JF Gonzalez - Fetish.wps (4 page)

It was two days after their arrest of Rudy Montego and Frankie Rodriguez for the murder of five-year-old Stephanie Hernandez in a drive-by shooting. Both suspects had been arraigned that morning and had pleaded a big Not Guilty. Daryl and Steve had been in court that morning during arraignment, and Daryl had kept his gaze trained on both gang members as they sat with their court-appointed defense attorneys. When they had been led back to the custody of the Sheriff's Deputy, Rudy had turned to look back at the courtroom and Daryl caught his gaze and held it.
I'm on your ass like a fly on shit,
homeboy. Fuck with me, and it will be my pleasure to see that you suffer more than you
can ever imagine.

It had been a good morning and the arraignment had been only the beginning of it.

After the court appointment, the two partners had gone back to Parker Center to fill out some paperwork pertaining to the case, and Daryl had gone through the motions mechanically. It was the least favorite part of his job, but he liked it anyway. He liked working with Steve, too. When Steve wasn't working he was a grinning goofball of a guy who looked like he'd be at ease renting you a Jet Ski at Lake Havasu or surfing in Newport Beach. He had bleached blonde hair, deeply tanned skin, and his five foot eight frame was toned and muscular. For a thirty-two year old man, Steve looked easily ten years younger. Daryl was envious of the way Steve got the attention from women on the sporadic occasions they went out after their beat to the local watering hole for a few beers. Still, he couldn't complain. Having Steve around only brought the women around to him as well.

Daryl was three years older than Steve and stood two inches taller. His black hair was combed back from his forehead, giving him the suave look of a romantic. His eyes were large and brown, his mouth sensual, a neatly trimmed mustache accenting his chiseled features. He favored neatly tailored clothing, even for undercover work. The guys always told him he looked positively dashing in his normal work attire, which consisted of slacks, a white shirt and tie.

Daryl wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and squinted at his partner. The air was hot and still. “What do you mean by ‘this makes seven'?"

“Don't tell me you don't know?” Steve asked in that incredulous tone he sometimes got. As much as he liked Steve, he could be a little irritating at times.

Daryl turned to the dozens of cops scouring the graffiti-stained concrete banks of the river. “Apparently it appears I'm not the only one who's in the dark since these guys are looking for evidence with us. Now would you please tell me what the hell you're talking about?"

“Okay,” Steve Howe took a step forward and glanced around, as if afraid to be overheard. He cocked his thumb back towards where the initial torso of the victim was found floating in stagnant water. “Look at what we have here; homeless guy scouring the banks of the river for recyclable bottles finds the torso. He hightails it up to call us. We get here. Find one dead, very dismembered human male. So far in addition to the torso, all we've found have been both legs, correct?"

“Right.” Thirty minutes ago an officer reported finding two human legs severed at the knees, presumably from their pal fifty feet away, already covered with a white sheet by the coroner.

“His head is missing too, right?” Steve went on. “Decapitated. Haven't found it yet."

“Right."

“Plus both arms are still missing and the sick fuck who did this cut the guy's cock and balls off for good measure, too. Right?"

Daryl sighed, nodding. He had never seen anything like this in his twelve years as a cop in Los Angeles. His first reaction upon initially viewing the body was one of question: it was very hard to tell that the lump of flesh that sat on the sandy concrete banks of the river was the torso of a human being. It had been even further puzzling, after making out the bloody stumps of where the head and limbs had once been connected, what the raw patch of flesh that lay in the triangle at the bottom portion of the torso signified. He actually had to look at the remains for a few minutes before it finally hit him. He had turned away sickened, then embarrassed. The way the human mind will rebel at such a shocking crime scene was something he thought as a detective of homicide he would never have to experience. He thought he had seen it all—shootings, stabbings, hell, one time he had seen a guy whose head had been split in two with a chainsaw by a guy on a PCP binge—but
this
beat them all.

