To Kill a Sorcerer Read online

  I stepped out of the car, sliding on my jacket. The wind had eased, but the temperature was still in the eighties. As I neared the house, several photographers turned my way. I averted my head as they took pictures.

  Officer Chen guarded the perimeter, standing on the path leading to the front door. She held the tape up, and I ducked under it. Yellowish flecks dotted the sleeve of her uniform shirt. Her face was white.

  I removed my sunglasses and slid them into my coat. The officer maintaining the crime scene log leaned inside and shouted for Hamilton. As I started up the red brick walkway, he came out of the house, hustled down the steps, and walked toward me quickly. I stopped, seeing he intended to intercept me.

  “Feeling better today?” he asked. His detective’s shield was clamped to his lapel. He wore black examination gloves.

  “I felt fine last night.”

  “Want to tell me what happened?”

  I stood there, working on the tan on the back of my neck.

  He grunted. “All right, we’ll let that slide. For now. Come on.”

  He led the way to the stoop, stopping next to the table with the log. I signed in. The high smell of vomit issued from a camellia bush.

  The log officer handed me a pair of examination gloves. Pink. Everyone else wore red or black.

  “Thanks.” I glanced at her name tag. “Officer Kennedy.”

  “You’re welcome. They support breast cancer awareness.”

  I snapped on the gloves. “I knew that. I’m always willing to do my part to keep breasts safe.”

  “We appreciate that, sir.”

  Gonzales appeared in the doorway. When not wearing unfashionable formal wear, he favored brown suits, knit ties, and short-sleeved dress shirts.

  “Well,” he said, “if it isn’t Jacques Cousteau. Nothing happened in the pool in the backyard, but I suppose you’ll want to inspect the bottom anyway, right?”

  I gave him a grin.

  The four of us stood there, Gonzales the only one inside. I held my pink hands up, thought about using them to light a cigarette, put them back at my sides. Birds tweeted. Carbon-14 decayed. The earth orbited the sun.

  Hamilton said, “Girl’s name is Jessica Patterson. Seventeen. Same as the Barlow kill. Bloody. We’re supervising the SID team as they finish collecting evidence, then we can take a closer look.”

  “They’re still in there?” The members of the Scientific Investigation Division were LAPD’s crime scene forensics specialists.

  “Yeah. And they’re still taking pictures. The medical examiner’s techs haven’t touched the body yet.”

  “What about the parents?” I asked.

  Gonzales’s mouth tightened. “We had the EMTs take them to the hospital. That was a balls-up, they never should have been allowed to view the scene.” He glanced at Kennedy, who fidgeted. “The father had to be restrained—tried to throw himself on his daughter’s body. The mother—she took one look and fainted dead away.”

  “Can you imagine?” Hamilton asked.

  “No.” Time had withered my five children, each one of their deaths as painful as the first.

  This was magnitudes worse. What must it be like to live each day, knowing your child spent her last moments being tortured and gutted by a homicidal maniac? Mr. and Mrs. Patterson must be facing the most agonizing human experience imaginable.

  Gonzales stepped back and gestured inside.

  “Welcome to the party.”

  We walked through the front door and turned into the family room.

  There she was, her body suspended from the rafters by a thin cord around her ankles. The three of us stopped a meter from the body so as not to interfere with the techs processing the physical evidence.

  I thought the photos of the Barlow kill had prepared me for this sight, but it is not possible to anticipate the shock your mind and body receive in the face of such mutilation. I studied the scene, suppressing the anger growing inside.

  Gonzales watched me. I raised my eyebrows at him.

  “I got a twenty-two-year veteran upchucking in the master bathroom,” he said, “but you stroll in here cool as dammit and look at the corpse like it’s a mannequin.”

  “Is there a question in there?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Who the fuck are you?”

  “A concerned citizen.” I turned back to the body.

  Jessica’s limp arms hung toward the floor, splattered with blood. The killer had slashed her torso vertically, then splayed the flesh to either side.

