The Death Row Complex (24 page)

“Lexi, I understand your motivations. I really do. And for the record, I myself am opposed to unnecessary animal cruelty. But don’t you think it’s a bit hypocritical that you condemn the work I—we, as scientists—are doing, while you also sit back and reap the benefits?

“And by the way, monkeys are not apes—so at least get your facts straight if you’re going to continue on this crusade.”

Alexis reddened. “Whatever. You know what I mean. Monkeys may not be officially classified as apes, but they are still evolutionarily right next to humans, and you know it. And to demonstrate this point, I will be protesting—along with ten thousand of my closest friends from PETA and the ALF, at the biotechnology convention.

“Yes, I know, you’re going to be a big speaker there. You’re getting a great, big, fat ‘congratulations’ for killing the most animals. Well, guess what. I’ll be outside. My boyfriend will be dressed as a monkey. I will be holding him on a chain with a knife to his throat. And I will be dressed as you.”

J
ANUARY 21, 2016
6:36 P.M.
PST

Two nights later, the sun had long since set when Katrina pulled into the dirt parking lot at the Torrey Pines Gliderport. It was something to which she was well accustomed. During the winter months and into March, it was dark every moment that Katrina was not in her labs. This evening, with just a sliver of moon peeking out from a foggy coastal sky, the blackness was almost total.

Katrina was happy to see that the rocks on Ho Chi Minh Trail were dry, and she began trotting down the staircase with abandon. The exercise felt freeing until reached the sand and her heart rate and breathing began to increase. It was then that the pain returned to her lungs.

Normally a religious nightly runner, Katrina had just taken an unprecedented two nights off, the residual effects of the pepper spray still too strong for cardiovascular exercise. Tonight, as she tested her ability to return to her routine, she grimaced against the stabbing in her lungs. But she ran even harder.

Tonight, she ran to calm down.

Alexis had all but physically threatened her. And aside from the brief moment of rushed apology, which had seemed more like shock than true regret, her daughter had not
really
seemed disturbed by the fact that she had attacked her mother with pepper spray.

The paranoia. The drastic changes in friends. The attitude. Above all, the fanatical animal rights activities that Katrina could not help but take personally.

Katrina reflected back over the last few years, wondering when Alexis had begun to spiral out of control. In retrospect, it had been happening gradually for quite a while.

At first, it was the occasional snotty remark or lack of respect toward Katrina and Tom. Now, she treated both of her parents with utter contempt. She drank to get drunk. And rather than serve as a wake up call, a DUI had only led Alexis to stop concealing her behavior. Apparently, she no longer felt the need to bother.

The pepper spray incident revealed a horrifying truth to Katrina. She was beginning to fear her own child.

Katrina was literally sprinting as she turned to ascend the steep hill toward North Torrey Pines Road. On the first switchback, she sharply cut the corner, running within inches of the trees flanking the paved street. And as she did, a thick, muscular body emerged instantly from the shadows and crashed into her from the side.

The momentum of Katrina’s uphill charge carried the stranger for a step or two, but he was easily twice her bodyweight. The pair crashed sideways to the pavement, Katrina’s petite body crushed to the hard surface by the weight of her attacker. A rough, massive hand over her mouth muffled an instinctive scream.

Katrina had been breathing rapidly from her run and the effects of the pepper spray, and now, with her face covered and the weight on top of her, she could not catch her breath at all. As she was violently flipped onto her back, a second hand encircled her throat. Katrina felt the reflexive, choking cough that accompanies compression of the trachea, but there was no air. There was no air.

She couldn’t breathe at all. She couldn’t move at all. A rush of panic overtook her as her head began to swim. Above her, a pair of dead, black eyes pierced into her from the small holes of a ski mask.

You can’t pass out
, she barely had time to think before she did.

6:58 P.M.
PST

Chuck Morales straddled the woman lying on her back. Her hair—reddish-brown, not black—fanned out around her on the pavement. A sudden strong stirring arose within his groin. Chuck continued to watch for a moment after the woman’s eyes rolled into the back of her head, and then he cautiously loosened his grip on her small throat.

The body was lifeless.

He glanced down at her T-shirt, damp with perspiration, and thin running shorts. In this horizontal position, the T-shirt clung lightly to her breasts and stomach, revealing the outline of her torso. The waistband of the shorts was elastic, but an additional drawstring poked out below her navel in a bow. Chuck pulled the drawstring open and then reached for his own fly. As he pulled down his zipper, a now full erection poked through a thin pair of cotton boxers, and he drew a breath.

Don’t lose your head because of your dick
, he reminded himself. While his left hand reestablished its grip on her throat, his right reached into a cargo pocket halfway down the right thigh of his loose pants. It emerged rapidly, and in three precise motions, the six-inch blade of a silver butterfly knife caught the thin light of the slivered moon.

But suddenly there was too much light.

The ski mask blocking his peripheral vision, Chuck’s eyes jerked upward, and he turned his head toward the source of illumination. Headlights. From above.

“
Fuck
,” Chuck muttered. He quickly reversed his former hand movements to re-sheath the knife, dropped it back into the pocket, and stood up. Tucking his softening penis back into his pants, he jerked the woman upright by her arms and threw her over one shoulder. Then he ducked quickly into the trees.

