Chaos of Crime

by Dell Shannon

Genres: Mystery; Police Procedurals; Traditional Mysteries

Synopsis

An early June hot spell takes its toll as it fuels a wave of bloody and bizarre crimes for Luis Mendoza of the LAPD. Grisliest by far is the psycho they call the werewolf, who gets his kicks by killing hookers before vanishing into the dark. A gorgeous teenage redhead holds up liquor stores with her boyfriend. And to make the caseload really interesting, 'Jack the Stripper' hits the city's gas stations - stealing cash and his victim's clothes . . . 'A Luis Mendoza mystery means superlative suspense' Los Angeles Times

Release date: November 21, 2014

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

THERE WAS A MAN turned into wolf prowling the streets of downtown Los Angeles these nights.

He didn’t know he had turned into wolf. He thought of himself as an eminently sane and rational man—only different from other men.

But there was always a cold, small place in his mind that was aware—aware that if anyone should find out, other men would take him and do terrible things to him—lock him in a cell,
and perhaps even kill him—so he was always very careful. He had always been very careful—except that once. That had been the first one here, and it had been stupid and impulsive. He had
ruined a good suit—he wouldn’t do one like that again.

There would be times when the days went along and he was content, and then the Voice would begin whispering to him again, and he would know it was time for another one. He didn’t clearly
remember how long it had been since the last one—but all last night the Voice had been talking to him, so he knew it was time for another. Today when he had come to work he had brought his
tools, locked away in the little case in the trunk of the car.

He was a meticulous, accurate workman. All day he had sat at the desk at his work, with the anticipation of the next one at the back of his mind, and now it was five minutes of five and the end
of the working day.

He folded away the papers he had been working on in the manila envelope, and put them into the desk basket tidily. He put the cover on the calculator.

The man at the desk next to his stood up and stretched. “I wonder what the temperature went to outside,” he said. “It’s early for a heat wave to get started. And now, for
God’s sake, we buck the rush-hour traffic on the freeway. Thank God it’s Friday—I’ll be glad to get home tonight.”

“Yes,” said the man turned into wolf in his pleasant low voice. “It can be bad. I think I’ll stay downtown for dinner and avoid the jam.”

“You carefree bachelors—you can please yourselves.”

They rode down in the elevator together, with other people. In the lobby the other man said, “Well, good night—see you on Monday.”

The man turned into wolf went out the plate glass door of the tall building into the hot glare of the blazing cavernlike street, the big buildings on all sides. Other people were streaming past,
heading for the parking lot. He stood on the sidewalk, undecided, and then started up for the next block on Flower Street. There was a nice restaurant there where he often had lunch and sometimes
dinner.

With daylight saving, the sun was still fairly high. He had some time to kill. It wouldn’t be dark until nine o’clock or so, and he couldn’t go hunting until after dark.

“JESUS H. CHRIST!” said Pat Calhoun, and drew in his breath with a long hiss. “I saw the photos of the others,
but the real thing—”

“Not pretty,” said Hackett.

And this was number five. Number five since the last day of April, and this was the second week of June.

You could just see that the thing on the bed had been human, and a woman. The head had been cut off and was sitting on the second pillow on the double bed; both eyes had been gouged out and
deposited beside the head. The entire genital area had been sliced away and left between the outspread legs. The lower torso had been disembowelled, the intestines torn out and draped across the
footboard of the bed. Both the breasts had been sliced off and left beside the corpse. And there was the trademark—the carved cross between the breasts, as on all the others.

This was number five—all of the others bearing that same trademark, and of course there was nowhere to go on it.

“We’d better get out of here and not mess up the scene for the lab,” said Hackett.

“Not that they’ve given us anywhere to go,” said Calhoun. They went out to the hall of this shabby, cheap apartment on San Marino Street. Hackett said, “You
okay?”

Calhoun said roughly, “Don’t be a damned fool, Art—I’ve seen my share of messy accidents—and homicides, for God’s sake.”

