The Beholder, a Maddie Richards Mystery (20 page)

“I’m sorry,” was all he said. Maddie stood quietly, expressionless. “Maddie, say something, anything.”

“Fuck you, Jed Smith.” She yanked his Playboy calendar down from the wall over his tool bench and threw it at him, at the moment, somehow that seemed enough. She turned and started to leave, but he darted in front of her.

“Forgive me, Maddie. Please. I love you like a sister. I can’t lose you, too.”

“Too? Don’t tell me you’ve lost your blond TV pussy? Gee, I wonder why? Don’t you have any more information to trade for fucks?” She wanted to knee him in the balls, but settled for a hard slap across his face.

Sweat thrown from his hair sizzled on the hot bulb dangling a few feet from his head.

“I deserved that, Maddie. I was a stupid son of a bitch. I told myself she wanted me, even while I knew she only wanted the information. Am I that dumb?”

“You’ve got a pecker so, yeah, you’re that dumb.”

He grinned ruefully. “You want to hear the real kicker? You wanna know just how big a jerk I was? She never even had to ask. I just told her. I don’t know why, maybe to impress her, maybe to show off. Now, I got no more information for her and she won’t even return my calls. I’ve lost my badge and your respect.”

“I guess that says it all. Case closed.” Maddie turned and headed for her car, chased by his voice.

“I am sorry, partner.”

That last word pushed Maddie over the top, she turned and rushed back to pound her fists against his sweat-soaked shirt. “Don’t say that,” she demanded. “You used to tell me you loved being a cop. Well, there’s more to being a cop than having a hard chair to park your pants in and hang out with your buddies. Now you say you love me. That’s crap, mister. We don’t betray the things we love and you betrayed both me and the department.”

She left the garage and headed for her car. This time she did not turn and go back.

“Maddie, if you ever need anything. If I can ever help—”

The slamming of her car door cut off his words.

Do all men make their decisions with their dicks? Do they all ambush you? She looked over as she pulled away and saw the expression on his face. She had hurt him.

Good. He had deserved it.

Chapter 29

Two blocks from Jed’s house, Maddie pulled the car to the side of the road and slammed the flat of her hand against the steering wheel. Then her phone rang; she swiped away her tears as if the caller would see her crying. Guessing it was Jed, she thought about not answering, but police discipline kicked in. She held it to her ear.

“The Beholder has struck again.” The lingering trace of the man’s cozy southern accent told her the caller was Lieutenant Adam Harrison. “I’ll call Detective Ortega, ah, your new part—”

“So I’ve heard,” Maddie said, using a tissue to wipe her cheeks.

“I’ll have him meet you at the scene, you two’ll have to do your mating dance on the run.”

“We know each other from around the station. We’ll be okay.”

After Harrison gave her the overview, she tossed her cell on the seat next to her purse, U-turned on Hayden Road and accelerated down the on-ramp onto I-202 heading west. By the time she was on the interstate, she had used her other hand to stick a magnetized light and siren on the roof of her car.

Tonight’s victim, Carmen Diaz, a single woman, had achieved considerable success as the owner of one of the largest real estate brokerages in the city. Her picture had been a staple for years in Diaz Realty advertisements. It made people feel that if they went to her firm, she would help them personally, but her firm had grown so large that she rarely helped any clients, one-on-one. Maddie had decided long ago that if she ever sold her home, she would call Diaz Realty, now maybe not. The Beholder had been true to form. Carmen Diaz was a beautiful woman, and, as Linc had predicted, a successful woman.

When the speedometer hit ninety, Maddie lowered her window and let the breeze tear at her hair. “Goodbye, Jed,” she said, letting the hot wind take her words wherever it wished. “Stay well, you bastard.”

It may have just been electronic interference, but the lieutenant’s voice had cracked while he had given her the particulars on tonight’s victim.

When Maddie got to the top of the off ramp, the desert wind streaked a loose page of newspaper across the hood of her car. Carmen Diaz lived a couple blocks on the other side of Indian School Road. She would be there soon.

“Diaz has no record,” Harrison had said, “and from all appearances the lady was a solid citizen.”

