Arsonist (17 page)

CHAPTER 32

Stephen Gunn pulled up to the apartment complex and jumped out with such glee he felt like hitting his heels together like some leprechaun. He sprinted up the stairs and got to Jaime Spencer’s door. It was locked and he used his key rather than knocking and waiting for her.

“Hello?” he said, coming in.

The apartment was actually clean for once and vacuum impressions were on the carpets. He went to the fridge and took out a beer, drinking half of it down before noticing the note on the counter. He walked over and picked it up:

Stevie, make yerself at home
I’ll be back later Jamie

He crumpled it up and threw it in the garbage. She had probably gone out to score and would stumble back at one in the morning, used up from a gangbang she probably had to do to score the amount of H or
OxyContin she needed to keep her high for the next few weeks. Gunn wondered what the hell he was doing with a whore like her.

He went into the bedroom and
lay down on the bed. He closed his eyes and listened to the traffic outside. Kids were playing out there, chasing each other with water balloons and squirt guns.

Gunn had never been able to play games like that when he was a kid. His father, when he was actually home, was so drunk that Gunn had to intentionally piss him off to take a beating. His father was fat and a pothead; he didn’t have the energy for two beatings in a night. If Gunn could take it, he’d spare his mother and younger sister. But Gunn had been sickly as a child and many of the beatings broke bones and tore ligaments. Injuries he would have to live with until morning when his mom could take him to the emergency room and spend the co-pay without his father blowing up.

But, the last time Gunn had seen his father, that one moment had almost made those years of pain worth it. In that moment, he let his father know who he was. He beat him for over an hour, so badly that his father had passed out several times. Gunn sat down on their cigarette-stained sofa and patiently waited for him to wake before continuing. Gunn had been sixteen years old.

A
sound was coming from the living room as Gunn dozed off to sleep. It was soft, almost a scratch, and if the kids had been yelling or a car had been driving by at that moment he wouldn’t have heard it. He thought perhaps a dog or cat was clawing at the door and thought about getting some food out and giving it to them; he could use some company right now.

Then, he heard a click. The doorknob began to twist. The door opened quietly, only a minor creak as it closed again.

Instinctively, he jumped to the floor and crawled under the bed, pulling out his Glock and aiming out the bedroom door. Jaime wouldn’t have been so quiet, couldn’t have been so quiet. Still, it was probably just one of her junkie boyfriends.

The footsteps in the hall were light, light enough that he couldn’t hear them until they were close. Then he saw a pair of converse shoes quietly stop in front of the bedroom and then keep going farther down the hall. They came back a minute later and walked to the bedroom closet, opened it, and then closed it again. The bed above him dipped down as the person sat. Gunn heard the beep of a phone and then a male voice said, “Yeah, he ain’t here. Nah, I’m tellin’ you
, the mutherfucker ain’t here.”

Gunn, as quietly as he could, moved his head enough to peek out from under the bed. The man was still talking on his phone and his back was turned to Gunn. Across his lap sat a
12-gauge shotgun.

Gunn slowly pulled his Glock up across his chest and out from under the bed. He was just slowly going past the metal railing when the barrel tapped the bed from an inadvertent muscle twitch. The man immediately looked down, saw Gunn, and went for the shotgun on his lap.

Gunn fired two rounds. One hit the man in the side as Gunn slid back under the bed and a shotgun blast went off into the floor. Gunn rolled out on the other side of the bed and fired three rounds to keep the man on the other side of the room. He got up to his knees and fell back down as another blast echoed off the walls.

On the floor, Gunn aimed for the man’s ankles on the other side of the room. He steadied his hand, and fired.
A scream as the man nearly toppled over. He stumbled out of the room, blood trailing on the carpet.

Gunn jumped to his feet and went after him. He quickly glanced out the bedroom door and saw that the man hadn’t waited for him. He was already out the front door. Gunn ran after him but by the time he was at the front door the man was hobbling to a waiting car. Gunn lifted his weapon, but didn’t fire at the man. Instead he shot one round into the front tire, and then another round into the rear tire which seemed to explode from the sudden release of pressure. The driver got out and ran and the man that had been in the apartment turned with his shotgun aimed at Gunn’s chest.

Gunn dove behind the railing as it shattered, the plastic in between the metal bars spraying over him in sharp fragments. He fired two rounds, missing both times as shards of the plastic had cut up his face and gotten in his eyes. He rolled backward as far as he could go until he hit a storage closet that the unit across from Jaime’s used. When he went to stand, his knees buckled and he fell to the ground with a thud. That’s when he noticed the small holes dotting his chest.

His breath was short and he felt like he was about to pass out. He got out his cell phone and dialed
911. By the time dispatch answered, he had blacked out.

CHAPTER 33

Stanton tore down the freeway at over eighty miles per hour. He weaved in between cars and when he couldn’t weave he honked and rode their butts and blared his sirens—two small red and blues attached to his windshield and rear window—until they moved. It took him ten minutes to make a drive down to Scripps Mercy Hospital that should’ve taken him twenty. He parked in emergency patient parking and ran inside, flashing his badge quickly to the nurse and demanding the room for Stephen Gunn.

“He just barely left the ICU. Visiting hours aren’t until—”

“I want to see him now.”

“Sir, I can’t let you—”

“Who’re you going to call if I force my way up and look into every room? The cops? I am the cops. So just give me his room and you’ll save both of us hours of wasted time.”

The nurse didn’t budge at first and then picked up a chart that was clipped to a clipboard. “He’s in room 162.”

