lips. All three corpses had been found in the typical inconspicuous places: one in a garbage dumpster, another behind some trash cans in an alley, and the McKeever girl slumped in the corner of a parking booth. Each body had been tied up in a grotesque bundle of clear plastic sheets, like the kind painters use to cover furniture, obviously a move on the killer's part to solve the problem of excretory evacuation. Lastly, autopsies revealed traces of sodium pentathol in their blood. small puncture wound was evident on the right side of each girl's throat. Needlemarks, no doubt. It was apparent that the killer was knocking the girls out before taking them home and having his fun.
This first two victims had been nobodies, hustlers from the redlight district. The third girl, though, had been a politician's daughter, and that's when the whole thing had been blown to critical proportions. Nobody gives a shit when unimportant people get the ax, he thought, but when it happens to someone in the public eye, then watch out. The shit will fly.
And the shit was flying, it seemed, right into Dignazio's face.
Yep, he thought, everything was going fine and smooth until this Electrocutionist bullshit came up. Dignazio had performed miracles in the past, and now the top brass had dropped the case on him with full expectation of still another miracle. That's what frightened him most. The Electrocutionist was a heavyweight head case. There was no way to get into a crazy person's head, especially a crazy person who had intelligence. It was impossible to calculate where he would strike next. This killer was moving fast—three girls so far, in little more than a week and a half. And that brought about the worst question of them all.
When will it happen again?
They had but one lead, hardly a lead at all. Leslie McKeever was last seen in a Georgetown singles' bar called the Ultravox Lounge. She went there alone, but one of the bartenders said he saw her leave with a man. He had never seen the man in the place before, though he was able to give a vague description: five-foot-seven or thereabouts, approximately one hundred and fifty pounds, well dressed, a dark complexion, and dark kinky hair. That was all the homicide squad had. There were probably a million guys in D.C. who matched that description, and the way it looked now, Dignazio's only real hope was luck. He had decoys out on 14th Street, five of them, but he knew that the chances of one running into the killer were astronomical. Maybe we'll get lucky, he told himself. Maybe one of those decoys will latch onto him. Or maybe the guy will just quit, lay low, leave town. Yes, you fucking bastard. Leave town. Go to New York. Go to Chicago. Go anyfuckingplace. Just get out of my town.
TWO
The clock in St. Thomas Tower read 11:31.
Diane Slezak stared at the lighted clockface for a moment, then smiled to herself, knowing that she had less than a half hour to go. She could remember the clock since her kindergarten days; it was one of many landmarks Washington had to offer, sort of like the capital's version of Big Ben. In her youth, she never would have guessed that she'd someday be looking at it from the middle of the porno district.
The street was noisy tonight, more traffic, more people. A cluster of prostitutes congregated on the corner; they all seemed to be sharing an incredibly funny joke. Diane viewed the circle of girls with a kind of stunted avidity, and she became aware, then, of just how much she hated them. She couldn't imagine how these girls could dole out the use of their bodies for money, could let total strangers screw them, or worse, put their penises into their mouths. Whores didn't care, Diane knew They'd open their legs and mouths to the filthiest Johns, just as long as they got their money. Nothing else mattered to them. Diane had been around hookers for so long now that she didn't even regard them as girls any more. They were commodities—Hershey bars, wanting an easy way out. Why work for a living when you can turn your bodily orifices into cash? What could be easier than renting the holes that nature provided?
Diane hated them all.
And that was the funny part. As much as Diane hated them, there she was, standing on their streets, wearing their clothes, pretending to be one of them. It was nothing more than that—pretending, a tactical game of make-believe. Diane wasn't really a hooker; she was an undercover cop. Of course, all the real hookers knew that (prostitutes were ultimately street-wise; they could smell an undercover cop ten blocks away), but Diane wasn't interested in fooling hookers. She was only trying to fool one John in particular.
The Electrocutionist.
