The Monster Within Read online

  I pull up to the yellow tape, putting the raging beast to rest with a turn of a key. Looking around the outside of the building, I climb out and carefully close the door. There are no more gawkers or ghouls. There’s an ambulance waiting to take the body to the morgue. There must be a body if Owens decided to call me. He could have called anyone, but he decided to call me. I wonder what reason he has for picking me out of all the fucking child detectives at his disposal. I flash my badge at the nearest uniform and he holds up the tape for me. I cross under and I can’t help but feel like I’m making a mistake. It’s the same kind of feeling that cheaters describe feeling when they flirt with the cute secretary at their office, or a drug addict recalls before taking his first hit. Bad ideas send out ripples in the universe and when we accept them without thinking about the consequence, everything that follows is thrown back at us. No one makes us decide to take a step down the darker path. That’s all on us. That shit is no one’s burden but ours. Those of us who walk the darker path understand.

  2

  Everything in the apartment is exactly as I suspected the moment I got the address from Owens. There’s just something about these people that makes them all act like sheep. But the greatest irony is that they think they’re being unique or special. They’re all a bunch of indoctrinated rich kids, told that fashion trends are going this way or designs are going that way, so they follow suit, blindly. There’s nothing creative or innovative about it. If anything, it just makes them look dumber. I don’t care about the logic behind all of the victim’s decisions, all I care about is that it’s as ugly as a modern art display at the local gallery. What makes people decorate their homes like this? How do they go so far down the stupid path to think that this is beautiful?

  The walls are a sort of beige that makes me think of a naked woman in the morning light. The floors are black tile, shiny enough that I see my reflection and it creeps me out. On the walls, there’s art that I don’t understand or comprehend in the slightest way. Call me a Philistine, but it’s worthless shit. Put that up next to Picasso and I’d use them both as toilet paper. There are modern, minimalist tables against the walls holding strange statues that just look like misshapen blobs. The whole place is as appealing as dog turds in your morning cereal. The furniture is awkward and uncomfortable looking. There’s nothing in this house to distinguish it as a home or unique to the person living here. I can’t look at the art and say “Oh yes, they smoked.” Or “Hmmm, looks like he was addicted to gambling.” No, it’s all pointless and without a fingerprint of a personality.

  I feel like a loner crashing a party until I’m caught by the familiar sight of Bernie Owens. It’s strange seeing him in the black and silver uniform that I haven’t worn for ages. I know that I still have mine somewhere. It’s stuffed in the back of my wife’s old closet. His looks much better than mine. I doubt I could even fit into mine. But the thing that strikes me most about Owens is how much hair he’s lost. It’s not like he has a bald spot, but it’s definitely thinned. It’s dark enough that it’s obvious he’s using some sort of dye to keep it looking that way. He still sports the mustache that all the other boys back in the bull pen want to emulate. On Owens it looks at home, natural. Not like some kid glued the cat’s hair to his face. He’s still fit enough, but the beers are starting to take a toll on his gut.

  “Glad you came,” Owens says as he reaches out for my hand. I take his and feel that his hands are still rough. He’s been working with them. It’s a strong grip that almost breaks mine, but it’s natural. It’s not like he’s trying to break my hand. He’s just a strong man.

  “Yeah, no problem,” I say, brushing it off like it’s nowhere near as weird as it truly is. “You mind if I ask who the lead was?”

  “Evans and Waters,” Owens answers as he leads me deeper into the house, past the uniforms who are packing up to get out. He leads me past a couple of the coroner’s boys who look at me with annoyance and frustration written across their smug faces. They’re stuck here, waiting for me. “Chin up, boys,” Owens growls at them before they’re officially behind us. “It’s just your job.”

  Without a word about what’s happened, Owens leads me into a room that’s as unremarkable as everywhere else in the apartment. The only thing that sticks out is the black table against the switchback stairs that lead up to the apartment’s second floor. This room has high ceilings, which is the only feature I truly like about it. But it’s all ruined by the dead girl hanging on the wall. I look at her with immediate, morbid fascination. I’ve seen a lot of death, but I’ve never seen someone quite like the girl. I take a step forward and know exactly why Owens called me. He knows I’m a sucker for this kind of shit. He’s known me long enough to have an inkling about my weaknesses.

  The first thing that catches my attention and holds it is the placing of the furniture. There is an enormous rusted metal cross hanging on the beige wall that serves as an overlook of the living room, or at least that’s what I’m assuming this room is. Directly below the old, fleur de lis cross is a black table that is holding a single red vase with two dozen white roses. It only takes me a second to count the roses. Yes, two dozen. But the roses have been painted in a horrifying Alice-esque fashion using the victim’s blood. The girl’s blood has dripped down onto the flowers, spilling across the table and pouring onto the floor. The puddle nearly blends in perfectly with the black, glossy floor. I look at the flowers, admiring how unnerved and disturbed they make me feel.

