Pure Hate (4 page)

Detective James Bryant didn’t believe
the Cozen family’s murder was connected to the Family Man. At 45-years old, he
had seen a lot of horrible murders, but the Family Man was by far the worst.
This bastard was careful, cunning, evil. He didn’t buy that degeneration,
self-destruction, downward spiral bullshit. This wasn’t a guy who wanted to be
caught. If he did, he would have been leaving clues all along—notes, taunting
phone calls, any evidence at all. But the monster had never left them anything.
It was the total lack of physical evidence that had marked his crimes as
unique. It was what had first gotten Detective Bryant to thinking all the
homicides were linked. That and the fact that the male victims in each case—the
Pine Street Slasher, the Chaperone, and now the Family Man”—all bore a
remarkable similarity to each other. Of course, no one listened to him. He
didn’t have his partner’s fancy Ph.D. and high-powered IQ. All he had were his twenty-seven years on the force and his instincts. Right now,
his instincts were telling him that there was definitely something wrong with
this latest twist in the case. Killers like these didn’t self-destruct all at
once. There would have been signs that he was starting to slip, that he was
getting sloppy. The murders would have started coming closer together; they would have gotten more and more random, and there would have been little mistakes here and
there. But the murders had stayed two or three months apart, and they had stayed absolutely perfect. They had
certainly grown more savage, but even that was
predictable. Still, there was an element of control, a calculated, premeditated
design to the crimes. This one just didn’t add up.

He watched the crime scene guys going
over the scene with tweezers, zip-lock bags, Dust Busters, brushes and silver
latent print powder. The forensic photographer was taking his grisly photos
from every conceivable angle. Tight Ass was staring at Linda Cozen’s half-eaten
heart, peering into her vandalized chest cavity, trying to impress everyone
with how calm and detached he could be. Detective Bryant only smiled and shook
his head. He could see how pale the man had gotten and how his hand shook when
he scribbled on his little pad. The cold sweat was another dead giveaway. How
to deal with the smell of a corpse disposing of its waste products was
something they didn’t teach you in Criminal Psychology 101. Detective Bryant
walked outside. For once he was convinced that the answers were not to be found
in the crime scene evidence. The answers were lying in a hospital bed at
University Medical.

The forensic boys were busy doing their
thing, so James decided to leave them to it and wait for the report. The
Medical Examiner had just arrived, looking appropriately somber. Tight Ass was
still poking around the corpses looking for God knows what. All this would be
fine for convicting the killer once he was caught,
but it wasn’t going to help catch him and that was all James was interested in.
The fingerprints would help confirm the witness’s identification, but James was pretty sure they had a good suspect.
Malcolm Davis.

“Hey, Baltimore!”

“Yeah, you got something?” Detective Baltimore
was beaming with enthusiasm.

“Uh, no. I’m done here. I’m gonna head back to
the station and run these prints.”

Titus glared at him like he couldn’t believe what
he was hearing. He gestured around the victim’s living room at all the evidence
to be collected and then shook his head.

“Yeah, whatever,” he said.

“Tight Ass.” James hissed under his
breath as he turned to leave.

Detective Bryant slid behind the
wheel of the almost new, white, 2009 Dodge Intrepid the Department had given
him and cruised away from the crime scene
,
headed for University
Hospital. Tight Ass had promised the press he would have a suspect in custody
by sunrise. James wasn’t so sure. Fools rush in. James wanted to know a little
more about the Family Man, the Chaperone, the Pine Street Slasher, the butcher
who had hacked through the Cozen family like a lawnmower—Malcolm Davis.

James had been with the force a long
time. He’d already buried two partners and survived one brutal divorce. Rosalyn
Ali had been his partner for fifteen years when she’d fallen to a stroke during
the search for a serial child murderer ten years ago. The stroke left her
partially paralyzed on her right side, relegating her to a desk for two years
before another stroke relegated her to the grave. Rosalyn, Rosie, who was a
double minority as a Puerto Rican/Filipino female with the added handicap of
being young and sexy, had fought her way up from the streets with him, even
making detective before he did. She’d had to kick a lot of ass to prove that
she was not the useless piece of fluff most policewomen were considered back
then. Everything she did, every case she volunteered them for, every arrest she
made, seemed to be aimed at getting that gold shield and she’d gotten it, years
after other non-minorities in the department had already gotten theirs, but
she’d done it. Even now thinking back, he was
proud of her.

