FIVE

Detective Tommy Doyle stared down at the ripped leather of the suitcase in disgust, watching the flies as they buzzed and swarmed over the body inside.  The boy's head hung out through a tear in one side of the bag, and what had once been his face was ravaged, rent and torn beyond recognition.

There was debris and old junk piled on top of the suitcase, falling off to the sides and surrounding it in a heap.  The bag had been dragged from beneath the junk.  The teeth marks were deep and savage.

Off to one side, barely within the range of Tommy’s hearing, the junkyard attendant who'd discovered the body, one Matthew Jenkins, droned on and on to “Big Mac” Markum in a dazed monotone.  The man had obviously been drinking heavily the previous night; his words were slurred and unfocused.  Small snatches of the conversation floated to where Tommy stood, and he listened closely as he watched the flies.

Tommy had backed off and left the man to Mac.  The stench of day old rotgut whiskey and the question of how many days it had been since the guy's last shower had been too much, combined with the presence of the body in the suitcase.  It had been one or the other, and Tommy had chosen the stiff.

"I just heard 'em barking, louder'n shit, officer," the man was saying.  "The dogs, I mean, Wolf and Charlie.  Never heard anything like it since I been here.  It sounded like they was killin' something, you know?"

"And you came straight here?"  Mac weighed in at two hundred and fifty-five pounds and six feet four, but for all his size and strength, he was a quiet, careful man.  His voice had a calming quality, despite his imposing bulk, and he dragged the story from the man with easy efficiency.

"No sir," Jenkins shook his head.  "I went in that office over there," he pointed vaguely toward the gates, "and I grabbed me the shotgun from behind the desk; then I came over here.  You never can tell what kind of wild shit will happen out here. Remember that graveyard thing a few years back?  Place is just over the hill from here.

"Now, if it'd just been a man, that would've been somethin' different.  I've done me some fightin', let me tell you.  Been trained for it.  That shit that happened at Shady Grove, though – Jesus."

Tommy remembered it well.  His old friend Ken Straker was the police inspector over in Lavender, where the thing had taken place.  Psycho ministers, ritual killings, all pretty gruesome.  "But once you had the gun," Markum went on patiently, "you came straight here, is that right?"

"Yes sir.  I followed the noise of them damned dogs.  Couldn't see at first what the hell they had.  It looked like they were just fightin' over this old suitcase.  The dust and shit was pretty stirred up.  It took a while to sort it out."

Tommy doubted if the man had sorted anything out in his life.  He could barely string words in front of one another at that moment.

"What made you look closer?"  Mac asked him.

"I saw the hair," the man answered promptly.  "Saw ol' Charlie had somethin' by its hair, or someone, and I thought I'd lose my breakfast right then 'n' there.  I was hopin' it would just be a hairpiece, you know, a wig?  Damn."

The questions went on, but the picture was pretty clear.  Someone had killed the boy, packed him up like overnight luggage, and dumped him here without a thought.  Fucking swell.  Tommy felt his stomach roll and reached instinctively for the Rolaids he kept in his pocket.  Why did he always have to be the one on duty when this shit happened?

The sun was going to be getting a lot hotter soon, and things were going to get nasty.  He made quick mental notes of the scene as cars rolled in and the crime scene guys scurried around him, placing barriers, dusting for prints, snapping photographs. 

It was obviously an amateur job, a fact that might have made him cheerful if there were more to go on.  He was certain there would be prints, and he was right.  They found them all over the handle of the suitcase. 

That helped a bit.  If they were dealing with a stupid killer with a history of crime, they were in luck.  If, however, they were dealing with a newly hatched psycho, or an irate stepfather who just couldn't take it anymore, they might be in for a real search.  Fingerprints were only useful if you had something to match them to.

“Swell,” he commented to no one in particular.  “Just fucking swell.”

He was about to turn away and head back to his cruiser when one of the lab techs, a kid named Cotter who'd just transferred from the Lavender Police Force let out a whoop.

"Holy shit," the boy breathed.  "Detective Doyle, you better get a look at this."

Heaving a sigh, Tommy turned back and moved to the young man's side.  Cotter was standing in front of the old freezer that the suitcase had been tucked behind, pointing.  The side of the freezer was scratched to hell.  The dogs had apparently fought over more than the suitcase.  It looked like they had tried to claw their way inside.  Tommy’s guts took a roll.

