The Monster Within (13 page)

The trailer is a sea foam green that looks absolutely hideous and I wonder if the sun has faded it over the years or if they bought it with that color. The windows are dirty and unwashed along with most of the whole building. It’s a dilapidated, terrible looking place and I wonder what it is that brings me here. What did Owens see here that I wasn’t at this moment?

The screen door swings open and Owens appears, my salvation.

“What am I doing here, Owens?” I ask as I climb the steps and stand in front of him.

“You’re not the only one who can do some detective work,” Owens growls as he holds open the screen door and I immediately smell the stench of cigarettes, something rotting, and the humid disgusting presence of someone dying slowly. It doesn’t take long for me to find the source of the odor sitting on a couch in the trailer’s living room. She has an oxygen tank to her face, slowly breathing in at the request of the paramedics. She’s a fat, squatty thing and she looks like the cancer is kicking her bloated, yellow ass over and over again.

I follow Owens and another paramedic into the back room, past the bathroom and where the woman sits watching us. They push open a door and I’m immediately greeted by something that looks like it’s a statue or prop for some sort of horror movie, definitely having something to do with a voodoo doll. There’s a man who has a short, dirty blond beard, messed hair, and a face that looks pretty handsome, but it’s hard to tell from all the gashes and blood running across his face. He’s wearing black slacks and a red polo. I immediately picture the gas station across from the trailer park. His body is riddled with pens, pencils, and an enormous pool of blood is underneath his chair.

“Who the fuck is this?” I ask with a confused look on his face.

Owens gestures behind me. I turn and see a closet that is full of nice clothes, something that I didn’t expect to find in this hellish place. I almost instantly see a charcoal gray suit. Pulling my latex gloves over my hands, I reach out and turn the shoulder of the suit on its hanger and see that it is indeed a three-piece. Shit. This is the guy.

“Theodore Martin,” Owens introduces me to the dead body. “Everyone seems to know him as Teddy. He dropped out of college to come home and work across the street at a gas station to help pay for his mother’s medication.”

“That seems to be working out well,” I grunt. “What does she smoke? Eight packs a day.”

“I’m guessing a full carton,” Owens looks through the doorway at the fat, sickly hag. “Anyway, a girl outside talking to Trina says she was supposed to go out with him last night, but he never came to the door. She figured he’d ditched her and went home for the evening. From what the paramedics have told us, it looks like he stabbed thirty four pens and pencils into him at various spots then took an x-acto knife to his face before he finally bled out.”

“Jesus.” I look at the dead man as the paramedics slowly take him from the chair and place him in a body bag. He looks like he was tortured. He looks exactly like what I would expect a victim to look like. “How did you find him?”

“When I talked to Kendall Stein.” Owens turns and looks at me. “Fine piece of ass, right?”

“Definitely,” I nod.

“Anyways, she said they’d been to The Office,” Owens says. “She also gave me a description of Teddy. I went to the bar, asked around and the bartender gave me his name. We came here to question him, thinking that he was our guy. The mother shouted for him to come out of his room, and when we kicked in the door, we found Teddy here like a pin cushion.”

“Jesus,” I whisper again.

“But that’s not all,” Owens continues to enlighten me. “Turns out Teddy had a run in with the law yesterday. He was robbed at gunpoint at his job and then decided to quit shortly after. The girl outside witnessed the whole thing.”

“So what’s the theory?” I ask Owens, folding my arms.

“Not a fucking idea,” he answers with a dazed and lost look on his face. “But whoever killed him, must have known about Jenny Martinez. Maybe it’s a vengeance kill.”

“Were there any other detectives called out?” I turn and look out the window where the blonde girl is being questioned.

“Some boys called in a few favors,” Owens answers. “You’re the only one who caught this. But Mendez is going to know. Your ass is officially on the chopping block, but at least you’ve got something now, right? I mean, this has to be something.”

I hope so. God, I hope so. Turning to the drawing table, I look at the message Ted decided to leave behind for those he’d left. It’s drawn out in charcoal and it looks like it was written in the hard hand of a maniac. It reads: ‘
I’m sorry I’m such a big disappointment and that I never lived up to your expectations. I just wanted you to love me. –Ted’
. His name looks alien, foreign to his own hand. I watch them zip up the body bag and I decide that it’s time for me to get out of their way. I hesitate a moment on whether or not I should question the mother, but she looks like she’s about to die herself. As I turn and head outside, I hear the paramedic call out that she’s fainted. I roll my eyes and head toward the blonde.

