Monsters (A Detective Pierce Novel Book 1) Read online

  Pierce’s share of the income the crops earned wasn’t a great deal of money, but it wasn’t bad either. He received many offers over the years from land developers; they all told him that he was sitting on a goldmine, given the land’s location.

  Although his home’s surroundings were bucolic, he could take a five minute drive and find himself in a land of strip malls, big box stores, and traffic.

  Pierce had declined to sell his land, many of his former neighbors had not.

  Suburbia seemed to creep a little closer each year. Pierce thought that he might someday find himself an old man, sitting out on his balcony, surrounded by shopping centers. It was not an image that gave him comfort.

  If the image ever came to life, it would have to wait a few decades. Pierce was only in his mid-thirties, white, and a shade under six-feet tall. He never exercised if he could help it, but stayed thin due to the fact that he rarely ate more than once a day.

  Ricardo Pierce was named after his maternal grandfather. His mother was Puerto Rican, and lived with her third husband in Florida, while Pierce’s only sibling, a sister, lived with her boyfriend in California.

  As he sipped on his beer, he thought about the latest missing girl, Jenny Liu. While it was possible that she had run away from home, he found it extremely unlikely. He had been tipped to the case by a buddy who worked in missing persons, and had spoken to Liu’s boyfriend, who had been on the phone with her the night she vanished.

  Liu’s boyfriend, a kid named Michael, said that she stopped talking in mid-sentence and that afterwards, it sounded as if the phone had been dropped. It had been, and today a keen-eyed rookie had spotted it.

  After Jake Collins had given him the phone, Pierce returned to the South Ward station house he worked out of, and spoke to his lieutenant, Coke Dyer.

  Coke wasn’t the lieutenant’s real name, of course, but a nickname he had gotten back in the late-eighties when he made a string of cocaine busts while working in narcotics.

  Pierce hadn’t been alone; he had gone to Dyer with the detective from the missing persons squad, a cop with the unfortunate name of Al Finder. It was actually Finder who first realized that there might be a serial killer stalking the streets.

  Detective Albert Finder was white, in his mid-forties, five-foot-ten, and nearly as skinny as Pierce. The two men got along well because they were both married to their jobs, and they understood the dedication and effort it took to be successful.

  Finder had tracked down more missing and runaway teens than anyone and knew the streets well.

  While Finder was used to teenagers and young adults running away, he often found when he investigated that there were always earlier signs that they might do so, signs such as trouble with peers, abusive parents, severe financial woes. However, lately, he was coming across missing young women with none of these stressors, and without fail, their disappearances were sudden, and final.

  Over beers one night, Finder had revealed to Pierce a list of thirteen females that he thought fit a pattern. The pattern was not one of race, or even age, although all of the victims on the list were young, no, the pattern was one of circumstance and opportunity.

  Each of the victims went missing as they were walking home from somewhere. Each of the victims had no reason to abandon their lives, and, none of the young women were ever seen again. It was as if they had evaporated.

  Pierce told Finder that he thought he was right, that someone out there was taking these women, and he wouldn’t stop working the informal case until he caught the bastard doing it.

  He took Finder’s theory to his lieutenant and found him to be unenthusiastic; the lack of physical evidence made Finder’s theory just that, a theory and nothing more.

  Earlier that day, when Pierce and Finder told Dyer that they believed Jenny Liu was the latest victim of the serial killer, Dyer told them to shut the office door and take a seat.

  As they sat before the lieutenant’s desk, he smiled at Finder.

  Finder hung his head and sighed.

  “Jesus, Coke, not this again.”

  Coke held up a hand, as he began to chuckle.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t help it.”

  Pierce looked back and forth at them.

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s my name,” Finder said. “I work missing persons and my name is Al Finder. Coke thinks it’s the funniest shit he ever came across. He does this almost every time I see him.”

  “It wouldn’t be so funny if you weren’t so good at it. How many runaways have you found?”

  “Dozens, but not my sister, she ran away when I was only twelve, and I never saw her again.”

  Coke’s face went from amused to solemn in a second.

  “Jesus, Al, why haven’t you told me that before?”

  Finder waved it off.

  “Let’s talk about the case.”

  “Right... okay, I’ve given that file you gave me a closer look, and I agree, there does seem to be a pattern to some of these disappearances, but...”

  “But? But what?” Pierce had said.

  “But, there is absolutely nothing to back you up. There are no bodies and no signs of violence.” “What about the cell phones? Most of these victims are teenage girls. Teenage girls don’t just toss their phones away, hell, no one just tosses their phone in the gutter like that, and we’ve found three of them now that belong to missing women.”

  Dyer shrugged.

  “People lose shit all the time. And if they are runaways, even teenagers are smart enough to know that they can be tracked by their cell phones. Maybe they threw their phones away because they didn’t want to be found.”

  Pierce let out an exasperated sigh.

  “These girls were taken; I know it.”

  The lieutenant laughed.

  “What’s with you, Rick, you’re already working the Danbury case, one murder is not enough for you?”