He had also told Maddie, and she had wondered how the lieutenant had known at this early stage, that Diaz bought older tract homes her firm didn’t represent. She would then live in them, fix them up, and resell them before moving to the next similar opportunity. The crime scene had been one of those houses.

Folami Stowe was a black woman with a history of prostitution, while Abigail Knight was a white woman with two known promiscuous relationships outside her marriage, and Maddie figured there had been more. Carmen Diaz was likely Hispanic. Was the changing ethnicity important or coincidental? Did Carmen Diaz also keep a welcome mat next to her bed?

Ms. Diaz was a known face in the city. That and her agency’s advertising budget, would assure the heavy media coverage the Beholder apparently wanted, perhaps even needed.

The street on which Carmen Diaz lived reminded Maddie of her own, neither poorer nor richer. But tonight Carmen’s neighborhood also had police sirens, the modern minstrels charged with announcing the presence of mayhem.

Maddie drove into an eerie cast of yellow from a nearby streetlight mixed with the rotating colors shooting out from a cluster of quieted squad cars. Dr. Ripley’s van was parked in the driveway. Its rear doors open, patiently waiting. The flock of reporters who swarmed this kind of case like locust descending on ripe vegetation, mingled just beyond the police barrier.

The crime-scene technicians were patterning off their search grid and setting up artificial lights to begin their methodical inspection outside the home. The neighbors were gathered at the house across the street, drinking, talking, and pointing like fans crowded near the finish line.

A tall man, his broad back turned toward her, stood leaning against the crime scene technician’s truck, a stream of steam rising from the throwaway cup in his hand. Maddie wondered why anyone would drink hot coffee in one-hundred-degree weather. Then she saw the ponytail. The coffee drinker was her new partner.

Seeing Gil Ortega coming toward her brought home the fact that Jed Smith was history. Gil was a little taller, a lot wider, and a little more than half Jed’s age. There would be other differences which she would discover as their partnership aged.

“I haven’t gone in yet, Sergeant,” Gil said after they shook hands. “Truth is I’ve never done a murder scene. During my time in vice we didn’t have any. I’m a little rusty on procedures.”

“I understand you requested homicide, Detective Ortega, so I assume you want to be here. Stay with me and don’t touch anything. Don’t talk to anyone but me. And if you say boo to the media, I’ll kick your ass so hard your tail will land back in vice. Get it?”
And likely break my foot.

“Got it.”

“Good.”

The screen door had been propped open with a large garden rock. Ortega reached around Maddie for the frame to push the screen open all the way.

“Stop!” Maddie grasped his arm tight within his shirt sleeve.

“I’m sorry, Sergeant.”

“This isn’t spring training. Don’t touch nothing, means nothing. You don’t know the killer didn’t do just what you were about to do. Get it?”

“Got it.”

“Let’s hope your ‘got it’ lasts a bit longer this time.” She had been a bit caustic, but her mood remained rancid and at the moment she didn’t care.

The light from the back of the house reached down the hallway bleaching the color from the rug runner. Maddie walked toward the light, listening to the jumbled voices of Bill Molitor and his forensics crew.

She stopped and took a quick peek into the first bedroom which housed a queen sized bed, a dresser and a sewing machine near the window. A blouse draped from the rounded end of an ironing board. Next to it, a chair stacked with clothes waiting for mending or pressing.

The next bedroom had been outfitted as an office. The titles on the binders stacked in the bookcase, indicated Carmen had used this room for her real estate work. A long wall shelf on the other side held an assortment of the things that sustained memories and fueled dreams. A picture of an elderly couple Maddie sensed to be the victim’s parents, a harmonica, and a tray of trout flies. Two cruise line brochures for next year. But no dust, as busy as Carmen Diaz had been she had made time to show pride in her home.

Then Maddie stepped into the kill zone. Gil entered close behind her. At first, she just stood and looked at the ugliness, the brutality, the hate.

Could civilization be only a mirage? Could the real reality be where these monsters come from?

The blood splatter high on the pillow told Maddie the Beholder had started skinning the face of this victim before she died. This was a change in his modus operandi. Had the Beholder simply become impatient? Had he wished to inflict even more pain while she was still alive? Or, perhaps, she thought wryly, he simply wanted to rush home in time to see a rerun of
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit?

