The Monster Within (16 page)

“I’ve got two victims that first met at this location,” I shrug. “If he was spending time with one of the victims and got jealous of the other, it might drive him to do something bad. It’s worth having a chat with him.”

“He lives about an hour away,” the bartender volunteers freely. “It’s a shitty little apartment complex off Abe Street.”

“Thanks for your time, gentlemen.” I look over at Mr. Million Dollar Smile who isn’t even looking like five bucks now. “I appreciate all you’ve given me here. I’ll see myself out.”

It doesn’t take long to find out that Michael ‘Mikey’ Jones does in fact live off of Abe Street in government subsidized housing. He’s on food stamps and various other programs and is working at a local Walmart thanks to a felon correction system that places felons in the workplace. From what I’ve heard from Owens, his network is already standing by to pounce on him if I find out that he’s behind it. I’m not so certain that he is, but I’m interested in finding out. I pull into a neighborhood that has more pit bulls than children and stop at a duplex where Mikey is supposed to live. The lawn is dead and there’s a bike laying out in the yellow grass like an ornament. Stepping out of my car, I look around at the faces staring at me. Most of them are what you’d expect to find in a trashy neighborhood in this part of the city. Racism is definitely still a thing, but Mikey proves that white people aren’t exempt.

I knock on his door and when it opens, he’s standing in a towel and stares at me like he’s seen a ghost. “Michael Jones?” I take off my sunglasses and fish out my ID. “I’m Detective King, I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“Whatever you think I did.” Mikey is trying to sound like he’s black, no doubt trying to camouflage in with the environment that he’s become a part of.

“Mind if I come in?” I ask him as I put my hand on his chest and push him back into the house and enter the property. I’m breaking the law, but I don’t really care. Mikey might be able to get some cheap ass lawyer to scream a lot, but no one believes felons. No one gives a damn about them down at the department. The only one who might raise an eyebrow is IA, but I’ve given them nothing in the past five years, not even a sniff of trouble. Mikey is out of luck.

“Hey, this is private property, asshole,” Mikey shouts.

“Asshole?” I punch him square in the face, feeling his cheekbone and teeth through his skin as I split his lip and send a shock of pain through my fist and wrist. It feels good to punch someone every now and again, especially criminal trash. “You’re done for, Mikey,” I tell him. Reaching into my pocket, I fish out Jenny Martinez and show him her picture while he scuttles away from me, his towel coming off as he squirms buck ass naked across the carpet. “Do you recognize this girl?” I ask him.

“Yeah, that’s the bitch from my brother’s club,” Mikey shouts in horror as I take a few steps closer to him.

Brother’s club? That would explain Mr. Million Dollar Smile’s horror at me asking about Mikey. Poor bartender, he’s probably out of a job right now. If Mikey is at the club pushing pills, his brother is probably setting him up with suppliers to cut the profit at the club. I’m going to let Vice know about Mr. Million Dollar Smile, since they’re clearly clueless when it comes up about him. I reach into my pocket and pull out Ted and show him the picture.

“You recognize him?” I ask.

“Yeah,” he nods, holding up a quivering hand to stop me from punching him again. “Yeah, man, he went home with that bitch.”

“Did you follow them?” I read his face carefully. An entire career of reading the faces of assholes, criminals and scumbags has led me to this point and I know without a doubt that this guy is going to give me the answer I want, whether he says it or not. I look at his shaking face, the muscles contracting out of fear and curiosity. Am I going to beat the shit out of him and leave him for dead? Am I going to let him go? Am I going to arrest him? These questions fly around his mind, but all the while, his subconscious is an honest animal, incapable of lying to me.

“No, man,” he says. I read instantly that he’s telling the truth. “I was getting heavy with that bitch in the bathroom, fucking her brains out, and then some other bitch comes in and took her away. Sure, I watched them for a while, but then that dude started hitting on her and I watched them leave together. I was pissed, but there’s fucking pussy dripping all over my brother’s joint. So I moved on to more profitable grounds.”

