Tell No Lies Page 5

  “You’re not a cop, Daniel.”

  “I know. But a woman’s gonna be attacked in minutes. How do I not at least go down there, knock on her door?”

  “You could run right into the guy.”

  “I’ll stay outside. I’m only gonna warn her, wait in the street with her for the cops. Look—there’s no time to go around and around on this. I’ll be careful.”

  Cris reached across the counter. The butcher knife came free from the magnetic strip with a soft ping. She extended it to him, handle first. Her thin arms trembled.

  “Just in case,” she said.

  Chapter 9

  Daniel took the Audi for more muscle, rocketing down the cascade of Webster, the undercarriage scraping and throwing off sparks like flicked cigarettes. The park flew by on the left, a shadowy expanse behind chain-link. The buildings’ letters zoomed at him through the passenger window, and he slid to the curb, fumbling for the knife. From the dashboard the time glowed menacing red—12:03.

  He leapt out, stumbling. Discordant laughter reached him from a late-night congregation on the dark softball fields across the street, but it seemed only to highlight the desolation of the midnight hour. The block, infused with his own dread, seemed postapocalyptic.

  The lawned sidewalk strip housed a row of sycamores with pollarded branches, upthrust stumps like the severed arms of scarecrows. His footsteps jarred his vision as he sprinted across, his shoulder scuffing a trunk, sending off a puff of bark dust.

  He searched for the street numbers, his wild gaze finally landing on 1737. Dueling columns, cracked steps leading to a wide, unlit porch inlaid with Art Deco tile. Three red doors stood out like something from a game show, the building carved into different apartments, number two oddly on the right.

  He jumped up onto the porch and skidded to a stop before door number two, his heart thumping. A brass lion knocker stared out at him, and he stared right back.

  Now what?

  In his slalom down the hill, he hadn’t contemplated much besides Marisol Vargas and the dashboard clock.

  Sorry, ma’am, but someone with bad handwriting’s coming to kill you, oh, right about now.

  It would have to do.

  As he reached for the brass knocker, his gaze snared on the narrow strip of black at the seam of the jamb. The door was a half inch ajar.

  The killer was already inside.

  The night breeze seemed to blow right through Daniel, bones and all.

  He lifted his hand to the wood, applied a hint of pressure. The door swung silently inward.

  The foyer, revealed by degrees. Side table with bowl. A Jim Dine print, tilted nearly off the wire. Tangled fringe of an expensive rug, one corner flipped back to show the pad beneath.

  She’d fought.

  His fist ached around the knife handle. His arm, knotting from the tension.

  He told his fingertips to apply more pressure to the door, and they did, the view widening inch after maddening inch. Past the foyer, beyond the dark dining room, and through a doorway, a recessed light glowed in the kitchen ceiling.

  He blinked, the tableau assembling itself in chunks.

  Under the fall of light, a woman on her stomach, cheek mashed to the floor, her temple swollen, strands of hair matted to one bloody cheek. The kitchen doorjamb seeming to cut her off at the thighs. Her arms wrenched painfully back, wrists bound at the base of her spine. Eyes straining, pupils swimming in white.

  She was staring directly at him.

  With horror he realized that she must have been watching the entire time. Pinned to her own floor, her only view a sideways tilt through two unlit rooms, every last hope glued to the front door creeping open.

  Dark tracks ran across the bridge of her nose and down her temple, and it took him a moment to realize through his shock what they were. Tears of blood. She’d been cut?

  The woman’s lips moved, and somehow he heard her fear-desiccated voice: “… help me.”

  Her imploring stare froze him there in the doorway.

  The last thing he wanted to do was go into that house. But how could he leave her there?

  From somewhere behind her, footsteps creaked the floor.

  Daniel made no conscious decision to enter; his legs just moved him. Sliding inside, he eased the door mostly closed behind him to eliminate the light profile, however faint, from the porch.

  There he was, armed with a cooking utensil and two weeks’ training in hostage-crisis intervention, in a closed space with a murderer.

