The Collector

2

No one ever gets used to death.

It could stab you through the heart or spray your guts across the wall with a bullet. It could slam into you on the sidewalk and knock you right out of your shoes.

Quick. Clean.

Or it could be a dark business. Strange and wicked. Bent.

Detective Stephen “Seven” Bushard watched his partner walk around the victim’s body. The woman lay dead on a canvas of her own blood, her arms and legs posed as if captured midrun. The white suit seemed almost like an accent, as if maybe there’d been some attempt at a pattern. White carpet, red blood—white suit, red blood. A pebble dropped on a quiet pond.

Seven’s partner, Erika Cabral, knelt alongside the victim to examine her face.

“The parrot’s head in the mouth is a nice touch,” she said.

“Looks like Polly got more than just a cracker.”

Erika rolled her eyes at him, never big on his jokes. Seven’s partner was dressed in a simple corduroy jacket and jeans, her thick chestnut hair pulled back in a messy topknot. On anyone else, the outfit wouldn’t turn heads. But the fit of the jeans, the slight peek of cleavage…If she wasn’t such a ball buster, his Latina partner could lead half the force by the nose.

“You ask me,” she said, “someone didn’t like what the vic had to say.”

“Could be,” he admitted.

“Ever heard the expression, don’t kill the messenger?” Erika asked.

Tran was a well-known psychic, a woman paid to see the future.

The crime scene tech, Roland Le, had already taken video of the scene and had moved on to stills. He snapped photographs in a carefully choreographed dance they knew all too well. Seven had seen it a hundred times, death. But he’d never get used to this.

Whoever killed Mimi Tran was a grade-A whack job.

The victim had been sixty-one, information delivered by the officer who had first arrived on the scene and secured the premises. He’d interviewed the two women, relatives of Tran, who’d been unlucky enough to step into this nightmare. The medical examiner would set the time of death, but Seven could take a stab at it just by the smell in the room. Another blazing day in sunny California and the place reeked of death.

Mimi Tran liked the color white: white carpet, white leather couch, white lacquered Italian office furniture. The color choice made a stunning contrast to the blood.

He knelt down to examine the near-black splatters on the carpet. Teardrop shapes led toward the door, then, abruptly—almost as if she’d been spun like a top—the trail turned in on itself, bread crumbs leading back to where the victim had fallen. Mimi Tran looked to be about five feet nine inches tall, approximately 160 pounds, no easy pickings. And still, someone had tossed her around like a rag doll.

There’d been no signs of a forced entry. The vic had an elaborate security system that had been disarmed. Both facts indicated the victim knew her killer.

Seven stared at the blood on the walls and the white sofa. However it had gone down, Mimi Tran had put up a fight.

The body now lay on the floor, bloody sockets where her eyes should have been and a bird’s head shoved inside her mouth. The blood where she had been stabbed flowered across the white wool of her suit like some flashy pattern by those designers his sister-in-law loved so much. Chanel or Gucci. Tran still wore some impressive jewelry—diamond studs the size of fat peas, gold bangles shining from her wrists, a dragon pendant with fiery rubies for eyes—taking robbery off the list of motives.

On the wall, there appeared strange markings, like maybe someone had dipped a finger in Mimi Tran’s blood and started to paint some weird wallpaper design, then changed his mind. There were exactly fifteen marks, each no bigger than a man’s palm. To Seven, they looked like Egyptian hieroglyphs. Or maybe one of those cave paintings you see in museums. The tech on the scene had already tested the stuff and made a preliminary determination. It was blood.

“My best guess?” Roland said. “He used a feather from the bird. You know, like a paintbrush.”

Erika came to stand next to Seven. Still staring at the body, she asked, “You okay?”

She said it like it was nothing, just a little chitchat between friends. But he knew what she meant.

Of course she’d ask.

He shook it off. “Just tired of this shit.”

They didn’t often get cases like this. Gang shootings, traffic accidents, domestic disputes gone bad—the everyday stuff, sure. But this was different, like some sort of ritual killing.

