Pure Hate (8 page)

When Titus’s head rose from the pillow it was
nearly ten in the morning. He was late for work and no suspects were in
custody. His lazy dinosaur of a partner hadn’t even bothered to wake him. Of
course, they hadn’t picked each other up for work since they first partnered up
two years ago. They rarely even rode together in the same car. Titus knew the
Captain hated it when he drove his own car on duty, but so far he hadn’t said
anything. The only way Titus could work with James was separately. Not as
partners, but as two individual investigators working simultaneously on the
same case.

Titus didn’t understand James. He
couldn’t relate to his lackadaisical attitude, his lack of enthusiasm for the
job. He would bet anything that James got a good sleep. The fact that there was
a madman running around hacking up women and children probably didn’t stop him
from getting his eight hours in. If he just wanted to collect a paycheck every
week, there were easier jobs than homicide detective. No one waded through
blood and guts everyday unless they were truly committed to the cause and Titus
was committed. Titus was a crusader. James didn’t make sense.

“Baby, are you up? I made you some bacon and eggs
and your favorite French toast!”

“Okay, I’m up,
Mom!”

The smell of fresh bacon drifted up to Titus,
pulling him from the bed and into the shower. It was time to begin the day. He
needed to get over to the hospital to talk to Reed. If they couldn’t locate
Malcolm, maybe they could find his accomplice. Titus showered, shaved, and slipped into a gray Brooks Brother’s suit and
a pair of black Stacy Adams. He considered his new Armani silk tie and felt
foolish as he turned it down in favor of a blue polyester tie from Jeans West,
but he wasn’t up to dealing with the whispers of “spoiled rich kid” from his
fellow officers.

With his all-American good looks,
Titus looked more like a model in a men’s apparel magazine like “GQ” or “M.”
Well, except for the tie and the fact that he was a good three inches shy of
six feet and was showing the beginnings of a spare tire around his mid-section.
His face was quite handsome however, almost pretty. He had high cheekbones with
thin lips and dimpled cheeks, ice blue eyes,
and dark brown hair that he slicked back the way the Italian gangsters did in
the movies. He would never be pegged as a homicide detective. Although on those
special occasions when he wore his black Armani Tux, he did look a little like
James Bond.

Titus walked downstairs and smiled.
Mrs. Janet Baltimore sat at the kitchen table sectioning a grapefruit half with
a paring knife. She was wearing the red flannel pajamas he’d bought her for
Christmas along with the blue and white terry cloth bathrobe and slippers that
he’d given her for her birthday. Her long silver hair was cinched into a tight
bun and her glasses hung off the tip of her nose as she carefully prepared his
meal. She had looked exactly the same for the past twenty years. Titus couldn’t
remember her ever being young. The gray hair, the wrinkles, the fifty or sixty
extra pounds, the extra chin, the loose flesh that
hung from her triceps, the varicose veins that crisscrossed her legs, all
seemed to have been there since his first birthday. Looking at pictures of the
young, vibrant, sexy woman she had once been was like looking at a stranger. To
him, she had always been the same woman she was today—a hard-working,
church-going, house-cleaning, home-cooking mom.

Detective Titus Baltimore was a mama’s boy. He had
always been and probably always would be. His dad had never been around.
Fitzgerald Baltimore was always too busy with his art gallery and
borderline-legal import/export business that dealt mostly in ancient artifacts
plundered from various sacred burial grounds around the globe and smuggled into
the U.S. from the same private airstrips the cartels used to fly out Columbia’s
most popular export.

Baltimore’s dad was two thousand dollar suits that
hung in the closet, the smell of expensive Cuban cigars that lingered in the
air, the ninety thousand dollar Mercedes sports car in the driveway, a ten
thousand dollar a month trust fund account supplementing the paycheck that
cared for his son and his wife when Fitzgerald was away on one of his seemingly
endless business trips. Baltimore’s dad had never been there to tuck him in at
night. That had always been Mom. His dad had never been there to show him how
to throw a football or shoot lay-ups. Instead, he’d learned to play piano and
ballroom dance. He’d had girlfriends, had even gotten engaged and moved out on
his own. But those relationships had always failed, and when they had, Mama had
happily been there for her little boy. Baltimore was a real mama’s boy, and he
was proud of it

After finishing his breakfast, Baltimore kissed
his mom goodbye and headed for the station. Feeling a little gutsier, he
decided to take Dad’s Mercedes instead of the ’65 Ford Mustang he normally
drove.

