One
SUSPECT
“YOU’VE GOT TO get a load of this guy, Miriam,” Nick told me that morning, leaning against the jamb of my office door and grinning. “You really do. He’s a serious piece of work... like...” He made a motion by the side of his head with his fingers, expanding them out sharply, like his own brain just exploded. “...Total head job. Right up your alley.”
I scowled.
It was seven in the morning.
I hadn’t even managed to finish my first cup of coffee yet.
Inspector Naoko “Nick” Tanaka hadn’t bothered with a hello first, when he showed up at the door of my inner office. He was also there an hour before reception opened, not like that ever stopped him. I knew Gomey was out there too, as in Gomez Ramirez, my so-called administrative assistant and personal pain in my ass. And yeah, I knew Nick was a pushy bastard who never knocked, never asked permission, but it still bugged me that Gomey hadn’t even tried to stop him. He could have warned me at least.
I combed my fingers through my long black hair and sighed, looking up at Nick with what I hoped was a flat-eyed stare. I hadn’t even put on make-up yet, telling myself I’d do it in the office bathroom before my first client. I could pull off the no make-up thing better than most, I knew––thanks to inheriting my mom’s Native American skin tone and good bone structure and dark eyelashes––but I still felt a little naked without it. I’d left my hair down too, and for some reason, that always made me feel a bit too visibly female at work.
Truthfully, I felt unprepared to deal with anyone this early, even Nick, who I’d known forever. I hadn’t donned my professional armor yet.
Nick took his weight off the doorjamb, all five-foot-eleven of him, most of it solid muscle.
He looked tired, I couldn’t help noticing.
I assessed his overall mental state out of rote, more occupational hazard than because I meant to do it. Tired, and more stressed out than usual, even if he was doing his usual and hiding it under a grin and his own professional armor, that of the swaggering, b.s.-talking cop. I knew that armor was partly calculated. I also knew it worked, in that people who didn’t know him constantly underestimated him.
Nick knew I saw through it of course, but he couldn’t help himself.
He lingered in my doorway for a few seconds more before entering all the way.
I don’t know if he’d been waiting for an invitation or just letting me get used to the fact he was there. Nick, being a homicide cop, wasn’t dumb about psychology either.
Technically, that was my bailiwick, though.
I’m not a forensic psychologist by training, but somehow I ended up one––a de facto one at least––and most of that was Nick’s fault, too. Technically I’m a clinical and research psychologist, and honestly, I tried my damnedest to stick to the research side of that as much as humanly possible.
Nick and I had history, though.
He’d even introduced me to my current boyfriend (now fiancé, I reminded myself)... Ian. Ian was another old military buddy of Nick’s. They met in Iraq, though––not Afghanistan like me and Nick. I’d gone in later than Nick, being over a decade younger.
Since Ian was British and worked in intelligence, not the regular armed forces, he and I never crossed paths over there. We met after Ian moved to San Francisco over a year ago and Nick took us all out for drinks, thinking me and Ian might hit it off.
Well, that was Nick’s story, anyway.
Ian told me that the drinks had been his idea. He claimed he’d pushed Nick for an introduction after seeing a picture of me on Nick’s mantle in his crappy apartment in South San Francisco.
Either way, Nick and I had history.
And Nick might be a cop now, but he still thought like a guy in a firefight.
I watched Nick do his cop-walk into my personal space, wearing a rumpled black suit with a dark blue shirt underneath. Only then did I notice the splattering of stains on the front of his suit, visible under the heavier motorcycle jacket he wore over it.
I frowned, trying to identify the exact stains.
They didn’t look like coffee. Even so, the more conscious part of my mind refused to acknowledge the “blood” categorization that popped into my head.
So yeah, Nick was tired, wound up, and he had blood on him.
He put his hands on his hips, which rumpled both jackets enough that I saw the handle of his Glock poke out from where he had it in a shoulder holster on his right side. I noticed he’d cut his midnight-black hair shorter than usual on the back and sides, but left it longer in front.
Even exhausted, he still looked good, did Nick Tanaka. Even at this ungodly hour.
