The Beholder, a Maddie Richards Mystery (2 page)

A doctor would be home eating tacos with her son, Maddie thought, not to mention making a hell of a lot more money. Instead, as a homicide cop she was on her way to the scene of a murder.

As she sped toward the interstate, the light cones from each street lamp passed crawled up the hood of her car, pierced the windshield and streaked across her face.

Maddie’s first thought about the case had been that the sick memo should have read, I
got
you, my pretty. “I’ll G
et
You, My Pretty” was the wrong verb tense unless the killer had meant it as an open-ended warning for killings to come.

At this week’s detectives’ meeting, Maddie had learned that Folami Stowe, who now appeared to be the first victim, had been a poor, pretty, single black girl with one arrest for prostitution. Tonight’s victim, Abigail Knight, was a rich, married white woman. Serial killers rarely mixed victim types, but that departure hadn’t changed her partner’s mind. Jed remained convinced that both killings were the work of the same fruitcake, and Jed’s instincts were generally right on.

She accelerated down the on-ramp into the concrete funnel known as Interstate Fifty-one. The serried hills to the west were already fading from view as the night tugged its dark blanket under the city’s chin.

Chapter 2

An armada of police cruisers, their sirens muted, and other official vehicles that responded to mayhem were idling in the street, immune to the parking rules of the road.

The tires on Maddie’s five-year-old Taurus rubbed the curb as she came to a stop while leaning sideways to get a full view of the Knights’ home—strike that, estate—on Mummy Mountain in Paradise Valley, Phoenix’s ritzier side of the tracks. Brick-like pavers framed the driveway in an alternating pattern.

After shutting off her engine, Maddie could hear the cries of coyotes, scattered in the bordering hills, voicing their objections to the static sounds coming from the squad-car radios. As she stepped out of her car, she noticed that the lining of her size-ten beige, linen blazer had begun to fray from rubbing over the short-barrel Smith and Wesson .38 she carried on her hip. She had tried a shoulder holster, but rejected it after Jed said it made her look like she had three boobs.

Jed walked toward her, his biceps sagging a bit from age. He took pride in the fact that he still worked out regularly on a heavy bag that hung in his garage, while remaining unconcerned with the leathering of his face. One of the lingering differences between the sexes, the time spent caring for the face.

“Got a score in the D’backs game?” she asked. Jed was a big Arizona Diamondbacks fan.

“My car lost the signal coming up the mountain. We’re playing the Dodgers. The only thing I got to hear was a pre-game interview with one of the spoiled visiting superstars. The jerk was crying about having to play five away games in the next six days. Those guys make a gazillion playing a kid’s game, have women throwing their panties at them while they’re on the road, and only have to work about eight months a year. And they think us regular stiffs ought to feel sorry for them. Those pricks have no clue.”

Maddie ended Jed’s sports editorial by asking, “Who called in tonight’s main event?”

“A couple of young studs in heat, they hike over the back hill on their way home from summer ball practice. Over this way,” Jed said, nodding his head toward the end of the cul-de-sac, “I’ll show you.”

The backdrop of the city’s twinkling lights made the neighborhood a beautiful place to live, but a bad place to die and death was what had brought them here.

“What’s the latest on your ex-husband’s efforts to snatch Bradley?” Jed asked as they walked.

“Curtis’s attorney just filed for a review of the custody agreement. My lawyer’s sending me a copy.”

“What grounds could he possibly have? I’m sorry but your ex is a real butt.”

“Curtis just got hired to do color commentary for the Phoenix Cardinals on radio. He got that by marrying the station owner’s daughter who, rumors say, is barren. So he’s using her to get near football and she’s using him hoping to get a child. Her only problem, Bradley already has a mommy with a gun. My attorney says Curtis’s argument is that he’ll give Bradley a more stable and safer home life than he’ll get being raised by a divorced homicide sergeant. Odd hours. Threats from unsavory characters, blah, blah, blah. Do you ever get the impression that except when they need us, civilians see cops as the enemy?”

“Maddie, my love, you’re way too beautiful to be so cynical. Now, what are you going to do about Curtis?”

“Fight the son of a bitch, what else? Listen. We need to get into tonight’s show.”

