I slammed the trunk, crouched, and hustled backward into the house, scanning the horizon the whole way. I saw nothing, but I locked all four locks on the front door.
I went through the documents in the bedroom with the door locked. I wasn’t one for technical information. I mean, I wasn’t a goddamn sleuth, but I was able to piece together enough from the pictures. They say a thousand words, don’t they?
The first murders were in California.
Those early murders were the ones he learned from, the ones that gave him the lesson that he could do whatever he wanted to and get away with it, that given enough time he could do whatever his sick mind came up with.
The first two victims looked different from the others. The girls were escorts, which, considering this was California we were talking about, probably meant they were struggling actresses. They were strangled, beaten, bludgeoned. Roses were incorporated, but in that first kill, which occurred in a motel room, a rose from a nearby dozen was singled out and placed atop her corpse, almost as if it were a decoration. The star at the top of the Christmas tree. Or a sick gift.
For that second girl, the stem of the rose was pushed up inside her.
The first two were the only two that weren’t marked with semen. With the third, traces of semen were found just feet away from the dead girl’s body. He couldn’t take it anymore.
After that, the sky was the limit, and like Pearce said, things had just gotten worse. That’s the weird thing about serial killers: the more they do it, the more sophisticated they get, yet at the same time, they become more animalistic, more savage, as time goes on.
The rest of the crime-scene photos, when viewed chronologically, seemed like a virtual flip-book showing how the female body could be mutilated to greater and greater degrees. The roses became his calling card, placed in the sockets where a pair of eyes should have been. The question was, did he do it because he thought it was important, or did he do it just to let people know that he was the guilty party?
They didn’t seem to have any hair or blood from the killer, but if they had semen, that meant he left a scent, and if he left a scent, I had the utmost confidence that the wolf—all teeth and nails and bad intentions—would hunt the man down without even breaking a sweat.
I put everything back in the folder and went back out to the living room. Pearce was still sleeping in the chair. I peeked out through the curtain, and even though I spent an extra minute looking around out there, I saw nothing. I had to presume that the sound of the snapping twig was caused by a cat, or a dog. I unlocked the door, ran to the car, put the folder back, and zipped back into the house.
I put the keys back in Pearce’s pocket, along with a handwritten note I hoped his wife would find. She didn’t like me for any particular reason. I figured I ought as well give her one. The note read:
Danny—
You know I have been with a lot of men, but no one has ever given me better cock than you. I love your cock inside me. It fills me up like I’m a balloon. I know you still love your wife, but if I could feel you cum inside me every day of the week, I would die a happy transvestite.
Love—
Tommy Candy
I threw a moth-bitten blanket over him that probably smelled like phantom cats, turned out the lights in the living room, and locked myself in the bedroom. It was two-thirty in the morning. I had to be at the restaurant at seven. I would have liked to have slept a few hours, but Pearce snored.
NINE
More people than I had ever known showed up to pay their last respects to Judith Myers. Pearce was there, at least in spirit, because his mind was fried. I think the only respite he’d had since Gloria Shaw’s body was found was when he dozed off at my place. Since then, all he did was work. I was there in a cheap brown suit I had gotten at a thrift shop for fifteen dollars. It was shiny at the elbows, and was probably last worn by the man who had died in it back in the mid-seventies. It fit like a glove. I was also sporting a pair of black shoes I had to pay a little more for—men don’t part with nice black shoes until they are destroyed—and the sunglasses I wore when I kicked that guy’s ass a handful of days before.
There were a lot of church people at the funeral, as well as students and friends of the dead girl. Everyone else was media, and if not that, then federales in disguise, which meant, as far as I knew, that they weren’t wearing their earpieces with their black suits and ties. I guess for a funeral they were dressed as inconspicuously as they could be. In a black Chrysler off a ways, and also out by a willow tree, were a couple of lawman-photographers taking pictures of all the people who showed up. Sickies apparently had the bad habit of showing up at the funerals of their prey. I had to presume that they would later compare their new pictures to the photos taken at the funerals in the other states, see if anyone matched up.
As the priest went on with his shtick about eternal life coming down to the little town princess, I started thinking about all the people I’d put down over the years. I wondered if any of them got any kind of burial service. As far as I know, there just wasn’t a whole hell of a lot left of them to bury—and that kind of got me all maudlin. There were a handful I’d have liked to have seen off, if for no other reason than I’d know where to go back to if I ever felt like pissing on someone’s grave.
It wasn’t often that I felt completely justified sending the wolf after a particular person. Sometimes I had to settle for someone who didn’t really deserve to die. But I had zero sympathy for my new target. In regards to pissing on someone’s grave, I figured if things worked out right, I could start off with this fucking Rose Killer, once I got my mitts on him.
TEN
I woke up on the day of the full moon in a great mood, and why wouldn’t I have? The world was just hours away from having a creep known as the Rose Killer wiped from existence. Yeah, I felt pretty chipper indeed.
When I got to work my usual five minutes late, Anthony Mannuzza’s Mach 1 was parked out front, and he was leaning against the side of it with a cigarette in one hand and a handful of loose papers in the other.
I pulled up next to him and got out of the truck. I put my keys in my left hand just in case I had to put the right one to work.
He smiled. “I’ve been waiting for coffee.”
“Keep waiting,” I said, and I brushed past him to climb the stairs.
“Aren’t you even curious why I’m here?”
“I know why,” I said. “You’re a glutton for punishment.”
He smiled again and sidled up next to me. He showed me what the papers were—black-and-white photographs. The picture on top was an eight-by-ten shot of me in my suit and sunglasses.
He had been at the funeral.
“How the fuck did you take this without me seeing you?”
“Telescopic lens,” he said. “I have all kinds of equipment in the car.”
“I thought you were full of shit about being a picture man.”