The Collector Page 2

  Má’s barging in didn’t surprise Trisha one bit. Her mother and Mimi were pretty tight. Mimi came to the house for tea all the time. Usually, she gave Má pretty good advice. There was only this one time she had Má in tears. Má never said what Mimi had told her, but two weeks later, Bà, Trisha’s grandmother, passed away. Weird.

  Since she could remember, Trisha had studiously avoided the woman she called “Auntie.” Mimi used Tarot cards, and some of her readings could be eerily accurate. Like the thing with Bà, and the time Mimi warned the family to beware of the “friendly snake.” A couple of weeks later, they found out her father’s business partner was embezzling a bunch of money. There were a ton of stories like that about Mimi. Really, it gave Trisha the willies to think that someone could see her future.

  She felt a cold, hard ball in her stomach as she stepped inside the foyer, her high-heeled mules making a staccato sound on the marble tile. The house seemed strangely quiet.

  It bothered her, this growing fear. She wanted to shut out her mother’s voice inside her head. What if Tommy isn’t the right one, Tuyen? Or more likely, what if Mimi told the family he wasn’t? Could Trisha really elope as she’d threatened?

  She frowned, finding herself face-to-face with the most gawd-awful painting. The enormous oil took up half the wall in the living room and showed a squat, grinning demon sitting happily on a heavenly throne. Mimi had told her the story behind the image. It came from a Buddhist text, about a demon who fed off the anger of others. A heavy red mist oozed from his scaled body, forming a bloodred aura.

  Aunt Mimi collected all sorts of demon paraphernalia. She’d told Trisha her little demons protected her. Walking past the canvas, Trish glanced nervously away from the bug-eyed figure in the painting, thinking, Right…

  Aunt Mimi had a really posh setup. Furniture made of exotic tropical hardwoods stood on beautiful Oriental silk rugs. A huge mirror hung over the fireplace, with an intricately carved Chinese frame depicting a phoenix. At the other end of the room stood a beautiful lacquered screen inlaid with mother-of-pearl and seashells. Four mythical creatures had been painted onto the individual panels: a dragon, a turtle, a unicorn and a phoenix. The four often came together to form a superpower of prosperity, luck, love and strength.

  Trisha followed her mother into the den, admiring the juxtaposition of modern, white leather sofas bracketing the traditional rosewood table. A black vase at the center held several wicked-looking leather shadow puppets from Bali. The figures were believed to have great spiritual power. They were “brought to life” during special ceremonies performed by a puppet master. Supposedly, the puppets portrayed good and evil, but this collection steered heavily toward the dark side. But then Trisha figured that, if you already knew the future, you could probably sleep pretty well in a house full of demons.

  Her mother walked past an altar cabinet holding an impressive stone Buddha. There was a small china plate piled with oranges as an offering. Incense burned alongside, giving off a hint of sandalwood. An enormous plasma screen dominated the wall on the opposite side of the room.

  But along with the incense, Trisha smelled something else—something not so pleasant. She wrinkled her nose, following Má into the kitchen.

  Really, it was freaky quiet. Trish lived in an apartment off campus, with four other girls. Someone was always up making noise at just about any hour of the day or night. For a minute she thought maybe Mimi wasn’t home, and she could skip the whole ordeal.

  Only, that was another thing that didn’t make sense. They had an appointment, and Mimi was nothing if not professional. And the door swinging open like that—no way Mimi would have left her house unlocked if she was out.

  Inside the kitchen, Trisha watched her mother open the door to the garage to show that—yes, indeed—Mimi’s white Beemer was still in residence. Again, Trisha smelled something strange mingled in with the sandalwood. It reminded her of Brillo pads. Or the heavy iron skillet they kept on the stove back at the apartment. She looked around to see if maybe Mimi had left something out, some meat that might have gone bad. But the kitchen looked pristine.

  Her mother closed the door, for the first time appearing alarmed.

  “Maybe we should wait outside?” Trish ventured, hoping that they could just forget the whole thing and leave.

  No such luck. Her mother called out again for Mimi in Vietnamese. Trisha could tell her mom thought something was wrong. And maybe it was. She knew Mimi kept a fortune in jewels here at the house.