Unfortunately, he knew it.
So did the women he burned through on a monthly or sometimes weekly basis.
Not me, though.
I’d become part of Nick’s inner circle, one of his go-to people when he was working a case, like an oddly-shaped tool in his tool box that he pulled out when he found the right-sized bolt that needed unscrewing.
I’d already known something was going on at the station.
Whatever it was, it had a lot of people excited. I’d heard smatterings on my way into the office, mostly via low-voiced conversations while I stood in line for my daily dose of high-octane coffee from The Royale Blend, the gourmet coffee shop that lived in the storefront directly below my office. Since my office is located just a few blocks from the Northern District police station, I share the same coffee shop with a lot of the cops that work out of there.
Well, the cops willing to fork over four bucks for a decent cup of coffee.
Still, even though I knew something was up, I was surprised to see Nick here already.
Usually he didn’t need me this early.
“Seriously,” Nick said, grinning at me as he assessed me with his dark brown eyes. “I can’t wait to get your diagnosis, doc.” He gave his head a theatrical shake. The smile didn’t entirely mask the tenser look I glimpsed underneath. “This guy... wow. You’re going to get a kick out of him, Miri. Assuming you can get him to talk to you at all.”
I arched an eyebrow, giving him my best clinical stare.
“You think he’s mentally unfit?” I said. “On what diagnosis?”
As per usual, he totally blew past my sarcasm.
“On the diagnosis that I think he’s a total nutcase,” Nick said, grinning at me. He pulled a toothpick out the back row of his white teeth, a habit I’d told him more than once was disgusting. I grimaced now as he tossed the frayed piece of wood into my trash can. “...That’s my expert opinion, doc. No charge. But I still want you to talk to him. If I could nail this guy without him dropping down into an insanity plea, I’d sleep better at night.”
Given that I was still nursing my first cup of coffee, I wasn’t sharp enough yet to get anything but annoyed at the glint of denser meaning in his dark eyes.
Then again, I’ve always hated cagey, hinting crap.
It even annoyed me coming from Nick.
Despite the tiredness I could see around his eyes and the blood on his shirt and suit jacket, Nick looked amped up and almost on edge, even for him. I knew Nick ran every day before work. He left his apartment like clockwork at four a.m.––unless he happened to be working, like today. He also surfed, at least on the mornings he didn’t get called in, and was a member of the same martial arts club as me.
Unlike me, Nick also lifted weights, went mountain biking, played basketball.
He was one of those cops.
He also lived almost entirely for his job. Nick was in his early forties at least, but he’d never been married, which probably helped with the near-singular focus. He was just one of those intense, burn-the-candle-at-both-ends kind of guys.
Driven, I guess would be the non-clinical word.
I continued to cradle my coffee cup for a few seconds more, not moving in the half-broken down, leather office chair I still hadn’t managed to get Gomey to either fix or declare dead and replace. Glancing around at the papers strewn across my desk and the filled-to-overflowing in-box with its beat up manilla and dark green folders, I could only sigh.
My one and only office plant looked like it was screaming silently at me, possibly in its death throes since it had been so long since I’d remembered to water it.
I knew Gomey hadn’t been doing that, either.
“Why?” I said finally, when all Nick did was grin at me. “What’s his deal?”
“Oh, don’t let me spoil it...”
“Seriously?” I said. “What are we, twelve?”
“Trust me,” Nick said. “You’ll want to talk to this one in person, Miri. I don’t want to say anything until you see him. I don’t want to... bias anything.”
Realizing he wasn’t going to let me off the hook, and further, that he was actually waiting for me, expecting me to just drop everything I hadn’t yet started for the day and follow him to whatever piss-smelling interrogation room where they were holding this clown, I sighed again.
“You can’t give me a few minutes?” I said.
“No.”
“I have an appointment coming in at nine, Nick.”
Frowning, Nick looked at his watch, as if a ticking bomb were counting down somewhere in another part of the building.
“Any chance you could cancel it?” he said apologetically, shifting his feet. “We’re pretty sure he’s the guy on the thing last week. That mess at Grace Cathedral.”