It was all Dignazio's idea, forming an emergency liaison between vice and the homicide squad, a rather unorthodox decoy operation. It wasn't much different from what she did every day with vice, only now she wasn't out to bust a John. She was baiting a killer. Of course, Dignazio had explained to her outright that she would participate in the operation only from a volunteer standpoint, and that there was a certain amount of risk involved. Lots of girls had volunteered, but only five had been accepted. Diane was one of them, because she met the physical prerequisites. The three murder victims all had only one thing in common—physical build. Dignazio had used specific terms, something about endomorphs, mesomorphs, and ectomorphs. Diane didn't know an endomorph from a cat's ass, but then Dignazio had explained that the killer's three victims had been very thin, ranging from ninety-five to a hundred and five pounds apiece. So, the only female officers considered for the assignment had to fall close to that weight margin. There weren't many girls on the force who were that light, but Diane was one of them. This killer, this Electrocutionist, only went after thin girls; therefore, only thin girls would be employed to bait him.
Endomorphs, she thought. So I'm an endomorph. You learn something new every day.
So far, the only thing they had on the killer was a rough composite from one of the bartenders at The Ultravox Lounge; hence, Diane's operating instructions were simple—she was to turn down all Johns except for those who matched that composite.
Since she had taken the assignment, however, she hadn't encountered a single John who even remotely matched the description.
Eyeing chilly 14th Street, she asked herself what she would do if she did manage to get picked up by the killer. She knew; she had gone over it in her mind time and time again. She would go with him, right down to the last minute if necessary. And when she was absolutely certain he was the killer, she would ...
What would you do?
She would draw her tiny pistol, stick it in his eye, and squeeze the trigger. That's what she would do. Decorate the floor with his brains.
The small leather holster, scarcely more than a strap, created a snug sensation just above her right ankle. At home, she had practiced back-rolling on the floor, yanking her pants' leg up, and extracting the weapon, all in one swift smooth motion. By the time she had completely rolled over, the pistol would always be pointing dead center at the paper silhouette target which hung on her bedroom wall, her finger ready to crack off the first round. She had gotten the entire procedure down to under three seconds.
It was a puny pistol, a Smith & Wesson twenty-two-caliber derringer, loaded with magnum rounds. It only chambered two bullets, but Diane was quite confident she could do the job with one. The twenty-two magnum cartridge was generally considered anemic unless the shooter could put one in the head or the heart. But that didn't worry Diane; she was a pistol expert, the only woman in her class to qualify one hundred percent at the range. When it came to pistol-shooting, Diane Slezak was one to look out for.
Come on, motherfucker. I dare you. Come and see what I got.
The ankle holster and its blue-steel contents sometimes went to Diane's head. Because she knew that with a gun in her hand, she was more powerful than the strongest of men. Most of the other decoys carried larger pieces, but Diane was more than happy with her teensy gun. The size of the holes didn't matter, but where you put the holes did. And a twenty-two mag, as small as it is, will make as clean a hole as any. Nice, meaty little holes. The hidden pistol gave her a kind of dangerous comfort, because she knew that in three seconds she could kick anyone's ass. Yes, the gun, along with the police badge pinned to the inside of her jeans, made her feel special, almost superhuman.
"Piggie, piggie, piggie, piggie."
Diane's thoughts broke at the sound of an outside voice. A prostitute stood off to her right, one of the 14th Street regulars, wearing a dark-green dress and shiny nylons. Her face was broad, heavily made up, and she had that weather-beaten look of so man years turning tricks. Girls such as these, Diane knew, were not to be taken lightly. The average D.C. whore didn't last more than a year on the street; it was a tough town, where only the tough survived. Most of them would either burn out, O.D., or get stuffed because they weren't hard enough to take it. That's why the ones who could take it were so dangerous.
The hooker pivoted her hips back and forth on one of her heels and continued to goad Diane. "Piggie, piggie, piggie."
With fatal complacency, Diane glared back at the girl. "Take a walk, shithead."
"Piggie, piggie, piggie."
Diane took steps toward the girl, staring her down. "I said take a walk. And close your mouth—you're drawing flies."
The hooker opened her mouth to continue harrassing, but before she had time to say anything more, Diane snapped one hand forward and clamped her fingers around the girl's neck, her thumb and forefinger squeezing painfully under the jawbone. Diane increased the pressure until the whore's cheeks puffed out and turned red.
