Everyone Pays (2 page)

CHAPTER TWO

When we finished examining the bed, we rolled Piper over and found his right leg cut from calf to foot, his jeans a mess of blood. The Achilles had been ripped out in a mess of a job. I didn’t want to guess at the tools used.

“Off the bone,” I said.

“Left foot.” Ibaka pointed to where the little toe was missing.

Other than what had pooled in the bed underneath Piper’s foot and neck, the bedroom was surprisingly free of blood. All the cutting had happened in his torture room, just like this victim had liked it. I could almost admire the logic.

Hendricks said, “Even with all he did on his own pain trips, what all he did to those women in the pics? I almost feel sorry for this guy.”

“Can’t say I do. Slug like this? Dime a dozen in vice. You saw those girls. How many of them had cuts?”

“Not like this. Nothing deserves
this
.”

I turned on Hendricks faster than he was ready for. He stepped back. Big as he was, I didn’t worry about scaring him.

“You sure? You ever been tied up and tortured?”

Hendricks stepped around me to the bed. “This guy had a family somewhere. Think about that.”

I did. But I also thought about how I’d have done it to Piper: I’d have made a few changes. Nothing as dramatic. More with his gags and whips, perhaps, unless he liked that. Wouldn’t want that.

Imagining what I’d do to the bad guys was a little game I liked to play in my head, but I was never serious. This was what I always told myself.

“I got a ball gag here.” Hendricks bent over to pick something up. I could almost see it before he showed us: a black leather strap and a standard hard rubber ball. Just like the others in his dungeon.

Then he lifted it up, and there it was, hanging limp on the end of his pencil. It had teeth marks deep into the rubber. Multiple sets. And blood.

Hendricks said, “I’m gonna need a bag for this.”

Ibaka handed him a large.

CHAPTER THREE

That night I had to blow off steam, so I went to the Potrero Rec Center, a gym near my condo in Potrero Hill that had open court four nights a week. Basketball for the guys, mostly, but on plenty of occasions, I brought the discomfort of having a girl in the mix.

Ever since junior high, basketball had been my release valve, my way away from whatever troubled me. Now I played to get away from the visions of bodies, the thoughts of pain, memories of my Achilles tear that had come up at Piper’s. I shot by myself on a corner basket while a three-on-three went on at the other end.

Hooking in layups from both sides—my own Mikan Drill—not only built up a good sweat, but also helped with everything going on in my head. Almost everything, that is. Even shooting around can’t take away
some
things, like what it was like being single at my age, watching all your friends first get married and then start having kids. Now I was old enough that they were starting rounds of divorce, definitely not something I minded missing out on, especially with kids in tow.

As the daughter of a single-parent father, I knew all about what it was like growing up in a broken home. Not that my dad hadn’t done everything he could, anything possible to give me a leg up in the world. But like I was relearning in my own life, the days, nights, and long hours of a homicide investigator didn’t leave room for much else.

On a break from shooting, I watched the guys play three-on-three on the other court. They were into their second game, all of them sweating and holding their knees at any opportunity. They were tired and out of shape, which was true for most of the guys my age or older who still played.

Usually I waited until they were winded before I asked into the game. Tonight none of the regulars who knew me were around though, so I had to give “the guy thing” its wide berth. Some didn’t like to play with a girl. A woman, sergeant, investigator, hot chick, whatever they called me in life or out on the street, even if they called me for a date—here on the court I was always “a girl.”

And that suited me fine. They were guys; I was a girl. And if I could come in and show a few of them I could play, even drop a few outside shots on their heads and get them to play real defense, I was winning a personal battle all my own.

I dribbled in zigzags with my left hand, still watching their game, waiting for my chance. One guy was good: an Asian kid in his late twenties with a nice body and a full head of hair. He faked, then drove by his man after a quick crossover and laid it in. His teammates gave him high fives, but the one guarding him was pissed.

I had to laugh. It really was a nice move.

I started flipping the ball out to myself with backspin, gathering it, then popping jumpers from the elbows. Shoot, rebound, dribble to the other side, flip it out, catch, turn, and shoot. All in rhythm. It felt good, the back and forth, images from Piper’s and thoughts of my Achilles tear nearly forgotten.

“Hey, you want to play?”

