Carter Chris - The Death Sculptor

She had clocked them way before they entered the café, as they parked their car outside. She could still tell cops from a mile away. She looked up as both detectives stepped through the door, and Hunter immediately saw a face that, long ago, must have been pretty, but now looked hollowed out and emptied of life. There was a long, thin scar on her left cheek that she made no effort to conceal. They locked eyes for just a second.

‘Jude?’ Hunter asked, coming up to her table. He knew that wasn’t her real name, but it was the name she’d given him over the phone.

The woman nodded as she studied both faces in front of her.

‘I’m Detective Hunter and this is Detective Garcia. Do you mind if we have a seat?’

She recognized Hunter’s voice from their brief phone conversation less than half an hour ago. Jude’s reply was a tiny shrug.

‘Can I get you another cup of coffee?’ Hunter offered.

She shook her head. ‘I need to get up early in the morning, and I already blew my caffeine quota for today.’ Her voice was slightly husky, sexy even, but firm. She was wearing a collarless, long-sleeve white shirt with a red rose embroidered over her left breast. There was a delicacy to her perfume, with a base-note of spice, something dry and exotic like clove or star anise.

‘What can I get you gentlemen?’ an overweight waitress asked, approaching the table.

‘Are you sure?’ Hunter tried again, sending a smile Jude’s way.

She nodded.

‘Two black coffees, no sugar, please,’ Hunter replied, looking back at the waitress.

The waitress nodded and started collecting the plates from the next table along.

They sat in silence for a few seconds. As the waitress moved back into the kitchen, Jude looked across the table at Hunter and Garcia. ‘OK, as I told you over the phone, I don’t know if this has any relevance, but it has been bothering me for two days now. I’m not a great believer in coincidences, you know?’

Hunter laced his fingers and rested his hands on the table. He knew that the best thing was just to let her speak, no questions.

‘I was taking the subway to work two days ago, as I do every morning,’ she carried on. ‘I tend to avoid reading the papers, specially the LA Times . It’s just too much crap, you know? And I already deal with a lot of that every day. Anyway, the woman sitting opposite me had the morning paper with her. As she flipped through it, I caught the frontpage headline.’ She pursed her lips and quickly shook her head. ‘I didn’t think anything of it at first. So there was another killer running loose in LA, what’s new, right? But then, one of the pictures made me look again.’

The waitress came back with two cups of black coffee.

‘Which picture?’ Garcia asked, once the waitress was out of earshot.

‘One of the victims.’ Jude leaned forward and rested her elbows on the table. ‘The guy called Andrew Nashorn.’

Garcia nodded calmly. ‘What about the picture? What made you look again?’

‘Actually it was the name underneath it. I recognized the name.’ Jude picked up on the hint of doubt that had colored Garcia’s face. ‘When I was in school,’ she explained, ‘I had this big crush on this kid, Andreas Köhler. His family had immigrated from Germany.’ A melancholic smile parted her lips. Her teeth looked stained and damaged. ‘Anyway, I thought that I could increase my chances of getting with him if I could speak a little German. So I borrowed a few tapes from the school library. I listened to those tapes for about a month solid. Didn’t learn much. It’s a difficult language. But one of the things I did learn was the names of animals. And I still remember them.’

Garcia’s confusion intensified, but he tried not to show it.

‘ Nashorn means rhinoceros in German.’

‘Really?’ Garcia looked at Hunter.

‘I didn’t know that either.’

‘It does,’ Jude affirmed. ‘And that made me take a closer look at the picture. He obviously looked older. His hair was all gray, but I would recognize that face anywhere. It was the same person. And that’s when I paid a little more attention to the photographs of the other two victims, and it all came back to me. They were all much older, but the more I looked, the less doubt I had. I knew all of them.’

Hunter hadn’t touched his coffee yet. His eyes were studying Jude’s facial and body movements. There were no twitches, no rapid eye movement, no fidgeting. If she was lying, she was really good at it.

‘Well, I didn’t actually know them,’ Jude clarified. ‘I was beat up by them.’

One Hundred and Three

Those words fell over Hunter and Garcia like slabs of rock, almost knocking the breath out of them.

Garcia shook the surprise off his face. ‘You were beaten up by them?’

For the first time Jude broke eye contact with the detectives. Her gaze moved down to her unfinished coffee cup. ‘I’m not proud of it, but I’m also not ashamed of my life. We’ve all done things we wished we never did.’ She paused, collecting her thoughts. Hunter and Garcia respected her breathing space. ‘When I was a lot younger, I worked the streets down in Hollywood Boulevard, the low end of the Strip.’

The east end of the famous Hollywood Boulevard used to be LA’s best-known red-light district.

‘I was new to the area. My usual spot used to be around Venice Beach, but back then the Strip was a much more popular place. If you could handle the numbers, you could make some serious cash.’ There was no shame in her words. She couldn’t change her past, and she accepted that with tremendous dignity. ‘Anyway, I was picked up one night by this guy. It was really late, past midnight, I think. He was quite good-looking, and funny. He took me to this place out by Griffith Park, but what he’d never told me in the car was that there were another three guys waiting for us.’

Jude’s gaze moved past both detectives and up into the distance, as if she was trying to see what was coming.

‘Well, I told them right then that I didn’t do gangbangs. Not for any money.’ She stopped talking and reached for her cold coffee.

‘But they didn’t care,’ Hunter said.

‘No they didn’t,’ she replied after having a sip. ‘They were all high on something, and they were drinking a lot. The problem wasn’t really having sex with four drunken men at once. The problem was that they liked it rough.’ She paused and thought better of her words. ‘Well, two of them did, more than the other two. By the time they were done, I was so bruised I wasn’t able to work for a week.’

It was pointless asking Jude if she’d gone to the police. She was a working girl, and the sad truth was that the police would’ve barely lent an ear to her story. She might even have been arrested for prostitution.

‘But things like that happened. It came with the job,’ Jude said in a resigned tone, without bitterness. ‘And they still do. It was a risk us girls took when we chose to work alone. I was beaten up before, worse than that. The reality is that, out on the streets, you never really know what kind of jerk is going to roll down his window and call you over.’

By ‘work alone’ both detectives knew Jude meant she didn’t have a pimp. Pimps provided protection for their girls. If anyone laid a rough hand on them, or decided they didn’t want to pay, they would have their legs broken, or worse. The problem was, the girls had to work for peanuts. Pimps would take 80 to 90 per cent of all the money their girls made, sometimes more.

‘The driver,’ Jude continued. ‘The one who picked me up and took me to his friends, that was the guy in the picture in the paper. Nashorn, rhinoceros man.’