"Why don't you just advertise the scene to the whole neighborhood, huh?" Detective Baker shouted at him. "Close that damn door, will ya?"
Hamilton finished snapping on a pair of latex gloves and gently shut the door behind him.
"Sorry."
"Always so apologetic, Rudy. You really need to grow a pair," Baker joked.
"Why, did you find it lacking the last time you were down there, baby? I'll pop a few hard-on pills next time and maybe you wont notice it so much, how's that?"
Baker chuckled as he waved his partner over. The filthy hotel room was cramped with barely any floor space around the single-sized bed and nightstand. Hamilton had to balance awkwardly on the tips of his plastic-wrapped loafers to avoid tainting evidence. On the opposite side of the bed the body lay in the center of a blood splatter explosion that ran up the walls and across the ceiling, dripping from the dingy curtains and soaking into the side of the mattress. Where the guy's face should have been there was a pile of pulp and bone shards caved in like a rotten melon.
"Jesus!" he gagged. "You couldn't warn me a little?"
"You act like you've never seen this type of thing before."
Hamilton felt his stomach do a flip.
"Have you ever seen this kind of overkill in person? I mean...wow...that's fuckin' disgusting!"
"Gore doesn't bother me, sweet cheeks. The smell I could live without though."
"That's right, you get a kick out of doing that to people's faces in your spare time."
Baker smirked.
"What can I say...I'm an animal. Take a look at this."
He used the back side of a pencil to point out a large, almost circular wound in the victim's chest.
"It's like some shit out of Aliens," Baker continued, "only going in, not out."
"Now that I've definitely never seen before."
"It's a pretty clean hole."
"What could have done that?" Hamilton asked a nearby CSI.
"Hard to tell from the looks of it. Something heavy. I'd say it looked like a shotgun blast, but: no exit wound, so...something like a sledgehammer, maybe?"
"Sledgehammer? Jesus," he repeated.
Baker shouted to the room:
"Anybody see a dude walkin' around with a giant sledgehammer? Covered head to toe with blood? Maybe a few brain shards? Anybody? ...No? Fuck me, it never is that easy, is it?"
Baker stood up, dusted off his pants and took a quick glance around the room - nobody seemed amused.
"I've seen enough," he said. "Step outside, I'll fill you in."
Outside room 212 the two men pulled the plastic bags off their shoes and tossed them in a rubbish bin.
"This place fuckin' stinks," Baker spat.
The Hotel Boyd was an old dive that rented out rooms by the hour catering mostly to a clientele of drug addicts and prostitutes looking for a place to escape the wind and the rain. The drab mid-20th century wallpaper bubbled and wilted under the yellow glow of the hallway lights like dusty wax melting down the side of a candelabra. The two detectives made their way to the lift, careful not to touch any surface with bare skin. Hamilton waited until the elevator's rusty metal gates squeaked closed before finally opening his mouth.
"Is it insensitive of me to ask what the fuck we're doing here?" he asked. "I mean, no offense to the lovely patrons of this fine establishment, but this neighborhood isn't usually high on Todd's priority list. I haven't been on this block since my beat days."
"I was wondering the same thing myself."
Baker slammed down the lobby button repeatedly, waiting for it to light up.
"Fuckin' piece of shit, c'mon!" he grumbled. "Shit!"
"What?"
"It's fuckin' busted."
"You serious? I just took it up five minutes ago."
"What the fuck do you expect? Look at this place."
"Stairs?" Hamilton suggested reluctantly.
"Actually, I was thinking about just jumping out the fuckin' window and saving myself the trouble."
Downstairs, the detectives used the night watchman's cube as a private interview room. The cramped box office was just big enough for the two of them to lean on the edge of a desk and still have room for a single employee at a time to sit in the rusty old swiveling chair to be debriefed. Baker removed a Translator from the inside of his jacket and began setting it up on the desk before they brought in their first witness.
"The only thing I can guess," Baker mumbled, "is that this John upstairs isn't just your average John - know what I mean?"
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Hamilton squinted, hardly paying attention.
"Why we're here, dumb fuck...Jesus. Can't you hold it together?"
