Blackout - John Milton #10 (John Milton Thrillers) Read online

  Logan took the bottles and cans from the bag and stood them all out on the table.

  Twelve cans of Red Horse.

  Two bottles of Grasovka Bison Grass vodka.

  He took one of the six-packs into the bathroom, pulled the ring pull on each of them and poured the contents down the sink. He took the empties into the bedroom and dumped them in and around the bin.

  He collected one of the bottles of vodka, cranked off the lid and poured it out over the bed. He tipped a little over Milton’s chest and then rested the bottle on the edge of the bed, allowing it to glug out onto the floor until it was half empty.

  Milton did not stir.

  He took the other bottle and dropped it on the tile, the liquid splashing everywhere, rivulets that ran around the shards of freshly razored glass.

  One more thing to do.

  He turned to Sanchez. She was still asleep. Her head had fallen back, exposing her long and shapely neck. He crossed the room until he was standing over her. She had been useful to him. Her desperation for money and her previous closeness to Milton had combined in a fortunate intersection, but her utility was coming to an end. She had done well, but she had one last role to play. It was unfortunate for her, but necessary. Bad luck. Logan didn’t care.

  A strand of hair had fallen over her face. Logan reached down and gently pushed it away with one gloved finger.

  He leaned down and eased the girl onto the floor. She stirred a little, snuffling in her sleep, but she did not wake. Logan knelt down on either side of her body, her loose arms pinned to her sides by his knees. He reached for her throat with both hands, his fingers on either side and his thumbs meeting over her larynx.

  And then he squeezed.

  Her eyes opened, bulging with panic, but there was nothing that she could do. He was too strong and her body was deadened by the sedative.

  Logan pressed down hard until the muscles in his arms locked.

  It didn’t take long. Her weakness meant that he could be precise, placing his thumbs to ensure that he cut off the flow of blood to her brain.

  Ten seconds.

  She stopped her gentle struggling and lay still.

  Logan kept pressing down for another ten seconds and then he relaxed his grip.

  He stood.

  He took the girl by the wrists and dragged her body across the room. He left her in the tiny bathroom. He inspected her throat: red shadows from his fingers were already evident, darkening as the bruises slowly started to form.

  Milton had not stirred. He was snoring more loudly now. Logan looked at him and thought how easy it would be to kill him now. He was as helpless as a baby. Logan’s profession usually required the death of his target, but Logan had not been paid to kill Milton.

  Quite the opposite.

  He checked the room one final time and, satisfied with his work, he opened the door and stepped out onto the veranda. He pulled the door to, not quite closing it, and then crossed the lot to his waiting car.

  Part II

  14

  POLICE OFFICER Josie Hernandez watched as the suspect was loaded into the back of the squad car. Her partner, Manuel Dalisay, shut the door and went around to the front. Ideally, she would have gone back to the station with the suspect, but manpower within the department was a serious issue and she knew that she would have to take care of the crime scene until the lab technicians arrived.

  “Put him in the cells until I get back,” she called out to Dalisay.

  “No problem.”

  It was a hot morning, already up in the high nineties with stifling humidity. It had been hot last night, too, and Josie’s two-year-old son had been unable to sleep. Josie had lain on the floor next to his crib until the boy finally drifted away, but she had found it difficult to sleep herself after that and had eventually given up, taking a shower and getting into the department two hours earlier than usual.

  Her career had taken a turn for the better over the course of the last month. She had been promoted from Police Officer 1 to Police Officer 2. She was a good cop, but she knew that the promotion was as much about expediency as about her talent. The streets of the capital had been swamped with vigilantes tempted by the promise of bounties if they prosecuted the president’s war on drugs, murdering the men and women who had been put on semi-official kill lists for their alleged involvement in the drug trade. Those slayings all needed investigating, even if they were almost always signed off without the killers being brought to justice. Duterte had vowed to clean the streets with the same brand of outlaw justice that he had unleashed in the twenty-two years he had served as the mayor of Davao. They said that his death squads were responsible for nearly fifteen hundred killings in the once-lawless southern city, and his hard-line attitude had been responsible for his election. They called him ‘Duterte Harry,’ and it was an appropriate sobriquet. He could back it up.

  She took out her handkerchief and mopped the sweat from her face. The door to the hotel room was still open and she went back inside. The room stank of alcohol. She saw the bottle on the table and the broken bottle on the floor, and, as she made her way farther inside, her boots squelched through the sticky residue on the floor. There must have been some party here last night.

  There was a small suitcase parked at the side of the room. She took a pair of latex gloves from her pocket, pulled them on, and went over to it. The lid was unzipped, and she opened it. There were clothes inside: a pair of jeans, a pair of shorts, two plain T-shirts and a plain black shirt. She left them as they were.

  There was a thick blue book titled Alcoholics Anonymous with a subtitle that announced “This is the Third Edition of the Big Book, New and Revised. The Basic Text for Alcoholics Anonymous.” Josie riffled the pages, noticing that the corners of several had been folded back and that inked annotations had been made in the margins.