I turned toward the game. One of the older players had pulled up lame, something with his hamstring or quad, it looked like. Everyone else stood around, hands on hips. At this late hour, we were the only ones here. With no one else to ask, they all looked at me.

“What do you say?” the young Asian guy asked. This close up, I could see he was cute.

“I’ll play.” I bounced my ball into the bleachers and jogged over to their end, trying not to look like a happy puppy whose owner had just picked up the leash.

A bald guy, in good shape and with a handlebar mustache, passed me the ball on a bounce. He was shirtless, clearly confident in his frame. “Take a few shots. Get used to the weight.”

I dribbled a little, then passed it right back to him. “I’m good.”

“Ooh,” his friends teased. Nobody wanted to be shown up by a girl, which was the main reason it was hard for me to play with them. Anyone guarding me was in a lose-lose situation. If I did well, they looked bad, but if they were actually trying, then they looked bad too. Maybe I liked making guys look bad.

Maybe I liked it a lot.

This guy was okay though. He smiled instead of getting upset.

“My bad,” he said. “This girl knows her balls. What can I say?”

The others laughed; I had to smile. Call it an extension of the Hall of Justice, the locker room, or whatever, I just managed to gravitate to these situations.

Instead of explaining that I always shot with a guys’ ball, I said, “Who’s my team?”

The cute guy pointed to himself and a white guy my age wearing a swoosh T-shirt and SB Dunks. I was already unimpressed.

But I knew I had one good player to work with.

Turns out, the game was already half over: 13–11 with my guys up and the game to sixteen. For some reason, I have never liked playing to even numbers. No idea what it is, but back home we always played to fifteen or eleven, and that felt better. Never sixteen. Sometimes twenty-one, though that was a different game altogether.

“What’s your name?”

I held out my hand. “Clara.”

We shook hands. Too formal. “Alan.”

“Or Claire is cool too.”

On the court, little details like how to say my name didn’t matter. I offered the option so people could choose what they thought was easiest. Honestly, I’d have been fine with just C.

SB Dunks was Edgar.

The oldest, shortest, slowest guy from the other team stepped up to guard me. He was in his late forties, I guessed. Bearded Caucasian male, 155 pounds. This would be fun.

Alan checked it up and passed off to me. I dribbled my guy around the circle, watching Alan to see what he would do. When he caught my eye and went backdoor, I scorched a pass in off the bounce, exactly where he wanted it. He laid it right up and in off the glass.

14–11.

“Nice.” Edgar slapped my hand and then, when Alan ran by, patted his butt. I didn’t need to be one of the guys like that. I could get posted up, guys would get a little touchy, but mostly I stayed away from hands on my ass.

I checked it and passed to Alan on the wing. He faked a drive, jab stepped, then faked a shot. His man bit, and Alan took two dribbles toward the middle, just enough to pull my man in, and then passed it to me on the opposite wing for a wide-open jumper.

I took the shot, hit it—
all net!
—and everyone stopped playing. It was only then that I realized they were playing ones and twos and that I’d lined up just outside the three-point line from force of habit. I’d ended the game without even knowing it.

“Good shot,” Alan said. We touched hands.

Then the old guy with the hamstring problem jogged back onto the court, and Mustache passed him the ball.

“Run it back?” someone said, and just like that I was on the outside again, heading over to my own hoop to shoot around by myself. I glanced over my shoulder, and Alan winked.

“That was a nice pass,” he said. “Maybe I’ll see you next time?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Cool.” I went over to retrieve my own ball and shot around for a few more minutes before I got bored. I decided to head home. Once I got the rush of a game, shooting around didn’t cut it anymore.

CHAPTER FOUR

MICHAEL

The first name I had, Jay Piper, lived in the Marina. It was these types of guys—the ones who had cash and a need for what Emily provided—who lived there. They were who I’d find as I tracked back through her past.

I headed to his place on my night walk, cruised through North Beach, asking for him, but he hadn’t been around. I saw fewer girls out this time of year. Maybe the January cold. Maybe someone had cleaned up the streets.

But not likely.

Used to be, the area near the strip clubs offered crowds and protection, the right kind of men: guys who liked women and girls. Every part of the city had something, whatever you wanted. You only had to know where to look.