They had all seen their share. It was cops got called to look at the bloody messes. But when they had landed here ten minutes ago, they had found the patrolman who had taken the call—Dave
Turner, hardly a rookie and a good man—vomiting into the gutter. Hearing that it was number five, they had told him to put a call in to the lab.

Now they just stood in the dusty hall of this ancient apartment house, disinclined to talk to the witness, waiting for the lab men to show.

“And there won’t be any leads on it, any more than the others,” said Hackett.

“Damn all,” said Calhoun.

Number five—and as usual Headquarters Robbery-Homicide had this and that going on to work, but this was something else. Hackett stood there looking at Calhoun, waiting for the lab men to
show, and thought about the other four, and the various things they had going on to work.

A few changes had come to Headquarters Robbery-Homicide since the first of the year. They had lost Sergeant Lake in February, shot by the amateur heister, and Administration had given them
Sergeant Rory Farrell to sit on the switchboard, with one of the girls from Communications, Rita Putnam, sitting in on his Sundays off. Then in March the Narco office had lost two men—one
shot fatally during a wholesale drug bust and one retiring after thirty years’ service, and Administration had arbitrarily plucked Henry Glasser out of Robbery-Homicide and transferred him up
there. On Mendoza’s bitter protestations that Robbery-Homicide was just as shorthanded as Narco, finally in April Administration had given them Calhoun as a replacement. Calhoun was one of
the bright boys shooting up in rank early; he had only ridden a squad four years before making plainclothes detective at twenty-six, and he was barely thirty now. He was a big, handsome,
wide-shouldered fellow with curly dark hair and a charming one-sided grin; nobody could help liking him, but Hackett and Higgins at least were still regarding him with some reservation. He had a
mind like quicksilver and was rather given to erratic conclusion-jumping. But Mendoza liked him very much; of course they were essentially the same kind, relying on emotional instincts rather than
cold logic. Calhoun had been at the Robbery-Homicide office at Seventy-seventh Street Division the last four years and wasn’t exactly an inexperienced detective.

Scarne and Horder showed up, lugging all the lab equipment, and heard that it was number five. “Oh, Jesus,” said Scarne, looking sick.

“All I can say is,” said Hackett, “if you have to throw up, don’t do it on any evidence.”

“Not that we’ve turned up any evidence for you on the others,” said Horder sourly. They went into the apartment.

“I suppose we’d better talk to this girl,” said Hackett.

The door to the apartment across the hall was open, and they could hear the girl still crying. This was a very typical old apartment building for this area—small, shabby, one-bedroom
places. The building was sweltering hot, without air conditioning. It was fairly early for a heat wave to get started, but it could happen any time in southern California. They went across to the
other apartment.

The girl who had found the body was sitting crouched in a chair still sobbing and hiccuping. The tenant here was an elderly man named Braun, looking bewildered and shocked. The girl was in her
mid-twenties, blond, and fairly good-looking.

“We’d like your name,” said Hackett.

She sat up and looked at him forlornly. “Marlene Thomas,” she said.

“And who was she?”

“Nadine Foster. We were going to lunch together—I was picking her up—I got a car and she didn’t.” She sobbed.

And of course they knew, but it had to be spelled out. “She was a hooker—in business for herself—maybe like you?” said Calhoun.

She sat up and dragged a hand over her face, smearing her eye make-up. She was too sick and shaken to be at all wary, and she would know they weren’t Vice cops. She said dully,
“That’s right—but oh, my God, to see her like that— Oh, my God. Neither of us—meant to go on hustling—rest of our lives—just like me, she come out here
hoping to get into show business, but it’s not so easy—and you’ve got to live— She was savin’ up, goin’ to take a course at a beauty college and get a decent
regular job—”

“All right,” said Hackett. “Do you know where she usually picked up the johns? Do you know where she was going last night?”

