part0004

I hung up. Dehan had been examining the eraser on her pencil and now shifted her narrowed eyes and pensively pursed lips in my direction. Her face was a question so I said, “We have a live, active, hot case, Dehan, where the evidence is as fresh as dew-kissed March tulips. Let us not waste a moment!”

She stood and pulled on her black leather jacket while I shrugged into my coat, and as we headed out of the station and trotted down the two shallow steps toward my ancient burgundy Jaguar, she said:

“A woman, apparently murdered in her home, just south of the Cross Bronx Expressway…”

“Two sixty-one, that places it near the overpass, by the Westchester Creek.”

“And the chief wants us to take lead because…?”

I opened the driver’s door and climbed in. She got in the other side and the doors slammed like two gunshots. The big cat growled into life and I reversed out of the lot.

“He didn’t say. He just said he wants us to report to him as soon as we’re done at the victim’s house.”

“So, either the case is important because the president’s billfold was found at the scene, and only we are good enough to deal with such a sensitive case; he’s taking us off cold cases and putting us on hot ones; or this case relates somehow to a cold case and he figures we may as well take it and kill however many birds with one stone.”

“My money is on that one.”

I pulled onto the Bruckner Boulevard and began to accelerate. Dehan was beating a tattoo on her knees.

“So, it’s an MO we’ve seen before in one of the cold cases.”

I glanced at her and frowned. “We’ll be there in five minutes and we’ll find out.”

“There is nothing wrong, Stone, with exercising one’s deductive faculties by attempting to anticipate what one is going to find in any given situation…”

“…or set of circumstances. Call it an intellectual workout.”

“At this early stage of the investigation it is unlikely to be a weapon, or a suspect, or indeed a victim. What is far more likely is that it is an MO we have seen in a previous case or cases.”

I smiled at her, and the slightly pompous language she was using. “Makes sense.”

“We can, my dear Stone, extrapolate a little further. For a modus operandi to stick in the chief’s memory to the point that he would call us in for a renewed offense, we are looking at two things: that the MO was used a number of times and the perp is therefore a serial offender, and that it is a very serious crime—as murder indeed is.”

I arched both of my eyebrows very high. “A serial killer, Dehan? That is one hell of a leap.”

She spread her hands and thrust out her bottom lip. “Well, now you can gloat when you prove me wrong, can’t you, Mr. Stone.”

Then she grinned at me and winked and I felt odd and wobbly inside. She could still do that.

I turned left onto Castle Hill and after two blocks turned onto Black Rock Avenue, to enter Watson from the west. The house was opposite the Catholic Church of the Holy Family. There were two patrol cars outside, a crime scene van and Frank, the ME’s mid-’90s Jeep Cherokee. There were also a couple of uniforms, a sergeant and a lot of tape.

I pulled up next to Frank’s Jeep and we climbed out. The sky was a clear, pallid blue, but there was already the ghost of a translucent silver moon drifting above the rooftops. A chill breeze crept in and made my skin crawl. Dehan shuddered and stuffed her hands in her pockets.

The sergeant knew us and lifted the tape. He had grizzled hair turning to gray and eyes that were slightly yellow where they should be white. He didn’t look surprised to see us. But then he looked like there were few things left on Earth that would surprise him. His greeting was terse.

“Sergeant Musa, who called it in?”

“Benny Jackson. He’s inside. He didn’t exactly call it in. More like he lost his shit and went screaming to the next-door neighbor, and she called it in. A Ms. Edna Brown.”

Dehan asked, “Has he said what he was doing here?”

He shook his head. “But Edna says he was a frequent visitor.”

I gave a single nod that I understood the euphemism and turned to Dehan. “OK, let’s go have a look.”

Sergeant Musa turned away. “It ain’t pretty.”

We climbed the six steps to the front porch of the two-story redbrick box. My feet were heavy and my legs were reluctant to move. Death is unpleasant to see. Murder is horror, madness, turned banal. Dehan glanced at me, took a deep breath and stepped through the door like a woman diving into a cold pool in January.

The entrance hall was small, no more than seven foot square, with a narrow staircase carpeted in deep burgundy climbing up the left wall, and a white door open on the right. Through it I saw a man sitting on a faded red sofa with his elbows on his knees. He was big, tall and lean, with big hands and feet. He had dark skin and tightly curled hair, with a scraggy beard. He watched me with large, frightened eyes.

There was a uniformed cop on the door. She had the pallor of someone who has recently vomited. She jerked her head at the stairs. “In the bedroom…” She winced and gave her head a small shake.