"Get lost, honeypot," Diane said, "of I'll throw you in the lezzie tank so all your bulldiker sisters can take turns sitting on your face." Then she shoved the girl away, jerking her sideways as she let go of her throat. The whore side-skipped awkwardly, grunted, and nearly fell down. "You ain't shittin' anyone, pig," she said to Diane, and began to walk way. "And one of these days real soon, somebody's gonna fuck you up good."
Diane flipped her the finger and watched as she disappeared down the street.
Diane had had many such confrontations with some of the more ballsy hookers, and her one working philosophy was that whenever any of them gave her shit, she'd throw it right back at them. It always seemed to work, and it didn't matter that these girls were tough. Diane was tougher.
And she thought that that was the reason she'd been feeling down a lot lately. She had once prided herself on her toughness, her dedication, her superior job performance, but at times such as these, she wasn't so sure. Her job had now become an obsession, the only real focal-point in her life. She knew she was using it to cover up her own inadequacies. And because of this, she had no one. Her friends had shied away from her years ago; sometimes it seemed that they were actually scared of her, this chick who gets off on carrying a gun and putting people in jail and roughing up hookers. Her parents didn't even speak to her any more; they said she'd failed them; they didn't understand that this job was the only thing in the world she could do; she'd called them bullheaded and selfish, but only now did she realize what a terrible disappointment she must have been to them. My daughter the vice cop.
Then there was Jason.
Before, it didn't matter to Diane that she didn't have any friends, and that her family had all but disowned her. Before, she'd always had Jason to fall back on. But even he was gone now, forced out of her life through her own inability to be a real person. She'd lived with Jason for six months, and had loved him for longer, but she'd never told him that. She'd hoped that it was assumed, that such things did not need to be communicated through words, when actually she didn't dare say it for fear of rupturing her image. One day, though, he'd told her straight up, "You're going to have to quit your job."
"What are you talking about?" she'd said.
"It's impossible for me to love a girl when I don't even know if she'll be alive in the morning."
"Be serious."
"I'm perfectly serious. I can't handle living like this any more."
She'd put her hands on her hips and scowled. "Jason, I can't quit just because of your whims. What else could I do?"
"You can get a normal job," he'd said, his sarcasm rich. "You can't play supercop all your life."
Now she was getting mad. "Christ, Jason, you sound like my fucking parents. I'm good at my job, I like my job. It's-"
"I'll tell you what it is," he'd interrupted. "It's a kids' game of cowboys and Indians, only these Indians aren't kids, and they don't shoot toy arrows. It's dangerous. . . . And you know what I think? I think that's what you like about it. I think that kind of shit turns you on."
"Don't be a jerk. Haven't you ever heard of public service? Has it ever occured to you how many people I help, and how many lives I save?"
"Sure, but that's not the reason you do it, Diane, and you know that as well as I do. You use that job as escape."
She'd said nothing then.
"So let me put it this way," he'd continued. "Is that job more important to you than I am?"
She hadn't faced him when she said, "No."
"Then it's settled. You put in your notice tomorrow."
"I'm not quitting!" she'd shouted at him.
"I hate to be trite, Diane. But either the job goes, or I go"
Again, she'd remained silent, called his bluff. And watched him grab his coat and walk out the door.
She never saw him again after that, and for the longest time she thought she'd done the right thing. To concede to him, or to compromise, would have been a blow to her pride. So she had kept her pride intact, and faced loneliness every night as her reward. Diane had more guts than most men; it took guts to do her job, took guts to bust Johns, stomp whores, and set up pushers, yet with all that, she didn't have the guts to tell Jason she loved him.
Sometimes she cried at night, but it was okay because no one else was ever there to see her.
I’m a loser, she thought just then. An emotional cripple, who lies to herself to get away from the truth. I’m a loser. I'll spend the rest of my life by myself.
She decided, then, that she would call Jason tomorrow, would do anything to get him back. Maybe she'd even look for a new job.
A gust of wind reminded her that she'd been daydreaming, that she was standing on 14th Street trying to catch a killer. From some farway place, she heard the sound of breaking glass. Probably a couple of drunk marines, she thought, busting up one of the bottomless bars. Go to it, fellas.
Footsteps behind her, then, and a short, dark, curly-haired man said in a strange voice, "Excuse me. I am looking for a . . . how is it said here? A date."
Diane grinned.
