Everyone Pays (3 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

I walked across the room in two steps and gave my full attention to what lay on the desk. There were more pictures here than at Piper’s, and they were your standard pharmacy prints, not Polaroids. I saw some of the same faces. Not just the same look, but the same girls. Small blondes, young, but with a look like they’d been here before and knew exactly what they were willing to do for the money.

They were young, their legs thin enough to bulge at the knees. Some wore heels and held their legs together, but most had bare feet, their legs at odd angles to support the strange positions they attempted to hold. Smeared makeup, runny mascara, small breasts with pert nipples, just the smallest pooch around the navel. Too many had track marks on their arms from drug use, a far-gone look in their eyes that came with any consistent use of meth. They were only young enough to have desirable bodies for a little longer, already had started the slide into selling their pain.

In a few more months, the nights and drugs would take more of a toll: they’d put on weight, lose the last veneers of youth, the remaining light in their eyes. Catching tricks would get even harder; they’d have to resort to even more desperate means to score.

During my time on sex crimes, I’d seen the story play out too often and with too many girls, barely women. Many had families somewhere, people who would want them to come home if they knew.

I looked at one picture, a girl with a tattoo on her neck, her nose pierced. Even tied up, her face said,
Bring it on. What you got?
The john would like that, beat her harder, and maybe she would like it too.

Some got into the pain by choice, but there was always more to the story—a heavy-handed uncle with salty thumbs, a stepfather coming into the bedroom too eager, a first boyfriend who couldn’t comprehend the meaning of no.

I closed my eyes and turned away, said a silent prayer that they’d leave this grind, go back home. I prayed to whomever or whatever I believed in for them to still be in this world, to have hope. Such was my use for religion.

I could still see their faces in my head, tell by their eyes how hard they’d been used. They were hooked, wanted more. It would be a long way back for them, if they could ever get back to being just girls.

“Donner.”

“What?”

Hendricks stood to my side, waving his hand. “You there? That coffee too weak?”

“What?”

“Ibaka just left. She was talking to you, but you didn’t say boo.”

The studio was quiet, just the two of us and yellow crime-scene tape across the door.

“I’m here.”

“Where’d you go?”

I waved at the desk, the pictures, and Hendricks went over. He swore a few times as he flipped through them.

“You know,” he said, “perp like this doing everyone a favor. Getting these animals off the street.”

Farrow’s feet stuck out of the bathroom. I saw his pale, skinny calves and knees. There lay a man who would never take another breath, not another step on this earth.

Hendricks waited for my response.

He didn’t believe what he’d said; he was trying to bait me, draw me in. I had crossed the line once with a jerk named Brian Terranella who’d killed his wife, Jeannine. This was when I had first come over to homicide, about six months back.

Terranella got off, walked on the strength of his alibi—that he’d been at a bar with his brother, who was a Mill Valley DA. I had thought about introducing false evidence, wanting to make sure he went away, but Hendricks talked me out of it, convinced me that wasn’t how things were done here. I still wasn’t sure he did right. In my father’s day, you got your guy off the streets one way or another. When you knew, you
knew
. And things got done.

The job might be different now, and maybe that was fine. Or maybe it wasn’t.

After the trial, I found Brian Terranella in the hall outside the courtroom and brought him to his knees, broke two of his fingers when we shook hands. I got a reprimand and two weeks’ suspension without pay, three months’ mandatory therapy, but it was worth it—to me, anyway.

Now I strode a thinner layer of ice, and Hendricks wanted to know if I’d fall through.

I turned to meet his eyes. “Find out who killed these turds, and we’ll go lock that bastard up right now.”

“Okay. Tell me what you make of this, then.” He swept his hand across the apartment with a wave. “What do you see here?”

“I see a lowlife paying for S&M sex with girls too young and drug addled to know better. He’s a small part of them ruining their lives. Lately he got off that, onto horse, and now he’s dead. You want me to say the girls will be better off? They won’t. Someone else will step in to pay for what they’re selling.

“Nobody’s addictions or habits are getting quenched. Nobody’s but his.” I pointed to Farrow.

Hendricks lowered his shoulders. “That’s what I needed to hear.”

“The bigger question is whether we have a pattern. If this ties in with Piper or if Lund and Peters just dumped an extra case on our heads.”

“What’s your thinking? Just the pictures, or there’s more?”

“Those pictures say a lot for the similarity. It’s true.” Then I shook my head. “The kill is so different though. Body left a mess, a very different mess than at Piper’s. What we saw at Piper’s was all premeditated, slow. This was fast, an act of rage.”

“Maybe this guy pissed him off.”

“Maybe.”

“Or it’s what he wants us to think.”

The cheap wood floor creaked under my feet. “Maybe. But if these are the same hand, your butcher theory has to go. This guy didn’t even bother to find a knife.”