Signaling to the officers behind him for assistance with a short whistle, Tommy stepped up and grabbed the lid carefully.  He didn’t want to smudge any fingerprints that might be on the lid – if he did he’d never hear the end of it out of these guys.  Cotter grabbed the lid as well and turned to look at him.  The boy’s eyes sparkled with excitement. 

Tommy wasn't excited, he was disgusted.  Damned psychos, anyway.  And for that matter, damn anyone who thought they were exciting.  They were warped, and they could ruin a man's day faster than anything on earth, not to mention his stomach.

“On three,” Tommy grunted.

He counted, and the two of them lifted the lid, sending old trash and debris sliding off the far side.  The stench hit them like a hammer blow, and they dropped the lid, wrenching violently to either side.

Cotter hadn't turned away fast enough, and Tommy heard the kid spew his breakfast all over the ground as he staggered in the other direction.

There you go, son, he thought.  Maybe that will help to put an end to some of that fucking excitement you thought you'd found.

Wiping his arm angrily across his forehead to clear the sweat away before it dripped into his eyes, Tommy turned to Mac and nodded at the freezer.

"Got another one, Mac.  A girl."

His partner nodded, but made no move to get a closer look.  The lab boys would get it all, no sense letting his own breakfast join Cotter's.  They'd have it diced and quartered and stuck away in little specimen bags, listed down to the DNA count in no time.  They didn’t miss much.

Mac escorted Jenkins out beyond the lines of crime-scene tape and told him to go back to his office.  Then Tommy and Mac turned away, threading their way through the slowly gathering herd of black and whites and past the carrion gaggle of reporters who’d caught the story on their scanners with grim faces.

Tommy slid in behind the wheel without a word, fired the cruiser up and backed out slowly and carefully.  The "ladies and gentlemen of the press" followed the pair’s departure, filmed it, and launched their pursuit.  They paced the cruiser, banged on the windows and waved their notebooks and tape recorders insistently.  They were as bad as that kid, Cotter.  They thought it was great, something to get a by-line off of.  News.

Tommy ignored them, focusing on the road and cutting them out.  No way was he risking another scene with those bozos. He'd been warned enough times.

Detective Tommy Doyle had a colorful career behind him.  He was the last of a line of cops, following the footsteps of his father, his grandfather, his uncle and his cousin Patrick.  All of them had died in action.  All of them had been killed by, or in pursuit of, psychos.

Patrick had been the last, and the worst.  Tommy had been in the academy when it had happened, right there in San Valencez.  Patrick had been an Inspector on the force, a specialist.  Homicide had been his baby, and he'd been good at it.  That is, right up until he'd apparently snapped and gone on a killing spree of his own.

Tommy didn’t buy it, and any time it was brought up in his presence, he was quick and violent in his disapproval. The papers claimed that Patrick Doyle had raped and killed five women, including the wife of a local minister, then had gone to San Francisco and killed the minister himself.

Tommy didn't know what had happened. He had the sketchy details of the news story, and he’d heard more from others on the force, but he knew his family, and he knew his uncle.  Somehow, deep inside, he knew that some psycho had just gotten the better of his cousin.  If you let down your guard, they got you every time.  It was something Tommy wasn’t going to let happen to himself, something he'd had nightmares about.

A fair number of killers were behind bars because of Tommy’s efforts.  Some of them had been normal citizens prone to sudden flashes of violent anger.  Some of them had been cold, calculating, and efficient.  Then there were the others, the ones you had to look out for.  Psychos.

There was a certain sensation when it was a psycho, an aura that hung in the air like a giant spider’s web, waiting for Tommy to get snarled up in it. The itch caught deep in his bones and sent him sniffing into places and things he'd be better off miles away from.  He wondered if he was just next in line, the last of his family to be hunted and stalked.  Somehow, he always got the psychos.

For his efforts, the city had promoted him to Detective.  Homicide, where his late cousin had lost his mind, was Tommy’s home, and he was comfortable there.  Not comfortable in the sense of feeling safe, but in the sense that it was the point of offense against the insanity that surrounded him.  It was the one place, even on the force, where they openly opposed the sickness that permeated the city.

The ladies and gentlemen of the press were another matter.  Tommy had his methods.  Not all of them could be found in the regulations, and on more than one occasion, he'd been called forth to explain himself to his superiors, and to the city he served. 

They also remembered his cousin, and that ghost dogged his footsteps, waiting for the day when he, too, would snap, giving them the juicy headlines they craved.  Fuckers were almost as bad as the psychos.

