Chapter Text
PART 01
Detective Joaquin Murietta reached the front door of the West Los Angeles Community Police Station exactly ten minutes before the beginning of the night shift, like on every other working day. This rather unremarkable brick building had been his workplace for the last seventeen years, and he still looked essentially the same as he had on the day he’d first set foot into the office of Lieutenant Bronowski: a moderately well-clad Latino man in his mid-thirties, with sharp features, short-cropped black hair, a neatly-trimmed goatee and wide, observant dark eyes.
People sometimes teased him about the fact that he apparently wasn’t aging a day; to which he usually replied that his grandfather hadn’t shown any sign of aging well into his late sixties, and that he must have come after the old man. “It’s all in the genes,” he used to say.
Which was, basically, true. At least the part about his grandfather, who’d lived to a ripe old age of ninety-seven and barely looked a day older than seventy when he’d died. The other part wasn’t something Murietta would discuss with anyone but a few chosen allies.
He locked his car, a black Sedan with tinted glasses, and entered the building. The officer on duty behind the desk – infallibly Sergeant Miguel Sanchez on night shift, a short, wiry, balding man in his early fifties, and of Mexican origins like himself – nodded in his direction, looking exceptionally grim. Which was to say a lot, as Sergeant Sanchez always looked grim. The bone structure of his face, combined with the hollow cheeks, made him look like a skull on the best of days, albeit an aesthetically pleasing one, from a purely artistic point of view.
For Sanchez to look so much grimmer than usual, something really bad must have happened. As a rule, he was pretty unshakable, which wasn’t surprising if one knew his personal history. Murietta got a sinking feeling in his stomach, guessing already what must have caused the man who’d been to hell and back several times to react so strongly.
“There’s a new case, isn’t there?” he asked.
Sanchez nodded. “The call came in less than an hour ago.”
“How bad is it?”
“Bad.”
“Like the others?”
“Worse, actually. It seems getting worse with every new case.”
“Is Moralez in already?” Murietta asked.
“She’s in the bullpen with an informant,” Sanchez replied.
“What? Do we have a witness this time?” Murietta began to feel somewhat better, but Sanchez was quick to dampen his excitement.
“No, I think it’s just the usual background work.”
“Who’s the informant?
“Anne something; the girl who runs that homeless shelter where two of the previous victims sometimes stayed.”
Murietta frowned. “The East Hills Teen shelter over on Cranshow? Why has she come to us? They belong to a different precinct. The last thing we need in this sorry case is a fight about competence.”
“I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that,” Sanchez replied. “The captain has ordered that all affected stations should work together on solving the case,” Sanchez replied.
Again, Murietta felt his stomach tightening.
“That… that’s really bad,” he said, seriously worried now. “Working with Downtown Central Community Station could mean…”
“…working with Lochley, I know,” Sanchez finished grimly. “Considering her history, it’s certainly a risk, but… well, there’s nothing we could do about it. Not right away.”
“She’d do everything in her powers to get on a case like this,” Murietta prophesied darkly. “And we must do everything in our power to keep her out of the case. I don’t want Kate Lochley sniffing here around. She has the unfortunate tendency of stumbling over things that aren’t good for her health… and getting rid of her would draw too much attention.”
“I’ll place the calls as soon as I can get a safe connection,” Sanchez promised.
Murietta nodded in understanding. The phone lines of the police station were monitored. The last thing they needed right now would have been getting caught talking to people they weren’t even supposed to know.
Their conversation was interrupted by the first regular patrol ready to go out into the night. Murietta had a fleeting familiarity with the Adam 12 unit, consisting of Gus Grant, a former football player and mild-mannered family man, and his partner, Matt Doyle, Sanchez’ personal… protégée.
“We’ll go now, Sergeant,” Grant said, a bit unnecessarily, but he was a man of proper protocol if there ever had been one. He liked to do things according to the rules.
“Be careful out there,” Sanchez repeated. This was his standard parting message to all units leaving for patrol, but even more so if this particular unit was concerned, as Doyle was like a son for him.
“Aren’t we always?” Doyle asked with false innocence.
Sanchez gave him a narrow-eyed look that used to make newbies shake in their boots during his time as a training officer at the Police Academy.
“Not to my knowledge, no,” he said in a clipped tone, and Murietta winced, remembering how they had found Doyle in a great puddle of his own blood just a few years earlier. It was a miracle that the young man could return to regular duty at all.
Grant elbowed his partner into the ribs, which took Doyle off-balance for a moment. “Don’t taunt the Sergeant, Doyle. Jess and I can’t afford any more pay cuts because of your antics.”
They laughed and left, partners and unlikely friends for quite a few years. Perhaps there was some truth in the saying of polar opposites attracting each other, after all.