  “Other than the Barlow girl,” I said quietly to Hamilton and Gonzales, “have either of you ever seen anything like this?”

  Neither answered. Gonzales gave the tiniest shake of his head, his gaze never wavering from Jessica.

  The burning scent in the air caught my attention.

  “Incense again.” I pulled out my phone and dialed. While I was listening to it ring, I said to Hamilton, “Tell them to close the back door and any other doors.”

  “What the hell for?” Gonzales asked.

  “Keep this smell in here. There might be someone . . . hold on . . . Charlie? What are you doing right now? Can you come over to a place, take a sniff for me?” Since no one was moving in the house, I slammed the front door shut. Everyone turned to me, startled. “Hang on, Charlie.” I held my phone against my chest. “Close that!” I yelled to a uniform standing near the door leading to the backyard. He slid it shut.

  I put the phone back to my ear. “Charlie, you still there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good, look, we’re just off the boulevard, maybe five minutes from you. On Greenleaf. Left on Van Nuys and right on Greenleaf. You can’t miss the place with the crowd. Get your driver to bring you over here, could you? Thanks.”

  “This isn’t a party, Montero,” Gonzales said. “You can’t just invite a civilian to view a crime scene.”

  “So far we have no way to trace this killer,” I said. “Incense has been present at both scenes. This man might be able to tell us what kind of incense this is. Scent, maybe even a manufacturer. It gives us something to work with, especially if our killer is purchasing it locally.”

  “Please,” Gonzales said. “He’s probably buying it on the Internet from some place in China.”

  “Do you know a lot about the Internet, Lieutenant? If we know what sort of incense he’s buying, finding him electronically may be easier than going store to store and asking for receipts.”

  “Because of your little team of nerdy experts?”

  “That’s not very nice. They are respected scientists, all of them published in their fields. I employ them because they’re the best.”

  “And pay them gigantic salaries.”

  “They earn every penny.” I turned to Hamilton. “Are you going to let this man in? He might be able to identify this odor.”

  “This is bullshit,” Gonzales said.

  “We can’t let a civilian in here,” Hamilton told me. “Still . . . I could smell this outside. If we open the doors again, he should be able to catch the scent. He doesn’t have to see anything.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that. He’s legally blind.”

  “Fine, we’ll let him take a sniff.”

  “What gives this man any expertise in the first place?” Gonzales asked.

  “He has made a small fortune as an incense manufacturer, and his loss of vision has given him a remarkable nose.”

  One of the SID team had been hovering on the edge of our group, and now, as Gonzales turned away with a disgusted look on his face, she stepped up to Hamilton.

  “Sir?”

  “What have you got?”

  She held up a plastic bag with a tiny black ball in it. “I found this on the carpet under the body. It was mostly outside the pool of blood— . . .” She stopped and swallowed a couple of times.

  “Thank you.” Hamilton took the bag. “What do you think it is?” He held the bag higher and peered at the contents.

  “It felt so
ft when I picked it up.”

  “Like wax?” I asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “Okay,” Hamilton told her. “Is this the only one you found?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Keep looking.”

  Hamilton handed the bag to me. I studied the contents. “We’ll need an analysis.”

  “Why did you say wax?”

  “As I told you last night, the Barlow murder looked ritualistic. This is obviously the work of the same man.”

  “So you think that’s candle wax?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll see.”

  I handed the bag to a tech who cataloged all of the evidence.

  Hamilton and I turned our full attention to the scene.

  Framed photos stood on a nearby table. I picked one up. Jessica stood with her brother and two sisters at a family picnic. Young and beautiful, she probably ran on the track team and had a boyfriend who adored her. I looked back at her hanging body. The pretty girl in the photo was unrecognizable. The face was twisted out of true, the eyes mute horror.

  The techs from the coroner’s office looked at the mutilated corpse, trying to figure out how to get it down. Their faces shone pasty, and there was some nervous murmuring.

