Nocturnal

Handiwork

Rich Verde was just about maxed out. Too many years of this bullshit. Time to start thinking about retirement. Someplace warm. Someplace with rich divorcées and enough booze to drown out any memory of this fucking city. Boca Raton, maybe?

The wind whipped at a blue tarp tied up inside a cluster of Golden Gate Park’s gnarled Australian tea trees. The trees were spooky enough all by themselves, even without the corpses that had been found hidden among the twisted, contorted trunks.

Rich and several uniforms stood just outside the tarp. He didn’t want to be in there, not with those bodies. He’d had his fill of symbol killings; more than enough for one lifetime. Baldwin Metz was on the way. The Silver Eagle would get this body out of here lickety-split.

That was the process. That was how things were done. Rich just didn’t want to be part of that process anymore.

He wondered how he was going to tell Amy. How would she take it? Well, that wasn’t his problem. She could go cry on the shoulder of that needle-dick husband of hers. Rich had put in his time. Thirty years’ worth of time, fuck you very much. He didn’t owe Amy a goddamn thing.

This latest killing, though, it was a problem. The media had got to the bodies first. Pictures of two corpses with missing hands would be all over the front page of the Chronicle. Hell, it was probably already up on the paper’s website.

Whoever this killer was, he had struck twice in as many days. Yesterday morning, the first set of bodies had turned up at Ocean Beach. And now, less than twenty-four hours later, a second set. All four victims showed the same m.o. — broken necks, missing hands and gnawed feet. Gnawed feet, for fuck’s sake. And, of course, someone had given the bodies a golden shower.

Naw, not Boca Raton. Maybe Tahiti.

The symbol had been found at both sites. He’d been at this game long enough to know it was a new killer, not the same one who had whacked Paul Maloney and those BoyCo kids. He could just tell. The only break was that this time the symbol had been carved into the back of one of the tea trees, and the media had missed it.

All this, and Amy had yet to call him back. So unlike her. Robertson was on the way, though. Sean could run things. Hopefully he’d get here before the rest of the media did.

A uniform walked down the dirt path, then ducked under a line of yellow police tape and approached.

“Inspector Verde, more media is showing up,” he said “We’ve got CBS-4 setting up now, KRON-TV’s van just pulled up into the park, and the ABC-7 chopper is closing in.”

“Just keep them all back,” Rich said. “The last fucking thing we need is for them to start asking questions about a serial killer, you know?”

“Might be too late for that, sir. I think they already have a name for him. They asked me if I knew anything about the Handyman.”

The Handyman?

Yeah, Tahiti. That would do the trick.