"I'm doing my goddamn best."
"Well, anyway...what I'm sayin' is, maybe he's someone important and that's why we're down on this block during prime slack-off, getting piss-drunk hours. Why else would Todd send us, arguably his best - and certainly most handsome - detectives down to this fucking shit hole?"
"Maybe you did something to piss him off."
Baker chuckled.
"Or maybe you did, more likely."
Baker attached a transmitter to the side of the device on the desktop and then clipped a tiny wireless microphone to the edge of his notepad.
"Honestly, I don't give a shit if it's the reincarnated son of God himself in that flophouse," Hamilton ranted, "there's a reason we don't bother policing around this fucking neighborhood. There's no point to it unless you're gonna arrest everybody within a ten-block radius and just be done with it. You investigate one crime, uncover fifty others. It's a waste of my goddamn time."
Baker knocked on the office door and an A.F. Officer inched it open. His projection field depicted a young Asian man with a thin mustache, the name tag read Officer L. Tse. The composite image flickered unconvincingly under the dingy light.
"You can send in the hotel manager," he said calmly over his partner's raving.
A minute later the manager sat in front of the detectives in his swiveling chair, hair matted and greasy, eyes swollen as if he'd been woken out of a coma. His shirt was sweat stain yellow.
"Can you state your name for the record?" Baker asked into the tiny microphone.
The manager waited for the machine to spit out the translation in garbled, computerized Chinese and then said:
"Zhao Jaw-XIEN."
"And your position here at the hotel?"
The man spoke quickly and the machine translated on the fly.
"Manager. AND day watchman," the machine spat.
"Ok, Mr. Zhao - what can you tell me about the man in room 212?" the detective continued.
"No name. He came in by himSELF," the computer voice hummed, "two night ago. He left once YESTERday for ONE or two hours. He has been in the room ever SINCE."
"Did anyone come to visit him?" Hamilton chimed in.
"Nobody came. Not during the dayTIME."
"Any messages left?"
"No messages. We do not take."
"Did you see anything suspicious tonight? Anyone that seemed out of place?"
They didn't need the machine to translate the man's laugh.
"HOW can you ask that? Look AROUND!"
"Yea," Baker smirked.
"He someONE important, yes?" the computer voice asked.
"Why do you say that?"
"I have three murders in my business this year - THREE MURDERS! Police never come before this. They don't care. Only care IF someone important."
"Three murders...in this place?" Hamilton questioned, "Jesus Christ..."
The device couldn't translate the man's next words:
"Baa Cawla!"
"Excuse me?" Baker asked, confused.
"Baa Cowla, Baa Cowla! He KILL!" the man insisted.
"The fuck is he saying?" Hamilton scoffed to his partner.
He continued in Chinese:
"He kill him, probably. The others too. He kill many, all THE time. You do NOthing!" the device repeated.
"Slow down...who killed many?"
"Baa Cawla!"
"Baa Cawla," Baker repeated to himself, "Baa Cowla..."
"What a fuckin' waste of time," Hamilton mumbled to himself.
"You mean Bar Crawler?" Baker interjected.
"YES, Baa Cawla - he kill!" the man nodded his head.
After hearing the same allegations from the night watchman and the dezis in room 214, the two detectives left the rest of the questioning to the A.F.O.s, who were programmed to ask all the standard inquiries and retain audio records for later inspection by human detectives. The A.F.O.s didn't need Baker's pocket translator, but he shoved it into Officer Tse's arms regardless as they quickly made for the front door. They ran through the rain with their coats over their heads and slammed closed the doors to their squad car.
"Well, this is a crock of shit if I've ever seen it. Let's get the hell out of here," Hamilton sighed as he clicked on his seatbelt.
"Just a second," Baker said, "I gotta check something first."
He activated the center console and the SFPD logo leaped into focus just above the dashboard, rotating in mid-air.
"The body was stripped of ID," Baker said, "so I swabbed a DNA sample."
He waved a small handheld device under a sensor near the radio and a search window appeared in front of them.
"Unless our guy here is smarter than the average bear, we should be able to ID him pretty quickly."