“I’ll better be going, too,” Murietta said. “Moralez and I will need to compare our stories before the colleagues from all the other stations start coming in on the case.”
“That won’t be easy,” Sanchez warned him. “Especially if we can’t get Lochley off the case, after all. Whatever else she might be, she’s first and foremost a damn good cop.”
Murietta gave him a wolfish grin. “When did I ever go for easy solutions?”
“When did you get the chance?” Sanchez asked back. “Now, get going, or you’ll be late, and the lieutenant is not in the mood to tolerate lashness in these days.”
Glancing at the big clock above Sanchez’ desk, Murietta realized that the sergeant was right. He had only three minutes left, should he want to arrive punctually to the start of the night shift.
He waved Sanchez and jogged up to the fourth floor to Homicide (after all those years, he still could not make himself trust the elevators), taking two steps at once to shorten his way. The clock struck when he entered the bullpen and threw his keys and his briefcase onto the desk.
Two of his colleagues, detectives Turner and Barritza, were already assorting the details of the new case. They had both come from the Highway Patrol, having decided at about the same time that they wanted more from life than just coursing around in their police cars and writing up people who drove faster than speed limits would allow. As they had served together for years before going to detective school, they had been assigned to the same station in the hope that they’d keep up the good work – which they did.
“I heard we’ve got a new case?” Murietta said, after exchanging absent words of greeting with Nancy Wong, their president computer geek, who did most of the research and all of the filing.
Jed Turner, a six-feet-tall, trim African-American man well over forty, with glasses and a thick moustache, nodded and put on the most recent crime scene photos onto the whiteboard with the help of the usual small magnets.
“It seems the same handiwork to me,” he replied in that surprisingly mild voice of his that seemed to rumble deep within his broad chest. “Save from the fact that the killer is getting more brutal with each new case.”
“Yeah, Sanchez has told me,” Murietta gave the photos a thorough look and had to agree. The killings had been disturbingly brutal from the first case on, but as new and new ones were added to the pile – the current one was the fourteenth known case – they kept getting bloodier and more excessive. There was no doubt, in the opinion of the detectives of the West LA Community Station that they were dealing with a serial killer. With an insane one, most likely.
Fourteen victims, scattered across several precincts between Downtown and West-Hollywood. All murdered in what seemed in a rage, their throats torn out, and although they must have bled copiously, very little blood had actually been found at the crime scenes.
The implications of that made Murietta’s shackles rise. The possible consequences filled him with dread.
The demographics were interesting, though. It seemed that the killer was less concerned about the social status of his victims. He – or she, although that was less likely – only killed young, white men between the age of twenty and thirty, and he also seemed to be attracted to the tall, lanky, brown-haired and somewhat anaemic type.
Half the victims had been homeless people, living on the street, near to well-known shelters. The other half had been successful young men; ones that had reached a certain level of fame either in business or in science or art at a fairly young age. Never the really big names, but relatively well-known ones anyway.
For some reason, these latter ones had been the more savagely maimed during the killing. As if they had been the primary targets, while the others only served to still the killer’s bloodlust between two “real” murders.
Again, the implications chilled Murietta to the bone.
“What do we know about the latest victim?” he asked his colleagues.
Barritza, a tall, lanky, brown-haired man himself, yet safely out of the killer’s prey scheme with his forty-something years, consulted his laptop.
“Seems to be one of those in-between types again,” he finally said. “Name’s Douglas Howser, age thirty-four…”
“Thirty-four?” Murietta interrupted. “That’s too old for our killer.”
“Not really,” Barritza replied. “He looked at least a decade younger – it seems that the killer doesn’t check the age of his victims too closely, as long as the visuals match. This Howser character started off as some kind of child prodigy; he attended medical school at the age of fifteen, but dropped out three years later. Apparently, he couldn’t bear the pressure and turned to drugs.”
“Is that why he’s in the system?” Murietta asked.
Barritza shook his head. “No, he was still underage at that time, so even if he had a file, it must have been sealed. But he worked as a paramedic for almost six years; clean all the time, before having suffered a setback. That’s why his fingerprints are stored.”
“He wasn’t a bad guy for a junkie,” Turner commented, peering over his partner’s shoulder. “He even helped sometimes with the sick and the injured in the shelters where he stayed overnight.”
“All good deeds get properly punished,” Wong added cynically, but none of the men felt like laughing. For a fragile little lady in her late sixties, she could have a pretty morbid sense of humour sometimes.
“Sounds awfully familiar,” Murietta said. “And yet I have the feeling that there must be something that we’ve overseen, all the time. There must be more in common in the victims than simply their looks. That would be over-simplifying things, and we can’t allow having any preconceptions. Every mistake we make can cause another death.”