“Did you see anyone else watching them?” I demand. This isn’t going the way I wanted it to. Mikey was supposed to give me more. He was supposed to give me something that I could use. Hell, he was supposed to be a lying piece of shit that would give me the answer I was looking for. He was supposed to be their killer. Now, I realize that Mikey isn’t even smart enough to get his own supply. He’s a target for the police to shoot at while his brother makes off like a bandit in the night. Damn it, Mikey, give me something to work with here.

“No man.” He squirms away. “There wasn’t anyone interesting in that club and I would know. I keep my eyes open for everyone. I’m my brother’s inside man. I see the things Cheto and his roided goons don’t see. I’m their spy.”

“Way to go, super spy.” I stuff the pictures back in my breast pocket and turn toward the open door.

“Hey, what did you say your name was?” Mikey shouts after me as I walk across the dead lawn to my Shelby which is already drawing notice. That’s the problem with having the best car ever made. It draws flies in places like this. It might as well be a big wad of cash driving down the road. I watch Mikey rush out the house, barely holding on his towel as I speed off down the street. If he goes to the station, he’ll be able to describe my car, and anyone working the desk will know who it was that forced their way into his house and split his lip.

Flipping open my phone, I pass a parked squad car and realize that they were probably back up waiting for me. I search through my contacts and give Owens a call. He answers almost immediately. “Owens, I need your web of spies to make sure a Michael Jones gets picked up,” I tell him before he can ask if I got anything. “He’ll be carrying pills or pot, one of the two. Anyways, hand him over to Vice. They’ll be able to flip him.”

“Did he have anything on the victims?” Owens asks.

I shake my head, already kicking myself for wasting the time. “Nothing,” I say. “I got to go.”

Before I can stuff my phone back in my pocket, I feel it vibrate. It’s not a number I recognize but I figure that it might be worth checking out. I flip open the phone and hit the talk button, holding the phone to my ear. “King,” I answer.

“Hey, King,” a familiar voice says, but a name eludes me. Thankfully he pulls back the veil so I don’t have to keep guessing. “Detective Carson, we found Chad Roberts. It looks like your pal Mendez is here. You should be getting a call soon.”

“Thanks for the heads up,” I furrow my brow. What could this be all about? And why would Mendez call me?

“You owe me one, King,” Detective Carson says before hanging up. I’m racking up the favors lately. I need to stop that or I’m going to start building a habit of it. I go to put the phone in my pocket again and it starts to vibrate. Sure enough, like a fucking prophet, Carson was right. Mendez is calling me.

The last place I expected to be today was suburban America. I’ve been to ritzy high rises, trashy trailer parks, and dumpy ghettos, but this was the first time I’ve been called out to the breadwinners and the salt of the earth. I drive by their houses like they’re alien domiciles, invaders from another world. Honestly, I can’t tell what the fuck it is that draws them to this city. They’re here like pioneers, trying to stake a claim to their part of the world and they only end up getting caught in the crossfire of the perpetual war that rages on like a tire fire up to the extinction of our species. There will always be crime in this town, and there will always be people living here who think that the crime came after they did. These are the people that blame the blacks or the Mexicans or the Asians. These are the people too deluded to see that they’re the invaders setting up camp in the middle of the battlefield.

I pull up to the crime scene, late again, my ears still burning from Mendez’s call. Hearing him ask for my consultation on a crime scene was as good as I was going to get for an apology. This was the prime showing for this killer. He’s finally drawing the flies and the attention. I see media trucks set up, blocking my way to the house that’s been blocked off. With Mendez out on the streets, there’s bound to be media publicity. I see uniforms interviewing everyone in the surrounding houses who stand out on their lawns, holding their hands over their eyes as they peer up the street at the house swarming with uniforms and forensics teams. Whoever this killer is, we’re on to him now.

I shut my car door and lock it, looking around at all the lingering souls, wondering if he’s here among them. Is he watching me? I walk along the sidewalk, feeling the heat of the sun boring through my head, making me feel like I’m melting. It’s so damn hot out here. People are going to freak out. So far, two of the victims have been white. That means that white people will draw action and publicity, because they’re the movers and shakers in this town and for some reason, we all want white people to feel safe. But Jenny Martinez. She’s Mexican, which means there are going to be Mexicans up in arms and defending themselves now. There are going to be shootings, lots of shootings. People are going to start dying, all in the name of self-defense or vigilantism. Gangs are always good for doing a little investigation of their own. They’re great at shit like that. They start hunting and looking for who killed one of their own. Usually they start with the other gangs, the blacks, and then they start hunting the white gangs. Killers always see killers behind the masks of strangers. I know for a fact that killers do.

