15. Chapter 15

A headache pounding away behind tired eyes, Agent Johnson folded his arms and leaned back against the wall of the observation room. He hoped it looked casual rather than exhausted.

This was a break in the case. Despite what it looked like, this was good news. A win, a small one, but the first they’d had over the past two months and four states. Johnson had to remind himself of that, otherwise he’d let Agent Michaels go and rough Former-Detective Graham up and damn the consequences.

“It’s the Devil,” the man insisted. His eyes looked wild, savage, even from the cover of the one-way glass, the rage in his eyes burned. Now that Johnson looked at them and saw the madness within; he wondered how they could ever have missed it.

At least his team hadn’t been the only ones; the local Lieutenant had been shocked too, when she’d come to politely tell Graham that ‘under the circumstances’ he was being ‘let go’ and the insane rant she’d gotten in return.

“Come now, Malcolm,” Price cajoled whilst Michaels loomed in the background, “we both know how this game works. Sure, an insanity plea might look good from your end, but you know you’ll get a better deal if you can show some signs of remorse. Helping the case will help your sentence.”

Price was going for the professional courtesy route then. Well, so far so good. Johnson nodded thoughtfully. His position here was to watch for anything the two in the room might miss, but it would do more good if the suspect weren’t law enforcement too - Malcolm knew these tricks.

Why had their subject picked Malcolm to bribe?

The girl was a clear choice, assuming this Collector – Johnson still didn’t approve of the name – had picked this station to select a victim from. Chloe Decker was more famous for her mother than on her own, but she was the only one of any notoriety at all in this precinct.

So if the Collector worked via geographical preferences rather than attention, was he more limited in scope than previously assumed? Or was the girl’s involvement with Lucifer Morningstar the trigger? Well-known, rich and with an untapped wealth of contacts, the real target might be the assumed father figure? The Collector didn’t have a preference for nuclear families after all.

Nothing was lining up right in his mind. He couldn’t see the link that bound them all together.

“None of it matters!” Malcolm screamed, jerking Johnson out of his thoughts. “Don’t you get it?” The man was raving, trying to wave his arms, failing due to the steel that bound them to the table and trying again anyway. “I’m already dead! So what if I want to go out with a bang? I deserve it. I’ve worked all my life and it means nothing. Nothing, do you hear me? Nothing!”

Was he actually frothing at the mouth? He certainly didn’t seem to notice that the cuffs had drawn blood from his wrists he was pulling on them so hard. Michaels did notice however, and he gave the mirror a pointed glance, eyebrow raised.

If an act this was, then it was a good one. Malcolm was pale, sweating, an unhealthy flush to his cheeks, and the circles under his eyes were black with fatigue adding a decade to his features that the manic energy did nothing to disturb.

Johnson let it continue; providing medical treatment would be a good way for Price to establish trust, especially if she sent Michaels out the room and cleaned the cuts personally so that it was one on one, female to male. It was something he’d suggest when they got to the second round of questioning - if nothing else worked before that.

In the mean time, wild ranting was just that, wild. Johnson had seen plenty of men and women say something in the midst of anger that they wouldn’t otherwise.

“You’ll be in protective custody as a former police officer,” Price reassured, absolutely unfazed by the scene in front of her. “We can bump that up, if you’re cooperative. Why do you say that you’re already dead? Have you been threatened?”

Malcolm laughed, hoarsely, jerking his entire body forward to bang his head on the table and keep it there.

“You can’t protect me from him,” he told the desk, shoulders hunched up around his ears.

The certainty in his words was chilling.

Johnson frowned. He’d heard such things before of course, when people had been afraid, terrorised, the monster under the bed was always a thousand times bigger in their minds than reality.

This was different. He didn’t know how or why, but the hairs on the back of his neck quivered, and a chill leeched into his bones. Johnson straightened, there was something there, something -

“He’s the Devil.”

-Johnson slumped back again. Quietly, he allowed a small spark of bitterness to register in his mind. He despised it when criminals used religion as a justification for their actions. It was so demeaning. As if faith itself was tainted by their selfishness.

“Come now Malcolm,” Price soothed, “We both know you’re not a religious man. This façade is pointless. Who contacted you first about Beatrice? How did they contact you? Where? What can you tell me about them? How did they arrange the money transfer? Did you negotiate or did they offer you a flat price?”

Johnson was momentarily distracted as a pair of uniforms entered the observation room, escorting Espinoza. The man grimaced at seeing Malcolm, but didn’t seem particularly surprised or concerned by his condition.