"Psychos are everywhere," he'd told a reporter once, about one interview before he'd learned to keep his mouth shut.  "I learned that a long time ago, when they started picking off my family one by one.  You can't sit and read the rulebook to them, and you can't expect normal methods to put them away. 

"I do what is necessary in every given situation, no more, no less.  You pay me to hunt psychos; that is what I do.  What you don't do is to take the time to understand what you are asking.  Go stare insanity in the face, then come back and ask me about my 'methods.'"

That interview had made him as famous as any of the weirdo killers could have hoped to be and had put him in a position he'd never wanted and certainly hadn't encouraged.  His face had been plastered over the front page of The San Valencez Chronicle with the headline, "Psychos 'R' Us Cop Vows to Keep Our City Safe."

Swell.  He'd thought that then, he thought that now.  Fucking psychos got nicknames, now he had one of his own.  Just what he needed.  To top that off, every time he got a case just a little out of the ordinary, like this one, he was the center of attention again.  He'd hit two reporters already, and pulled his gun on a third.  One more and even his reputation wouldn't be able to save his career.

 The problems with the press were pretty much in his past.  It had been at least two years since he'd lost his temper in public, and there had been ample opportunity.  One of the reasons was the man at his side. Big Mac could, and would, intimidate a reporter into silence just as easily as he could coach a witness through his statement.  He was a rock, an immovable object that helped to anchor Tommy against the insanity.  Tommy thought maybe the big guy upstairs had finally decided it was time to give the Doyle boys a break – something to help even the odds.

Big Mac didn't have Tommy's intuitive ability as a detective, nor was he as colorful.  What he was was a necessity, and Tommy found himself thanking whatever God would allow a fucked up world like this one to exist for putting him in the same car. 

They were nearly back to the station before either man spoke.  Tommy heaved a sigh, releasing a ball of tension that had knotted in his stomach at first sight of the body in the suitcase, and leaned back in his seat.  "Here we go again, Mac. You ready for this one?"

"Nope," Mac said, a slow grin sliding across his face, "but what does that matter?  You're thinking psycho, then?"

Tommy nodded.  Mac wouldn't question him, not anymore.  It was almost eerie the way Tommy could detect insanity in a situation, and in any case, this one was a no-brainer.

Still, psychos attracted Tommy like a magnet, pulling him into vortex after vortex of violence and danger.  Mac had seen it enough times to know the danger in ignoring his partner's odd "sixth sense." 

In this case, the evidence of the two young bodies and the condition they'd been in spoke pretty eloquently for itself.  Nobody in their right mind could've done it.

"I'll go by the lab and get the reports later," Mac said quietly.  "I'll get everything I can from that new kid, Cotter. He's young, but damned if the kid can't pull a fingerprint off a grape-skin if you need it.  We were lucky to get him."

"Ken Straker recommended him," Tommy nodded, parking the car and getting out slowly, stretching.  It was going to be a long day.  "I know he helped out some on that graveyard thing a couple years back.  He said we needed him more here.  Over there their psychos are fewer and farther between."

"Maybe we ought to move there," Mac said, his smile slipping a bit.  "Might be a nice change."

Tommy tried to smile.  "Might be at that, Mac, might be real nice.  They'd probably just follow us, though, and Ken's got enough trouble.  Let's try and put this one to bed quick."

They went into the station house without further words, both preparing themselves as well as they could for what was to come, and both knowing in their own way that any preparation was futile.  They were stepping into the void, hoping like hell that there wouldn't be sharpened stakes – or worse – waiting when they hit bottom.

Tommy went directly to the office they shared with two other detectives and started a pot of coffee bubbling in the decrepit, half-melted Mr. Coffee by his desk.  He sat back and lost himself in his mental inventory of the crime scene as the liquid hissed and sputtered through the filter, dripping slowly into the charred glass pot beneath it.  Coffee and scotch were the two things he drank to excess.  At work it was coffee, and after, it was scotch to forget about work.

He knew very little about this one so far.  He was going to need more on the prints, a cause of death, something.  All he had now was two dead bodies, both young, the boy dressed for the street and the girl naked, wrapped only in an old blanket.  Both victims were tied with nylon rope, and duct tape had been used to cover their mouths.  Red, industrial strength duct tape.  Damn.

