Slasher

Chapter 15

I could tell David was home when I opened the front door. Garth Brooks blared from the stereo system in the living room and I could hear the shower going.

But where the hell was his car?

I knew something was wrong the instant he emerged from the bathroom. He didn't so much walk out as stagger.

David was drunk.

I'd known him to drink, even get tipsy on occasion, but he always told me he'd seen too many cops fall down that dark hole of drinking to forget into full blown alcoholism. He wasn't going to follow that path. Tempting as it was at times to drown the horrors a cop saw all too often he had always kept his drinking under control. Until now.

"What happened?"

David stopped in the center of the living room, in full view of the open window that gave a panoramic view of L.A. He'd forgotten a towel and now stood there in full, naked glory, still dripping.

"Thought I heard you." His words were spoken slowly, as though he was determined not to slur them. "Come home to cook dinner? Not sure I can eat." He brightened. "But I could use another drink. How 'bout you?"

"I think you might have had enough," I said. "What happened, David?"

David ignored my words and stumbled into the kitchen where he pulled a beer out of the fridge door. He popped the top and put back half of it before he met my gaze again. His eyes had feverish pitch.

I knew it was bad. His next words confirmed it.

"Found another one," he said. "One we'd missed. Our buddy got tired of our sloppiness and called it in to the paper. The Los Angeles fucking Times got the scoop of a lifetime and called us after they sent a reporter and photographer out to the location. No one found it earlier because it was an abandoned industrial site. One of the dumpsters had been left behind." David laughed hollowly. He raised the glass in salute, though to what I had no idea. The Slasher? His own perceived incompetence? "Apparently the stink was so bad our brave press boys couldn't get close enough to do more than watch each other toss their cookies."

I followed David as he moved back through the living room and wound up in our bedroom. He sat down on the edge of the bed.

"Our Slasher was very helpful," David said. "He gave the Times a name. Craig Sanford. Sixteen year old runaway who was into porno and relieving older johns of their wallets while they were in the throws of passion. He's got a rap sheet going back nearly three years, can you believe. Sixteen."

I grabbed a towel out of the bathroom. I barely paused in the door to survey the chaotic mess David had left behind him. David was usually such a neat freak.

I hurried back and used the towel to rub him dry, hoping the action would help calm him down.

Unfortunately he felt a compelling need to talk.

"Must have been one of the Slasher's last vics. M.E. said it looked like the body had been out there only a couple of weeks. Probably after Stephen but before your Bobby."

"David --"

"One of the reporters had already found out where Craig lived. Well, at least where he lived when he wasn't hustling some sugar daddy into letting him sleep at his place. They even found some pictures of him. Nice professional ones, someone spent some money on them... guess he wanted to be in pictures, too." David buried his head in his hands, the bottle of beer tipping over and spilling foam out onto the floor and all over David's bare feet. He didn't notice. I threw the towel down on top of it to stop the spread of beer. "The kid looked like an angel, Chris. I think that's what one of his roomies called him. Said it was his nickname. I can see why... The pictures were new, but I swear he barely looked twelve in them. He must have been real popular with the twinkie crowd.

"The bastard told the paper about the web sites. The reporter asked me about that. Wanted to know why weren't shutting the sites down. I wanted to tell him if we did that we might be losing any chance we had of finding this guy. But the Captain's got a gag order out on this case. No one talks to the press. They got such a hard on for me as it is, I don't dare be the one who fucks up..."

"So the press is going to print the web site and let millions know where they can go and get a nice long look at that sick freak's handiwork." I frowned and rubbed his back, trying to loosen his tension. "Chances are they'll shut the site down now anyway. Once word gets out and the ISP knows what they're hosting..."

"How much did you get out of it? Enough?"

"I don't know. It's been running for days now. If he's been back to check things out I'm sure I've got his number. Now it's just finding it amidst all the other lookie-loues."