I glanced up sharper at that.
He meant the wedding guy.
Once more glimpsing the more serious look behind the humor in Nick’s eyes, I nodded my defeat and rose to standing from behind the broken chair.
Sadly, I guess there’s a reason Nick counts on me.
I’m a sucker.
THERE WASN’T A lot of pre-work on this one.
Well, not yet.
No one wanted to debrief me on much in the way of details, presumably because Nick told them not to. So I didn’t get handed the usual cobbled-together file of scribbled notes and photos and whatever else from the preliminary interrogations, or much in the way of details of what they’d found at the actual scene.
Nick gave me the bare bones story only.
Three fifteen-year-old girls stumbled upon the suspect at the scene of the crime. According to them, he’d been covered in blood. He also looked like he’d just finished––or maybe remained deep in the process of––doing “something” to a woman’s dead body. Their testimony was pretty vague on details, according to Nick.
He admitted to me that he couldn’t really get a sense if they’d seen anything concrete, apart from the suspect himself... as well as the victim, a white dress, a lot of make-up and a lot of blood... all of which were damning enough, under the circumstances.
Well, that and what had been done to the victim herself.
I only got the bare bones on that, too, and didn’t ask for more. Truthfully, I’ve never gotten used to seeing that kind of thing, not even in pictures.
The three girls ran like hell once the suspect spotted them.
Even so, more than an hour passed before they called in what they’d seen, although they freely admitted they all had smart phones with them at the time. The latter had been confirmed by the presence of photos they’d taken on the walkway leading up to the Palace before they reached the dome where the body had been displayed.
From what Nick told me, the delay on calling had more to do with the girls’ fears of getting caught by their parents than fear of the suspect himself, who hadn’t bothered to chase them. Something about being out all night and drunk while crashing at the home of an out-of-town parent. Nick said they admitted to arguing amongst themselves about what to do after they arrived back at a Marina residence.
They finally called it in around five o’clock.
A black and white had already picked up the suspect by then, as it turned out.
They saw him crossing Marina Boulevard towards the promenade, presumably to reach the coast. Bad luck on his part, Nick said with a wry grin. He figured the guy had been heading for the yacht harbor north of the Palace of Fine Arts, either to hop a boat or to wash off the blood, or maybe both. If he’d succeeded in either, they might never have got him.
As it was, they pulled guns on him to get him to comply.
From what I could tell, they pretty much lifted this guy off the street and parked him in an interrogation room while they called the coroner and forensics to the scene of the murder. I knew someone must have talked to him... and likely cleaned him up... probably Nick and whatever officer arrived first on the scene. But they couldn’t have gone through the whole range of the usual song and dance, either.
Which meant Nick was bending the rules a little, bringing me in now.
I knew Nick had a tendency to pull me in when he had a gut feeling, so I figured that must be the case with this guy, too. Despite the overwhelming evidence, at least in terms of the Palace of Fine Arts murder, Nick probably wanted me to help him crawl into the guy’s head, maybe so he could get a sense of his connection to the Grace Cathedral killings, or maybe to build evidence against an insanity plea, like he said.
Maybe he liked him for other, possibly-related crimes.
They’d do the DNA testing thing and everything else, of course, but Nick tended to be thorough. He probably wanted me to confirm or deny his working profile on the guy before he started running up blind alleys.
I peered through the one-way glass of the interrogation room, sipping my now lukewarm coffee and trying to assess the scene before me objectively.
“So you like this guy for the Grace Cathedral murders?” I said, as much to myself as Nick, who stood right at my arm.
“I like this guy for Jimmy Hoffa,” Nick said, glancing at his partner, Glen Frakes, who snorted from the other side of him. “I like him for the Zodiac killings... and the death of my Aunt Lanai in Tokyo, God rest her soul.”
Rolling my eyes, I nodded, getting the gist.
I continued to look through the one-way glass, trying to get a sense of what I might be in for when I went in there.
The guy just sat there, not moving.
I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone sit so still in an interrogation room before. His eyes didn’t dart to either the door or the cameras, which just about everyone looked at, seemingly without being able to help themselves.