“I want a couple of close-ups of the markings on the wall,” Seven told the tech.

“Tell me something I don’t know.” Just the same, Roland knelt down to take the stills.

They’d dusted for fingerprints and interviewed the relatives. They’d confiscated Tran’s laptop and PDA. Every nook and cranny of the scene had been documented. Pretty soon, the coroner’s office would remove the body for autopsy.

And then they’d have to figure out what the hell it all meant.

Seven stepped closer to one of the bloody symbols painted on the wall. He frowned, staring at the marks, trying to make them out. Two horizontal lines curved around a small circle…an eye? Made sense, given the condition of the body. Taking out a pen and notepad from inside his jacket pocket, he made an attempt to copy the image.

He tried to figure out what it might mean. Someone was watching—all-knowing and all-seeing—lording his omnipotence over the now blinded victim?

“Roland? These make any sense to you?” Seven asked, pointing out the bloody images on the wall.

The tech shook his head. “It’s not Vietnamese, if that’s what you’re asking.” He looked over at the body. “Neither is that.”

But Seven might argue with him there. No one was immune to this kind of violence.

“The niece said she had an appointment to pick a lucky day for her wedding,” Seven said, moving on to the next symbol, a shaky copy of the first.

“Not my gig,” Roland said. “Fortune-tellers, that’s more old school. When Wendy and I got married, we went to the Buddhist temple to pick a date.”

“Old school or not,” Erika said, “business wasn’t hurting. Did you get a load of that Beemer in the garage?” She gave a wistful sigh. “A 735i. My dream car.”

“Never too late to marry for money,” Seven kidded.

“Yeah. Because I meet so many rich guys on the job.” Erika flashed her best smile, the kind that could sell toothpaste.

Erika was all of five feet, two inches tall, maybe 105 pounds soaking wet. But she carried herself with the confidence of a woman who wore a badge and could regularly put men in their place on the firing range. She had the classic good looks of many Hispanic women. Her clothes didn’t flaunt her curves, but you could see she was proud of her figure just the same.

She turned back to the victim’s desk and slid back the top page from the desk calendar using the eraser end of a pencil. “It’s like my mami always told me, Seven. A woman needs a man like a bull needs tits.”

“Right. And I’m sure she said it just like that, too.”

Seven had met Erika’s mother, an elegant woman born in Cuba who looked as if she might still wear a veil to church on Sundays. But he had to admit, Erika’s mom wasn’t exactly the poster child for happily-ever-after. Just last year, Milagro had moved on to husband number three.

Getting his attention, Erika motioned Seven over to the desk. Three wooden statues stood on the desk lined in a row like good soldiers. They were old, maybe even museum quality. They had monstrous heads, and their bodies appeared to be covered with hair, looking like some sort of incarnation of Bigfoot.

“What do you think these little guys are?” she asked. “Some kind of idols?”

“It’s definitely not your everyday table decoration.”

She glanced back at the body. “Could be a ritual killing.”

“That, or the killer was one sick fuck.”

That was the problem, of course. If they’d come in and found some poor vic with her throat cut and her diamonds gone, the job would get chalked up to a home invasion gone bad. Asian communities were ripe for the picking when it came to burglary. A deep-seated distrust of banks usually meant a lot of cash stuffed under the mattress.

But this was different. Already, a crowd had gathered outside, neighbors whispering about the bizarre circumstances surrounding Mimi Tran’s death. Nor would the colorful nature of the victim’s trade help to keep things low-key. Soon enough, reporters would be buzzing around the story like flies on shit.

And then the speculation would begin: was this a one-time deal or just the beginning?

There’d already been a leak. While the cop who’d arrived on the scene had done a decent enough job, one of the witnesses, the victim’s niece—a coed from Chapman University—had kept her trusty cell phone in hand. Her fiancé was just outside, champing at the bit to see her. Seven understood the beginnings of a small memorial had already been erected for Mimi Tran, complete with incense sticks, bowls of rice and fruit, and a framed photograph of the victim covered with flowers.

