Chase caught it alright; it was no smoking gun, but served to solidify her own opinions.
“You ever get the idea that Drake was jealous of him? That he wanted the man’s job? Maybe pissed because Rhodes got the promotion to Sergeant while Drake toiled as a detective?”
Beckett’s face turned serious.
“What’s this about, Chase?”
“Just humor a lady, if you would. Was he jealous?”
Beckett chuckled.
“Fuck no. Drake is exactly where he wants to be—in the field, getting his hands dirty. Shit, it would torture him to be behind a desk all day. You’ve seen him, you know what I’m talking about. Drake is… complicated, but he’s a good detective and a better man. The six months off nearly killed him.”
Chase nodded slowly.
“That’s what I thought.”
The waitress came over, but Beckett waved her away.
“Is that it? May I be excused, Madame?”
“Just one more thing: did you hear from the labs? Were Jenkins’s fingerprints on the syringe? The container?”
Beckett crossed his arms over his chest and pouted.
“And why would I know that? I mean, I only deal with bodies, not with insects.”
Chase continued to stare at him.
“Alright, you got me. I may have called in a favor to a buddy in the lab. Asked about the evidence.”
Chase offered a weak smile.
“I thought you might. And?”
“And there were no fingerprints. Not a single one on either the container or syringe.”
Chase swore under her breath.
“Well now, that’s not very ladylike.”
Chase got to her feet.
“That’s cuz I’m not one. I’m a detective.” She held out her hand. “Thanks, Beckett. I owe you one.”
“And you can repay me by going on a date perhaps? A real date, not this shithole.”
“Maybe another time, Beckett. Thanks again for your help.”
Beckett held up his hands defensively.
“Can’t knock a guy for trying, can you?”
“Nope. Definitely can’t knock you for trying.”
Chapter 63
Drake awoke with his mouth so dry that it felt as if he had fallen asleep gorging on a bag of cotton balls. He clucked his tongue, tasted the familiar flavor of sour whiskey, and then his head started to ache.
For several seconds, Drake was disoriented, unsure of where he was. He was in his car, that much was clear, but the street seemed unfamiliar to him.
Am I at Tim Jenkins’s house? Am I watching for movement?
His eyes eventually fell on a familiar black mailbox, this time with the flag down, and everything came flooding back.
Sorry, no more cash infusions now and probably for a while, he thought.
As Drake shifted his hips trying to work out the stiffness that had built up as he slept, a car pulled onto the quiet street. He had misplaced his Timex and the dashboard clock blinked 12:00, but judging by the way the sun had already started its descent, he thought that it might be early afternoon.
Just around the time that Jasmine Cuthbert might be arriving home from work.
When the car slowed as it neared the house, his heart rate quickened. When it pulled into the driveway, he was on the verge of hyperventilating.
He hadn’t spoken to Jasmine since that night in the rain, the night he had knocked on her door weeping.
Jasmine Cuthbert stepped out of her car and Drake was momentarily frozen. She was pretty, if tired looking, with dark brown hair pulled into a loose ponytail, pale features, and striking eyes. Sporting a tartan skirt that ran to mid-calf and a white blouse tucked in, she went directly to the trunk.
Before looking inside, she glanced around, her eyes scanning the dusk for something.
She never noticed Drake sitting in his car across the street.
With a deep breath, a failed attempt to slow his adrenaline, Drake reached into the glovebox and cracked his final miniature and swallowed it in three gulps.
He grimaced with the accompanying searing sensation in his throat, then tossed the bottle onto the floor of the passenger seat with the others and stepped out of his car.
With hesitant steps, Drake started across the street, his eyes fixated on the woman’s back.
It had been six months since he had seen Jasmine, and he wasn’t sure how she would react to his presence. If the woman was anything like her daughter, then things were destined to go very, very poorly.
But he had to speak to her one more time. He just had to.
“Jasmine,” Drake whispered. The woman was rooting in her trunk, struggling to hoist several brown paper bags out at once.
“Jasmine,” he repeated. When she still didn’t hear him, he reached out and gently put a hand on her shoulder.
Jasmine Cuthbert whipped around so quickly that she almost fell into her open trunk in the process.
“Who—” she started, but then her gaze fell on his face.
This is it, Drake thought. She’s going to scream and yell and hit me and I’m just going to sit here and take it. When she’s exhausted and collapses, I’ll hold her and then she’ll curse me and I’ll get back into my car.
Then I’ll grab Chase’s gun from the glovebox, check that it’s loaded and stick—
“Damien?” she said softly. “Oh, Damien, what happened to your face?”
When she reached out and ran her soft fingers across his puffy cheek, Drake lost it.
He burst into tears and collapsed into her arms.
***
“It’s been… incredibly difficult,” Jasmine said, her eyes focusing on the glass of tea cupped in both hands. “Particularly for Suze.”
Drake looked down at his own steaming cup and wished that Jasmine had put something stronger than Orange Pekoe in it.
He thought back to the morning he had waited outside Hockley Middle and High School, to how visceral Suze’s reaction to his presence had been.
