Michael Prescott: Shiver

“I love you, Kathy. Love you. Love you.”

It occurred to him that he could do whatever he liked with her, and she couldn’t stop him. He wanted to; he really did. But he was afraid to linger. At any moment someone else might enter the parking lot.

Reluctantly he abandoned her body and ran to his car. He pulled out of the lot and drove aimlessly till he was sure nobody was following him. Then he parked on a side street and sat behind the wheel, letting out long slow breaths till the windshield was filmed with fog.

He’d killed a woman. Not a fantasy creation, and not one of the animals either, but an actual human being. She’d been named Kathy, and she’d worked at a restaurant, and she’d had a sister named Eleanor, and she’d misquoted Edgar Allan Poe. Now she was a huddle of bloodied meat. And he had done it with his own hands.

Yes. He’d done it, all right.

And it had felt good.

Slowly he smiled. A year ago he’d been afraid of that woman. He’d been terrified to ask her out on a date, terrified that she would reject him, as indeed she had. He’d thought she had some sort of power over him.

Now he knew what true power was and who had it.

And he knew that he need never be afraid again.

Sebastian Delgado put down the psychological profile from the Behavioral Science Unit and massaged his burning eyes with his fingertips. He’d read the paper at least a hundred times, and it had told him nothing. He wondered if the experts knew any more about this case than he did, or if any rational person could be considered an expert in such matters.

He checked his watch. Five-thirty A.M. His gaze drifted to the cot in the corner of his office, where he’d been stealing rare, restless cat naps for the past four weeks, ever since the investigation had shifted into high gear. The cot was inviting, but he was too tired for sleep, and he didn’t want to dream again.

Abruptly he stood up, scraping his chair away from his desk. He needed air. As much air as he could find in the windowless labyrinth of the Butler Avenue station.

He left his office and wandered the hallways. Drunken shouts rose like the wails of alley cats from the lock-up area in the rear of the building. Phones rang and went unanswered.

He entered the Detective Unit squad room, the walls covered with collages of mug shots and departmental memoranda, and crossed to the basin in the corner. He splashed cold water on his face, then dried himself with a paper towel from a dispenser.

On the way back to his office, he saw Detective Tony Sachetti standing outside the closed door of an interrogation room, pouring himself a cup of coffee and muttering irritably.

“Something wrong, Tony?”

Sachetti looked up, startled. His heavy eyebrows lifted in mild surprise. “Don’t you ever go home?”

“Not recently. What have you got?”

The smaller man released a grandiloquent sigh. “Real piece-of-shit case. The thing of it is, it should be open and shut, but it’s not. Something’s screwy.”

“Let’s hear it.”

“Haven’t you got enough to worry about?”

Delgado chuckled. “More than enough. Let’s hear it anyway.”

“Guy named Ruiz is coming out of a bar in Mar Vista, near Palms and Centinela, about four hours ago, at one-fifteen. His car is parked on the street. He’s fumbling with the keys when somebody decides it’s payday. Either Ruiz puts up resistance or the robber gets nervous; one way or the other, Ruiz winds up being knifed in the neck. Just then, a black-and-white swings by. Suspect takes off on foot and ducks into an alley. Another unit cuts him off at the opposite end. He’s collared. Paramedics declare Ruiz dead at the scene, so it’s a homicide, and we’ve got our man. Nice and neat, huh?”

“Sounds like it.”

“Except for one problem. The knife. He didn’t leave it in the body, so he must’ve still been carrying it when he started running. But when he got nabbed, he didn’t have it on him. Only place he could have ditched it was the alley. But I’ve got ten guys pawing through garbage and looking under parked cars, and they can’t find diddly. That knife has done some kind of disappearing act.”

“Can’t you make him anyway?”

“We can make him, yeah. But without the murder weapon, I don’t know if the D.A. will file.”

Delgado frowned. “Let me talk to him. What’s his name?”

“Leon Crowell.”

Delgado pushed open the door and entered the interrogation room. A young black man, his head shaved bald, sat in a straight-backed chair, his left wrist handcuffed to a steel ring bolted to the wall. He wore a leather jacket emblazoned with the silver and black logo of the Los Angeles Raiders, an outfit favored by youthful offenders in L.A. Delgado had never been sure whether it was the team’s rebel image or simply the bold color scheme that attracted the interest of streetwise criminals; but he’d caught himself thinking, at times, that the city’s crime rate might not be rising quite so fast if the Raiders had stayed in Oakland.

“Hello, Leon,” he said, making no effort to sound friendly.

Leon pursed his lips like a pouting child. “I got nothing to say.”

“My friend here”-Delgado indicated Sachetti-“seems to think you killed a man tonight. Want to tell me why he’s wrong?”

A shrug. “Man, I don’t know nothing about that. I was just out for a walk, you know?”

“At one-fifteen in the morning?”

“I get sort of restless sometimes.”

“Why were you running?”

“I like to run, is all. Exercise.”

He scratched his nose with his right hand. Delgado studied that hand. A ring of dirt, a perfect circle an inch and a half in diameter, was printed faintly on the palm.

“It’s a public street, man,” Leon was saying. “Public property. I can run on it if I want to. Says so in the Constitution.”

Delgado smiled. “You’re a smart fellow, aren’t you, Leon?”

“Smart enough.”

“I’ll bet. But I’m smart too. Do you want to see how smart I am?”

“I don’t want to see nothing.”

Delgado turned to Sachetti. “You said there are cars in that alley?”

“Yeah. It’s right behind the bar, and some of the staff park there. But we searched the cars, Seb. Nothing underneath, and nothing inside.”

“No,” Delgado said. “Leon’s too smart for that. Leon, show Detective Sachetti your hand. Your right hand.”

“Say what?”

“Do it.”

Slowly, suspiciously, Leon raised his hand. Delgado twisted his wrist, angling the dirty palm at the overhead fluorescents.

“Hey, man,” Leon whined, “let go of me.”

Delgado ignored him. “See that, Tony?”

Sachetti leaned closed. “I see it. Now tell me what it means.”

“It means Mr. Crowell is a quick thinker. He sprinted into that alley, and he knew he had no more than two or three seconds to dispose of the knife.”

“There never was no knife,” Leon said, his voice reedy with the first piping note of desperation.

“So he ran to the nearest available hiding place,” Delgado continued. “One of those cars. He crouched down and shoved the knife into the exhaust pipe. When he did so, his palm made contact with the end of the pipe, which left the circle of dirt marked there.”

“I’ll be damned,” Sachetti muttered.

Delgado released Leon’s hand. “Tell your people to check the exhaust pipes, Tony. One of them will contain a surprise. A surprise with Mr. Crowell’s fingerprints on it, not to mention Mr. Ruiz’s blood.”

Leon shifted in his seat and knocked his sneakers together. “Shit.”

“I’ll tell you something, Seb,” Sachetti said with a smile. “That fucking birdman you’re looking for doesn’t stand a chance.”