The Monster Within (2 page)

“Owens, what the hell are you doing calling me?” I say in a tone that’s joking enough to surprise even myself. Owens and I had too many intertwined cases back in his day. It was hard not to like a detective who had the same ideals.

“Making sure you’re still alive,” Owens says in a hushed voice. “You got a case right now?”

“Just cleared one up, actually,” I answer, leaning back in my chair. The remnants of my old days were all contacting me from across the city. They’ve all caught word that I’m retiring and they won’t let me go without one last drink or meal. I’m more than willing to get a free round or burger off of people I haven’t seen in a while. “Why? You got something exciting for me?”

“I, well—.” The phone goes silent and I can feel a tickle in the back of my mind. This isn’t the sort of thing that I was expecting him to say. Two words, spaced out with a long pause at the end. “I’ve definitely got something. I think you should take a look at this.”

“Isn’t there a detective already at the scene?” I ask him, trying to remain light-hearted. If there’s a murder, then there should already be a detective on the scene. They notify dispatch and then they call up and the next name on the roster gets the case. So if Owens is asking me to come and check out a scene, then there should already be a detective there.

“There was,” Owens answers. I don’t like the sound of that. “Just… do you have a pen nearby? I want you to come have a look at this before they wrap this up.”

“Alright,” I answer. I guess that I owe him a favor or two from back in the day, even though I keep my ledger black. I don’t let others do favors for me. I don’t like owing people anything. But it’ll be nice to clear up something that Owens thinks I owe him. Or hey, best case scenario, he owes me a favor. He gives me the address and I scribble it down on the back of one of my own business cards. I hardly use these things. They’re mostly to hand out to witnesses who can’t remember shit. They end up in the gutter or in the trash more often than not. “Alright, give me some time. Don’t let them bag everything up.”

We all have our vices and I know for certain that I have three. At one point, when we’re young, we try to fight our demons. We have this naïve mentality that it’s us or them. We’re too stupid to accept our character flaws and to roll with them. We are what we are, and denying ourselves does nothing to save us. Salvation comes through adaptation, acceptance, and control. But for me, one of my demons has always been harder to control than the others.

The silver and black Shelby sticks out like a sore thumb amidst all the sedans and minivans that line the parking lot. It’s amazing what you can buy when money doesn’t go to your family, or bills, or savings for vacations or homes you’ll never have. For me, cars have always been a priority, since I first dropped my lead foot down on the accelerator and hit the open road. Unlocking the door and dropping into the custom leather interior, I fire up my beast and listen to it roar, the engine growls like a monster ready to destroy the city. There’s a warmth in my stomach and a rippling in whatever’s left of my heart as the engine fires up.

The city is silent beyond my engine and as I pull out of the precinct, I’m left with my interior and that’s it. The whole city melts away from me as I drive. I feel like an astronaut in space, orbiting the city, unable to contact the life below because of an impassable barrier. I might as well be on the far side of the moon. I don’t care about the people that walk by while I’m at a red light or those in the other cars. This city doesn’t need me. It will live on long after I’m gone, just like it survived long before I arrived in my new boots. With retirement on the horizon, everything seems flat, distant, and blurry. I’m ready to give up the watch. I’m ready to drop the shield.

The address Owens gave me is in the heart of town. It’s right in the middle of a bunch of apartments that were created for people who fancy themselves as artists, or at least people who were up and coming. No one dared to live inside of these architecturally peculiar structures unless they were part of the new order, the future of this city’s elites. They were still too wild, too busy, too spontaneous to be able to convince themselves of settling down and buying an excessive mansion. Here, they were at the golden age of their lives. When the future became too much for them, these academics, artists, and trust-fund babies would look back to their old apartments on this street and dream of those simpler days, unaware that this is the high life that most of the world can only dream of. People are ignorant. This is the sad reality of people. No one is ever happy with their lot. That much I’ve come to understand while on the job.