Tommy's mind drifted back through time, back to pictures his father had shown him, pictures of another young woman who'd died.  The photos had been of his cousin, Jeanine.  They’d accompanied a letter from Tommy’s cousin, Patrick, a letter that his father had kept hidden from him for many years.  That moment, the moment he'd been handed those pictures and been baptized in the name of the motherfuckers, the insanity, and the holy-Christ school of law enforcement, was branded into his brain, permanently imbedded in his conscious and subconscious thoughts.

Patrick had found his sister tied and mutilated, raped and then stabbed to death in her own apartment.  He'd tracked the killer, and he'd arrived only in time to see the psycho commit Hara-kiri on himself, robbing Patrick of any sort of vengeance.  The pressure had nearly been too much, and so Patrick had written this letter, sending it to the one relative living who might understand, Sam Doyle, Tommy's father.

He remembered his father that day, his expressions, the slow, low tones of his voice.  Tommy had seen emotion in the old man's eyes so seldom that his father's expression had taken him by surprise.  Tommy had taken a seat, as directed, and he'd taken the pictures without a question.  It was the day before he was to leave for the academy, the day before he would become a cop.

They were bloody pictures, violent and senseless.  Jeanine had been a beautiful girl, long haired, slender.  She was naked in the pictures, spread-eagled and ravished on the floor.  Her own floor, her own apartment.  His family.  It hit home like no other message could have.

He had looked at the pictures for a long time, turning them over and over in his hands.  Then he’d just stared at his hands and watched them tremble.  When he'd looked up, his father was watching him.

"I wanted you to know why,” the man had said, taking the pictures back and tucking them back into their envelope.  "I wanted you to know that, no matter how hard you try, how many of them you put away, there are more.  They are everywhere, Tommy, sick, sick men.  Don't you ever let your guard down."

Tommy had listened then, and he remembered now.  His mind was strobing the quick glimpse of the young woman's face he'd gotten that morning and the stark terror of his cousin's face, tied and cooling on her living room floor.  It had been true then, it was truer now; some things never changed.

He was startled back to the presence by the sound of the door opening.  Mac slipped in quietly, dropped a stack of papers in front of Tommy and turned to pour them both a cup of the now finished coffee.

"You been through any of this yet?" Tommy asked, indicating the pile of paper.

"Just a quick glance.  Look at the cause of death, Tommy.  You were right again."

His stomach sinking to new levels of queasiness, Tommy flipped the folder open and scanned the first few lines. He stopped on the words "lethal injection, Hydroquinone, diethanolamine, sulfur dioxide, sodium bisulfate."  Beside this was a scribbled note, "Photographic developing fluid."

Fuck.  Now he was faced with a much different set of circumstances.  There was more to this than a simple killing, more than household violence.  Now the insanity was leaking out from under the edges.  Tommy read on.

The girl had been made up carefully, according to the report.  Although it had been smeared as she was thrown into the freezer, or on the journey to the junk yard, it had obviously been applied by a professional.  Also, she had been alive until she was in the freezer. 

Collected dust on her feet and bottom of the blanket indicated that she had walked to her final resting place and the lump on the back of her head showed where she had been slammed down into it.  Her left arm had broken from the impact.

"Christ, Mac," Tommy muttered, still skimming the report, "if it hadn't been for the boy in that suitcase, we might never have found her.  Seems our psycho might be smarter than I originally thought, just wasn't prepared to deal with the boy.  Maybe he's small."

"You mean he couldn't lift the body?" Mac asked, obviously impressed.  "Sounds reasonable.  I mean, he didn't even carry the girl.  Maybe he killed the boy first because he was scared of him?"

Tommy went back to his reading.  It was all conjecture at that point, and they both knew it.  There was nothing that would really help except in giving them that mental picture, that "edge" they needed to track the guy down. 

There wasn't much else.  Both of the bodies had shown traces of alcohol, Scotch, to be exact, and a strong barbiturate.  There was no way of telling if the killer was behind that, or if they'd just taken it on their own.  The way the boy was dressed seemed to indicate that the two were no strangers to the street.

"No positive ID on either one, so far, but we have a couple coming down later to view the girl's body, maybe the parents.  They called in worried when she didn't show up this morning."

"Good.  Maybe we can get something from them on the boy, too, if it's their daughter.  Christ only knows we need something more than we've got.  What do you make of this developing fluid shit, Mac?"

Mac considered the question carefully before answering.  Mac considered everything carefully.  "Don't know for sure, Tommy, but I'm thinking not that many folks would have it lying around their house."

"That's what I was thinking.  You don't suppose she was posing for pictures, do you?"

