The Monster Within (12 page)

Brushing my teeth as I drive, I spit out the window and rinse my mouth out with water, smiling at the rearview mirror before I pull up to the address that Owens sent me. Once more, Kendall Stein lives in a very nice apartment and I’m left wondering if anyone in this city even lives in houses anymore or if I’m one of the few remaining house dwellers. Her apartment is deep in the wealthier side of town and one of those apartment buildings that’s built on top of three stories of shopping plazas and restaurants. I could only dream of living in one of these places. Hell, I wonder if any of them come down in their bath robes to get a carton of milk or something. I would, all the time.

When I find the apartment I’m looking for on an enormous registry hanging on the wall, I press the buzzer, hoping that she’ll give me clearance to the elevator. There’s no names, nothing to tell anyone who lives on what floor. It’s the kind of elevator that goes up and opens onto a small common area with four doors to choose from. I’ve been in the exact, identical building across the street once. A guy killed his maid after he found out that she was stealing from him. He was a paranoid, reclusive type. Not that that justifies him doing it or anything.

I press the buzzer again.

“Hello?” a voice asks over the intercom and I pull my sunglasses off, as if she can see me. I stuff them into my breast pocket.

“Hello,” I clear my throat away from the microphone. “My name is Detective King, I was hoping that you’d be willing to answer a few questions for me.”

“Could you hold your badge up to the camera?” The woman sounds distraught, like she’s been bawling for days now, even before all of this happened. I look around, searching for where the camera is. There’s a small green light on next to a glossy, black hemisphere, so I reach into my pocket and hold up my badge for her to see. “No, sir, its right in front of your face,” she coaches me. I quickly hold the ID up to the camera that is apparently right in front of my face and wait for a second. “Okay, come on up,” she sniffs quietly before the elevator doors open.

“Thank you,” I say before entering the elevator. The button next to the number seventeen is illuminated and I press it, waiting for only a moment until the doors close softly. The elevator looks nicer than any elevator that I’ve ever been in, except for the one across the street. But honestly, I don’t remember theirs being so nice. Maybe they’ve got a leg up on their sister building.

When I reach the seventeenth floor, the doors open with a soft ding, ending the concerto that’s been softly playing for my listening pleasure. I step out onto a faux marble flooring that is pretty hard to decipher as fake. All the doors look exactly the same and there’s a tiny, ivory column between every white door frame with a potted orchid sitting on it in full bloom. The building maintenance crew here must be really good to keep so many orchids alive. I reach out and touch one of the petals, making sure it’s real. It is.

One of the doors opens and a man steps out. He’s the soft, nerdy kind of looking guy that I don’t expect to see in a place like this. Rich boys usually have an entitled, self-important air to them that makes me want to kick them in the nuts. This guy looks like he should be serving espressos in the coffee shop sixteen floors down. He looks at me and gives a sort of solemn, sad smile that makes me wonder even more who the hell he is.

“Hi,” he greets me awkwardly. “Kendall is inside. She’s not taking the news very well.”

“I’m sorry, who are you?” I lift an eyebrow, wondering if this is my mystery killer standing right here.

“Oh, Mason Gunn.” The guy sticks out a hand and I take it immediately, gripping his hand like a vice. “I’m Kendall’s boyfriend.”

“Oh.” I stare at him, wondering if I go into Kendall’s apartment, am I going to find her dead in a pool of her own blood and this asshole racing down the elevator to escape me. “You mind showing me in?”

“Sure.” Mason takes a step back into the apartment and while his back is to me, I flip the strap off of my Beretta. “Kendall, babe, that detective is here.” He vanishes into the hallway. I make my way slowly after him. I can hear movement inside, and it’s clearly another person. Is this going to be a really bad day?

“Okay, babe, you’re late,” I hear a woman’s voice. I can hear them kissing. “I love you,” she says to him in a way that makes me wish Katherine had said it in that way to me at least once. We were never that lovey to each other.

“Love you.” He sounds as smitten as a poet. “See you soon.” He turns and looks at me, my hand well away from my pistol. “I’ll give you two some privacy.”

“Thanks,” I nod to him as he leaves.