I pull up to the yellow tape, putting the raging beast to rest with a turn of a key. Looking around the outside of the building, I climb out and carefully close the door. There are no more gawkers or ghouls. There’s an ambulance waiting to take the body to the morgue. There must be a body if Owens decided to call me. He could have called anyone, but he decided to call me. I wonder what reason he has for picking me out of all the fucking child detectives at his disposal. I flash my badge at the nearest uniform and he holds up the tape for me. I cross under and I can’t help but feel like I’m making a mistake. It’s the same kind of feeling that cheaters describe feeling when they flirt with the cute secretary at their office, or a drug addict recalls before taking his first hit. Bad ideas send out ripples in the universe and when we accept them without thinking about the consequence, everything that follows is thrown back at us. No one makes us decide to take a step down the darker path. That’s all on us. That shit is no one’s burden but ours. Those of us who walk the darker path understand.

Everything in the apartment is exactly as I suspected the moment I got the address from Owens. There’s just something about these people that makes them all act like sheep. But the greatest irony is that they think they’re being unique or special. They’re all a bunch of indoctrinated rich kids, told that fashion trends are going this way or designs are going that way, so they follow suit, blindly. There’s nothing creative or innovative about it. If anything, it just makes them look dumber. I don’t care about the logic behind all of the victim’s decisions, all I care about is that it’s as ugly as a modern art display at the local gallery. What makes people decorate their homes like this? How do they go so far down the stupid path to think that this is beautiful?

The walls are a sort of beige that makes me think of a naked woman in the morning light. The floors are black tile, shiny enough that I see my reflection and it creeps me out. On the walls, there’s art that I don’t understand or comprehend in the slightest way. Call me a Philistine, but it’s worthless shit. Put that up next to Picasso and I’d use them both as toilet paper. There are modern, minimalist tables against the walls holding strange statues that just look like misshapen blobs. The whole place is as appealing as dog turds in your morning cereal. The furniture is awkward and uncomfortable looking. There’s nothing in this house to distinguish it as a home or unique to the person living here. I can’t look at the art and say “Oh yes, they smoked.” Or “Hmmm, looks like he was addicted to gambling.” No, it’s all pointless and without a fingerprint of a personality.

I feel like a loner crashing a party until I’m caught by the familiar sight of Bernie Owens. It’s strange seeing him in the black and silver uniform that I haven’t worn for ages. I know that I still have mine somewhere. It’s stuffed in the back of my wife’s old closet. His looks much better than mine. I doubt I could even fit into mine. But the thing that strikes me most about Owens is how much hair he’s lost. It’s not like he has a bald spot, but it’s definitely thinned. It’s dark enough that it’s obvious he’s using some sort of dye to keep it looking that way. He still sports the mustache that all the other boys back in the bull pen want to emulate. On Owens it looks at home, natural. Not like some kid glued the cat’s hair to his face. He’s still fit enough, but the beers are starting to take a toll on his gut.

“Glad you came,” Owens says as he reaches out for my hand. I take his and feel that his hands are still rough. He’s been working with them. It’s a strong grip that almost breaks mine, but it’s natural. It’s not like he’s trying to break my hand. He’s just a strong man.

“Yeah, no problem,” I say, brushing it off like it’s nowhere near as weird as it truly is. “You mind if I ask who the lead was?”

“Evans and Waters,” Owens answers as he leads me deeper into the house, past the uniforms who are packing up to get out. He leads me past a couple of the coroner’s boys who look at me with annoyance and frustration written across their smug faces. They’re stuck here, waiting for me. “Chin up, boys,” Owens growls at them before they’re officially behind us. “It’s just your job.”

Without a word about what’s happened, Owens leads me into a room that’s as unremarkable as everywhere else in the apartment. The only thing that sticks out is the black table against the switchback stairs that lead up to the apartment’s second floor. This room has high ceilings, which is the only feature I truly like about it. But it’s all ruined by the dead girl hanging on the wall. I look at her with immediate, morbid fascination. I’ve seen a lot of death, but I’ve never seen someone quite like the girl. I take a step forward and know exactly why Owens called me. He knows I’m a sucker for this kind of shit. He’s known me long enough to have an inkling about my weaknesses.