Outside on the street, a light night rain had started. We wrapped up what all we needed to do at the scene and left the rest for the techs. We got into Hendricks’s car, and he drove while I watched the corners and the streetlights through the windows as we rode in silence.

I could smell fresh oil on the streets, see visions of the city caught in bubbles of water on the glass.

On the corners I saw predators: buyers, johns, men looking for women or other men they could use to live out their desires. Money could buy anything here, from drugs to souls.

San Francisco offered a marketplace of depravity. Whatever a man wanted, he could get: domination, she-males with postoperative breasts, good sex, bad sex, young boys, girls, women who let them inflict pain. For every taste, a different block with its own set of nightwalkers to satisfy an urge.

I had read that the city’s slave trade was bigger than in the South before the Civil War. So far we had come. We should’ve known better. Someone had to.

My mind’s eye flashed to a dried smear of blood over Farrow’s bed—not from tonight. What kind of a man would live like that? With blood on his wall?

I still didn’t have a clue.

“We talk to the girls, I bet we find something.” Hendricks stared straight ahead as he drove.

“We could try that. Might get somewhere.”

“They look like a link to me.”

It was late enough for us to pass through the city, barely slowing at lights. We cruised all the way east and then south.

When we pulled up outside my place in Potrero, a nice third-floor walk-up with great city views and a deck, Hendricks turned and touched my arm.

“Listen, it was nice working with you tonight, Donner. Full truth, you make leaving a hot date to come out and see a dead guy not the worst thing imaginable.”

I tried not to smile, because it was the most backhanded compliment I could get, but I knew what he meant. “Thanks.”

I turned to the door to go.

“Hang on a second, okay? About this case, what you think?”

I sat back in my seat, sighed. “I think we got us a potential perv killer. Someone taking scum off the streets in the bloodiest ways. It’s a nasty world we’re dealing in.”

“Maybe it’s best you ask off it.”

“No,” I said. “This guy, he’s doing the perps. I want to see why.”

It was after three in the morning, and we were on the clock again at nine the next day.

He said, “Get some sleep. I’ll see you in a few hours.”

I moved for the door, then stopped. “You ever wonder?”

“Wonder what?”

“If this shit really comes out in the wash. If things wind up right in the end, justice served and all that.”

“As long as the justice system does, that’s what I care. Courts get used, turds tried, cells filled. The cases go up and come down. My checks come. I get paid, even get out on a date once in a while. I see my kid the odd weekend. Have some fun, you know? Something you might try once in a while.”

“I hear you.” But I was already turning away, opening the door to get out. I stepped up into the night.

“Wait. Donner?”

I turned back.

“What does it for me is I think of their families—Farrow’s and Piper’s. I think about how I would want this case worked if I was one of them.”

I nodded. That was the hook: the humanity in it all. The call to always do what was right for the other good people in this world, assuming they were out there.

I thanked him for the ride and got out. At the curb, I turned back and watched him go, heard his tires roll along the wet asphalt.

Hendricks was going to worry about me. It was his job, what a good partner did. And he was a good partner: picking me up at home, following my hunches, and letting me lead. I was lucky. I’d be fine.

I wasn’t sure how I had gotten so tied up in my own head all of a sudden, gone away from having fun and giving Hendricks a hard time. But I did know too: it was the girls. They always got to me, got me down.

I walked up my front stairs to the porch, could still smell the oil, but now something else too.

Ash. Ash and dirt.

In the morning it would all start again.

CHAPTER EIGHT

MICHAEL

The second name Emily gave me was Doug Farrow.

His place in the Tenderloin was only a short walk. I broke in late, and as I came in, he stood at the desk, naked, fondling himself, entirely without shame.

Red anger. I wanted to kill him right then. No waiting. No words.

“Who are you?”

I didn’t answer, couldn’t speak. I got closer, saw he stood before a table of pictures. There among the others was Emily.

My Emily. My charge.

“No!”

I backhanded him with a closed fist, turned and caught him under his chin with my left hand and drove him back, off the floor and into a wall so hard it cracked. His hand finally left his sex to manage some minor defense but too late. The thrum in my ears blocked out his words, the world.

I held him above the ground, both hands at his neck, him coughing. Threw him airborne into his bathroom sink. He landed, knocked it off the wall. I rushed in and grabbed what I could, found myself holding the faucet fixture in my hand, its odd-shaped metal coming clean off from the white porcelain, jagged grout around its edges.

Then the rest was urge and violence—lack of control, my own abandon, blood. Something else took over. When it was done, there was very little left of Farrow’s face to see.

I stepped out of the bathroom into his studio, my chest heaving. I bent, put my hands on my knees, worked to catch my breath. Then stood hands on hips, breathing harder than I could remember. I was gassed.