This is a girl that’s going to be hard to resist. She has the face of an angel and the body of a goddess. She’s wearing a leather headband with flowers on it and a low cut shirt that shows off her stomach and a glittering piece of jewelry on her belly button. I look at her and wonder what sounds she makes when she’s having an orgasm. She looks at me with sad, horrified eyes and I can’t help but feel that she’s already soiled. There’s no more magic in the world. Right now, she’s learning that suffering and agony is all that there is for the living.

“Detective Steven King.” I hold out my hand and she takes it gently. I try not to squeeze her hand too hard.

“Like the writer,” she smiles weakly.

Okay, I fucking hate that joke. “Sure,” I grin playfully, trying to ease her suffering. I look at the uniform that I interrupted and give her my permission to get the fuck out of here. She looks at me angrily and decides to move on. “You witnessed the robbery that Ted was a part of?” I ask her softly, trying not to sound too professional.

“I did,” she nods.

“What was your name, sweetheart?” I ask her, reaching into my pocket and pulling out an old tissue I’ve been saving for a moment like this. I look at her as she takes it, wondering if I’m going to meet a gorgeous redhead before the day is over. I’ll be complete.

“Courtney,” she answers.

“Well, Courtney,” I pull out one of my business cards for her and hand it to her. “I know that this is a tough time for you, but if you need to talk to anyone or you just need someone there for you, feel free to call me any time.”

“Don’t you want to ask me questions?” She looks up at me with a confused look on her face.

No, I want to fuck you
, I wish I could say. “After a while, if you can think of anything that might tell me who did this, give me a call,” I say gently to her, confident and strong. “Until then, Officer Trina has gotten everything that I think I will need.”

I look over her body from behind my aviators one last time and shake her hand, feeling how soft and smooth her skin is before leaving the crime scene. I can feel my phone vibrating and that means Mendez is on the hunt. I decide that I can no longer hold onto running. I have to go see him. I have to lay all of this out for him. This morning, I had nothing, but now, I have something. I don’t know how Jenny knew Lola Maretti, but I’m certain that if we start digging, we’ll find out the connection. The killer knew Jenny, then moved onto Ted. Why kill Ted? Was it because he’d heard Ted talking about how depressed he was at The Office? Maybe that’s the connection. Maybe the killer lurks in public places, listening to conversations and selecting his victims that way. God, I don’t know. All I know is that I need to contact Robbery to find out who they’re looking at for robbing Ted. Maybe that was just a test run for the killer, but Courtney had been there to fuck it up. He wanted this all to look like a suicide, so he needed no witnesses there to contradict him.

It takes over an hour to get back to the precinct and I would feel like I’m a man on death row taking the long march up to the electric chair as I step out of my car and approach the building, but my days are already numbered. As I walk, I feel the weight of this coming storm all around me, the electric sensation in the air makes my neck tingle. This is going to suck, big time. I’ll just have to try my best not to punch the fucker in the face. As I open the doors, I’m nearly ran over by a uniform that approaches me. She looks like a boot and she’s way too pretty to be an officer. Why isn’t she modeling somewhere? We don’t need beautiful beat cops. I look at her dark, chocolate colored hair and feel slightly disappointed that it isn’t red.

“Detective King?” she asks me, but she knows exactly who I am, long before she ever asks me. All I do is nod at her, not willing to play this game. “I’m supposed to escort you to Chief Mendez’s office. He has some questions for you.”

“What a surprise,” I sigh. I stick out my hand for her. “What’s your name, officer?”

“Cindy Turner,” she answers, shaking my hand with a strong grip.

“You don’t get points for kissing ass here,” I tell her.

She takes me all the way up to the bull pen and as I enter, I can feel dozens of eyes watching me silently as I pass my desk where there’s a detective sitting on the opposite side of it reading the newspaper. He looks up at me and I can see that he’s waiting for me, but he wasn’t expecting me to be escorted to the Chief’s office. He stops from rising up and catching me and just looks back at his newspaper as Officer Turner leads me straight to Mendez’s office and lets me enter.