  Whoever owned that book had fallen off the wagon in a big way.

  She turned to the bed. There was a pack of cigarettes on the bedside table and a vintage black cigarette lighter that looked expensive. There was a scattering of banknotes and a cigarette that was floating in a finger of vodka.

  There was little to go on. There was nothing to identify the man who had been arrested. He would be searched when he reached the station; he was a westerner, and the suitcase suggested that he was here for a visit, so they ought to find a passport at the very least.

  She stood and went over to the bathroom.

  She guessed that the victim was in her early thirties. She had been beautiful, but her beauty had been marred by the obscene red welts around her throat.

  Josie wasn’t in the habit of leaping to conclusions, but it was difficult to look past the obvious explanation for what had happened in the room last night. There had been drink, too much drink, and an argument had become physical, and then, eventually, deadly. She looked down at the body again and then turned to gaze out the door as Dalisay put the car into gear and set off.

  No, Josie thought. This wasn’t going to be difficult. The only thing to do would be to find out the names of the killer and his victim.

  15

  JOSIE STEPPED back outside into the heat. The crime scene technicians had arrived and, after a quick explanation of what they would find, she surrendered the room to them and walked the short distance to the hotel office. It was a small hut on the other side of the parking lot, and by the time she had reached it she was sweating again.

  There were three people in the office. The manager had met Josie when she had arrived. He was a nervous man, forever kneading his hands together and picking at the loose edge of a fingernail. A murder on his property was cause for concern; perhaps he was worrying about the effect it might have on his business. There was a woman next to him and, from the way she fussed and fluttered around him, Josie guessed that it was his wife. The third person was dressed in a maid’s uniform: a light brown jacket and loose trousers with flip-flops on her feet.

  “I’m Officer Hernandez,” she said. She indi
cated the two women. “Could you tell me who you both are?”

  “I am Mrs. Santos.”

  “My wife,” the manager added redundantly.

  “And I am Vilma Cruz,” the maid said.

  Josie turned to the maid. “You discovered the body?”

  The woman nodded.

  Josie nodded back toward the room. “There must have been some party there last night. Two bottles of vodka.”

  “I don’t know,” the manager said.

  “Did anyone complain?”

  “No,” he said.

  “There was no noise?”

  “No one has said anything.”

  “Were the rooms on either side occupied?”

  “Yes. The hotel is full. The holiday.”

  Josie nodded. Tomorrow was Independence Day, the public holiday that marked the national Declaration of Independence. People descended on Rizal Park from all around the country so that they could join in the festivities. All of the hotels would be full.

  She turned to the maid. “Tell me what happened.”

  “I came to clean the room,” she said. “The door was open a little. I knocked and there was no reply, so I went inside. The man was on the bed. I saw him. Asleep. I was about to leave when I saw the woman…” She stopped, her lip trembling.

  “And next?” Josie said. “What did you do after that?”

  “I think I screamed. The shock. I…” She paused, swallowing as she tried to compose herself. “I have seen many strange things in rooms like these, madam, all across the city, but I have never seen a dead body before.”

  “You ran?”

  “As fast as I could. I went to the office and told Mr. Santos what I had seen. He called the police.”

  “Did you go into the room, Mr. Santos?”

  “No,” the man said. “Just to the open door. We went back and waited in the office. We could see the room from there. No one came in or out.”

  Josie looked through the window to the row of rooms. She saw a camera flash through the open door. The investigators were collecting their evidence.

  “When did he check in?”

  “Yesterday,” the manager said. “In the afternoon.”

  “What was he like?”

  “Friendly.”

  “You spoke to him much?”

  “A little. He mentioned the weather. It was very hot last night.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  “He registered under the name of Smith. He’s English, I think.”

  16

  JOSIE PUT her notebook away and went back to the room where the body had been found. The dead woman had been zipped into a body bag and placed onto a gurney. Josie stepped aside as the gurney was wheeled out of the room, into the parking lot and toward the open doors of the waiting mortuary wagon.

  The crime scene investigator was a middle-aged woman who was always disturbingly cheerful—strange, given the number of crime scenes and dead bodies that she was responsible for examining every week. She was supervising a young colleague, who was dusting the bathroom for fingerprints.

  “Good morning,” the woman said as she noticed Josie standing in the doorway.

  “What did you find?”

  “Not too much to say about this one, really. We’ve got plenty of prints, but most of them will belong to people who were staying here before. It’d be a nightmare to try to track them all down.”

  “You think that would be necessary?”

  She smiled and shook her head. “Not really. Pretty obvious what’s happened. The two of them come back here with a couple of bottles of vodka, they get drunk, they fight, it gets out of hand and…” She let the sentence drift off and spread her hands expressively.

  “Will they do an autopsy?”

  “I doubt they’ll bother. The morgue’s backed up, and they’re only looking at ones that are important or where something’s unclear. That’s not the case here. This one is obvious. She was strangled.”

