Ribbons (17 page)

“Huh. Maybe they realized what an asshole you are.”

“I didn’t get a chance to be an asshole to them,” said Matt.

She shrugged. “Must have been something else, then.”

Erica stopped scrubbing and pulled a large glass dildo out of the sink. She used the dishtowel that was draped over one of her shoulders to start drying it off. Then she set it on the dish rack next to the others. She smiled and started scrubbing the next one.

23

Dani looked up just in time to see a coffee cup midflight. It shattered against the wall next to a whiteboard in the LVMPD war room. Ceramic shards bounced across the stained carpet. Luckily the cup was empty, so they wouldn’t need to clean coffee off the pictures clipped to the board. Foster’s most recent mug shot stared blankly out next to crime-scene photos and a scribbled timeline.

Most of the officers in the war room had been working double shifts. The conference room was the largest they had in the building, but all the workstations and bodies made it seem cramped. The exploding cup startled them, but maybe not as much as it should have. Their eyes all looked from the dent in the wall over to the sergeant, who was now yelling into his cell phone.

“Yes, I know there was a patrol on that street! I’m the one who scheduled it!”

Dani didn’t know who Dwayne was yelling at, but whoever it was, they were taking the full force of his pent-up frustration. The sergeant hadn’t slept since the second victim was found, and the only thing Dani had seen him eat or drink came out of the mug that just flew across the room. The call must have been the most recent in a long line of patrol reports. Each car had a picture of Foster taped to the dash, and each officer had a copy on his or her phone. Chances were, whoever Dwayne was unloading on was just as frustrated as he was.

Dwayne wasn’t done yelling. “Canvass the whole goddamn street if you have to! Somebody must have seen what direction he came from!”

The sergeant didn’t wait for a reply. He jabbed a finger at his phone and then slammed it down on the table he was using as a desk. Dani gave the phone a fifty-fifty chance of survival. Dwayne pressed the palms of his hands against his eyes for a second before exploding again. This time he didn’t have anybody in particular to yell at so he just started ranting at the whiteboard.

“Where is this motherfucker? We know his name! We have his picture! This city isn’t
that
big!”

All the other officers in the room looked from the sergeant to Dani. She was the investigative lead, but she knew that Dwayne was blaming himself. She got up from where she was working and went to sit at his table. He looked up at her as she came over and lowered his voice just a bit.

“If he was smart, he would have moved on by now,” he said. “But now we have two dead women. And one of them used to work at the same fucking place that just fired him.”

“We talked to Foster’s former employer,” she said. “He told us he warned all the women who worked at the club.” Dwayne already knew this, but she told him again anyway.

He lowered his voice a bit more. “I guess he wasn’t very convincing.”

She looked down at his desk. The victims stared back at her. Each of them had been recreated by laying out a series of autopsy photos. All the cuts lined up from photo to photo. There were Post-it notes next to some of the photos with questions or comments. No wonder he threw the mug. You couldn’t think about anything else with those eyes constantly watching you.

The sergeant was looking down now, too. “There has to be some kind of meaning here.” he said. “A message or a statement.”

He was slipping into bad habits again. Stating the obvious. Not a good sign. He was losing focus, and the stress was obviously getting to him. Maybe he needed to throw more mugs to let off some of that steam. She wanted to help him. This is where she usually stepped in to start piecing things together. They had both studied the patterns on the victims numerous times, as had the medical examiner. So far, none of their theories were sticking.

“Well,” said Dani, “the cuts don’t seem to be random. They’re almost identical on each body.” She used a pen to point out identical symbols on each woman’s belly. “We know he draws them ahead of time and the cuts are very precise. It’s like art or some kind of writing.”

“So what does it say?” asked the sergeant.

“I’ve worked with an artist to draw them out,” she said, “and I’ve made a few calls but . . .” She ended the sentence with a shrug.

Dwayne looked up at the whiteboard again, staring down Foster. “Maybe he’s just fucking with us? I certainly feel fucked with.”

Dani leaned back from the table but kept her eyes on the photos. “Sir, maybe we
should
hold a press conference.”

“And tip our hand?” He started to shake his head, but then stopped and looked at her.