Steve Howe continued. “Almost two months ago, Jack Looper over at Foothill Division gets called over to a scene in the San Gabriel Mountains right above La Canada and Pasadena. A couple of hikers found a dead body, naked, badly decomposed and decapitated. They still haven't identified him."

“You think they're related?” Daryl asked, his mind whirling. He hadn't heard about the Foothill incident. Murder was so common in this city that he never gave it much thought anymore whenever he was on the scene of one, whether it was the result of a domestic quarrel, robbery, or gang related. When you saw hundreds of murder cases in any given year, you grew numb to it after awhile.

“There's more,” Steve said. “In May there was that gang member found beneath the Eighty-First Street bridge near downtown. Remember that?"

Daryl made the connection. He remembered it vaguely due to the fact that one of the detectives that worked at Parker Center he was friendly with had been on that case. It had been the first time that he had ever heard of gang bangers decapitating a rival. “That's right. Where was he from?"

“Boyle Heights,” Steve said. “Don't remember what gang he was affiliated with, although I think it might have been Eighteenth Street. The point of it is this: his head was found first in his own pants stashed near some bushes on the side of railroad tracks about a quarter of a mile north. A day later some gang members found his body neatly laid out in some bushes about a quarter of a mile down the line. Not a drop of blood anywhere to be found. The gang members that found him were from another gang, and they claimed they didn't know how he got there. Lie detector tests and circumstantial evidence confirms this, much to their benefit. End of story?"

“Apparently not, since you eluded to seven victims."

Steve held up his hand, counting off on his fingers. “This January a prostitute was slaughtered in East LA. She had been dismembered and decapitated, found ten blocks from the Eighty-First Street bridge. We still haven't found the head. She was affiliated with a Boyle Heights gang."

“You think all these killings are gang related?"

“Gangs don't kill this way,” Steve said. “You and I both know that."

That was true. In reality, gang members were cowards who preferred to spray an area with bullets hoping to hit their target. The brave ones actually walked up to their intended victims and shot them point blank. The butchery as evidenced in the cases Steve was talking about was out of character for a gang member's standard operating procedure.

“What about the other three?"

“Last September I assisted a case in which two males were found at the bottom of a gully in Echo Park, only five miles from here. Both men were decapitated and emasculated. Both men had gang ties."

“Jesus!"

“And the year before that, a homeowner in Newport Beach reported a body that washed ashore near his home. A buddy of mine, Rick Mercado, was on that one. The body was that of a young girl, a teenager actually. Dismembered and decapitated. We weren't able to get prints because we never found her hands, but DNA testing matched those of a missing teenager from Echo Park.” Steve's voice lowered as he regarded Daryl with a serious gaze. “The missing teenager in question had ties to another Boyle Heights Gang. The thing to consider is this: the missing teenager hadn't been seen since she left home about three months before the body washed ashore in Newport Beach."

Detective Daryl Garcia turned away from Steve, toward the hub of the investigation. His heart was racing. Steve was telling him the truth; he was damned sharp at connecting things. He might be on to something here.

The reason they were gathered here today was due to the discovery of a dead male who appeared to be in his mid-twenties. At approximately noon a homeless man scavenging for bottles along the concrete bank of the river saw something white floating in the shallow waters in the center of the river. The unusual amount of water at the river's bottom was due to a freak summer storm that had dumped three inches of rain in the Los Angeles area. The flood had since trickled to a steady stream, leaving a good two feet of water running down the center. Surely enough to carry the remains of a dead human being.

The first officers on the scene immediately called for backup, and within the hour the river was swarming with cops. Daryl and Steve arrived two hours ago upon being told by their Sargent that they were to handle this case. On the drive out Daryl wondered to himself what it would be this time; another gang retaliation killing, or maybe a thrill kill committed by some sick teenager? Or maybe a robbery gone awry. Those were the kind of cases Daryl was used to.

Now as he saw the body, inspected the area for clues with his partner, and conferred with a couple of the other officers, Daryl wasn't so inclined to believe this was just another routine murder case. He hadn't been aware of the murders Steve just told him about—with the exception of the Eighty-First Street Bridge victim.
Great
, he thought.

