Nine

As he reached the ridge, he saw smoke coming from the cabin’s chimney. He began ru

Spooky had found the matches.

2

Lakewood, California

Sunday, May 18, 9:45 P.M.

Homicide Detective Ciara Morton gri

Alex Brandon took his gaze from the dangling carcass and glanced at his partner. Here was Morton, standing in this hot, fetid, crowded bathroom, smiling over the dead man, while the sheriff’s department rookie who had found the corpse was getting sick on the front lawn. He shook his head. “Wrong, Ciara. Somebody else just made more work for us.”

“Taking Bernardo Adrianos out of commission?” she said. “You’re right. Should have called the pound for a dead animal pickup, not us.”

He ignored the laugh that brought from the coroner’s assistant, who was standing in the hallway, and went back to contemplating the scene before him, wishing he could hold his breath longer. The acrid, sour smell of aging blood thickened the air.

The vacant house, on a street lined with similar small 1950s-era homes, was located in Lakewood, one of several area cities policed by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Neighbors had called the LASD to complain about the stench.

Alex rubbed a hand along the back of his neck, trying to loosen the tension there. Unlike Ciara, he found nothing to celebrate in the scene before them. Alex had spent weeks hungering for the chance to bring Adrianos to justice, but he felt no satisfaction in discovering that Adrianos’s other enemies had caught up with the drug trafficker first. In fact, it was a letdown.

For a brief moment, he allowed himself to imagine what it might have been like to be working this case not with brusque Ciara Morton, but with his previous partner, J. D. Dodson. After more than a decade of working together, J.D. and Alex would have gone about this work totally attuned to one another, without stepping on each other’s toes-or those of anyone else working on the case. He knew nothing good would come of such thoughts, though, and he focused again on the scene before him.

Alex looked up at the small sliding glass window above the tub. Didn’t seem as if much air was coming in through it. At least it was open now. Those who had arrived earlier at the scene had been forced to wait until the crime lab and coroner got the information they needed on the temperature of the body and the room-and for the window latch to be dusted for prints-before opening it. The heat and stench must have been nearly unbearable.

He heard the rumble of the gasoline generator the crime lab had brought with them-the only source of power. The hot, bright, portable lights reflected off the white tiles of the bathroom, casting harsh shadows over the macabre stage before him.

The average human body holds just over a gallon of blood, and Alex figured most of Bernardo Adrianos’s gallon lay in the cloudy, putrefying layer in the bottom of the tub. Adrianos’s long ponytail rose from it like a wick to his head. His face was battered and nearly unrecognizable. All along his heavily tattooed body, dried rivulets of blood from a multitude of small cuts overlay the artwork on Adrianos’s skin. Some of the black lines on his skin were moving. Ants, Alex realized. The flies weren’t dining alone.

Enrique Marquez, one of the homicide detectives who had originally caught the call, stood on the other side of Alex. Marquez had noticed that the tattoos on the victim’s arms matched ones he had seen in a department bulletin. “He’s the one who murdered your witness, about three months ago, right?” he said.

“Yes, he’s the one,” Alex said, trying not to think of that other scene, trying to concentrate on this one.

Ciara wasn’t going to let it go, though. “Our witness? No, Marquez, he killed our witness, the witness’s wife, the witness’s two-year-old son, and the witness’s four-year-old daughter. Adrianos didn’t go easy on any of them. I mean, he could have beaten the murder rap and kept the heroin coming in over the border without touching those kids, right? Two and four. That was the first case Alex and I worked together. You’re lucky you didn’t walk in on that one, Marquez. Alex here hasn’t been sleeping well since.”

Marquez shifted uncomfortably and glanced at Alex.

“That’s true,” Alex said calmly, hiding his irritation. His anger at the loss of the witness, his sense of defeat, were nothing compared to what he had felt when he found the children. Alex had followed a trail of blood outside the witness’s house to a metal garbage can. Adrianos had crammed the small bodies of the children into it.

“You saw the mirror?” Marquez asked.

Alex turned to look again at the mirror over the sink. Mixed with his own reflection, he saw the large numeral painted in blood:

9

The single curving stroke was neat and even.

“Any idea what that’s about?” Marquez asked.

“Not offhand. You find what it was painted with?” Alex asked. “A brush? A cloth? A glove?”

“No, not yet. Looks like a brush, though. The lab’s going to take a sample to see if it’s the victim’s blood.”

“Don’t call him a victim, Marquez,” Ciara said.

“The owners of the house moved out of here over a year ago?” Alex asked quickly, hoping to head off an argument. He turned back toward the body.

“Yes,” Marquez said, “but the coroner doesn’t think the vic-uh, the body’s been here more than a couple of days. Not enough insect progress, and after a while, the body would have pulled apart. It’s already stretched out a little.”

“Blood in the tub is still liquid, though,” Alex said. “After two hot days, wouldn’t it be more congealed?”

“Coroner wondered about that, too. He found a puncture wound here.” Marquez carefully leaned over and pointed with gloved finger to a bruised place on Adrianos’s left arm. “He thinks the killer used an IV anticoagulant.”

Alex grimaced. “Injected something into Adrianos so that he’d bleed to death faster?”

“All guesswork right now, but the coroner says these wounds don’t seem to be all that deep or in vital places. No spray from arterial wounds, for example. But none of these little wounds ever clotted, like they normally would have.”

“So if this drug was used on him, it made him into something like a hemophiliac?” Ciara asked.

“I think so,” Marquez said. “No definite answers until toxicology does some tests.”

“Great,” she said. “Judging by their current backlog, we won’t have a report in my lifetime.”

“It might take weeks,” Alex agreed. “But I think we’ll be able to move this one to the front of the line.”

“Dream on-they’ll know this one is an AVA, and no one will be in a rush.”

AVA-asshole versus asshole. Alex didn’t think she had that right, though. That type of killing wouldn’t have been staged so elaborately-and there could be no doubt that this was a dramatic production. But who was the intended audience?

“You find his clothes anywhere around here?” he asked Marquez.

“No sign of them.”

“You checked the whole house?” Ciara said.

Seeing Marquez bristle at the insult, Alex said, “Don’t jump to conclusions, Ciara-Adrianos could have arrived here in his birthday suit. Maybe we couldn’t find him because he’s been hiding out at a nudist colony.”

“Talk about nothing to hide,” she said, staring pointedly at the dead man’s genitals.

Adrianos had been stripped and bound. The thick rag stuffed in his mouth further distorted his face. His arms were securely tied behind him, and a taut line of black rope extended from there to his ankles, which were also tied together. From there the rope looped from between his ankles into two cleanly cut holes in the ceiling above the tub.