The sergeant had the support of the department with regard to how much information to communicate to the press. His original plan was to keep Foster in the dark long enough to quickly track him down. Somehow that hadn’t worked. Now Dani didn’t see the benefit. Foster had killed again even without seeing his handiwork splashed all over the nightly news. And she was sure he would do it again. It’d be better to have the press working for them at this point.

She looked up at him. “It doesn’t seem to matter anymore.”

Dwayne closed his eyes and stretched his neck from side to side. It made a couple of popping sounds. Then he sighed and looked back at Dani. “No,” he said, “I guess it doesn’t.”

He looked defeated, but that could have just been the lack of sleep. She certainly hoped so. He got up, looked at the white ceramic fragments on the carpet, and then went in search of a new coffee mug.

She didn’t see much of him for the rest of the day. He did come back into the war room once to announce that he would be holding a press conference the next afternoon. Then he went home.

Most of Dani’s time was spent making sure patrol schedules were updated and reviewing the reports that came in from the officers canvassing the neighborhood near the most recent crime scene. She followed up on a couple of leads, but information seemed spotty. One man said he’d seen somebody who looked like Foster staring at his watch and talking to himself as he walked down the sidewalk heading away from the apartment complex. But that was
before
Foster had entered the apartment complex according to security footage from the parking lot. Then another man swore he’d seen Foster waiting at a bus stop not far from the second victim’s apartment building. None of the bus drivers who picked up at that stop remembered seeing Foster, though one did recall seeing a homeless man playing with an Etch A Sketch.

Between reports, Dani reviewed all the evidence from the crime scenes again, looking for any similarities that might point to some kind of pattern. So far she hadn’t found anything useful. The first victim was probably a stranger to Foster; the second one was an ex-coworker. The first victim hadn’t put up any kind of fight; the second one had been subdued with a stun gun and then knocked unconscious with a dining room chair. The only thing consistent was the pattern of the actual cut. So that’s what she was digging into now.

Looking at the whole design was too much. She didn’t recognize it at all. She broke down the pattern into pieces, scanned them into her laptop, and cleaned up the images to focus just on the lines themselves, rather than the torn skin they were made from. She sent a number of these scans to a consulting professor at the University of Las Vegas. The professor said it looked stylized, like calligraphy, which would make the symbols in the pattern harder to identify, but that she would see what she could dig up. Her best guess was that they were religious in nature.

Dani was doing some digging of her own online based on what the professor had told her. She started by simply typing the phrase “crazy cult symbols” into a search engine. Within a few clicks she found a site dedicated to the translation of Enochian letters and phrases. The site looked pretty batshit crazy. It said that Enochian script was used to record the names of demons and angels, and that it was even spoken by some who claimed to be possessed or speaking in tongues. The site also had animated images of the devil from
South Park
at the top of each page, so it wasn’t a source she was going to officially reference. Even so, she thought she saw something familiar in the way the script was written. Or maybe she just wanted to see something familiar. It was hard to tell anymore.

When she finally looked up from her laptop, she was alone in the war room. She vaguely remembered waving to somebody who’d said they were calling it a night. That seemed like a couple of hours ago now. She leaned back and stretched her arms upward. Something smelled. She suspected the thing that smelled was her.

She began to gather her things. A shower and change of clothes were long overdue. If she couldn’t sleep after that, she could always fire up the laptop at home.

Her cell phone buzzed, and the screen lit up with caller ID. It was Erica. Her finger hovered over the
Ignore
button. She had received a couple of texts from Erica since their last night together. They were one-liners like,
How’s it going?
and
Thinking of ya.
Dani hadn’t returned any of them. She hadn’t felt like smoothing anything over. She still didn’t, but she picked up the phone anyway.

“What? I’m busy,” she said.

There was a slight pause. Then Erica said, “You work too much. You should come over and play.”

Dani’s mood should have been pretty obvious, but it sounded like Erica was choosing to ignore it. That tore open the wound from the other night, and Dani felt herself getting angry. She almost hung up, but she didn’t want to keep it building up inside her anymore. She didn’t want to lose it on the job like Dwayne. Her coffee cup was metal, and if she threw that, it might bounce back and hurt somebody.