  “You’ve taken your pictures?”

  She nodded. “Of course. We’ve got everything we need. We’ll finish up on these prints and then we’ll hand the scene back to the hotel. The manager’s been waiting for us to finish. He says he can’t afford for the room to be left empty.” She laughed. “Can you believe that? He’s going to try to let it out again tonight.”

  “Holiday tomorrow,” Josie said. “He says he’s full.”

  The woman’s assistant shone a black light around the bathroom, satisfied himself that he had taken the relevant prints, and started to pack away his brushes and powders.

  “I’ll have a report for you in a couple of days,” the woman said. “It’ll be short.”

  “Thanks.”

  Josie watched them as they loaded their equipment into their car. She noticed a small camera fixed to the underside of the ceiling of the veranda. She looked more carefully and saw that there were two of them, each pointing in opposite directions. She stood back and considered the arc that they would be able to cover. One of them was pointing almost directly at the door to the room. This case was so obvious that she didn’t need a break to solve it, but the footage would be useful for the purposes of confirming what she already knew.

  The manager and his wife were watching at the edge of the crowd of ghouls who had gathered to observe the scene.

  She went over to them.

  “It is finished?”

  “Finished,” Josie said with a nod.

  “Is there anything else?”

  “You said his name was Smith?”

  “John Smith. He said he was from London.”

  “How did he pay?”

  “He booked online and paid cash.”

  “Do you have his address?”

  “No.”

  “Anything else, Officer?” the wife said. “We are very busy. We’d like to get back to work.”

  Josie pointed over to the cameras that she had seen.

  “Do those work?”

  “Yes,” Mr. Santos said. “We have had problems in the past. There were—”

  “There were problems,” Mrs. Santos cut him off, presumably uncomfortable with discussing the prostitutes and pushers that Josie suspected were the reasons for the difficulties and the installation of the cameras.

  “I’d like to have a look at the footage.”

  Mrs. Santos sighed. “Is that necessary? I thought it was obvious what had happened.”

  “I think it is, but I like to be thorough.”

  “Can you do it?” Mrs. Santos said to her husband, her tone clipped and impatient.

  “I’ll have to set it up for you,” the man replied. “Can you come back tomorrow?”

  Josie had to come by the hotel on her way back to her mother’s house in Alabang.

  “Get it ready for tonight,” she said. “I’ll be here at eight.”

  * * *

  LOGAN WATCHED. He had been listening to the police radio and had heard the report of the murder as it was called in. He had arrived at about the same time as the responding officer. She was a woman and, he noted to his satisfaction, she looked young and inexperienced. That was good.

  A small group of onlookers had gathered to gawp as Milton was hauled out of the room, taken to the police car and driven away. Logan had parked his rental at the other end of the lot. The sedan had tinted windows, and he knew that he would not be visible from the outside. He waited there for another hour, watching as the police officer went back and forth between the office and Milton’s room. The girl was wheeled out of the room on a gurney and loaded onto the back of the mortuary wagon. Logan waited. The man and woman who owned the guesthouse came out of the office and hovered at the fringe of the onlookers.

  Logan was happy. Everything was as he wanted it to be.

  He put the car into drive and slowly drove away.

  * * *

  JOSIE GOT into her car and set off for the station. She waited until she had merged into the heavy traffic and made a hands-free call to her mother.
/>   “Hello? Josie?”

  “Hello, Mama. How is Angelo?”

  “He is good.”

  “What time did he wake?”

  “An hour after you left. He was asking for you.”

  She drummed her fingers on the wheel. She knew that her mother meant well, that she was trying to say that Angelo missed her, but every reminder of the fact that she couldn’t be there for her son was a fresh wound.

  She and her husband had decided that she would stay at home to look after the child for the first few years of his life, putting her own career on hold until he was old enough to start school. It was a sacrifice, but she wanted to be there and it was one that she was prepared to make. It was a fine plan, but life had taken a different turn. Her husband had run off just after Angelo had been born. He had told her that he wasn’t cut out to be a father, that he had too much life to live and wasn’t prepared to accept the changes that his son’s arrival would require. Josie wasn’t one for sentiment and had written him out of their lives as soon as he had moved out. She had guessed that he was cheating on her and, once he had confirmed it, her trust had died. She didn’t try to change his mind. Instead, she cancelled the rent on their tiny flat in Taguig and moved in with her mother in Alabang.

  Her husband had been arrested shortly afterward on suspicion of drug offences. There had been insufficient evidence to charge him and he had been released. His body had been found in Pasay one week later. He had been killed by one of the execution squads; a note on his body said: “I am a pusher. Don’t follow.”

  Her promotion had come shortly afterwards. It led to a small increase in Josie’s salary, but the extra money had not, so far, made up for the increase in her workload. She left her mother’s place at six in the morning, before Angelo was awake, and returned at eight or nine at night, long after he had gone to sleep. She would eat her dinner in his room, staring at him inside his crib as she ate the meal that her mother had prepared for her.