Dark Heart (21 page)

S
andra sat in an uncomfortable chair in Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, listening to a bored voice announce the status of her flight. The plane was available for boarding, first-class passengers or those requiring special assistance only. The throng of people heading from Chicago to San Diego shifted and moved toward the gate.

She made one last check of the passenger waiting area, but saw no sign of the junkie in the trench coat. Which was not a huge surprise. Maybe if she’d had a hundred dollar bill in her wallet
then,
she’d know
now
whatever the hell it was he wanted to talk about. She doubted he’d be chasing after her again. It wasn’t likely he’d enjoyed their meetings much. So now she’d have to track him down.

What a pain.

Mac had checked the jackets on all of Madrone’s cases, and in the Wheeler jacket he’d found a grubby, handwritten note that referenced a snitch, a kid Madrone had listed only as Maxie—had to be the same guy. The first-name-only dodge wasn’t all that strange—a lot of cops were secretive about their snitches. At least there had been a phone number, but the phone turned out to be a hot-sheet welfare hotel. They found one Pakistani clerk who, based on the kid’s description, thought he’d seen him around.

No, he hadn’t seen him around lately, though. As for the phone, it was in the lobby of the hotel, and was obviously a one-stop communications shop for dopers and their dealers. No help there.

And Dr. Dawes had been a disappointment. He had nothing for her. Or practically nothing. His only contribution was the name, number, and address of some herpetologist who lived in southern California, a little town called Fallbrook. According to Dawes, if anybody could identify that scale for her, this would be her guy.

“I should warn you. Dr. Simmins. He’s a little…odd,” Dawes had said.

A little odd? What the hell did that mean? Another loony? She’d just about had it up to here with loonies.

As she watched the first-class passengers trudge onto the plane, she thought about what she had. One weird scale, several weird footprints, a weird method of murder, and three connections.

Baxter, Madrone, and Zack Miller had all been brutally murdered, their hearts ripped from their chests. That was one connection. The second possible connection was that Baxter and Madrone had been cops, or Baxter at least sort of. But the dead kid named Zack wasn’t a cop, so maybe that pattern didn’t hold. Or maybe it did, and Zack had been a murder of opportunity.

A further, even more tenuous connection involved methods of access. The killer, in the cases of both Baxter and Madrone, had gained access in apparently impossible ways—high floors, no obvious entrance. And Madrone had been investigating a high-profile case with a similar access problem. But with Madrone’s case, the victim had been shot, and his heart left untouched inside his rib cage. So was that a real connection or just smoke? Mac was probably right—it was a hell of a reach. Still, a hell of a reach was better than nothing at all.

She made a mental note to take a look at the Carlton Wheeler jacket, maybe even check out for herself whether there were any mysterious scratches or gouges in the walls beneath his windows.

In the end, all of it added up to not much. She had the scale and the prints. And the junkie. If she could find him again.

Every homicide cop knew that the vast majority of killings either were solved more or less on the spot, or through somebody—the killer, a friend or relative of the killer, or some other informant—dropping a dime. And all of Sandra’s instincts told her that Maxie, the junkie, might have something. But what? He claimed to know who killed Carlton Wheeler. But beyond her own gut feelings, there was nothing solid to link Wheeler to her own psycho killer. The mere fact that Madrone had been investigating Wheeler’s murder, and had gotten scragged by the ripper, wasn’t much to hang her hat on. Madrone had been investigating a lot of other cases, too.

Still, similar access problems, and Madrone’s murder. Maybe something. Not much, but maybe something…

So find the kid. Find Maxie. It shouldn’t be too hard. Junkies were junkies. They had a limited world-view. The world was junk. Watch the junk, find the junkie.

Mac was working on that while she hauled her small glass vial off to California. At least the scale, whatever the hell it was, was something
real
.

She also had high-resolution digital photos, both disk and prints, of the weird tracks they’d found at both Zack’s and Madrone’s murder scenes. Forensics said they were of the same type, but they had no idea what type that was.

