Everyone Pays (13 page)

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Back at the Hall, we ate lunch at our desks: grilled chicken on a simple green salad for me and a Reuben hoagie with extra stomach pain for Hendricks.

I took Bowen’s green light for help and requested an officer stationed outside Emily’s room. Doc Matal might like that or not, probably not, but it wasn’t my concern. As long as she could see through to keep Emily for the full seventy-two hours. We needed at least that much time.

I started updating the Clip on Father Michael—the series of images and critical information that went out to the districts, telling officers on the street what to watch for. I put in the new data about his name and particulars, whatever we had, and uploaded more pictures from St. Boniface. The more we had, the better, the closer we would get to him. I hoped so, anyway. All we had to do was wait. That and work the case as hard as we could.

Hendricks belched loudly and pounded his chest. He would start complaining about his phantom angina next, if patterns held. I always told him to eat healthier, that just a small change could help, but he didn’t listen.

“Oh, the angina.” He winked at me. “Just kidding.”

I started to laugh.

Then his cell started ringing, and he made a dour face when he saw who it was. Had to be his daughter’s mom. He answered the phone and mouthed her name, but I could already hear her voice. It wasn’t one you easily forgot.

As Hendricks’s partner, I was responsible for watching his back in all things—even with his baby mama—but from a woman’s viewpoint, she usually had him dead to rights.

Now I tried to avoid listening. I forked into my salad. Protein for energy, greens for roughage and vitamins. Trying to eat healthy was another facet of my belief system, yet to steer me wrong.

Hendricks and his daughter: he never came close to marrying her mother, but she still haunted him like they’d had a divorce to beat all others. If he didn’t do what she asked, he’d hear it from her for a week. Of course, she was his least favorite topic, and the other officers joked that his manhood existed to be squeezed in her pocketbook.

From where I sat, he didn’t get off too badly for all his daughter privileges with very little of the work. He was an absentee dad, only around for the fun times on odd weekends. So he was lucky, all in all.

Finally, exhausted and beaten down, Hendricks put away his phone. “I need to pick up Trina at school.”

“How’s her mom going to like it when you and I run off together?”

He smiled. “Seriously. Please take me away.” He folded the rest of his sandwich in its white paper.

“Seriously?” I said, “You better hope nothing else comes in the rest of the day.”

He laughed, but it was an uneasy chuckle, something like a recognition of the Murphy’s law of police work: that we were now sure to get a call.

Sure enough, the phone on my desk starting to ring. I checked the caller ID: Lieutenant Bowen.

“It’s Bowen.”

Hendricks sighed. “Uh-oh, partner, better get ready for more reaming.”

“Roger that.” I looked over to the lieutenant’s office, and it was dark, blinds drawn. “Where is he?”

“Guess you’ll find out.”

I answered the phone, holding it away from my ear, expecting to hear him yelling more about bishops, politicians, priests. Even the pope maybe. Instead, his voice came through calm and at a normal volume.

“We got another body already, Donner. Your suspect keeps busy. This time Russian Hill. Lund and Peters on the scene, say he looks to be the same sort of john as the others. This is turning into a killing spree. Neighbors say they heard noises but thought it was the TV. Anyway, the body’s in pretty bad shape, like the others.”

I stirred my finger in the air, giving Hendricks the sign to round ’em up. We were on our way.

“On it, sir. We’ll be there soon.” I put the top on my salad as I stood up.

When I told Hendricks the what and the where, he swore. There was no way he’d make a four o’clock pickup for his daughter without a lightning bolt of major-league luck.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

MICHAEL

I started to take David Heyes’s apartment apart in pieces. I broke and crushed everything I could using the bat, then stomped whatever was left with my boots. He cried out at first, but after I warned him not to, he did a good job of keeping quiet—biting his tongue, so to speak. Finally, I found a towel in the bathroom and shoved it into his mouth, let him bite down on that.

This was when I started breaking fingers.

“Why are you doing this?” he asked when I let him speak.

“To rid you of your sins. To take Emily’s sins and the ones who created them out of this world.”