“Let’s go with the obvious first. Mimi Tran is a psychic,” Seven said, thinking out loud.

“The kind that likes St. John suits,” Erika said, naming the designer of her outfit. “And a few other things. Patek Phillipe watch, Daniel Yurman necklace, Shelly Segal shoes. Not cheap.”

He gave her a look. “Aren’t you the little fashionista.”

She shrugged, sending him a flirty glance as she batted her eyelashes. “I’m a girl, aren’t I?”

The family was Vietnamese, but swore that nothing at the crime scene had anything to do with custom or religion. No one had ever threatened Mimi Tran as far as they knew. She was well liked and respected in the community.

“Too bad we’re not just up the road,” he said to his half-Cuban partner.

“Santeria?” Erika asked, naming a religion comparable to Voodoo that flourished in Cuba. She again rolled her eyes at him. “Because I’m such an expert on the stuff?”

In Westminster, their turf included the largest population of Vietnamese living outside of the motherland, with a hodgepodge of Cambodian and Korean immigrants mixed in. But just up First Avenue would be Santa Ana, an area dominated by Hispanics. Seven could definitely see Santeria, or something like it, mixed up in this.

Still, whatever had happened in this room, he imagined no one was an expert.

Seven stepped around the blood splatters, coming closer to the body. He was careful not to disturb any evidence. She’d been stabbed in the back, chest and abdomen, a trinity of vital organs: heart, lungs and stomach.

Only, something about the blood didn’t strike him as right. He remembered when he’d first entered the room. Blood and the smell of it appeared to be everywhere. But now that he looked closer, there didn’t seem to be enough of the stuff. Almost as if someone had strategically spread out splotches of red to make it look like there was more.

These houses were built on slab, usually with a layer of linoleum under the carpet, which was Berber—not a lot of absorbency. Any liquid from the body would spread out through the fibers of the rug.

Mimi Tran was no small woman. If she’d bled out, here on the carpet…

He was thinking about the blood on the rug, examining the crime scene, putting the pieces together when suddenly, it all changed in his head. Just like that, he was staring at a different body, experiencing a different crime.

He closed his eyes against the memory, trying to block it out. Before he knew what he was doing, he backed away from the corpse, almost tripping.

Shit.

He forced his eyes open, telling himself to be here, in the present. He held perfectly still as the room came back into focus. He took a couple of deep breaths, trying to calm down. All he needed was to screw up by trampling on evidence.

He took a few more steps away. Best to let the crime scene guys finish up. He told himself he was just giving Roland a little space, ignoring the fact that Erika had no such qualms.

He didn’t want to admit that it could be something else. That suddenly murder had become personal.

With her sixth sense, Erika was instantly there beside him.

“I’m fine,” he said, a bit more gruffly than he’d meant to. “Really,” he added, softening his tone.

She was just worried about him. But that was the problem. He didn’t want her concern, didn’t want anyone to connect the dots and figure out that a homicide detective didn’t have the stomach for the job anymore, couldn’t come in close and stare at those bloody holes where her eyes should have been, dissecting the situation like a professional.

So he kept to the markings on the wall, focusing there.

The killer had been in a hurry. Maybe even caught in the act by the relatives who found the body. At first, Seven had thought it was some sort of calligraphy, the kind you see on storefronts or painted on shop windows. But up close, it didn’t look so much like writing. Despite his question to the tech, he was pretty familiar with the different calligraphy in the area.

He put in a call to the security system guys. He had some passing knowledge about the system in the victim’s house, his brother having installed something similar. Ricky liked to brag about all the bells and whistles.

From what Seven could see, Tran’s system was heavy-duty, just like Ricky’s. Nothing you would expect in this neighborhood.

“It was disabled,” Erika said, coming up from behind. “Maybe by the perp.”

“Or the victim,” he said.

“Whoever did it,” she answered, “they knew the code.”

“Which probably means the victim let them inside. Someone she knew?”

“A client maybe?” Erika asked.

“A client? So whoever she’d let in would be here for a reading?” He looked at his partner. “Guess she didn’t see it coming?”