“It doesn’t matter if you believe,” Malcolm lifted his head – a blood vessel had burst in his eye and red streaked the sclera. “It just is. I was so stupid. I thought it was all a con – and then I got shot, and I was there.”

Price went with it, only long years of working together allowed Johnson to see the exasperation in her eyes. “Where were you, Malcolm?”

“Hell,” he croaked, his pale face losing a few more shades of colour.

“You were in a coma, Malcolm,” she soothed briskly. “It was a dream, but who could say how a guilty conscience affected you. Confession is good for the soul, you know. Now if you could cast your mind back to when you were first offered the bribe-“

“It’s all that bitch’s fault. If she hadn’t got me shot because she couldn’t take a fucking hint, couldn’t give a man some fucking slack, the self-righteous little tart–“

“Detective Decker was doing her duty,” Michaels interrupted from behind Malcolm, a well-timed classic. “As you should have been doing.”

“Decker,” Malcolm snarled, his face twisting up, “His whore.”

Since he wasn’t alone, Johnson kept his sigh silent. This was going nowhere fast. Malcolm was sticking to his insanity plea and that was that. They didn’t have the time to wear him down and he wasn’t remorseful enough to cooperate.

Well, they had their leak at least. Maybe Beck would get somewhere with the money trail off of Malcolm’s accounts. No one had been bribed in the other cases. Was The Collector evolving? Or had it just been necessity this time, or efficiency. None of the other victims were related to law enforcement.

“Are you talking about Mr Morningstar?”

Johnson blinked, realising he’d missed the reference. His whore.

“For fuck’s sake don’t say his fucking name,” Malcolm shivered. “He can probably tell.”

Ah, now this could be interesting. The club-owner had certainly piqued his own curiosity.

“You’re afraid of him,” Price realised, and Johnson found himself watching Espinoza as well as Malcolm. The local officers had had a great deal to say about the consultant, but what Johnson had found most telling, as always, was what they didn’t say. Decker’s clearance rate on cases had shot up through the roof since they’d partnered up. But that was nothing compared to the silences that fell when he came up in conversation, to the way they watched him from the corner of their eyes, the way that some stepped into his path, and others stepped away, quickly.

Johnson understood. One conversation with Mr Morningstar and he’d been telling him more than he should have. Johnson blamed a headache, stress, and having no one else in his life to confide in. he’d been worn down, and the man was charming. In hindsight, it was easy to see why he’d been so easily taken in.

But months of it?

He’d have stepped away too.

“He’s the Devil,” Malcolm whispered, leaning across the table as if finally making that confession. “Really, swear to God, swear down, pinkie promise, cross my heart and hope to not-die-again, he is the Devil.”

Malcolm giggled and Johnson started wondering if the coma was the start of this. Had it left Malcolm in a delicate mental state, vulnerable somehow? Coming so close to death, dreaming of Hell, it had to leave a man thinking over his choices. An existential crisis could certainly explain the shopping spree. Cleared for duty too soon, working with the woman who he blamed for his pain, and then meeting a man with an unfortunate name?

A good lawyer could spin that to gold.

Price and Michael shared a look.

“There’s a little girl’s entire life resting on this, Malcolm. Talk to me about the Collector.”

#

An hour later, and Price left the interrogation room with nothing but mad raving to show for it. Johnson had been relieved a while ago, and was reading over Beck’s report when she appeared in his door, a fresh drink in her hand.

“Anything?”

“No, he’s sticking to this Devil shtick. I hate to say it boss, but I’m starting to believe that he’s really cracked.”

“He hasn’t asked for a lawyer?”

“No.”

“Give him an hour to sweat it, and then put the pressure on. We have some news on the financial trail at last, here, read this.”

She read it, a grim smile appearing briefly, before she handed the papers back.

“Sir,” Michaels appeared at the door next, his expression serious. “We have a problem.”

“What is it now?” Agent Johnson demanded, feeling the weight of too many days without sleep and bad coffee besides.

“The suspect, Graham, sir.” He looked incredibly uncomfortable.

“Is he still blathering about the Devil?” Johnson asked, flipping the report back onto his temporary desk.

“No sir, he’s, well, I don’t quite know how it happened –“

“Oh just spit it out man.”

“He’s dead sir. Murdered. It’s, well, it’s pretty bad down there.”

For a moment, there was silence as Johnson tried to translate the words he’d heard into an actual thought. The thought varied between, this is a disaster, why me, and god doesn’t give you a burden heavier than you can carry before cycling back to this is a complete and utter clusterfuck.

