Pure Hate (17 page)

“Well, now we’ve got a highly intelligent,
extremely cunning, out-of-control Malcolm, who could murder anyone for any
reason.”

“Oh, I’ve got a reason.” Malcolm said as he
stepped into the room behind Detective Baltimore, grabbing Baltimore by the
hair and jerking his head back. Baltimore cried out in surprise and groped for
his Glock. When he saw the glint of surgical steel in Malcolm’s free hand, he
knew he would never get to his weapon in time to save his life.

Reed jumped as if someone had sent a
thousand volts through the floor. He hadn’t locked the door behind the
detective and had left it half-open, anticipating the detective would be
leaving soon. So, neither of them heard Malcolm slip into the house. Death was
once again standing in Reed’s house and Reed was once again at its mercy.

Reed shuffled backwards, yelping and screaming
like a frightened infant, knocking over the rug shampooer, stumbling, and
splashing down in the bloody foam and suds. Malcolm was smiling. He ran his
tongue over his platinum tipped canines as he stabbed a long Japanese tanto knife
into Detective Titus Baltimore’s neck and ripped it across the man’s throat
with one hand, twisting his head in the opposite direction with the other.
Detective Baltimore struggled to free his Glock nine-millimeter from its
shoulder holster.

Malcolm smiled as the gun came out of
its holster and the detective attempted to point it over his shoulder at
Malcolm’s head. The huge black man appeared to be amused by the detective’s
valiant struggle for survival. Reed clamped his hands over his ears to muffle the
whistling, wheezing gurgle coming from the detective’s throat.

Despite the Baltimore’s obviously
mortal wound, he still tried to aim the gun at Malcolm’s head. Reed paused,
hopeful that the detective would succeed and it would all be over. Malcolm would
be out of his life forever.

The good guy couldn’t die could he?

In Reed’s upright and moral world,
the hero would somehow aim the gun over his shoulder into Malcolm’s face and
blow him away. Then Reed would get to the phone and call the paramedics who would
arrive just in time to save the detective’s life. But Reed was learning more
and more that his world had changed. Everything he’d known, all the laws and
rules he’d come to believe in, were gone for good. And this new world he now
found himself trapped in, was a dark and terrible place where no one escaped
unscathed.

Malcolm laughed a harsh, guttural,
feral bark that made Reed cringe. Then he thrust the tip of a long thin knife
that looked like a miniature sword through Detective Baltimore’s eye socket,
sinking the blade into his skull up to the hilt. Reed watched the detective’s
gun hand fall limply to the ground, the Glock tumbling down across the blood
stained Berber carpeting, and all hope fell with it.

Reed backed up across the room as far as he could
and curled up in a corner, holding his knees and moaning, waiting for the
killing blow, hoping Malcolm would have more mercy on him then he’d had on
Linda, and feeling like shit for it. But he didn’t want to suffer like Linda
had. Oh god, he didn’t want to hurt like that.

“If you kept him out of it like I told you to,
he’d still be alive. Who you gonna call now Reed? How many more people you want
to get killed? It’s just you and me now, Reed. This is between you and me.”

Reed was trembling and weeping.

“Please. Please don’t. Don’t hurt
me.”

Malcolm dropped Detective Baltimore’s
ruined corpse to the floor, studied it for a second with a look of
satisfaction, turned, and walked out the door. Reed was still curled into a
fetal position watching the blood gush from the detective’s lacerated throat
onto the carpet that was still stained with the blood of his wife and children.
He stared at the hilt of the knife sticking out of Detective Baltimore’s eye
socket. The blade completely disappeared into the detective’s skull. He stared
into Baltimore’s remaining eye. It was completely still, empty of any life. The
detective was gone. His life had fled and left its bleeding shell in Reed’s
living room. It was only then that Reed became aware of his own inexplicable
survival. He was still alive. For some bizarre reason Malcolm had once again
allowed him to live when he could have snuffed him out as easily as blowing out
a candle.

“What the hell do you want from me?”

But Reed knew. He knew what Malcolm wanted the day
he killed his family. He wanted Reed to come to him, willingly, to try to stop
him. He wanted Reed to come at him with the same rage and hatred Malcolm had
shown his family. He wanted Reed to come to him with a heart craving vengeance
so he could carve that heart from his chest. Reed’s head filled with memories
of his lost family smiling, laughing, and then finally screaming in horror as
Malcolm tore them apart. He remembered his childhood, his high school years
with Malcolm. He saw again the day he met the huge black kid, the day he first
accepted Malcolm’s friendship, the day he betrayed that friendship. He saw the
blade ripping across the detective’s throat. He saw it ripping across his own
throat.