  He took swift, weightless steps through the foyer, then sliced through the dining room to get out of the sight line, veering for the wall just beside the doorway. As he neared, a large shadow edged into view in the kitchen beyond, but he jerked right and flipped, planting his shoulder blades silently against drywall, just out of sight. Hanging plants all around stained the air with a fecund, earthy smell.

  A blurred, masculine voice: “What?”

  From the cramped vantage, Daniel could see only a sliver of kitchen, the outer edge of the light’s glow, a tumble of Marisol’s hair.

  He was sucking air. His heartbeat seemed so loud he thought it might give him away.

  Breathe. Breathe.

  He wanted to get the drop, but there was no time. He’d have to go in blind. Straight jabs so the killer couldn’t block his arm.

  Just like a wrestling takedown.

  But with a butcher knife.

  “… elp me.”

  Daniel braced himself. A panic beat pounded in his skull. His legs tensed to pivot and leap. One … two …

  An instant before he reached three, he heard that same hushed voice say, “Here you go,” followed immediately by a sickening sound: Slit.

  Daniel had barely registered the noise when a mist of blood pattered on the visible wedge of kitchen tile.

  There came a burbling of breath, then another faint spray of blood—timed with the heartbeat or the lungs.

  A hideous rattling against the floor. The unmistakable sound of someone dying, just around the corner. Daniel’s hesitation—the final second he’d taken to steel himself—had been the difference between her life and her death.

  His heart jerked, a throat-crowding heave.

  Even from the far side of the jamb, Daniel saw a sharp flash of light illuminate the kitchen—a camera? He jerked his head back, squinting against the flare.

  Before he’d recovered, a dark form strode through the doorway, speeding right past him without taking note. The killer moved quickly but without panic, heading to the front door. The breeze from his movement chilled the panic sweat on Daniel’s face. In the gloom Daniel could make out only parts of the man as he passed through falls of weak light from the windows. He seemed to be big, broad, indistinct in loose-fitting black sweats. At his side dangled a wicked-looking blade, a military knife that he swiped across his thigh and back again.

  Unaware of Daniel, the man walked on through the dining room and into the foyer.

  At once, for no apparent reason, he halted. His back to Daniel, he was nothing more than shadow against shadow, a charcoal silhouette.

  Electricity coursed through Daniel. His chest seized. He didn’t want to take a breath, didn’t want to exhale. If he so much as shifted his weight, it could announce his frozen presence in the darkness.

  The man’s head cocked. What the hell was he looking at?

  The front door. When Daniel had arrived, it was barely cracked. But in his rush to get to Marisol, he’d left it open several inches.

  The man’s arm shifted inside the sleeve of his sweatshirt, muscle flexing as he tightened his grip on the blade.

  He turned.

  And stared across the unlit dining room at Daniel in the shadows.

  It was a horrifying blank face, nothing more than a polished oval. Wait, no—it was a black neoprene mask that was wrapped tight, removing the features. A missing figure-eight band for the eyes, like a reverse superhero mask. Triangular peak in place of the nose. A circle of br
eathing perforations where a mouth should be.

  The knife spun around the man’s black-gloved hand as if of its own accord, flipping across the knuckles, blade catching light. Then the fingers seized it in a new grip, angling it down along the forearm, cutting edge out. A well-practiced hold.

  All sound vanished, leaving nothing but a white-noise rush in Daniel’s ears. His back—literally to the wall. Nowhere to run. But that also meant the attacker had only one way at him. Daniel slid his heel to the baseboard, gauging the distance. Let him come, then counter hard.

  Daniel lifted the butcher knife.

  The man took a step toward him, then another, his boots pounding the floor as he wound into a run.

  And then, in the distance, a police siren warbled, freezing the man just as he was getting up speed.

  He and Daniel stared at each other across the length of the dining room. Daniel’s chest burned, and he realized he was still holding his breath.

  The masked face dipped a bit, perhaps in amusement, and then the other gloved hand rose from the man’s pocket, a small digital camera lifting into view.

  Before Daniel could process what was happening, a blinding flash bleached the unlit dining room, turning everything hospital white.

  Bright spots, glued to Daniel’s eyes, blotted the ensuing darkness. Yelling, he swiped at the air, blinking his way back to visibility. When it came, he saw that he was alone, stabbing at the darkness.