Just what this city needs in the midst of psycho gang members and car jackers is another
serial killer.

He turned to Steve. “Are there files on these cases back at the station?"

“Yeah."

“I'd like to see them,” Daryl said. “Let's not say anything to anybody until we review those files. I don't want to be spilling the beans without some substantial proof to back us up."

“I agree completely.” The two men started heading back up the bank of the river toward their cars.

“What about the FBI?” Daryl asked. The heat was tiring and he wiped his forehead. “Have they been called in on any of these cases?” Standard operating procedure was for the FBI to be called in if it appeared that the murder was sexual or serial related, or if local law enforcement had exhausted all their efforts.

Steve shook his head. “Don't know about that one. I'm fairly certain they were called in on the two guys from last year, and the hooker. I'm not so sure about the others."

It was probably hard to pin a series of murders as a case of serial murder. If the victims had gang ties and associations, it would most likely be chalked up as gang related.

But if this was a bona-fide serial killing case, it might help boost Daryl's career quite a ways. Especially if he went to his superiors with his suspicions and they were found valid.

For the first time in Daryl's career he smiled at the fact that murder, a commodity he dealt with every day in his job, might actually help him get ahead in life.

Daryl Garcia sat at desk, cradling his head in his hands. Before him on his cluttered desk lay a myriad of files and paperwork, all relating to seven different murders in the last day alone. All seven murders occurring in the same five block radius of Boyle Heights and Echo Park.

It was close to seven p.m., two days after the discovery of the LA River stiff.

Steve Howe had gone home for the day, as had all of the day shift detectives. Daryl rubbed his eyes and stared down at the mess of papers on his desk, wondering how what appeared to be a simple open-and-shut case of serial murder-as open-and-shut as serial murder
gets
-could accelerate into something like
this
.

Fifteen gang related shootings in the past twenty-four hours resulting in seven fatalities. Daryl and Steve were handling four of them, and with the dismemberment murder that sparked it all on their priority list, it was making work a trifle frustrating.

The coroner hadn't even identified the body when the reverberations of the killing began making their way through gang-infested Los Angeles neighborhoods. The gang that claimed the area the body was found in-Los Compadres Mafia-started the fire by belligerently voicing their opinions to news journalists that the LAPD and the Mayor didn't give a rats ass for the people in the barrio, especially the Hispanic community. The elders of the community echoed this, and a chorus rang through from members of the city council who were of Latin American descent. Daryl Garcia chalked that up to simple minority whining, something he had grown used to in the twelve years he had been a cop in Los Angeles;
the LAPD is racist and beats down Mexicans and blacks and women
.

Same old bullshit. It pissed him off more when they tried to appeal to him by bringing his own race up in the debate.
You're Hispanic, too. You should know how it feels
.

Well, he didn't. His basic philosophy was this: if you break the law, it is open season on your ass from law enforcement. He didn't give a shit if you were black, white, brown, purple, pink, or claimed to be from another planet. If you fucked up, you fucked up, and he wasn't playing favorites to gang members just because he happened to share their same ethnic background. To do so was the worst form of racism he could think of.

The evening the body was found two gang shootings were reported in the area, and by the end of the night LAPD had logged down seven additional shootings from four different gang factions in the area. The Los Compadres Mafia initiated the violence when three members of that gang opened fire on a group of men milling around outside a house in Boyle Heights. The targets were Eighteenth Street Gang members. Nobody was killed, but it trickled down that the Los Compadres Mafia believed that the dead man found earlier that day was a member who had been missing the past several days. They believed Eighteenth Street was responsible. Naturally, Eighteenth Street retaliated.

The resounding retaliations, encompassing two additional gangs, led to a tense situation in the East Los Angeles neighborhoods. The city council urged citizens to be calm. Angry residents, reacting to the news coverage of the latest killing, denounced the LAPD from the comfiness of their front porches as news cameras ground on.
The LAPD