Reed felt the scream rising inside him, not in
his throat, but in his mind, a loud, agonized screech that rattled his teeth
and twisted his thoughts. It was the sound of his family dying and it stayed in
his head and never reached his throat, becoming a chorus of screams. He could
hear Jennie, Mark, Linda, and others, many others. It was the others that
scared him the most. It sounded like hundreds. It grew louder and louder,
wiping every thought from his mind, every thought but one . . . killing
Malcolm. That was the one thought that seemed to quiet the screams. He seized
it and followed it out of the madness. Reed knew he would stand almost no
chance against Malcolm. Still, he picked up Detective Baltimore’s Glock and
stepped out of the house in search of his tormentor. He had only one clue to
Malcolm’s whereabouts, the same one he had given to the detective before
Malcolm had taken him.

Rick’s house.

“Where the fuck were you! You were supposed to be
watching the house! Where the fuck were you?"

James attacked the two detectives,
grabbing both of them by the throat and nearly driving them over the hood of
the car. The entire eight-officer Family Man Task Force was there and all of
them rushed to pull James off Detectives Trinidad and Nellis. James fought them
as they wrenched his hands from the detectives’ throats and pulled him backward
until he and the other officers all fell back against another squad car. James pulled
himself free and tried to go at the two detectives again, but the others
grabbed him. Trinidad was no punk, and he stepped up to James as he raged in
the arms of his fellow task force members and pointed his finger in James’s
face.

“Fuck you, James! Titus told us he
had everything covered and he was the primary on this case, not you! He told us
we could go home. We’d already been watching the house for twelve hours
straight with no sign of Malcolm. So we left. The next watch was coming on in
two hours anyway. We figured the department was just trying to save some
overtime. Baltimore made the call, not us. So, fuck you! And don’t you ever put
your hands on me again, motherfucker!”

James glared at him and Trinidad
glared back.

“Besides, there was still one more
surveillance team in place. Where the hell were they?”

All eyes turned to Detectives Wilson and Jones
who had been watching the Cozen house from a house directly across the street,
taking pictures of everyone who came and went from that residence. They were
unable to get a warrant to tap the phones or install listening devices, so they
were virtually deaf, relying solely on visuals and a long range listening
device. Wilson stepped up, unable to look James in the eyes. He looked like a
beaten fighter flinching at blows that hadn’t even been thrown.

“Alright, so what tha fuck
happened?!”

“Well . . . uh . . . Mike went to
pick up lunch and I just turned around for a second to load the film. I . . . uh
. . . had to go to the bathroom, too. When I got back to the window and
adjusted the camera, I saw Mr. Cozen coming out of the house with a gun in his
hand. I hadn’t heard any shots or anything, so I didn’t think it was an
emergency. I figured maybe Titus had already left. So I called Titus’ cell to
tell him the suspect was moving, and that he was armed. After I didn’t get an
answer, I started looking up and down the street. That’s when I saw that
Baltimore’s car was still parked up the block and I knew something was wrong. I
got down there as fast as I could, but by the time I got to the house, Mr.
Cozen was gone and Titus was already dead.”

“Reed couldn’t have done this
himself. Did you see Malcolm go in there?”

“No, but like I said, I was on the
toilet for a few minutes and he could’ve slipped in from the back of the house
or something.”

“Fuck! Fuck!” James yelled at no one
in particular. He shrugged off Lieutenant Woo, who was still restraining him,
and stormed back into the house.

“We keep making mistakes and this
motherfucker keeps getting lucky! I don’t believe this shit!”

“But what if it wasn’t Malcolm? What
if Reed did it himself?”

Captain Kelly showed up, looking like
he was ready to kill. Lieutenant Woo’s eyes shifted from Captain Kelly to the
patrol car as if seeking an escape route.

“Woo? What-tha-fuck-happened here?”
He spoke calmly and deliberately, his deep voice rumbling like an engine
revving up in some terrible machine.