“Fuck those jealous assholes!” Baltimore yelled
as he gunned the engine and pealed out of the driveway. He wasn’t going to feel
guilty just because he was rich and they weren’t. He’d lost years of quality
time with his father to the pursuit of money, so he felt owed it to himself,
and, perhaps,
to old Fitzgerald as well, to enjoy some of the luxuries his father had
abandoned him to obtain.

As he drove, Baltimore went over the case again
in his mind. How could a six-foot-five, 230-pound, black vampire in a designer
suit disappear? He decided to skip the station and head straight for the
hospital. He needed to talk to Reed and find out more about Malcolm’s sidekick.

Veins and cords bulged through his skin. His back
and bicep muscles ached from the super-set of seated row and military style
pull-ups with a twenty-five-pound plate dangling from a chain around his waist.
Malcolm walked over to the water fountain, wiping the sweat from his brow and
smiling appreciatively at the well muscled but still pleasantly voluptous ass
attached to the gym’s sales manager. She was also some kind of fitness model or
something. She seemed to live at the gym. Her breasts were perfect—implants,
but natural looking. She obviously had large breasts in the first place and
probably lost them when her body fat dropped below 10%. She had just filled the
void with silicone. She was short but tough looking, and her eyes were jet
black like her waist length hair.

Italian? Sicilian maybe? Possibly
Spanish.

She was obviously down with the
brothers whatever her ethnicity. She always stared at Malcolm when she thought
he wasn’t looking and was constantly trying to make small talk. Malcolm liked
her. That’s why he hadn’t fucked her yet. Let her enjoy life for a while
longer.

Malcolm bent over the water fountain to get a
drink and saw her staring at his ass out of the corner of his eye.

I guess what’s good for the goose . .
.
he thought. She
sighed longingly and he knew she had meant for him to hear it.
She keeps
this shit up and I will haul off and fuck her!

Malcolm went back to the free weight area and began
to load up the bar on the preacher curl bench. He knew he shouldn’t be out in
public with all those cops after him, but he had lost the capacity to process
fear anymore. He couldn’t envision anyone possibly stopping him. He knew that
would be his downfall eventually, but for right now, it was his strength.

Half the gym’s muscle-bound troglodytes were
staring at Malcolm and snickering derisively as he slid two forty-five-pound
plates on each end of the twenty-five- pound bar for a total of two-hundred-five
pounds. Malcolm snickered back. He knew they thought he was crazy, trying to
curl so much weight. He knew they were waiting to see him tear a bicep muscle
just trying to lift it from the rack. But what they didn’t know was that he
was
insane, stark raving mad, and he could easily toss this weight up for at least
eight reps thanks to a stack of Deca, Clembuterol, and the latest legal growth
hormones that had swelled his biceps from eighteen-and-one-half-inches to a
Herculean twenty-one-inches in just the past two months. The thick, tentacled
roots that were Malcolm’s fingers wrapped around the curl bar and easily
hoisted it into the air. His arms strained and burned with lactic acid, but the
weight curled steadily upward, reaching its apex just below Malcolm’s
collarbone and then slowly lowering back down to mid-thigh twelve times. The
snickering had turned to gasps of astonishment.

Showed those fools!

Malcolm slammed the bar back down on the rack and
stretched his massive arms, smiling at his reflection in the mirror. He may not
have been able to bench-press five hundred pounds like some of the juiced-up
Italians that seemed to spend all day everyday doing the same three
exercises—squats, bench presses, and shoulder presses—but he knew he had the
strongest arms in the Atlas gym.

The Atlas gym was hardcore, for serious
weightlifters only. There was no sauna or Jacuzzi, no pool, no aerobics room,
only a handful of cardio equipment, and no
juice bar. What the Atlas had was weight, massive weight. Each bench could hold
up to a thousand pounds and there was at least that much weight in iron plates
stacked on weight trees beside each one. Even the dumbbells went all the way up
to one-hundred-fifty pounds each. No one but hardcore bodybuilders and
power-lifters, mostly professionals, worked out there.

Malcolm glanced around the room at
the grossly over-muscled clientele, groaning and straining beneath impossible
stacks of weight, and thought that if he got his arms around any one of their
necks they would never get away until their lifeless husks slumped to the
floor.