“For Emily?” he asked. “This is all about
her
?”

I hit him again.

“How could you do that to another person on His earth?”

“She was dirty,” he said. “Just a druggy slut.”

I held the bat still, willed him to speak, to say more. Though it burned me, I knew this was what I needed to hear. I needed this anger to carry out His acts.

I said, “Tell me.”

“We did that. We did it.” He shook his head, looked upset and sorry. “I don’t know how it came to that. The others. Of course I’ll say that, right? But really. I can’t—part of me still can’t believe we did that. But come on. What’s she worth, really? Not all this.”

“Why? Why did you?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know. How much you want? You want money?”

I hit him with the bat, lost control for a few moments. Such was my own pain.

When I stopped, he told me he understood what I was doing and why I had to do it. He said he knew someone would come to administer punishment, even stopped crying as he said it.

But these were lies. The trickery of a sinner.

I saw his filth, signs of his meager, disgusting life. He had a job that paid him well for doing something of no value, a series of tasks that added nothing to the world but helped to provide more financial distribution among the country’s wealthy. He did nothing for the poor, the ones with actual
needs
.

He talked more: “Drugs, girls, all that. I did it all. Didn’t ever have any problem getting the money, so why not? Right? I’m supposed to enjoy myself, aren’t I?”

I didn’t answer.

“Right?” He waited. “Anyway, why not? I get the work done, do my job, make the dough. No one around seems at all bothered.”

“God,” I said, “what about your life in the eyes of God?”

He laughed. “Never stopped to think about that one, brother.”

I fixed a stern gaze on him. “Getting right with the Lord is your sole duty on this earth, my son. My wayward son.”

“Father?” he asked. “Should I call you father?”

I ground the end of the bat down onto one of his fingers.

“Because that’s bull. Pure bullshit.”

“Come on.” I dragged him into the kitchen, propped him up in one of the chairs beside a small wood table.

“I mean, I never gave a crap about religion, you know? Why should I look at that as a way of life? Just do and get done, right?
That’s
the American way.” He looked hard at me like he was waiting for an answer. “You know I’m right.”

I turned on a burner, started warming oil in a pan.

“What are you going to do with that?”

I spun toward him, flipped one of the chairs around, and sat backward on it, right in front of his face. “Tell me again why nothing stopped you. Why you would do that to this poor girl?”

“It’s just life, man. You should know. The things you can do in this city. Why shouldn’t I? If there are items to be purchased here, why not try the wares, you know? See what I like to do for fun.”

When I didn’t answer, it made him uneasy.

“What are you going to do with that oil?”

I thought about cutting off his pant leg, one of them, and pouring the oil down his thigh once it was heated up. It seemed like this would make sense, what I should do to him next. Something in the old ways of religion led me to this desire.

“But what do
you
get out of this?” he asked.

He saw things clearly now, the pain having pushed away his high.

“This is for Him.”

“Him?
God?
Are you serious? You’re going to say something crazy like he talks to you now, right? Get serious.”

“Get serious?”

“You’re a man of the cloth? Swore an oath or something? Why don’t you—”

I squeezed the top of his jawbone just in front of his ears until his mouth opened and pushed a wooden spoon in, all the way back until he gagged. He looked at me like he wanted to get something out, like I was interrupting some major revelation, the most important question he could ever ask. In all likelihood, it would be one of his last. Maybe he knew that right then.

He was begging with his eyes, whining in the back of his throat as I took the pan off the stove and held it over his leg. I hadn’t cut off any part of his pants; they weren’t going to do him any good. First, I started to drizzle. I could see the smoke or steam coming off his leg, the hot oil burning through his pants, and he started to go a bit wild from the pain, screaming around the spoon. I pushed it in harder.

“This okay for you?” I asked. He shook his head violently. “Oh, no?” More head shaking. “Guess not, then. Let me just see if—” I poured more along his leg. The skin melted a little, blending together with the fabric as it burned away, changed shape under the weight and heat of the pour.

“No, that’s not good,” I said. “That has really got to hurt.”