Maddie remembered that Jed had often used such absurd asides to take the edge off what they saw. She missed him and she knew it.

Mostly, this scene looked like the first two. The skin-filled wastebasket sat next to the bed. The victim’s legs fastened down with panty hose. The knots tied the same as the knots that cut into the legs of Folami Stowe and Abigail Knight. After treating Carmen Diaz’s body as a wolf treats carrion, the fiend had angelically arranged her blond hair around her butchered oval face. The gold fleur-de-lis wallpaper blemished by the same cryptic message in blood, “I’ll Get You, My Pretty,” brushed above the headboard in block letters. The wallpaper looked new, likely part of the in-process refurbishment Miss Diaz had undertaken before putting the house back on the market.

Maddie saw this broken, torn, once-beautiful woman with a feeling she had not experienced before. A sense that her own spirit might not rest until the killer had been found, and finding him was her job. The awareness felt a bit mystic. But then Arizona was Indian country.

She pulled herself out of the brief trance and went to the wall thermostat. A moment later, Bill Molitor came over to stand beside her.

“I remembered you having us check the thermostat for prints at the Knight house,” he said. “I had this one done right off.” He shook his head. “Not even the victims.”

Ortega had stayed close, stayed quiet, and kept his hands in his pockets. After Molitor had walked off, he asked, “What’s the deal with the thermostat?”

“The thermostat at the Knight scene was set at sixty-six and the lady was naked,” Maddie explained.

“I saw that in the forensic report. I just didn’t see a connection to anything. What about Stowe?”

“I wasn’t at the Stowe scene,” Maddie said. “But the landlord told me he found the thermostat way low and reset it at normal before Brackett arrived. I had Molitor go back. They pulled only the manager’s prints.”

“And from this we know what?”

“Nothing for certain,” Maddie admitted. “It would appear the killer is lowering the temperature and then wiping the thermostat clean before leaving. He’s careful. We know that, at least. Come on. Let’s go outside.”

Once they stepped into the outside heat, Gil, looking a bit woozy, said, “What a terrible way to die.”

“Know any good ways?” Maddie asked.

“Yeah, quickly. And then only when it can’t be avoided.”

Brackett had said Gil was a fast learner and compliments from Brackett were rare.

The uniforms had dispersed the crowd, so Maddie sent Ortega off to canvas the neighborhood. “Start in that direction,” she pointed. “Include any houses on the back street that have any view of the Diaz backyard or fence. The lady who found the victim lives next door, I’ll take her.”

In August, Phoenix had twenty-four hour days that all felt like high noon. The Chamber of Commerce liked to say, “But its dry heat,” or some such attempt to put a dress on a pig. But they were right about one thing, putting up with the summers brought Arizonans the best daytime winter weather in America.

Maddie had worked homicides long enough to know that murder had no rules, but in a civilized society there were boundaries even where murder was concerned. Serial killers smashed through those boundaries to forever link their names to evil, the way the name Pinocchio is linked to lying. It was her theory that serial killers wanted to be caught eventually because it wasn’t enough for them to know of their accomplishments. They needed the world to know. Only then would they stop being nobodies, and that prize, to them, was worth their being revealed as sicko somebodies.

The lady next door was a widow and Ms. Diaz was single; the two women had swapped door keys. They just unlocked each other’s doors and walked in if the other wasn’t home and they needed to borrow a cup of sugar. The light had been on in Carmen’s office and when she didn’t answer the door, the neighbor woman used her key and went in. That’s when she found Carmen Diaz.

The woman stood staring at the ground along the side of her house as if fascinated by the fading bougainvillea pedals the wind had tossed there during the day.

“How could anyone do something so horrid to another human being?” She covered her eyes and her shoulders bobbed as she fought back a dry cry.

“I doubt I’ll ever know the answer to that,” Maddie replied. “Why did you go over to see Ms. Diaz tonight?”

“Carmen works too hard. Sometimes she doesn’t even stop to eat. After I had dinner, I made a half dozen stuffed bell peppers and was about to freeze them. I wondered if she wanted one.”

“Did you see anyone around her house earlier tonight or during the last week or so?”