Chuck had barely gotten off the road, his victim still over his shoulder, when a patrol car rounded the switchback just above him on the road. He waited, motionless, while the car slowly passed.

That’s a sign, bro
, he heard in Oscar’s voice.
Stop fucking
around
.

Slowly, almost gently, he lowered the body to the ground before him. He retrieved the knife from his pocket and reopened it, and then straddled the woman once again. Her eyes were closed. His left hand gripped her lower jaw to hold steady her head.

As Chuck’s right hand raised the knife to her throat, one of the woman’s knees thrashed upward, squarely crushing his scrotum into his pelvic bone. Chuck’s groin exploded in sudden, immense, eye-popping, excruciating pain.
“Ooooh,”
he moaned weakly as the pain flooded from his loins through the rest of his body and then turned to nausea.

Chuck fell sideways off the woman and retched. His body convulsed violently several times, each time drawing him into a tighter fetal position. For the next fifteen minutes, he was paralyzed, lying with the side of his face emerged in a small trickle of vomit, hands drawn protectively—too late—to his squashed, deflated testicles.

7:43 P.M.
PST

By the time Roger Gilman arrived, there were four police cruisers lined up alongside an ambulance, and a fire truck stretched down the other side of the street. The lights of the police cars were still flashing, and a section of street had been sequestered from passing traffic, but the sirens had been silenced. Gilman could hear the frantic barking of the four K-9 unit German Shepherd dogs racing through the foliage below.

Had Gilman not been notified in advance, he might not have recognized the woman before him.

Katrina Stone was sitting in the back of the ambulance, her legs dangling out of the opened door. One of them was skinned all the way from the hip to the knee, and a medic dabbed at the still-bleeding road rash. Stone held an ice pack to the back of her head with one hand. The other held a blanket around her torso. She was shivering violently. As Gilman neared her, she looked up and her red, puffy eyes briefly met his before she broke her gaze and looked at the ground beneath her.

Gilman felt a pang of guilt. From the moment of his own involvement in Operation Death Row, he had considered her the prime suspect in the investigation of an unspeakable crime. Looking at her now, he thought,
there’s no way
.

Stone was in the middle of giving her statement. “No, I didn’t say that,” she said when Gilman arrived, “I didn’t know it was a cop coming by at all. I passed out.”

“I’m sorry,” the police officer said sympathetically. “I must have misunderstood you. Can you please start over from when you were attacked?”

Stone sighed and began again. “I was running, and all of a sudden out of nowhere, this huge guy just slammed into me. I couldn’t breathe. He pinned me down. I was out of breath from running, and I couldn’t breathe because he”—she let go of the blanket and tried to demonstrate with her free arm—“he pinned me down. He sat on top of my stomach. He was wearing a ski mask. His eyes were like coal.”

Her eyes began to well up again, and Gilman reached wordlessly into his pocket for a handkerchief. Stone took it and surprised him with a brief smile of gratitude before she looked down at her feet and broke into sobs.

The officers huddled around her waited. Out of the corner of his eye, Gilman saw a flash of movement and then turned to see Sean McMullan charging toward them.

When he reached the circle of men surrounding Stone, McMullan gripped the shoulders of two of the policemen and pulled them roughly aside to step in toward her. He reached one hand forward to lay on her shoulder; with the other, he tilted her face upward to look into her eyes.

Stone’s sobbing was cut short with a slight gasp.

McMullan looked critically into one eye and then the other. He then looked away from her face to the bump on the top of her head, and scanned her body thoroughly. “You hit your head,” he said, “can you follow my finger?” He held up an index finger vertically in front of her nose, and then began slowly moving it from one side to the other.

“The EMT already did that,” an officer began with a bit of annoyance. McMullan’s eyes blazed as he stood upright and glared at the officer, who took a step backward, closing his mouth as he did. As McMullan’s attention returned to Stone, Gilman and the officer exchanged a glance.

Stone wiped her face with Gilman’s handkerchief and closed her eyes for a moment. As she did, she took three deep breaths and held each, letting the air out slowly each time. Then she looked back up, and for the first time, into the eyes of each man in turn.

Gilman was shocked at the transformation. It was if she had closed a valve that released her emotions. She handed back the handkerchief and gathered the blanket around herself once again.

This time, when she spoke, her voice was strong. Angry. Determined. And logical. “I passed out, and when I came to he had me over his shoulders and was carrying me. There was a car passing. I didn’t look up to see it. I kept still. I was hoping he wouldn’t know I was awake, which evidently, he didn’t.

“He put me down. After the car passed he straddled the top of me again and I could hear him doing something. I couldn’t tell what he was doing… my eyes were closed… ”

Stone closed her eyes again and paused for a moment, but this time it was not to gather her emotions. Gilman could sense her reliving the moment. She wanted to be sure to remember the details accurately. The data needed to be precise. Otherwise, the conclusions would be wrong. It was almost fascinating.

Gilman glanced at each of the officers briefly, and then settled his eyes upon McMullan. McMullan did not seem to notice. His gaze was focused on Stone, his jaw working, his face flushed, his breathing rapid.

As his eyes darted from one player to another, the sympathy Gilman had been feeling for Stone gradually began to wane. This was an intelligent woman. Out running, alone, on an abandoned beach, at night, in the middle of this investigation. She should have known better. And McMullan was in the palm of her hand. It was possible that she was playing with all of them.