“Funny,” Erika said. “Really, Seven, you should take it on the road.”

Just then, his cell phone went off. It was a special ring, one he had set up just recently. He could feel his guts twist at the familiar tone, a neutral arpeggio.

Erika looked up. She recognized the ring and knew what it meant. “I can take care of things here,” she said.

He wanted to ignore the call. He didn’t want his life to interfere with his work. He wanted to escape, run away from his own drama and disappear into the facts of the Tran murder.

He didn’t want to see that other dead body in his head.

“Don’t be stupid,” Erika said, reading him. “Go.”

He fumbled with the cell phone, but didn’t take the call. Erika shook her head, walking away, making it clear she was washing her hands of him.

The ringing stopped. But he knew she would call again.

Turning for the door, homicide detective Seven Bushard went to deal with his own ghosts.

3

Seven sat in his car, staring at the LCD screen on his cell phone. Three missed calls, all from the same number.

Beth was nothing if not persistent.

He slid back against the headrest of the Jeep Cherokee, the unkind thought ringing with guilt. After eight months of this crap, he knew the drill: Beth couldn’t handle the giant slice of reality being shoved down her throat. Not alone.

And he was Ricky’s brother. Nick, his nephew, depended on him. Beth was family. End of story.

This time, when the phone rang, Seven picked up.

“I’m fifteen minutes away, Beth,” he said, starting the Jeep.

He drove past the crowd gathered around the Tran place and headed out of the housing track. Beth had recently been diagnosed with panic disorder. Seven shouldn’t have let it go to the forth call.

Only, he couldn’t help wondering if maybe Erika was right about his relationship with his sister-in-law.

If you just let Beth get through the damn panic attacks by herself—without stepping in and making it all better…

Erika thought Beth needed to learn to stand up for herself. What the hell had she called it? Some psychobabble about him being an enabler?

“It’s just guilt, Seven. Pure and simple,” he could almost hear Erika saying in his head.

Getting off the freeway ten minutes later, he was still wondering how much longer he could keep dropping the ball into Erika’s lap. The chief had told Seven to take more time. As long as you need… But Seven needed to get back to normal, and that meant work.

He was lucky to have Erika covering for him, that was for damn sure. There’d been a lot of carping about how fast she’d come up the ranks to detective. Some finger-pointing about the fact that she was a Hispanic woman, as if somehow she’d hit the job lottery being a double minority. But all that mattered to Seven was that she was a good cop—the best damn partner he was likely to have.

Unfortunately, he’d messed up there, too. After a night of tequila shooters, he’d gotten a little too familiar with that gorgeous body. It was a testament to their partnership that they’d made it through the morning—and months—after.

Going south on Bolsa Chica, he headed toward Huntington Harbor. His brother lived in a posh neighborhood where half the homes were on the water. He’d heard about this list on one of the news shows. Huntington Beach was number eight in the country when it came to homes selling over a million dollars.

Ricky had made a killing on the place, buying it when the market had taken a dip. A million-dollar teardown. Now the place was worth well over five million. Not that it mattered. Ricky had it all leveraged. Beth would probably lose everything.

Seven tried not to imagine her reaction when she discovered that the one thing she’d relied on from Ricky—money—was gone.

Well, they’d manage. Seven had some money put away. By summer, Beth and Nick could move into the rental property Seven had bought with his dad some years back. He did the mental math, moving the pieces of their lives around like chessmen. Imagine, the family fuck-up in charge, while Ricky, the “good son,” the plastic surgeon, did time. It was freaking biblical.

The whole thing sounded too damn much like a soap opera. Ricky having an affair with his male nurse at his plastic surgery practice. The affair going sour—Scott wanting Ricky to leave Beth.

Ricky offered money, undying love. It wasn’t enough. Scott wanted it all. The fights grew more abusive. Scott started making threats, tailing Beth. He knew where Nick went to school, that sort of thing.