“Right over there on that hill,” Jed pointed. “If they were old enough to remember Fats Domino, the boys would likely call it Blueberry Hill, ‘cause that’s where they found their thrill.”

Maddie had long ago learned to just grin at her partner’s hackneyed humor. “Two boys,” she asked, “right?”

Jed held up two fingers. “It’s private over there, a great spot for peeping.”

“What did the boys tell you?” Maddie asked.

“Mrs. Knight regularly left the drapes open while she undressed. The teens carried binoculars in their backpacks.”

“You buy that?”

“Yeah, boys banging up against their hormones. According to them, she’d gyrate her shoulders in front of a big mirror on her bedroom wall. Last night they think she saw them. I guess it freaked them a little. They said she walked right up to the window wearing nylons and heels and crooked her finger beckoning them to come to her. After spending the day challenging each other’s stones, the boys decided if she did that again tonight they’d knock on her door and offer to leave their cherries.”

Maddie smirked. Then Jed added, “The boys say they never saw her with anyone.”

“What time were they up here?” Maddie asked, taking Jed’s arm and turning him back toward the crime scene.

“About seven, summer practice ran a little late. They had stopped for a slushy.”

“And that’s when they saw her?”

“That’s their story. But this time she was on her bed, naked and dead. And—”

“Wait a minute,” Maddie raised her hand. “How did they know she was dead if they saw her on the bed through binoculars?”

“Well, there you go, Maddie. That’s what I asked.”

She gave him her look that meant: and the answer is? She didn’t use her go-to-hell expression—that one required more shoulders than eyes.

“At first they fantasized some man having swizzled chocolate syrup all over her, but when they didn’t see a man and she didn’t move, they eventually threw a few pebbles against her window. When she didn’t react, they called it in on their cell phone. I had them take me up there so I could check the magnification. Looks like it went down about like they said. What surprises me is that the boys didn’t just run off. Or call it in anonymously.”

“Where are these boys now?”

“They were already late so, after they told me what they knew, I let them go home. They’re both shook up about what will happen when their parents find out the boys were using their fathers’ binoculars to peep. Then again, the boys weren’t peeping so much as Mrs. Knight was showing. Their behavior would have been stranger if they hadn’t watched.”

“Look at that,” Maddie said, pausing as they neared the crime scene. “The frigging place looks like the mall at Christmas.”

The house had been cordoned off with the department’s standard yellow crime scene tape, as if anything could make a murder scene appear standard. Neighbors, a few holding drinks, had their bellies pressed against the tape, their faces splashed with red from the taillights of one of the TV trucks at the curb, the driver sitting with his foot on the brake. There were more than the usual number of cops and crime scene investigators milling about. And the media was scurrying around like ants at a spilled picnic.

A moment later a circling news chopper began tossing its light beam around like a UFO searching for a landing site.

“I got a hold of the vic.’s husband, Dr. Mills Knight,” Jed said. “He’s some big-shot shrink. The department used him on a murder case back about fifteen years, before the doc became too expensive. I met the guy then, can’t picture him, but I expect I’ll recognize him. He’s in San Diego attending a symposium, whatever the hell that is, probably a five-dollar word for a conference. He’s been over there two days. The Knights have no children and their parents are all dead. The victim has no other known relatives. The doc has a sister in Tempe. That’s all the background we’ve put together so far.”

“When does the husband get back?”

“He should be on the road about now. Claims he can’t think of anyone who would want to kill his wife. We agreed to meet here around midnight. After that he’ll be at his sister’s place. When we’re buttoned up here, you go on home; I’ll do the paperwork. Give Bradley a hug for me. While I wait for the doc, I’ll stop to see the boys and their parents. Prep them for being witnesses when we catch this perp, not that they saw all that much, and try to convince the boys to keep quiet about all this until then.”

“Fat chance,” Maddie said. “This will be number-one tomorrow when those boys see their buds.” Jed smiled and nodded.