“Some of us don’t get to play all day,” she snapped. “Some of us have to stop bad people from doing bad things.”

Another slight pause. Maybe Erica was trying to calm herself before responding. This time it didn’t work. “Hey! I’m just trying to make you feel better. You don’t have to be all bitchy!”

“Sometimes I don’t want to feel better,” Dani said. “Sometimes I want to feel what I
should
be feeling.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s real and it needs to be felt.”

Dani heard Erica sniffle and take a breath before replying. “I can’t afford to be depressed.”

Dani slammed her laptop closed and stood up. “Well, you do your job and I’ll do mine.”

No reply to that. Just more sniffling. Dani hadn’t seen Erica cry before. She was glad she couldn’t see her now.

“Look,” Dani said, more calmly this time, “watch the news tomorrow at six. Tell the girls.”

“Okay.” Erica’s voice sounded hoarse.

Dani gritted her teeth and a knot twisted in her stomach. “And Erica?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t call me anymore.”

24

Matt stood on a stack of furniture in Uncle Quent’s office. At first, he had just tried a chair, but that didn’t get him enough height. There was an end table by the love seat, so he dragged that over and balanced the chair on top. It was a bit sketchy. From the top of the stack he was just inches away from the symbol carved into the ceiling beam. He supposed he could have gotten a ladder, but it was all the way out in the shed. He wobbled a bit as he reached out to the symbol, and he realized how little it took for him to risk personal injury these days.

He had been spending a lot of time staring up at that symbol. He assumed Quent must have put it there. It would be too much of a coincidence otherwise. He did ask himself why Quent had felt the need to put the symbol in his office at all when he had worked so hard to leave all that behind. He knew Quent had the same brand he did on his wrist. That was part of the process. You took the oath, and then you took the brand when you were initiated as a Scholar.

It was the coin nailed into the center of the symbol that had finally made Matt start stacking furniture. From the desk chair he couldn’t recognize where it was from. Now at eye level, he still had no idea. There was writing around the edge, though. The letters were badly worn, but he could make out enough detail to know it was in Latin. His childhood education had taught him that much at least. In the center was some kind of coat of arms and above that was the year 1577.

It looked rare and expensive. Not something that you nailed into the ceiling. Unless it was a sacrifice. Matt knew all about sacrifice, personal and otherwise. It was his unwillingness to sacrifice that made him leave the Scholars—and his family—behind. He could have handled nailing coins to walls, but they had given him a knife instead of a hammer. Of course, nobody ever really left the Scholars. They just ran and hid for as long as they could.

Maybe Quent had taken up old habits again. Symbols and sacrifice went hand in hand with Scholar rituals. Maybe he had traced the diagrams and recited the formulae one more time. Or maybe he had never stopped. It could have been to keep him hidden, or to protect the house, or maybe to draw power for some other purpose. Each ritual was a sort of transaction. If you wanted power, you had to pay for it. If Uncle Quent had put this symbol on the ceiling, then he had paid with more than just the coin. Matt figured he better leave it alone.

Now he just had to figure out how to get down.

As he was starting his descent, he heard the front door to the house open and then close. Christy and Adam were already here. They hadn’t spoken to him in a couple of days, but he’d heard them earlier down in the break room. And Thug Guy hadn’t been by since the house went on the market. Matt’s stomach tightened at the thought of another
pep talk
. His foot missed the edge of the end table, and he lost his balance. He grabbed the chair for support, but it just followed him down to the floor. No blood, but he landed hard on his tailbone.

He thought he heard laughing downstairs. A woman’s voice. He couldn’t imagine women laughing around Thug Guy. Matt grabbed the edge of the desk and pulled himself to his feet. His back complained a little but less than he thought it would. It would probably hurt a lot more later on. The front door opened and closed again. More voices. They were muffled, but they sounded familiar. He supposed he should go check it out.

From the top of the stairs he could hear a little more clearly. The voices were all coming from the parlor now, and someone had turned on the TV by the bar. As he was about to start down the steps, he saw Adam coming through the foyer from the break room. He looked up and saw Matt, as well. Matt wanted to say something to break the ice—a joke, a smart-ass remark, or even just a hello—but his mind wasn’t working fast enough, and Adam turned away to head into the parlor.