Some big animal. Maybe a lizard. Maybe something else. Maybe a setup…she was inclined in that direction herself. If Dawes hadn’t been able to identify the scale—and also hadn’t recognized the prints as belonging to any reptile species he knew about—then maybe it was just a psycho playing games. She’d read stories about Bigfoot, about how hoaxers deliberately left fake footprints around to bolster their scams. She did have a witness, though. Tina what’s-her-name. And Tina said a big guy with wings and claws. And
scales
. Some kind of dragon-like monster. Not a real dragon, of course, but a dragon man. And some weight-lifting bozo wearing a Godzilla suit, complete with claws and big feet, would account for what Tina thought she’d seen. That is,
if
Tina hadn’t been smoking something really
serious
before she climbed in the backseat with her former boyfriend…

Another mental note. The hospital had taken blood samples from the girl. That was standard. If the samples were still around, run a check for drug traces. The girl—and her mother—had claimed she wasn’t a doper, but who knew? Kids didn’t tell their parents everything, and parents sure as hell didn’t know everything about their kids.

She hauled out her cell-phone, dialed the District, and left a message for Mac to call the hospital and take care of it.

Still, even if the girl had actually seen what she claimed she’d seen, it didn’t answer why. Why off some punk kid? There was
no
connection between the crime scenes. Two were indoors, in hard-to-reach places, with absolutely no witnesses. This was outdoors, in the open, and the killer had left a witness behind. One he didn’t have to leave behind.

And what about that other guy? The one Tina had said sounded like an Arab? Who’d
also
tried to kill her, or at least threatened to? And the Asian karate kid. Where the hell had
he
come from?

Jesus. Smoke, mirrors, and no idea in the world
why
. Still, did
why
matter?

No.
Why
mattered only if it would help her catch the scumbucket. Means, motive, opportunity. She had problems with all three. How did the killer, even if he was immensely strong, manage to rip out the hearts with one punch? Forensics said the kind of strength those wounds demanded was beyond even the most powerful man. So he used something, maybe some kind of home-brew weapon…

Motive. Who knew? With a real psycho, it might be anything from the voice of the devil to a conviction that his victims were possessed by Martians. As for opportunity, how the hell did this clown, complete with lizard suit, get into Madrone’s apartment, Baxter’s museum, and maybe…into Carlton Wheeler’s apartment?

That was a thought. Wheeler had died before any of the others. Was that the first strike, before the killer put on scaly long johns and figured out how to keyhole punch a major cardiac arrest?

Still one hell of a lot of smoke. And there was only one thing to do when you had a lot of smoke. Take what you
did
have and work it as hard as you could.

She had a scale and some photos of weird footprints. And she had a name of some guy in California who might be able to identify them.

It was worth a trip, even if Captain Mahoney hadn’t been real enthusiastic about signing off on her travel voucher. But he knew how thin everything was, and he was also painfully aware he couldn’t keep a lid on this thing much longer.

“Push it as far as it will go,” he’d muttered, his eyes bloodshot, his thick white hair rumpled. “Once it comes out, then the mayor gets involved. All the pols. And we’re in a shitstorm up to our eyebrows.”

Shitstorm
…

That was a fair enough description of what the media would generate as soon as they got hold of the details. With sweeps week coming up, the local TV stations would throw armies of hysterical reporters at the case. And at her…

“Passengers in aisles one to fifteen, please board now.”

The bored voice of the airline attendant cut through her revere. She gathered her things, stood, and walked onto the plane.

The flight was a direct one, lasting about four hours. The kid sitting next to her spilled his juice on her lap, nearly ruining her expensive woolen slacks. She’d brought a book—the latest thing in murder mysteries—but the cops in it were so unrealistic she finally put it aside. How come bad mystery writers always made their cops idiots?

The flight landed on time. She lugged her carry-on to the rental car desk, then got on the shuttle bus and went to a parking lot at the outskirts of the airport to pick up a cramped little Dodge, all the Chicago P.D. would spring for by way of transportation.