Malcolm looked at himself in the mirror again,
pleased with the way all eight sections of his rectus abdominus were as clearly
defined as his obliques and serratus muscles forming an armor-plated waistline
that was only 31 inches around. He liked the way his lats fanned out under his
arms, but not so much that he couldn’t lower his arms to his sides like some of
those other muscle-bound freaks. Malcolm smiled as he flexed his bulging pecs,
admiring their crisscrossed striations and how the pectoralis major was clearly
separated from the pectoralis minor. He liked his rounded delts and the way his
traps rose like a cobra’s hood when he rolled his shoulders forward but not so
much that they made his neck disappear. With the exception of his
disproportionately large arms, he had the body of a supremely well-conditioned
prizefighter, similar to Evander Holyfield or Lennox Lewis with Lee Haney’s
arms. Unlike the bodybuilders who spent just as much time in the tanning booths
and hair salons as they did in the weight room, Malcolm’s muscles weren’t just
for show. They were more than cosmetic. They had crushed, bludgeoned, beaten,
and stabbed the life from twenty-seven innocent people that the police knew of
and another seventeen they had no clue about. His body was a perfect killing
machine.

You’re a fucking monster!
he thought as he
stared at himself in the mirror and that predacious smile split open his face
once more.

Malcolm had just finished his last set of curls
when the twelve TV sets positioned above the treadmills and lifecycles began to
broadcast the morning news. As Malcolm expected, it featured a headline story
about the murder of the Cozen family with a surprisingly accurate description
of him, along with a police artist’s sketch that was also remarkably accurate.
He was flattered that Reed remembered him so well. He regretted that he would
not be able to workout at the Atlas anymore, but he did not regret neatly
crushing the throat of the blonde-haired, blue-eyed, pumped up aryan with the
squeaky voice who shouted, “That’s him!” as Malcolm attempted to exit the
premises peacefully and quietly. He did regret not being able to stay and watch
him drown in his own blood.

Titus Baltimore had one more question for Reed.

“Describe Malcolm’s accomplice for me.”

“I already did. He looks exactly like me . . . or
rather like I looked fifteen years ago. He even has my old heavy metal/ hippie
haircut. You could take one of my old yearbook pictures and put it out there.
That’s how much he looks like me.”

The answer was unbelievable. Detective Baltimore
didn’t know whether it was Mr. Cozen’s shock over losing his wife and kids
confusing things in his head, or if the man was just flat-out lying. Mr. Cozen
seemed eager to help catch the killer, but then why make up such an absurd
story? He seemed perfectly lucid, but what he was saying went way beyond creepy
to become something else altogether, something perverse.

“His accomplice looked just like you? Identical?
Like some kind of twin?”

“Yes.” Reed replied with conviction, looking
Tight Ass right in his smug little eyes.

“First a giant black vampire and now your evil
twin? What is this—a creature double feature?”

“Fuck you, Detective! Those are the bastards that
murdered my family! I ain’t making this up!”

Detective Baltimore stared at Mr. Reed Cozen for
a long moment before he spoke again. He wasn’t sure about this story. Something
about it just didn’t click for him. In fact a lot of things about it made no
sense to him.

Why would a man wait fifteen years
then suddenly reappear and savagely murder a man’s entire family because he’d
messed around with his best friend’s high school sweetheart?

Even as violent as kids were today,
he’d never heard of a teenaged romantic rivalry resulting in mutilation
murders. Maybe a drive-by or ambush shooting, but never after more than a
decade had passed.

Titus had only been thirteen when he
graduated from high school, a child prodigy with the highest SAT scores in his
little private academy, and he couldremember very little about the
girls he dated at the academy or even later at Princeton for that matter. There
had been too damned many of them. He couldn’t imagine still being strung out on
one of them after all these years. Certainly not enough to kill.

And why would he leave Mr. Cozen
alive as a witness if
he
were really the target of Malcolm’s vengeance? Why would Malcolm
Davis confess to Mr. Cozen about a series of homicides he had so far gotten
away with and then not kill him?
It made no sense!
And why did Reed seem
to be acting so guilty, so defensive, as if he was hiding something?

As far as Titus was concerned, Mr.
Cozen had just topped the suspect list.

“Please forgive me, Mr. Cozen, but I am just
terribly confused by all this.”

Reed’s eyes searched Baltimore’s face in helpless
frustration. It was obvious that he wanted to strangle the detective and
probably would have tried if he wasn’t injured and Baltimore wasn’t armed.

“What the hell is so confusing? I told you who
did it. You just go get him. Lock him up! Shoot him! Anything! Just do your
fucking job and leave me the fuck alone! While you’re in here fucking with me
that sonuvabitch is probably out there killing another family!”

“I assure you,
Mr. Cozen, we have half the Philadelphia
Police Department kicking in doors all over town, searching for Mr. Davis right
now. We’ll have him in custody soon. In the meantime, you get some rest. I
understand you might be released later today or tomorrow. I may need you to
come down to the station and answer a few more questions.”

“What fucking questions? There’s no more I can
tell you.”

“Well, that may be true, but you still haven’t
given us an official statement and you might think of something else between
today and tomorrow that might help us.”

