Bleeders Page 18

  “He’s never killed a male before,” Franco said. “Why start now? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “My theory is he came to kill the female and unexpectedly encountered the male. He had to kill the man to have the woman.”

  Franco spit out a mocking laugh. “Theories are a dime a dozen. I need evidence. Facts!”

  But Trisha wasn’t about to be cowed. “Then how do you account for two methods of killing?”

  Franco’s frowned. “What do you mean? They were both bludgeoned with the guitar.”

  “The autopsy will show that the man was hit harder and possibly more often than the woman. Drac was just getting rid of him. But the situation had gotten out of hand. He hit the woman to subdue her, maybe keep her from helping the man. Drac didn’t intend to kill her that way, but the blows were fatal. He stuck in the needle anyway. Maybe he didn’t realize she was dead. When her blood wouldn’t flow, he must have been very disappointed.”

  Franco bunched her manicured fingernails and shook them. “This is all conjecture, McCleery. Fiction. Admit it. You’re just making it up as you go along.”

  “This is how I put a profile together. I analyze the crime scene to see how he thinks. This crime scene is telling me that Drac was here and he’s changing.”

  Franco turned to Pete. “And what do you think, Detective? Are you buying this malarkey?”

  Despite Pete’s hipster cool, Trisha could see he was uncomfortable. “Well…” he said, then paused. He was trying to come up with something that would satisfy his boss and not offend Trisha. “Well, one thing that strikes me as odd is the age of the victim. Drac likes wealthy mature women. This victim wasn’t his type.”

  But Trisha already had an answer for that. “We’ve been working under the assumption that he has a thing for older wealthy women, but maybe age and social status has nothing to do with it. As for age, this woman was forty-three. His youngest so far, but not by that much. His first Orchid Club victim, Linda Martinson, was forty-nine.”

  “But this woman looked younger. You can see it on her drivers license.” Franco flashed a gotcha smirk.

  “With all due respect, I can’t tell what this woman looked like in life.” Trisha pointed to the track marks. “It’s possible that her drug use had aged her from the time that photo was taken. We won’t know till she’s cleaned up.”

  “And she’s a blue-eyed brunette,” Pete pointed out. “Just like Drac’s other victims.”

  Franco exploded. “So she’s a freaking Snow White! So what? That tells me nothing. Does it get us any closer to an arrest? Does it, detective? Does it, Agent McCleery?”

  Franco’s two assistants, Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum, rushed in as soon as they heard their boss yelling. She stared hard at Trisha, waiting for an answer.

  But Trisha was somewhere else, her mind tumbling down a bottomless well of memories. It was the mention of Snow White that did it. When she was in third grade, she had dressed up as Snow White for Halloween and Cindy had been Sleeping Beauty. They never went trick or treating when they were kids because their nearest neighbor was a quarter mile away, so their parents always threw a big costume party. That year a fat woman who had come dressed as a gypsy commented on how pretty Trisha was and how much she looked like her mother. “Two pretty Snow Whites,” the woman had said. Trisha remembered that because Cindy had overheard the comment and ran to her room in tears, thinking the woman had meant that she wasn’t pretty.

  Franco’s Snow White comment spooked Trisha. She was right. Except for Ginger Wexler, all Drac’s victims were Snow Whites. So was her mother and so was she. She had no proof, but she was more convinced than ever that Drac had to be the one who had killed her mother.

  She stared into space, her pulse racing. While Franco was huddled with her assistants, Pete shot Trisha an annoyed glance as if to say, “Get with it.” She nodded, assuring him that she understood his butt was on the line here. But her deepest fears had a powerful grip on her. She had to keep telling herself that she was the hunter not the hunted.

  She looked around the room for a jewelry box, intent on getting back to work. If Drac was the killer, he might have taken a souvenir as he had in the past. Of course, it was possible that he might not have wanted one this time. If the experience had been disappointing, he wouldn’t want to remember it. She didn’t see a jewelry box on the dresser or on the floor, but that didn’t surprise her. A heroin addict probably wouldn’t spend money on niceties like that, not when she had a habit to feed. But she was wearing bracelets and a necklace, so she did own jewelry. Trisha pulled a pair of latex gloves out of her pocket and put them on.

