The Subtle Art of Brutality, page 16
Clevenger has been in contact with Ms. Richley. She told him she traded Pierce a holiday for the reunion. Looks like she got the holiday back free of charge.
He leans against the doorway outside. Techs walk back and forth. Police tape and the lingering miasma of old blood and fingerprinting dust. We enter.
The crime scene: family room. A flat screen LCD HD TV set so large it requires its own stadium seating and concession stand. Carpet thick and lush enough to make a bald man green with envy. Tasteful original art hanging on the walls. Looks like oil to me. But anything outside of a comic book looks like oil to me.
“How is Molly?” I ask, rubbing my five o’clock shadow.
“Good. Taking a pottery class this season at the community college.”
“Is she going to make me anything?”
“An ash tray, I’m sure.”
The blood was well-contained. Pierce was jumped. An axe sunk into the back of his skull deep enough for him to taste the keen, acuminous edge. The murderer looked like he put all his fury into that one swing. The mess of his bone and brains left at the entry wound means the killer tried for a while to un-jimmy the axe from Pierce’s head. Pried out; rocked back and forth. Yanked.
“Have you eaten at that new Japanese place near the water? Sixteenth and Bayline?” Clevenger asks as he crouches and studies the skull.
“The only thing I eat raw comes from the ass of a cow,” I say. “Anything else was intended by God to be cooked first.”
“Sushi is very good. And healthy. I’d recommend you trying something easy first like a California roll or salmon nigiri or—”
“Put a sock in it, Clevenger. You know you ain’t gonna convince me to eat that shit. I ever tell you about the cuisine during the war?”
“I know, I know. Dog and monkey. They’d dice up a cat and tell you it was chicken.”
“Right.”
The body was left lying on a tarp. Standard blue. M.E. thinks a serious hunting knife took the limbs off. Both arms and legs were severed and stacked on one end of the tarp, firewood style. His torso was exposed and carved with the knife tip. The word Betrayer carved over and over. Good for handwriting analysis.
“How is your car coming along?”
“Ordering parts. Mechanics.”
“I told you not to go there. They’re cheap for a reason. I know a guy named Eric, and he’s the one you want—”
“Tell me about him next time, then.”
Pierce White has his genitals in his mouth, like a roasting pig biting an apple. Good thing he had an axe buried in his noggin before his cock was sawed off and fed to him. Arrogant jack-off or not, that’s no way to be found dead.
“Came in through the back,” Clevenger says, kneeling by the body. Absently picks at something. Stands.
“With a backdoor like that, I would too.” The backdoor was paneled with glass. There is more breakable surface on that door than wood. It was for looks, not security.
“Pretty straight forward,” Clevenger says, points out back. “Footprints.”
There’s a hefty, disheveled trail running through the backyard. It looks like the killer intentionally drug his or her feet through the snow to destroy any easy footprints. I assume the killer followed the same path back out in similar fashion.
“The killer opened the wooden privacy fence gate—unlocked, of course—and meandered up into the backyard. One pane of glass is right next to the backdoor handle. Broken out. Unlocked from the inside. There’s even tape residue around the glass where our murderer must have patched the hole.”
Didn’t want ol’ Pierce here to come home from a long day at the office and feel his house twenty degrees cooler. That tells me the killer showed up much earlier than White did. Means the killer didn’t know White’s schedule so he made allowances for time or he needed time in advance to set something up.
“Then, just wait. Jump. Mutilate,” Clevenger says.
“Any chance at all this was a burglary he walked in on?” I ask, knowing the answer.
Clevenger looks at me and raises an eyebrow.
“All right. Never mind,” I say. “Your killer knew Pierce.”
“I’d put money on it.”
“I’d hope he did anyways,” I say. I want a cigarette. The kind of wounds Pierce sustained says intimate knowledge. No one just cuts someone’s family jewels off and stuffs them into a mouth without reason. Barring complete insanity, there is motive behind it.
