Five Knives Read online

  One Reporter.

  Three Dead.

  Five Knives.

  Inspired by true events.

  ※

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  ※ — ONE — ※

  SAN FRANCISCO. FALL, 2007.

  Will Finch saw the corpse less than a minute after he heard the horrible noise. He never imagined that death could sound so leaden. And yet, so wet. The punch of a heavy body splatting onto flat concrete. A splash punctuated by a gasp. Then a faint wheeze as the lungs released a final breath into the city night.

  At first, he couldn’t see the body. Four people stood on the sidewalk blocking his view. Their heads tipped down at an angle as they absorbed the catastrophe that sprawled next to their feet.

  “What happened?” Finch pushed forward and stepped around the blonde girl. She held a hand to her mouth and let out a cry.

  “I don’t know.” The boy next to her glanced at the building above them. “He fell,” he offered with a stony expression.

  Finch studied them a moment. Two couples in their mid-teens, white, vibrant, all well-bred and dressed for dinner at an upscale restaurant in nearby Jackson Square. Probably making their way down to the Embarcadero where they could catch a street car or train back to their suburban homes. He checked his watch. 11:18. These kids were probably trying to beat their midnight curfews.

  But now he observed the change coming over them. The reality seeping in. One by one, the cold hand of death caressed their faces and forced them to look again at the bloody pulp on the ground. Turn and watch. This is what I can do.

  “Did you see him fall?” Finch studied their shocked expressions. Two girls and two boys, standing stock-still. They all shrugged and glanced away from the corpse. One of the boys lurched to the sidewalk curb and vomited into the gutter.

  “Yeah. I did.” The blonde rubbed a hand over her mouth, her trance now broken. “Just in the last second.”

  “Do you have a phone?”

  “What?” She glanced at him for the first time. Her eyes swept over his face as if she were memorizing the features of his eyes, nose, mouth.

  “To call 9-1-1.”

  Her look suggested some uncertainty. Then she rummaged through a small purse that hung from her shoulder by a chain strap.

  “Here.” She offered Finch her Nokia.

  He made a mental note of her number on the flash screen, then placed the call. The dispatcher advised him that a response team would be by as soon as possible. Meanwhile, he should remain on the line and not leave the scene. As he waited, he leaned his buttocks on the door of a parked car, pressed his ear to the cellphone and stared at the building. He counted fourteen stories which rose above the Bank of America outlet on the corner of Stockton and Washington Streets. He tried to determine how many apartments had open windows. Maybe six. His eyes swept from room to room, scanned for fluttering curtains or someone above who might be peering back at him. Nothing.

  Then he detected something unusual. Behind the curtains in an apartment on the eleventh floor a lamp clicked on, then off. On and off. As the pattern continued Finch tried to time the periods of each interval. Five seconds, seven, ten. Then the apartment blinked into darkness. And lit up again.

  Finch made another calculation: the intermittent flashes came from the sixth window along the left side of the building. He guessed that each apartment had two windows facing the street. The third apartment in from the north side on the eleventh floor had one window open, one closed. The room behind the closed window was the source of the flashing light.

  He took the phone from his ear and passed it to the blonde. “What’s your name?

  “Alice.”

  “Alice?”

  “Winkler,” she added.

  “All right, Alice. My name’s Will Finch. The 9-1-1 dispatch said someone should be here soon. They want you to stay here and stay on the line.” He gave her a serious look. “Now I think I saw something up there, so I'm going to see what happened.”

  “Okay.” She said this as if she were making a polite concession and then held the phone to her ear and nodded. She turned to her friends. Both were tending to the boy who’d lost his dinner.

  Will walked along Washington Street past the bank and approached the glass doors that led into the apartment building. He tugged on the handles. Both doors were locked. He stepped to the curb and turned his attention back to Alice and her friends. Three pedestrians had come to their aid, and then an older couple coaxing a Shih Tzu on a leash paused to provide more support. Another minute passed, and Finch saw a couple approaching the building entrance from the interior elevator bay. He stepped up to the door. When it opened, he smiled at the two women strolling past him and said, “Thanks. I don’t seem to have my key.”

  He rode the elevator alone up to the eleventh floor and wondered if he’d counted everything correctly. The car door opened onto a hallway illuminated by covered fluorescent ceiling lights. The carpets bore a floral pattern of braided roses that stretched from one end of the empty corridor to the other. As he eased toward the north side of the tower, he detected the flat odors of fried food. Years of fried chicken and beef dinners had added their heavy flavors to the stale air. He guessed that the building was about thirty years old. Perhaps it had once been an impressive residential tower, but years of wear and disrepair had tarnished its pedigree.

  He stepped along the passageway counting off the numbers on the street-side apartments. 1110, 1108, 1106. He approached 1104, the third door from the end of the hallway. Like all the others, it was closed. He knocked once, twice — and again. Nothing. He pressed an ear to the wood panel. From the apartment’s interior, he could make out a quiet mewling. The sound of a puppy whimpering? In the distance, he heard the wail of approaching sirens.

