The Sketcher's Mark (Lara McBride Thrillers Book 1) Read online

  Chapter Two

  Koreatown, Los Angeles

  Lara McBride did not look like a typical Detective on the LAPD’s Homicide Division. She was intense, athletic, her hair cut short because she did not indulge in the vanities she saw in the women she moved past every day. She liked to think her style, everything about her, was functional, which was her taste. She did not dress elaborately or for attention, nor did she make a point of dressing down to appear less feminine. She was striking, but it was the intensity of her eyes that gave her real presence. She could walk past people in the street and they would never notice her if she didn’t want them to because even though she walked with purpose, she did not crave the attention of those around her. She could move undetected, slip by like a ghost and nobody would ever know she was there unless she chose to make herself known. She found that skill to be able to choose to blend in or stand out came in very handy for her work and in general as a woman in Los Angeles. When she did make herself known, it was an experience most people never forgot.

  When one found oneself in the presence of Lara McBride, once those inquisitive eyes focused on them, the rest of the world melted away in a blur and all that existed was her. She could see beneath the masks people wore to hide their true selves. Her gaze penetrated beyond the surface to hungrily seek out and identify the insecurities, strengths, weaknesses, guilt and innocence most people tried so hard to hide. She was, in essence, a rare creature and to look back at her with similar eyes would be to see a woman who was in a constant struggle with the burden of this gift she had been born with- which was to see the evil in people.

  She stopped the Nissan Maxima just outside the Police Crime Scene tape that was blocking off the sidewalk outside a large house that had been built during the post War boom of the 1940’s, once a regal place that signified wealth and success, but now had security bars across the windows as the money and people who had it moved further west towards the ocean. She turned off the engine and sat there for a moment, absorbing the scene. Police cruisers, EMTs and a couple of news vans were already on the scene. Uniformed Officers were keeping the perimeter secure, corralling the reporters and the cameramen to the other side of the street. She looked over and saw the neighbors were watching. They stood huddled in groups, gossiping, speculating. A couple of uniformed Officers were taking statements from them. They were a typical ethnic mix for this part of town, which was just a few blocks off busy Normandie Avenue. Koreans, Armenians, mid-Western white people, some good looking young men and women in their twenties, probably service industry and wannabe actors who had come to Los Angeles to live the dream and now found themselves living across the street from a nightmare. Nobody in the crowd looked to her like a suspect hanging around to watch the show. She got out.

  The air smelled warm and carried the scent of rotting garbage mixed with some kind of spice wafting over from the restaurants a block over. She showed her Detective badge to the uniformed Officer on guard at the foot of the steps leading up to the two level yellow house. Waiting in the doorway at the top of the steps was a man in his late forties, stocky, buzzcut, looked like he’d have been at home in the 1940’s himself- and would have still been a cop.

  “Detective Hoyt,” she greeted. Hoyt smiled and held out his hand. She shook it.

  “Lara, great to have you back. I missed that smile. Am I gonna see it any time soon?”

  “Depends what kind of horror show you’ve got for me in here.”

  She walked inside. Stained beige carpet in the hallway, running all the way down to the back of the house. Bathroom on the right, bedroom in back. Stairs ahead leading up to the master bedroom and another bathroom. She knew the layout, been in plenty of places made with the same blueprint. They’d all been built the same way and this wasn’t her first crime scene inside one. Detective Hoyt led her in to the living room, the kitchen and back door beyond.

  A Forensics crew were taking pictures of the crime scene, gathering fibers from the carpet, table, sofa and chairs. The room was a clutter. They were hoarders. Newspapers, magazines, unopened mail, flyers. Disgusting to most, but Lara saw it as a mental affliction, not a hygienic choice. The carpet looked like it hadn’t been vacuumed in a long time. That was good, more chance for the Forensics team to get DNA samples. There were photos on the wall of the owners, a Korean couple in their fifties. Pictures of the two of them together, maybe twenty of them covering one wall, all placed at crooked angles. They hadn’t cared enough to mount the pictures properly. That suggested they didn’t care much about the memories the photographs displayed. She looked closer, saw the couple looked bored in most of the pictures, at someone else’s wedding, someone else’s party, someone else’s happier life. The couple were smiling in the older pictures so it hadn’t always been miserable, just as they got older. Happier when they were younger, the spark had just gone over time and the smiles disappeared. Same old sad story.

