Stan chugged the rest of his coffee and threw the cup into a trash can near the park. His stomach was already churning, but he’d sooner give up an arm than stop drinking coffee. He crossed against the light and walked a half block to the victim’s building.
View of the park, this guy had.
Had had
, he reminded himself. His partner hadn’t been too forthcoming with details, just told him that a kid had found the body and that it was a real mess inside.
Stan flashed his badge to the beat cop by the front door, who was interviewing the doorman. He continued through the foyer to the elevator. The foyer was richly appointed, its thick carpet and dark wood attesting to the wealth of the tenants. Stan entered the elevator and pushed the button for the second floor.
The elevator let him off on a floor with only three units, all facing the park. It was easy to tell which unit to head for; there was a cop outside the open door.
He stopped and took a deep breath through his nose. There was an odor in the hall. It was decay, something he was quite familiar with, laced with something else. Pine, definitely. And
cloves? Not air freshener or cooking smells, though. Something else.
As he approached the door, he noticed it wasn’t merely open; it looked like it had been torn off the hinges and smashed with a thirty-pound sledge.
“Hey, Louridas,” he said to the cop at the door.
“Detective.”
“Richie?”
“Inside.”
Stan started to enter.
“It’s bad in there, Lieutenant,” Louridas said.
“They always are.”
Stan gave him a knowing look, and the kid tried to smile, but it was clear that what he had seen was weighing on him. Stan considered telling him to go get a breath of air, then thought better of it. His first homicide had been a man whose wife had burned him to death while he had slept on the couch. Stan had been there when the coroner and his men had tried to move the charred corpse from the couch, part of its flesh coming off the bone like overcooked meat. Stan had puked all over his new shoes—Florsheims that had set him back two hundred bucks—but no one had taken pity on him. Eventually, he had toughened up. If Louridas was ever going to be more than a beat cop, he was going to have to get over being squeamish.
Stan did give him a pat on the shoulder, though, and entered the town house.
Inside, the smell was much worse. There was a strong scent of feces mixed with the smells of decay, cloves, and pine. It might have been a fashionable place, but now it looked as if someone had taken the time to smash and destroy everything within. Expensive pottery and archaeological artifacts were so much debris. A computer was thoroughly smashed, probably with whatever had been used to break down the heavy door.
His partner, Richie Matthews, was exiting an adjoining room. Stan gave him a slight nod.
“Guy’s got enough food and supplies in there for a while. Must have been preparing for a siege.”
“Fat lot of good it did him,” Stan said.
Richie shrugged. He looked at Stan.
“Where’s my coffee?”
“Get your own coffee, you lazy fuck.”
Richie laughed, his mouth exposing some spectacularly crooked teeth.
“Okay, tough guy. You wanna see the body?”
“I’d rather do that than look at your ugly mug any longer. Where is it?”
“Depends. What part you wanna see?”
Stan winced. He hated dismemberment cases. Murder wasn’t bad enough, some psychos
had to rearrange their victims or take little souvenirs away from the scene of the crime.
“He’s not missing his head, is he?”
“Yes and no.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
Richie motioned for Stan to follow him into the bathroom.
The bathroom was as elegant as the rest of the town house. At least, it had been. Expensive Moroccan tile was now cracked and stained with blood, excrement, and some kind of greenish ooze. The mirrors were smashed, and the tub was filled with something that looked like a mixture of large flakes of rust, algae, and shit. The smell in there was worse than in the living room.
Stan tried breathing through his mouth. It didn’t help. He looked around, wondering if the body was submerged under that odious waste in the tub.
He happened to look up then and saw it.
At first, he thought he had found the body of the victim, minus the head. It was nailed to the wall, opposite the bath. There was little blood, though, and the proportions of the body seemed wrong. Something white was hanging from the left foot and was waving slightly. For a moment, Stan thought it was a maggot and was trying to reason how the body could have become infested so quickly.
Then the white object came away from the body and fluttered gently to the ground, settling at his feet. He reached down with a plastic bag and picked it up.