“You may be right,” Barritza allowed. “I just can’t think of anything else that would connect the victims. They’ve apparently never met… unless on the street, of which we have no evidence. They had different jobs…”
“Those of them who did have one, that is,” Turner added sotto voce.
“…different interests,” Barritza continued, ignoring his remark. “They lived in different parts of the city. While most of them were single, one was married and one betrothed. Two of them had illegitimate children, one paying his aliments regularly, the other not at all. It just doesn’t make any sense!”
“Oh, I’m sure that it does – from the killer’s point of view,” Murietta replied with a sigh. “We just haven’t found the right angle yet.”
“Yeah, and how many more will die yet before we do?” Turner asked bitterly. “I hate being so… so helpless, you know? We are supposed to protect people from such beasts, but we seem to be several steps behind, all the time.”
“As Hercule Poirot said once: it’s very hard to protect a city full of sane people from one madman,” Murietta said. “Although, of course, the actual sanity rate of LA perhaps could be a matter of some discussion. In any case, we can’t do more than our best.”
“Which doesn’t seem nearly enough,” Turner retorted.
Murietta had to agree with him. Even if his personal suspicions – or fears – would prove true, they would have to stop the killings, by any means necessary. He was just afraid that if he was right, for the first time in his life he might not have the means to do so.
“Well, at least we’re trying,” he said, answering more his own fears than Turner’s actual comment. “Where is Moralez, by the way? The sergeant said she was talking to an informant.”
“They’ve been in there for half an hour or so,” Barritza waved in the vague direction of the interrogation room. “The girl’s a tough one, wouldn’t give away more than absolutely necessary, but Moralez seems to handle her well enough.”
“She’s always been good at that sort of stuff,” Murietta took his jacket off and draped it over the back of his chair. “Besides, we’ve known this Anne for a couple of years by now. I’ll go over and see how far Moralez has come with her.”
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
He found his partner in relaxed discussion with Anne Steele, a somewhat anorexic-looking blonde in her late twenties – they were old acquaintances, after all. Anne had run the East Hill Teen Center – a shelter for homeless youths – for some six years by now, and she was known about to be ready to do just about everything to ensure the safety of her young wards. That included walking the grey zones of the law as well as cooperating with the police if it served her interests. They had solved quite a few cases thank the information provided by Anne, even though they knew that she’d only done so to protect her residents.
Murietta usually let Moralez deal with her. As much as he respected Anne for the work she was doing, she also made him a little uncomfortable. She saw things most people didn’t even realize to exist, and he did have a lot to hide. Those ancient eyes in that pretty young face always had him shiver. Anne had been through a lot in her young life, and that had made her age prematurely in the inside, even though she looked younger than her actual age to the naked eye.
Although he was curious whether the girl could tell anything of interest, Murietta didn’t enter the interrogating room. The shared stance of the two women showed that they’d nearly reached the end of their conversation, so he opted to avoid Anne. He paged Moralez to make her aware of his presence, but otherwise remained on the other side of the mirror, simply listening to them.
It seemed that Anne had indeed known their latest victim quite well. Douglas Howser had spent the last year in the shelter, helping out with the sick and the injured, trying to get away from the drugs once again.
“Did he have any temporary jobs?” Moralez asked.
Anne shrugged, staring at the broken half-heart tattooed in the inside of her right forearm thoughtfully. It was an ugly piece of work, and Murietta wondered why she hadn’t tried to have it removed. Either that “Ricky” whose name was tattooed into the middle of the half-heart was someone who had once been very important to her, or it would have cost more money than she was willing to waste.
“Not very often, and never for very long,” she answered Moralez’ question. “Sometimes he helped out in that exotic dance club, the Vesuvius, as a waiter. But he could never stay away from those damned drugs for long, so he could only work from time to time, when he happened to be clean… as long as it lasted anyway.”
“I’m surprised that they took him in the Vesuvius, even if only as an ersatz waiter,” Moralez said. "It’s a club with fairly good reputation. They don’t usually employ junkies.”
“Howsie wasn’t your usual junkie,” Anne said with a hint of angry defence in her voice. “He could keep up appearances like nobody else. He was also a very fastidious person.”
“That’s fairly unusual for someone living on the streets,” Moralez commented.
Anne nodded. “Yeah, it is. I think he only stayed in the shelter to use the shower and the washing machine. He once told me that living on the street had actually been cool, but being filthy all the time was killing him.” She shook her head, almost amused, despite the tragic event that had brought her to the police. “He was a strange one.”
“How did the others from the shelter accept him?” Moralez asked.