  Hamilton and I walked over to the hanging girl.

  “Okay, give us some room, will you?” he said. He looked around, raised his voice. “Hey? Everybody take a break.”

  Slowly the crime scene team, uniforms, and ME techs left the room. Gonzales remained with us. He walked closer, hands on hips, and looked the body over. The three of us stood in a circle around the murdered girl. The outer edge of the blood pool kept us a meter away.

  Her upper body was stripped bare, but she still wore pink shorts, white socks, and red tennis shoes. I looked closely at her dangling arms. She had no defensive bruises—and the wrists showed no signs of having been bound. Yet the killer had strung her up as if she were a helpless child.

  In a life and death situation, people become extraordinarily aggressive. They will kick and claw in an attempt to beat off an attacker. So far, our killer seemed able to subdue healthy, athletic young girls without a fight.

  The thin cord binding her ankles looped over a hook screwed into the ceiling. There were two other hooks in the room, each with a hanging plant.

  “Detectives?” Kennedy stuck her head in the door. “We have a man out here. You might want to take a look. Says he was invited by Montero.”

  By the time we were out the door, the officers at the perimeter were finishing a mandatory search of Charlie “Chimney” Habib. Although in his late fifties, Charlie dressed as if still attending UCLA, wearing baggy khaki shorts with cargo pockets, brown leather sandals with white athletic socks, and a faded T-shirt featuring a World War II pinup.

  He also had on his glasses, with lenses as thick as space shuttle portholes. He stared about vaguely. He had got himself declared legally blind, but I knew he could see more than he let on.

  “Hey, hey, watch the threads,” Charlie said as Chen finished patting him down. “I’m here by request.” He looked in the wrong direction. “And if you’re a girl, maybe we could do lunch sometime.”

  Charlie’s nickname was Chimney because he always reeked of smoke. Some of that smell had to do with the incense he manufactured.

  “I guess he’s okay,” Chen said. “Smells funny.”

  “Then laugh, my friend,” Charlie said, gazing into the air.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Hamilton turn to me. Explanation at this point was useless. As the old adage says, an ounce of demonstration . . .

  “Charlie,” I said, holding out my hand. He looked vaguely in my direction. I took his hand and squeezed it hard. “Thank you for coming by so fast.”

  His face scrunched, and his vision improved a bit. “Ah, Montero, good to see you again.”

  “What’s wrong with your eyes?” Gonzales asked him.

  “I am aware of no problem,” Charlie said. “You have something for me to smell?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Hamilton took his elbow and led him to the door. He was required to sign the crime scene log. Kennedy held the pen out to him. He reached past it and grazed the front of her uniform, copping a cheap feel.

  “Oh!” he said. “Sorry.”

  She jabbed the pen into the soft center of his hand. “Do that again,” she said sweetly, “and I’ll break your fingers.”

  “Charming.” He scribbled his name without looking.

  Hamilton took him by the arm. “We’re going to have you stand just outside the front door, okay? Back to the scene, facing out here, toward the street.”

  “Yes, yes,” Charlie said, sounding impatient now. “Let’s do it.”

  Hamilton nodded at Kennedy, and she opened the door. Hamilton began to turn Charlie around when Charlie shook him off.

  “I do not need to go nearer. I know this smell. It’s a natural brand. Tashua Jong.”

  “You can tell already?” Gonzales asked.

  Charlie gazed somewhere above the detective’s right shoulder. “Yes, of course. Why else am I here?”

  Gonzales grunted. “You have a spelling on that?”

  Charlie spelled it. “Manufactured, coincidentally, by a subsidiary of mine in India, as well as several other companies.” He sniffed again. “I doubt if even an examination of the ashes could tell you which manufacturer, as they all combine the same medicinal herbs. It is used primarily for meditation.”

  “Do you meditate, Charlie?” Gonzales asked.