  She went to the dresser and pulled out the half-drawer on the top right. When she saw that it contained panties and bras, her fingers turned frigid. Drac had probably found his ligatures here, which meant he had touched this knob.

  She pulled out the drawer on the left. It was a “junk drawer” full of odds and ends. Loose packets of condoms. A tube of vaginal lubricant. The stubs of used candles. Matchbooks from various restaurants. A silver skull ring. A multi-colored beaded necklace. A worn green-and-yellow friendship bracelet. A roll of duct tape. A ballpoint pen. A jack knife. A set of black rosary beads. If anything was missing from this drawer, it would be impossible to tell.

  Trisha couldn’t hear what Franco was saying to her assistants, but she gestured angrily and hissed her words like a riled snake. Trisha ignored her. Franco had her own agenda, and it had more to do with promoting herself than solving crimes.

  Trisha went to the body and examined the hand tied to the headboard with a hot pink bra, suspended an inch or so off the pillow. She curled the fingers, which put up some resistance as rigor mortis was beginning to set in. The victim wore one ring—an oversized yellow rhinestone on her index finger. Trisha checked the other fingers. The base of her ring finger was a bit paler than the rest of her hand and slightly atrophied. She checked the knuckle for signs of bruising or damaged skin but didn’t see anything that indicated that a ring had been forced off. Still, it was clear that Robin/Ruth had been wearing a ring on that finger until recently.

  Pete came around to her side of the bed. “You find something?”

  She showed him Robin’s ring finger.

  Pete lifted his glasses and eyeballed it. “Souvenir?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “Or she hocked it to pay for a fix.”

  Trisha took in the shabbiness of the room. “Yeah, that a possibility, too.”

  Franco’s huddle broke up, the two assistants stepping out of the room.

  “Detective,” Franco said to Pete, “I need to have a word with you.” She crooked her finger and went out into the hallway.

  “Oh, goodie,” he muttered. “Be right back… I hope.”

  Trisha stared at the dead woman’s face, peering through the clumps of hair to see if she had Indian stripes, but it was hard to tell. Blood from the head wound had trickled to her face and smeared in the struggle with her killer. The room was quiet, the only sounds coming from the intermittent camera flashes in the next room.

  Trisha gently moved a piece of matted hair out of the victim’s eyes and saw a slit of blue. The tragedy of this woman’s life suddenly felt like a boulder on Trisha’s back. “So who did this to you, Robin?” she whispered. “Was it who I think it was?”

  Trisha’s phone vibrated in her pocket. She took off the gloves and pulled it out, assuming it was Barry Krieger wanting to be filled in. She glanced at the caller ID and didn’t recognize it. It took a second for the name to register, and when it did, she froze. “SAVITSKY RUTH.”

  A text message had been sent to her. With trembling hands, she pressed buttons to retrieve it.

  “I NEED U”

  A lump of ice formed in her gut. She could hardly breathe. She looked at Robin/Ruth’s lifeless eyes.<
br />
  It’s him, she thought. He took your phone.

  Pete came back into the room, an annoyed smirk on his face. “Yap, yap, yap. That woman is the biggest pain in the butt ever.”

  But Trisha wasn’t listening. She stared at the message, petrified. When the backlight automatically shut off, she jumped and dropped the phone as if Drac had turned it off himself.

  Pete looked concerned. “You okay?”

  She swallowed hard. No, she thought. I’m not okay.

  Chapter 16

  The glare of passing headlights shone on the wet pavement as Lassiter, huddled under an umbrella, walked along a residential street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He’d worried that someone would see him here, but there were hardly any people on the street. Williamsburg was supposed to be hip, the place where people in their twenties lived after college. Could have fooled him. Maybe this wasn’t the hip part.

