Did oral sex count? Sonny pictured herself in front of the board at Internal Affairs, taking the Bill Clinton defense.
Pushing that thought aside, she tried to focus on the details of the case, considering the ways this crime scene differed from the others. First and foremost, none of the previous victims had been submerged. Except Olivia Fortune.
Sonny had read the police reports and seen the photos. Emergency personnel had found an unintelligible Ben with his wife’s dead body. Both were soaked to the skin. He later admitted to removing her from the tub in an attempt to revive her.
Staring at the jumble of rocks pointing out into the midnight blue Pacific, Sonny wondered if tossing Lisette’s body in the ocean, or dropping Olivia’s into a tub of bathwater, were attempts at washing away evidence.
It was also inconceivable that Lisette had swept into Arlen Matthews’ gill net by circumstance. Either Arlen had killed Lisette and done a poor job of getting rid of her body, or someone wanted to make it appear that way. Sonny hated to cut the disgusting piece of slime a break, but she had to admit a well-known abuser of prostitutes made a convenient fall guy.
Of course, dismissing Arlen as the culprit hardly exonerated Ben.
After the body on the rocks had been loaded into the back of the crime lab van, Sonny asked for a closer look.
The space was tight in the van but the lighting was better. Dr. Ramashad unzipped the cadaver bag, exposing what once had been a face.
It hardly resembled the pictures Sonny had seen of Lisette Bruebaker. She’d been a very pretty girl with overstyled hair, too much eye makeup, and a full-lipped pout. In summer a body that had spent almost a week in the water wouldn’t have much skin, but at this time of year, the effects of decomposition were less pronounced.
The cold water hadn’t saved her from scavengers, however, and they always started with the soft tissues of the face.
“Let me see her neck,” she requested, her voice grim.
The girl’s long hair was tangled over her throat, strangling her for eternity. Dr. Ramashad lifted it away carefully with a pair of silver-handled forceps.
The deep black crease he exposed was much easier to recognize than her face, and there was nothing tentative about it. If anything, it was overkill. There was no doubt in Sonny’s mind now that the victim was Lisette Bruebaker and the perpetrator was the SoCal Strangler.
Feeling numb, she followed Sergeant DeGrassi downtown and sat in on the autopsy, her mind reeling. When the girl’s hair was matched to the sample Sonny had collected from Ben’s bed, he would be taken in for questioning. Perhaps even booked for murder.
Sonny would be under obligation to arrest the only man she’d ever been in danger of falling in love with. She was powerless to help him, cursed by her inability to trust, a victim of her own investigative fervor.
Deciding not to go down without a fight, Sonny went back to her apartment and took out her laptop, running another, more detailed search on Arlen Matthews. Incredibly, the guy had no official criminal record. In fact, he seemed to have dropped out of thin air sometime in the mid-eighties.
Before then, he’d had no driver’s license, no credit report, no history.
The door was locked, but he didn’t have any trouble getting in. He could be stealthy when he chose to be, slipping in and out of most places undetected.
The cheap hardware on the back door at the Matthews residence was no match for him. Because he wanted to make it look like an inside job, he left the lock intact, and would have to remember to reengage it after he left.
Matthews was a mean, canny son of a bitch, quick to anger and tough as an old boot. He was also a pass-out drunk who wouldn’t be able to defend himself, much less fight back, so the intruder went to the boy’s room first.
It was empty.
An unexpected complication, but no reason to turn around and go home. Unconcerned with getting caught, the man clicked on the bedroom light and studied the contents of the room. The paint was cracked, the ceiling had water damage, and the furniture was atrocious. Despite the dismal poverty reflected here and throughout the house, this room was spotless.
The bed was neatly made, boasting crisp sheets and a scratchy-looking wool blanket. There was a small dresser against one wall with a jagged shard of mirror above it. The hardwood floor was scuffed but clean. In a milk crate next to the dresser, there was a stack of workbooks and a jar filled with stubby pencils.
“What the fuck is this?” he mused aloud. “David Copperfield’s room?”
Shaking his head, he clicked off the light and moved on, finding Arlen Matthews’ personal quarters with no problem. The sour smell hit him two steps before he entered.
Arlen’s sense of hygiene left a lot to be desired. There were scummy clothes and dirty dishes everywhere. Sticky-paged porn mags littered the stained carpet. The man behind the mess was facedown on the bed, snoring. A trickle of blood ran from his hairline into his ear.
Another complication. Wasn’t life full of them?
Killing a man wasn’t going to be any fun, especially a stinking drunk with a head injury. All right, so it wasn’t going to be a challenge, and it wasn’t going to be executed according to his plan, but it was going to be easy.
The boy’s disappearance, however, created a problem. James was a sneaky little bastard, always moving silently across the beach, drifting from one rock formation to another like a fucking sand ghost. Arlen used his son to procure women. And why not? The kid was beautiful. A sweet, sinewy bit of flesh.
He’d seen James from afar many times, and although he’d been careful, the boy may have seen him, too. After too many close encounters, he’d hunted elsewhere, preferring a more upscale neighborhood and a younger, classier target than what Arlen could afford. Since then their paths had rarely crossed.
Still, James Matthews was a loose end, one he couldn’t wait to tie into a neat bow.
Sighing, he turned his attention to the foul-smelling beast on the bed. He could put the gun in Arlen’s hand, raise it to his temple, and pull the trigger, but what if forensics proved he’d never regained consciousness before death?
Modern science could be such a nuisance.
With his signature attention to detail, he brought the slim bracelet out of his pocket and held it in his gloved hands, watching diamonds twinkle in the meager light. The piece was his favorite and he hated to part with it. It didn’t fit his wrist, but he liked to feel the cool metal against his skin and remember his first kill.
Tears sprang into his eyes, because he wanted to bring the shimmering band to his lips one last time and knew he couldn’t. Blinking them away, he laid the bracelet on top of an open magazine, finding it fitting that the spread-eagled sexpot on the page resembled Olivia.
She was a slut, but most women were. Only he saw their true natures. Only he had the power to free their flesh.
Men like Arlen Matthews gave him a bad name. By raping women indiscriminately and then allowing them to live, Matthews created a cycle of abuse. The whores Matthews brutalized sometimes became predators themselves. They became the kind of women who would tie up a young boy and toy with him. The same kind of women who had gravitated to the coked-out sex parties at his porn-queen mother’s house.
The abused became the abusers, having found a preteen plaything.
He shut the past out of his mind and focused on Matthews, hating him for his lack of foresight, his failure to plan, and his general disorganization. But most of all, he hated him for letting his victims live.
Feeling melancholy, he gathered up a dingy pillow and shoved it under Arlen Matthews’ face, gripping the back of his neck when his body began to convulse, holding him down and forever ending his miserable, misogynistic existence.