It was a strip of paper, about two inches long and a quarter inch wide. It was the kind of strip you usually saw in the basket of a paper shredder.
Stan looked up at the body as realization dawned on him. This wasn’t the body—this was a flayed skin, filled with strips of paper.
Stan looked at his partner. Richie nodded and motioned for him to follow. Richie led him to the rear of the town house, toward the windows that overlooked Central Park.
“Watch your step, Stan; one of the beats puked, and nobody’s cleaned it up yet.”
Stan picked his way over the mess, its smell masked by the other odors in the apartment.
Richie used a pen to motion up to the ceiling, over the television.
If Stan had wondered about the lack of blood around the flayed skin, his curiosity was now satisfied. The ceiling was painted with it, covering an area nearly ten feet square. It was clotted and sticky, some of it hanging in long, dried drips like grotesque stalactites. And in the center of this sanguine geography, the body of Daniel Slater was nailed with large spikes. Ropy muscle and white bone and ligaments gleamed in the noonday sun. Flies had already gathered on the body although Stan had not previously seen any insects.
It was horrifying, oh yes, but the worst part was the face …
There wasn’t any.
The lawn mower gave a halfhearted cough and died.
Steven stood up, his right arm already sore from pulling on the starter cord. The thing was a piece of junk—the throttle cable was frayed, and the blades were in need of sharpening.
He gave another pull, but his heart wasn’t really in it. The day was hot, and the dust and pollen of mowing had given him a wicked case of hay fever. He pulled a soggy rag out of his pocket and blew his nose, which triggered another bout of sneezing.
Happy fucking Monday
, he thought.
Whoever talked about idyllic summer days had his head up his ass.
Such an attitude would have amused him most days, but not today. He and Liz had had a colossal fight before she had left for her class, and he had gotten a call from his landlord that the rent on the bookstore was late and this was the last time he’d get an extension.
Prick.
It wasn’t the heat that bothered him, or his burning sinuses; it wasn’t even the stubborn mower.
It was the bookstore, as it almost always was.
When they had moved here, it had seemed so perfect, a little farmhouse built in the forties, located in the heart of La Crescenta, high in the hills above Glendale. No major freeways, not much in the way of crimes or gangs. The neighborhood had good schools, and Liz’s commute to teach at UCLA was no worse than when they had lived in Long Beach.
And him? Why, he owned a small bookshop, right in the heart of town. Named The Magic Lantern, it carried new and old books on speculative fiction, science fiction, horror, fantasy, and magical realism.
And that had been the dream. Liz teaching and painting, Steven managing his beloved bookstore, and the two of them raising their young son. No nannies, no au pairs, none of that nonsense that passed for child rearing today. They were going to be the exception—the small nuclear family that is strong and self-sufficient.
But the bookstore wasn’t making it.
Oh, he had plenty of regulars, people happy for an atmosphere conducive to discussion and debate, a place where a book more than a year old could still be found on the shelf. Through
advertising and word of mouth, he had built a real community out of the local fan scene, but it wasn’t enough to compete with the big chains or the Internet. Hell, even the big chains were having trouble these days.
Should have listened to Daniel
.
It was something he thought about at least once a week.
July 2005. Their parents had been returning from a trip to the family cabin in Lake Arrowhead. There had been a brief rain shower in the afternoon, followed by bright sunlight. Several drivers were blinded by the sudden appearance of the sun, and this resulted in a horrific multi-car pileup.
Both their parents had been killed.
Their father had made a good living as a department head at JPL, and his two sons split a good-sized inheritance.
Steven, who had just graduated with a BA in English, had used his share to open The Magic Lantern and put money down on a house for him and Liz.
Daniel, who seemed to be as knowledgeable about the future as he was the past, had invested in several social-media sites. Two had been bought out by major corporations within two years, and he had made over three million dollars.
Daniel had begged his younger brother to join him, but Steven had his own dream, owning a local bookstore.
And now that dream was dying.
Christ, he did not want to think about this just then—not when it was his day off and so fucking hot.