How obvious her hatred for him was.
No, Suzan hadn’t taken her father’s death well, not that any child should. But Clay had been particularly close with her.
“How are you holding up?” Drake asked softly, trying to steer the conversation.
Jasmine didn’t raise her gaze.
“I get up every day,” was all she offered, and Drake felt himself nodding. Sometimes, getting up was the hardest part.
For others, for those like himself, it was closing his eyes that proved most difficult.
Jasmine finally looked up, and he noticed that her eyes were red.
“Suzan’s applying for college this year,” she said, pulling the conversation back to her daughter. “Wants to do pre-med.”
This surprised Drake; he had known that Suzan was interested in medicine—Clay had talked about it ad nauseum—and in becoming a doctor, but going from high school directly to medical school?
It felt odd knowing that the world continued on even when your existence seemed to cease.
“Good for her,” Drake managed after a short pause. “I’m glad that she’s continuing to…” he scrounged his mind for the right words, eventually settling on Jasmine’s own. “…get up every day.”
Jasmine nodded and then took a sip of tea.
“I want to thank you, Damien,” she said without warning.
Drake frowned.
“Thank me? For what?”
Jasmine seemed to consider this for a moment. Then she sighed and said, “I know that you were the one behind the article in the Times. While you were on leave and before it was published, I asked around the precinct, trying to get more information about Clay’s death. Everyone I asked said the same thing: the report is sealed; it’s for internal affairs only. If there is an arrest, you will be notified. I mean, Clay had many, many friends in the precinct, across the city even. But when he died… when he was murdered, everyone handled me with kid gloves, if they would handle me at all. I cou
ld see it in their eyes—they were terrified of me. Scared and sad. They wouldn’t even tell me where you were, if you were okay, if you still worked there.”
Drake felt himself nodding.
The time immediately after Clay’s murder had been, and still was, hazy to him, but he remembered picking up his cell phone, hearing Jasmine’s voice and being unable to do anything but listen. He couldn’t speak—no words would be sufficient to express his sorrow.
It had taken six months and basically his career to be over for him to muster the courage to come here.
“And then the article came out,” she continued. “It was you who leaked the information about what happened, wasn’t it?”
Drake swallowed hard and closed his eyes.
While he had been unable to formulate words to express his condolences to Jasmine, he had reached out in the only other way he knew how.
He had picked up the phone and called the Times, knowing full well that if he spoke to a reporter, his career would effectively be ruined. More than that, he was breaking a cardinal rule in the NYPD world and was going to alienate himself from every other police officer in New York City.
But Drake was compelled to tell what really happened that night; he just couldn’t live under the guise, the collective narrative that Rhodes and the press liaisons were spouting.
The lies about how he and Clay had been ambushed, and that Drake himself was a hero, taking out the Skeleton King after he had shot Clay.
Drake knew better.
After all, he had carried Clay’s bloody body into the rain and collapsed on the porch.
He swallowed again. His throat suddenly felt incredibly dry and he reached for his tea.
Before he could answer, before he could confirm Jasmine’s suspicions, the front door opened.
“Mom?” Suzan’s voice drifted to them in the kitchen. “I’m home, mom,” there was a short pause. “Whose shoes are these?”
Chapter 64
Chase left Patty’s Diner shortly after Beckett and found herself driving aimlessly while she thought about the Butterfly Killer. She had done this often as a Narc in Seattle; driving around, watching the wet city sluice by while her mind struggled to silence distractions.
It was clear that Rhodes was in Ken Smith’s pocket, something Chase had known even before seeing the man drive to SSJ. It was the reason why he was so reluctant to link Chris’s case to the others, knowing that the FBI would show up and start poking their noses into places that he didn’t want them looking.
But Rhodes wasn’t the only one who had taken bribes to keep his mouth shut: the high school teacher, Veronica, Raul, even Clarissa in a backward sort of way were not talking because of the man’s influence.
It dawned on her that Drake might also be taking bribes from the man, but quickly dismissed this thought. After all, everything he was doing was in direct opposition to what Ken wanted: he was going to the press and dragging people involved with links to the Smith family down to the station.
As for their meeting? Chase probably should have seen that coming. After all, the two men were on a collision course, a concentric circle that pitted both of them in the center.
No, Drake’s destruction was self-inflicted.
And when the dust settled, Chase foresaw only one possible outcome, no matter the results of the case.
By week’s end, or perhaps even sooner, Damien Drake was no longer going to be an NYPD detective. This served everyone’s interests, including Rhodes and the rest of the detectives who loathed him as much for what he let happen to Clay as his exposé in the Times following his murder, and the Smith family.
The only one that would come to harm was Drake himself. And she had seen it in his eyes; he would go down without a fight. The man was broken, so shattered by his own guilt that he believed that everything that came his way was deserved.
Chase had told him soon after they had met that she wouldn’t go down with his burning ship, but she also couldn’t imagine letting him die with it. She might abandon ship, but Chase was not so career driven that she wouldn’t throw him a lifeline.
How to do that, however, and not drown in the undertow was still something that she was trying to work out.