Within a few seconds the wizened face of an elderly Asian man with thick, gray eyebrows and a large brown mole on his cheek appeared on screen.
"Let's see what we have here," he mumbled to himself as he tapped out something on the keypad. "Lealand Ocampo, birth date...1992 - Jesus Christ, this guy's older than sin."
"Who the hell is he?" Hamilton asked.
"See, I fuckin' told you he was a big shot! He's a researcher for Gladstone. Doesn't say which department."
"Must be a senior annalist," Hamilton scoffed.
Baker looked at him sideways.
"Your jokes are even worse than mine."
"Well, that's why I'm here and not opening the late show at the Punchline."
"Lucky for them."
"Lucky for you I'm here instead of where I'd much rather be, in bed watching trash TV, so let's fuckin' get on with it."
"The room was covered in prints and the guys are running those through the system as we speak, but considering the location I'm guessing that'll turn up just about every junkie in town. Probably take a week to run down all those leads and most of them will be dead ends anyway."
Hamilton sighed.
"So how are we going to narrow down our pool?"
"We'll cross reference with the other cases for similarities and hope something comes up so we can pawn this off on some other schmuck and move on to a real fucking case."
"What do you mean 'other cases'?"
"You really are out of the loop, aren't you?"
"What?"
"You're honestly telling me you haven't heard about the Bar Crawler?" Baker smirked. "I mean, I know as far as Todd is concerned we've never heard of him, but I don't know how you could actually not have heard of him."
Baker turned in his seat, genuinely surprised.
His partner laughed.
"You mean Baa Cowla? I thought they were making that shit up - like a crackhead boogieman or something."
"He's been killing hookers and dope fiends in seedy hotel rooms just like this for the last...I don't know...year and a half, two years. I can't believe you haven't heard of this."
"Does it look like I hang out in the Tenderloin on weekends?" Hamilton said indignantly.
"Well, not today, but I don't really know you that well."
"Oh, fuck off, Leon."
"It's been on the news."
"I don't watch the fucking news, I've got better things to do. I make the goddamn news."
Baker chuckled.
"I guess I know now never to wake you up on the weekends. You're a real bitch when you're grumpy."
"Yeah, yeah - I'm fighting an awful hangover here."
Leon glanced down at the time and smirked.
"It's barely midnight, Rudy. I'd like to know how the hell you managed that."
"Maybe I'll tell you sometime."
He continued to browse through Ocampo's file.
"Not much info in here. Rare to find anybody without some kind of record these days."
"I'm sure he's a real boyscout."
"Or somebody had his record cleared. He does work for Gladstone. Never know what kind of connections those guys have."
Baker pulled open his center console and picked out an open package of roasted peanuts.
"Partake?" he asked.
Rudy shook his head.
"Suit yourself."
He tossed a handful in his mouth and started crunching. Hamilton stared out the window toward a cluster of dezis at the end of the block that were shouting at each other inside the doorway to a dingy old liquor store.
"So why do they call him the Bar Crawler again?" he asked as he pinched the bridge of his nose between his eyes.
"They think he follows people home from the bars. The vics are usually in the party scene or they're the workers that cater to them - the dealers, the trannies, crackheads, dezis...you name it."
A woman ran out of the liquor store and jumped unexpectedly into the arms of one of the shouting men, sending him toppling over between parked cars on the street. Laughter erupted over the pounding of the rain.
"Sounds like he's on our side.""Look at this," Baker touched a bit of text from Ocampo's file and it enlarged in front of them. "His wife passed away five years ago, but it says here they had a daughter, Cecilia. And wouldn't you know, she owns a place not three or four blocks from here."
"How fortunate."
"Can I bother you to accompany me over there, my grumpy gay friend?"
"I thought we were gonna pawn this case off for fuck's sake, Leon. Are you serious?"
"Yea, I'm serious. It's three fucking blocks away and it's our fucking jobs, Rudy. Would it kill you to do some actual investigation every now and then?"
"It might, yea..."
"Did I mention it's a bar?"
Hamilton huffed, then reluctantly clicked on his seat belt.