“No—no, I don’t know.” She was a thin blond girl with a long nose and pale blue eyes. “I don’t know— She had a card up at all those porno places down
here, like me, but if she didn’t get the date set up that way she’d hit any of the bars— She didn’t have a car like I say, it’d be the places along Olympic, Alvarado,
Wilshire— No, I didn’t see her last night, I was supposed to pick her up at eleven this morning—and the door was unlocked, I just went in—see her like that, oh, my
God—”

And Hackett thought, the lab would be getting photographs of that head, but they couldn’t show those around. “Can you give us a description of her? Height, weight, age?”

She looked at them uncomprehendingly. “What do you mean? Nadine— She was twenty six—I guess about my size— Call it five-five, a hundred and twenty.”

The man didn’t know a thing. He was an old bachelor, retired from some probably humdrum job, and he said he didn’t know anybody in the building, all younger people, working people.
There wasn’t anybody else at home in the place. They would have to let the night-watch men ask questions, whether anybody had heard or seen anything, but it wasn’t likely.

There would be no leads on it at all, as there hadn’t been on the others.

Marlene Thomas said she could get home all right, she had her car. They got her address and let her go. They went out and stood on the sidewalk; Turner had gone back on tour. It was blazingly
hot in the street. “Handful of nothing,” said Hackett. “No way to go hunting, Pat.”

“And this is a something, isn’t it,” said Calhoun. “Another Ripper.” He lit a cigarette. “Nowhere to look. The hookers, for God’s sake, it could be
anybody in town. The advertising cards and the porn shops—” He hunched his wide shoulders. They knew how that went. The owners of the porn shops would charge a little fee for putting up
the cards on the bulletin boards, wouldn’t pay any notice to the casual customers maybe copying down the phone numbers. Aside from that, the girl wandering around the local bars looking for
pickups—it wasn’t very likely that any of the bartenders would have noticed which anonymous john she had picked up last night, if she had. And it was just getting on for noon; none of
those bartenders would be on until around four o’clock. They would have to go through the motions and ask around, doing the legwork, later on; but it would come to nothing.

“Write a report on it,” said Hackett. “The lab hasn’t given us a damn thing, and won’t on this.”

“Where do we go looking for a lunatic?” said Calhoun savagely.

They had, of course, looked in the indicated places, when number two had showed up. They had asked the computers down in Records for any similar M.O., and drawn blank. They had asked the
institution at Atascadero—for the criminal insane—about any recent ones let loose who might be suspects for mutilation murders, and come up with nothing. They hadn’t gotten the
autopsy reports and lab reports on these in a hurry; there was too much scientific work to do on them. And when they got those reports on this one, it would be more of the same.

At the moment, there wasn’t anything to do on this but write the report. Later, canvass the bars, and probably some of the bartenders would have known her as a hooker, but it wasn’t
likely that any one of them could say, yeah, she picked up a john here last night, and give a usable description.

They drove back to Parker Center in Hackett’s Monte Carlo. Farrell was sitting on the switchboard reading a paperback. In the communal detective office, Wanda Larsen and Nick Galeano were
listening to witnesses, Jason Grace on the phone, everybody else out somewhere. It was Landers’ day off.

“I want to kick this around some more with Luis,” said Hackett.

“He’s not here,” said Farrell. “When he heard the new call was number five he collected all the paperwork and went to talk to a head-doctor at the Norwalk facility. Not
that I suppose the head-doctor can tell us anything useful.”

“Damn it, probably not,” said Hackett. “You can write the report, Pat.”

“Thanks for nothing,” said Calhoun. “And goddamn it, after looking at that damn bloody mess I don’t know that I want any lunch.”

Hackett was feeling about the same way. He glanced around the office and asked Farrell, “Nothing else new down?”

“Just witnesses coming in. That Stripper—and a couple on the latest heist at the liquor store last night.”

WANDA WAS LISTENING to the witness on Jack the Stripper. That one had been around since the first of the year, and they had nick-named him as a joke;
now, with a for-real ripper in their midst, it seemed a rather sick joke. He had been hitting the all-night gas stations on Central beat and in Hollywood and Hollenbeck divisions, cleaning out the
register and getting the attendants to strip, walking off with all their clothes. The latest couple of times he had hit in Hollywood, but last night he’d pulled a job at a station on
Alvarado, and the victim had just come in to make a statement. He was a paunchy middle-aged man named Simms, and he was still mad.