Katie Carson, a hard-driving reporter from Channel 12 Eyewitness News, came toward Maddie. The two women had met in the sixth grade and remained close friends, although their differing lives and careers had mostly kept them apart. In today’s world, hair, clothes, makeup, and voice training were part of the entertainment side of the news. Katie had always had a great shape, and now dressed like a fashion model. She had also smoothed her voice until it poured over you like expensive body lotion.

“Sergeant Richards, what can you tell us?” Katie asked, speaking loud enough to be heard over the hubbub. She then thrust her microphone at the side of Maddie’s face as if she might reply through her ear.

“I just got here, KC.” Maddie and Jed ducked under the yellow tape. Then Maddie turned back, squinting into the glare of the cameras, “Maybe more on the way out.”

The officer at the door had the pressed shiny look of a recent academy grad. A trimmed shock of carroty hair reached below his service cap. He looked scared. No. Not scared, more like overwhelmed. Could be it’s his first murder scene. His responsibility: only cops get in.

Death has its own energy field, and that force drew Maddie through the open double mahogany doors. Part way up the winding stairs, she passed a large oil painting of a blond woman with an innocent face and the kind of body you see on the fronts of hotrod magazines.

She also picked up a faint fragrance: Lavender, she thought.

As a homicide cop Maddie had learned that people came in all gradations of bad. Her instincts told her that what waited at the top of the stairs would be as dark as bad got.

Chapter 3

Death was life’s stop sign. When it came a person had no way of knowing that whatever they were doing at that moment would be the last thing they would ever do. Given the conditions under which Abigail Knight had died, she had likely welcomed the stop sign, probably begged for it.

Maddie’s black flats nested into thick white pile carpeting while she and Jed watched the medical team unwind the duct tape that had been wrapped clockwise around the victim’s wrists, pinning her arms to the brass rods of her headboard. Abigail Knight’s legs were bound to the foot posts using nylon stockings, probably her own.

Maddie inhaled, drawing the stench into her nose but she refused to flinch. Some cops used various gimmicks to trick their senses. Vapor rub under the nose, for one, but Maddie felt that keeping her smeller unencumbered came with being a homicide cop. Sometimes what stunk was a clue. Time would tell if the lavender she smelled on the stairs would mean something.

Maddie’s first close look told her that Mrs. Knight was the woman in the picture on the stairway or, more accurately, she used to be.

Abigail Knight’s face—oh God, not her face exactly—the skin from her face had been peeled away, as a chef peels the translucent outer flesh from green seedless grapes before the stuffing of a game hen. And even that had not ended Abigail Knight’s horror. Her lips had been cut off, leaving her teeth a red-splashed miniature picket fence. Maddie gasped, she had forgotten to breathe.

There was no blood spray near the victim’s head, but gravity had extracted enough to blur the stark contrast between her raw flesh and the white silk pillowcase on which her face had finally been allowed to rest. The absence of spray from her head said that Abigail had been dead when her face was peeled.

Murders like this stuck to your heart like barnacles to the hull of a ship. You just knew they changed you, knew they had to, even without knowing how or how much. Maddie fought off her shallow breaths with deeper ones and willed herself into her job.

Blood, sweat and the contents of Abigail’s freed bowels had congealed to form a foul-smelling puddle that hugged the low points of her body like cold turkey gravy. Maddie breathed through her mouth while studying the area around the bed and the rest of the room. A second picture of Mrs. Knight hung on the wall across from the door. Despite the mutilation of the person, the killer had not defaced either picture of the victim.

The killer had knocked her unconscious downstairs, Maddie reasoned, or, if he were an expected paramour, maybe upstairs in the bedroom. If on the main floor, the killer had to be strong enough to carry her limp body up the stairs. The fierce wolf that emerges to do these bestial killings is always stronger than that beast’s host body.

A man cleared his throat. Maddie turned and saw the uniformed officer she had seen outside: Carrottop. Everything from his highly polished shoes to his shirt looked new. His pale face and the pink splotches that mottled his neck, instantly told her how he was feeling. He attempted a smile but his mouth stayed tight.

She walked over and stood beside Carrottop. “There isn’t a person in here who hasn’t felt the way you do right now. We’ve just learned to control our reactions. Go outside for a few minutes, away from the crime scene. Breathe deep. If you barf, stay away ten more minutes.”