No one liked being watched.
No one liked being trapped inside a featureless room, either.
This guy wasn’t trying to be clever, either, staring at us through the one-way glass, which a lot of them did to show us they knew they were being watched.
Nick’s suspect didn’t seem to care.
I got nothing. A blank wall.
That didn’t happen to me very often, truthfully.
Maybe thirty, thirty-five years old.
Muscular. Obviously in good shape, but not bulky like Nick with his weight-lifting and kung fu and judo and whatever else. This guy had the lean musculature of a runner or a fighter, not an ounce of excess flesh on him anywhere. I’d seen criminals and even addicts with that kind of body type of course, but I wasn’t getting any of the other signs of career criminal or addiction or living on the street on Nick’s new favorite perp.
His eyes were clear, as was his skin, which was on the tanned side, but still light enough to be ethnically ambiguous. He looked healthy. He was handsome, actually, if in a feral kind of way. He had black hair, high cheekbones, a well-formed mouth, and some of the lightest, strangest-colored eyes I’d ever seen... so light they looked gold, and strangely flecked.
Those eyes reminded me of a tiger. Or maybe a mountain lion... or an actual lion... although I couldn’t remember what color eyes either of those had in real life.
Even those oddly riveting eyes weren’t the most noticeable thing about Nick’s new friend. Not at that precise moment, anyway.
No, the most noticeable thing about him now was that he was covered in blood.
Unlike with Nick, I couldn’t even pretend to not know what it was.
A good portion of his visible bare skin wore a mostly-dry layer of reddish-brown smears and spots. It covered his hands and arms from his fingertips up to his rock-hard biceps, just below the cuffs of the stretchy black T-shirt he wore, which also accentuated the size of his chest. More smears and splatters of the same covered his neck and one side of his face. I could see it on the rings he wore, where his wrists were cuffed together and resting on the metal table.
I also saw blood smearing the face of his military-style watch.
I wasn’t an expert of course, but even if Nick hadn’t already told me how they’d found him on the street, I would have known just by looking at him. It was definitely blood.
He’d practically been bathing in it, this guy.
It explained how Nick came to have it on his own shirt, too.
The suspect’s clothes, which included that form-fitting black T-shirt, black pants and black leather shoes, the last of which I could just see under the table, absorbed most of the color and texture of what decorated his bare skin. I’d already been assured by Nick and Glen that blood covered a good portion of his clothes, too, visible or not.
I was kind of surprised they hadn’t stripped him yet, to pull evidence.
They’d even left his shoes, rings and watch, which was unusual when they had a suspect cuffed like this and chained to the floor.
As if he’d read my mind, Nick said, “We’ve got forensics coming up here in an hour. They’re at the scene now. We thought we’d give you a look first... while we wait.”
I gave Nick a skeptical stare.
That time, he had the grace to blush.
“Okay,” he said, holding up his hands in a gesture of surrender. “I wanted you to look at him, Miriam. He won’t talk to us. I thought you might be able to give me some suggestions. Before we go all Guantanamo on his ass.”
Frowning, I pursed my lips.
Then I looked back at Nick’s blood-covered suspect.
That time, I tried to push aside the emotional impact of the blood and assess the man himself. I still couldn’t get anything off him in the usual way. Even so, his war-paint aside, he had something about him, this guy. I couldn’t put my finger on what it was, not in those first few seconds, but I found it difficult to look away from his face. He looked surprisingly calm, and those odd-colored eyes shone with intelligence.
If anything, he looked alert.
Not quite waiting, but expectant... even as he seemed to be using the time in some more complex mental exercise I couldn’t see. That sharpness he wore had a calculating quality, as if he were otherwise occupied in some further reach of his mind.
I also distinctly got military.
Only after I’d been looking at him for a few seconds more did I realize that the alertness told me more about his demeanor than the calm he wore over it. Something about that calm of his was deceptive, in fact. Behind it, he looked high-strung.
Like, really high-strung.
Like he was remaining where he sat through sheer force of will.
