Totem Phase

Angel hit the stairwell, nostrils flaring. Must. Wet rot. Chemical tang. The blue haze pulsed-strobe lights casting hard shadows. TAC boys had set up at the top and bottom of the stairs. Angel yanked the face mask over his nose, sucked in the sweat-tinged, filtered air. No time to admire the decor. He beelined for the suspect's room.

The air was thick. Officers hovered, some crouched, some standing. One of them pumped a dead man's chest. Another forced breath through a plastic tube. Blood geysered from an exit wound at the back of his skull. His mouth was a ruin-shredded cartilage, splinters of teeth, slicked with dark red. The TAC officer doing compressions exhaled sharp, sat back on his haunches.

"Bag and tag," he said.

The corpse wore blood-slick jeans, a soaked white tee. A hand-scrawled message bled through the fabric: I am a monster and I will eat you if I have to! Dark eyes half-lidded. Skin bone-white, spattered in arterial spray. His face-what was left-gaped at the ceiling, jaw unhinged. The house pulsed with movement. CSI swept in, setting up lamps, snapping on gloves. A logging officer sat at the door, clipboard steady. He logged names, times, reasons. The local beat cops had vanished.

Angel moved room to room. Hands behind his back. No touching. Yellow tape slashed the space in half. He ducked under it and stepped into humidity. A damp rot smell crawled up his sinuses. The floor was dirt, potted plants crowded like a jungle. Behind a tree, a red light glowed. Water trickled through a makeshift stream, boulders piled along the banks, fish darting in the dark pools.

Glass tanks lined the far wall. Angel moved carefully. Something crunched underfoot-soft, brittle. He bent, peered through the tank's glass. A chameleon, still as death. A faint rise and fall in its pale belly.

"You're a big fella, huh?" Angel muttered. He turned to the CSI tech bagging floor debris. "What do you got?"

"Crickets. Katydids. Fungus."

Angel grunted.

Elsewhere, Cole yanked on latex gloves. A swollen door groaned open. The pantry was bare-except for a two-liter can of motor oil and car parts. His eye caught a Dunlop tire propped against the back wall. He stepped in, beam scanning. The ceiling sloped-this was the boxed-in space beneath the main staircase. Footsteps thudded above. Voices hummed.

Cole grabbed the tire, rolled it forward. Empty. He pushed it back. It rebounded, tipped, landed against the wall with a dull crack. The plaster creaked. Hairline fractures spiderwebbed. Cole went still. He reached out, fingers brushing the surface. Thin plywood. A partition. Slapped with a lazy coat of plaster and paint. He pressed-another crack, dust sifting down. He stepped back, breath shallow. The fear hit hard.

He'd seen this before.

Wilmberg. Three girls. Mummified in a homemade vault. The reek of death, thick, metallic, acidic. Stuck to your skin, your hair, your clothes. Officers had puked at the first whiff. Cole had held steady, menthol rag jammed against his nose. He carried it always now. A tool of the trade.

Fresno. A shack. A suicide. A dead school principal, hung from a kitchen doorframe. Seventeen days ripening in the heat. Maggots. Stumps where his legs had been. The sight had cracked Cole's stomach wide open. The Post ran the photo: FBI Agent Sickened by Scene. His field office never let him live it down. Xeroxed copies taped to every surface.

And now-

Cole pulled the menthol rag free. Radioed Angel. He ran fingers over the partition, found a weak spot, pried at it. Thin, flimsy, but reinforced with paint and plaster. He grabbed a screwdriver from a pile of oily tools and chipped away, working the hole bigger. A musty scent trickled through-not decay. Stale air. Damp walls. He pressed closer, squinted in the dark.

A shape.

"Cole?"

Angel's voice, sharp, from the doorway.

Cole kept digging. Another hole, wider. A flashlight beamed through. A dull gleam. Cardboard. A bundle. He widened the breach, ripped free the plywood. The partition gave way. He reached in, pulled.

A pile landed on the floor. Purses. Credit cards. IDs. Colleges. Libraries. Clubs. Snapshots. Cut square. Folded. Angel sifted through. Names. He knew them. He'd known them too long. The victims. The Starman's girls.

Then the unknowns. Five IDs. Five lives. Five names he'd never seen before.

Cole exhaled, long, slow. "This guy's been busy."

Angel pulled a tarnished silver pendant from the heap. A dolphin. He turned it over in his palm. "Recognize this?"

Cole shook his head.

"Baldwin kids. Brandt's daughter. Missing jewelry: a yellow Alice band, a pair of clip-ons, and a silver dolphin pendant from her ninth birthday."

Cole let out a breath. "Rrameraz is walking free."

Angel smirked. "Pity."

A pile of books caught his eye. Stacked against the wall. He plucked one free. A hardback, dust-coated, plastic-wrapped. He flipped it open. Der Ring des Nibelungen.

His lips curled. "Due back at LA City Library. August '78. That's one hell of a late fee."

Passages were underlined. Margins inked with notes. Pages dog-eared. Angel flipped through, grabbed another. War history. Under Saigon.

Cole was still bagging evidence when Holland jogged up, envelopes in hand.

"Sir, you need to see this."

Cole's head snapped up. Urgency in his voice. Angel stared down at the book. Under Saigon.

Vietnam. The tunnels. The rats who crawled through the dark. The things they found there.

His stomach turned. The weight of it settled. The dead man on the gurney. The blood-streaked walls. The things left behind.

He exhaled. "Shit."