The Porn Star Murders Read online

  Childs nodded again, lost in thought.

  “What is it, Danny? You’re clearly here for a reason, and I doubt it’s to talk about Raymond Valdez.”

  “No it’s not. It’s to talk about the man that killed the Blums. He’s sitting in maximum security right now, and he wants to talk to you.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Stanton was silent a moment. “How do you know?”

  “He confessed,” Childs said, shifting in his seat. “Knew all the info, even the stuff that wasn’t released in the papers.”

  “Like what?”

  “He knew that Mrs. Blum had been object raped on top of being sodomized. He said the object had been a gun he found underneath the bed. We spoke to Michael Blum’s brother. He told us Michael always had a gun underneath his bed. The cocksucker even knew the make and model. That was never released to the press. We didn’t even know about that ’cause he took the gun with him.”

  Stanton felt a familiar tingling in his gut: it was excitement. Like the kind one feels at the end of a long chase.

  He didn’t forget about the Blums. The two boys had made sure of that. When he had quit the force, he scanned a few documents from the murder book and took them with him. Every few months, he would pull them out and spread them on a table at a coffee shop and go over every detail, hoping that something would jump out at him that he had missed before. Nothing ever did.

  “Who is he?”

  “Philip Oster. Got a rap as long as a novel. He’s been at George Bailey for seven years now. Went on a distribution of a controlled substance charge in ’06, three months after the Blums.”

  “Is that the only detail he has?”

  “No, man. He went through the whole thing. Step by step. He scoped out their house with a uniform from the power company, broke in through a basement window, took out the kids first and dragged them into the bedroom before taking out Michael.”

  “How did he say Nina Blum was killed?”

  “That’s the only part that doesn’t match the autopsy report. He says he shot her up with heroin and she overdosed.”

  Stanton remembered fielding the calls from people taking credit for the murders. The Blums were an average, upper-middle-class couple and nothing scared the upper-middle-class more than one of their own being brutally murdered for no apparent reason. The story had caught a lot of press, and with any story that does, the desperate and insane would call in and take credit.

  The papers reported that she had died from strangulation. Something Stanton and Sherman had agreed to release in order to filter out those trying to take undue credit from those that may actually have knowledge about the murders. No one except Sherman, Stanton, Nina Blum’s mother, who had given permission to release the information, and the ME knew what the actual cause of death was.

  Stanton was silent a long time.

  “You all right, man?”

  “I’m fine, Danny. Just dredging up some things that have been buried a long time. The cause of death was overdose by heroin,” he explained. “There’s a second murder book that I guess IAD didn’t get ahold of. We released cause of death as strangulation to filter the calls. No one should know that.”

  Now it was Childs that kept quiet. “Would you do me a favor? Mind meeting with him?”

  Stanton shook his head. “I gave up my badge for a reason, Danny. I’m not about to go trudging back.”

  “I know, I know. But no one knows the case like you. I’m the one that caught this case and it’d be a huge help to have a second pair of eyes on it.”

  Stanton saw the slight upper curl of the lip: an inadvertent micro-expression. Childs wasn’t telling him the truth.

  “What are you leaving out, Danny?”

  “What d’ya mean?”

  “There’s something you’re not telling me because you think I won’t do it if I know. What is it?”

  Childs cleared his throat, clearly uncomfortable. “Look, I’ll level with you. The guy won’t talk to me. He won’t talk to the DA’s Office either. He told his attorney that the only person he’ll talk to is you. He says if you meet with him, he’ll give a full confession. Not just to the Blums, to five other murders too.”

  “What others?”

  “Remember a few months back there was a story about that porn star that was killed?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “Well she wasn’t the first. She was number five. The other four were all blond, fake breasts, blue eyes, like Nina Blum. Unlike Nina, the other four were in porn too. I think our man got sick of the porn stars and moved over to the housewives.”

  “Why wasn’t that in the media?”

  Childs shrugged. “Porn star deaths happen all the time. Usually drug overdoses or STDs. Doesn’t make the news much in this town anymore.”

  Stanton thought a moment. “I’m sorry, Danny. You’ve got everyone you need. I’d like to help you close those cases but I’m done with police work. I can’t go back to thinking that way. It nearly killed me last time. And it’ll never be just one confession. There’ll be follow-up and interviews and gathering evidence and I’ll get deeper and deeper until I can’t get out. I help find kids now. I enjoy it and take only the cases I want to take.”

  Childs clicked the nails of his thumb and forefinger together. An annoying habit he’d had since Stanton first met him, when they were new uniforms on traffic patrol.

  “There is one more thing I haven’t told you: he didn’t work alone. He says we’ve never caught his partner. That he’s still here in the city. He says if we meet with him, he’ll help us find him. Jon, if that sick bastard is gonna put other women through what Nina Blum went through—you can’t say no. I know you. You can’t say no to that.”

  “I’m sorry, Danny. I wouldn’t even know where to start anymore. I’m saying no. Sorry.”