  Chapter 10

  “How are you doing?” Theresa Dooley asked.

  Hunched forward in his chair, Daniel studied his hands. “Better than Marisol Vargas.”

  Seconds after the killer’s retreat, the cops had blown into Marisol’s apartment to find Daniel standing with the butcher knife at his feet, arms raised, his back still to the wall. He’d been brusquely cuffed and shoved into a chair, where he’d waited, ineffectively explaining himself and enduring glares from an endless torrent of uniformed officers until Dooley finally arrived to clarify matters. She let him call Cristina who was, by now, frantic.

  As Daniel was led out, he glimpsed the body through the huddle of crime-scene investigators. Thin black notch in the throat—the death cut—matched by dueling slits beneath each eye that drained tears of blood down Marisol’s cheeks, a gut-twisting depiction of coerced crying. He halted, transfixed by the stiff, painted doll face until Dooley gently prodded him along.

  She brought him down to the Hall of Justice at 850 Bryant Street, a city-block slab that housed SFPD headquarters, Southern Station, and the courts and jail. The edifice, thrust up from a scattering of bail-bond shops, overpriced parking lots, and pretzel stands, was less than a mile from Daniel’s workplace.

  A noise kept reverberating off the walls of his skull. Slit. It was the sound of a person being killed a few feet from where he’d stood. And the heart-stopping pop of that flash. It had done more than merely blind him in the moment. It meant that Daniel’s face was now preserved in the killer’s camera. For what future use?

  His adrenaline had ebbed, finally, leaving him spent. The muscle of his left forearm twitched irregularly, a stress reaction he’d not encountered before. He’d been gripping his elbow to make it stop. It finally dawned on him that his nails were digging through his skin, and he looked down at his clawed hand, told it to relax.

  In the cramped space of the Homicide Division on the fourth floor, Dooley’s office was small and virtually unadorned. Schoolroom-size desk, two chairs, bookshelves housing brittle binders, and a single poster on the wall featuring the SFPD badge, backlit like a superhero logo. No personal photos in evidence, no stained coffee mug, not even a fake fern. Dooley sat on the edge of her desk facing him, her shoulders tugged forward as if bearing weight. Through the bleary, rain-spotted window, early morning leaked over the horizon.

  “That’s the problem with living in a nice ’hood,” Dooley was saying. “No police station nearby. We just couldn’t get there in time.”

  Daniel gave a little nod.

  “Marisol’s bedroom phone was left off the hook—probably by the killer. That’s why none of our calls to warn her got through. He covered his bases. We were late by a sliver.”

  “So was I.” Daniel realized that his hand had again fastened onto his forearm. “I shouldn’t have hesitated in the dining room. I should’ve just charged straight into the kitchen—”

  “This is an organized, highly aggressive killer,” Dooley said. “If you’d barged in, we’d be dealing with two murders tonight.”

  A tightness clutched Daniel’s neck, threatened to force a shudder. “Same request on all those letters. ‘Admit what you’ve done.’ So why Marisol Vargas? Why Jack Holley?”

  “We haven’t linked them yet. Quite a range on demographics between those two. Our girl Vargas is a professor at San Francisco State who lives in … well, your neighborhood. Jack Holley was a former rent-a-cop who lived in the Tenderloin. As you know, ain’t nuthin’ tender ’bout that ’hood. They both got the same knifework, though. The bleeding tears. Our boy, he likes making them cry.”

  “I have a question.”

  Dooley rubbed her eyes. “Just one?”

  “It looked like there was a struggle in the foyer. But the door wasn’t kicked in. Marisol had deadbolts, everything. How’d he get her to open the door?”

  For the first time, Theresa’s face showed her exhaustion. “Same question we had at Jack Holley’s. No signs of forced entry at his place either. Doors, windows, nothing. A street-smart ex–security guard who lived at Turk and Taylor, and he just opens his door to a large male stranger?”

  “Maybe he isn’t a stranger,” Daniel said, and one of Dooley’s thin eyebrows lifted slightly to indicate that the consideration wasn’t a fresh one.