  “How long have they been married?” she asked.

  “Twenty three years,” Hoyt replied, thumbing through a small notebook he always carried with him. His wife had bought him his first one when he made Detective and she continued to buy him the same brand every year on his birthday. Lara counted the pictures on the wall. There were twenty three.

  “There’s a picture for every year. They hung these for someone else. Mother in law probably expected great things. Any kids?”

  “One. A daughter.”

  “That’s disappointing for first generation Koreans. They all want sons. Tell me she grew up smart and fast and moved far far away from all this.”

  “She’s working for a law firm in Boston. She’s already on her way to the airport to come home.”

  “Poor girl. And now she has to deal with the guilt of leaving them alone.”

  Lara took a breath and allowed her eyes to move around the room. The husband was on his knees, his arms limp and loose by his side, knuckles on the carpet, his head down. The blood had stained his white vest almost completely all the way through. It was still wet, the fabric ripped here and there from where the knife had hacked its way through. The TV was on behind him playing a black and white episode of The Twilight Zone.

  The wife was on the carpet. She’d been completely carved up. Her chest was a mess of blood and flesh and her throat was almost completely gone. There was a kitchen knife next to the bodies, bloody, small chunks of flesh on the blade. A Forensics officer was taking pictures.

  Lara looked past the bodies and the blood on the carpet. Arterial spray on the wall, some had spattered over the photos. On the coffee table, two plates, knives and forks, half eaten dinner. Looked like meatloaf and mashed potatoes, probably frozen dinners heated up. There really was no passion left in this house except whatever had happened on the carpet. Hoyt said nothing. He knew better. He let her work.

  She walked in to the kitchen. Filthy. A refrigerator with coupons months out of date. Good intentions to save money never followed up. Dirty plates and pots in the sink. A plate, knife, fork and glass were sat clean and dry in the dish caddy. A cockroach scuttled across the linoleum over dried sauce stains and out under the back door. Lara opened the back door and looked out. She saw flashing lights coming from the response vehicles on the street. It was dark back here, a little alley going between the dead couple’s house and the similarly designed one next door. She looked at the lock and saw there were no signs of forced entry. Window was still intact. She went back in and closed the door. Hoyt stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the living room.

  “Was the TV on when you came in?” she asked.

  “The volume was blaring, I muted it but left it on so you could see the crime scene exactly as we found it. Can I ask what you’re thinking yet?”

  “Sure. You can ask.”

  She looked past him to see a man in his 30s, well dressed in an expensive tailored suit, his hair perfectly put together, enter the living room. He was tanned, had exquisite five o’clock shadow that was intentional. This was Detective Jerry
Barnes.

  “McBride, I thought crime scenes made you sick these days?” Barnes said, grinning and testing her.

  “No, that’s your aftershave, Barnes,” she threw back. She wished he wasn’t here right now. He had always proved more of a distraction in Police work than any kind of help, but he was somebody’s son in law so he would always have a job and a badge.

  “You know we have been solving crimes without you while you was in rehab,” he said, trying to cut deeper.

  “Hey, come on, Jerry,” Hoyt tried to mediate. Barnes was in the living room now, making the Forensics team walk around him. This annoyed Lara because she couldn’t stand seeing ego get in the way of work. There was no place for it in a crime scene. And she had little use for it anywhere else. She moved out of the kitchen and in to the living room.

  “It was a Trauma Center, Jerry, and thanks for asking. I’m fine now.”

  “I thought you were just gonna stay home and write books about this shit.”