  Leaving the kitchen, Trisha remembered another reason why the quiet house struck her as odd. Mimi had a bird. A small parrot called a conure. She kept it in her office. Every time Trisha had come to visit, that screeching bird had driven her half-crazy. It was like some sort of freakish guard bird, going off every time Mimi let anyone in the house.

  From down the hall, Trisha heard her mother scream.

  “Má!”

  She raced toward her mother’s screams for help. She found her back in the den, standing in front of the altar cabinet, her mouth gaping as she faced the Buddha.

  Trisha saw the bird immediately. Or what was left of it.

  She hadn’t noticed it there before. It was a small bird. A sun conure, she remembered. The coloring blended in with the oranges, almost disappearing there on the plate with the offerings. The dead bird had been placed before Buddha, a sacrifice.

  The head was missing.

  Her mother covered her mouth with both hands as if to hold in her screams. Trisha backed out of the room, her eyes still on the Buddha and its strange offering. Her back hit the doorjamb. She let out a small mewling sound.

  Má turned to look at her. The expression on her mother’s face, how she stood so still, reminded Trisha of a deer catching scent of something.

  Má whispered Mimi’s name under her breath before calling it out louder and louder. She pushed Trisha aside and ran back into the hall.

  They found Mimi on the floor of the room she used as an office. She wore one of her beautiful white St. John suits. Where her aunt had been stabbed, the blood blossomed like some crazy Rorschach test over the white knit.

  Her eyes were empty, bloody sockets. And there was something stuffed in her mouth.

  It was the bird’s head.

  This time, Trisha screamed right along with her mother.

  2

  No one ever gets used to death.

  It could stab you through the heart or spray your guts across the wall with a bullet. It could slam into you on the sidewalk and knock you right out of your shoes.

  Quick. Clean.

  Or it could be a dark business. Strange and wicked. Bent.

  Detective Stephen “Seven” Bushard watched his partner walk around the victim’s body. The woman lay dead on a canvas of her own blood, her arms and legs posed as if captured midrun. The white suit seemed almost like an accent, as if maybe there’d been some attempt at a pattern. White carpet, red blood—white suit, red blood. A pebble dropped on a quiet pond.

  Seven’s partner, Erika Cabral, knelt alongside the victim to examine her face.

  “The parrot’s head in the mouth is a nice touch,” she said.

  “Looks like Polly got more than just a cracker.”

  Erika rolled her eyes at him, never big on his jokes. Seven’s partner was dressed in a simple corduroy jacket and jeans, her thick chestnut hair pulled back in a messy topknot. On anyone else, the outfit wouldn’t turn heads. But the fit of the jeans, the slight peek of cleavage…If she wasn’t such a ball buster, his Latina partner could lead half the force by the nose.

  “You ask me,” she said, “someone didn’t like what the vic had to say.”

  “Could be,” he admitted.

  “Ever heard the expression, don’t kill the messenger?” Erika asked.

  Tran was a well-known psychic, a woman paid to see the future.

  The crime scene tech, Roland Le, had already taken video of the scene and had moved on to stills. He snapped photographs i
n a carefully choreographed dance they knew all too well. Seven had seen it a hundred times, death. But he’d never get used to this.

  Whoever killed Mimi Tran was a grade-A whack job.

  The victim had been sixty-one, information delivered by the officer who had first arrived on the scene and secured the premises. He’d interviewed the two women, relatives of Tran, who’d been unlucky enough to step into this nightmare. The medical examiner would set the time of death, but Seven could take a stab at it just by the smell in the room. Another blazing day in sunny California and the place reeked of death.

  Mimi Tran liked the color white: white carpet, white leather couch, white lacquered Italian office furniture. The color choice made a stunning contrast to the blood.

  He knelt down to examine the near-black splatters on the carpet. Teardrop shapes led toward the door, then, abruptly—almost as if she’d been spun like a top—the trail turned in on itself, bread crumbs leading back to where the victim had fallen. Mimi Tran looked to be about five feet nine inches tall, approximately 160 pounds, no easy pickings. And still, someone had tossed her around like a rag doll.