We look at each other for a moment. Like the old days.
“This done by your girl?” Clevenger asks.
“Maybe. I don’t know her style.”
“The question is, why?”
“If Delilah Boothe did this it could be because she was seriously delusional and madly in love,” I say, collecting plot points. “And she somehow found out he considered her...what’d he call it? A sport fuck. She loses her job over it, he blows her off, divorces the woman she wanted him to divorce, marries some other gal instead of her.”
“It would jive with the Betrayer carving.”
“And the dick in his mouth.”
“A woman scorned.”
“Yup,” I say, stepping outside for a smoke. “A woman scorned.”
41
The buy: Jared Garrett’s informant was a weasel he dug up who had a laundry list of charges and bench warrants pending and we squeezed in all the right places.
His name was Alfonso, but everyone knew him as Rodent. It fit him. Your informant is only as trustworthy as the gun you have to his head, and we held enough iron to his to ensure compliance.
Rodent introduced Garrett and I to the seller. We bought for a while and built a case. The seller went down, along with six other guys. The bust was huge. The D.A. looked like he was made out of twenty-four karat gold. I thought it was my ticket back to homicide.
I’d call Graham just about every day, feeling like an excited little school girl. Tell him to dump his partner and make sure I had a big desk to return to.
Rodent got hooked up for the bust, but even with that he got fifteen to life when it was all said and done. A few months after he went in he was found dead, stuffed in a crevice somewhere in the prison’s laundry facility. We didn’t think anything of it; he was arrogant and annoying; an ankle-biter of a man with an obnoxious voice and a penchant for stirring the pot just to see the fireworks.
Then Garrett didn’t come into work one day. I didn’t care a bit; Flemming had just sent me an official notice I was getting an extension at stolen autos. I was planning on how I was going to ruin Flemming’s life while Garrett was being beaten by some associates of the dealer we hit. And Garrett sang. Told them everything.
They dropped him off on a street four blocks from the Saint Ansgar riverfront about the same time I was finishing a hamburger and fries at the local cop-friendly joint.
Garrett didn’t call the unit, didn’t call me. Instead, battered and half-dead he wandered around in a daze until EMS picked him up. He even managed to wet himself. His lips were bloody and swollen. His chest was knifed up pretty bad. Both hands broken. One foot as well. His face was one solid mass of purple swelling. His right ear cauliflowered.
His wife and kids were untouched, and I think that threat, the threat to kill Monica and the twins, that was what got my name out of his lips.
As mad as I get for how my life was ruined, when I see the mental picture of Monica, her dark hair swaying in the wind as she coddled both those infants that Garrett was so proud of, I forgive him. Then her image washes from my mind like sparkles in a heavy breeze, floating away to pepper some other area with their glitter. And then, I hate him all over again.
I never saw it coming. Someone clocked me good and it was all I could do to not piss my pants as I went down. Whatever happened next the doctors and I speculated. All I can think about was the blackness that swam over me in that one split second where I knew I was hit because I was still feeling it connect, but there was nothing I could do.
An indiscernible amount of time later and the veil of shadows stretched across my life began to slowly, unsteadily lift. I came to and my head was poisoned. My stomach was turning over and over. My body was alive with an electricity that frightened me with its power. Shapes and colors were dancing in my skull and I vomited. It was red with blood. And black with a coffee ground-like substance. Half-digested blood looks like that.
Ditched in an alley. Like trash. I walked out of that tight brick corridor onto a major street I would have recognized if I were in my own mind and body. A woman in a business suit walked past me. I think I asked her something along the lines of where am I and she refused to answer.
Instead, she screamed. She screamed bloody murder.
Her eyes were drawn to my neck, which burned molten and infected. I ignored her, feeling various shades of that pain up and down my body. I threw up again. Reeling from the fit of nausea I blacked out in the street. I guess EMS got me also. I came and went for an hour or so and eventually the scenery changed from the street to a trauma room.
