Nocturnal

The Golden Gate Slasher

The department’s electronic records of the Golden Gate Slasher case had been spotty, at best. That didn’t surprise John Smith. The case was old enough that all initial reports had been done on typewriters or word processors, before the SFPD implemented a database.

Reports that old had to be scanned or hand-coded into the system. With hundreds of thousands of pre-database cases, even high-profile records didn’t always get transferred. Vast amounts of the SFPD’s records still existed only on paper: slowly fading, degenerating, slipping away into the untouchable realms of lost history.

The Internet didn’t give up much, either. The Golden Gate Slasher wasn’t even on Wikipedia. In a culture fascinated by murderers, a culture that celebrated crime, this serial killer had gone surprisingly unheralded.

So John had come down to the archives to see the real McCoy. A white cardboard box in a climate-controlled room was all that remained of one of San Francisco’s ugliest summers. Crime-scene reports, medical examiner notes, evidence tags … a ton of information, although it seemed very scattered and disorganized.

Maybe John was too damn scared of his own shadow to provide any real help, but he could make himself useful digging through these files.

He hated who he had become. Once upon a time in fairy-tale land, he’d been a real cop. He’d been a man. Now he was a glorified secretary. Every night he woke up in a cold sweat. Not with nightmares, exactly, but rather with playback memories so real they made that moment come to life all over again.

Pookie had been obsessed with exposing a dirty cop named Blake Johansson, who was taking payoffs from gangs to ignore certain cases. Chief Zou had told them to leave Johnansson alone, but Pookie wouldn’t let up. He kept digging for dirt, kept banging away for that bit of evidence that would put the guy away. John had also wanted to let it go, let Internal Affairs handle it, but Pookie refused to stop — and like a good partner, John had been there every step of the way.

A tip led them to the Tenderloin, where they hit gold — Johnansson taking a payoff from Johnny Yee, boss of the Suey Singsa Tong. Pookie had rushed things. Instead of calling for backup, he went in. There had been a moment when Pookie had Johnansson dead to rights, but that moment passed. Johnansson drew. Pookie should have put him down, but he didn’t. John would never understand why Pookie hadn’t pulled the trigger at that moment. If he had, things would have turned out different.

It got crazy from there. Johannson fired, Pookie fired, John fired, then Johnansson ran out the back door. When John followed, he took a bullet in the belly. He never saw the shooter, didn’t know where the shooter was, didn’t even know if it was Johnansson.

John crawled fifteen feet to a big plastic garbage can for cover. During the crawl, he took a second round, this time in the left calf. Pookie called out — he’d been hit in the thigh. He was pinned down, unable to come to John’s aid.

For fifteen minutes John Smith cowered behind that garbage can, shoving his fist into the agonizing wound in his belly to try and stop the bleeding. That whole time, bullets kept on coming. John tried to find the shooter, looked at the buildings surrounding him, at the windows, at corners, at trees, but couldn’t see anything. He learned that plastic isn’t exactly the best bullet-stopping material in the world.

Bryan Clauser had been the first to respond to shots fired and officer down. Bryan, somehow, found the shooter and found him fast — that exchange lasted all of a few seconds and ended with three new holes in Blake Johansson: two to the chest, one to the forehead.

Since that night John’s life had never been the same. He couldn’t go outside without staring at every window, every door, without thinking that every stranger had a gun and was watching him, waiting for him to look away.

The shrinks couldn’t do shit. John knew he was being crazy, but knowing it and fixing it are two different things. The constant, numbing fear made it impossible to be a cop.

Months later, Chief Zou had reassigned him to the Gang Task Force as a graffiti expert. Same pay, same rank, but now his days were filled with computers and spent safely behind the walls of the Hall of Justice. Chief Zou had taken care of John when many people would have cut him loose.

He sorted through the box containing case files for the Golden Gate Slasher. What he saw briefly made him glad he didn’t have to visit crime scenes anymore. Eight children, ages six to nine, murdered over a ten-month period, yet the case hadn’t drawn the same kind of attention as other high-profile serial killers. In fact, it had received almost no national attention.

John didn’t want to think of the probable reasons for the lack of media coverage, but it was obvious — all the murdered children had been minorities. Six black kids, an Asian and a Latino. Back then, the media didn’t really give a shit about niggers and spicks and slants.

Not that things had changed all that much in the last thirty years. He could turn on cable news any day of the week and see the bias in full effect. A missing pretty white girl? National news for months on end, driven by angry women wearing too much makeup who screamed about it on cable. A missing black girl? Local paper, page five, running under an ad for Doritos, if she was mentioned at all.

John flipped through a forensics summary report.

“Holy shit,” he said quietly. “How can people be like this?”

The report showed a detail that the cops had managed to successfully keep out of the papers — the children’s bodies had been half eaten.

He thought of the Ladyfinger Killer. Both the Slasher and Ladyfinger were dead, cases separated by a decade and two thousand miles, yet both had that symbol, and both involved cannibalism.

Forensic reports of the Slasher case also showed fork-and-knife marks on the children’s little bones. Some bones even showed gnaw marks. All eight children had been missing their livers. Most had limbs cut off … some limbs appeared to be chewed off.

It was the chew marks that gave a positive ID. SFPD had matched the Slasher’s right upper molars to grooves in the bones of four victims. That reminded John of what Pookie had told him about Oscar Woody’s body, about marks made by too-wide incisors. John dug through the box until he found the perp’s dental charts — he didn’t know much about dentistry, but the charts seemed to show a perfectly normal set of teeth.

John started putting the box’s contents into neat piles on a table: one pile for each child and a final pile for the killer. The crime-scene report for the Slasher’s death was missing. John found the autopsy report’s summary page. That report — signed by a much younger Dr. Baldwin Metz — said that the perp had committed suicide with a self-inflicted knife wound to the heart. John looked through the box again — yes, just the summary page … where was the rest of the autopsy report?

He quickly flipped back through the files for each victim. Each case had missing information, particularly the initial scene descriptions where inspectors would have recorded strange drawings or symbols. Any paper file would be missing some information, sure, but this?

This was systematic.

John went back to the perp’s death report, or what little of it there was. Maybe he could find the name of the investigating officers. If they were alive, Pookie could track them down and get more details.

He found what he was looking for — the Slasher task force’s lead inspector had been Francis Parkmeyer. John had checked that name right after Pookie called with an update about the fortune-teller meeting; Parkmeyer had passed away five years ago. No lead there.

John read through the other names on the task force. Most had to be long since retired, if not dead.

Then he saw the last two names.

He read those names a second time. Then a third.

“Ho-lee shit,” he said.

John started putting the files back together. He still had to get over to the San Francisco Chronicle offices. Considering the sorry state of the police records, the newspaper archive was the only place left that would have the information Bryan and Pookie needed.