The first thing that catches my attention and holds it is the placing of the furniture. There is an enormous rusted metal cross hanging on the beige wall that serves as an overlook of the living room, or at least that’s what I’m assuming this room is. Directly below the old, fleur de lis cross is a black table that is holding a single red vase with two dozen white roses. It only takes me a second to count the roses. Yes, two dozen. But the roses have been painted in a horrifying Alice-esque fashion using the victim’s blood. The girl’s blood has dripped down onto the flowers, spilling across the table and pouring onto the floor. The puddle nearly blends in perfectly with the black, glossy floor. I look at the flowers, admiring how unnerved and disturbed they make me feel.

“Lola Maretti,” Owens introduces me to the woman. She is wearing a white dress that has been savagely torn and soiled by the blood running through her wounds. Her eyes are open, bloody locks of hair hanging in her eyes as she stares down at the floor with an agonizing look of remorse across her face. She wasn’t a particularly beautiful woman, but her method of ending her life has me puzzled. In death there is something serene about her, and her flesh, even torn, stands out like porcelain or silk that makes me believe she’s never seen the sun. I want to touch her skin to see if it’s as soft as it looks.

She has bound herself to the large, rustic cross with barbed wire. Hanging like some sort of human substitute for Christ. It looks like some sort of twisted art display, notably better than anything else in the apartment. Tendrils of barbed wire are wrapped around her ankles, her legs, her waist, stomach, armpits, and her left elbow and wrist. Obviously she used her right arm to bind her left arm. Her right arm hangs limp, blood running down from her pale arm and dripping from her fingertips. The weight of her body has knocked the cross off of many of its higher anchors. It is barely still connected to the wall and at any moment it looks like she’ll be coming down on her face. There’s enough blood to convince me that she bled out the moment her weight pulled that cross off the wall and jerked her at the sudden stop. A hundred tiny little barbs would have shot into her flesh, ripping into her and tearing her open. This is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.

“Any leads?” I press, putting my hands on my hips and taking a step forward to get a better look at the girl. They’ve dusted a lot of the house for fingerprints already. It looks like I’m late to the party. Evans and Waters have already combed over this place.

“They’re ruling it as a suicide,” Owens enlightens me.

I look at him as if this is a joke. I don’t care who you are, you don’t use barbed wire and a cross to kill yourself on display, no matter how much of an art nut or a lunatic you are. Guns are messy, but they’re quick and they’re pretty efficient. Jesus Christ, people, what about pills? Get a bottle of gin, some pills from your local dealer and have one last party. Why the fuck would anyone go through all of this trouble to just kill themselves? This doesn’t look like any kind of suicide I’ve even heard about and everyone has their weird bodies they talk about in the bull pen. Everyone has heard about so-and-so’s case where they found the victim on display like a marionette or holding their head in their lap.

“What’s their angle?” I ask Owens, not sure that I’m seeing what they saw.

“They found a suicide note with Lola’s fingerprints all over it, but no one else’s,” Owens informs me. “Apparently she was a bit of a reclusive artsy type. Also, there are no windows that open in the apartment, it’s entirely climate-controlled. You need a special code to get into the building and the moment the doors open, the cameras flip on and video whoever passes through the door. Also, there’s cameras running in the common area and on the staircase. There is no way anyone could break into this apartment without getting filmed, which means the killer had to have been in the building for a very long time since the only people who were in the building were her neighbors across the way. The cameras have them entering the building and going into their apartment two hours before they heard the bang of the cross ripping from the wall. They promptly called the police, Wilson and Avery arrived on the scene and kicked in the door when they got no response. When they found the suicide note and the added camera footage, there’s no way someone committed this as a murder. Evans and Waters closed the case within an hour of getting the security contractors to get down here and show them the footage.”

I look at the woman on the cross and wonder how in the world someone would even conceive of this. How would you get the logistics of it all down before actually climbing up there, your feet planted on barbed wire, bleeding while you work. I look at her eyes. Even now I can tell from the streaks in her make-up that she was crying, a lot. Why wouldn’t she scream out if someone was doing this to her? Even if they had a gun on her, a bullet to the head would be a better bargain than bleeding to death painfully.