“I’ve already given you everything but the man’s
address and phone number!”

Titus straightened his cheap tie and flashed a
cheap smile as he exited Reed’s hospital room.

“Sleep on it. Maybe you’ll remember something, something
you may not even think was important but that might help us. Goodbye, Mr.
Cozen.”

“Yeah, fuck you very much.”

Baltimore shut the door quietly behind him and
nodded to the uniformed officer stationed outside Reed’s door.

“I can’t wait to interrogate that prick.
Sonuvabitch is lying through his fucking teeth. He’s involved somehow. I just
can’t figure out how. But I know he knows something. It’s time to look a little
into Mr. Cozen’s background, see what kind of skeletons he’s got in his closet.”

Detective Baltimore decided to re-question Reed’s
neighbors. This time, he wasn’t going to be asking about suspicious looking
strangers lurking around the Cozen house or strange vehicles parked on the
street. He wanted to know about the Cozens themselves. He would go through
address books and scraps of paper at the crime scene, call up friends, family,
coworkers, find out if they had a babysitter and question her as well. He would
question the family physician, see if he had any suspicion that there was abuse
taking place either against the kids or the wife, any suspicious bruises or
injuries on any of them. He wanted to find out if the Cozens were seeing a
therapist or a marriage counselor. Baltimore would track down and question
anyone who might have any knowledge about what went on in that household. He
wanted to know just how loving a relationship Reed Cozen had with his wife and
kids.

Baltimore suddenly had an idea. He had just
exited the hospital when he paused and started fishing through his wallet for a
business card. Last year, he had worked a case where a ten-year old girl was
kidnapped, raped, brutally beaten, and murdered by an intruder who dragged the
child out of her bedroom window in the middle of the night and took her across
the street to the park where her body was later found.

The family was on TV every night for
weeks pleading for anyone with information about the crime to come forward.
They offered a reward that would have bankrupted them. They looked so genuinely
grief-stricken that the public never considered the possibility the parents
might be suspects themselves, and the police only conducted a half-hearted
interrogation of them. The crime scene evidence—the jimmied bedroom window and
the screwdriver that had obviously been used to pry open the window then used
to repeatedly stab the child—seemed to all fit the pattern of a stranger
abduction murder.

After one of the couple’s tearful
pleas for the killer to turn himself in or for anyone with information on the
killer’s identity to come forward, someone did. A caseworker from the
Department of Human Services called the station and told the detective that the
child had come to her office just two weeks before the murder to report her
father and mother’s brutal physical and sexual abuse. It turned the whole case
around and the police eventually got a full confession out of the couple and
the court put them each away for life without the possibility of parole.

Detective Baltimore sifted through the forty or
more business cards he had stuffed into his wallet that was at one time
handsome sealskin, but was now just a worn out mess. Finally, he located the
office number of Ms. Judy Hamilton, pulled out his I-phone and called her up.
She answered on the first ring.

“Hello, Department of Human Services, this is
Caseworker Hamilton. May I help you?”

“Hello, Ms. Hamilton. This is Detective Baltimore
with the Philadelphia Police Department Homicide Division.”

“Oh, yes, I remember you from that terrible case
of the little Simpson girl, Etta Simpson, the little girl that was killed by
her parents. That was such a tragic case. I felt bad because we just didn’t act
quickly enough to save her. The day I went and talked to the parents, the
little girl suddenly changed her mind and said she made the whole thing up or
else we would have taken her out of there right then and there. We planned to
come back and do a follow up investigation, but by then it was too late. They
murdered that poor child.” Her voice was choked with emotion as she spoke.

Detective Baltimore was impressed with how much
Ms. Hamilton seemed to care for these children. He wondered how such a woman
could handle the type of horrors she no doubt witnessed every day, crimes and
abuses perpetrated against innocent women and children, families torn apart
from within, and still stay so compassionate, so caring. Most of the DHS
workers he’d met were as hardened and cynical as cops. They treated the kids
who came through the system like they all brought their misfortunes upon
themselves and, of course, there were many that had— teenaged mothers,
adolescent prostitutes, drunks, drug addicts, and juvenile delinquents kicked
out by families who just couldn’t take them anymore. The job tended to harden
the heart to sob stories, but this woman’s heart still had quite a bit of
giving left in it. Baltimore, looking into his own heart, wondered how long
either of them could last.

“I have to ask a favor of you, Ms. Hamilton. Have
you seen the news? Have you heard anything about the family they believed was
murdered by that guy they’re calling the Family Man?”