David flopped back on the bed. Normally the sight of his naked body would have put me in the right mood for some good, hard sex, but now all I felt was a mingling of pity and anger. The pity was entirely for David, the anger -- I don't know where that was aimed. At David, for not knowing how to back off, at the whole LAPD who drove their detectives to early burnout. Or maybe at the sleazy bastard who was doing this to him. The Slasher. Because I knew David would never rest until the Slasher was history. Until they stopped him and knew no more gays were going to be tortured and killed by him.

Which meant I had to help, if I could.

I rolled David's limp body around and wrestled him under the covers, pulling the duvet up to his shoulders, and giving him a light kiss on the cheek which he never even felt. Already his soft snores were filling the bedroom. I shut the door behind me on the way out after turning off the phone beside the bed. To hell with the LAPD. David was in no shape to go back out tonight and short of a battalion of cops showing up at our door, I was going to make sure they didn't get to him.

My plans for dinner were shot so I made myself a roast beef sandwich and a tall glass of milk which I carried into the den. I shut off the phones there, too -- if Petey needed me, he'd use my cell -- then I launched my newly downloaded hacking tools and got down to work breaking into the Slasher's ISP server.

Hacking, contrary to the mythology surrounding it, is not some glamorous, genius-at-work adventure. The tools are available nearly everywhere these days, and, given a powerful enough machine, nearly any site can be hacked. The IBM the LAPD had sprung for was a top of the line model. I had souped it up even more, with extra RAM and a second processor. The thing blazed. I got it to start the number crunching involved in hacking algorithms and ate my sandwich before I moved over to the laptop to perform the next onerous task.

I had to see if Craig Sanford had a web site devoted to him.

He did.

Maybe eating supper had been a mistake. David was right. Craig had been a beautiful boy, looking like a young teen on the verge of adulthood, poised to become a handsome man. Until he fell into the Slasher's hands.

I watched the first of Craig's videos, thinking of David lying in our bed. I kept thinking of him as I forced myself to watch each video in turn. There were four of them at this site. David, I knew, had seen far worse than this. He had seen what this poor boy looked like after he'd been left like so much garbage in some industrial dumpster.

I saw him die.

And I think I saw the Slasher.

Chapter 16

The image was blurred, the mirrored surface of a battered TV that sat on a desk or dresser -- it was hard to make out -- captured the movement of the somebody approaching a bound and terrified Craig. I scrambled to launch the graphics program Lee had lent me and carefully excised that part of the image. When I had cleaned it up I realized I was looking at the same face that had stared at me from the driver's seat of the Porsche that had nearly carried Bobby to his death. I now had irrefutable proof I had seen Bobby with the Slasher days before his battered body had shown up. Wanting to go and take a shower to wash the filth away, I hastily printed off a couple of copies of the recovered image. Wondering the entire time:

Who the hell was he? He obviously found his vics through some Hollywood link. Was it the porno, though, or the legitimate acting side he used? Bobby'd had his SAG card, since he'd done enough some real acting to acquire one. But did the others? I knew where I might be able to find the answers, but first I had other business to tend to.

Back to the more technical aspects of hacking someone's server. It looked like I was in.

It was a UNIX box. I did some basic commands to see what security level I was and was pleased to see I had slipped in as a superuser. That meant I had full access to all levels of the server, including the normally hidden directories and files.

I started cruising.

When I stumbled across the database I knew I had hit gold.

It was encrypted of course, but that only slowed me down, it didn't stop me.

Database encryptions are a whole different ball game to crack than servers. But I had the best tools, so I set to work. Knowing it would take a while, I got up and paced the room. I suddenly didn't feel like sitting still.

I had to get out.

But first I went in search of David's report book. I knew he had taken to carrying it around with him nearly everywhere. He spent his evenings and weekends at home writing up his reports and going over what they had already found in the hopes of making some connection that hadn't come to him earlier. I had seen the book a dozen times, but never paid much attention to it. I had stood my ground in the beginning and forbade him to bring it to bed with him, but otherwise it was always there, near at hand. I found it in the mess he had made in the bathroom. He had dumped clothes, gun and book just inside the bathroom door.