  He hesitated for a moment and wondered what he was doing. What business is it of yours? Good question, he decided and made a bargain with himself. He would try the door handle, and if it were locked, he’d go back to the street and tell the emergency responders what he’d discovered. On the other hand, if the door were unlocked, he’d go in.

  He turned the handle. The door opened.

  ※

  He stepped onto the beige carpet and closed the door behind him. He paused a moment to assure himself that he was making the right move. Who could know? The apartment appeared to have a standard one-bedroom layout. To his right stood a galley kitchen with an eating nook that faced into the living room. On the left, a bathroom. Adjacent to the bathroom a closed door — which Finch assumed led into the bedroom.

  Directly in front of him, he could see the living room window had been pulled open. The sheer drapes, drawn tight to the side window frames, lofted slightly in the breeze coming off the bay. Finch sniffed the air. It smelled fresh, full of life. He heard the emergency vehicles stop on the street as the blare from their sirens wound down. The whimpering noise he’d heard from the corridor was detectable again.

  He walked to the open window and stood to the left of the window frame. From there he peered onto the street. Directly below him lay the corpse, which from eleven floors up, appeared to be little more than a sack of flattened pulp leaking a dark stream of blood that slipped toward the curb. A crowd of fifteen or twenty people made way for the ambulance crew. A fire truck pulled up behind the ambulance. One of the attendants approached Alice, who still held the phone to her ear. They began to talk and she slipped the phone into a pocket. Her friends moved to the corner across the street. One of the boys waved to her, a gesture to let her know they were still present, if not at her side.

  The trucks left their flashers on alert. The silence surprised Finch, and
for a moment he tried to grasp the conversation of the ambulance crew as they attended to the body. He could make out a few words, some standard commands, he guessed, but no complete sentences.

  Then he heard the mewling again. He turned from the window and approached the bedroom door.

  “Hello?” He tapped the door panel with a knuckle and said, “There’s been an accident. I’m here to check on you.”

  The whimpering now turned into something more human. A gasp of surprise.

  “What? See-See, is that you?” A woman’s voice, rigid with fear.

  Finch eased the door open. The bedroom was half the size of the living room. The curtains were pulled tight across the window. With her left hand, the woman clutched the bedpost opposite the door. Her left leg was poised on the floor as if she was about to stand. The right calf was curled under her thigh and resting on the bed. She wore a bra and panties. Nothing else. Her almond-blonde hair was disheveled. It appeared as if she’d just showered but hadn’t had time to dry and brush her hair. From where he stood Will thought that she could be leaning on the post to support herself.

  “Jeez. Who are you?”

  Her question came out with another whimper. Finch felt confident she was the source of the cries he’d heard from the hall.

  “Do you need some help?”

  “Help?” A startled frown crossed her face, then a rising awareness that something had changed. “Get me that key,” she demanded and shook her wrist against the bedpost. She flicked her free hand toward the bureau in the corner.

  Finch now saw the handcuff that clamped her left wrist to the post. He moved to the bureau and examined a standard handcuff key that sat in a glass ashtray on top of the bureau. Will almost picked up the key, then thought again. He turned to face her.

  “Who busted you?”

  “Busted me?” A flash of panic gripped her face. “No one busted me. This is all a setup for some psycho with a rape fantasy.”

  A stick lamp stood on the bedside table next to her. He assumed that she’d been able to reach the light with her free hand.

  “Was that you clicking the lamp on and off?”

  “Yes, damn it!” Her panic shifted to exasperation. “Now get the key so we can both get out of here before it’s too late.” She tipped her head back toward the bureau.

  “Before what?”

  “Before we both get thrown out the fucking window!”

  The panic in her voice sent a chill through him and he knew he had to take her seriously. At the same time, his doubts and uncertainties multiplied. He didn’t understand what was going on. Not half of it. But he had to make a decision. Will grabbed the key from the ashtray and approached the woman.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Jojo.” She shifted her right leg off the bed.

  “Jojo who?”

  “Joanne Joleena. Jojo. Get it?”

  “Hey, look — I don’t need the attitude.” He examined the key and the handcuff fastened to the bedpost. It took a moment to determine how they fit together.

  “All right. Just unlock me,” she pleaded with another gasp of exasperation. “Please.”

  Finch unlocked the cuff from the post and took it in his left hand.

  “What are you doing?”

  He noticed that she had two script tattoos on her forearms. One read Forever Young. The other, Love Now. “Where are your clothes?”

  “In the bathroom.”

  He locked the free cuff around his right wrist and slipped the key into the half pocket in his jeans. “Okay, let’s get you dressed.”

  “What the fu—”

  “Come on.” He yanked on the cuff and pulled her toward the bathroom. “Let’s get going before it’s too late.”

  ※ — TWO — ※

  “TAKE MY HAND.” Finch grasped Jojo’s left hand in his right and draped his jacket over the handcuffs that bound them together. “Anyone asks, and we’re on a date. Okay?”

  He stepped into the elevator car and pressed the “L” button.

  “I said, okay?”

  “Yeah. Whatever.”