I counted. Five. Seven. Ten. That was all.

Water poured out of the wall above Farrow’s head, gurgling behind me. Running over what remained of his face.

I turned to the table, lifted Emily’s picture up out of the rest. A mess in front of me. Too many girls, poses, straps. Filth. Emily was in another shot and another. Her face among a mix of many others, all mired in filth, her thin body contorted to his desires.

I took what I needed—only one picture of her—and left Farrow in his bathroom. Shut the door behind me, tucked the picture inside my jacket, close to my breast. Brushed off my hands, saw the cuts, didn’t care. I wiped the blood off on my pants and walked out of the building, onto the street, toward home.

Emily’s soul one step closer to clean.

CHAPTER NINE

I lay awake at 3:57 a.m., listening to her breath, longing to touch her in ways I never would. Protector, savior, absolver . . . these were the roles I played for her in the name of our Lord.

But lover? That would never be.

Under the bedsheets, I allowed myself one touch.

I brought my fingers along the length of her thigh, hip to knee—not even. Stopped myself inches from her knee, just touching with the pads of my first fingers. Just two! The softness of her skin. In the dim dawn light, I saw her side move as she inhaled, lowering as she let go. Her soft sounds.

I allowed myself one long touch, put my palm against her side where she felt warm. This, in the night, was where I committed my own sin. I wanted to believe she liked it. My hand burned. I felt the fire of my own urges—more than I could take.

The cold floor shocked my bare feet when I pushed myself out of bed on the opposite side. I wanted to come around and watch her face as she slept, but couldn’t risk waking her. Instead, I moved to the sink, where I splashed cold water on my face and under my arms. I knew the movies where men like me self-punished with whips and straps, flagellating their backs. Silly. Why would I want to do that when the streets beckoned with a wealth of sinners waiting to be claimed in His name?

Outside on Larkin, I headed north, into the heart of the city at its worst. At this time of night, I passed addicts nodding on the concrete, bodies laid flat. Beyond them walked the last peddlers of physical sin—those too broke, without a home to go back to, barely standing in the light for the last hopes of a trick that might pay what they needed to cop. He was in the middle of all this, out here for me to find.

Emily had given me one final name. The one I wanted most.

I knew where to find him. Her instructions were specific: third floor in the back. The door wouldn’t have a lock. This was where he would be.

Taking this route, I saw the city’s worst. The smells, the faces, the questions. They asked for money, even knowing He has a house where they might go to be helped and fed. But not these; they didn’t come for absolution, only recognized me as a black shape passing at 4:00 a.m. They had no want of change or saving, death their only end.

I stopped at one I couldn’t pass: a black man with foam at his mouth and an unshaved chin, holding his hand out. His clouded eyes didn’t even recognize me from his meals.

“Quarter? Dollar?” he asked.

“You,”
I said quietly. I pushed him back against a building with my hand, close enough to get his smell. He hadn’t bathed in weeks. “Absolution in the face of our Lord. Do you accept it?”

“What, man? Why you coming up on me . . .”

He tried to raise his arms, but I already had both his wrists.

“What do you want?” I asked him. “Do you want to be saved in the eyes of the Lord? And live in heaven?”

“What you talking about? What is this?” He struggled to break my grip but couldn’t. Not only was he weak, but he was undernourished as well. He couldn’t do a thing.

“I can offer you absolution right now, for a price. Do you take it? Or do you choose to stay in this sinful place?”

“No. Fuck, no. What the shit you saying?” He pulled his head back and angled his face away, trying to see me more clearly through the sides of his eyes. Who knows what he saw? In all likelihood, he hadn’t seen clearly in years.

I used my left hand to hold his wrists. With my right, I drew the knife. A sliver of streetlight gleamed against its blade, and he saw this. Suddenly his vision cleared.

“What you—”

“One chance, old man. Don’t ask me why I’m giving it to you, but I am. One chance to be absolved of all your sins.”

“How is . . . ? How can you?”

“I take them on as my own, my son. Send you to heaven for eternity to live in His presence among angels.”

He didn’t respond. I slid the knife’s tip down his jacket, slicing fabric.

He shook his head, did his best to push me off. This time I let him. He danced away, down the wall, screaming no, over and over.

No one bothered to notice. For all they knew, he was just howling at the night—seeing things, imagining ghosts.

Then he fixed me with the clearest stare he could muster, a clarity of vision I had not seen in some time—from anyone—and he said, “I choose this earth and this life. This is where I’m gonna stay.”

“Your decision.” I turned away. Perhaps if he had chosen absolution, it would have changed all that came after, kept me away from the pimp, saved us all.

But he had not.

The sinners chose their sins, the path toward faith presenting itself daily and lying untaken. Everyone had free will upon His earth.

Everyone paid.