Sandman (3 page)

He was stalking her. Just how far would he go?

That’s when Meagan decided to get a dog. She added dead bolts to her doors. She kept her curtains closed at all times. She spent every evening huddled in her cocoon, wondering when he would come in after her.

Afraid of becoming a star in her own Lifetime movie, Meagan asked a client of hers who was a sheriff’s deputy about what she should do. He told her that legally there was nothing unless Brad threatened bodily harm. But, off the record, he could scare the living shit out of the guy if she wanted, he told her. Meagan laughed and thanked him, but declined.

Then one evening while she sat in her living room reading, the phone rang. Meagan had become accustomed to letting the machine screen all her calls. This time she became unnerved. Brad was leaving another of his endless messages, but this time his rant edged on insanity.

“Who the
hell
do you have in there, Meagan? I know you’re entertaining some man, there’s a strange car parked in front of your apartment. Who is he?” His amplified voice echoed throughout the room.

She stared at the machine in disbelief. Her fear quickly turned to rage. “Is he totally
nuts
? The entire street is lined with apartments. Who the hell would know if there was a strange car parked out there?” she screamed back at the machine.

Without thinking, Meagan jumped off the couch and ran to the phone. Anger seethed from every pore. She snatched up the handset and yelled, “Leave me alone, you lunatic, or I’m calling your wife!” She slammed the receiver and stared at the phone.

Silence.

Meagan turned off the lights, peeked out the window. His car was still out there. She spent the rest of the night cowering under a blanket on her couch with a knife in her hand. That had been three months ago, and she had heard no more from Brad. It couldn’t have been that easy. Could it?

FOUR

Thomas slipped his phone into his jacket pocket and walked to where Cheryl was busy bagging the hands on the corpse.

“Got TOD yet?”

“My best guesstimate would be between five and midnight,” Cheryl told him. “I’ll be able to narrow it down after I get her back to the morgue.”

“COD?”

“I can’t give you cause of death definitively, but she’s been strangled. You can tell by the bruising around her neck. Can’t exactly check the eyes here, but if she’s anything like the last victim, there will be petechial hemorrhaging. You know I hate to speculate, but if he’s keeping true to form, it will be exsanguination. The sick fuck.” Finished with the hands, Cheryl glanced up.

“That he is.” Thomas stared out at the ocean.

“Who knows,” Cheryl’s voice softened. “Maybe he got so carried away this time he ended up strangling her to death and had to remove her breasts postmortem.” Cheryl stood, slipped off her latex gloves, and brushed the sand from her pants.

“That would be some consolation, better than being alive while some psycho slices off your body parts then watches as you bleed to death.” He kept his gaze on the tumultuous sea. The sky, now blanketed with heavy dark clouds, looked as if it would open up at any moment.

“Okay, she’s ready to be bagged,” Cheryl said before she joined Thomas. He felt her hand on his arm and turned his attention to her.

“Look, maybe he fucked up this time and left some evidence.” She shrugged. “It could happen.”

A sarcastic laugh escaped. “Yeah, right, and monkeys could fly out of my ass.”

Cheryl chuckled. “I’d pay good money to see that.”

He heard a commotion up the beach and turned his head.

“Shit, looks like we’ve got company.” He nodded toward the TV crew heading down the beach.

Cheryl followed his gaze. “Goddamned piranhas,” she grumbled.

Thomas ignored them and headed in the opposite direction toward the witness. After listening to the guy’s story, he asked the surfer to stop by the station sometime that afternoon to make a formal statement. Thomas gave the guy his card and asked him to call if he remembered anything else.

The poor guy was in shock, Thomas could tell. His nightmares were going to be a bitch. He would be a good candidate for post-traumatic stress disorder. As an afterthought, Thomas reached into his wallet and got out the card of a friend whose expertise was PTSD. He hoped he wouldn’t need it, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

The victim was ready for transport by the time he caught up to Cheryl. “Hey, I’m heading out. Give me a heads-up when you’re ready to start the autopsy.”

“Will do. Oh, and be careful.” She crooked her head toward the camera crew blocking the path.

