The Feeder (22 page)

Chapter 1

The phone rang. A man’s voice said, “Samuel Thompson?”

“Who wants to know?”

“I think you and I need to meet, Sam.”

“Oh really?” I said, “And just who the fuck are you? I’m straight, by the way.”

“We need to discuss your little vacation to Los Angeles last year.”

My heart thudded in my chest. For a moment I was speechless.

“Where would you like to meet?” I replied finally.

“How about Stanley Park? Prospect Point.”

“When?”

“How’s seven o’clock sound?”

“Seven it is.”

Click.

I slumped back in my La-Z-Boy chair with a heavy sigh. Camille, the Maltese dog named for my late sister, raised her head from my lap and looked up at me. I stroked her silky white fur thoughtfully. I didn’t know who the hell this guy was but somehow he knew I had been in Los Angeles the previous year. How much else did he know about the events that had transpired during my time in LA? I had slaughtered four men in cold blood in my quest to avenge my sister’s murder and gotten away with it. All of the cases were closed and it was believed that one Detective Caleb Barton was responsible for all of the murders prior to his ‘accidental’ death by drug and alcohol overdose.

Now some asshelmet had phoned me out of the blue and he knew something about my visit to LA. I would meet him to find out what he knew. I hoped against hope that I wouldn’t be forced to kill again.

* * *

At seven o’clock the seawall near Prospect Point was quiet except for an occasional jogger or strolling couple. A figure stood, silhouetted against the setting April sun, presumably waiting for me. I approached tentatively, feeling the comforting bulge of my hunting knife sheathed against the small of my back. I would kill him if necessary but I’d have to try to get him to a more private place.

He stepped forward when he saw me; clearly he recognized me.

But how?

“Sam,” he said.

“You already know that.”

“John Pfeiffer, LAPD.”

I tried to keep my breathing slow and calm but I was sure he could hear my heart hammering in my chest and the flush that rose to my cheeks was impossible to stop.

“What do you want with me?”

“Don’t panic. I’m not here to arrest you. I was Caleb Barton’s partner up until his death.”

“Caleb who?”

“Don’t play stupid. You and I both know who Caleb was and what he did. I became his partner after his other partner was dismissed for misconduct. Internal affairs placed me with Barton because we suspected he was involved in criminal activity. But you already knew that, didn’t you Sam?”

I nodded hesitantly.

“Before we go any further, there’s something you need to see.”

He handed me a tablet with a video clip loaded. I clicked Play.

The video was a series of clips from several different camera angles; obviously security footage. I recognized the setting as well as all of the people in the video.

In the first clip, a blonde woman dressed in black shorts, stockings and knee-high stiletto boots slashed a man’s face behind a bar, then drove the knife into his eye. The woman was identical to my late sister Camille.

In the second clip, a black-haired woman knelt before a man and began to give him a blowjob. About halfway through she suddenly jumped to her feet and ran away. The man leapt to his feet, furious, with the black wig clenched in his hand. He began to chase her and she nimbly evaded him. It was the same woman as the one in the first clip. The video cut to another angle, which showed her administering several injections to the man’s neck.

The woman was me, disguised as my twin sister. The men in the video were Louis and Caleb Barton, two brothers I had murdered in the same Los Angeles apartment.

I stopped the video. I’d seen enough. I handed the tablet back to Pfeiffer.

“What do you want from me?” I asked.

“That’s what we’re here to discuss,” he said. “By the way, that was security camera footage. Do you really think guys who were in the business those two were in wouldn’t have a video surveillance system? I was first on the scene of Caleb Barton’s death and I confiscated the footage so nobody else would see it.”

“I don’t get it. Why would you do that?” I asked.

“Because,” he told me, “you did what none of us were able to pull off. Caleb was slippery. We knew he was pimping and we suspected his involvement in a number of murders that he himself was in charge of investigating. But he would have walked. We had nothing on him. He was first on the scene in each case and he contaminated every crime scene with his own DNA so no matter what forensics found it wouldn’t stand up in court. As his partner, I was hoping to get close enough to him to catch him when he messed up but he was always a step ahead. You singlehandedly took out a guy that everyone on the street was too afraid of to testify against.” He leaned on the railing and looked out over the water. “In one way, I was a little pissed that an ordinary guy from Canada came along and did my job for me. On the other hand, I couldn’t help but admire you, Sam. You were willing to go to any lengths necessary to get your man. You would have made a helluva cop.”

My father would have been proud to hear him say that
, I thought.

“So you’ve got me. I did it. But you know as well as I do that he deserved what he got. That fucker killed my sister. Did you see her?” an old familiar rage began to boil up inside my chest at the memory of Camille, slumped on the bathroom floor in a shitty hotel room, clutching a bloody towel to her chest because her nipples had been sliced off and shoved into her mouth. Her throat had been cut so deeply that her head nearly fell off. Caleb Barton was the man responsible and I had hunted him down and given him the death sentence he deserved.

Pfieffer shook his head sadly. “Yes. I saw her. I’m sorry for your loss. Caleb and I were the ones who found her, after he reported receiving an anonymous tip. Convenient, huh? He walked right in there and touched her with his bare hands – something he knew better than to do. I remember giving him shit for contaminating the scene. Bastard. He knew exactly what he was doing.”

“So you know what I did and why I did it,” I said. “You have enough evidence to put me away for life. But you said you weren’t here to arrest me. Why not?”

“Because,” he said, “your job isn’t finished yet. You believe you killed the man known as The Feeder. You haven’t. He is still out there and he is still killing, and worse.”