Inside, all the words in my head, all the questions, pleas for help, outrages at my condition, they were cotton in my mouth. Useless and jumbled like a handful of marbles without a jack.
Two nurses and a tech took possession of me. They extracted a syringe from my neck, the source of all that blistering hot pain and misery. Left there by my assailants as a message, they shot me so full of the Big Fry that even without a gray matter detonation I should have been poisoned to death. Whacked. Eighty-sixed.
My head was split open, my face gashed. Maybe it was cut. Maybe it ripped open from the fall I took after being knocked unconscious. Or being thrown out of a vehicle into an alley.
The hospital did their best for me, and in the end the only resounding effect I have is the damage to my mind. The smearing. The lost time.
After surgery, after the drug overdose treatment, I got to share a room with another man whose luck had run out that day. Every now and then his family would leave his side to check on me. I would look up through bleary and unsure eyes, not trusting their information anymore, but I would see Monica looming over me, telling me that Garrett says he’s sorry and everything will be all right.
But it was not, and the police decided I could not serve them anymore.
As the detective sergeant for his squad, Pierce White’s murder is Clevenger’s squawk if he wants it.
After the murder scene. Coffee. Clevenger with pancakes, me with Tabasco and hash.
“You are going to catch this one, right?”
“Why?”
“Because I need you to. How else am I going to get the resources of SAPD to find this chick?”
Sarcastic: “Sure, buddy. Anything I can do to stall official police work into a murder to help you earn a paycheck.”
Honest: “Oh good. For a second I thought you were going to fuck me on this one.”
Interested: “How do you want to play it?”
“Okay, this is how I see it—”
“I’m just entertaining you, by the way. I’ll see what parts of your idea Captain Flemming will let me get away with.”
“Right, right,” I say. “Here’s the plan...”
42
Riggens, Rudd and Volksman all in the same room at the same time.
SAPD headquarters. Detective’s bureau. One of the three conference rooms. The other two rooms have their own projector screens; they were booked.
No one has smoked in this building in twenty years but the stale grit of long-gone tobacco holds firmly in the brick and mortar. The floors are wood and in desperate need of refinishing. As it is the bottom-of-the-barrel, the house cleaning crew just runs a buffer over it once a week and calls it good.
The incandescent light bulbs cast a harsh patina across the bureau. One socket buzzes no matter what maintenance does. The socket hangs over a desk we all called the FNG Desk. Every new detective spends time under the buzzing light, waiting for the next rookie to get promoted.
Rudd looks fairly severe and all business. That’s too bad because I like the shape of her. If she were in a school girl’s outfit, snapping a ruler against one palm, I think I’d stick around for detention. Riggens looks young, naïve and a little too blockheaded to be in this job so early. Volksman looks like he should be hung over the side of a bridge and made to cry a little bit before he’s dropped.
Clevenger walks in, papers in hand. Copied, collated and bound. Drops them on the table, sits. Slides a packet across to everybody.
“Pamela Rudd, Art Riggens, Richard Dean Buckner.”
They nod. So do I. I look to the egomaniac seated to my right. He smirks and I’m not sure if it’s a greeting or an acknowledgment of his feelings towards me. Either way I don’t like it.
“Okay,” Clevenger says, sipping coffee. “We’re all here because I think our separate cases tie in. I want to put our pieces together as best we can and—”
“What the fuck is this burnt-out piece of shit doing here?” Volkman asks.
“Oh, Thomas...” I say, rubbing my knuckles. Clevenger grunts and I see him shaking his head. I guess my old partner would look bad if I cleaned this fat turd’s clock right here, right now. I might do it anyways. I wonder what it would take to get Clevenger to forgive me for it.
“Mr. Buckner is here because he is working a related case and his information will tie in. And watch your mouth, Detective.”
Volksman’s eyes light with a fury and I love it. Detective. That’s got to sting. I know the story but I hate this worthless fuck so much it’ll be worth the delay in real police work to see what I can stir up.