  The words lingered until another inspector ducked into the office. Fifties, bloodshot eyes, with white hair and a red fringe of mustache. “Christ, Dooley, have you slept since the Holley murder? I can get this. You need some rest.”

  “Black don’t crack, O’Malley.”

  “So they tell me.” He nodded at Daniel. “Brave thing you did tonight. Stupid, but brave.” Back to Theresa. “All right, then, Pam Grier. What do you need?”

  “Besides a newer reference? Pam Grier? Do I call you Burt Reynolds?”

  “I wish you did. Now, come on, lady, what do you need me to jump on?”

  Dooley asked, “What have we heard back from Lyle Kane’s house?”

  It took Daniel a beat to place the name: Kane was the intended recipient of the third letter.

  “Nothing yet,” O’Malley said.

  “I dispatched a unit there hours ago,” Dooley said. “Why can’t we get a simple confirmation of his safety?”

  “I’m on it.”

  “Also, pull a warrant and have surveillance get a hidden camera up in the mail room at Metro South in case our boy Daniel here gets any more accidental fan mail.”

  O’Malley gave a curt nod before withdrawing. “Anything you need.”

  As far as Daniel could tell, the statement was in earnest. It struck him that Dooley was not only the youngest homicide inspector he’d seen tonight but also the sole female and the only non-Caucasian. Photos of the academy classes lined the corridor from the elevator, progressing from the early 1920s; in his stunned, trancelike state walking in, Daniel had focused on all those tiny frozen faces, changing through the years. More color. More women. Except, it seemed, here in Homicide.

  “The camera Marisol’s killer had,” Dooley was saying. “Digital, right?”

  “Looked it.”

  “It used to be the department could put the word out to the Fotomats. Now any sicko with a laptop can print out whatever souvenir he wants in the privacy of his own lair.”

  “That’s why you think he took the picture?” Daniel asked. “For a souvenir?”

  “Whether the victims’ transgressions are real or imagined, those letters make one thing clear: These are revenge-based killings. So yeah, I think our guy wants to revel in them a
fterward.”

  Daniel’s mouth was dry. “He got my picture, too.”

  Dooley nodded solemnly. “I know.”

  She didn’t dismiss the grim fact with any false reassurances.

  She didn’t linger on it either. Bouncing off the desk’s edge, she circled to her computer. “So that mask,” she said. “It look something like this?”

  She swiveled the monitor, and a Google image of a faceless mask stared out at him, eerily disembodied. He pictured that cocked head, the expert twirl of the knife and felt his forearm muscle give another twitch.

  It took a bit of effort to swallow. “Yeah,” he said. “Very close to that.”

  “And the gloves. You said shiny leather with backing straps, maybe Velcro?” Her fingers purred across the keyboard. “Like so?”

  He came forward in his chair, pointing at the screen, as if the image were new to her as well. “How did you…?”

  “Sounded like a motorcycle mask,” she said. “So I figured motorcycle gloves, too. This helps, Brasher.”

  They stared at each other across the desk.

  “Now you can…?”

  “Start slogging,” she said. “Check motorcycle-supply stores. Ask around the crime scenes if anyone noticed a bike. It’s not a lock that the guy’s a biker, but it’s a pretty good bet he’s familiar with them. There are more obvious masks to get, you know?”

  “And you can check who in Metro South owns a motorcycle.”

  “Felons with choppers. That should be a short list.”

  “Still.”

  “Yes. A start. If any of your convicts bothered to register their bikes. That’s the problem with criminals. They’re fucking criminals. Disorganized messes. They drive unregistered cars, shoot unregistered guns, change jobs like other people change clothes, skip out on rent to crash on their cousin Hector’s couch. Outdated, incomplete files. Which makes them harder to track down.” She grimaced, cut short her tangent. “What the hell makes you choose a job dealing with these people?”

  “These people?”

  “Hell yes, these people. I grew up with these motherfuckers. Made me want to protect the rest of the world from them.” She chewed the side of her cheek, her eye contact unremitting. “So that’s all you got? Liberal guilt. Save the world. Help the underclass?”