He leapt up from his chair, strode out the room through the bullpen, and down to the interview rooms.

The corridor was packed, and it was impossible to see anything over the press of bodies, or hear anything over the tide of panicked babbling, but the smell told Johnson what he would see before he reached the doorway.

It was a scene out of a nightmare.

There was blood everywhere. It painted the walls in great arcing curves, it dripped from the ceiling like thick gelatinous rain, and it smeared the light shade so that the room was lit with a red glow.

The body had been torn apart and for once, that was no exaggeration. There were scraps of flesh in every corner of the room. There was a tuft of bloody hair stuck to the light switch, and as Johnson watched in numb horror, it slid down the wall, tipping onto the floor and into a puddle of blood with a plop. It was not the only lump in the soup either.

Intestines like a pile of spaghetti were splayed over one leg of the upturned desk, swaying in the draft, and dripping with juices. There was a fragment of bone stuck in the brick wall, stark white against the splatter of blood around it. It had lodged there so forcefully – been thrown? Exploded? – that there was a tiny impact crater in the brick.

A single eyeball, stripped clean of veins and nerves, lay in the middle of the floor, rocking backward and forwards – and looking straight at him through the film of death.

The stench was like a solid wall. Somebody behind him was throwing up, and if Johnson had had an ounce less experience or pride, he’d be joining in. Malcolm must have been eviscerated – blood alone didn’t foul up a room like this. There had to be urine, faeces, digestive juices, stomach acid, saliva, disintegrated organs and everything else a body had in the mix too. That would explain the colour at least, and some of the pools of fluid.

“How-,” he cleared his throat, gagged on his breath and cleared his throat again.

“How could this happen? We’re in the middle of a police station for crying out loud. Who was on guard? Why didn’t we hear anything? Where are the tapes?”

His brain kick started and he managed to start shaking off the instinctive revulsion, the sheer disgust, as logic returned.

“I’ll find out,” Michaels replied, leaving so eagerly he might as well have given up the pretence and just ran.

Johnson touched a cop on the shoulder, giving him a shake to snap him out of it. “Come on man,” he said, “I need forensics down here. You know the drill. Stop gawking.” He lifted his voice to project the last two words to the rest of the room.

“Back off and clear the area, have some respect for god’s sake, we’ve all got jobs to do people. Lock this whole place down and do it now.”

#

After a quick visit to the bathroom and three sips of whisky, regulations be damned, Johnson was ready to deal with this latest atrocity.

No one had heard anything; no one had seen anything.

Yeah, like Johnson was going to believe that.

A man was torn apart. Was he supposed to think it had happened silently? For god’s sake, the interview room was only down the corridor from the bullpen.

Decker was person non grata in this station. Johnson should have paid more attention to that. He’d blown it off as local politics, attractive woman in a man’s world, the usual. He should have thought beyond that. Maybe she wasn’t outcast because she’d been looking for a dirty cop, and found one as it turned out. Maybe she was outcast because she wasn’t dirty.

Well, Johnson had a plan.

He was sick of navigating these treacherous waters. No, enough was enough. It was time to use shock tactics.

“Sir, can we talk outside?” Beck said, hollow eyed. “Oh, and don’t forget to put your phone on charge, you know you forget.”

She’d found something in the video, and wanted to talk about it away from prying ears. Johnson put his phone on charge, only now seeing that it was indeed in the red even though he hadn’t used it much, and followed her outside to the parking lot.

“Who was it?” Johnson asked her.

“The tapes have been doctored,” Beck replied quietly. “And they didn’t care if we knew it.”

Johnson clenched his teeth and counted to ten, twice.

“Who, when and how?” He asked thirty seconds later.

Beck shook her head. “It gets worse. We’ve been hacked.”

“Ah, my phone. I see.”

“All our phones, sir, and all of the stations computers, the radios, everything, even the cameras.”

“So that’s how the subject’s been getting ahead of us so easily.”

To his despair, Beck shook her head.

“It doesn’t make sense, sir. We know the subject’s good with computers; we know he’s clever. It’s not smart to taunt us with badly doctored security footage. Where would be the benefit in it either? He could only be protecting another officer here, and that’s a waste of his time. He won’t ever return to L.A.”

“Maybe he’s devolving, getting cocky, making mistakes.”

“We’re not that lucky.”

Johnson sighed. She was right. A monster he might be, but The Collector hadn’t continued business for all these months by being stupid.

“What was doctored?”