“Detective, huh?” I look at Volksman, smile, interlace my fingers and place my arms on the table. Lean his way. Shit-eating grin written all over me. “Last I heard, you were on the list for Detective Sergeant.”
“RDB,” Clevenger says.
One more: “What could possibly knock you down?”
“Richard.”
One more again: “You noodle a school girl?”
“Damn it, Richard.”
One more again for the last time: “Your wife find out about that Filipino chick you were keeping south of the river?”
“Jesus, RDB, don’t make me throw you out,” Clevenger is getting honestly pissed.
With a laugh: “Okay. My fun is over,” I say to Clevenger.
Without a laugh, as cold as I can make it: “Watch who you call a piece of shit, Volksman. Ears around here still listen to me.”
“I doubt that, RDB,” Volksman says, picking under his fingernails.
“Then answer two questions for me. Why haven’t I been tossed from this room yet?”
He pauses, looks around, but not at me. Finally: “What’s the second question?”
“Why won’t you look me in the eye?”
“What does that have to do with people on the PD still listening to you?”
“Nothing.” I lean in. Whisper, challenge: “But you’re a pussy.”
Volksman says nothing. Does nothing. I whisper, truth: “Why some sack of shit like you gets to stay on and I am labeled unserviceable is beyond me. Because we both know who was of any worth to this PD.”
Clevenger groans. Head in hands, rubbing the bridge of his nose. I love that kind of thing. Because, I used to own this department. And I’ll say the truth: I can take stabs at some worthless disgraced piece of shit like Thomas Volksman all day and no one is going to eject me from the department.
No one. No one has the balls. Not the Chief, not Captain Flemming. No one.
Rudd and Riggens just fiddle with their paper packets and whistle Dixie. Rudd has smoothed her pant skirt several times. Riggens has run his index fingers along his eyebrows. His own brand of smoothing.
I look to Clevenger.
“Would you like to begin?”
43
The dry erase board says “Delilah Boothe” in Clevenger’s trim, efficient script.
He circles her name. Looks to me. Holds out the marker and says, “You do it.”
“Sure thing,” I say. Take the marker. “Delilah Boothe is the sun in our collective universe. Her old address is your case, Riggens. Her mom is your case, Rudd. Her surrogate father is your case, Volksman. Three arsons in one night all drawing lines to one woman are too coincidental to ignore. Not to mention Clevenger’s murder victim, Pierce White, is Delilah Boothe’s ex-boyfriend.”
“Three MO’s for three fires and one murder,” Volksman says dryly. As if those two words shatter reality.
“So what?” I say.
“Three MO’s points to three different firebugs. Like the one Delilah Boothe’s father bunked with in prison. You telling me he did all three?”
“I’m telling you one firebug—whoever he is—used three different MO’s,” I say. Look to Clevenger. “And the murder was just icing.”
“Ex-boyfriend?” Rudd asks.
“Yeah. They had an office romance that got them both canned and him divorced,” Clevenger says.
“There’s your firebug,” Rudd says.
“No. He’s got no history,” I say.
“Did he have a history of cheating on his wife before he did it?” she asks, eyebrow raised.
“I didn’t ask before he got his dick cut off and shoved down his throat.”
“There’s your murderer,” she says flatly.
“I’m not ruling out Delilah at all for the murder. We concentrate on the arsons,” I say. Rudd is lucky she has a neck I’d like to put my mouth on. Her personality is starting to come through. But like my old friend Howard Michigan always says: You’re not getting off with their personality.
I continue: “One firebug torched the three homes. Killed three people. We’re all in this together.”
“Pierce White,” she says. Volksman scoffs at me because he’s an asshole and Riggens is just taking notes.
“That guy has no reason to burn down three homes,” I say.
“Hitler had no previous history of starting wars until he did, Dahmer had no history of eating his lovers until he started one day and Darth Vader had no history of throwing his boss down a shaft until the mood struck him. Everybody starts somewhere, Mr. Buckner.”