After a time, he calmed. The oil had run off, and I took the spoon out. “Now, what were you asking?”

“You’re sick,” he said. “That’s it. Just simple. You’re sick. You get off on this.”

“I’m not like you. This? I don’t enjoy this. I do this for
Him
.
He
has shown me my path, and I follow only where He leads. This is not something I choose.”

His head slumped against his chest. “What’s the difference?”

“For one, you enjoyed what you did to her. For two, I have a stated path. A purpose. That’s what makes us different. That’s why God is punishing you.”

I pushed the spoon back in, continued to pour.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

DONNER

We got to Glover Street in Russian Hill just after two. Neither Hendricks nor I had finished our lunch. Based on what we’d seen at the other crime scenes, we didn’t want a lot of food on our stomachs, anyway.

Lund and Peters had left their notes with one of the duty officers from the Central. They left before we arrived, claiming they’d gotten a call in the time it took us to come over.

“If we’re lucky, they’ll actually hold on to this one,” I said.

“Yeah.” Hendricks was reading through the sheet.

“This has to be an all-time string of bad luck.”

“Just one major case, partner.” He looked up at me. “We really caught one. A killer on a spree.”

“So we agree on something.”

“Yeah. Maybe I should get myself checked out by a doctor.”

I smiled. “That, or they’re just yanking our chains and went out to lunch.”

Hendricks got a sly look in his eyes. “Let’s call and find out.”

“Come on, partner. We should get to this if you want to have any chance of picking up your girl.”

He nodded. Even if being a cop basically precluded any semblance of having a life, we had to try to be normal people once in a while. At least that’s what I was thinking when my phone started buzzing inside my jacket.

I pulled it out, checked the screen. Sure enough, it was Alan with some of the worst timing: right after I’d told Hendricks we should get to it. But it gave me something to smile about. Maybe he’d leave a voicemail for me to look forward to. I silenced the ring and tucked the phone back into my jacket, then followed Hendricks inside.

This place was another one-bedroom, one-man apartment. Not so nice, initially, and left in much worse shape by the killer of its lone inhabitant.

There were no pictures of girls inside, but judging from the collection of porn on this guy’s shelves—most notably of the bondage and S&M varieties—it wasn’t much of a leap to assume he’d been with some of the same girls as Jay Piper and Doug Farrow. For Lund and Peters, it was enough to go on, and they weren’t likely to be wrong.

We walked into the living room of one David A. Heyes to see a smashed flat-screen TV. One of the big ones. Hendricks read from his notes. “Baseball bat,” he said.

“Looks like.” There were shards of glass and pieces of plastic all over the floor.

He pointed with his chin toward the kitchen. “Our guy’s in there.”

“Where’s Ibaka?” I asked.

He shrugged.

We wrote up our own report on the scene after examining the body of David Heyes: black male adult, dead, tortured with what appeared to be hot oil. Of course a priest knew more about the physical history of punishing sinners than your standard perp, had studied the history of practices dating back centuries. Punishment for breaking moral laws had been the purview of the church for so long that only in our most recent awareness did we think this wasn’t normal. Just the past couple hundred years—basically nothing.

Go back before that and maybe this kind of sinner-salvation spree would be heroic. But there was no time machine anywhere near, no way these practices could be condoned.

What stuck out the most from the whole scene was Heyes’s mouth. His tongue had been removed. We couldn’t find it anywhere on the scene.

Hendricks put up his hands. “Maybe our priest took it with him.”

“Just like with Emily. This is adding up. Maybe too well. We got him.”

Hendricks looked around. “That’s funny, Donner. Because I don’t see anybody. Looks to me like we don’t have zip.”

“We’re getting closer. He’s on the run.”

He puckered to spit, then choked it down. “He’s killing a man a day. This is a killing spree.”

“Maybe we’ll get a promotion. Become celebrities.”

“I’m not in the mood to laugh, Donner. Aren’t you tired?”

“Don’t even,” I said. “You didn’t have Bowen blast you this morning. You’re in a good place.”

“Let me go this afternoon? Will you do the reports on this so I can get Trina?”

