Primacy of Darkness (3 page)

Castillo took back her phone. “Maybe. Thank you, Mr. Knotts.”

She closed the door behind her when she left and returned to her car. Her trembling hands struggled with the seat belt latch, and she sat for a full minute gripping the steering wheel to collect her thoughts and nerves. Castillo hit the Contacts button on her phone.

“Frank, Detective Castillo again.”

“Hello, Detective, you’re lucky you caught me. I was just clocking out. What can I do for you?”

“I need you to run that name against any other military conflicts. Can you do that?”

“Sure, you mean like the Gulf War and such?”

“That, but can you go back as well?”

“Like Korea and World War II? How freaking old is this guy you’re looking for?”

“I think he may be using former soldiers’ identity. Can you do it?”

“Sure. How far back do you want me to go?”

Castillo swallowed the knot tightening in her throat. “As far as you can.”

“All right. We have decent records going back to The Deuce, but they get a bit sketchy before then. How soon do you need it?”

“If you care about my sleep at all, you’ll put in some overtime for me.”

Frank sighed. “Lucky for you it’s exotic night for dinner, so I’m looking for an excuse to miss it.”

“Exotic night?”

“Yeah, the wife watches that goddam Anthony Bourdain on TV and cooks whatever third-world crap he ate, for dinner.”

“That sounds exciting,” Castillo quipped.

“Only for my colon. This shouldn’t take long. Lucky for us, that’s not a common name. If it were Williams or Smith I’d tell you I hope you have cable, because you’d be in for a long night.”

“Thank you, Frank.”

Castillo guided her rental car onto the freeway, back in the direction of New York. Her brain fought to make sense of what she had learned. There was no way the Malone Gary spoke of was the same Malone she wanted for a host of unsolved crimes and accusations. It simply was not possible, but what he described matched what she had seen Malone do.

Her phone chimed and she pushed the Bluetooth button on the car’s radio. “Castillo.”

“I hate to cut your vacation short, but I’m calling for all hands on deck,” Captain Starks said.

“What’s going on, Captain?”

“We’re getting more bodies than I have cops. I think we have a serial killer on the loose.”

“Jesus. I was on my way in anyway. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”

A serial killer in one of the most populated cities in the world was not a good thing. At least it got her back on the job. She hated the selfishness of the thought, but she was a realist. If someone was going to go around murdering the citizens of her city, she would be there to try to stop them.

She had just crossed the bridge onto Staten Island when her phone chirped again. “Castillo.”

“Detective, it’s Frank Worthen.”

“What do you have for me, Frank?”

“I have a couple dozen names going back to the Civil War. Different socials and middle names, but same first and last. I dug up as many photos as I could to try to put a face with a name. Most of them are just unit photos and such. I don’t know if that will help in an identity theft case, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.”

“Thank you, Frank. That’s perfect. Do you have my email information?”

“Of course I do. I’m the government,” Frank said with a laugh.

“Great. Send it to me and I’ll look it over when I get to my desk.”

“You aren’t going home?”

“Nope. It’s looking like an all-nighter for me.”

“What’s the address? I’ll have the wife send you some fried monkey brains or whatever the hell she made tonight.”

Castillo chuckled. “I’ll pass, but I appreciate the thought. Thanks again.”

“Anytime, Detective.”

Castillo parked the rental in the station parking lot and headed inside. She threaded her way past the usual perps and complainants filling the booking station and went upstairs. Captain Starks had not lied. The department was fully staffed despite the hour.

“Hey, Castillo, I got another story about your boyfriend,” one of her fellow detectives called out.

“Louis, if this is a dead battery joke, I’m going to shoot you.”

“Naw, I mean your other boyfriend, Malone.”

“What about him?”

“You heard of a guy named Nathan Taylor?”

“From the Giants?”

“That’s the one. He says he caught Malone taking pictures of him banging his girlfriend, so he broke his camera and kicked over his motorcycle.”

Castillo cocked her head, confused. “So? Is Malone pressing charges?”

“Naw, Taylor says Malone tossed him through his bedroom window. Is that crazy or what?”

“Why is it crazy?”

“Malone kicking the crap out of a guy Taylor’s size? Besides, Taylor’s bedroom window is on the second floor. He was drunk and I bet there was more in his blood than alcohol if you know what I mean. Besides, he ain’t pressing charges.”

Her partner waved her over the moment he spotted her. Castillo wound her way through the desks and took a seat at Angel’s station.

“Did the captain call you?” Angel asked.

“Yeah, he said we might have a serial killer. What do you have?”

Angel pointed to a stack of folders on his desk and flipped open the one on top. “Four dead women, all prostitutes. Each one had their throat cut prior to the killer opening them up and taking out some of their organs.”