I led the way up on heavy feet. A guy in a plastic suit was dusting the banisters for prints. At the top there was a small landing, also carpeted in deep burgundy. There were three doors. The one at the far end stood open and gave onto a bathroom. The walls gleamed white under a fluorescent bulb that was reflected in a partially visible mirror. The door on the left was also open, though the light was off and the drapes were closed. From the posters I could make out on the walls, the football on the chest of drawers and the jacket hanging on the back of the chair, I figured it might be a boy’s room, though it may have been a person of gender fluidity who self-identified as a boy. In a world where everything is anything, who could tell?

The door directly in front was also open. The room was full of people, all of them dressed like spacemen in hazard suits, moving slowly around a large bed. Some were crouched down, examining the floor, while others were standing, inspecting the headboard, the bedside tables and the wardrobe.

We stepped through the doorway into insanity. On the floor, beside the bed, I noticed a small pile of discarded clothes. The bed itself appeared at first glance to have red sheets. But it was no ordinary dye that made it that color. The sheet, the duvet and large parts of the pillows were saturated with thick blood. Lying on the sodden sheet, with the duvet tangled around her feet and legs, was a woman. Or, more accurately, what was left of a woman.

At a guess she was in her forties, on the plump side. She lay naked, her peroxide hair tangled on the soaked red pillow. Her eyes were wide with terror, staring at a ceiling that was speckled with blood. Her mouth was open. Her arms were straight down by her sides and her fingers had clawed so hard at the sheets, she had torn into the mattress beneath.

Both breasts had been removed and lay, deflated and grotesque on either side of her head. A large hunting knife with a black rubber handle protruded from her lower abdomen, just above her pubic bone. Her face, at first horrific in its expression of abject terror, had been painted with a thick coat of very red lipstick and blue eyeshadow.

Frank, slightly stooped, was leaning over her, but watching us.

I heard a sniffing from beside me and turned to look at Dehan. She said:

“Lavender. Essential oil of lavender.”

Frank said, “Good.” Then he straightened up and stepped toward the door. “Please leave. The scene is rich. It’s hard enough for us not to disturb things, and we know what we’re doing.”

“Rich?” I stepped closer to the head of the bed, taking care not to tread in the blood that had spilled there. I studied the twisted, agonized expression, and the exquisitely clean cut to the breast. “I don’t think you’re going to find a single trace of forensic evidence.”

“Joe’s down in the kitchen. Looks like they may have been in the kitchen together having a drink or a cup of coffee before they came up here.” He paused, glanced at us both in turn and added, “I’m not that surprised to see you, to be honest. I thought the inspector might send you. I called him.”

I nodded. “I can see why.”

Dehan said: “The lavender, the knife in the womb, the boobs… What did they call him? Mommy’s Boy?”

“Yeah. Five, six years ago?”

Frank stuck out his lower lip and gave his head a small shake. “It spanned a year, between 2014 and 2015. There were five that we know of and I examined all of them. This was exactly his modus operandi. Then suddenly he just stopped.”

Dehan grunted. “Looks like he just had a Kit Kat.” She jerked her head at the body. “She was alive during the worst of it.”

“I’m afraid so. I can tell you more when I get her back to the lab. But there are a couple of details…” He pointed back at the ghastly, raw wounds on her chest. “In the original killings he removed the left breast first, antemortem. As you can imagine this causes profound shock, the heart accelerates violently and the victim bleeds out very quickly. You can see there, the bleeding from the left breast is copious. However, when he removed the right breast, it was either perimortem or postmortem. There is practically no bleeding. And there is none from the knife wound.”

I asked, “Who knew that, Frank? Was that ever in the news?”

He shook his head. “I knew that, my team knew and Detective Alvarez and his team must have known, but it was never considered a fact of much relevance. Now, of course, it becomes one. The other point which might have just become relevant is the makeup.”

I nodded. “I was going to talk to Joe about that…”

Dehan interrupted me. “We need that analyzed and compared with the makeup used in the original killings. Was it always the same?”

Frank smiled at her, but not with much humor. “Yes, that was my point. He always used the same brand and shades. L’Oreal—”

“Because she’s worth it.”

Frank glanced at her curiously, then went on, “All Night Blue, number six. The lipstick was British Red Three-Fifty. The mascara was Age Perfect Lash Magnifying, with conditioning serum.”

Dehan echoed my previous question. “And who would have known that?”

Frank shook his head. “Me, Joe, one or two guys on our teams, Alvarez. We discussed it, but the detective’s attitude, and I can understand it, was that it was interesting, but it didn’t really get you anywhere.”