  Pierce had risen from his seat and leaned over the desk to stare into his boss’s eyes.

  “There’s a creep out there yanking girls off the street and doing God knows what to them, and some poor woman out there is going to be his next target.”

  Coke Dyer stared back at him, and Pierce could tell that the man was debating something within himself. After the lieutenant gave his head a little nod, he spoke.

  “Bring me something, something more than a discarded cell phone and I’ll send your task force request upstairs with my full support, in the meantime, just work on the cases you’re given.”

  Pierce had agreed to his terms and he and Finder left the office, but after his shift ended, Pierce returned to the scene where the rookie had found Liu’s phone.

  He parked at the curb and removed a pair of black coveralls from his trunk, along with a pair of work boots. He then spent the next two hours checking out alleys and even dived into two dumpsters that looked as if they hadn’t been emptied in some time.

  He found nothing.

  He’d been hoping to find Liu’s pocketbook, or her wallet, or something, anything that might prove she had been taken forcefully, but the odds were good that if someone in that neighborhood found a purse, that they would keep it. The truth is, they were damn lucky to have found the phone.

  Of course, there was a chance that her abductor took her purse with them, perhaps as a souvenir.

  After going back to his car and stripping off the coveralls, he changed back into his shoes and began canvassing the area with one of the missing person flyers that Liu’s family had made, asking if anyone had seen Liu.

  No one had seen her, and Pierce thought that no one would ever see her again.

  Pierce tilted his head back and drained the last of the beer from his bottle, then said a silent prayer for Jenny Liu.

  CHAPTER 4

  Pierce’s house was more than just his home, it was also his hobby, and he would spend hours each week keeping it in pristine condition. The work helped to alleviate the loneliness.

  While on a
case recently, he had occasion to visit Vermont, and on his off hours had browsed as many antique shops as he could fit in. In one of the smallest of the shops, he came across a collection of antique cabinet hardware. There were drawer pulls, hinges, and knobs, all matching, and all exactly what he had been searching for years to find.

  At home, there were albums full of photographs of the Pierce family going back well over a century, and thus, there were also albums full of photographs of the Pierce family home.

  At some point during the 1970’s the cabinets had been sanded down to the wood and refinished. Whoever did the work had done a good job, but they also replaced all of the original cabinet hardware at the same time, everything, right down to the hinges.

  Pierce knew what the original hardware looked like from studying old photographs of the home, and in that little Vermont shop he had finally found hardware exactly like it.

  After spending a month’s pay for the hardware, he returned home and began refinishing the oak cabinets in his spare time. When he was done with that, he would replace the hardware with the vintage pieces he had bought in Vermont.

  The entire project would take weeks, and had already been going on for more than a month, but Pierce was never in a hurry to complete any of the work he did around the home, for after all, he lived alone.

  What was the rush?

  ***

  The following morning, Pierce woke up a little after four and then lay there and gazed at the ceiling. He didn’t have to be at work until eight, had set the alarm for six, but sometimes sleep would elude him.

  When five o’clock came and he was still awake, he got up and showered. While sipping on his first cup of coffee, he got the urge to see her.

  He fought against the compulsion, went online and began reading the day’s headlines. After reading the same sentence four times, he dressed, got in the car, and drove to her house.

  He parked where he always parked, in a back corner of the supermarket parking lot, the one that sat on the hill a block from her home. It was the only spot where the angle was right, the only spot where he could watch her, unseen.

  He removed the binoculars from his glove compartment and waited for her to awaken.

  At 6:34 a.m., the light came on in the kitchen and Pierce could see her through the window over the sink. Her name was Amy Lowe.

  Amy was blonde with brilliant green eyes, shapely, and intelligent. Her IQ was north of 150 and she had made a career in academia.

  She had been Pierce’s high school sweetheart, had stayed his sweetheart during college, and then had abruptly dumped him when she met Professor Arthur Lowe during their senior year.

  Amy had fallen in love with Lowe, as she sat in the young professor’s poli-sci class.

  Pierce had made a fool of himself for weeks as he pleaded with her to come back to him, all to no avail. A month after graduation, Amy married Lowe.

  Pierce had moved on after that, or so it seemed, and had even lost track of Amy’s whereabouts for years, despite the fact that he thought of her on more days than not. During that time, he would date infrequently and always found some reason to break things off.

  While at a funeral earlier in the year, a mutual acquaintance happened to mention Amy’s current address. A week later, Pierce found himself researching Amy online, and soon after that, he wound up spying on her.

  He fought the urge every time, but the chance to see her, to simply look at her, often overwhelmed his good sense, and he’d find himself staring at his long-married ex-girlfriend.

  He loved her, had always loved her, and, would always love her. It was his truth, and he knew he couldn’t change it.

  At half past seven, he put the binoculars away and headed for the station, while feeling as if he should arrest himself for stalking.

  ***

  THREE WEEKS LATER

  Dave climbed into Jack’s van with a wide grin on his face, despite the fact that the last few days of his life had been his worst.