I broke into his building, knocked on his apartment door. The light in the hallway, the speed of the dust in the air said he wasn’t home. Hadn’t been in a while. I could wait out in the hall, hanging in the shadows until he came home, but that wouldn’t be much fun.

Instead I broke his lock and let myself in. The first sight was a dark hall, its smell money and leather. There was another sensation, one that disgusted me. Partway down the hall I found a locked door, broke the handle, and opened it.

Inside, a small office had been converted into a padded cell: studded handcuffs fastened into walls, extra sets on the floor with shorter chains, whips and crops, nipple clamps, a few small knives. This was the first I must clean from His earth, absolve before Him to make Emily whole again.

This was more than I wanted to see, worse than I could have expected. Whether a hunch or my interpretation of Emily’s breath when she slept, my study of her scars, I could not have guessed at these acts, this depth. That her past featured this kind of pain—that’s what I was there to absolve.

At the end of the hall, his bedroom: normal looking, the kind of place he could bring any girl. In the dresser I found stacks of Polaroids. All of girls. They sickened me. I wanted to hurt him, make him bleed.

Emily’s picture was among them.

I had to sit. I waited and counted to forty to catch my breath. Then fifty. Seventy.

At one hundred, I opened my eyes and could see without red. I stood, put the photos on a shelf in the front hall so he could see them first when he got home.

I wanted him to know exactly why I was there. Why he was getting what I had to give.

Back in his bedroom, I waited by the closet, the dresser beside me to support my weight.

CHAPTER FIVE

He came home after sunup.

Jay Piper.

If he were clearheaded, he might’ve noticed his pictures of the girls in the front hallway or seen me by the dresser near his bed. But he wasn’t. Didn’t. Light of day, and I was standing right there—him too drunk or too stupid to notice.

He threw his jacket on the chair, took his shirt off, and walked back out to the hall. I heard him piss for a long time, groaning, the bathroom door open. His jacket smelled of cigarettes.

I waited, counting breaths.

He came back and flopped onto the bed, yanked a pillow over his face to block out the sun. I stepped softly, even if he was too oblivious to hear, and leaned down with both hands and all my weight on the pillow.

He scratched at my hands, kicked his legs, tried to push himself up.

I bore down harder, holding his head in place until the kicking slowed. When I took the pillow off and rolled him over, he showed no signs of recognition, no respect for who I was. Of course he missed the presence of God.

I choked him out with my hands, then dragged him into the other room, his dungeon, where I bound him against the wall with his short-chained cuffs.

He was out when I started to work his ribs. I had my shoes off and bag gloves on. I started in with light jabs and straight rights, warming up, doing him like a heavy bag.

When I brought left and right hooks, I heard breaking: a few ribs.

He came to before I finished a round but by the end of the second three minutes was out again. I hadn’t even started in on his face yet.

I took a break, hung my shirt on a hook in his bathroom, pissed in his tub, and wiped my face on a clean towel. At least he was good about laundry, his place far from a mess.

This was the kind of man to have a woman come in once a week to clean. Paid her cash under the table, didn’t think twice about the world she lived in. Didn’t care.

I did. I saw women like her in church every day.

When she came to clean, he would always keep the door to his dungeon closed and locked.

She would have no idea what was inside.

I threw his old coffee down the sink and filled the filter with the best stuff I could find: some Guatemalan single origin that probably cost thirty dollars a pound.

While it brewed, I took stock of his knives, deciding which one I liked most.

CHAPTER SIX

DONNER

Our week on call stretched from one Sunday midnight to the next, with Hendricks and me as the primaries and Investigators Jeff Lund and Andrew Peters as secondaries. Accordingly, the next call due to come in would be theirs.

On Monday, Hendricks and I worked Piper and our other cases hard, trying to get anything we could to move forward. I didn’t get out of work early enough to hit the courts, though I thought about getting back and maybe seeing Alan, hoping we’d meet again. The best I could do for my sweat was a long run on a treadmill down at the Hall.

The next call, late Monday night, should have gone to Lund and Peters by all rights, but when they found a stack of pictures at the scene, ones of young girls in bondage situations—just like Piper’s—they called us.