Dr. Simmins’s home was an hour’s drive north on I–15 to the small, inland town of Fallbrook, not too far from the Marine base at Camp Pendleton.

She spent her drive admiring the scenery and listening to the stereo. At times the terrain between San Diego and Fallbrook was stunning—rocky highlands and lush green hillocks. But much of it had been what they called
developed.
She passed more than one golf course, seen through distant trees, and thousands of tract homes, each so like the next that it was a miracle the owners managed to find the right house every night.

Finally she hit the freeway exit for Fallbrook. Her directions sent her on a winding road that took her through fruit groves. She recognized the orange trees, but some of the trees hid their fruit behind large green leaves. Limes, maybe? Avocados? Whatever they were, the surroundings were idyllic.

And almost without realizing she did so, she found herself thinking about Justin.

He had not called her asking why she’d left in such a hurry, without waking him. Despite herself, she liked that. He hadn’t needed to chase after her, didn’t seem to expect anything from her in particular. Had he assessed her desires so correctly that he’d figured out trying to hold onto her was exactly the wrong course of action? Or had it just been a one-night stand for him?

She wished it had been a one-night stand for her. It would be so much easier that way. But she couldn’t stop thinking about the way he smelled, about how his eyes glistened as he looked down at her, the feel of his body pressed against her.

She frowned unconsciously and looked out the window.

Puffy white clouds floated across the blue sky, their shadows sliding over the land. Beautiful country. She wished she was visiting California on a vacation, rather than on business.

Dr. Simmins lived off the beaten track. She’d left the freeway, and now she turned off a twisty, gravel lane onto a dirt road. She guided her rented car up the side of one of the larger hills, climbing through groves of fruit trees whose trunks looked as if they’d been whitewashed.

After fifteen minutes of bumping and pounding along, she began to wonder if she’d taken the wrong turnoff. The further she drove, the rougher the terrain became. She almost got her car stuck twice but finally made her way to the top of the hill.

The road ended in a parking area of sorts. There were three old 4x4’s in various stages of disintegration sunk into the ground and grown over with grass.

As she got out and shut her car door, Sandra stretched and admired the view. As Mac put it, anything—and anybody—that wasn’t nailed down too tightly tended to roll to the West Coast. But standing here on this hilltop and looking out on paradise, she could understand why people flocked here. There was a windswept wildness to everything that was appealing to her city-bred heart.

She looked up at the sky. The clouds were turning gray, and darker still along their heavy, bulging bottoms.

Rain in Chicago didn’t bother her much, but that dirt track she’d come up on, as bad as it was dry, was likely to be much worse in a downpour. She decided to make sure she wound things up and got the hell back to a real road before the storm broke.

The house sprawled out across the entire east side of the plateau, expansively if not elegantly. Wood-slat siding curled away from the studding in places. Where the paint had not been completely stripped by the elements, paint flakes hung tenuously to the boards. Most of the structure was hidden by foliage. Dozens of lush trees formed a barricade around the house. At least one of every kind of fruit tree she’d seen on the way up seemed to be planted here. Ivy carpeted the ground, climbed across the windows, and reached up into the sagging eaves.

She walked toward the house, looking for a path to the front door. She saw flashes of a wraparound deck, also sagging, through the luxuriant greenery. Broken pavement blocks partly covered in green moss were half buried in the ground, but they seemed to lead in the general direction of the porch.

The trees closed in on her immediately. Between the increasingly dense cloud cover and the thick, leafy canopy, it felt as if she had gone from day into night. She stepped under a low hanging branch. A chirping noise off to her left caught her attention. Something scuffled next to her left ear and she turned around.

A chameleon was making its slow journey across a branch, its thin legs releasing their long-fingered hold one at a time, stretching and looping around to grasp the branch again and pull itself forward. Its tail curled slightly and uncurled, as if it were some horizontal periscope, sensing her position. It stopped for a moment. Large, scaled eyeballs swiveled, focused on her, studied her.