Cut to the Quick (2 page)

“Look at him up there, acting like he’s master of his domain,” he nearly shouted to no one. “King of the hill. What’s that old Beatles song? The fool of the hill. No,
on
the hill. That’s it. ‘The Fool on the Hill,’ ”

He hummed a few bars of the tune. Grinding out his cigarette, he said, “Showtime.”

He craned his neck to look at himself in the rearview mirror, then turned the key in the ignition. He circled the cul-de-sac and headed for the bridge to cross the arroyo.

At Mercer’s driveway, he punched in the code to open the gate. He’d gotten it by watching the housekeeper when she came to work. Even the stupidest criminal wouldn’t have trouble getting into this place. And he was not a stupid criminal.

He rang the doorbell, impressed with the pleasing musical notes it emitted. He turned his back to the peephole, knowing that Mercer would open the door for a blonde. He could almost count the steps it took Mercer to get to the door from the terrace. He’d look through the peephole and wonder what the intrusion was about. Then he’d open the door, still holding his martini.

The door opened and there was Mercer, holding the martini.

“Hello, Oliver. I love it when people fulfill my expectations.”

Mercer blinked at his visitor, as if having trouble taking it all in.

“Such an ugly scowl, Oliver. Not very hospitable.”

“Who the hell are you? Maybe I should ask
what
are you? A man dressed like a woman?”

“I hate when people criticize things they don’t understand.”

Before Mercer could close the door on him, he kicked it open, knocking Mercer to the floor, the high heels doing a good job. The hunting knife was out, and he started stabbing and stabbing.

Later, after whacking off another piece with the chain saw, he cut the motor and stepped back to admire his work, taking a drag on his cigarette. If he had it to do over again, he would have rethought the chain saw. It made such a mess, splattering bits of meat all over him and everything else. He took a bottle of Miss Dior from
the pocket of his plastic apron and dabbed more beneath his nostrils.

The doorbell rang, followed by rapid knocking. Still holding the chain saw, he wiped a gloved hand against the apron in a wasted gesture. He was covered in blood and gore. His dress was ruined. He had figured it might be, so he hadn’t worn one of his favorites. He looked through the peephole and
tsked tsked
.

Standing behind the door, he opened it a crack.

Lauren Richards tentatively pushed it and leaned inside. “Oliver? Are you playing games with me?”

She gasped at the trail of blood in the marble entryway and took a step toward it in spite of herself. Her mouth twisted in horror, her eyes fell upon the corpse of Oliver Mercer on the living room floor. At least, she thought it was Oliver. His arms and legs were in pieces, disassembled at the joints, the hands and feet cut off. The severed body parts were rearranged.

She made strangled squeaking noises through her palms pressed against her mouth.

A hand snatched her arm and flung her inside, where she slipped on the blood-slick marble. The door slammed closed. She looked up from the floor to see him and the bloody butcher’s apron, women’s clothes, and blond wig. She didn’t know if his mouth was covered in blood or smeared lipstick.

He still held the chain saw. A burning cigarette dangled from his lips.

He shook his head.

“Oh, honey. Talk about wrong place, wrong time.”

TWO

D
etective Nan
Vining felt the murders before she saw them. The spilled blood. The screams of unbridled fear spewed from that place deep inside where words have no value. She could feel it beneath her skin, a flush of her own hot blood prickling beneath her scalp. It was residue from her journey. She’d been to hell and back. Or maybe it had been Heaven. She wasn’t sure. All she knew was, she had the scars to prove it.

She stood in the driveway of Oliver Mercer’s home. She was tall and lean, taut and muscular. She’d pinned her long, nearly black hair into a bun, showing off her ears, which were adorned with simple gold studs, and her graceful neck. She’d stopped caring about hiding the long scar that marred her neck, trailing from her left ear down beneath the collar of her blouse. She had another, smaller scar on the back of her right hand. She’d come to view the scars as quirky characteristics, like her slight overbite and the gap between her front teeth. She’d prefer that they weren’t there, but she wasn’t about to spend time and money on vanity.