“What could be worse than murder?” I wondered aloud.

He sighed. “The ones who died are some of the lucky ones. Sure, Caleb killed a few, but he was mostly in recruitment. He had an accomplice, and that’s the guy we were really after. Caleb was our only connection to him. We knew that Caleb was sending him girls. We just needed to catch them together but like I said, they were slippery. Unfortunately, when you killed Caleb you cut off our only connection to our prime suspect. We need to find him, Sam. Our methods have failed. I need your expertise.”

I shook my head. “Nope. I don’t know what you think I can do to help. I’m no detective. I went to LA to find my sister and bring her home and instead I caused her death by interfering. My interference also caused the death of some poor schmuck at the White Surf Motel. The only thing he did wrong was rent the wrong motel room. I’m no help. All I do is fuck things up.”

He held up the tablet. “I would say that the existence of this video makes you my bitch. This little goody can put you away for life, and you know what they do to pretty boys in prison.”

“Fuck you!” I spat. “If it’s blackmail you’re after, name your price. I have money.”

“I don’t want money, Sam. I want you. You can help me catch this asshole. Believe me, when you learn a little more about him you’re going to want to help me.”

Fed Up ~
Coming in 2014!

~*~

Preview:

Avenging Annabelle

Chapter 1 ~ The Casket

Jim dug in the dark of night, sweat dripping from his brow in spite of the brisk autumn air. His feet slipped and slopped in the mud.

“Whatcha doin’, Daddy?” came the small voice from behind him.

He ignored her and kept digging. She repeated the question. “Whatcha doin’, Daddy?”

“You know what I’m doing,” he panted without hesitating in his work. “I’m doing what needs to be done.”

He was inside the hole now, about six feet down, standing in several inches of water and liquid muck. He drove the shovel downward once more and heard a dull thunk as it finally hit something more solid than the earth. He dug carefully around the object, finally putting the shovel aside and moving the rest of the earth away from it with his hands.

He groped in the dark until he found the handles once again and ran a rope through them, tying it securely. The other end of the rope was anchored to the bumper of his pickup truck. Using the rope to pull himself up, he climbed, slipping and scrambling, out of the hole. Some of the dirt loosened by his boots made a small landslide into the hole behind him. He turned around and shone his flashlight down into the hole, worry creasing his brow. Good. It wasn’t buried.

Phew. Now let’s see if this thing will move
.

He wrapped the rope around his hands, wedged his boot behind a rock and heaved, weary muscles shaking from the effort and the residual effects of the adrenaline that had flown liberally through his system just a few hours earlier. Just when he thought he might have to use the truck to pull it up, he felt some give on the rope and pulled harder. It was coming. He dug his heels into the dirt and pulled one more time, grunting from the effort and dragged the small casket up out of the grave.

The casket was about a foot shorter than an adult-sized one – just the right size for a child about six or seven years old. He avoided looking at it and immediately went about the business at hand, angrily yanking the blanket-wrapped bundle from the bed of the pickup. The man’s head bounced hard off the tailgate and thudded to the gravel below with a satisfying crunch but Jim didn’t care; he continued to roughly drag it across the ground, as a farmer might drag a bag of manure, until he reached the edge of the hole. Jim paused a moment to catch his breath and stared down at the body of the man he’d killed just a few hours earlier, allowing the searing hatred to burn freely through his veins.

Annabelle was sitting on top of the small coffin, hugging her knees to her chin, her large amber eyes gazing at him intently.

“I don’t know if you should do that, Daddy,” she whispered.

Ignoring her once again, he delivered a solid kick to the tightly bound body with the steel toe of his heavy logger’s boot. He could have sworn he heard a grunting noise coming from beneath the blankets.

He kicked the body again, muttering, “Fuck you!” as he booted it over the edge into the hole. The corpse tumbled down into the darkness, landing with a satisfying smack into the liquid mud below. Jim thought he heard further sounds of movement after it landed, but it was probably just the loose dirt falling back into the hole.

As he shoveled the dirt back into the grave he replayed the evening’s events in his mind. Had he really killed the man? It seemed so surreal, remembering his confrontation with the monster who had murdered his Annabelle. A blow to the skull with a ball-peen hammer usually does it, all right. The man’s skull had caved in like a paper lantern when the hammer hit its mark but he had already been knocked unconscious from being kicked repeatedly in the head by the logger’s caulk boots that Jim was wearing.

The severe injuries to the man’s face made him unrecognizable, but that’s generally what happens when someone stomps on your face with the spiked soles of a pair of caulks. The skin of his face had been mangled beyond recognition, looking more like ground beef than a person’s face. His nose was squashed flat and all of his front teeth had been knocked out. His face had a lopsided look to it from his cheekbone being caved further in on one side than on the other. His lower lip was shredded, dangling off to one side like a limp slice of raw liver, exposing his bloodied, toothless gums.

When the hammer had hit its mark, the man had simply twitched a few times then stopped moving altogether. It wasn’t likely that he’d even felt that final blow.

Oh well
, Jim thought.
Tough shit, you fucking murdering prick. Sucks to be you, doesn’t it?
Besides, even if the man was somehow still alive, the blankets were securely bound with duct tape, so it wasn’t as if the brain-dead bastard was going to manage to free himself before he suffocated. He’d had it coming, the filthy child killer. Now the fucker was in the cold, muddy ground where he belonged in place of Jim’s sweet, precious Annabelle.

Annabelle was still sitting in the same spot, perched on top of the muddy casket that held her body.

“What now, Daddy?”