“Of all the goddamned things,” he said to Wanda, “stealing all my clothes! My God, it’s one thing to get heisted, but leaving me stripped naked—I mean, it’s
crazy! Well, all I can say, he was a young fella, maybe five-ten, medium build, with sort of dirty blond hair—”

Which was, of course, the same description they had heard before. He signed a statement when Wanda had typed it up.

Palliser was talking to the witnesses on the liquor-store heist, and what they had to say was interesting but rather useless. The witnesses were Albert Preston, the owner of the store, and his
clerk, Don Meehan, and they were both still surprised and outraged.

“I tell you, Sergeant,” said Preston, “you never saw such a good-looker—a real beaut! She’s maybe just in the teens, real young, and she’s absolutely
gorgeous, see?—a figure like one of these models in Playboy, real curvy, a real eyeful, see, and she’s got this bright red hair down to her shoulders, natural I mean, you can
tell— She had on a white pantsuit, kind of tight—and she’s a real beauty, a real gorgeous dame. I was never so surprised in my life, see. They come in, and I had it on the tip of
my tongue to ask for I.D., because they both looked so damned young and I’m not about to risk my license sellin’ to minors—and then this girl, she pulls a gun out of her purse and
says to clean out the register—it was a pretty big gun—and she says, all business, snap it up, buddy, I’m a crack shot and I’d just as soon get some practice in on
you—”

“She sure as hell meant business, all right,” said Meehan.

“And neither of you noticed much about the man,” said Palliser. This was the second time they’d heard about the gorgeous redhead with the gun.

“Not much,” said Preston. “I tell you, the girl was sort of takin’ up all our attention, know what I mean? He was just a punk kid—another teenager, maybe, I
couldn’t tell you what he looked like. But he took the money when I handed it over.”

“And you didn’t follow them out to see whether they got into a car?”

“We did not, Sergeant. It was a pretty big gun, and that redhead was all business.”

Palliser laughed, but that was another handful of nothing to work. The businesslike redhead and her anonymous partner had pulled a heist at another liquor store last weekend. The description
hadn’t turned up in Records, and there was no way to go looking. As usual, Robbery-Homicide had several other heisters to look for, and a couple of bodies to do the paperwork on, if nothing
very mysterious—the overdoses, the derelicts passing out of natural causes. He took statements from both men; there was always the ongoing paperwork. When they’d gone out he went over
to Hackett’s desk to hear about the new one.

“Number five,” said Hackett. “My God. And the lab won’t give us anything more than they did on the others.”

Calhoun was slouched at his desk smoking, with his long legs stretched out. “The bloodthirsty lunatic, and he could be anybody, anywhere. What little we can guess about him takes us
nowhere.”

Palliser perched a hip on a corner of Hackett’s desk. “Replay of the Ripper,” he said. “The hookers, and all the mutilations. Nowhere to look. Five in six weeks, my God.
When we get the lab and autopsy reports, they’ll say the same things. And the lunatics don’t always go around foaming at the mouth.”

“I suppose we go through the motions,” said Hackett. “The legwork. Go and talk to those bartenders when they’re on duty. But we all know those dives—they’re
dark as hell, and who’s going to notice the anonymous john the hooker picked up? And it could have been a date made by phone, the john getting her number from the advertising card in one of
the porn shops.”

“That’s about the size of it,” said Calhoun.

“And I really don’t suppose,” said Hackett, “that Luis is getting anything useful from the head-doctor.”

Higgins and Galeano came in towing a suspect for questioning, and Higgins stopped at Hackett’s desk to hear about number five. Hunching his massive shoulders, he said, “God. Nowhere
to look.”

“Don’t say it, George. The cheap hookers, I suppose no loss, but that one’s a real maniac, he ought to be locked away. What have you and Nick come up with?”

“Possible on that pharmacy heist on Wednesday night.” Higgins followed Galeano down toward the interrogation rooms, and the other three jus. . .