  The portholes revolved as Charlie’s magnified gaze slowly pointed at each of us. “Yes, I do.”

  “Do you burn incense?”

  “Yes, of course. Millions of people do.”

  “Yes, but do you use this Tisha Young stuff?”

  “Tashua Jong. Yes.”

  “Is it an expensive brand?”

  “Comparatively speaking, I suppose. But incense is not a luxury item. Burning it is still cheap.”

  Gonzales wrote in his notebook.

  “You do have MSDS sheets on the manufacturer of your brand, don’t you?” Hamilton asked. “If you could give us those, we’d have something to work with in case we recover anything from a future scene.” Hamilton tried to hand over his card. Charlie reached out in the wrong direction. Hamilton finally put it in his palm.

  “I’ll have my assistant fax the information to you.”

  “And any other details,” I said, “on manufacturers, specifics on the scent, local retailers, anything else you might think useful.”

  “Sure,” Charlie said.

  “I appreciate this,” I told him.

  “No prob. By the way, detective,” he said, sniffing in Gonzales’s direction, “you might want to lay off the menudo for lunch.”

  Gonzales’s pen halted.

  “Maybe you should go now,” I said to Charlie. He probably heard the exasperation in my voice. I resisted the urge to kick him in the seat of his droopy shorts.

  “I am so gone,” he said.

  Fourteen

  Wednesday, December 22, 3:21 p.m.

  “You’re fucking kidding, right?” Gonzales said after Charlie’s chauffeur led him back to the car. “If this is your idea of contributing to our investigation, you’re wasting our time.”

  “Look,” I said, “just include the incense he named in your reports. Clearly state your doubts about his lack of reliability. Who cares? We have the name of the brand of incense the killer is using. If it comes to nothing, it comes to nothing. But if it gives us a way to identify this guy, are you really going to complain that the source of that information is a stoner who’s blind as a bat?”

  “He’s not blind,” Kennedy said. “He went right for my boob, the dirty faker.”

  We couldn’t help it. There was a soft bulge under her starched uniform shirt, and we all looked at her boob.

  “Hey!” she warned.

  Gonzales gave me a look, turned to Hamilton. “Our ri
ch fucking genius.” He walked back into the house.

  Before Hamilton and I could follow him, Deputy Medical Examiner Tasha Watanabe came out of the crowd and ducked under the crime scene barrier.

  Watanabe was tall and slender, with close-cropped jet hair and coal eyes.

  “Is this another one like two days ago?” she asked in a low voice as she signed the log.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, Sebastian. Have you got anything?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  Hamilton and I exchanged a glance. He shook his head.

  “Is it—is she hanging from the ceiling again?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Watanabe took a deep breath and led us into the house. She stopped when she saw the body.

  “Ah, God,” she said, staring at the hanging corpse, “not again.”

  After taking samples, the crime scene team had covered the area under and around the body with clear plastic so we could stand close to the victim without getting blood on our shoes.

  Hamilton stared up at the rope looped through the hook on the ceiling. “How do you think he got that up there?”

  “He used a chair or swung the loop until it caught,” I said.

  “With the victim doing what?” Gonzales asked. He was down on his haunches, peering at Jessica’s arms. “Hanging around while he tries to snag it? She’s got no ligature marks on her wrists, so he didn’t tie her up. What do you think, Tasha? Are those chest wounds post?”

  Watanabe had been studying the girl’s torso. “It doesn’t look like it,” she said. “Based on lividity, I think she was alive when he started cutting her open.”

  “Just like the last one,” Hamilton said.

  I hated to admit it, but Gonzales had a point. If the tox panel came back negative again, and there were no bruises or other marks to indicate the killer had stunned her or knocked her unconscious, his method for stringing these girls up without a struggle was a mystery.

  “He must be using something,” I said to Watanabe. “He’s immobilizing them somehow. It’s got to be drugs.”

  “Maybe he’s scaring them,” Watanabe said softly.