Anne gave that almost-laugh again.
“They laughed about his washing tic, of course, but they liked him nevertheless,” he answered. “He was friendly and helpful, and he could work wonders with the simplest of medical remedies. They called him ‘the witch doctor of the streets’… but it was meant fondly.”
“Sounds almost like a fairly tale,” Moralez commented with a sarcastic undertone.
“It would have been,” Anne replied dryly, “had he not been abusing drugs all the time. He could have achieved so much if he could just get away from that damn E.”
“And despite the drugs, he still achieved more in a few years than many other people would during their entire life,” Moralez said thoughtfully. “It’s a real shame that he had to be picked out by a crazed killer.”
A shame perhaps, but not an accident, Murietta thought, his trained detective’s mind already making the connections. Even as a homeless junkie, this young man had made extraordinary achievements. No, he wasn’t picked out randomly. I wonder if the other homeless victims had outstanding abilities, too.
In the interrogation room Moralez asked Anne a few more questions, and then released her. Before leaving, though, the blonde stared at the mirror for a moment. As if she could have felt Murietta’s presence somehow. It was an eerie thing, and Murietta backed off involuntarily, until the opposite wall blocked his retreat. He felt the illogical urge to flee or hide, more certain than ever that something was not entirely… normal with the young woman – and it was more than just her troubled past.
Finally, Anne left, without saying anything else, and Morales came into the observation room to talk to her partner. She was a very attractive Latino woman in her early thirties, with a few African-American ancestors somewhere up her bloodline, and had worked with Murietta for the last seven years. They were the oldest team at Homicide, with the most solved cases, which was why this particularly nasty one had been dropped onto their laps. Five of the serial killer’s victims had been murdered in West Los Angeles. No other precinct had such a high victim rate.
“So, you’ve heard,” Moralez said, twisting her long, jet-black hair into a lose knot and fastened it with a hairpin on the back of her head. “Madre de Díos, will this… this massacre never end? Fourteen young men dead, and we still don’t know a thing about the murderer!”
“I believe I begin to see the pattern,” Murietta said slowly.
“Good for you,” she replied. “Care to enlighten me?”
“It was Anne’s description of the last victim that gave me the clue,” he answered. “That despite his addiction, this Howser character actually did look presentable and even worked. Think about it: for a homeless junkie, that’s actually glowing success.”
“Which means that he also matches the primary prey scheme of the killer,” Moralez was a smart woman and an experienced detective. She caught on with impressive speed.
Murietta nodded. “We need a deeper look into the past of the other homeless victims. Who knows, perhaps we’ll find a similar pattern.”
“That will take a long time,” Moralez warned him. “Wong is good, but fighting bureaucracy is a long and hard battle.”
“We don’t have the time for that,” he said. “Every minute that we waste can cost the next young man his life. Have you noticed how the intervals between two murders keep getting shorter?”
“Of course,” she replied. “So, what are you going to do? Have Four-Eyes hack the databases to all affected precincts?”
“And more, if I have to,” he said. “But first, I need to go down to the morgue and take a look at the victim’s wounds.”
“What for? I’ve already seen them – they’re the same as by all other victims… just worse,” Moralez said with a shrug.
Murietta sighed. “You know that you can’t always see everything that I can see… or smell,” he reminded her.
Moralez gave him a piercing look. “Do you have a suspect? Because if you do, you ought to tell me, you know.”
“I don’t know who it is,” he answered, choosing his words very carefully, “but yeah, I have a, let’s say, a hunch of what kind of person it might be. Which is another reason why I need to pay Four-Eyes a visit… and Hawk probably too. This might be one of those cases; one that belongs under his jurisdiction.”
“Be careful, Joaquin,” Moralez rarely called him by his given name; only when she was really frightened. “Be very careful. The captain has called in the FBI.”
“What?” He realized he’d been shouting and lowered his voice hurriedly. “What for? All murderers happened within the boundaries of Los Angeles; this is not a federal case.”
“He’s called for the BAU,” Moralez whispered. “Those are the highest qualified profilers of the whole country, Joaquin – it’s by no means sure you’ll be able to fool them. Whatever you may need to do to cover your tracks, do it now, because tomorrow it might already be too late.”
That was devastating news indeed, but Murietta wasn’t willing to declare defeat just now.
“When are they supposed to be here?” he asked.
“They’ll take off from Quantico at ten in the morning,” Moralez replied.
“Then we still have time. Even by plane, it will take them a couple of hours to get down here from Virginia,” Murietta thought over his chances for a moment. “Can you cover for me tonight? I need to go to Four-Eyes… now more than before.”
Moralez nodded. “Of course I can. Go and do what you have to do – and for God’s sake, be careful!”