  “If I did that, who would actually solve the homicides?”

  “Fuck you, McBride.” He never could last long in the back and forth banter. He could hurl it but not take it.

  “Why don’t you do us all a favor and go on another book tour and don’t come back? We don’t need your bullshit voodoo dog and pony show.”

  “We all handle stress in different ways, Jerry. You need to wear designer clothes to crime scenes. I needed to talk to somebody. Can we get back to the dead people in the living room?”

  Barnes blustered, unable to find something to say. Hoyt moved him back out of the room to the hallway and she could hear him grumbling. She breathed in and closed her eyes. Quiet the mind. Lock everything else out. Just like her father had taught her. She controlled her breathing, felt her body relaxing, opening up to the imprints in time that had been left behind.

  She opened her eyes and the Forensics team were gone. She was alone now in the room with the bodies of the husband and wife. The TV was still on, playing a show that had first been beamed out across homes in Los Angeles decades ago. Thick black ribbons fluttered across the room. They trailed from the dead couple, undulating in a breeze that didn’t exist, trailing in to the kitchen. She looked back to where they led- the sink. The solitary washed dish, knife, fork and glass. The room blurred, seemed to expand and contract on itself as though it were breathing. It had something to tell her, pregnant with a secret that had to be birthed and only she could deliver it. It throbbed with intent. She closed her eyes, breathed out and when she opened them again, she was back in the room with everybody else. It had taken her a long time to be able to control her gift so well. She had just figured out the best thing to do was to not fight it. Her father had taught her well. He had never understood it, but he had helped her with it.

  “They had a boarder,” she announced. “Male, 30’s to 40’s, same ethnic group, probably recently divorced or separated, possibly out of work. No previous criminal history, comes from a home of domestic abuse. He saw a lot of it when he was young. He’s in a place right now where he feels like a failure. That’s where his rage comes from. His parents.”

  “Come on,” Barnes chimed in. Hoyt looked around the living room, as though everything she had just said could be found right in front of him.

  “Lara, I’m not saying you’re wrong or you’re rusty but I don’t see anything here to tell me it was anything other than a domestic argument that escalated. I mean, they’re holding the murder weapons in their hands. Probably hated each other for years and tonight they just snapped.”

  “They needed money, that’s why the coupons on the refrigerator and the need for a boarder to make the mortgage. Self esteem was low, hence the hoarding and keeping it all out in the open even with a guest in the house. They didn’t care about fighting in front of him, either. That was how far they’d fallen. And that was the stress trigger for the UnSub.”

  “Bullshit,” Barnes uttered. Lara ignored him and walked out of the living room in to the corridor. Hoyt followed her.

  “She’s gone crazy from all the shock treatment and meds they probably had her on at the loony bin. Not that she wasn’t crazy before she went in,” Barnes chirped.

  “If they were fighting, why would the boarder get involved?” Hoyt asked as Lara opened the door to the small guestroom at the back of the house.

  The room was small, tidy, clean. The bed was made. Nothing seemed out of place. Lara pulled disposable gloves from her pocket, put them on and opened the chest of drawers against the wall. The paint was peeling, the furniture was old. Nothing was inside the drawers. She opened the walk-in closet, pulled the chain that turned on the bare bulb overhead. Empty. She ran a finger over one of the shelves. No dust.

  “Time of death?” she asked.

  “We’re guessing at this point, a couple of hours.”

  “Time for him to clean up, pack up and book.”

  “There’s nothing in here, Lara. It’s a spare room. Bed doesn’t even look slept in.”

  “Their boarder was a neat freak. He wants order in his surroundings because his life doesn’t have any. They gave him chaos. They gave him his parents mark two.”

  Barnes leaned against the door, looked around the room. He wasn’t impressed with Lara McBride but he liked the way she looked in her jeans, sweater and that black leather jacket she always wore. He licked his lips, involuntarily. Maybe he could get her drunk one night or mess up her meds and see if she was just as sure in her own bedroom as she was in this one. Man, that would be something, he thought.