“Damn straight. I don’t want to see
my
ugly mug on the eleven o’clock news.”

Cheryl laughed. “Better you than me.” She turned back to the gurney and checked the straps.

Thomas trudged up the beach to meet the trail. He hoped to sneak by while the reporter interviewed some poor sucker who’d happened by. No such luck. The petite blonde with big hair intercepted him; her name was something like Misty Waters, or Stormy Weather, some asinine name like that. Thomas couldn’t remember and really didn’t give a shit.

She planted herself right in his path. “Detective, is it true you found another woman’s body in the same condition as the victim found in Huntington Beach?” Her high-pitched voice sounded like she’d been sucking helium.

The microphone thrust in front of Thomas’s face.
Where the hell do these people get their information?
His jaw clenched. He had a strong urge to shove it down her throat, but thought better of it. He liked walking around as a free man. He gave her his best death stare.

“No comment,” he grumbled in a voice that made the toughest men tremble, then sidestepped her.

She jumped in front of him again. “Do you think it’s the same man who brutalized young Jennifer Hooper?” There was that damn microphone again. This woman could not take a hint.

“What part of ‘No comment’ don’t you understand?” She reminded him of a little dog running around in circles, barking, and jumping up and down. He wouldn’t be surprised if she didn’t piddle in the sand while she was at it.

“Was today’s victim a young collegiate like poor Jennifer Hooper? Should college girls be alarmed? Do you think—”

“Look, lady—” Thomas’s hands shot out, grabbed her on either side of her arms, then lifted all ninety-eight pounds of her and set her out of his way. She gasped. Good, he had her attention.

“Sissy,” she interrupted. My God, she had the IQ of a gnat!

“Get out of my way,” he finished through clenched teeth.

The news crew silently backed up. Sissy, the blond-haired Pekinese, simply stared at him.

He stomped up the trail toward the road, steamed about the encounter. He shouldn’t have lost his temper. He would hear about it for sure, but it always amazed him why anyone would choose to be a bottom-dwelling, scum-sucking “broadcast journalist” as they liked to call themselves.

By the time he reached the top, it had started to sprinkle. He noted the
Beach Closed
signs and Officer James guarding the head of the path.

“James, after they clear out down there, I want you and Cooper to start canvassing the homes along the cliff.”

“Yes, sir.”

***

Driving up Interstate 5, Thomas’ windshield wipers kept time with an old blues tune by Jimi Hendrix. One of the best things about his new car, he thought, was the stereo.

Once he hit the station, he went directly to the office he shared with Malone and Campanelli, two other detectives in homicide. He was glad to find he had the office to himself and started thumbing through the active files piled high on his desk.

Finding what he had been searching for, Thomas sat back in his chair and put his feet up. File in his lap, he began reading the case he’d been working before hitting a brick wall.

Jennifer Hooper, was a twenty-two-year-old senior at Cal State-Berkeley majoring in marine biology. In life, she stood five-foot-five and weighed one hundred and fifteen pounds. She had blue eyes and long blonde hair.

Jennifer was last seen by her roommate on a Friday afternoon. She was driving home for the weekend to see her parents in San José. When she hadn’t shown up by midnight, her worried parents called all her friends. The police weren’t able to file an immediate report because she was a legal adult.

By Monday morning, she hadn’t shown up for classes, so the San José Sheriff’s Department filed the missing persons report. Jennifer’s body was found ten days later in Huntington Beach, more than three hundred miles south from where she went missing.

Her eyes and lips had been sewn shut and her breasts had been removed. She had been brutally raped and repeatedly sodomized. Because of the overlapping bruises around her neck, it was obvious the perp had tortured her over the course of several days, strangling her to the point of passing out, but not enough to end her suffering.

Her body was covered with shallow cuts. Some, probably the first wounds, had become infected and gangrene set in. In the end she bled to death from the removal of both breasts.

She was alive, although just barely, when the sick bastard performed the operation. Cheryl informed Thomas that by the time she died, her body was more than likely emitting the odor of decaying flesh. That was why the guy decided to get rid of her, Thomas concluded.