Tough as Hendricks came off, he was no match for his baby mama. “Let me think about it.”

“What’d I miss?” Ibaka walked into the apartment, dropped her kit onto the table.

I turned around, genuinely happy to see her, and tipped my pad to acknowledge it. “She arrives. Finally. What you got?”

“I’m the one should be asking that question. What’s here? A whole body? A kill scene? How’d I get so lucky?”

In his grumpy voice, Hendricks said, “More from our priest.”

He went out into the hallway.

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Baby mama troubles.”

Ibaka flipped through her kit, getting out the tools she’d need. “Don’t see why people aren’t getting married anymore. You want a kid, you get married. You make somebody pregnant, you get married. Simple. Lock yourself down and take away the happy. It’s worked for centuries. The tried and true.”

“You’re asking me? I’m the girl can’t even get a dude on the Internet.”

“Right. Robocop online dating. That still not working out?”

Ibaka had become the closest thing I had to a true girlfriend. I was half tempted to pull up one of Heyes’s chairs and sit down and vent.

“We still having that beer later?”

“As soon as I get done here.” She winked.

I pulled my phone out and showed her the screen: “Alan—Voicemail and Missed Call.”

“And who is
that
?”

“Exactly what I want to tell you about
later
.”

“Deal.” We bumped fists. Maybe the voicemail would be nothing, no big deal, but I liked knowing that he’d called, at least.

I followed Hendricks out into the hall, ready to let him go. Clara Donner, softie at heart. I wanted to listen to Alan’s voicemail, but I couldn’t. Didn’t have time.

I found Hendricks hunched over the railing, looking down the stairs. I clapped him on the back. “Know what, partner? Go get Trina. You drive me back to the Hall, I’ll cover the rest of the afternoon.”

He perked up. “Yeah? You’d do that?”

“Absolutely. I got to keep
someone
in my life happy, don’t I?”

“And I’m that person?” He moved in like he wanted to kiss me, but I pushed him off.

“No sugar?”

“No. Gross.”

He turned as if to go. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. Just remember sometime that I did this for you.”

His brow furrowed. “Wait. What’s
up
?”

“Nothing.”

He angled his head down and toward my face, trying to meet my eyes. “Don
ner
?”

I avoided his gaze, sure by now I was blushing. He’d get it out of me sooner or later, I knew. So I showed him my phone, the call and voicemail from Alan. It was all he knew and all he needed to. He laughed but was smiling genuinely.

“Come on,” he said, “let’s go.”

Back at the Hall, I pulled out my chair, dropped into it, and slumped in front of the computer. Coffee wasn’t helping anymore. Beer would, but I still had two hours to go until meeting Ibaka at the Mars Bar.

I checked my email and felt my jaw drop as I opened one with a St. Boniface SF address.

The subject was “Detective Donner.”

The body of the email read,

I saw you today. You entered my church. My home. The house of the Lord. You have no business there.

Now, because of you, Emily is gone.

Where did you take her? What have you done? You and your partner will not be forgiven by the Lord. If you want to be saved, bring her to me.

Has God brought you onto His path?

Do you hear His words?

I am watching.

If God has chosen you, I will know it. He has chosen to reveal YOU to me, and now I see YOU. God knows your name.

I am watching.

“Holy smokes!” I said, pushing my chair back. “Sound the lunatic alarm. We got a live one.”

No one responded. I looked around to see empty desks. It was the middle of the afternoon, just before shift change, and everyone seemed to be out on calls. A uniformed officer walked across the floor, but I didn’t know him well enough to say anything. Bowen sat in his office, talking on the phone, his door closed.

I was alone with the investigation.

I sat back in my chair. The email was unsigned. The address was [email protected]. He’d been watching from somewhere as I came out of the church.

He had seen me, us.
He’d been there, and we’d missed him.

I swore and stood up, slapped the side of my chair. I wanted to call Ibaka; I knew she had my back on this one, might even have some news to report. It was five o’clock: late enough in the day that I could go have a beer. I sent Ibaka a text letting her know where to find me.