“Jesus, what a fucking monster.”

“Yeah, but that’s not all. We also have two men with a variety of wounds suffered moments before someone cut their heads off.”

“What kind of wounds?”

“Cut, stabbed, shot, and some other things we’re waiting on the ME to identify.”

“What’s the timeline?”

“Four women in a week. The two men were murdered four days apart. One was killed on the same night as one of the women. One man was killed on Staten Island, the other in Manhattan. The four women are all over the place.”

“Doesn’t sound like the same killer. Can we link either of the men to the dead women?”

“Not yet. Steven Spicer worked at a bank and Ryan Wendlen sold high-end cars. Neither of them had been arrested for solicitation before. One had a couple of misdemeanor batteries, but they were otherwise clean.”

Castillo rubbed her forehead. “Great, so we probably have two killers with some serious anger issues. We can assume that one hates prostitutes, but what’s the angle on our two men?”

“Both dealt with money,” Angel offered. “Maybe the guy got screwed on some investments, lost all his money, and they repossessed his fancy new car?”

“It’s as good a theory as any. Pull up a list of repos at Wendlen’s dealership and see if any names match Spicer’s client list. Let me know if anything correlates.”

Castillo sat at her desk and logged onto her computer. She sighed at the number of emails flooding her inbox as she searched for the one Frank sent. She found it near the top of the list and opened it. The document contained only two dozen names but numerous photos. Most were unit pictures with anywhere between twenty and thirty men standing or kneeling in formation. She started with the individual pictures, but none of them were of Malone—at least not the one she was looking for.

She opened the first of several unit photos, starting with the most recent. She doubted Leo would be in any of the most recent since she had known him since the war in Iraq and Afghanistan began. The pictures from the Gulf war did not reveal anything either.

She started to doubt herself and felt stupid for entertaining the thought that Malone could have fought not just in Vietnam, but even earlier and still be the same man she had arrested numerous times over the years. Her breath caught in her throat and her heart skipped a beat as she scanned the faces of the men in the photo. Leo Malone’s face looked at her from the second row of a group of soldiers just days from shipping out to fight in the Korean Conflict.

It was not possible, but she knew that face as well as any in her family. It was a few years younger, but there was no doubt in her mind it was the same man. Castillo continued to scroll through the pictures, searching for the face that had no logical reason for being there. She gasped loud enough to draw attention when she found it again. It was a news correspondence photo of a group of soldiers who had participated in the liberation of the Philippines in World War II. Malone stood in the background, seemingly trying to avoid the camera, but his name was amongst those credited in the picture.

He could not have been more than twenty years old in this picture, but there was no disguising his identity. While the face had aged over the decades ever so slightly, the haunted eyes looking out at her were the same ones she had stared into right here in her station.

“Who are you, Malone?” she whispered to herself. “What are you?”

CHAPTER 5

The sun and I do our best not to exist in the same location at the same time, so I’m already in a bad mood. Vampires don’t turn into big, flailing bonfires if the sun touches them, but we still don’t like it.

I open my fridge and stare at the blood bags for half a minute before slamming the door shut. They have all the culinary appeal of two-day-old truck stop sushi. I need to feed. A partial feeding, one where my target doesn’t die, will hold me for a few more days, but I really need a full feeding soon before I start getting itchy and very unpleasant.

Thanks to the mutual disdain sleep and I share, I have a couple of hours to kill before I meet with the doc. I press the hidden button on the wall; a section of floor lifts up a few inches and rolls back to reveal my hidden workshop and armory. I select a few of the weapons from the racks, break them down, and give them a good cleaning.

Picking through my selection of electronics, I see that I am getting low on a few key components. I’ll have to make a stop at my supplier’s shop. I could order the stuff online and save myself the hassle and some money, but I’m not a fan of computers, and I don’t like the idea of the NSA and FBI tracking my purchases. Individually, they wouldn’t raise much suspicion, but if someone took the time to put together the pieces, it could draw some unwanted attention.

I manage to kill some time, one of the few things in this world I have a hard time executing. I grab my sunglasses despite the overcast day. To my sensitive eyes, it approximates the comfort of night, but I know the sun is out there and it still bugs me.

After fiddling with my mirror for five minutes, I navigate the late morning traffic, occasionally using the sidewalk to get past the worst of the jams. Dr. M’s office occupies the bulk of the first floor of his brownstone residence. I brace myself for whatever waspish comment his secretary has waiting for me, as I enter the reception area.

“Mr. Malone, in a civilized world, we have a thing called an appointment. Would you like me to make you one sometime?” Jeanine says when I walk in.

I smile politely at the wrinkled old crone. “Oregon has a thing called assisted suicide. Would you like me to get you a plane ticket?”