Waiting for me in the apartment is a woman that I would never leave alone in another man’s company. She’s wearing a nightgown that looks exactly like it does on all the magnificently lit Victoria’s Secret posters in the windows at the mall. But I highly doubt someone like her shops at somewhere so pedestrian as Victoria’s Secret. She’s got to be a boutique, secret Parisian fashion shopper. Her legs are sneaking out of the bottom of the black nightgown and it looks more like lingerie to me than sleep wear. She slips out of her short, thin, gray robe and stands up from the couch to greet me. She looks like a woman who needs to be respected, but also treated like a woman. I shake her hand and stare into her piercing, azure eyes. Locks of her long, black hair hang down from a messy bun that’s barely containing her mane. She smiles sweetly at me, but it’s a hurt smile. Her eyes are red and puffy and even without make-up, she’s beyond a ten.

“I’m Detective Steven King,” I introduce myself.

“Like the writer,” she smiles. God, I’ve heard that more times than I can count and I swear that one day I’m going to pistol whip someone who wisecracks about it. I keep it hidden pretty well, how annoying it is, but she catches on pretty quickly, even without my hints. “Sorry, you must hear that all the time.”

“Not as often as you’d think,” I lie.

“Sorry, I’m such a mess.” She leads me to the living room where I drop down onto a chair that doesn’t even look like it was designed for people. I worry for a moment whether it even is a chair, or if I just sat on something decorative. “Poor Mason has been so patient with me.”

“I’m sure it’s understandable,” I shrug.

“What can I do to help?” she asks me with sad eyes. “Jenny was such an amazing person and there’s no way this was her idea.”

“Why do you say that?” I furrow my brow. Does she so eagerly and obviously not think it was a suicide either? Or did Owens and his goons get to her and plant this in her mind.

“Because there was nothing wrong with her,” Kendall says with a firm, unswaying tone in her voice. “I saw Jenny every day at ten in the morning and we texted each other all through the day. I swear that I spent more nights with her over here than with Mason. That girl was a rock. Nothing ever got to her and I made sure that she never felt like a pet hanging out with me. Some people get insecure when they start spending time with me. They think there’s a gap, but Jenny wasn’t that way. She was very confident in herself.”

“From what we’ve discovered,” I reach into my breast pocket and pull out a notepad, “She recently broke up with a Charles Murphy?”

“Yeah,” she nods and wipes a tear from her eye. “That asshole cheated on her with his boss’s assistant. She wasn’t taking it well, but it wasn’t like she was moping around. She was getting back out there. She didn’t want to linger on the past.”

“From what her neighbors said,” I look at Kendall’s leg and resist the urge to reach out and run my hand up her inner thigh and finding what treasures lurk beneath, “Jenny was home with a different guy every night.”

“Recently,” Kendall nods slowly, as if she’s ashamed of it. “I tried to stop her from behaving recklessly, but she was hurt. She wanted to get back at Charlie, so she started sleeping around. She was coming around, though. The last time I saw her, I pulled her off some creepy guy in the bathroom.”

“Do you have a description of him?” I grab a pen from my pocket.

“Average height, skinny, bleach blond hair.” She leans back on the couch and I look up at her flat stomach under her silky gown. “He dresses like a total sleaze ball and I’m pretty sure he’s selling drugs. We were at The Office and every time I go there, I see him lurking around.”

“I’ll check him out.” I finish writing down the note. “Was he the guy she went home with?”

“I don’t think so.” Kendall rubs her forehead. “She was checking out some guy at the bar. He was tall, lean build, dirty blond hair, a short, stubble beard that guys are all about right now. He was wearing a gray three-piece. He was handsome. Actually, he was an upgrade to all the others she’d been sleeping around with.”

“Maybe the bartender will know him.” I write down the guy’s description.

“They’re saying that it was a suicide.” Kendall looks at me with red eyes. “Do you think it was a suicide?”

I’m hesitant to answer that. According to Whitman, Jenny killed herself, but I’m not sure that there wasn’t someone else in the room whispering in her ear. But, what if I’m wrong? If I’m wrong and I tell her that I think it was a homicide and I turn out to be a dumbass, then she’s going to be pissed and hurt even more. I look at her and feel a knot twisting inside of my stomach. “I’m not sure yet,” I tell her. “Some things aren’t adding up.”

