The Collector

She nodded, wiping her tears. Inside, Ricky had one of those espresso bars. The man loved his coffee.

“Hey, Nick,” Seven called out to his nephew. “You okay?”

“I’m okay,” he answered, sending up a three-point attempt that went wide.

Seven followed Beth inside, knowing it was a lie. The fact was none of them were okay. On the television crime shows, it was all about the victim’s family—their loss, their quest for justice. But Seven, the homicide detective, had seen the other side, how one unforgivable act could affect a family.

His brother had killed a man. And it wasn’t just Ricky who was paying for it.

Erika stared at the woman’s mouth. Mimi Tran had thin lips and a bad overbite, as well as a penchant for dark lipstick. Erika would have suggested a lighter shade.

She walked slowly around the body, getting to that place in her head where all other considerations melted away and she focused right here, right now.

There were three basic methods of determining time of death. Rigor mortis usually set in three hours afterward, beginning in the facial muscles, then slowly spreading to the extremities. Approximately thirty-six hours later, the process reversed itself and the body became supple again. To Erika’s trained eye, Mimi Tran appeared stiff as a board.

As well as assessing rigor, the medical examiner would take a temperature reading. A number of factors, including Tran’s size and the hot room, would determine a possible time of death, but the process was far from exact.

Then there was lividity, during which red blood cells eventually leak into the body from the capillaries, making a permanent color change on the skin where the blood settles like sediment in a muddy pond. With her pen, Erika pulled back the collar of Tran’s St. John suit to expose the skin where one shoulder blade pressed against the carpet. The skin was a deep wine-red, showing the body hadn’t been moved since the heart stopped.

With her latex-gloved hand, Erika pulled out a magnifying glass from inside her jacket pocket. She knelt down. The bird’s head stuffed inside the victim’s mouth…it was elemental, almost primitive. Definitely something religious or sacred.

Erika was all too familiar with these sorts of rituals. She’d grown up in Santa Ana, the daughter of a Cuban immigrant married to an American of Mexican descent. Her mother was an educated woman, but still, Santeria had been part and parcel of her upbringing.

Even for a seasoned homicide detective, the sight of those bloody, empty eye sockets might prove too much. But Erika didn’t pull away from the grotesque image. That wasn’t her style. She fell into it, trying to see where it could lead her.

Like any good investigator, Erika had a healthy dose of intuition. With time, she’d come to realize hers was sharper than most. Seven called her ability “uncanny.” Her mother had a different name for it. El don de la doble vista. Only, Erika wasn’t buying that sixth sense crap. Her job required a sharp eye and tedious hours gathering evidence. That’s what got convictions in the courtroom. If good instincts and a little imagination helped, well, hell. Why not?

She cocked her head in thought. The victim was a psychic. A successful one, judging from the posh surroundings and the high-end jewelry.

So, this was about power. But what kind? Money? Prestige? Warring factions in the occult world here in Little Saigon?

Or was this about something more sinister? Had Mimi Tran been searching for a darker power?

Erika frowned. She had experience with the damage that sort of struggle could cause. The need for miracles. The lies behind the desire to control.

She turned her focus to the victim’s hands. Defensive marks. Mimi Tran had put up a fight. But the missing eyes…it seemed almost a cliché. The idea that, as a psychic, Mimi Tran had “the sight.”

“So what’s the connection to the bird’s head?” Erika asked herself.

Taking out a penlight, she pointed the beam into the victim’s mouth. With the magnifying glass in her other latex-gloved hand, she peered closer.

Something there? Inside the bird’s beak?

“Hey, Roland?” She motioned over the tech.

She had him take a couple of close-up shots. She pulled out an evidence bag and a pair of tweezers from her jacket pocket. With the penlight held between her teeth, she knelt carefully over the body.

She remembered a game she used to play with her brother as a kid. Operation. The goal was to use tweezers to remove tiny plastic game pieces from a body without touching the sides. Her brother and mother always messed up, but not Erika.

Slowly, she pried loose the object from inside the tiny bird’s beak. In the beam of the flashlight, the thing glowed a rich sapphire-blue.

It looked like a glass bead. Or maybe more like a crude gem?

“Holy shit,” the tech said, snapping more pictures. “What is that?”

Erika carefully placed the bead in the plastic evidence bag. “Your guess is as good as mine.”

She put away the penlight and held the plastic bag up to the ceiling light. Suddenly, the glass bead turned a bloodred color.

Erika glanced upward. The lights in this room were fluorescent…

Shielding the bead with her body, she again reached for the penlight. As soon as the incandescent light struck the bead, the color of the gem changed back to a dark blue.

And something else. Something inside the bead flashed white. The gem appeared to catch the light, like one of those star sapphires. Only, in this case, a single white stripe appeared, making the thing look like a cat’s eye.

“Weird,” the tech said, snapping a few more pictures for good measure.

Erika glanced back at the blinded body of Mimi Tran.

She told Roland, “Looks like it’s an eye for an eye.”

4

David Owen Gospel II felt the woman stir beside him on the bed. The fact that she was still asleep irritated him just a little bit. But he held back any reprimand. It was still early.

He reached and stroked the black sleek hair, admiring her lovely naked back. He considered himself a collector, and this woman was one of his finest pieces.

Her name was Velvet. He was certain that wasn’t her real name. Most likely, it was the translation of her Vietnamese name. In Vietnam, many first names had special meanings, like Kim for gold, or Tam for heart.

David thought the name suited her. Her skin, her dark, liquid eyes and waist-length hair, all of it felt rich and smooth.

He always gave her jewelry. He liked that best about Velvet. She was high-class, never grasping for his money. Jewelry seemed so much more civilized an exchange. And he knew she found him attractive; many women did, liking that air of power that could only come with age and experience. And David kept himself fit. Velvet had often complimented him about his gray eyes and silver hair. She didn’t have a problem with the age gap—almost forty years—between them.

As soon as she felt his touch, she turned and kissed him, gracing him with that lovely perfect smile as she caressed his face. But Velvet knew her business. Quickly, she slipped out from beneath the silk sheets. Donning a robe he’d bought her, an artistry of lace from a particularly fabulous lingerie shop in Paris, she hurried off to the kitchen.

Over a breakfast of jackfruit Danish and Vietnamese drip coffee, he read the paper. His beautiful Velvet sat across from him in the condo’s jasmine-scented courtyard, reading some tome on corporate taxes. Velvet was finishing her law degree at Whittier. He looked forward to hiring her on as in-house counsel for Gospel Enterprises, a privately owned development company that made more than the gross national product of most small countries.

It wouldn’t be easy to lure her in—she’d have many lucrative job offers. David anticipated that Sam Vi, Velvet’s thug of a cousin, would be his chief rival. David smiled against his coffee cup. He knew work at Gospel Enterprises would appeal to Velvet’s imagination. What could she really do for Sam other than keep his ass out of jail?

Of course, she’d have to get over the whole sleeping-with-the-boss issue. That’s one of the things he found tantalizing about Velvet. She had scruples.

Today, she would find a beautiful pair of ruby earrings waiting for her on the bedside table—he’d bought them just last week. They were antiques, presumably worn by Marie Antoinette herself, although he wasn’t naive enough to pay a premium for something so improbable. But Velvet would like the story.

He reached for the newspaper, thinking of what Velvet would look like wearing the earrings and nothing else. Suddenly, the image of her naked and reaching for him vanished.

David sat up, staring at the newspaper on the table. The smile faded from his face as he read the headline: Vietnamese Fortune-Teller Murdered in Ritual Killing.

There was a photograph of Mimi. A publicity shot by the looks of it, taken some years ago. He felt his body go numb.