  There’d been no signs of a forced entry. The vic had an elaborate security system that had been disarmed. Both facts indicated the victim knew her killer.

  Seven stared at the blood on the walls and the white sofa. However it had gone down, Mimi Tran had put up a fight.

  The body now lay on the floor, bloody sockets where her eyes should have been and a bird’s head shoved inside her mouth. The blood where she had been stabbed flowered across the white wool of her suit like some flashy pattern by those designers his sister-in-law loved so much. Chanel or Gucci. Tran still wore some impressive jewelry—diamond studs the size of fat peas, gold bangles shining from her wrists, a dragon pendant with fiery rubies for eyes—taking robbery off the list of motives.

  On the wall, there appeared strange markings, like maybe someone had dipped a finger in Mimi Tran’s blood and started to paint some weird wallpaper design, then changed his mind. There were exactly fifteen marks, each no bigger than a man’s palm. To Seven, they looked like Egyptian hieroglyphs. Or maybe one of those cave paintings you see in museums. The tech on the scene had already tested the stuff and made a preliminary determination. It was blood.

  “My best guess?” Roland said. “He used a feather from the bird. You know, like a paintbrush.”

  Erika came to stand next to Seven. Still staring at the body, she asked, “You okay?”

  She said it like it was nothing, just a little chitchat between friends. But he knew what she meant.

  Of course she’d ask.

  He shook it off. “Just tired of this shit.”

  They didn’t often get cases like this. Gang shootings, traffic accidents, domestic disputes gone bad—the everyday stuff, sure. But this was different, like some sort of ritual killing.

  “I want a couple of close-ups of the markings on the wall,” Seven told the tech.

  “Tell me something I don’t know.” Just the same, Roland knelt down to take the stills.

  They’d dusted for fingerprints and interviewed the relatives. They’d confiscated Tran’s laptop and PDA. Every nook and cranny of the scene had been documented. Pretty soon, the coroner’s office would remove the body for autopsy.

  And then they’d have to figure out what the hell it all meant.

  Seven stepped closer to one of the bloody symbols painted on the wall. He frowned, staring at the marks, trying to make them out. Two horizontal lines curved around a small circle…an eye? Made sense, given the condition of the body. Taking out a pen and notepad from inside his jacket pocket, he made an attempt to copy the image.

  He tried to figure out what it might mean. Someone was watching—all-knowing and all-seeing—lording his omnipotence over the now blinded victim?

  “Roland? These make any sense to you?” Seven asked, pointing out the bloody images on the wall.

  The tech shook his head. “It’s not Vietnamese, if that’s what you’re asking.” He looked over at the body. “Neither is that.”

  But Seven might argue with him there. No one was immune to this kind of violence.

  “The niece said she had an appointment to pick a lucky day for her wedding,” Seven said, moving on to the next symbol, a shaky copy of the first.

  “Not my gig,” Roland said. “Fortune-tellers, that’s more old school. When Wendy and I got married, we went to the Buddhist temple to pick a date.”

  “Old school or not,” Erika said, “business wasn’t hurting. Did you get a load of that Beemer in the garage?” She gave a wistful sigh. “A 735i. My dream car.”

  “Never too late to marry for money,” Seven kidded.

  “Yeah. Because I meet so many rich guys on the job.” Erika flashed her best smile, the kind that could sell toothpaste.

  Erika was all of five feet, two inches tall, maybe 105 pounds soaking wet. But she carried herself with the confidence of a woman who wore a badge and could regularly put men in their place on the firing range. She had the classic good looks of many Hispanic women. Her clothes didn’t flaunt her curves, but you could see she was proud of her figure just the same.

  She turned back to the victim’s desk and slid back the top page from the desk calendar using the eraser end of a pencil. “It’s like my mami always told me, Seven. A woman needs a man like a bull needs tits.”

  “Right. And I’m sure she said it just like that, too.”

  Seven had met Erika’s mother, an elegant woman born in Cuba who looked as if she might still wear a veil to church on Sundays. But he had to admit, Erika’s mom wasn’t exactly the poster child for happily-ever-after. Just last year, Milagro had moved on to husband number three.