I reassessed my “not a drug addict” summation briefly, but then went back to my original conclusion a few seconds later. What I was seeing didn’t come from drugs. He looked like he wanted to be elsewhere, without looking the slightest bit afraid, or nervous, or even angry. He didn’t look smug, either, like most psychopaths I’d seen.
Instead, he seemed to view his being here as a colossal waste of his time.
Once I’d seen that, I couldn’t un-see it. Further, it occurred to me that he didn’t even seem to be hiding his impatience particularly well.
I might have noticed it before if I hadn’t been trying so hard to read him in other ways.
“What’s his name?” I said.
Again, Nick and Glen exchanged a look.
“What?” I said. “What’s the joke now?”
“If you can get a name out of that guy, I’ll buy you dinner,” Nick said. Grinning, he gave me a teasing once-over. “Of course, I’d do that for free, doc... just name the day.”
Glen snorted again, folding his thick arms over his chest.
Raising my left hand to Nick in what had recently become a running joke with us, I tapped my engagement ring with my thumb. Nick grinned, feigning disappointment, then motioned with his head towards the man sitting in the other room. My eyes followed his stare back to the guy with the flecked, gold-colored eyes, even as Nick’s voice grew more openly cop-like.
“He won’t give us a name. No ID on him. His prints aren’t in the system.”
“Mystery guy, huh?” I said.
I said it casually, even with a lilt of humor. Still, I was puzzled. Television aside, that almost never happened, not anymore.
You couldn’t get anywhere anymore without some kind of ID.
“We’re running facial rec on him now,” Nick said, almost like he heard me. “We’ll give him to Interpol if we don’t find him here. He’s got to have at least an alias... somewhere.”
“No military record?” I said.
“Nothing on the books.”
I nodded, only half-hearing him as I frowned at the suspect.
Nothing. He really was a blank wall.
That was pretty rare for me, like I said.
Not unheard of, but yeah... rare.
“What makes you think he’ll talk to me?” I said finally, looking back at Nick.
Nick just smiled, shifting his weight on his feet.
“He probably won’t,” Glen volunteered from Nick’s other side. “But Nicky here seems to think you walk on water, doc, so he wanted to give it a shot.”
Shrugging, even as I gave Nick an annoyed look, I tossed my paper cup of coffee in the plastic-lined bin under the desk and made a somewhat overdone motion towards the other room.
“Well?” I said. “We might as well kill time until forensics shows up, right? I canceled my morning’s slate for this dog and pony show.”
I added that last part with more bite, giving Nick a harder stare.
Grinning at me, Glen, who was a good five inches taller than Nick and built like a linebacker, or maybe some kind of throwback to his Viking roots, nodded. Motioning for me to follow, he aimed his feet for the door so he could let me inside the interrogation room.
As I walked past him, though, Nick caught hold of my upper arm.
“Don’t fool around with this guy,” he warned.
The smile vanished from Nick’s face, leaving my friend, the guy I knew behind his schtick.
I remembered that look from Afghanistan, too.
“...I mean it, Miri. He’s probably a serial killer. At the very least, he likes dead bodies a little too much. We’ll be right outside that door. If you want out, get out. Right away. Don’t play tough for the cop crowd... hear me?”
Normally I would have chewed him out for the whole damsel-needing-protection crap, which I thought we were well past, given everything we’d been through together. Normally I also would have thrown in a few cutting reminders about just how many murderers, rapists, child molesters and other pillars of society I’d interviewed for him already.
Something about the way he said it diffused my anger though.
“I hear you,” I said, giving him a mock salute.
As I did, I glanced at the guy on the other side of the one-way glass.
The suspect just sat there, a faint frown touching the edges of his dark lips.
For the first time however, he was staring at the one-way mirror.
It looked like he was staring directly at me.
Seeing the speckle of blood to the right of where that sharp mouth ended, I felt my pulse rise, in spite of myself.
Nick might just be right about this guy.
He usually was.
Pushing the thought out of my mind, I looked away from the glass, following Glen out into the corridor. As I did, I let my face slide into a blank, professional mask and hoped that this time it would protect me.