  “I say Mr and Mrs Kimchi started arguing about some shit, the garbage, the lottery, who knows, whatever, she grabs a knife and starts going at him, he grabs it off her and cuts her up like his Salisbury steak. Case closed. Daughter sells the house, goes back to Boston, marries an accountant and we all move on with our lives.”

  “They did a lot of damage to each other,” Hoyt suggested.

  “The TV is set to a rerun channel,” Lara explained, “it’s probably showing the same show that was on when he was a kid and his parents used to fight. He got the knife from the kitchen and butchered them in the living room, made it look like they did each other. Then he washed his plate, packed his stuff, cleaned this room, took a shower and left.”

  “He took a shower? Who the fuck takes a shower right after they killed two people? He’d want to get the hell outta here.”

  Hoyt found himself wondering the same thing.

  “He figured the neighbors have heard them fighting so much they don’t care anymore and nobody’s gonna come knocking on the front door to make sure they’re alright. Our man’s crossed the line now and he knows it. He needs help, he’s in pain. Chances are, he’ll probably turn himself in or throw himself off a building. Either one is fine by me.”

  “This is ridiculous.” Barnes pulled a pack of cigarettes from his jacket and began to head down the corridor to the front door.

  Hoyt looked at Lara, saw she meant everything she’d just said, as matter of fact as if she had been ordering dinner.

  “Barnes,” Hoyt called. Barnes stopped, cigarette in his mouth and his lighter in his hand.

  “Don’t tell me you’re buying any of this crap?”

  “If he showered then we need an ultraviolet in the bathroom. You want to do the honors with Forensics?”

  “I’m not gonna say no to overtime,” Barnes said, putting the cigarette back in the pack and moving in to the living room to harangue one of the Forensics team.

  Hoyt stepped inside the guest room and closed the door. Lara looked at him, knew this conversation was going to happen at some point. She just didn’t expect it to be now.

  “Why’d you come back?” he asked. Even though he was only about ten years older, he had adopted a fatherly concern when it came to her. She appreciated that. It was nice to know someone cared without an agenda.

  “Why do you?” she countered.

  “Because my wife says I’m sick in the head.”

  “
She’s right.”

  “You should hear what she says about you.”

  Lara smiled. She’d always liked Anna Hoyt, a sincere woman who spoke her mind and made sure there were no secrets in her marriage. With everything on the table, she believed nothing could hurt them. Lara was sure her husband never brought his work home, though. They were good people. She envied them.

  “I’m fine. I wanted to come back. I got my head straight again.”

  “If you say so,” Hoyt nodded. “I go with you, Lara. You just make sure you talk to me if you need to. No more keeping this crap trapped inside. It poisons the soul.”

  A uniformed Officer opened the door, mid twenties, fit, eager, ready to impress Hoyt.

  “Sir, I just talked with the neighbors. They say there was a guy renting a room here. He left a few hours ago on foot carrying a suitcase. I figured it’s important.”

  “Slow down, son, there’ll be no more crimes left to solve,” Hoyt pulled the rookie cop inside the room, put his arm around his shoulder, making him feel important. Lara watched, remembering how he had used the same trick with her on their first case together several years ago.

  “You think this is important, sir?” the Rookie asked, already seeing advancement in his future. “Cos I got my application in for the Detectives exam.”

  “And you’re gonna ace it, kid,” Hoyt smiled at Lara as she walked out of the room.

  Moving down the hallway, she saw the Forensics team had their UV light going in the bathroom. She stood in the doorway and watched the lights exposing the bodily fluids under the black light. The Forensics Officer turned back to her and Barnes.

  “This tub’s covered in blood,” he announced.

  Barnes watched her silently, and she thought he was going to call her a “witch” again as he had done many times before, but he had nothing left to say tonight. His look was one of complete disbelief.