There was a derisive edge to Dehan’s snort. “Well it will now. It will tell us if our perp’s a copycat or the real thing.”

I nodded. “And a little more than that, I hope. Frank, we’ll come and see you when you have her at the lab. I want to see if Joe has anything downstairs.”

Dehan led the way back down, speaking over her shoulder as she went. “In the Mommy’s Boy murders they never found any forensic evidence at the scene. Alvarez never got close. Where is Alvarez now? He moved west, didn’t he?”

“San Diego PD. He took a lot of flack for not solving the case.”

The kitchen was part of an open-plan living room, dining room kitchen affair with narrow French doors onto a backyard. The drapes were closed, like the drapes over the window that looked out onto Watson Avenue and the Holy Family Church. There was a small dining table down by the kitchen, with three bentwood chairs. And almost opposite the door there was a red sofa and a coffee table facing a large, flat-screen TV. Forming a nest with the sofa, there were two battered armchairs.

In and around the kitchen were Joe, the head of the crime scene team, and a couple of his guys, all dressed in plastic. On the sofa, watching us with big, frightened eyes, was the same guy I’d seen earlier. Sergeant Musa was with him, writing in a notebook. I approached.

“Benny Jackson?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

I sat in one of the armchairs and Dehan remained standing, watching him. Musa closed his pad. “I’m done. You need me for anything?”

I told him I didn’t and he left. I said to Benny, “Tell me what happened.”

He jerked his head at the door. “I just told him.”

I allowed my mouth to pretend it was smiling. My eyes told him it wasn’t for real. “Now tell me. As soon as you do that, you can go home.”

“I come to see Claire, ’bout four o’clock. The door was open. I come in and I went upstairs…”

Dehan was already shaking her head. “Slow down, Benny. Let’s start with how come you just went in when the door was open. You didn’t knock or ring the bell?”

“No. We was friends. She often left the door open and I just come in. That weren’t nothin’ strange.”

“OK, so how come you didn’t come in here to look for her, or the kitchen?”

He shrugged. “I called her. She din’ answer, and sometimes, a lot of times, when I come to see her she’s already upstairs in her room. So I just done like I always done. I went right on up.”

Realization dawned. “You were having a sexual relationship with Claire?”

He screwed up his brow. “Huh?”

“You and Claire were lovers.”

His slack mouth kind of sagged into a smile. “Lovers?” He grunted something like a laugh. “Yeah, right, lovers.”

Dehan arched an eyebrow and folded her arms. “Are you saying she was a sex worker?”

“No, man, nothin’ like that. She was a gas, we had a laugh. Ain’t nobody rich ’round here. We all need a bit of somethin’, right? I give her fifty bucks sometimes and she says, come ’round we’ll have a party. That kinda thing. Claire weren’t nobody’s whore, man. She was a good woman. I’m gonna miss her bad.”

His lips and his nose seemed to swell instantly, his eyes flooded with tears and he wiped his whole face with his wrists.

Dehan spoke softly. “I’m sorry Benny, I didn’t know. It’s gotta be tough.”

He wiped his face with his sleeve now. “When I got up there and saw what I seen, I just kinda lost it. I didn’t wanna see that, man, and I ran. I think I was screamin’. When I got to the front yard, Edna was on the porch saying, ‘What happened? What happened? Benny, talk to me!’ and I’m just screamin’ like a crazy person, till I says to her, ‘Call the cops, Edna! Call the cops. Claire’s been hurt. She’s been hurt real bad!’ I din’ wanna believe she was dead.”

It was a simple enough story and unless he was a thespian genius, he was telling the truth as accurately as he remembered it. I asked him, “Think carefully, Benny. When you were approaching the house, did you see anyone, did anything happen that caught your attention? Anything at all out of the ordinary?”

“Man, I was jus’ thinkin’ about Claire and her moves, and the party we was gonna have. I wasn’t thinkin’ about nothin’ else. I din’ see nobody nor nothin’ strange at all.”

Dehan said, “Cars.”

He squinted at her. “What?”

“Cars. Most of the time the cars parked outside houses in residential areas are the same cars, in pretty much the same places at the same times.” He thought about it a second and shrugged. She went on. “Think back. Were they the same cars?”

“Maybe…” He paused. “You know? Now you say it, maybe, there was an old model cream Ford SUV, maybe a Kuga? Maybe, ’cross the way, outside the church.”

I sucked my teeth for a moment, then sighed and nodded. “OK, Benny. You can go. On your way out tell Sergeant Musa about the car so he can add it to your statement. Show him where you saw it.”