“Yes, I’ve seen it. Are you involved with that
case, Detective?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m in charge of the investigation.
That’s the reason I’m calling. I have reason to believe that the same killer
may not have committed this last murder or, at least, he may not have been
working alone. I’m beginning to think the father may have had something to do
with it. In fact he may
be
the Family Man or his accomplice. I need you
to see if there’s a file on him. Maybe his wife or his kid tried to reach you.”

“What was the name?”

“Cozen. The father's name is Reed. The mother’s
name was Linda and there was Jennie and Mark.”

“Can you hold on while I check the computer? It
should just take a second.”

“Sure. I really appreciate this.”

Detective Baltimore walked across the hospital
parking lot with his iPhone wedged between ear and shoulder as he fished for
his car keys. He slipped behind the wheel of his Mercedes and began to head
back to Reed’s quiet little neighborhood to check out the neighborhood
elementary school. Maybe there was a teacher or a counselor, even a school
nurse in whom one of the children had confided.

“Uh . . . Detective? Are you still there?”

“Yes, Ms. Hamilton. Did you find anything?”

“Well, it seems like the daughter, Jennie, came
to us about six months ago. The Vice Principal, a woman named Anna Lamb, at her
school brought her in, She believed the little girl’s father had molested the
child. Little Jennie didn’t seem to think anything was out of the ordinary.
When she was questioned by one of our staff assigned to her case,
a
Rita
Franklin, Mrs. Franklin noted that she had gotten the impression that her
father was perhaps a little overly affectionate, perhaps even inappropriately
so, but nothing serious, nothing criminal. Mrs. Franklin said it seemed to her
like a father who just really loved his little girl. She assured the teacher
that she would talk to Mr. Cozen and then warned her to be more careful with
those kinds of accusations around children.

“Children have very active
imaginations. Things can get all twisted in a child’s impressionable young mind
and they can start to believe that they were victims of sexual molestation when
it was actually something entirely innocent. The woman wasn’t completely
convinced, so Mrs. Franklin agreed to go with her to Mr. Cozen’s house to drop
off the child, and she talked to him there.
She noted in her records that Mr. Cozen seemed rather confused and more than a
little embarrassed by the whole thing, but that he was cooperative and assured
Mrs. Franklin to her satisfaction that nothing illicit or untoward had taken
place between him and his daughter. The child was returned and no follow-up was
ever done.”

Titus scribbled down all the information in his notepad,
steering the Mercedes with his knees and with an occasional quick turn of his
left hand before returning to scribble something else.

“Would it be possible to interview Mrs.
Franklin?”

“Um . . . unfortunately she is no longer with
us.”

“Would you happen to know where she’s employed
now?”

“Detective . . . Rita Franklin died two months
ago. She was very old, almost seventy, and she just went in her sleep. She was
at work all day the day before she died. She could never stand the thought of
retirement. Such a sweet old lady.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Listen, thank you very
much for the help, Mrs. Hamilton.”

“That’s Ms. Hamilton, Detective, and you can call
me Judy.”

“Well . . . uh . . . thanks Judy. You have been a
tremendous help.”

Now there was an accusation of sexual misconduct
between Reed and his daughter. What if Reed really was molesting his daughter?
If the mother found out and threatened to leave him and take the kids, or call
the police, that would be a hell of a convincing motive for murder. It would
definitely convince a jury. Juries don’t have much tolerance for crimes against
kids. Baltimore wondered what had made the vice principal so certain the little
girl had been molested. He turned off Frankford Avenue onto Tarsdale. He was only
a mile or two away from Frankford Elementary. He would ask her himself.

Frankford Elementary was one of the older schools
in Philadelphia. It was right next to Frankford’s low-income housing project,
which was right next to an upper-middle class white neighborhood. The fifty-year
old three-story red brick building covered in creeping ivy was a racial
battleground. It was filled with over-privileged white kids and
under-privileged black and Latino kids.

The poor kids saw, in the clothes the
white kids wore and the expensive cars that dropped them off in the morning,
exactly what they would probably never have. The city planner who zoned the
housing projects and the school for that area seemed to have been some kind of
racist out to turn every white kid in that neighborhood into Philadelphia’s
version of Hitler Youth. Their whole perception of the black and Latino
community was of down-trodden, angry, rebellious black and brown faces that
stared out at the white kids from their hellish projects and extorted lunch
money, sneakers, jackets, jewelry and anything else of value the white kids
were stupid enough to bring into this war-zone. Every one of those white kids
would grow up to hate and fear blacks and Latinos, except the ones who idolized
and emulated them, the so-called whiggers who would eventually join the same
gangs and wind up on the same nowhere path the projects condemned the minority
kids to.