  Getting his attention, Erika motioned Seven over to the desk. Three wooden statues stood on the desk lined in a row like good soldiers. They were old, maybe even museum quality. They had monstrous heads, and their bodies appeared to be covered with hair, looking like some sort of incarnation of Bigfoot.

  “What do you think these little guys are?” she asked. “Some kind of idols?”

  “It’s definitely not your everyday table decoration.”

  She glanced back at the body. “Could be a ritual killing.”

  “That, or the killer was one sick fuck.”

  That was the problem, of course. If they’d come in and found some poor vic with her throat cut and her diamonds gone, the job would get chalked up to a home invasion gone bad. Asian communities were ripe for the picking when it came to burglary. A deep-seated distrust of banks usually meant a lot of cash stuffed under the mattress.

  But this was different. Already, a crowd had gathered outside, neighbors whispering about the bizarre circumstances surrounding Mimi Tran’s death. Nor would the colorful nature of the victim’s trade help to keep things low-key. Soon enough, reporters would be buzzing around the story like flies on shit.

  And then the speculation would begin: was this a one-time deal or just the beginning?

  There’d already been a leak. While the cop who’d arrived on the scene had done a decent enough job, one of the witnesses, the victim’s niece—a coed from Chapman University—had kept her trusty cell phone in hand. Her fiancé was just outside, champing at the bit to see her. Seven understood the beginnings of a small memorial had already been erected for Mimi Tran, complete with incense sticks, bowls of rice and fruit, and a framed photograph of the victim covered with flowers.

  “Let’s go with the obvious first. Mimi Tran is a psychic,” Seven said, thinking out loud.

  “The kind that likes St. John suits,” Erika said, naming the designer of her outfit. “And a few other things. Patek Phillipe watch, Daniel Yurman necklace, Shelly Segal shoes. Not cheap.”

  He gave her a look. “Aren’t you the little fashionista.”

  She shrugged, sending him a flirty glance as she batted her eyelashes. “I’m a girl, aren’t I?”

  The family was Vietnamese, but swore that nothing a
t the crime scene had anything to do with custom or religion. No one had ever threatened Mimi Tran as far as they knew. She was well liked and respected in the community.

  “Too bad we’re not just up the road,” he said to his half-Cuban partner.

  “Santeria?” Erika asked, naming a religion comparable to Voodoo that flourished in Cuba. She again rolled her eyes at him. “Because I’m such an expert on the stuff?”

  In Westminster, their turf included the largest population of Vietnamese living outside of the motherland, with a hodgepodge of Cambodian and Korean immigrants mixed in. But just up First Avenue would be Santa Ana, an area dominated by Hispanics. Seven could definitely see Santeria, or something like it, mixed up in this.

  Still, whatever had happened in this room, he imagined no one was an expert.

  Seven stepped around the blood splatters, coming closer to the body. He was careful not to disturb any evidence. She’d been stabbed in the back, chest and abdomen, a trinity of vital organs: heart, lungs and stomach.

  Only, something about the blood didn’t strike him as right. He remembered when he’d first entered the room. Blood and the smell of it appeared to be everywhere. But now that he looked closer, there didn’t seem to be enough of the stuff. Almost as if someone had strategically spread out splotches of red to make it look like there was more.

  These houses were built on slab, usually with a layer of linoleum under the carpet, which was Berber—not a lot of absorbency. Any liquid from the body would spread out through the fibers of the rug.

  Mimi Tran was no small woman. If she’d bled out, here on the carpet…

  He was thinking about the blood on the rug, examining the crime scene, putting the pieces together when suddenly, it all changed in his head. Just like that, he was staring at a different body, experiencing a different crime.

  He closed his eyes against the memory, trying to block it out. Before he knew what he was doing, he backed away from the corpse, almost tripping.

  Shit.

  He forced his eyes open, telling himself to be here, in the present. He held perfectly still as the room came back into focus. He took a couple of deep breaths, trying to calm down. All he needed was to screw up by trampling on evidence.