I show the officer at the yellow tape my badge and I step across it. This is hallowed ground, just like all the other crime scenes. I look up at the two story house, the white walls and the dark gray shingles on the rooftop. It’s a happy house with a manicured lawn. There’s nothing about this house that would make you think that something terrible would happen here. There’s nothing about it that would make you think that you’re unsafe or unwelcome. It’s a place people would call home. It’s a place people live. I wonder if they thought it would come to this, ever in their darkest thoughts.

The investigation is taking place in the garage where a screen has been erected to keep the flocks of news crews at bay, and the peeping eyes of neighbors. A uniform holds back the opening flap and I step into the harsh floodlights that illuminate the scene. There are three detectives all standing around a body sitting in a wooden chair. I recognize the man from Carson’s file. It’s him, just without the wild eyebrows and the fake mustache that he’d been wearing.

He’s sitting in a wooden chair with his head limp, hanging over the back of the chair like he’s looking up at the ceiling, waiting for God to answer his prayers. His eyes are open and his mouth is slack. The only strange thing is that Chad Roberts decided that last night would be a good time to tie four belts to his appendages. There’s a light belt at each elbow and just under each knee. It’s strange that he accomplished all of this without any hands at the end of his arms. I look at the pools of blood, the gory instruments with which he removed his feet and hands, and the enormous pool of blood around the chair. His makeshift tourniquets did their job, but only for a while. Inevitably, he bled out.

For his feet, he used a hacksaw on his left foot, leaving it next to the jagged tears that removed his foot form his ankle. The white bone is sticking up through the serrated red flesh. His right foot was taken off with a chainsaw and on the far side of the room. It looks like he started with that one then hopped over to the chair. Next came the circular saw and his left hand which fell to the floor with a nice clean cut at the wrist. With only his right hand left, Chad turned on his table saw and sliced the last appendage that he didn’t seem to want off and left it on the table in a pool of blood. From there, he seemed to just lean back in the chair and bleed out, peacefully.

Mendez approaches me with a plastic bag in his hand. He looks at me without saying a word. He read my file, everything that I had on this case. I left it on my desk for him to pick up if he ever decided to change his mind and I’m so glad that I did now, because that asshole knows I’m right. As he hands me the piece of paper, I look at the supposed suicide note that Chad decided to leave behind for his loved ones.

“He had a wife,” I tell Mendez.

“We’ve contacted his family,” Mendez answers. “A patrol car stopped by last night and found the lights in the garage on. When he called out to see if Chad had returned home, he called for backup and entered the premise under the pretense of hearing noises inside. That’s when the officer, his partner, and two other officers discovered him in the garage like this. They say that he was still alive when they found him, but he died shortly after. They searched through the house and found this.”

I look at the letter in the bag. It’s wrinkled and crinkled, but on the back of Chad’s final message to the world, there’s another note. I read through it carefully and recognize where he’d cried on the letter. His wife had been contacted by Detective Carson about her husband’s activities. She left him. Everything was over for Chad Roberts. He was done for. No wonder he decided to kill himself. I look at the letter and realize that there’s nothing I could do to make this not look like a suicide. Thankfully, Mendez is already on my side, because honestly, this is the first body I found that makes me think that it’s actually a suicide.

On the back of Chad’s wife’s note, I read the message he left for the world. It’s short like all the others, simple, and strangely vague just like the rest.
I’m sorry I wasn’t the man you needed. I’m sorry I was a failure at everything. Chad
. Why do they always end like that? Why do they always end with the name and that’s it? There’s nothing here that shows a personal touch to all of the bloodshed he’s caused to himself. Why would be feel so emotional about his failure that he’d give up on life and kill himself, but not write his wife and kids an apology? Nothing about these notes make sense to me.