  Childs sighed and stood up. “I’m sorry too.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Stanton left the office early in the afternoon and headed to La Jolla Shores, one of his favorite surfing spots. Not that the waves would be particularly good, but the beach was a mile-long crescent of golden sand packed with families. Stanton enjoyed watching them as he glided into shore on the water, letting his mind drift to wherever it would take him.

  His own family wasn’t nearby anymore. His ex-wife Melissa had remarried someone that played for the Chargers and then had been recruited by the New England Patriots, so the family had moved to Boston. His two sons, now nearly teenagers, had both said they wanted to stay with their mother. His older son, Matthew, had told him that she needed them a lot more than he did, which was probably true. But it didn’t make the pain of distance any easier.

  Stanton parked, and changed behind his Volvo. The wet suit hadn’t fully dried since this morning and its coolness perked him up after the dreary drive from downtown. A local surf shop, Mickey’s, kept a board for him in back for a small monthly fee and Stanton picked it up and headed to the ocean.

  As he paddled out, he inhaled as one arm entered the water and exhaled as it rose up and the other entered. He took long deep breaths and exhaled loudly through his mouth. The deep oxygenation relaxed him and cleared his mind.

  But as he caught his first wave and it began pulling him back to shore, he saw the children playing in the sand and instantly thought of the Blums. The two young boys lying on cold metal slabs with Y-shaped scars from the autopsies across their chests. When Stanton had gone to see them at the morgue, they both had stamps on their right hands from their visit to a museum earlier that day. He had taken his sons to that same museum several times.

  After only a few sets, he returned the board, and headed home.

  Stanton lived on the eleventh floor of a skyrise, as close to the ocean as he could get. The building was secure and he had gotten to know every doorman on every shift. A precaution in case he ever saw someone as the doorman that shouldn’t be there. It was a small paranoia that he allowed himself without too much reflection on it.

  When he entered his apartment, the smell of cooking meats and vegetables hit his nostrils and he remembered he hadn’t eaten in over five hours. His girlfriend, Emma Lyon, was in the kitchen with an apron that said KISS THE COOK. Stanton kissed her and picked a piece of bell pepper out of a frying pan.

  “How was class?” he asked, placing the pepper in his mouth.

  “Good. Half my students were asleep and the other half were on Facebook or Twitter.”

  “Chemistry isn’t the most exciting subject.”

  “It is to me. Try this.” She thrust a spoon with a thin red sauce into his mouth. “What d’ya think?”

  “Needs some more salt but good.”

  “We’re cutting back on your sodium, young man,” she said, turning back to the oven. “Doctor’s orders.”

  “You’re a doctor of quantum chemistry. I don’t think you’re the kind that gets to tell me to cut down on salt.” Stanton wrapped his arms around her waist and kissed her again.

  “Well someone’s affectionate today. Something happen at work?”

  “Nothing much. Signed up a new client. Her fourteen-year-old son went missing eight months ago and Missing Persons is closing the case. How about you?”

  “Just class and then grading papers. You ready to eat?”

  The food was hot and spicy and Stanton, luckily, had exactly two plates. Emma liked wine with her meals, but out of respect for his Mormon beliefs, she never had alcohol around him.

  They spoke of mundane things: the weather, gossip, the upcoming holidays. Emma had a way of relaxing him that no one or nothing else could achieve. By the time dinner was over, he had almost forgotten about the Blums. Almost.

  Emma began cleaning up. “Do you want to watch a movie before I leave?” He nodded and went into the bedroom to change.
After getting into shorts and a T-shirt, he reached up to the top shelf of his closet and pulled down some red file folders. Three of them. He took out the bottom one, labeled BLUM, MICHAEL AND NINA and headed out to his balcony, knowing Emma would still be busy cleaning up.

  An ocean breeze was blowing, though this high up, he couldn’t taste the saltiness of it, and it just came through as a cool wind. He sat in one of his patio chairs and opened the file.

  Brief biographies took up the first three pages. Michael Blum was a successful CPA with a company downtown. He had come from a good family in Los Angeles and his father had been an insurance salesman, his mother a stay-at-home mom. His father died of cardiac arrest at the age of fifty-eight. Michael was fifty-three. Stanton could imagine the tightening dread that must’ve been choking him as he approached the age of his father’s death. He had no criminal history, other than a “failure to stop at the command of a law enforcement officer” charge.

  Stanton had seen that charge frequently in the upper-middle-class when they had no other history to speak of. They’d run a stop sign, or violate some other traffic law, and then notice the police officer camped across the street and try to get away. Their interactions with police were so rare that even a ticket frightened them and they’d panic.

  Nina Blum had come from a wealthy family, far wealthier than her husband. Her father had been the CEO of a telecommunications company. Nina had attended Vassar before moving to California to pursue a career in acting. Michael had married late: when he was forty-four and Nina was twenty-six. The biographies were simple summaries Sherman had written up. They didn’t include some of the details Stanton would have pursued and written in, like how they had met.