She wore little makeup, just eye shadow and mascara that set off her deep-set, green-gray eyes. She’d been told that she was pretty, but didn’t believe it, choosing to believe that the men who said it were attempting to get her to relax her guard. The only appearance she cared about
was maintaining a command presence. Pretty didn’t help her on the Job.

Standing where two people had been recently slaughtered, Vining could sense the karma. It was easy to name: evil. This was something she knew first-hand. She’d been up close and personal with evil. Too close. Too personal.

Houses and other places have karma. They carry an imprint of the small and large dramas that take place within their walls and seep into the soil. An empty house, waiting for a new family, gives off a wistful yet hopeful aura. An abandoned house seems wickedly stubborn, still standing, like a ruined beauty hints at former glory in her clouded eyes. Why else do people fall silent when standing upon great battlefields of the past? Why are people drawn to hotel rooms and homes where the notorious or merely famous have laid their heads? Why do homes where murders and suicides have occurred linger on the market and sell for less than they should?

Vining had come to embrace the concept, but was skeptical of taking it further.

When Vining’s fourteen-year-old daughter Emily was ghost hunting, an activity that, happily for Vining, the girl had since relegated to the dustbin of once-adored adolescent hobbies, she had shown her mother a photograph of an old prison electric chair. The photograph captured shadowy yet distinct images of faces in agony. Em had presented it to Vining as one piece in the mosaic she was crafting that proved the existence of the netherworld. Vining agreed that it was strange, but said that it could be trick photography. Emily accused her mom of being in denial.

Practical Vining enjoyed this indulgence. She didn’t indulge in too many luxuries.

Death changes everything. Vining had been dead for
just over two minutes. She’d been living-challenged—the gallows-humor term she’d adopted when the more insensitive jerks around the station had asked questions that were none of their business.

While she didn’t completely accept the person she was now, she’d stopped fighting her. Like a stray dog who decided she’d found a home, that person would not leave anyway. Vining reluctantly invited her inside. The dog circled around and plopped in front of the fire, like she’d always been there. After all, Vining decided, everyone’s life is crowded with ghosts. The ghost of the person one used to be. The ghosts of children now grown. The ghost of love once hot, now cold. Ghosts were everywhere. All one had to do was close one’s eyes. Or open them.

Vining and her partner, Jim Kissick, were among the first to arrive at the murder house. Only Pasadena police officers were there. A PPD helicopter circled above. The grisly deaths were still the PPD’s secret, but not for long. News of the double homicide in the Linda Vista neighborhood was dispersing like a toxic spill at sea. Oliver Mercer’s and Lauren Richards’s corpses, at least the idea of them, would not only enter the lore of this street, this neighborhood, this police department, and this city, but would belong to the world.

They strode through a mass of blue uniforms in the street near the house.

“What up, T?” Kissick greeted Sergeant Terrence Folke, an African American whose size and muscle mass made him stand out among the patrol officers.

Crime scene tape extended across the street end of the driveway. The gate was open.

Folke was terse, in contrast with his usual easygoing demeanor. “Kissick. Vining.” He led the detectives beneath the yellow tape onto the property. His style tended
to be crisp, but his rundown today was a model of brevity.

“I’m setting up foot patrols for knock-and-talks. I’ve got the CHP en route to shut down the San Rafael exit off the freeway. No one’s been on the property except Pincher and Orozco, who were the first on-scene, and me. And no one’s going to get inside who doesn’t have a reason to be there.”

He pointed to a sobbing woman sitting on a stone bench being comforted by Officer Susie Pincher, a petite and athletic former high school cheerleader with an unfortunate surname.

Folke explained, “That’s the housekeeper, Rosie Cordova. She doesn’t usually work on Sunday, but came in because she’s going to a Labor Day picnic tomorrow.”

The big man was getting the job done, but his efficiency and control couldn’t hide that he was unsettled.

Kissick patted Folke on the shoulder. “Thanks, Terrence. Good job.” He called over Ray Orozco, the other uniformed officer, with a jerk of his head.

“Ray, how ya’ doin’?”

Orozco had twenty-two years on the force and a waistline that expanded with each anniversary. He’d never been promoted, nor tried to be, and he’d been around the block more than a few times. There was little he hadn’t seen. By his grave expression and the pallid tone of his normally bronze complexion, Vining guessed that today was the day he’d finally seen too much.