The glass ceiling, which from where
they stood was not transparent but opaque, hadn’t bothered either of them at
the time. They both knew the realities of racial politics in Philadelphia,
particularly in the police departments where minorities generally only came in
handcuffs. They were both just happy to not be teamed up with one of the many
corrupt and racist dinosaurs that polluted the PPD back in the ’90s. Neither
one of them wanted to have to deal with being forced to decide whether to turn
in a fellow officer who’d gone buck-wild on some innocent or even guilty black
kid, or whether to keep quiet and thereby become an accomplice. And they
definitely didn’t want to deal with a partner who took bribes or shook down
dealers and prostitutes. Neither one of them wanted to feel like a sellout. It
had been important to them that they feel like a benefit to their respective
communities rather than yet another hardship. Back then when the department was
overwhelmingly white and male, they had been extremely grateful for one
another.

When James finally made Detective,
Rosie fought to have him partnered with her again. As James struggled to pass
the detective’s exam, she’d been partnered for nearly a year with Greg
Jonieack, a lazy, moronic, Polish Neanderthal who Mother Teresa would’ve made
dumb Polack jokes about, and who was bringing her closing rate for murder cases
way down by spending most of his time flirting with prostitutes. Every murder
case seemed to take them to Broad and South where they’d spend hours
questioning prostitutes and Jonieack would inevitably take one into an alley
for “questioning” while she waited in the car. If they hadn’t gotten her a new
partner, the department would’ve had a scandal
on their hands because she was nearly to the point of turning him in.

As detectives working cases together,
James and Ali’s closing rate had been incredible. They’d gotten all the shit
cases that nobody wanted and they’d somehow managed to solve most of them. In
their first year together they’d closed every case handed to them and had
received the grudging respect of the other homicide detectives. Then, when
their solve rate started to slip and cases started to go into the files
unsolved, they’d caught other detective’s looking into some of the cases they’d
solved the year before to see if they’d faked or planted evidence. No one found
anything and even though James and Ali didn’t solve every case, their solve
rate remained higher than most of the other detectives, which continued to lead
to envy and suspicion. That envy and suspicion had even spilled over into
James’ marriage.

It was hard for a woman to accept
that her man spent most of his day with another woman. Twelve to fourteen hour
days were common and, when James came home
tired and sexually unmotivated, Lois’s suspicion had grown. In truth, James and
Ali did have a brief affair, but they’d ended it when it started to interfere
with work and when they realized that, despite the depths of their friendship,
they were not in love and what they were doing was just fucking and not worth
ruining a career over. Lois didn’t start
suspecting them of having an affair until years after it had ended. It enraged
him that when he was doing bad she was blissfully unaware but now that he was
innocent, every day was an inquisition.

The divorce was far from peaceful.
She’d wanted the house, the car, and five hundred dollars a month in alimony.
She’d gotten the car and the alimony. Now, he could barely afford to keep the
house with all the money he was sending to her each month. Rosie felt bad that
she’d caused the breakup of his marriage, but James knew that it wasn’t her
Lois had been jealous of. It was the job. And he’d chosen the job over her. She
was a bitch, anyway. He’d loved that car. He’d loved Rosie.

James remembered the day she died.
Her brain had turned to mush from lack of oxygen and there was no recognition in
her eyes as she stared at him from the hospital bed. He’d left the hospital
knowing that he’d just seen her for the last time.

Before Rosie, his first partner,
back when he was a fresh-faced rookie, was a Gung Ho ex-marine named Cliff
Douglas who missed all the action in Vietnam and seemed to regret riding a desk
through the war and never seeing front line combat. He made up for it with near
suicidal recklessness on the street. For him, the streets were his second
chance at seeing combat. Where many of the old-timers avoided any calls where
there were shots fired or armed suspects of any kind, Cliff would go out of his
way to join a gunfight. Cliff regularly charged into dangerous situations with
guns blazing. He had more courage than common sense and it seemed to James he
had a death wish. There were always jokes about “Crazy Cliff” but James didn’t
think they were funny. Having a borderline psychotic on the force made for
amusing bar stories but not when you were his partner, not when his madness
could lead to you catching bullets.