  Stanton flipped quickly through the autopsy and toxicology reports, scanned the ballistics report again to refresh his memory, and then got to the photos. Nina Blum, for all the terror and pain she had gone through, had been left mostly intact. The breasts and buttocks had not been mutilated—with the exception of about twenty bite marks—which was rare for a disorganized killer. Usually, long sessions of tearing and/or cutting were associated with this type of offense. Many times, they would eviscerate their victims or amputate limbs and breasts. But Nina’s only real disfiguration was a small pinprick on her left arm where massive amounts of heroin had been injected before the sexual assault.

  One thing that Stanton had noticed the first time he saw this photo was that Nina Blum had make-up on. It was possible she had gone to sleep with it, but there was little evidence of it on her pillow or clothing. So either she woke up in the middle of the night and put it on, or he had forced her to put it on.

  The last eight photos were of Michael and the children. Stanton flipped through them until he came to the last photo: one of the boys’ stamped hands.

  “What’re you looking at?”

  Stanton was startled but didn’t show it. He looked up to Emma’s soft eyes and quickly closed the file, placing it on a side table.

  “Nothing. Just an old file for work.”

  She sat down next to him. The ocean was less than a couple hundred feet away and they watched the setting sun as it glimmered off the water.

  “Have you ever thought about giving it up, Jon?”

  “Investigation? Why?”

  “It wears on you. Not as much as being a detective, but it still wears on you. It seems like a lot of the kids you find are dead. Chasing corpses can’t be very fulfilling.”

  “A lot of them are, but not all of them. Some of them are runaways. Some of them were kidnapped by relatives and taken out of state. There’s some reward in that.”

  “You ever thought about teaching? I think it’d be fun for you to be in our psychology department. Or what about opening your therapy practice?”

  Stanton shook his head. “I definitely wouldn’t do that. All the studies suggest that one type of therapy isn’t any better than another. Psychoanalysis doesn’t work any better or worse than cognitive behavior therapy, which doesn’t work better or worse than electroshock therapy. Progress is based solely on the skill of the individual therapist. That’s not science, that’s art. I’m not sure how good of an artist I would make.”

  “I think you’d be great at whatever you wanted to do. I just don’t think this is it. You take things too personal.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Like when you’re talking to someone new. You talk like them—you take on their speech patterns and vocabulary. I used to think you do it on purpose, to fit in, but I realized it’s completely unconscious. You absorb things from the people around you. And if those things are nothing but death…I just don’t think this line of work is for you anymore.”

  She reached over and held his hand. They watched the entire sunset without a word before going inside and lying together on the couch. They watched a movie before Emma kissed him goodnight and left.

  He went back out on the balcony and opened the Blum file.

  CHAPTER 5

  Stanton woke up and got a slight thrill knowing it was Friday. Though Sundays were spent in church, on Saturdays he would turn off his cell phone and refuse to check emails. He would spend the entire day surfing and occasionally a massage would follow.

  Next to him on the nightstand, the Blum file lay open, Mrs. Blum’s lifeless, gray face staring up at him. He reached over and closed the file before rising and showering. After a breakfast of almond butter and mashed banana on toast, he headed out the door. He’d received the email he’d been waiting for from Anna Dopler: a list of the regulars at the swinger parties she attended.

  She was shocked when he suggested that their sex life could have endangered her son, but after a few minutes she began to cry, admitting that sometimes she would host the parties at her home.

  “Do you really think we caused this?”

  “No,” Stanton had said, “you didn’t do anything to deserve this.”

  Stanton looked through the email as he got into his car. It was a list of eight couples that had attended the last party they had at their house. Anna insisted that everyone knew everyone else and that no strangers were there.

  Stanton submitted the names directly from his iPhone to background review affiliates, and within minutes, received an email with their occupations, addresses, phone numbers, debt, collection matters, law suits, and criminal histories. He was most interested in the criminal histories.

  A true sexual deviant couldn’t control his urges once they began to manifest at puberty; occasionally even several years before or after. If intelligent, they would bring only minor offenses with them into adulthood, avoiding sex offenses as long as they could before being caught when their urges didn’t allow them to stop, even when the risk was too great. If unintelligent, or careless, they would receive their first sex offenses as juveniles. Though the juvenile records were sealed, Stanton knew how to access them. Through the Office of Probation and Parole. He submitted a request on all eight couples. Those records would not normally be released to the public, but they made an exception for former detectives that went into PI work. A common practice in Southern California. It would be forty-eight hours before he received a reply.

  As he pulled out of his parking stall, Stanton’s phone rang. He recognized the first three digits: it was the District Attorney’s Office.

  “This is Jon.”

  “Yes, Mr. Stanton?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please hold one moment for Assistant District Attorney Kathleen Ackerman.”

  The line clicked before a female voice came on.

  “Jon Stanton. How have you been?”

  “Assistant District Attorney. Congrats, Kathy. I always pegged you as switching to defense.”

  “What can I say? The benefits here are too good. So how you liking being a private citizen?”

  “Can’t complain.”

  “They really miss you over in Special Victims. They always tell me you’re the one detective who didn’t lose his temper even once under cross.”

  Images of two-week jury trials, the days wasted away in windowless courtrooms, filled his mind. He couldn’t believe how much of his life he had thrown away inside courts.

  “Who knows? Maybe a little spit-and-fire would’ve been good for me.”