When I got a whiff of his clothes I knew why he had taken a shower as soon as he got home. They stank of death. I stumbled back into the kitchen and grabbed a garbage bag which I stuffed full of his clothes. They would have to be dropped at the cleaners tomorrow. No way I was washing them. His gun I locked up in the gun cabinet he'd had installed in our bedroom.

His book I carried with me into the kitchen, where I set it on the table and opened it up. It was crammed full of notes in David's strong handwriting, with sketches of what I took to be crimes scenes and detailed measurements that were completely over my head. Some of the measurements were for homicide sites, some, I realized belatedly, were for bodies.

Then there were the photographs.

Crime scene images of bodies from every imaginable angle. I almost wished I could join David in a drunken stupor. How the hell did he do this day after day?

Then I found the pictures I wanted. The ones he had mentioned of Craig, others of Stephen Carlos and Robert Anstrom. Not death scene photos, but living shots. The kind that people might well recognize.

Not wanting to get either David or myself in trouble for removing evidence from an active police file I grabbed the photos and used my scanner to send them to the printer. I was glad I'd invested in a good quality laser printer, I might not get the color, but the detail of the images that emerged more than made up for that.

While I waited for the images to print, I scanned the forensics reports. Something jumped out at me. Under the toxicology heading something called Gamma Hydroxy Butyrate was listed. Why did that sound familiar? Then it came to me. The date rape drug. Easy Lay, Liquid Ecstasy -- shit I'd been hearing about on the street for years now, though I'd never met anyone who had been burned by it.

Was that how the Slasher immobilized his intended victims? I thought of Bobby as I'd last seen him in the Porsche, lifting a silver flask to his lips.

The printing was done. Stuffing the half-dozen pictures into a plain brown file folder I returned the originals to David's work book. Then I grabbed my car keys and headed for the door.

In the off chance David might get up before I got back and wonder where I was, I left him a hurriedly scribbled note telling him I'd gone out for a while. I deliberately left it vague, since if he did see it, I didn't want him to come out hunting for me. The last thing I wanted was for a pissed-off David to be cruising WeHo looking for me, especially if he realized I had gone through his report book.

I was suddenly glad David had left his car wherever he had stopped drinking. I felt guilty about turning the phones off, since his bosses would get annoyed at getting nothing but an answering machine, but I wanted David to stay asleep. He needed his sleep more than he needed dealing with any more political bullshit like the department kept slinging around.

I cruised slowly down Santa Monica, not really sure what I was looking for, but just getting a feel for the kind of crowd that was out tonight.

Since I'd seen Bobby at Skewers, I decided to start there. I parked on the street and started walking. I'm an old timer on the boulevard. I've been coming here since before I was old enough to drink. I knew all the street corners and all the regulars.

Lots of people were out tonight. Guys -- couples, groups, singles cruising for action -- and the straights, some of them tourists who came to watch the circus, others who lived in the area, all strolled the boulevard. The bars were busy, the restaurants too.

I saw plenty of people I knew. I nodded and showed them my pilfered pictures. A few thought they might have seen one or another of the Slasher's victims. No one, it seemed, had seen the Slasher himself.

The invisible man.

I handed out my business card to any and all who would take it. It had only my cell and my email address on it, so I didn't have to worry about David getting any strange calls. I told them all: If they ever saw the distinguished looking white- haired man to call me. It was important, I told them. But not why.

Then I slipped into the Railhouse. I knew Bobby had hung out here. It didn't take much to figure some of the others must have too. I wished I'd had pictures of all the victims. But surely the cops must have been by already. Once they clued in on the gay angle they must have covered their bases.

But would anyone in here talk to the cops?

The bartender was an old favorite of mine. Ramsey. He was a forty something ex-Marine who had come out and subsequently been discharged for his views on same-sex relationship. He was all for them; the military had a different opinion.

But he still looked like a marine -- except for the triple row of earrings in his left ear that spelled out the word S-E-X, in case anyone didn't clue in right away to where Ramsey's priorities lay -- no pun intended.

