The Christmas Killer (26 page)

Jake was barely inside the detective bureau when Sara came to find him. She was pale.

‘Detective Austin,’ she whispered, ‘it’s Johnny …’

Would this guy ever learn? Would Sara? Just because there wasn’t a fresh kill overnight didn’t mean Jake could waste his morning on this lunatic. He had taken the dressing-down from Gail, and part of him knew she had been right to give it. But he was damned if he was going to provide a babysitting service for every sicko in Littleton.

‘Deal with it yourself, Sara,’ he said, making to move past her. ‘I need to—’

‘Please, Jake.’

There was something in her voice and a look in her eyes. No mischievous twinkle suggesting this was another prank. This was different. Jake got up and followed her to the front desk, thinking that maybe Johnny’s constant appearances at the station had worn Sara down.

He was also thinking that, if Johnny tried to lay claim
to the femur, he might just beat the crazy bastard over the head with it.

At the front desk Johnny stood with his hands thrust into the pockets of a purple bathrobe which, even from ten feet away, radiated a stench of cheap cigarettes, piss and BO. His shoulders were hunched, and the skin around his eyes formed two deep pools of black. He looked like he hadn’t slept last night – and maybe not the night before either. But he wasn’t twitching today. He was standing still, glaring. There was something in his eyes that gave Jake a momentary prickle of unease. There was a focus there – a kind of clarity in Johnny’s hostility.

But now was not the time for his bullshit.

‘I thought I told you I didn’t want to see you here any more,’ he said. But he kept his voice even. He wasn’t going to overdo it like he had on Monday.

‘I did it.’

‘I’m sure you did. Whatever it is, it can wait until your next therapy session. I understand you’re getting treatment from Gail Greene. She’s very good.’

Jake came from behind the desk and approached Johnny. Now was the time to escort him out and put an end to this mess. He reminded himself to do it gently – he did not want to give Gail Greene another reason to come back to the station and call him an asshole.

But Johnny took a step back. ‘I did it,’ he shouted. ‘You challenged me, and I did it.’ He took a hand out of
his bathrobe pocket and held it up. The hand was red with blood. ‘See?’ he shouted triumphantly. He began to pull his other hand out of the other pocket.

Jake reacted instinctively, pulling his gun from his shoulder holster and bringing it up in a two-handed shooter’s pose, aiming right at Johnny.

‘Take your hand out very slowly and raise both hands over your head,’ he bellowed.

The shout brought out a number of cops, uniformed and plain clothes. They saw Jake with his gun drawn and reacted instantly. Within seconds, five men had guns trained on Johnny Cooper.

‘I did it this time! I
do
have the guts.’ He said it calmly, and he wasn’t moving. Nutcase or not, he had enough sense not to draw a shower of lead on himself.

‘On your knees, Johnny – now!’ shouted Jake.

Slowly Johnny lowered himself until he was kneeling. Both his hands were covered in fresh blood. As he knelt, his robe swung open. He was naked underneath except for a vest, which was also red with blood. Not his own – there was far too much for him to be walking and talking …

Then his face seemed to cave in, and his body shrank.

‘My God! What have I done? I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I only did it because he told me to. It’s what
he
wanted.’

Johnny was pointing two blood-coated fingers at Jake.

Johnny was in a holding cell, cuffed. He had gone quietly, saying nothing more beyond a few muttered apologies and reiterations that he had been ‘challenged’ to take a life. He was on the chair, but curled up like a sitting fetus, and he was rocking gently, crying softly to himself. Back and forth. Back and forth.

‘We need to check out his place,’ said Mills. ‘See if there’s anything there that ties him to the others.’

‘He’s not the serial,’ said Jake. ‘There’s just no way. His statements contradicted—’

‘No shit,’ said Mills. ‘But he
has
committed a murder – from the looks of it, a messy one. The press is gonna be all over it, finding links. We have to follow it up, even if it’s just to rule it out.’

Jake nodded.

‘Two cars have already gone out,’ Mills continued. ‘They’re holding one for us. Are you OK?’

Was he? It was too early to say.

Ten minutes later they were on skid row. Johnny Cooper lived in a three-storey apartment block in one of the roughest areas of town. It was the kind of place
that should have eaten a man like Johnny alive but it probably did more to feed the beast of his dementia.

They pulled up behind the two black and whites. Three of the cops had gone inside, but one had stayed out with the cars. Mills locked the doors, something Jake hadn’t seen him do before. It was that kind of neighbourhood.

They walked into the apartment block. There was no intercom system. The door pushed open, the lock broken. The cops were on the first floor. Jake and Mills walked up the unlit stairwell, which stank of urine and worse.

The landing looked like a refuse tip. There were cans and bottles everywhere, with plastic bags, old cereal boxes and dirty nappies too. More worryingly the ground was littered with needles, some broken and rusty, some newer. Jake also spotted a few used condoms.

‘Classy place,’ said Mills.

The door was closed.

‘You’re up,’ said Jake.

‘No need. I took these when we searched him.’ Mills waved a bunch of keys in the air. ‘You wouldn’t remember; you were pretty out of it back at the station.’

Was I?

Jake felt slightly numb as he watched Mills put the key in and turn it.

As soon as the door cracked open, new smells wafted out to mingle with those of the fetid corridor – stale onions, burned toast, vomit and a filthy carpet – but the
unmistakable smell of a dead body lorded over them all.

‘He really did it this time,’ muttered Mills.

Jake tried to meet his partner’s gaze and found that he couldn’t.

He walked into the tiny apartment. Two doors led off the dual living and bedroom. They were both ajar. One opened into a tiny kitchen, the other into a toilet. Jake deliberately slowed his breathing and tried to get into the moment.