“I doubt you could afford the cab ride to the airport.”

“I would be happy to take you there myself.”

“I don’t ride on motorcycles, especially ones driven by insufferable, self-centered, narcissists.”

“It’s a one-seater. I had planned to drag you behind it.”

“Leo,” Stanley interrupts from his office doorway, “come on in.”

I wave to Jeanine as I follow Dr. M. “We can talk about the importance of appointments after I’m done with my…not appointment, if you like.”

Jeanine flips me a wrinkly, too-big knuckled finger as I stride past her desk. I wonder if she enjoys our little verbal sparring as much as I do, or if she really does hate me. I decide I don’t care and drop onto Stanley’s couch as he sits behind his desk and unwraps a sandwich.

“You were serious about that?” I ask.

“Of course.”

“Why aren’t you in your chair? You’re supposed to be in your chair when we talk.”

“Because I am eating lunch. When I am talking to a
scheduled
patient, I sit in the chair and take detailed notes. When I am eating lunch listening to someone who does not care enough to follow any of my rules and little of my advice, I sit at my desk.”

“I don’t know what’s more passive aggressive, you or that God-awful sandwich.”

“What’s wrong with my sandwich?”

“It smells like kimchee and pickled assholes.”

“It’s just a Reuben. You should try one. They’re delicious.”

“I ate a Reuben once. It took me days to get the taste out of my mouth and the smell out of my nose. I think he was a plumber.”

Stanley wipes a bit of sauerkraut from the corner of his mouth. “I think you just want to complain in order to avoid talking about what brought you here.”

“I think you picked that sandwich just to screw with me.”

Stanley wraps the sandwich back up and hides it in his desk drawer. “Can we proceed?”

“Can we Febreze?”

“Dammit, Leo! This is classic avoidance, and typical of almost all of our conversations.”

“It’s not my fault I have a heightened sense of smell. It’s like a homeless man is using my face as a bicycle seat right now—having just eating a Reuben sandwich he found in the dumpster.”

“Leo, since I cannot eat my lunch while we talk, you have thirty minutes to tell me what is bothering you.”

“I bet you’re charging me for the full hour.”

“Actually, I’m charging you for two—at time and a half and you have already used five minutes of your half hour complaining about the smell.”

“I’ve compared you to a prostitute before, haven’t I?”

“You have.”

“The analogy is still valid.”

“Leo…”

I sigh and stare at the ceiling. “I had the dream again.”

“You often have the dream. What was different about it this time?”

“I was…aroused.”

Stanley nods. “That is something you never mentioned before. Do you think you were aroused back then, or do you think it is a manifestation created by your subconscious? It is no secret that you use these flashbacks to punish yourself.”

“No, I think that was what happened back then. When I saw myself like that, it was what… ‘woke me up.’ That was when I finally realized what I was doing and what I had become.”

“It horrified you.”

“I dropped the girl and I ran. I thought the worst part of what I had become was all the lives I took, but now, remembering that, I realize how much I enjoyed the killing, and I don’t know how to reconcile it.”

“Understanding it and accepting it, is how you begin to reconcile it. Leo, you suffered a massive psychotic break in Vietnam. Those are bad enough in normal people. For people like you, it is catastrophic.”

“I’m sure gorgeous people have had psychotic breaks before. Oh, you mean vampires.”

“Your mind suffered a critical injury and the horrors you committed were your brain’s attempts to heal itself. It was not until you recognized your state of arousal that your mind realized that what it was doing to try to salve that wound was actually killing you. Many people hurt themselves and others, not because they want to or because they enjoy it, but because they are trying to fix something that is broken within them.

“The trouble is that those people rarely understand the underlying problem, and the solutions they devise, while providing a temporary reprieve, only cause more pain. Some choose alcohol, drugs, or abuse others. Your mind, largely because it is somewhat inherent to your nature and very survival, chose slaughtering people.”

I stand up and pace the room. “Is that supposed to make me feel good about what I did?”

“Of course not. If you still took pleasure in what happened in Vietnam, or even the lives you have to take now just to survive, we would not be having these talks. What you should do is appreciate the fact that even in your darkest time, when you were more animal than man, there still resided a part of your brain that was…we’ll say human for lack of a better term. It was strong enough then to pull you back into the light, and it is much stronger now and faces far less resistance than it did back then.”

“Why can’t I make it go away entirely?”

“Because it is part of you. It will always be part of you. The key is controlling it and not letting it control you. Have you ever watched the show
Dexter
?”

“I don’t watch much TV.”