The lieutenant was still looking
around. He looked at each detective as if wondering why he had been singled out
when he wasn’t even at the scene, conveniently forgetting that he was supposed
to be the head of the task force even though he had pretty much relegated that
position to Titus and James, whose case it was before the task force was ever
established. Baltimore had been considered by most to be the primary on the
case. The task force was more a public relations gimmick to make it look to the
press as if the police were doing more about the case than they actually were.
It looked better to say that they had an eight-man task force assigned to the
case than two over-worked detectives. But everyone here knew the truth. Still,
Lieutenant Woo couldn’t exactly point fingers at a dead man with his partner
just yards away, ready to rip the head off anyone who looked at him sideways.
Officially, this was Woo’s case. So he was responsible.

“Uh . . . Detective Baltimore has
been murdered.”

“I fucking know that. How? How the
fuck did this happen?”

“Well, um, Detective Baltimore went
to interview the suspect without his partner. He dismissed his back-up and the
surveillance team was . . . um . . . taking a break.”

Captain Kelly looked at Wilson and
Jones as if they were something he had scraped off his shoe.

“A break?” he grumbled.

“Well, see, um, Captain, I was in the
bathroom and Mike had already left to get some cheese steak hoagies. I mean, we
hadn’t eaten in over six hours so . . . .”

The Captain snarled with contempt and
stepped up to the two detectives, staring them down until Wilson’s mouth
finally stopped moving.

“Wilson, if you say one more word I’m
going to unload an entire clip in your ass and with the way you motherfuckers
handle an investigation I’m sure I’ll get away with it. Now, where’s James?”

“He was just here. He must be in
there . . . in the house.” Lieutenant Woo pointed back towards the open door to
Reed Cozen’s house that was now a crime scene for the second time in fewer than
seventy-two hours.

“Has Crime Scene arrived yet?”

“Not yet, but they’re on their way.
The ME should be here soon, too.”

“Fine.”

James looked up when the captain
walked in. He was sitting on the floor beside his fallen partner and Captain
Kelly squatted down next to him. James and the captain stared at Baltimore’s
body in silence. The blade was still sticking out of Baltimore’s eye-socket and
James resisted the urge to pull it out himself. He didn’t want to disturb the
crime scene before it could at least be photographed, and the Crime Scene Unit
had gone over it for possible evidence, but he couldn’t stand to see Baltimore
like that.

“Where’s his gun?”

“I think Mr. Cozen took it. We’ve got an APB out
for him.” James was still staring at the body, his eyes unmoving. He seemed to
be in shock.

“Wilson said he didn’t hear any gunshots.”

“I can’t find any bullet holes. And there are no
shell casings. The CSU boys are bringing the metal detector, but I don’t think
they’ll find anything. I don’t think Titus had time to get off a shot. It looks
like he was ambushed from behind.”

“Do you think it was Reed?”

“Well, I’d like to think that Titus would have
been able to take that little wimp, but who knows? My gut feeling is that it
was Malcolm. But maybe it was both of them. Maybe Titus was right, and they
were working together. Wilson said he saw Reed walking out of the house with a
gun. It might have been Baltimore’s. And if he wasn’t involved and it was
Malcolm, why would he leave Reed alive again?”

“Why did he leave him alive the first time?”

“I don’t know. It’s all fucking crazy.”

“I’m sorry, James. I know you two didn’t always
get along, but this must still be hard. I mean, losing a partner . . . like
this.”

“I was just starting to like the little
sonuvabitch, too.” James’s eyes teared up for a moment. He shook his head, took
a deep breath, and the tears were gone.

The CSU arrived and began their horribly
efficient task of raking the crime scene for evidence. James sat and stared
while they went over Titus’s corpse. He watched them dig under his fingernails.
He watched them dust the knife sticking out of his eye socket for prints. He
watched while they pulled little bits of fiber from his sports jacket with
tweezers then vacuumed the carpet from the door to where his body lay, in case
they missed anything. They vacuumed his jacket as well.

Dr. Medoff arrived and James was
still kneeling at Titus’s side. Captain Kelly intercepted the ME before he
could tell James to move out of the way and possibly wind up lying beside
Baltimore in his own pool of blood. Dr. Medoff worked around James . . . and James
watched. After the ME was through making his preliminary report, his assistants
lifted the body into a long, black zippered bag and carried it out to the
coroner’s van. James followed. The other officers stared in silence as their
fallen comrade was carted off to the morgue.

Reporters were already on the scene.
They buzzed about like flies. The smell of carrion was in the air and they had
come to glut themselves on Baltimore’s remains. James ignored them even when
their buzzing rose to an annoying whine in his ears. He shrugged them off as he
ducked under the yellow tape and crossed the street. He climbed into his patrol
car and followed the coroner’s van down to the city morgue.