Tried to get into the fucked-up head of Johnny Cooper.

He started with the crummy sofa. Shreds of tobacco on one of the cushions.

You were sitting here. Rolling a smoke. The one thing you had, your confessions, had been taken away from you. You felt vulnerable and alone. You didn’t like it. You sat there, thinking and thinking, getting angrier and angrier.

Jake let his eyes roam over the room. What happened next? A chronically messy bum living in squalor – it was hard to spot what was out of place in such a man’s living room. But Jake saw it – an unlit hand-rolled cigarette on top of the ancient television.

There was a knock at the door. So you got up to answer it. You don’t get many visitors and, this time, you were feeling like you needed someone. Someone to talk to. So you got up – quickly. You put the smoke on the TV.

But who’s at the door? Who would knock on
your
door? What does Johnny the Snitch have that anyone else would want? Not money. Or maybe it
was
money. A useless smoke-hound, a mooch, always with his hand out even to other people who everyone knows have nothing.

Was that who made the mistake of knocking on your door? Someone worse off than yourself. Someone who, if anything, would be missed even less. Someone asking to borrow a few dollars, just for a couple of days – he swore he’d pay you back just as soon as he had it.

You were angry. Mad as hell. You didn’t have the cash, but you told him you did.

You invited him inside.

Jake looked back at the cluttered living room. Not there – it was a small space, but to a man about to commit his first murder it would look too open. His victim, whoever he was, would have space to move, furniture to hide behind – any number of inanimate objects to use as a makeshift weapon.

The living room just wasn’t practical – and, besides, Jake knew that, had the murder taken place in the living room, the place would be awash with red, as Johnny had been when he turned up at the station.

He also knew that the toilet was far too small for Johnny’s purposes.

That left the kitchen. Jake hadn’t seen it yet, but he knew instinctively the body would be there, coated in whatever blood had not spattered Johnny.

He was a man – can’t imagine too many women would come here. And any who would, would almost certainly come with a friend. He was a man, a man who was jumpy, just like you. Maybe strung out. He’d have to be, to not be able to look you in the eye and see that there was something different there tonight, something
wrong.

You didn’t do it straight away. You
decided
straight away, but it took you a few minutes to wind yourself up for it. So you asked him to stay in the living room for a moment while you got the money. He probably thought you were afraid he was here to scope out your place, find where your stash was hidden. So he played along, stayed in the living room. And you went into …

Jake followed his instincts – and his nose – and walked towards the small room on the left. The kitchen. The smell grew stronger. He stopped at the doorway, letting his mind continue churning.

Of course it was the kitchen. That’s where the knives are. And you wanted to show me that you had ‘the guts’. So it had to be a knife – it had to be messy,
bloody
. You ducked into the kitchen for a moment, and he sat down on the filthy couch, thinking nothing of it.

You breathed in and breathed out, gathering yourself. Then you made your decision. ‘Here it is,’ you called out. You knew he’d come to you, unsuspecting – all he’s thinking about is the cash. He doesn’t think it’s weird that you suddenly suggest he comes into the kitchen.

As he bunched his hand into his jacket sleeve and reached for the kitchen door, Jake’s breath caught in his throat. But was he simply apprehensive at seeing yet one more dead body in Littleton, or was he imagining this scenario just a little
too
clearly?

The kitchen door opened outwards. In Jake’s
experience this was often the case in poorly designed shitty houses like these. It gave him the sensation that he was pulling up a curtain on the scene within.

Mills groaned and turned away. Jake felt like doing the same, but he didn’t let himself – this was his doing. A weak bulb cast its lazy light over a tiled kitchen floor that may once have been white but was now a grisly medley of piss-yellow and blood-crimson. The yellow was a sign of Johnny Cooper’s neglect, his years of living in squalor.

The crimson was his single moment of utter frenzy.

Jake crouched in the doorway, staring at the body of Johnny’s victim. He lay face down on the tiles, his face – black, weathered and with flecks of grey in his unkempt beard – for ever set in a mask of pain and shock. From the ragged dogshit-stained boots all the way up to the torn tracksuit bottoms and faded black denim jacket, Jake knew that his initial assessment had been correct. A smoke-hound – someone so deep in the gutter that they would come to Johnny Cooper for a handout.

‘That sick sonofabitch,’ said Mills, peering over Jake to get a closer look at the corpse. ‘Did he jack off?’

Jake followed Mills’s finger. A splashing of grey-white stain was on the collar of the denim jacket. Standing up, he leaned as far as he dared into the kitchen. It was definitely semen on the victim’s jacket. Jake turned and looked at Mills, who – for the first time since he had known the man – wore a look of absolute outrage.

‘Did he jack off on the vic?’ Mills asked again.

Jake shook his head. ‘Gail Greene indicated that Johnny may have presented with symptoms of necrophiliac tendencies—’

‘Don’t fucking dress it up, Austin,’ said Mills, his voice hiding none of his exasperation.

‘No,’ said Jake. ‘He was wearing a robe, remember? Probably it came open, loose, during the attack. The euphoria of the moment, as he stood over the body, probably got the better of him.’

Jake didn’t need to say any more than that. Mills puffed out his cheeks and turned away. Jake stood beside him in the filthy living room. The place where Johnny Cooper had spent his last moments of freedom, stewing over insults Jake had thrown at him in the station.

Jake imagined Johnny sitting with his bloody hands – the ones he would later point at Jake – held in his lap, rocking back and forth on the couch, thinking to himself that he’d done it. He’d really done it.

Now the serial confessor had something to which he really could confess.

Jake suddenly felt sick.