  “Lola Maretti,” Owens introduces me to the woman. She is wearing a white dress that has been savagely torn and soiled by the blood running through her wounds. Her eyes are open, bloody locks of hair hanging in her eyes as she stares down at the floor with an agonizing look of remorse across her face. She wasn’t a particularly beautiful woman, but her method of ending her life has me puzzled. In death there is something serene about her, and her flesh, even torn, stands out like porcelain or silk that makes me believe she’s never seen the sun. I want to touch her skin to see if it’s as soft as it looks.

  She has bound herself to the large, rustic cross with barbed wire. Hanging like some sort of human substitute for Christ. It looks like some sort of twisted art display, notably better than anything else in the apartment. Tendrils of barbed wire are wrapped around her ankles, her legs, her waist, stomach, armpits, and her left elbow and wrist. Obviously she used her right arm to bind her left arm. Her right arm hangs limp, blood running down from her pale arm and dripping from her fingertips. The weight of her body has knocked the cross off of many of its higher anchors. It is barely still connected to the wall and at any moment it looks like she’ll be coming down on her face. There’s enough blood to convince me that she bled out the moment her weight pulled that cross off the wall and jerked her at the sudden stop. A hundred tiny little barbs would have shot into her flesh, ripping into her and tearing her open. This is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

  “Any leads?” I press, putting my hands on my hips and taking a step forward to get a better look at the girl. They’ve dusted a lot of the house for fingerprints already. It looks like I’m late to the party. Evans and Waters have already combed over this place.

  “They’re ruling it as a suicide,” Owens enlightens me.

  I look at him as if this is a joke. I don’t care who you are, you don’t use barbed wire and a cross to kill yourself on display, no matter how much of an art nut or a lunatic you are. Guns are messy, but they’re quick and they’re pretty efficient. Jesus Christ, people, what about pills? Get a bottle of gin, some pills from your local dealer and have one last party. Why the fuck would anyone go through all of this trouble to just kill themselves? This doesn’t look like any kind of suicide I’ve even heard about and everyone has their weird bodies they talk about in the bull pen. Everyone has heard about so-and-so’s case where they found the victim on display like a marionette or holding their head in their lap.

  “What’s their angle?” I ask Owens, not sure that I�
�m seeing what they saw.

  “They found a suicide note with Lola’s fingerprints all over it, but no one else’s,” Owens informs me. “Apparently she was a bit of a reclusive artsy type. Also, there are no windows that open in the apartment, it’s entirely climate-controlled. You need a special code to get into the building and the moment the doors open, the cameras flip on and video whoever passes through the door. Also, there’s cameras running in the common area and on the staircase. There is no way anyone could break into this apartment without getting filmed, which means the killer had to have been in the building for a very long time since the only people who were in the building were her neighbors across the way. The cameras have them entering the building and going into their apartment two hours before they heard the bang of the cross ripping from the wall. They promptly called the police, Wilson and Avery arrived on the scene and kicked in the door when they got no response. When they found the suicide note and the added camera footage, there’s no way someone committed this as a murder. Evans and Waters closed the case within an hour of getting the security contractors to get down here and show them the footage.”

  I look at the woman on the cross and wonder how in the world someone would even conceive of this. How would you get the logistics of it all down before actually climbing up there, your feet planted on barbed wire, bleeding while you work. I look at her eyes. Even now I can tell from the streaks in her make-up that she was crying, a lot. Why wouldn’t she scream out if someone was doing this to her? Even if they had a gun on her, a bullet to the head would be a better bargain than bleeding to death painfully.

  “So it’s a suicide,” I say to Owens. “What do you want me to do about it?”

  “I don’t think it’s a suicide, King.” Owens sounds as serious as a heart attack. I notice that we’re not alone in the room. He’s speaking to me like he’s trying to convince me that killing Caesar is a good idea in a room full of uniforms. I look around at all the others. Some of them have the same stupid, cheap ass haircut that so many of the other detectives have, but some of these uniforms are old school. Some of them have the look that they came up in this city. They were born into the war and they’re committed. This isn’t a career for many of them, it’s part of the fight to take back their city.

  “Show him the files,” another uniform says. I look at the black man who spoke. He looks like he could bench press Owens and me together. He folds his beefy arms over his swollen chest and looks at me with a doubtful look.

  “What files?” I ask.

  “Some of us are starting to put the pieces together,” Owens says with an intense, serious look in his eyes that makes me feel more and more uncomfortable with every passing second. “Some of the boys and I have started noticing that the suicides in the city aren’t making a whole lot of sense. There’s too many of them, too violent, too dramatic.”

  “So what?” I raise an eyebrow. He doesn’t need to answer the question. I’m already leagues ahead of him. I’ve heard the story a thousand times before. “You think someone’s following depressed people and putting them out of their misery?”

  It’s hot outside. The heat has a way of getting to people, a way to make them more irritable, more violent when it comes to stupid little stuff. I caught more cases where street trash shot someone because they looked at him wrong or said his hat was stupid. They’re all about killing each other when they get in each other’s faces. It’s stupidity and violence all brought on because the heat gets to them. I understand that. I can comprehend it. Maybe the heat also makes people more interested in killing themselves? I’m willing to accept that over the idea that there is a serial killer out there looking to put depressed people out of their misery.