It was close to midnight when they did, and I was home watching
SportsCenter
, trying to drown out the images in my head with those of incredible athletes doing amazing things. These were far more appealing, and what’s more, I could root for a team over the long term, even believe in it, but have no real consequences if they didn’t win. Given that the closest basketball team was the Golden State Warriors, I was used to this brand of disappointment.

But maybe this year there was hope. Curry and Thompson, the Splash Brothers, were making me a believer. I knew Andre Iguodala would be big for them down the road.

On the flip side, my hometown Knicks were even worse—ruined by Carmelo Anthony and his shot-chucking ball-hoggery. They were on a straight shot to the bottom.

It had been six months since I broke up with my last boyfriend, Tim O’Malley, a good cop who wanted more than what was in my pants: a life together, a house in the suburbs, kids, everything. More than I could give.

We broke up.

What could I say? I wasn’t ready to settle down, wasn’t good at commitment.

Never had been. Except maybe to my job.

All this to say it wasn’t a big deal when the call came. I was happy to get out and away from my life, to have something to focus on other than finding a way to sleep.

I was almost happy to hear about Doug Farrow, resident of the Tenderloin, murdered in his bathroom with a piece of his sink.

When they called, I went because I knew something serious was up, something I wanted in on.

Hendricks came along because that’s what a good partner does.

He picked me up at my place, and we stopped at an all-night convenience store that would brew me a fresh pour-over. I let myself enjoy the smell of the coffee, knowing I was on the job and that my hours weren’t my own for a while.

Hendricks bought a Monster, one of the new-breed energy drinks. Who knows what they’ll realize these do to you in five years? He’ll probably find himself sterile, which he might not even mind.

When we got on scene, both uniforms out front looked more peaked than they had at Piper’s, like they wanted no part of what they’d seen inside. I recognized one of them as a friend of Tim’s. He ducked my glance, something I was probably due. Because I didn’t want to settle down, make nice, and play house, something was wrong with me. That was how Tim’s friends saw it, anyway. Even though they could ride any tail they liked. Some of the old double standards never died.

Going up the stairs to Farrow’s place, another walk-up, Hendricks asked how I was feeling about my love life.

“I feel just fine about it, thanks. And how about
you
? Judging by that slick tie, you’re probably coming straight from a hot date.”

“As a matter of fact, I . . .” I could hear the smile in his voice, didn’t have to turn around to see him beaming. That I’d gone the whole ride without mentioning his sixty-dollar tie had likely been driving him nuts.

“Save it,” I said. We were at the apartment, and I walked in.

Doug Farrow’s studio was typical of the Tenderloin and its inhabitants: dirty and dark, drug paraphernalia tossed around, stains on the walls. All it missed from the street outside was a homeless guy in a wheelchair, begging for quarters, scooting himself in front of cars to collect pity or insurance claims—whichever paid out faster.

In a corner of the room was a mini fridge and a hot plate, barely enough of a setup to make a decent bowl of ramen. From the cotton balls, syringe, and burned spoon on the coffee table though, I could see all Farrow had been cooking lately was heroin.

He hadn’t had any girls up here in a while. Getting hooked on smack can have that effect. Even the sex addictions fall away in deference to the bigger need. Farrow’s pictures were strewn across his small desk in a mess. They were close enough to the ones we’d seen at Piper’s, but all the same, Lund and Peters could have at least waited around for us to show before taking off.

I flipped through a few of the shots, planning to spend more time on them later, comparing the poses and kinds of knots, looking for the cuts and bruises to tell stories that made sense.

Patterns, predilections, profiles—that’s what I wanted, what I hoped to find.

“We have any way of knowing if one of these went missing?”

No one answered me.

A thin mattress rested on the floor in one corner, a single grungy pillow and a fuzzy fleece blanket shoved out of the way. Someone had opened a window to let some of the stink out. This place was even mustier than Piper’s.

“Don’t these guys ever open windows?”

“Apparently not.” Marlene Ibaka walked in from the small bathroom, smiling, enjoying a nasty late-night crime scene as much as I.

I raised my coffee to toast her. “Do you ever sleep?”

“Not at home,” she said. “The husband and kids take care of that. So I just stay on. You know. Work, work, work.”

“That’s because you married the wrong Ibaka. If you’d gone with Serge instead of his distant cousin Stephon, you’d be made in the shade right now.”