He listened for a bit. He heard Christy’s voice and then Erica’s. He heard some of the other girls, too. Maybe the former employees of the Golden Delicious were planning a mutiny. They sounded happy to see one another but also a little nervous. They were too eager to laugh at each others’ jokes. He heard the intro to the nightly news start up on the TV, and then Christy hushed the girls. Matt made his way down to the entrance to the foyer. He didn’t think he could pull off walking in to face them all again, but he did stick his head in to see what was going on.

The girls were crowded around the bar. Some already had drinks in front of them. Adam was there, too, sitting on one of the barstools in front of his mom, who was behind the bar. She had the remote in one hand and was aiming it at the TV to turn up the volume. Everyone was quiet by the time the news anchor started talking. Over her shoulder was a splashy graphic of a chalk outline next to the silhouette of a palm tree.

“We’re broadcasting live from the Shady Palms apartment complex in Los Prados, the scene of the latest in what appears to be a series of gruesome murders.” Her tone was even, with just the right amount of concern. “Mike?”

The camera cut over to a reporter standing in front of the entrance to an apartment complex. True to its name, there were a number of palm trees growing next to the two-story buildings. They weren’t luxury apartments, but they didn’t look run-down, either. As the reporter started talking, the camera zoomed in on one apartment door that was blocked off by yellow crime-scene tape.

“That’s right, Deborah,” the reporter—Mike—said. “Police responded yesterday morning when a concerned neighbor reported a strange smell coming from the apartment of Candice Brookes.”

The camera zoomed out again, and now there was a woman standing next to the reporter. She wore a uniform. Matt guessed she was a maid at a hotel or something.

Mike motioned a hand toward the woman. “With us now is—”

The woman leaned over to the microphone and cut him off. “Call me Bethel.”

Adam looked up at his mother. “Do we know her? She looks familiar.”

Christy didn’t take her eyes off the screen. “No, honey. Now be quiet.”

The reporter leaned back a little from the woman, who was right in his face. “I know this is hard for you, but can you please describe what you saw?”

It didn’t seem too hard for her at all. As the camera focused in on Bethel, a graphic appeared at the bottom of the screen labeling her
Bethel, Concerned Neighbor
. She seemed excited to be on TV. A bit too excited, really. Maybe nobody ever paid much attention to her.

“It was bad,” she said. “Real bad. You don’t even know. That’s the last time I walk into somebody’s house when I smell something
nasty
. There was blood on the walls, blood on the floor, blood on the ceiling.” She started talking with her hands, pointing them in the air like pistols. “Like somebody filled a squirt gun with blood and went crazy. And that was just the hallway. I didn’t even go into the living room where they found her.”

The camera angled back to the reporter, but Bethel leaned into the frame as though she didn’t want to give up the camera just yet.

Mike faced the camera, but his eyes kept flicking over to the woman as he talked. “Other residents of Shady Palms said that last night was calm and quiet. No screaming or other disturbances were reported.”

The scene changed, and the screen now showed a police officer standing at a podium set up in front of an official-looking building, probably the police department or city hall or something. Attached to the podium was a tangle of microphones. It took a second, but Matt recognized the guy. It was Christy’s ex, Dwayne. And the officer standing next to him was his partner, the woman who had “questioned” Erica the day they’d come by the house. Dwayne was grim-faced as he prepared to give his statement.

The reporter’s voice continued even though he wasn’t on the screen. “Earlier today, Sergeant Dwayne Murdock of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department had this to say...”

Adam looked up at his mom again. “Hey, it’s Dad!”

“Shh!”

The sergeant stared straight into the camera as he spoke. If he had any notes, he wasn’t using them. “We want the people of Clark County to know that tracking down this criminal is our top priority. We believe he is targeting young women working as adult entertainers and that he has a history of working with those women.”

Some of the girls exchanged glances, but none of them said anything. The frame changed to a mug shot, and it got everybody’s attention again. In general, the man in the mug shot looked normal, but that’s what they said about most serial killers. His
eyes
didn’t look normal, though. They looked pleading and vacant, like he might be on death row. Unfortunately, that wasn’t where he was.