“I know that she wouldn’t do this,” Kendall pleads with me.

God, I want to slip her out of that gown and just look at her. She would hate it if she knew that was what I was thinking about right now, but I can’t help it. I wonder if she still has the slutty schoolgirl outfit. That would be a little too perfect, actually. I look her in the eyes and swear to her. “I’ll do everything that I can,” I promise her and that’s the truth.

“Thank you,” she answers.

She suddenly rises and I rise with her. Rushing to a table near the door, she grabs a pen and writes something down on a notepad and hands it to me. I take it from her and look at the seven numbers and wonder how many men out there would kill for this phone number. How many men would kill Mason just to get that number?

“Call me if you find out anything?” she says softly.

I feel like reaching out, pulling her close, and planting my lips on her soft, crimson lips, kissing her deeply. I resist again. “You got it,” I tell her.

“Thank you,” she says as I turn to the door.

Standing in the elevator as it slowly takes me back from the heavenly home of the gorgeous beauty named Kendall Stein, I feel something vibrate in my pocket. I reach down, expecting a text from someone at the precinct. I stare at the phone with a cold sense of terror in my stomach. Somehow, between the time I entered Kendall’s apartment and left, lost in that haze of information download and extreme horniness, Owens called me twice and left a voicemail. There’s no way he would call twice and leave a voicemail if he was just trying to contact me to find out what news I’ve discovered. Something’s happened.

I’ve seen a lot of places in this city that remind me of Whispering Hills. It’s a trailer park that is its own contained form of a ghetto. A miniature society built within a stitched together network of self-sustaining, governing miniature societies that make up the outskirts of the city, surrounding all the happy, well-to-do and the rich people. This is where the angry, broken, beaten, and worn go to hide out for the rest of their days. It’s the dark part of the city that everyone avoids or just passes through if they have to. No one likes these places, especially me. I’ve spent too much time in dusty, hot places like Whispering Hills, leaning over dead bodies. This is where you get shot because you looked wrong at your neighbor.

I pull up behind a squad car that’s parked right in front of an old, sun-faded billboard with a smiling, happy cowboy over the name of the trailer park. I wonder if this place is inhabited with smiling, happy cowboys or if that’s false advertising. I stop the car and wish that I was back questioning Kendall Stein. At least there was aesthetic appeal all around there. I could admire the people and the décor. Here, I’m stuck with dust, tumbleweeds, and strange looking people who gave up on life long before the race really started. I step out of my Shelby and wonder if I’m going to be missing my tires when I come back.

A uniform steps toward me and holds up his hand, I flash him my ID. He looks at it thoroughly and head deeper into the trailer park. People are standing out on their makeshift porches looking south to where a tangle of cop cars are parked and yellow caution tape is stretched out in a perimeter to keep prying eyes away. There’s a woman with curlers still in her hair and in a nightgown that looks more like a tarp she’d purchased at some big chain store. She looks at me and I try really hard to figure out who still wears curlers in their hair. In fact, who still lives in a trailer park? She looks at me with her toad-like face and I give her a nod. She just stares at me, as if she thinks I can’t see her. I give up trying to communicate with the locals. Scotty, there are zero signs of life down here.

I pass a uniform who is interviewing a man with a mullet and a denim jacket with the sleeves ripped off so that his tattooed arms can bask in the glorious light of the sun. He looks at me with a sunken-in, worn looking face before he spits to the side and starts answering the uniform’s questions again, pointing back toward the entrance of the trailer park and across the street to a red and white gas station. I look back at the trailer I’m heading for and I catch the sight of a beautiful, blonde girl being questioned by a lady cop, since ladies generally begin gabbing. I never understood why women had to talk to women. It seems stupid.

The girl is something that screams out to my carnal, base desires and I immediately look away from her as she turns and looks at me. I pretend to be overly interested in a trailer near me and keep walking. I can’t get distracted here like I was with Kendall. I need to be focused and on top of my game. This could be what saves me from the wrath of Mendez. Or, this could be the final nail in my elusive, avoidance coffin. I can feel the girl’s eyes on me as I approach the trailer. The porch is covered in uniforms who are taking notes and discussing what they found inside with one another.