The Rock 'N Roll Detective's Greatest Hits - a Spike Berenger Anthology (63 page)

A padlock had been split open, most likely with a bolt cutter. Someone
had
recently been inside.

Berenger carefully lifted the broken lock off the door latch and set it on the ground. He then slowly opened the door—which was rusty and squeaky—and peered inside.

Pitch black.

He flipped on the flashlight.

The front room of the building was completely empty of furnishings. It was just a vacant, old space with a rickety wooden floor and millions of cobwebs. Berenger stepped inside and let the door close behind him. He was shut off from the outside with just the flashlight beam to keep him company.

“Hello?” he called.

Silence. He thought he might have heard the scuttling of a mouse—or a rat.

“Anyone here?”

He took a few steps forward. The floor creaked as his weight moved across the boards. An archway led to the rest of the building. Berenger figured the place was once a business of some kind. The front room was a reception area. Beyond that was a short hallway leading to a closed door. Two rooms that may have served as offices were connected to the hallway. Berenger cast the light around both spaces; one room was empty and the other contained a very old desk. He moved slowly into the office and examined the furniture. The top was thick with dust and cobwebs stretched from the sides to the floor. No one had touched the thing in ages, so he didn’t bother looking in the drawers. Berenger turned and went back to the hallway.

“Suzanne, can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear.”

“You’re right. This place is creepy.”

“What’s in there?”

“Nothing so far. It’s just me and the spiders and rats.”

“Ewww.”

“There’s a door at the end of this hallway. I bet I’m supposed to go through it.”

“If it’s any help, the storefront right next to where you are was a dentist office. The Chinese sign says, ‘Painless Dentist.’”

“There was some Chinese writing on the outside of the door but you’re too far away to read it. I don’t think it matters. The place has been gutted and left to rot. It smells as if it’s a hundred years old.”

“These buildings look to me more like nineteen-forties.”

Berenger reached the door, examined it in the light, and saw no identifying markings. The only thing to do was open it.

He entered a very large square space that was just as dark and musty as the rest of the building. Four wooden columns stood from floor to ceiling; if one were looking down from above, the room would appear as the number four on a die. Berenger swept the light across the space and saw a couple of old tables, a few broken chairs, and piles of debris.

“This was a storeroom or a workroom of some kind,” Berenger announced.

“What’s in there?”

“Junk. But I’m going to take a closer look at everything.”

His light beam focused on a double door at the far end of the room. Probably the way out to the back of the building and the alley.

He stepped farther into the space and then directed the flashlight on the floor in front of him.

There were dozens of footprints in the dust. They pointed in no particular direction; instead they gave the impression that someone had been moving back and forth in the room, performing a task of some kind.

“Hello?” Berenger called again. “Anyone here?”

“What do you see, Spike?”

“Someone’s been in here. Today, too.”

“Shit, be careful, Spike.”

He moved to one of the tables. Something smelled odd as he approached it. It was a scent he knew and it brought back the nightmares of his three-year stint as a Criminal Investigations Special Agent during his military service. His Military Occupational Specialty was 95D—ninety-five Delta—which made him responsible for supervising or conducting investigations of incidents and offenses or allegations of criminality that affected Army or Defense personnel, property, facilities or activities. Sometimes that included homicides. Usually wherever there was a homicide, there was the stench of blood.

Berenger smelled blood on the table.

He aimed the light at the top and noted the large puddle of congealing red goo. Some of it had dripped onto the floor.

“Christ,” he whispered.

“What?”

He wanted to say that the Angel of Death had been there but he didn’t speak. Instead, Berenger backed away, turned the light toward the rest of the room, and quickly made sure he was still alone. Then he noticed something on the floor beside one of the columns. He didn’t see it when he first came into the room, for the object lay on the opposite side of the pillar.

“Spike, did you say something?”

“Shhh.”

He stepped slowly toward the column, noting the footprint patterns—and blood splatter—on the floor between it and the bloody table. It seemed to take forever for him to walk across the room. With each step, Berenger felt a cold, sick fear develop and grow in his bowels.

He was close enough to shine the light on the object. From ten feet away it appeared to be the head of a mop. Or something with fur or hair. Was it a wig?

Berenger moved closer. Then he saw blood on the floor.

Lots of it.

He had to step around puddles in order to get to the other side of the column.

There, propped neatly on the floor at the base of the pillar, was one of the grisliest things Berenger had ever seen. He gasped, quickly averted his eyes, and held a hand over his mouth to keep from losing his dinner. In doing so, he inadvertently focused on yet another object, duct-taped to the side of the column.

This was a plastic baggie containing several compact disks.

His hand trembling, Berenger reached out and pulled the baggie off, tape and all. He wouldn’t want the police to know it had been there. As for the other horrible thing that lay at his feet, he had no choice but to alert the cops. How he was going to explain his presence in the building would take some thinking but he had a few minutes before the patrol cars arrived.

Berenger stepped back, making sure he hadn’t left his own footprints in the puddles of crimson. He then forced himself to shine the light beam back on the ugly abomination and confirm his identification of it.

No doubt about it. It was Manny Rodriguez’s severed head.