Her first instinct had been to accompany Detective Yasiv to the teacher’s house, to see if she could extract more information about what happened all those years ago, but decided against it. She wasn’t in the frame of mind to interview anyone, let alone an elderly school teacher who had been paid off already.
Her second inclination was to go to see Officer Dunbar, to put pressure on him to find out what happened to Marcus Slasinsky after the accident. But that wouldn’t accomplish anything; the man already had enough on his plate, and her presence would likely only slow him down.
Instead, Chase eventually found herself on the outskirts of the city, turning down the winding, arbor-embraced street that led to the Smith Estate.
It’s for the case, she thought, but then immediately dismissed the lie.
It wasn’t for the case—it was for her. She needed a friend to talk to, something that never came easily to her.
And Clarissa Smith was the closest thing to a friend that she had.
Chase parked across from the iron gates and took a deep breath before getting out of her car. She had only just pushed the intercom button when the door to the estate blew open.
Clarissa Smith rushed out, dressed in pajamas, her hair a mess.
“You promised!” she yelled as she rushed toward Chase.
Chase, so surprised by this outburst, took a step backward.
“Wh—what? Clarissa, I—”
“You promised!” Clarissa shouted again. She was pointing her manicured finger at Chase with such anger that in that moment it looked as dangerous as a loaded gun.
Chase shook her head, confusion washing over her.
“I don’t—I don’t know what—”
Clarissa grabbed the fence now, and Chase saw pure fury in her wide eyes.
She took another step back.
“I thought you were my friend! You come here, sweet talk me, play tennis, pretend to be a friend, and then you leave here and go right to the papers, didn’t you? They printed the prostitute’s name on the first goddamn page!” Clarissa shouted.
“N—n—no, I didn’t. It was—”
“You promised me that you would keep this quiet! My son—my eight-year-old son—was bullied at school, the other kids telling him that his dead father was cheating with a whore!”
Chase felt her heart thudding away in her chest.
“And do you know what that bastard Ken Smith did? Hmm? Do you know what he did to get back at me?”
Chase was nearing tears now. It had been a horrible, horrible mistake to come here.
“I don’t—”
“He froze everything! Every last dime I have, he froze. I have nothing now! Absolutely nothing!”
Chase licked her lips.
“He can’t—he can’t do that,” she stammered.
Clarissa’s eyes went so wide that they almost bulged.
“Oh yes he can, and he did!”
“I’m sorry,” Chase said. “I’m so sorry, I never meant for any of this to happen.”
“You stupid bitch,” Clarissa spat. “You came here and you tricked me. I thought you wanted to help, but the only thing you wanted to do is further your career.”
Chase was shaking her head so hard now that she could no longer focus on Clarissa’s angry face anymore.
“No, it’s not true!” she exclaimed. “It’s not true! I just—”
“You’re only out for yourself,” Clarissa said quietly.
Tears started to streak down Chase’s face.
“It’s not true, I—”
“Get out!” Clarissa suddenly screamed. Chase took a step back, tripped, and fell hard on her ass. “Get off my property! Get off my property now you stupid bitch!”
Chase picked herself off the pavement and sprinted for her ca
r, yanking the door open.
Once inside, she buried her face in her hands and started to sob.
Chapter 65
“What… what are you doing here?” Suzan gasped, her eyes locking in on Drake’s.
Drake lowered his gaze and started to stand.
“I was just leaving,” he said softly. “I didn’t mean to upset anyone.”
“Upset anyone?” Suzan said, stepping forward. “Upset anyone?”
“Suzan, please,” Jasmine said, also rising to her feet. “Drake was—”
Suzan’s eyes darted from Drake’s to her mother’s.
“He was what, mom? He was here to say sorry for what he did? Or maybe he was here to take out you, too, mom? Did you ever think of that?”
Drake reached for the young girl, but she recoiled.
“Don’t touch me! Don’t you fucking touch me!” she screamed.
Jasmine strode forward, but her daughter pulled away from her mother as well.
“You don’t touch me either!”
“Suze, I’m so sorry—”
She turned to Drake, hatred in her eyes.
“Fuck you and your ‘sorries’. We were a happy family! A perfect family and you took that all away from us!”
“You still have your mother—you still have each other,” Drake said softly. He wasn’t trying to make excuses, but was at a loss for what else to say. Suzan had been incensed outside her school, but Drake saw that even then she had been reserved.
Now, her true feelings were coming to the fore.
“We have nothing! This—” Suzan motioned to herself and Jasmine, “—this is just an empty shell… a husk of a family. A fake. A phony.”
In his periphery, Drake saw Jasmine break down and begin to sob.
It was a mistake coming here. I’ve just made things worse.
“I’m going to leave now,” Drake said softly. He took a step toward the door, and Suzan slid out of the way, going to her mother. “I didn’t want to upset anyone.”
“Get the fuck out!” Suzan called after him. “You ruined everything! We had the perfect family and now we’re… we’re…” her voice broke as she started to cry too. “Now we’re just an empty shell.”
Detective Damien Drake series Box Set 1 Page 26