  His mother had succumbed to her battle with Alzheimer’s and died. Dave took it hard, but Jack was there for him all the way and had stood beside him as his mother was laid to rest.

  When the funeral was over and the horrible day neared its end, Dave had walked Jack out to his van.

  “Thanks for everything you did this week, Jack my man. I would have been a mess without you. Janet tries to help, you know, but hell, she hates her parents, so she really can’t relate.”

  “How are you holding up? Are you going to be all right?”

  “It sucks, but what can I do? She’s gone.”

  Jack gave him a playful punch on the shoulder.

  “Boys’ Night Out, Saturday night, what do you say?”

  “Really? I thought you wanted to wait a while, in case... in case anyone was catching on.”

  “Fuck it. There’s been nothing in the papers and people go missing all the time in the city. Besides, we could both use it.”

  “What’s wrong with you? Is your father-in-law driving you nuts?”

  “Of course he is, he’s an asshole.”

  “All right then, Saturday night it is, but what’s your pick?”

  Jack smiled.

  “I could really go for some Italian.”

  ***

  Valeria Mangieri walked along the shoulder of Bayside Road while cursing her old car, which had just crapped-out and stranded her in one of the worst parts of the city.

  She and a girlfriend, Ginny, had gone to a concert downtown, but the girlfriend abandoned her for a guy she met at the souvenir stand.

  When the concert was over, Valeria, or Val as everyone called her, had taken a wrong turn while driving home, and before she could correct her mistake, her car had sputtered and died.

  She was wearing a T-shirt and jeans, and so the night air chilled her as she walked towards the familiar neon lights of a fast food restaurant that was several blocks away. While in the car, she tried calling her road service, only to learn that it had expired four weeks earlier.

  When she called her brother for help, he didn’t answer and she had to leave a message on his voicemail. He had gone on a date to the movies and Val guessed that he had probably shut his phone off.

  While she was sitting in the car waiting for her brother to call back, she had hugged herself to keep warm. When she also grew hungry, she decided to walk down to the fast food joint and grab something to eat while she waited for the call. After tucking her purse under the front seat, she stepped out of the car with only her wallet and phone in her pocket.

  Traffic was sporadic in the area, most likely because it was populated mainly by factories that had closed hours earlier.

  When Jack and Dave drove past her in the van, she didn’t even look to see who was driving, and watched with little interest as it made a right at the corner.

  She had just taken out her phone to call her brother, when the van appeared again. It was backing up at a high rate of speed, but once it reached the corner it braked and blocked her path.

  When Val noticed that the van’s side door was sitting open, she got a bad feeling and turned to sprint back to her car.

  As she turned, a dark-clad figure wearing a ski mask hit her with a running tackle that lifted her off her feet and sent her tumbling backwards into the van, even as her cell phone dropped into the gutter.

  Val was on the verge of becoming victim number 15.

  CHAPTER 5

  “Go! Go! Go!” Jack Murphy shouted as he leapt into the van.

  In the driver’s seat, Dave Owens hit the gas pedal and shot away from the curb. Since that section of the street was on an incline, the motion caused the side door to slide shut. It made the van look like just another vehicle.

  Then, Jack grunted, as the woman beneath him rammed a knee into his testicles. He shouted in rage and then brutalized the woman with four vicious blows to the face. On the final punch, he heard a crunching sound, and knew that he had just broken her nose. The woman made a cry of pain, and then
closed her eyes and stopped moving.

  Dave repositioned the rear view mirror in an attempt to see more.

  “What the hell is going on back there?”

  “It’s fine,” Jack said. “This one gave me a good smack in the balls, that’s all, just give me a second to recover and then I’ll cuff her hands toget—”

  Jack didn’t finish his sentence, because the woman hit him again, and this time it was a fist to the throat. His hands flew up to his neck as he rolled off of her and let out a loud wheeze. The pain was so great that it had brought tears to his eyes, and as he struggled to take a breath, he saw the woman scramble towards the rear double doors.

  Dave turned in his seat to get a good look.

  “What the hell now?”

  When he saw that the woman was loose and had her hand on the rear door, he braked suddenly to throw her off balance.

  ***

  Val cried out in pain as the van braked hard and sent her flying backwards, but she didn’t go far, as she refused to loosen her grip on the rear door panel.

  When the van came to a full stop, she raised herself up onto her knees and grabbed the handle. When the door opened and she felt the cool breeze on her bloody face, she smiled and crawled forward.

  Her fingers had just touched the pavement when the van began moving again, and she felt the skin scrape off the palms of her hands, even as the door bounced hard against her head.

  She screamed amidst panic as she feared falling out and smashing her skull open on the street, but the van made a tight right turn and she tumbled out as if she were doing a flip, and landed hard on her butt in the street. She sat there, legs splayed out, moaning, as blood ran freely from her nose and her injured palms sang with pain.

  Then, she heard the van backing up and swiveled her head to see the rear bumper rushing towards her, knowing that if she didn’t move, she’d soon be dead.

  Too weak to stand, she rolled over, and kept rolling until she hit the concrete curb, even as the van squealed to a stop in the space she just left.