Mendez is sitting behind his desk like the emperor of some evil dark dominion that I’ve trespassed into. As I sit down, Officer Turner closes the door and I sit there in silence for a moment. I’m not scared, I just don’t want to do this. I don’t have the patience. Whoever is sitting at my desk right now might have a clue as to what I’m dealing with here. Instead, I’m stuck with Mendez, dealing with his bullshit.

“Care to explain to me what you’re doing?” Mendez asks me after signing a piece of paper and putting it onto a tray that I’m guessing his assistant will be taking care of later. He folds his hands and looks at me, waiting for a response. I look at him with a maelstrom of answers whirling around inside my head like a game show wheel, waiting for my mind to land on one.

“Filling the time,” I say elusively.

“By taking cases from some of my best detectives?” Mendez says with the full amount of piss and venom that he can muster. “By taking the coroner’s office’s best doctor and distracting him with a suicide case that you’ve labeled as a homicide? What the hell are you doing, King? You’re wasting man hours and resources on suicides.”

“I don’t think they’re suicides.” I shake my head.

“So a couple of assholes get fed up with life and decide to take themselves out in a dramatic way.” Mendez tosses up his hands showing that he doesn’t give a damn about any of it. “So what? People kill themselves all the time and they try to make the people they leave behind feel bad or guilty about what they did or didn’t do for them. You’ve seen it a million times.”

“Sure, once or twice,” I say, but honestly I can’t recall a time where someone stabbed over thirty pens into his body to kill himself. “But that’s over the course of a career, Mendez. Why have three people in the past week killed themselves in bizarre, unnatural ways and decide to leave vague, cryptic messages for the living? What’s that all about? Huh? That shit doesn’t just happen, Mendez. And now two of them are connected. I caught one this morning that was with my previous victim the night before she killed herself.”

“This is circumstantial bullshit, King,” Mendez shouts. “Your Martinez girl was so high and drunk when she went home that Martin practically raped her. He goes home, feels terrible about hearing that she’s killed herself, he decides that he’s a piece of shit and takes himself out. Simple as that, why are you making it more than that?”

“Why are you simplifying it?” I shake my head. “Nothing’s that cut and dry.”

“Suicides tend to be,” Mendez shouts.

“These aren’t suicides,” I snarl at him. “Not until I sign off on Jenny Martinez and Ted Martin.”

“You’re off those cases, Steven,” Mendez shouts at me. “I assigned Redman to them and he’s already signing off on them as suicides—as we speak. There’s no evidence here to point to homicide.”

“It’s not about the evidence,” I shout back at him. “It’s the logic of it all.”

“Get the fuck out of here with that bullshit.” Mendez waves me out. “You sniff around another suicide and try to make it a homicide, I’ll have your ass on suspension before you can blink. I mean it, King. I’ll have your ass out of this building for the next three weeks just to make sure you’re not fucking around any more of my crime scenes.”

“Go ahead, you incessant puke.” I stand up from his chair. “Before your suspension even gets typed up, I’ll already be retired.”

I slam the door to his office and feel the magnitude of every eye on this floor staring at me as I storm back to my desk. I walk past the black guy in his tan suit and drop down at my desk, not saying a word to him as I look at the black, blank computer screen, deciding if it would be worth it to put my fist through it. I hear the man across from me clear his throat as I’m picturing everything I want to do to Mendez right now and I look over at him as he folds up his paper.

“I was contacted by an Officer Owens,” the man says after clearing his throat. It’s like he has a magical power, because while he starts to talk, everyone in the bull pen goes back to work, ignoring me and the little tirade that they got to listen to, no doubt. He hands me a file. “I’m working the case at the Stinker Station across from Whispering Hills,” the man says to me. “Detective Peter Carson, Robbery.”

I look at him, silently glaring at him. Owens is really starting to be a pain in my ass.

“This is everything I have,” he taps the file he put on my desk. “The guy we’re looking for is a real amateur, but I was told that you might want a crack at him. He’s driving a stolen car, but we got a good look at him once we started tracing his steps. He looks straight into an ATM camera. We contacted his wife, apparently he told her that he was away on business. We’re not sure where he’s at, but we have an APB out on him. We think he’s going on a robbery spree.”