He caught sight of me and roared a welcome, even as he snatched up a Dos Equis from the cooler. I grabbed a seat at the end of the bar where I could see the front door to watch who came and went and maybe get some private chat time with Ramsey.

David and I had never gone to the Railhouse together. I still realized within five minutes of sitting down that most of the patrons who knew me, knew of my relationship with the cop. Gossip in WeHo is alive and well, it would seem.

"So what's this I hear 'bout you hooking up with some bruiser from the force. You nuts or something?" was Ramsey's greeting when he finally got a minute to talk. "A cop? You?"

"Yeah, me. What's the difference between a cop and a marine?"

"About four inches." Ramsey waggled his eyebrows in a campy leer. "If you're lucky."

Ramsey had been after my ass for the entire two years I'd known the guy. More than once I'd been tempted, but for some reason it had never happened. Now it never would.

"Ram," I said, kissing him on the mouth. "You're the second sexiest man I know. Be satisfied."

"I suppose your cop's the first."

"Better believe it."

"I'm from Brentwood. You gotta show me."

"I thought that was Missouri."

"Whatever." Ramsey grinned. "I still want to see this guy."

I finished my beer and Ramsey brought me another. I knew I should have said no, but after what I'd seen tonight, no wasn't in my vocabulary. He passed me a bowl of peanuts and I started cracking them open, littering the bar top with discarded shells.

"Jesus, Chris, you born in a barn?" Ramsey wiped the counter in front of me and pointedly put a large ashtray at my elbow.

He left to serve someone else and when he came back I leaned forward and murmured, "You ever kill anyone, Ram?"

"Me? I'm a pussycat," Ramsey said, then paused. "You're serious, aren't you?"

I nodded. I knew he'd been in Desert Storm, though he'd always been reluctant to talk about it.

"Not so I'd know it. No one I could put a face or name to."

"Ever see anyone die?"

"Where'd this heavy shit come from? Your cop friend bringing his work home with him? You ought to tell him to keep that shit at the office."

"No, it's not David." I wished I smoked. It would have given me something to do with my hands. "It's not him at all."

Ramsey leaned forward, his face right in mine. I could smell his warm boozy breath.

"You aren't getting into something you shouldn't, are you, Chris?"

I didn't answer him. Instead I dragged out the photos I had brought and laid them on the bar in front of Ramsey. He stepped back and looked down at them.

"What the hell is this?"

"Have you seen any of these guys?" I fanned the shots out so he could see all their faces. "Any of them?"

Ramsey studied the images. He picked up the one of Stephen and frowned at it.

"This guy's been in here a few times. Hustling for drinks. I kicked him out once when he wouldn't take no for an answer."

"Did he ever say no to you?"

Ramsey eyed me. "Me?" Then he grinned. "Nah, he looked like jail-bait to me."

"Then why did you let him in?"

"You know the place, Chris. We can't compete with the Rage or Cici's. The boss wants warm bodies in here, the only way we got to bring them in is provide the eye-candy. This guy," he tapped Stephen's picture, "was primo eye-candy. So was this one."

He picked up Craig's picture.

"This guy was definitely jail-bait. I only let him in when the place was crowded and I knew he wouldn't stay long. He never did. Look at that face. Don't tell me you wouldn't have taken him home."

I refused comment. Ramsey grinned knowingly at my discomfort.

"This guy must be real special if you've gone so straight and narrow, Chrissy." God, I hated it when he called me that. Again he tapped the pictures. "What's with these guys?"

I slid the picture of the man I thought was the Slasher forward. "What about this one, Ram. Seen him?"

Ramsey squinted down at the white-haired, slightly grainy figure in the picture. He scratched his chin and frowned. "I don't know. There's something about him..."

Julio, one of the bar regulars propped himself up on the stool beside me. He peered over my shoulder at what Ramsey was looking at so intently.

"Hey," he said. "What're you doing with a picture of Socrates?"

 

Email Patrick