Maybe that should have been his first question.

Beck looked grim. “The footage shows Malcolm being attacked by an invisible animal whilst a woman laughs in the background. It’s disturbing, but it’s so obviously altered, I don’t know why someone would bother. All they’ve done is tipped us off.”

Johnson thought it over. This was a new twist, but it didn’t change his plan.

“Is it disturbing enough to provoke a reaction from any co-conspirators here?”

Beck nodded. “Easily, it’s ah, gruesome, like, really, really viscerally awful.”

“Alright. You focus on the hacker. Trap him if you can, protect us if you can’t. We need secure communications or we might as well kill the girl ourselves. Warn the team about their phones too, but keep it between us. ”

With that, there was nothing to do but to go and watch the video for himself.

The briefing room was packed with uniformed officers, and he didn’t try to kick everyone out. Gossip had done its job, and everyone who could possibly have been involved was here, without an official summons by him. Good.

Michaels and Price were at the front of the room and at the side, watching everyone else, whilst he sat in the front row, just as if this was a normal briefing. With a nod to Beck, the video played.

Malcolm sat alone at the desk, head down. Occasionally he thumped his forehead against the metal, or rocked in his chair staring at the ceiling.

Beck fast-forwarded.

“I knew you’d come,” Malcolm said tiredly. The camera covered all corners of the interview room and there was no one there. Laughter bounced off the walls, and the shadows flickered. The video was momentarily full of static, signs of a rush job since digital footage didn’t get static. “I fucking knew it.” Malcolm swore viciously. “It’s not my fucking fault, leave me out of this.”

“You were a mistake, Malcolm Graham.” The bodiless voice replied, caressing the name with uncomfortable amounts of savage relish. “Did you think it would not be corrected?”

“It was divine intervention,” Malcolm snapped back as he jumped to his feet, facing the corner of the room furthest from the door. There was still no one there. “I was allowed out. You can’t touch me.”

“Politics,” the voice drawled, bored, “are not my concern. As for touch…” Three long scratches appeared on Malcolm’s face, deep, and dripping blood. Too late, the man jumped back and started pulling frantically on his cuffs.

“Help!” He screamed towards the metal door. “Help me!”

Deeply uneasy, Johnson forced himself to watch. He knew what had to happen next, but no matter how gruesome, there would be clues. Something could still be gained from this.

“They can’t hear you,” the voice continued, cruel amusement a heavy thread in that low, whispering tone. “It’s just you and me here. Oh, and my pets of course. Here they are, meet-” An artificial pause, “how silly of me. You’ve met them before, haven’t you?”

Malcolm drew back as far as the chain allowed, scrambling to put the desk between him and the corner.

Johnson shivered, and he didn’t know why.

“Get them away from me! Help! Look, I’m sure we can work out some sort of deal – he wants the girl, doesn’t he? I know stuff, I’ll tell you everything if you get me out of here.”

Well, that was as good as a confession as far as Johnson’s report would be concerned. Excellent. One box ticked at last, and a clue; there was another player here, a third one.

“Deals are also not my concern,” the shadows drawled. “My orders are clear.”

A player who hired assassins as brutal as they were skilled, lovely.

Malcolm screamed. It took Johnson a blink to see the bite of flesh and fabric both abruptly missing from his calf. Blood sprayed, painting the wall, and swiftly staining Malcolm’s jeans black. The chunk of flesh was thrown through the air to hit the wall with a dull smack, swiftly followed by a spray of bright red blood.

Still screaming Malcolm kicked out at something unseen as a woman’s laughter filled the room. He hadn’t stopped pulling at his handcuffs, and with a cry of agonised victory, Malcolm’s hands slipped free – of his wrists.

Swallowing bile, Johnson had to close his eyes. Scum or not – how terrified did a man have to be to cut his own hands off?

Blood fountaining from both gaping wrists, Malcolm made a lunge for the door – banging on the window with two bloody stumps. When that failed, he kicked out at something again and promptly lost a boot full of flesh and gristle to unseen fangs. Undeterred, too desperate to care, Malcolm slammed his way to the chair, berserker style. He hooked one forearm through the struts on the back, and brandished it about, striking randomly, getting steadily weaker. Animalistic cries haunted the room with every blow.

It wasn’t enough.

Something struck him from behind, and Malcolm went down – and then it was all over. Three different bites appeared on his skin, clothing and fleshed vanished in mid-air, mists of blood and guts sprayed, and Malcolm was eaten alive.

The laughter never stopped.

#