  He’d never been to this neighborhood and was surprised at how unlike Manhattan or even the nicer neighborhoods of Brooklyn it was. The row houses were an architectural mishmash—old brick exteriors next to wood clapboard next to aluminum siding next to the tacky faux stonework Italian-Americans seem to love. It also seemed darker here, the streetlights dimmer and spaced farther apart.

  He felt his cell phone vibrating.

  “Hello?”

  “This is Mackie,” the voice on the other end said. David Mackie from General Foods.

  “Yes?”

  “Quarterly report comes out day after tomorrow. Much better than expected. Up eleven percent. Stocks will jump. You should—”

  “I know.” Lassiter cut him off. He didn’t need to be told what to do, certainly not over the phone.

  “I expect the usual arrangement.”

  “Yes, yes, the usual.” Mackie’s perpetual jitters and niggling greed were getting on his nerves. Lassiter hoped he didn’t turn into another Sam Banerjee.

  Lassiter let the silence turn awkward. “Is that all?” he finally said.

  “Ah… yeah.”

  “Good.” He hung up and pocketed his phone.

  First thing in the morning he’d alert the outside brokerage houses he used to buy as much General Foods stock as they could. He could potentially reap astronomical profits, depending on how much stock he could get.

  The rain had stopped, so he folded his umbrella and shook it out. He wore a blue Yankees cap and a black all-weather field coat, the collar flipped up. He tucked the umbrella under his arm and jammed his hands in his pockets, unaware that he was marching like a storm trooper. He was upset and distracted and had been ever since that disaster on the Lower East Side with Robin and Dave. He kneaded the Ziploc bag full of his mementos in his pocket, working them like worry beads. It shouldn’t have happened like that, he thought. He was above such an amateur performance. And killing them had done nothing for him. She was nothing like Natalie. He’d taken her gold Claddagh ring, but he felt like tossing it down a sewer. Robin Savitzsky wasn’t a memory he wanted to keep, but he wasn’t about to go rooting through the bag out here in the street.

  He passed a closed hardware store as he came up to a corner. The street sign said Leonard St. It was the next block, he thought. He’d Mapquested the address at home and memorized the sequence of streets from the subway stop. As he stepped off the curb, a taxi blew by in a hiss of wet tires, forcing him to stop short. He glared at the departing taillights, half-hoping the cabbie would stop and say something. He was itching for an excuse to hurt someone.

  But the taxi kept going, and Lassiter continued on his way, squeezing the bag of mementoes. He had to calm down. His emotions were getting in the way. Since his aborted attempt at having Trisha, he’d been crazy, thinking about her constantly, unable to pay attention to a simple newspaper article, unable to hold a thought for more than ten seconds unless it was about her. The problem was, she was more like her mother than he’d ever expected. It was more than just the physical resemblance. The similarity of their mannerisms was uncanny. Natalie had a way of slowly looking down then up before she spoke, which he’d attributed to her illness, but Trisha sometimes did the same thing.

  He passed more residential houses, all of them with small front yards enclosed by low walls, iron gates, or privet hedges. He thought these yards were ridiculous because there was barely enough room for a lawn chair or two. He came up to the next corner and saw the sign for Eckford Street, just as he expected. Take a right here, and it should be in the middle of the block on the right.

  He picked up his pace. He wanted to get this done. No, he needed to—

  Angry barking came out of nowhere and startled him. A menacing shadow shot out onto the sidewalk from one of those yards. Bared teeth and shiny black eyes. Lassiter jumped back as the creature lunged, and a chain around its neck snapped tight. It stood on its hind legs, straining to get at him. A large overfed boxer barking non-stop, spit flying from its fleshy jowls. Lassiter stared at the beast, outraged that the owner would give it enough lead to reach pedestrians. He glared up at the house, wanting the owner to come out. A large flat-screen TV visible through the front windows showed a female talking head with a busy news crawl running across the bottom of the screen. On the other side of the room, a pair of bare feet propped on the foot rest of a recliner didn’t move. The owner, Lassiter assumed. What if a little kid had walked by and this monster had pounced. Lassiter seethed, imagining what kind of bastard this person was. He wished this jerk would get off his fat butt and come out.