"It's possible.  I viewed the bodies a few minutes ago when they brought them in.  She was a looker, on her way to beautiful, for sure.  Would have made a hell of a model, I suppose."

"Well, if that's what she wanted to be, maybe her parents would know something about it.  We'll have to question them, if they ID her.  Go let the folks in the morgue know, okay?"

"Yeah, no problem."  Mac slipped back out the door, and Tommy returned to the folder in front of him.  Sixteen.  They had both been approximately sixteen fucking years old.  Sixteen years would be their eternity, now.  More statistics, more points for the psychos.  Damn.

He rose, walked to the window and sipped the acidic coffee slowly. It drained down through his throat to add to the churning mass of tension that was fast returning to claim his guts. 

It was fogging up outside, a storm sliding in from the bay, and he watched quietly as the first drops of rain splattered across the window, spreading out and blending, one with the other, like the lives in the city, overlapping and drawing into the maelstrom.  Shit.  It was going to be one long day.

* * *

The parents arrived on schedule, and after identifying the body, Mac brought them up to one of the interrogation rooms.  He gave them coffee and a bit of silence as they dealt with their shock, then he got down to business.

"Mrs. Andrews,” he said softly, “I am very sorry for your loss, but I’m going to have to ask you to try to calm down." 

Mac was doing his best to soothe the woman, but his best was falling short.  Tommy watched as patiently as possible from the far end of the room, sipping another in an endless stream of cups of coffee and wondering what was going through the woman's mind.

They had a positive ID on the girl, and a probable on the boy. 

Belinda Andrews, Lindy to her friends, had been out on a date with her boyfriend, Tony Rogers, a boy her parents had never trusted and had certainly not approved of.  They had been sneaking off together to "who knows where" for about a year now. No, the Andrews' didn't know if she'd wanted to be a model. 

"All either of them ever seemed interested in was music, drinking whatever they could get their hands on, and sex," Mr. Andrews informed them through a mask of white-faced shock.  "I always thought, you know, that they'd grow out of it, that he couldn't be that bad, if Lindy liked him."

"Mr. Andrews," Mac had informed him quietly, "the boy didn't kill your daughter.  He is dead too.  We need to know anything, everything you can tell us about where they might have been, what they might have been doing."

It was hopeless.  The parents had not been in control of their daughter for a long time, nor had they had a clue how to regain control.  They didn't know where she had been, what she'd been doing, or even what colors her hair might have been that night.  All they knew was that, after all their years of trying to raise a child, they had failed.  They’d lost the ultimate battle.

Tommy had an idea of what was ahead for them, what they were about to face.  They might make it, depending on how strongly their relationship was molded, but they might not.  It was going to be devastating. 

Each would blame the other, then themselves, then the other again in an endless circle of guilt and anger.  Each would call him, over and over, wondering why he had done nothing to get the fucker that had killed their little girl.  It was always the same, and, as usual he had little or nothing to go on.  Swell.  Tommy had his own bodies to bury; why did the city keep sticking him with more?

As Mac continued to try and question the Andrews, Tommy jotted notes in the small notebook he always carried.  He would have to begin with what he had, the chemical that was the cause of death, and the photo angle.  There had to be suppliers of such material, and there were more than enough photo studios and modeling agencies in the area to keep his men busy for a long, long time.  Maybe the kids had friends, enemies, maybe someone sold them dope and Mac could run them down on the street. 

He heaved another sigh of resignation.  This was the worst, the waiting.  He knew they didn't have enough to find this guy without a huge portion of luck, and he also knew, somehow, that it was not over.  There would be more to come, and they would probably be worse, and there was nothing he could do but to wait and to clean up the mess when the psycho was done, trying to dig something further from the debris.

How many this time, he wondered.  Two?  Four?  Ten?  It was too much to think about all at once, and to dwell on it was another road to insanity.  All he could do was dive into his work head first, do what he could, and wait.  Fucking swell. 

Moments later Mac ushered the Andrews out with a solicitous, sympathetic smile and the promise that they would indeed do their best to bring the guy in who did this to their daughter. 

Tommy admired his partner’s calm.  Tommy’s guts were rolling over and over like a pit of snakes, driving their fangs deep into his intestines each time they switched positions.

He couldn't tell someone what he didn't know, and he didn't know when, or if they'd get the guy.  He didn't even know if the guy would kill again, though he felt in his gut that he would.

There would be no sleep that night, so there was nothing more for it.  It was time to get to work.