“Aye-aye, sir.” She tipped an imaginary hat at me. Our joke that she could’ve married Serge Ibaka, the forward for Oklahoma City with an eight-figure salary, should have gotten old by now, but somehow it never did.

Hendricks cleared his throat. “You spinsters speak for yourselves. I had a hot date tonight. Dragged myself away from a
fine
woman to be up here!”

He puffed out his chest.

Ibaka flipped up his new tie. Its gold-and-blue diamonds were fancier than his usual; this one even had texture. “Must’ve been going well too,” she said, “for it to go this late.”

I said, “Rub it in, fine. But it’s better if you give up some details for when we fantasize about it later.” I raised my eyebrows, and he actually blushed.

Hendricks smiled. “
So
pretty, my dear.”

Ibaka and I laughed. She offered me a knuckle bump, and I gave it.

He said, “We got a body here? Or what?”

“Oh,
now
he wants to get busy.”

“Oh, we know he already did
that
.”

We laughed again, but then calmed it down when we saw Hendricks’s face. I almost felt bad for him; at the same time, if you couldn’t laugh on this job, then what did you have left?

“In here.” Ibaka stepped into the bathroom, a small enclosure that contained the place’s lone sink, as well as a toilet and shower. Doug Farrow, the victim, was stark naked, his legs spread out in front of him. He sat in the sink, which had been knocked off the wall and was now on the floor. The pipes above his head were shut off now, but enough water had spewed to soak through his floor, through the apartment below, and to the shower stall of the apartment downstairs from that, where someone had reported the problem.

Other than his pale, water-soaked naked self, the most disgusting feature of Farrow’s corpse was his face: I didn’t need to see the faucet fixture to deduce what the perp had used to beat it in. What was left resembled slices of ham sandwich—flaps of white-bread skin so swollen they’d pass for Wonder and pink, shiny meat underneath. A complete mess.

“Lovely. Hendricks, snap a picture of
that
to bring back to your date. This’ll get her going.”

He pushed past me into the alcove, dutifully using his digital camera to get shots of the remains.

Then he stopped and whistled. “Look at the cock on this one, Donner. You see that?” He pointed. “Even pickled, it’s got to be an eight incher.”

I cringed and looked away from it, but he’d returned the favor: now I was uncomfortable.

“Always with the cock size, Hendricks. Still hoping to find someone smaller than yourself.”

“Just the opposite. I mean—”

I cut him off with my hand. The idea of him talking about his junk was more than I could take. “Just take the pics, all right? You can compare measurements later.”

He laughed as he got back to snapping.

The faucet fixture leaned against the base of the toilet. It had a flat base and jagged remnants of blood-caked caulk around its edge. The spout made a workable handle, but the uneven weight of the thing would make it difficult to swing with force. This was a crime of pure anger, unlike the calculated torture and patience we had seen at Piper’s. This time our perp had barely thought about what to use. It all felt different, too dissimilar from the scene at Piper’s.

“I think Lund and Peters may have roped us in on something,” I said. “Other than the old pictures, this looks like a different MO.”

“All comes out in the wash cycle, Donner. Calls all even out in the end.” This—Hendricks’s constant refrain for anything that seemed unfair—was the odd element of Zen dating back to before he started AA.

I thought about that sink, wondering what it would take to break the fixture off, guessing a guy would have to be pretty strong to do it, to kill a man that way.

Back in the apartment, I stepped toward the window and took a deep breath. The smell of sweat woke me back to the job. I slurped my coffee, wishing it were hotter, stronger, wanting more.

Then Ibaka was at my side, snapping off her plastic gloves. “Don’t like that business about a dead man’s penis, sister. Partner like Hendricks? You ever think about reporting his ass for harassment?”

I laughed. “
That
, that would be funny.”

She shook her head, realizing the absurdity of the concept in our work environment. Any report would be a joke. Not only would it go nowhere, but it would be worse for
my
career than for
his
.

“Come on,” I said. “It’s all for show, to impress you. He’s actually a really sweet guy.”

“Sure he is. Sweet on you.”

I gave her a wry smile. “We might have had it coming.”

Then we both laughed, the best medicine of all.

“You want to look at the pictures?” She pointed to the desk.

“I guess it’s that time.”