  The dog kept barking, but the feet didn’t move. Lassiter stepped closer to the frantic animal, desperate to get at him. He inched closer until he was less than a foot away. The barking became insane, the dog strangling itself. Lassiter leaned in closer to provoke the animal, staring into its maniacal eyes.

  “I could kill you,” he whispered to the dog.

  The dog responded with an high-pitched growl.

  Lassiter grinned. The hound of hell, he thought.

  He looked up, but the feet hadn’t budged. Was this idiot asleep? How could anyone sleep through this racket? What if there was a real emergency out here? What if the dog were mauling a child? Would he just ignore it? Son of a bitch.

  The boxer switched to a hybrid growl-bark, baring its yellow teeth, saliva glistening in the streetlight.

  “If I killed you, do you think he’d give a damn?” Lassiter whispered. “Shall we find out?”

  He could hear the squeak of the dog’s leather collar as the animal strained to get at him.

  Lassiter spoke calmly. “I could take off my belt, loop it around your big ugly head, cinch it tight under your chinny-chin-chin, and strangle you. Just like that.” He glanced at the feet. “Then I could do the same to him.”

  The dog huffed and puffed, blowing hot breath into Lassiter’s face.

  “I know, I know,” he said soothingly. “It’s tough when you have to live with people who don’t understand you. I feel the same way.”

  His hand moved like lightning, grabbing the dog’s muzzle, and clamping down hard. The dog’s eyes shot open. In a millisecond it had gone from attacker to attacked. It tried to shake free, but Lassiter gripped its collar with his other hand, keeping it up on its hind legs.

  “I could move my little finger just so and block your nostrils, my friend. I could rescue you from this miserable life.” He slid his finger over the dog’s wet black nose and cut off its breathing. “It won’t take more than a few minutes.”

  The dog struggled, but Lassiter knew how to handle panicked animals. That’s why he worked at the shelter. He wanted that experience.

  His gaze shifting from the dog to the bare feet. Seinfeld was on the screen, Kramer sliding into Jerry’s apartment.

  The dog’s head jerked involuntarily, eyes fluttering.

  “Just a little longer,” he whispered. Feeling the life drain
out of the dog energized him. “Just a little bit longer.”

  The boxer slumped to the ground. Lassiter hunkered over it, his finger pressed to its nose. He glanced up. The feet were gone. On TV Jerry stood at the kitchen counter, pouring cereal into a bowl.

  “Hey!” A fat bald man in sweat pants and a white wife beater stood on the porch. His fleshy biceps were covered in tattoos, and his feet were still bare. “What the hell do you think you’re doin’?”

  Lassiter stood up. “This your dog?”

  “Yeah, it’s my dog.”

  “You oughta take better care of it, mister. He needs water. He’s dehydrated.”

  The dog lay on its side, motionless, barely breathing.

  “Don’t freakin’ tell me what to do with my dog.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. But I will tell the ASPCA.”

  “Go to hell!”

  I probably will, Lassiter thought.

  He stared at the fat man, silently daring him. He so wanted the man to come down off the porch. He knew he could have his belt off in a flash. Get it around the man’s neck. Drag him down behind the bushes. Get him on his big fat belly and sit on his back. Keep the belt tight to keep him quiet until he passed out. Then he’d link his fingers around the man’s forehead and yank up hard to break his neck.

  But the man stayed on the porch. “I’m gonna call the cops,” he said.

  Lassiter didn’t move, daring him to do it.

  “I swear to God I will,” the man said.

  An empty threat. Lassiter enjoyed watching the fat man’s posture melt. He was nothing without his fearsome beast.

  “Come on, boy,” he called to the dog. “Come!”

  But the pooch was still coming around, panting for breath. It could lift its head, but it didn’t have the strength to get to its feet.

  “Caesar, come! Come!”

  “Help him!” Lassiter snarled. “Can’t you see he’s in a bad way?”