James was the only one on the force
at that time who regularly wore a vest and it already had dents in the
breastplate from what would have been fatal impacts. He was constantly teased
about it by the macho assholes who sat in pizza and donut shops half the day,
leering at and making lewd comments about every girl who passed by, only
leaving long enough to gang up on some doped-up
juvenile delinquent. They thought it was cowardly to wear a vest, but those
idiots weren’t partnered up with “Crazy Cliff.”
James quickly grew tired of the whine of bullets whizzing past his head. He
pulled his service revolver more in those first few years partnered with that
nutcase than he had in all the rest of his twenty-five years on the force. James’s
GI-Joe partner finally got his wish during one of the many riots on South
Street. He’d finally gotten his Purple Heart, chopped in half by friendly fire
and left paralyzed from the neck down. Years later, after thousands of hours of
physical therapy, he’d regained enough movement in his right arm to point a gun
at his temple and blow his brains out.

Now he had Tight Ass. From the moment
he heard about the youngest detective on the force, James had hated him. James
had been on the force for thirteen years before he finally made detective, and
here this young punk gets his detective’s shield after spending less than two
years on the streets. Regardless of his Ph.D. and genius level IQ, James felt
all cops needed to do their time, pay their dues. What they learned in the
streets they could never learn sitting in a classroom reading case studies.

James aimed the Intrepid towards
Broad and Olney with his mind still lost in the past and hiding from the
present. It was easier to direct his anger at long-dead partners, an ex-wife he
hadn’t seen in years, and a partner who was not here to defend himself than at
the monster he was tracking. The man who had committed these crimes scared
James worse than the shootouts he’d had as a rookie, worse than “Crazy Cliff” ever
had. This man was completely outside his frame of reference. He’d looked all
kinds of murderers and rapists right in the eyes without fear, but he had
understood them. No matter how sick or depraved they were, he’d been able to relate to them. He knew what
motivated them. The Family Man, he could not relate to, could not understand.

James knew that if he had any chance
of catching Malcolm Davis he had to find a way to comprehend his madness, and
that meant finding out all he could about the killer. He needed to go where
Malcolm lived, to breathe the air he breathed, smell the scents he smelled, see
what he saw. He needed to talk to Reed Cozen and drag Malcolm Davis out of him.

James knew that this case would take
a toll on him. He wasn’t sure he could afford to pay it anymore. He felt old,
tired. Something this dark and ugly might destroy him. In some ways, it felt as
though it already had.

He and Titus had been working the
case for two years, and it had already worn him down. Some of the things he’d seen
still kept him up at night—especially the kids. The children made this whole
thing so much more terrible. There was a reason why James didn’t work vice.
Seeing abused and exploited children everyday was something he hadn’t wanted to
deal with. Now, he dealt with their corpses and the Family Man left him knee
deep in them.

It was more than simply catching the
man. A part of him
needed
to understand him, if only to convince himself
that he could never be like him.

James had been to enough Sex Addicts
Anonymous sessions to know that he also had a problem. He’d talked to enough
murderers, rapists, and child molesters to know that his problem was a little
too similar to theirs. He was a sexual predator just as they were, only he used
smooth talk instead of coercion and violence to trap his prey. What he did was
not a crime. The women he’d seduced and told that he loved to get between their
legs, had come to him willingly. Still, he’d left them just as emotionally
scarred as if he’d raped them, and the passion
he felt when he was with them was a little too close to the passion he saw in
Linda Cozen’s mutilated corpse. He needed to know that he would never, could
never, become
that
. He needed to know what made Malcolm tick.

James pulled up outside of University
Hospital, squealing his tires as he pulled into a handicapped-parking zone. An
overweight nurse with the 2010 version of a bouffant hairdo, started toward his
car looking unnecessarily irate. James backed the Intrepid out of the
handicapped zone before Henrietta Hippo could initiate an argument. He had to
cruise the lot for another ten minutes before he found another parking spot. He
sat in the car for another five minutes, taking deep breaths and trying to
clear all of his own problems out of his head so he could appropriately
commiserate with the victim. When he finally stepped from the car, a nervous
tremor went through him and he gritted his teeth against it, sucking the fear
down deep in his guts where stomach acids would dissolve it. As he walked through
the doors of the emergency room, he could feel his stomach acids at work.