  I’ve seen a killer who worked in a retirement home, going from room to room, finding ways to help put those suffering to rest. It wasn’t until one old man caught on and wasn’t interested in dying so early that they finally caught the woman. I’ve even heard of a guy killing off his chemo patients who weren’t getting better, deciding it best not to prolong the inevitable. But those sorts of people are deluded into thinking that they’re doing an act of mercy, killing those who are suffering. I don’t see anything that would imply that the killer followed the depressed back to their house to kill them. How would a killer even know about them? How would he know that they’re even depressed? Especially if they were recluses like Lola?

  “How about this?” Owens brushes off my comment. “Meet me at the archives and I’ll walk you through a little something that the boys and I have been putting together.”

  I don’t like the sound of that. Is this the cult of the suicide killer that I’ve stumbled into? I look at Owens and wonder if I’m stepping into something that I shouldn’t. I think of the number of days I have left and I wonder if it’s worth even opening this to have a look at it. But the reality of it is—I’m off rotation. I’m not catching anymore. I’m just wasting away for a month. Sure, that sounded great a few hours ago, but I’m not so keen on it now. That’s a lot of time to fill out a very small amount of paperwork and Lola… well, she’s got me intrigued.

  “Alright,” I nod. “But you owe me dinner if I have to listen to your conspiracy theories.”

  “I’ll get you something real nice,” Owens grins, happy that he’s caught me, no doubt.

  “I want a bacon guacamole burger.” I jab a finger at him. “Don’t even bring it if it doesn’t have everything I like.”

  “You’ll get your damn guacamole burger,” Owens nods, snapping his fingers at one of the lurking uniforms.

  “Bacon,” I stress, “guacamole burger. Pick up a bottle of Jameson too.”

  Owens reaches in his back pocket and fishes out a hundred dollar bill and slaps it into the Mexican officer’s hand. He looks at the money and then looks at me before giving me a curt, certain nod that makes me wonder how long they’ve been looking for someone to listen to them. That makes me worry. What the hell have I walked into?

  “Give me an hour,” Owens says as he stuffs his wallet into his back pocket.

  As I turn to walk away, I stop and remember something. It almost escaped me for a second, but now it’s blinding me like a car on a midnight highway with its brights on, refusing to let me go another inch without addressing it. “Can I see the suicide note?” I ask Owens, who gives me with a look that shows that the note had escaped him as well. He looks up at the top of the stairs where a bald officer is leaning on the railing over the dead girl. He vanishes without a word and as I stand there, getting one last look at the bloody roses, I wonder if they’re right. If there was a killer who did this, then that means something really horrifying. “He has to still be here if he didn’t go out the door,” I tell Owens in a soft voice.

  “We’ve searched this place over,” Owens informs me. “Every man you see in here is certain that this was a murder. Either he’s got one hell of a hiding spot, or he found some other way to get out. Right now, we think he fled onto the roof. There’s an emergency maintenance hatch in the closet. It’s locked now, but that doesn’t mean much if the killer planned this.”

  The bald officer returns with the note in a plastic, evidence bag. He hands it to me and I look at it with a speculative eye. This was the note that put the nail in the coffin and designated this as a suicide, or at least it was what put them on this road. I look at it, taking in the look of the note, analyzing the handwriting and the lettering, the wording of it before I actually read it. Satisfied, I take in the note for all it’s worth. ‘Death is the truest form of art’, she says from beyond the grave. ‘There are no decisions that can truly be made except for the one to end one’s life. I know that my parents will not understand, but those who admire my work will witness all that I have done and they will marvel. Goodbye, world, I am sorry I could not give you more than this. Lola’. I look up at the face of the dead girl and wonder just how much of this note was actually true. Did she really want to kill herself? Assuming that Owens and the others are right, did th
is girl actually want to kill herself and believe all of this bullshit she allegedly wrote?

  Handing the note back to Owens, I decide that it’s my duty to actually hear out everything he has to say to me. “I’ll see you in an hour,” I tell him before turning and making my way back to the door. There’s something evil in the air here, thick and oily as I breathe. Passing through the doorway, I look at the two punks who work for the coroner’s office. They look at me, asking silently with their glares whether I’m done or if they’re going to have to keep standing around. I look at them, impatient with their coldness. “She’s all yours, kids.”rbed wire are wrapped around her ankles, her legs, her waist, stomach, left armpit, elbow, and wrist. Obviously sh

  3

  “Did you remember the guacamole?” I ask as Owens hands me a brown bag. He’s holding his own. There’s a fleet of other officers that have accompanied him; it makes me feel like this is an undercover operation that they’re trying to keep witnesses distracted and those asking questions out of Owens’s way. How far does this go?

  The woman at the desk smiles at Owens and he chats her up as I open my bag and look inside, letting the warmth of fries waft over my face, the smell of bacon and the burger tantalizing me. This isn’t the kind of crap that they spring for on interrogations or during lunch, Owens’s man actually went out somewhere nice for this. I look at the back of Owens’s head and feel that uncomfortable tickle in the back of my mind.