“Dexter is a serial killer. There is a part of his brain he calls his dark passenger. He controls it by feeding it in a way he thinks is healthy. For him, much like you, he does it by killing criminals. You cannot destroy it, and you will only exhaust yourself if you try. If you weaken yourself too much by trying to destroy it, you are giving it a chance to take over again, and no one wants that to happen.”

I nod and make for the door. “Thanks, Doc. Speaking of serial killers, I heard that a guy is out there killing hookers. You should watch yourself.”

“Thank you, Leo, I will keep it in mind.”

“You should also buy your secretary something nice to show your appreciation for all her hard work. Maybe something in a leopard print and a pair of tacky high heels.”

“Goodbye, Leo.”

I try to smile politely as I leave, but Jeanine recognizes my obvious sarcasm and flips me off again. I wipe away an imaginary tear with my middle finger and pretend to flick it at her as I walk out the door. The fog outside is getting thicker, but not so much as to obscure the black SUV parked out front or the face of the man who is certainly waiting for me.

“Wyatt, does Vincent know you slipped your leash and got out of the yard?”

Wyatt gives me an abashed grin as my little verbal jab strikes home. He’s on something between house arrest and probation, and it’s still a touchy subject for him. It serves him right for his part in putting me through a bunch of crap, so I feel justified in giving him as much shit as I can.

“Vincent needs to talk to you,” Wyatt says.

“I kind of figured.” I crane my neck to look into the vehicle’s windows. “Where’s the rest of the Mod Squad?”

“It’s just me.”

“That’s a little odd. Why is that?”

“Vincent will explain when you meet him.”

“You seem to think my coming when he calls is a foregone conclusion.”

“Leo, please get in the car. It’s important.”

“It’s a truck and I have my own ride.”

“I don’t care. I need you to get in the car.”

“Truck.”

“Just get in the goddam…vehicle!”

I shake my head as I walk toward the SUV. “It’s always a contest with you. You need to feed my meter though. I’ll be damned if I’m going to get a parking ticket just because Vincent can’t be bothered to call first. You know, there’s a thing called making an appointment. He should try it sometime.”

Wyatt digs into his pocket for some change, storms toward my motorcycle, and pulls up short. “There’s no goddam meter!”

He spins back toward me, but I’m already in the driver’s seat and lock the door. Wyatt darts over to the driver’s side door and pulls on the handle.

“Open the door, Leo.”

I push out my ear with my finger. “What?”

“Open the door and get out of the car!”

“Technically, it’s a truck.”

“Technically, I’m going to kick your ass! Now get out before I rip this door off and beat you to death with it!”

I push the lock button on the armrest. Wyatt pulls up on the door handle, but of course, it does not open.

“Too fast. You have to wait for me to push the button before you try to open it.” I push unlock and lock in quick succession, thwarting Wyatt’s attempt to open the door again. “You did it again.”

“No I didn’t! Get out of the car!”

“First you want me in, then you want me out. Indecisive much?”

Wyatt grinds his teeth and snarls at me through the glass. “Stop screwing around, Malone.”

“Hold on, maybe I have to turn it on.” I turn on the ignition and actuate the locks too fast for him to open the door. “Nope, that didn’t work. Maybe I need to pull forward a little. I heard this model can stick when it’s in park.”

“Don’t you dare!” Wyatt shouts as I gun the engine.

I slip the SUV into gear and hammer the gas. The truck darts forward with a squeal of the tires, leaving Wyatt standing in my rearview mirror. He pulls out a pistol and points it at my bike. I slam on the brakes, roll down the window, and lean out.

“I am not chasing after you, Leo. Back it up, or I am going to put a bullet in your motorcycle.”

“You leave her out of it! She has nothing to do with this.”

“Back up.”

I fumble with the gearshift. “It’s stuck!”

Wyatt grumbles something incoherent and storms toward me. The moment he reaches the driver’s door, I slam it into reverse, and mash the gas. Wyatt’s gun comes up and points right between my eyes. I slam on the brakes and come to a stop a few yards away.

“Get out of the damn seat!”

He jerks the door open and climbs in as I scoot over into the passenger seat. “Is this a lease? You should really get someone to look at it. It has some serious maintenance issues. So…how you been?”

Wyatt jerks the SUV into gear and romps on the accelerator. “Blow it out your ass.”

Wyatt refuses to engage me in conversation as we make our way to Manhattan, so I fiddle with the radio until I find a truly awful station. Wyatt casts me a sideways glance but refuses to play along with my game. That means he forfeits and I win, which is good because I can’t stand losing.

It’s strange seeing New York through the encroaching miasma. The tops of the buildings are lost in the haze, and people disappear just a few blocks away. It makes the city feel much smaller. Even the tall, black building that serves as vampire central looks as if it were decapitated. An omen perhaps? We pull into the underground parking beneath The Tower and park near the elevator.