The sergeant’s voice continued. “We are currently seeking a man named Stephen Foster for questioning in relation to these crimes. If you see him, please do not approach him. Contact the local authorities immediately.”

The scene returned to the news anchor. The graphic over her shoulder was replaced with a smaller version of the mug shot. Under the mug shot it read,
Stephen Foster, Murder Suspect
and then listed the phone number for the police department.

“Please stay with us for continuous coverage of this high-stakes manhunt—”

Christy turned off the TV. Nobody said anything. Some girls were looking at each other, some looked at their drinks. Christy came out from behind the bar and put an arm around Adam.

It was Erica who broke the silence. “I knew her,” she said. “Candice. She worked at the Tail Spin. I used to work there, too. I
just
saw her. We had drinks. It must have been the same day as . . . I just
saw
her . . .” She couldn’t finish. Erica’s eyes were glassy as she turned away.

Christy left Adam to go wrap her arms around Erica. At first Erica looked stiff and uncomfortable. Then her whole body sagged. She started heaving silent sobs. Other girls joined in, wrapping their arms around both of them. Adam stayed on his stool. He looked like he didn’t know what to do with himself. Matt backed out of the room before anyone noticed him.

He hid upstairs for the rest of the night. He couldn’t get any sleep, not in his bed and not on Uncle Quent’s love seat. He even tried the bed in the party room, since it seemed like it would be the most comfortable. That hadn’t lasted long at all. The sheets were new, of course—he had replaced the satin sheets with cotton ones for the open house—one of the many things on Peggy’s to-do list. It didn’t matter, though. It was like he could feel the sex radiating out of the mattress itself. He finally gave up and went out to the break room.

He sat on the couch and flicked through the channels until he found an old movie to stare at—
Big Trouble in Little China
. Jack Burton let fly with fists and one-liners as ancient Chinese gods fought with lightning. It was strangely comforting. So much so that he must have dozed off for a good hour of it.

Too bad. He liked that one.

Just before dawn, he brewed a pot of coffee, drank it, and then brewed another for Christy. He figured he’d better fill up his belly with something, so he pilfered a couple of Adam’s cereal bars. A hot shower woke Matt up the rest of the way, though it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to bother based on his plans for the morning.

As he got dressed, he heard Christy getting Adam ready for school. He waited in his office until they were both gone. It would be better if they weren’t here after he made his phone call. When he heard the front door close, he flipped up the lid of the cigar box. The pistol was still there. Lying on top of it was a scrap of paper with a handwritten phone number. His fingers only shook a little as he dialed.

* * *

Matt met Thug Guy on the front lawn. Thug Guy looked at the toolbox Matt was carrying with a raised eyebrow.

Matt set down the toolbox as he spoke. “Look . . . what’s your name, anyway?”

Thug Guy crossed his arms. “You do not want to know me long enough to know my name.”

“Yes, that’s very mysterious, but here’s the deal. Nobody’s buying,” said Matt.

“Not yet,” said Thug Guy.

“There not gonna buy, not at a price that’s going to make you happy.”

“You owe us money. A lot,” said Thug Guy. “Plus interest, of course.”

“Yes, I do,” said Matt. “And I’ll get you that and more.”

“Is that right?” asked Thug Guy. “How? You don’t have business anymore.”

“We’ll reopen,” said Matt.

Thug Guy snorted.

Matt pointed at Thug Guy and then himself. “
We
will reopen. As partners.”

Thug Guy shrugged like he was making an obvious statement. “This is not our town. Is not possible.”

“So expand,” said Matt. “That’s the offer.”

Thug Guy narrowed his eyes and touched a finger to the bird skull on his hat. He was thinking things through. Matt just wasn’t sure if he was thinking about the offer or which part of Matt’s body to break first.

Matt opened up the toolbox. He reached in and took out a hammer. “You want to hit something? Fine. I can live with that, but I can’t shut this place down. Not right now.”

Thug Guy looked down at the hammer. Then he reached inside his pocket for something else. Matt let out the breath he was holding when it turned out to be just a phone.