Lividity proved she’d been lying in a prone position after death. A strange waffle-like pattern appeared on her upper torso, buttocks and the backs of her legs.

Semen was found in the vagina as well as the rectum, but the perp was not a secretor, meaning that he was part of the twenty percent of the populace that did not leave DNA in their saliva or other bodily fluids. Therefore Thomas couldn’t get any hits off CODIS, the Criminal Offense DNA Indexing System.

He wondered if the perp knew this. How else could one explain why the guy didn’t care that he’d left sperm in the victim’s body when everything else he had done proved he was nothing less than a pro? The body had been thoroughly washed with bleach from head to toe. No fibers, skin cells or hair for them to find. Thomas sensed this guy was too good to be an amateur; now he was certain the perp had killed before. But where? And how many times?

It took Thomas over a week to find Jennifer’s 2001 red Toyota Corolla. After he came up empty from the APB on her car, he had to resort to calling all the towing companies between Huntington Beach and San Francisco. He finally found the vehicle in an impound lot in Fremont.

It had been abandoned on I-5 with a flat tire not fifty feet from a highway call box. A clean cut was found in between the tread. It was deliberate. Most likely the guy put it there himself, then followed the girl until the flat made her pull over. If it were night, there would be no way for her to know she was being followed on the busy interstate.

Thomas checked the records; no calls had been made from the callbox since the Tuesday before, then not again until another four days after Jennifer’s car had been discovered. The perp was probably on her before she knew what was happening, pretending to be a Good Samaritan.

No evidence was found in the car, no sign of a struggle. Her overnight bag and purse were found in the trunk. Her wallet lay in the glove box; it still held fifty dollars. So robbery was not a motive. With no fingerprints or evidence to go on, Thomas was forced to move on to other cases.

But the image of Jennifer’s mutilated body haunted him. It crept into his thoughts when he least expected it, taking a shower or simply driving his car. But nights were the worst, and sleep proved elusive. It was the most disturbing case he had worked so far. Of course he’d seen plenty of dead bodies in his career, but this particular one was especially obscene.

His ringing cell snapped him out of his thoughts.

“Thomas, here.”

“Where the hell are you?” came the familiar bark of Captain Harris. “I expected you back at the station an hour ago. When you get here, I want you to come straight to my office. You got that?”

“Yes, sir, I’ll be right there.”

The line went dead.

Thomas reached into the top left drawer of his desk and pulled out his electric shaver. He ran it across his face haphazardly, then dropped it back in the drawer and stood.

He walked out of his office and strolled across the bullpen as if he didn’t have a care in the world. As he opened the door, the captain looked up in astonishment.

“What the—”

“I got here as soon as I could, sir,” he said with a smile before the captain could finish his sentence.

“Sit down, smartass.”

The captain reminded Thomas of a bulldog: short, bald, and stocky.

Captain Harris took a deep breath and looked at him seriously. “Thomas, I want you to start seeing the department psychiatrist.”

“What the fuck!” That was the last thing he expected him to say. “I don’t need the services of a shrink, thank you very much.”

“Really.” His voice dripped with sarcasm. “Well, you look like shit warmed over. Your suits are always wrinkled, your eyes are bloodshot, and it looks like you’ve been shaving with a weed whacker. Most importantly, I don’t feel I can count on you anymore. You’re like a loaded gun ready to go off at any minute.” The captain stood and began pacing.

Look who’s talking,
Thomas thought.

“You walk around with a permanent hangover, and it’s evident you’re not sleeping.”

“Show me one detective in the department that
does
get a full night’s sleep, and I’ll show you one that’s not doing his job. It’s not a luxury I can afford. It happens to go with the territory.”

“Oh, bullshit. You know damned well what I’m talking about. You’ve got to get it together. I need you sharp. You’re no good to anyone like this, least of all the department.” The captain came around and sat on the edge of the desk in front of him, his voice softened. “Look, I’ve given you a lot of slack, but it’s been almost two years. You need to get it together.”

“But Captain, I—”