Stanton walked quickly down the hall and turned left. He passed several rooms with patients lying quietly and watching television. He got down to 162 and peered in to Gunn staring blankly out the only window in the room.

“What the heck happened?” Stanton said.

“I’m not
tellin’ you,” Gunn said, his voice hardly a whisper, “until you actually swear.”

Stanton smiled and sat down on a stool next to the bed. “What’s going on, Stephen? Why were you at the complex?”

“Just getting some pussy, you know me.”

“Who?”

“Just a girl. It don’t matter, you don’t know her.”

“Who did this to you?”

“I don’t know. Some black dude.”

“Some black dude? Did you actually go through police training?”

Gunn attempted a half a laugh and then grimaced in pain. “Don’t make me laugh, it fuckin’ hurts.”

“Who is it? This wasn’t random. They found a slip of paper in that car you shot up with your name and that address on it.”

“No shit? Coulda fooled me. This city nowadays, you can’t control the violence. I blame video games.”

“I’m serious, Stephen. Who did this to you?”

“It’s none of your business. I can deal with it.”

“I can help you if you let me. You’re going to be in here another week at least.
You got buckshot in your shoulders and upper chest. It barely missed your heart. Someone needs to be out there following up on the car and spent casings. Let me help you.”

“You
fuckin’ Mormons. I swear you’ll never learn that some people don’t want your help. We just want to be left the hell alone.”

“To get shot up again? What if I’m there next time and they hit me too? What about if it’s in a crowded place and
there’re kids? No, nuh uh, you tell me right now what you know.”

“It’s
nothin’ I can’t handle, Jon. You got enough shit to worry about it. Focus on them cases we still got open.”

Stanton stood up. “Fine, you won’t help me, I’ll follow up on my own.”

As Stanton was walking out Gunn yelled, “You got one week, Brother Jon. After that I’m outta here and I’m on the hunt. If you want ‘em, you better find ‘em before I do.”

It was in the afternoon when Stanton finally entered Northern and went to his back office. He collapsed into his chair and put his feet up on the desk before flipping through Pandora and finding the Gregorian chant station. The music was calming and he closed his eyes for a long time and just listened before getting the distinct impression that someone was in the room with him.

He opened his eyes and saw Childs standing there watching him. “Thought you was asleep.”

“Just resting my eyes. What’s up?”

“Sorry ‘bout Steve, man.”

“It happens. We’re not milkmen.”

“Does he have any idea who did this?”

“I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him.”

“Oh, I see, protect the partner and all that shit. Well your partner’s got some fucking serious enemies, Jon. You better recognize what that could mean for your health too. Don’t take no chances, find out what the fuck is going on. He respects you, he’ll open up.”

“I’m not sure that’s true, but thanks.”

As Childs left, Stanton turned to the folders that were neatly arranged on the credenza behind him. Now that he was officially off the arson cases, he had been assigned several new cases. They were run-of-the-mill homicide: drug deals gone bad, a botched robbery, and a drive-by shooting that struck a seventy-one-year-old man in a wheelchair and missed the target completely. He reached for one of the files, and then stopped. He reached under his desk to a drawer and pulled out the copy of the arson files he had made before handing them off to the lead detectives.

He stared at the photos of the two families. The children in both families were young, and they had met a type of madness that few even know exists. He wondered what they would have become if they’d been given the chance. Some of them would have been successful, some of them mediocre. Some strung out on drugs and living on the street and others doctors or lawyers or politicians. Perhaps one of them would have even become the type of monster that snuffed out their lives, or the cop chasing men like him.

“Jon?”

He looked up to see Holly standing there with some papers. “Yeah?”

“Fax just came in for you. It’s from Erin, Stephen’s ex.”

“Oh, right. Thanks.”

Stanton took the papers and laid them on the desk. There were some reports from forensics with a note that the autopsy was just recently performed and the reports would be forthcoming. On the last page was a police sketch.

Several neighbors had seen the man coming and going from the Gaspirini home so Erin felt the sketch was relatively accurate. The man on the paper
was bald with a chiseled jawline and a slim nose. He would probably be handsome in life. Stanton looked at the eyes a long while. They were set just a bit too close and the sketch artist had drawn them with the lids partially down. They were the eyes of a corpse; empty.

The truth was he had completely forgotten about Monique Gaspirini and that he had promised to help Erin with this case. She was new to Homicide and still trying to prove herself. Stanton knew the reason she had called Gunn was just to get him there. Stanton had a reputation for cases like these.
Once, there had even been a newspaper article with an anonymous source in the San Diego PD calling him psychic. After that, the floodgates of grief opened up. Families would show up unannounced to the precinct with photos and personal items of loved ones that had gone missing with no leads as to their whereabouts.

Mothers would come in and weep and Stanton would be too soft-hearted to turn them away. He would give them
Kleenexes and sit across from them as they discussed what their son or their daughter liked to do, how kind they were, how many friends they had. They would describe birthdays and vacations and how full of life their children had been. They begged him to pick up their child’s brush or their favorite pen or their shoes and find them. They asked him to speak to the dead, to call upon Christ, to perform séances.

Every time, he would have to give them the same speech: he wasn’t psychic. He did the same things every other homicide detective in every other county in the country did. He had just gotten lucky a few times, that was all. And every time he would have to watch as the parents’ heart broke in his office as they quietly gathered their children’s items and left.

Stanton closed his eyes and took a deep breath, pushing the thoughts and memories out of his mind. When he opened them again, he put away the arson files and began reading about the death of Monique Gaspirini.