Flip Side: A Novel of Suspense - Hardcover

Detective Randy Bunker Briggs didn't use his first name. It had become a source of embarrassment on the job. Like when he arrested the orange-haired chick with the nose ring and killer breasts for shoplifting. When she heard his first name, she sniggered and said, Well, are you? He had been, but that killed it. Bunker was solidlike a concrete fortress. Bunker Briggs liked to think of himself as bombproof. Not everyone agreed. He looked solid enough for his agefifty-someas he alighted his unremarkable detective's car at the crime scene in a residential area of Northridge, California. It was overcast and there was an eerie stillness about the cantankerous air. The condominium was an ordinary stucco concoction with ersatz red tile upstairs. Cookie-cutter stuff for Southern California. No architect lost any sleep on this creation. Along the sidewalk was an eyeball-height Eugenia hedge that smelled of one of those illegal insect sprays. At the hedge opening, Bunker Briggs was startled by a low guttural sound. He dropped back and reached for his gun. Next it was the clumping of heavy footsteps and gut-wrenching coughs. Detective Bunker Briggs peered over the barrel of his gun, around the hedge, where he was greeted with splaying pellets of foodstuffs, as if from an old 10-gauge. The sour smell hit Briggs before he saw the young officer follow out the front door, as though being yanked on the chain of this curtain call of his bygone meal. Bunker Briggs, detective, Los Angeles Police Department, Devonshire Division, returned his gun inside his jacket and swallowed a smile: been there, done that, he told himself, as Kurt York, the young officer, crumpled to the stoop, next to the acrid, greenish-yellow fluids with flakes of red and green, his bleary head sinking between his parted knees. The kid was a salad eater, Briggs mused: pizza, Coke, and a salad! was his guess from a glance at the mess. Briggs himself eschewed salad. Sissy food, he called it, but, hell, more power to the kid. Greens were good for youif you could keep them down. Briggs patted the young officer on the head like a pontiff offering a blessing. Don't let reality get to you, soldier, he said. The veteran detective marched into the condo, leaving the rookie cop unconsoled. Detective Briggs had dusty curly hair and crinkled skin, but he was in good shape. And he liked to dress well. He paid more than he could afford for his suits, and his fellow cops never tired of ribbing him for looking like an accident-injury lawyer. Today the suit was midnight blue with just enough shine to say, I'm a hundred percent silklotta worms worked overtime to deck me out like a shyster. Randy Bunker Briggs had been around the course, he would tell you. He had failed in his bid for early retirement (he claimed unbearable job-related stress). Though he found a psychiatrist to back him up, and though he had been guilty of some bizarre behavior, the review board decided he was goldbricking. He was unceremoniously dispatched to the lowest-crime area in the city, where his skills were utilized detecting who pilfered $6.83 in petty cash from a real-estate office. Club Dev, they called the Devonshire Division, the department's Sleepy Hollow. This one, however, had the smell of something big. Inside the Northridge condo was nice enough, but it wasn't high-end luxury. Drywall construction with enough glop shoveled on the walls to make it look like an adobe hacienda; beige nylon carpet (eight bucks a yard, installed). Otilia Montez, the Mexican cleaning woman who had called 9-1-1 so hysterically screaming, Muerte! Muerte! was able to get out the address and the word ariba before she collapsed. So with the words transmitted by the 9-1-1 operator through his watch commander, Muerte! Muerte! ringing in his ears, Bunker Briggs climbed the carpeted stairs of the condo, careful not to touch anything. The bedroom door was open and Bunker could smell the mayhem before he had cleared the top step. The room was a bloody mess. The couple was nude in bed together with no bedclothes covering them. The bodies were pasty-dough white from the draining of blood, which was caked brown on and about them. The wounds were blue-black, giving the bodies a lugubrious polka-dot appearance. Detective Briggs, standing by the bedside, closed his eyes gently and tried to visualize the murderer in this savage act. He tried to picture the repeated maniacal strokes necessary to render two such brutalized corpses. He tried to imagine the thought processes that tortured the sick mind, but he could not. These murders were the result of a pathological hate beyond the understanding of a normal person. And Randy Bunker Briggs knew that kind of hate was never anonymous. This one had the earmarks of a revenge killing, and, affirmative action notwithstanding, Bunker Briggs would bet his best suit this was not a job a woman could have done. Bunker hadn't had a clue who the victims were. She was the one he should have known, but she wasn't recognizable. Besides, except for a few pictures in the tabloids now and then remarking on some blowup by her famous husband, she had been a low-profile woman. Of course, their battles over the divorce were messy, but Randy Bunker Briggs hadn't paid much attention to anyone's divorce but his own. Took everything except his suits, but he thought it was worth it to be rid of her. She thought he owed it to her. Bunker poked around the condo, looking for clues. But the more he looked, the less he found. What set this killing off from the other passionate homicides he had seen was the methodical, almost pristine method of its accomplishment. It was as though the horror in the upstairs bedroom in Northridge had happened in a hermetically sealed, germ-free environment. Except for the bloodthe blood was everywhere. There was no sign of forced entry at any of the doors or windows; the front and back doors had been unlocked. There was a second bedroom, scantily furnished but untouched. Everything in the kitchen seemed neat and tidy. No obvious signs that anyone had to hurriedly disturb its contents looking for a knife. No, the murderer, Bunker decided, had nerves of steel or a profound psychosis. It was like a fable beyond fantasy. When he saw the captain lumber up the stairs, he knew he had a special case on his hands. There was no love lost between Briggs and his captain, Norm Draper (Briggs thought the captain was a showboater; the captain saw Briggs as a goldbricker). No self-respecting cop wanted to be out in this graveyard, and as a result it was difficult for those self-respecting cops to respect one another. Captain Draper was pushing the officially mandated weight limits, and taking the flight of stairs with some counterfeit purpose was an ordeal. Detective Briggs saluted his commanding officer when he came into the bedroom. Captain Draper didn't know why, but a salute from Briggs always seemed more like a nose-thumbing than a sign of respect. The wave of specialists came behind the captain: the fingerprinter, photographer, coroner's representative, lab technician. The captain was making clucking noises with his tongue and teeth. Briggs always called the sounds the captain's duck-mating calls (sometimes Briggs was careless with his pronunciation of duck), but the sound was more like that made by a novice horseman to encourage his animal to action. Briggs refused to give the captain the satisfaction of asking him what he was clucking about, but the captain told him anyway. Be hell to pay with this one, he said, then clucked some more. Got his name written all over the place, the captain mused aloud with a combination of self-satisfaction and weird foreboding. D.A.'ll have a slam dunk, he said. Whose name is all over this? the detective asked his boss. He meant it to be an accommodating question, but it came out more like a challenge. The captain cast a suspicious stare at the detective to see if he were goading him or he was that naive. He decided the latter, because he spoke with pride in his prowess. Devon Orlando. Oh, my God, said Detective Randy Bunker Briggs.