  Jojo stood a foot shorter and weighed about a hundred pounds less than Finch. She wouldn’t be able to resist whatever decisions he made. In the lobby he found a back door that led into an alley. From there he steered them along Washington Street and away from the emergency crews still managing the crowd on the corner sidewalk. Five minutes later, they sat side by side at a table in the San Sun Restaurant in Chinatown.

  The waitress brought them a pot of tea and two shallow cups.

  “You want to eat?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’m famished.”

  He passed her the menu and told her to choose something. This was the first opportunity he had to study her, and he soon realized that Jojo could be in real trouble. Her punk hair and pale face weren’t a Hollywood fantasy job. She appeared to be twenty-five, but he guessed she was in her late teens. When she glanced up from the menu, he could see a small part of her right front incisor tooth had broken away at the tip. When she saw him stare, she flicked her tongue across her teeth and turned her chin toward him with an expression of defiance.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Okay, so I broke my tooth last week.” She seemed to think about it as if she needed to dredge up an explanation. “I fell and hit the sidewalk, all right?”

  Finch considered the probabilities. A week ago Jojo cracked her tooth against the pavement. Tonight a man flies out a window and hits the concrete next to the curb. Two sidewalk impacts within a week. She didn’t seem to detect the coincidence. “Sure. Fine. What do you want to eat?”

  “Chicken fried rice.” She pushed the menu aside with her free arm and braced her chin in the palm of her hand.

  Finch waved for the waitress and ordered the fried rice and a bowl of wonton soup for himself.

  “All right, Jojo.” He tipped his head back toward that apartment building. “What was that about?”

  “A queen-sized royal fuck-up.”

  “Yeah? That’s already pretty clear. Where’s See-See?”

  A hint of surprise crossed her face. “You know him?”

  Finch didn’t remind her that she’d called out for someone named See-See after he entered the apartment.

  “Through business,” he said. A guess.

  “Yeah. Sure,” she said with a smirk. “You like pushing girls on strangers? I don’t think so.” This insight seemed to inspire a question of her own. “Look, who are you? And what were you doing up there?”

  He paused to consider where this might be headed. What he should tell her, what to hold back.

  “Will Finch.”

  “Finch?” A laugh slipped from her mouth. “Like the bird?”

  He grimaced. The old high school taunting, still alive and well. “How ’bout we get back to you. Why were you stripped and cuffed to the bed?”

  She shook her head in a gesture of humiliation. A long band of her hair fell across her face. It took a few seconds before she could gaze at him again. “I got a better question, Finch. Why am I still cuffed to you?”

  He leaned forward and narrowed his eyes. “Because I’ve got the key, Jojo. Because I’m the one who saved you, remember? And because at any minute, I can get the cops over here and report that you’re an accessory to murder.” He continued to stare at her and then added, “Got it?”

  “Murder?” Her tongue stuck in her throat.

  “Yeah. That’s what it’s called when See-See pushed that guy out the window onto the street. Which brings me to the next question. Who the hell is the dead guy?”

  “...Murder...” Jojo was unable to dismiss the gravity of what had happened, especially now that she realized, in the eyes of the law at least, she was implicated. “Look, I got no idea. I saw him like, once. He stuck his fat face through the door to make sure I was cuffed. Like just the way he wanted. Then he went back into the living room with See-See.”

  “Wait a sec.”
Will held up his free hand. “What’s that mean? See-See?”

  “All the girls call him See-See.” She waved a hand. “Because he told us he could always see what we were up to. And it was like, basically true.”

  “All right, go on.”

  “Then I heard some sort of scuffling, then a scream and then … nothing. See-See never came back to get me. I heard him leave in a big hurry and that was it. Gone.”

  A big hurry, Finch thought. So big that See-See didn’t bother locking the apartment door.

  “Then I started clicking that light. That’s the full story.” She shrugged with a hint of disbelief and a loop of hair fall across her face again. “Then you showed up.”

  The waitress delivered the fried rice and wonton soup with a set of chopsticks and a soup spoon. Jojo studied her plate with a sneer of disgust. She stared at the waitress. “I need a fork,” she whined and held up her cuffed hand — still hidden under the jacket — to illustrate that she was disabled. “A fork. Not fucking chopsticks.” She threw the chopsticks against the floor, and they skittered to the far wall.

  “Sorry.” Finch shrugged at the waitress to suggest he was an older brother indulging an impudent child. “Sorry,” he repeated. “She’s had a bad night.”

  The waitress picked up the chopsticks and returned with a fork. They both began to eat. Jojo consumed her meal with ravenous hunger and apart from the sound of her moans of satisfaction, they ate in silence.

  When he finished his soup, Finch set the bowl aside and wiped his lips on a paper napkin. “All right. Tell me who the dead guy is.”

  Jojo forked a piece of chicken into her mouth. As she chewed, she shook her head. “I told you. I don’t know. Some guy named Gio that See-See was supposed to hook me up with. We’d done it two or three times before with other johns. He makes videos of us doing it. Then he charges them for the tapes.”

  “How much?”