T
he proverbial shit hit the fan with regard to Sergeant Doherty, the Chicago PD, and Spike Berenger’s involvement in the Chicago Musician Murders Case. Berenger and Prescott were at Area Five headquarters all night making statements and were still there when the sun rose.

Berenger could think of nothing better than to tell the truth. The one thing he withheld was that he had received copies of the compact disks. He told the police that the killer phoned him, saying that she wanted to meet with him and “give him something.” When he arrived at the designated address, he discovered Manny Rodriguez’s head and nothing else.

He hadn’t known that the rest of the musician’s body was lying in the alley behind the abandoned building. This detail was revealed to him during the interview at the station. By the middle of the night, enough physical evidence had been accumulated to form a clear picture of what had happened. How the killer managed to overcome Rodriguez, behead him, and transport the body to the location was a mystery. The amount of blood on the table in the building’s storeroom suggested that the actual deed was done there. It was conjecture that Rodriguez had been lured to the site in much the same way that Berenger had, but the victim’s cell phone was not on his body. Perhaps the killer took it. The police made a request for Rodriguez’s phone records to see what calls he had received that day.

At eight o’clock, Berenger asked Doherty if Suzanne could leave. “She was just following my orders as an employee of my company,” he told him.

“I tell you what, Berenger,” Doherty said. “I’m cutting both of you loose. But I’m also telling you to get out of town. Yeah, that’s right. The party’s over. I don’t want to see your face again. If I hear you’re still working the case after lunchtime today, I’ll haul you in. Believe me, there are plenty of charges we can dream up. Interfering with a police investigation is one off the top of the head.”

“Doherty, you can’t make me leave town. I haven’t done anything wrong and you know it.”

“The hell you haven’t! You should have called the police as soon as you heard from that murderous bitch. You should have brought professionals in at that point.”

“Sergeant, how many times do I have to tell you? She told me not to call the cops or she wouldn’t go through with the meeting. I honestly thought I was going to get close to her and
help you guys out
! I’m on your side, Doherty. My intentions were honorable and in your best interest. And I
am
a professional, goddamit!”

Doherty chewed on that for a moment, but said, “I still think it best that you and your partner leave Chicago.” With that, he departed from the interrogation room where Berenger and Prescott had been sitting for hours. After a moment, a police officer came in, gave Berenger his weapon, and told them they were free to go.

On the way out of the building, they saw Mike Case at a desk doing paperwork.

“Good morning, Mike,” Berenger said.

Case barely looked up. “Spike, I’m not supposed to be seen talking to you. I have some rather strict orders.”

“I see. Sorry, man.”

“It’s okay. We’ll stay in touch. There’re no hard feelings. Now get out of here before Doherty catches us.”

“So long, Mike. Take care.”

“Nice meeting you,” Prescott said.

“Same here.”

They got to the street and realized that the rental car was still parked in front of the murder scene building. Berenger hailed a taxi that took them where they needed to go, and then the couple headed back toward their hotel. But instead of turning toward the Drake, Berenger kept going.

“What are you doing?” Prescott asked.

“I’m going to the first audio component store I can find.”

“What for?”

“We have some CDs to listen to, remember? I didn’t bring my damned computer or my Walkman. Have to buy one.” He dug the baggie out of his flak jacket pocket. “Good thing they didn’t frisk me.”

“Spike, I have my laptop at the hotel. We can use that.”

“Geez, why didn’t I think of that? I must be more tired than I thought. Suzanne! Did I ever tell you I love you?” He made the next turn and headed back toward the hotel.

“Are we going back to New York, or not?”

“Hell, no. We’re getting
close
, now! I’m going to catch that crazy woman if it’s the last thing I do. I’m going to hand her to Doherty on a silver platter. I’ll make that son of a bitch eat his words.”

“Spike, this isn’t about—”

“It’s
about
doing the right thing, Suzanne. I don’t care if we’re not getting paid. I took this job on as a favor to Zach Garriott. Zach is dead as a result of
this case
. I have to see it through to the end, don’t you see?”

She nodded and allowed herself to smile. “Yeah. I see.”

“B
oth phone numbers were bought with pre-paid minute plans from two different phone companies,” Briggs told Berenger when he called New York. “Registered under the name S. Favero. The accounts have been terminated, so I bet she threw away the phones after she used all the minutes. The lady is smart.”

“So there’s no way in hell we can trace them back to her. She’s probably got a couple more phones and numbers, too.”

“Probably so.”

“What else you got, Tommy?”

“Remix has been helping me on the Immigration records. It’s a big job, Spike. We’re talking about three to four decades that my contact at Immigration and Customs has to go through. It’s taking time. But I do know this. Sylvia’s father was Emilio Favero and her mother was Caroline Kimball. Favero ran an import/export business from Italy. Turns out he was mob-connected and was wanted for tax evasion both in this country and in Italy. He was arrested in nineteen-sixty-nine and went to prison. Naturally, his company went belly up and is no longer around. Favero died in prison in nineteen-seventy-two. We’re having a harder time tracking down the mother. We don’t know if she’s still alive, if she remarried and lives under a different name, or what. But we’re working on it.”