He decided to leave the back lawn unfinished for a while. He considered kicking the mower, but its solid housing would probably just break his toe. He entertained a vivid fantasy of throwing it off a cliff, then put it back in the garage and wiped his face. As he left the garage, a bright flash momentarily blinded him.
He moved out of the bright spot and looked over at the far end of their lot.
The sun was reflecting off a side window of the old toolshed.
Steven mentally kicked himself. He had been meaning to buy a new hasp and padlock for the shed. He knew that his son Bobby found the place mysterious and inviting. Steven didn’t want him crawling around in there with the old machine parts and various chemicals. Besides, the structure was probably lousy with black widows and maybe even a rattlesnake or two. What he should really do is clear the thing out and tear it down, maybe put some lawn furniture there or plant a couple of trees.
But it was too damn hot to undertake such a project—easier to lock it up until the weather turned cooler. Steven made a mental note to buy the necessary hardware the next time he ran
some errands.
Inside the house, he found Bobby playing dejectedly with his teddy bear, a one-eyed veteran named Bonomo, and some Tupperware lids.
“Hey, kiddo.”
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Weren’t you going to play at Dylan’s?”
“Dylan’s at day camp.”
“Oh. Are you sad because you’re not in day camp?”
Bobby shook his head emphatically. “Dylan doesn’t like it there. He only goes because his dad says he has to.”
“Huh,” Steven said, “that’s pretty sucky.” He thought he should amend the sentence to something more polite, but Bobby hadn’t seemed to notice. “What about Caleb or Juan?”
“Caleb’s in vacation Bible school, and Juan’s got soccer.”
Jesus
, Steven thought,
don’t kids just stay home and play anymore?
When he was a kid, he’d roam the hills with his brother Daniel, often staying out until dinnertime. He knew that a structured childhood was the accepted norm these days, but he and Liz just couldn’t bring themselves to regiment every minute of Bobby’s time. They agreed that a child had to have some free time to give his own imagination and style free rein.
Steven hunkered down until the two of them were eye to eye.
“No one to play with, huh?”
Bobby shook his head.
“What about Bonomo? I thought he was your best friend.”
“He is, but we want to play with some real kids.”
Steven stroked his son’s hair. Bobby was as blond as his mother but had gotten Steven’s hazel eyes.
The kid looked so dejected—all alone on a bright summer day. That sucked. At least he had always had his brother to play with.
Danny. Steven hadn’t heard from him in months. That wasn’t unusual, as Daniel often went off on digs or various expeditions. He would become so immersed in his work that it would seem he had literally dropped off the face of the Earth, then he would call or suddenly show up, his arms full of gifts and his blue eyes sparkling, ready to share new stories and anecdotes from strange and exotic places. He really should give Danny a call, then go over his books, try to scrape up enough to get an order into Ingram so he’d have enough inventory to pay the rent.
Bobby sighed, that heavy, world-weary sigh of a five-year-old.
Steven kissed the top of his son’s head. His own father’s career as an aerospace engineer had kept him very busy, but he had always found time to be with his two sons. It was an example
Steven had vowed to follow with his own son. “Hey, sport, why don’t you and I go soak in the pool? When Mommy comes home, we can go to Red Robin Burger, then to the movies.”
The look in his son’s eyes was more rewarding than anything he could imagine. Sometimes, the world could be such a pile of shit. Then you’d look at your wife or your son, and you’d be shocked at how beautiful the world could be.
“Can we see the new SpongeBob?”
“Whatever you want.”
Bobby jumped up and cheered, trying to make his voice deep and powerful. Steven laughed as the boy grabbed up his bear and ran down the hall, shouting like a pint-sized berserker.
Steven smiled, glad he had made his son so happy.
Maybe things weren’t so bad after all.
* * *
While Steven was filling the little inflated pool, his wife, Liz, was sipping a Diet Coke in the Student Union building. Her classes were finished for the day, and she didn’t schedule office hours on Steven’s day off. Usually, she would be near Alvarado Boulevard by this time, working her way north to the freeways that took her home.