He shook the detectives’ hands, then pulled out a handkerchief and blotted his brow. It was mid-morning and already in the nineties.

“Hey, Nan. Jim. Bad scene in there. Nightmare stuff.”

Kissick squinted at a rustling noise. Two squirrels ran across the branches of a giant magnolia tree in the center of the vast drive. “What’s the housekeeper’s story?”

“She’s worked for Mercer for three years. Said she didn’t touch anything. She’s confident the male victim is Mercer. She recognized a scabbed-up spot below his left shoulder where he recently had a tattoo removed.”

“She can’t give a positive I.D.?” Vining asked.

Orozco huffed out a laugh but the source wasn’t humor. “You’ll see.”

“What else?” Kissick planted his hands on his waist and leaned his lanky frame forward, a pose he subconsciously adopted when speaking with people shorter than he.

“She said Mercer was having problems with his partner in some billboard company. Heard Mercer shouting at this guy on the phone, calling him an asshole and an idiot. Scoville, I think she said his name is. Regarding the female victim, name of Lauren Richards, Mercer had been dating her for two months or so. Rosie doesn’t know much about her except she’s divorced with a couple of young kids. As for Mercer, he was a lifelong bachelor. Born into money. Playboy.”

Orozco accompanied the sobriquet with an arched eyebrow toward the grand house and the new Lamborghini in the driveway. Parked behind the expensive car was a several-years-old Nissan Pathfinder.

Vining got his drift. Even with all of Mercer’s advantages, he wasn’t immune to a determined psychopath with cutting tools. Now it was the job of a group of civil servants to look after his interests and seek justice, the same as if he’d been a homeless man kicked to death on a sidewalk.

Vining took latex gloves from her slacks pocket and put them on. “Any idea about the number of perpetrators?”

Orozco sucked in his full cheeks. His eyes grew veiled as he mentally revisited the interior of that house. He
came back to them and shook his head. That would be the last time he’d force himself to go to that place. However, he’d unwillingly revisit it at unguarded moments for the rest of his life.

“Want us to take Rosie to the second floor?”

Orozco was referring to the second floor of the Pasadena Police Department, where the detectives worked.

Kissick also put on gloves. “Thanks, Ray. Make her comfortable. Let her call her family. We’ll be there as soon as we can.”

Vining and Kissick walked up the long driveway, which was composed of paving stones in variegated hues of gray.

She looked back toward the driveway gate. “If I were him, I would have driven my car up to the house.”

They knew nothing concrete about the killer, yet they could begin building a profile based upon experience. The killer was likely male and between eighteen and forty-five years old.

“It would be more secluded than parking on the street and hopping the fence. He either came in on someone else’s tail or had the gate code.”

Kissick tried the door to the Pathfinder. It was locked. Women’s clothes wrapped in dry cleaners’ plastic were hanging from a hook above the passenger’s window.

The Lamborghini’s door was unlocked. The registration and proof of insurance Vining found in the glove compartment showed Mercer Investments as the owner.

They continued toward the house, stopping at a patch of paving stones a few yards from the front door that were smeared with blood.

“Transferred from something else,” Kissick observed.

“Maybe he stripped off his bloody clothes here,” Vining said. “Wonder if he brought something to change into. Was this planned or random?”

Kissick leaned over, put his hands on his knees, and pointed at the ground. “A long blond hair right there. Looks synthetic. Was Lauren wearing a wig?”

Bent over, Vining examined a mark on the ground. “Bloody footprint, made by a woman’s high heel.”

“Lauren’s?”

Vining placed her foot, clad in cushioned flats, beside it. “My feet are big. The shoe that made this was huge.”

They looked at each other.

“Either Lauren is a big lady or our bad guy likes women’s clothing,” Vining speculated.

“Maybe Mercer had an appointment with Helga?”

“Helga?”

“Big strong Russian masseuse,” he said with a fake Slavic accent.

“Something you know about?”

“Mmm … strong hands.”

She gave him a peeved look and continued to the front door.

It was ajar. Blood was smeared on the polished brass handle.