It was made to look like a car accident. Only Ricky had done a pretty lousy job of covering his tracks. It was clear from the blood evidence that Scott had been dead before the crash. There had been a curious L-shaped blood spatter on the window. Apparently, Scott’s blood had splashed against it long before the car came to an abrupt stop. Momentum kept the blood slipping across the glass.

When faced with the evidence, Ricky confessed. He’d put a full two hours on tape with homicide in Laguna, where the “accident” took place, before asking for counsel.

Seven remembered it almost as if the whole thing happened yesterday. Erika had called bright and early.

Sit down, honey. This is going to be bad….

You knew it was something when tough-as-nails Erika tossed around words like honey.

The cherry on top? Laurin, Seven’s ex-wife, also got in touch…right after Ricky hit the six o’clock news. Here he was in the middle of hell, and his ex-wife calls to tell him, Jesus, Seven, I’m so sorry…. Is there anything I can do? And by the way, she’s expecting twins with her new husband. Twins, for God’s sake. Seven took the news like two shots straight to the head.

He was happy for Laurin, sure. But he couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for himself. Like he’d been left behind because Laurin, bless her heart, had moved on. She was leading this totally normal life with a real family…while he fought to keep the pieces of his from slipping through his fingers like sand.

Seven punched up the music, The Beatles belting out the end of “Hey Jude.” He reminded himself this wasn’t about him. It was about the people he loved. Nick and Beth.

When he turned up Ricky’s street, he saw Beth was waiting for him out on the driveway. She was wearing a baby-blue sweater set and ankle-length pants. She had on ballet slippers and her shoulder-length blond mane was held back by a black hair band. She hugged her arms across her chest as if trying to hold everything inside.

They’d made a pair, she and Ricky. Both blond and blue-eyed, they looked like god and goddess. If the brothers stood next to each other, no one could imagine they were related. Just under six feet, with brown hair and hazel eyes, Seven was everyman to his brother’s golden boy.

Out on the cul-de-sac, Nick played basketball. Looking just like his father, the kid put everything into his hook shot.

Seven slowed down, just watching what, for all intents and purposes, was the perfect picture of domestic bliss. Ricky had installed the hoop on the curb last year. Just eight months ago, Seven had been working up a sweat with his brother on the drive, giving as good as he got.

As soon as he pulled up and stepped out of the Jeep, Beth came up to him, throwing herself into his arms.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t call when you’re at work. But I just couldn’t deal anymore.”

He could smell the alcohol on her breath—not that he blamed her. Beth had been self-medicating with alcohol for a while now. Seven watched his nephew over her shoulder. Nick just kept bouncing the ball, pretending Seven wasn’t standing just a few feet away, trying to hold his mom together as she fell apart.

That’s how Nick was getting through the crisis. Pretending.

Abracadabra. Nothing’s wrong. I don’t feel a thing.

Seven felt a rare surge of anger. He wished Beth could be stronger for Nick’s sake. The kid was hurting, too.

But it didn’t help to start throwing around blame. That’s why he wanted to get back to work. Investigations like the Tran case took a dispassionate observer. He could crawl inside this cool place he’d carved out in his head, where nothing but the evidence mattered.

He wouldn’t have to think about Ricky and the shit he’d dumped on the family. Wouldn’t feel his guts getting ripped out every time he saw his ten-year-old nephew and thought about what the future held.

“I was making this pact with God,” Beth said, still clutching him. “If everything turned out okay, I promised I’d be stronger.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Seven said, putting his arm around her and steering her back toward the house. “You got some coffee?”

She nodded, wiping her tears. Inside, Ricky had one of those espresso bars. The man loved his coffee.

“Hey, Nick,” Seven called out to his nephew. “You okay?”

“I’m okay,” he answered, sending up a three-point attempt that went wide.

Seven followed Beth inside, knowing it was a lie. The fact was none of them were okay. On the television crime shows, it was all about the victim’s family—their loss, their quest for justice. But Seven, the homicide detective, had seen the other side, how one unforgivable act could affect a family.

His brother had killed a man. And it wasn’t just Ricky who was paying for it.