How any of this had happened.
Chapter 76
The scars on Dr. Kruk’s hand that he had seen when they had first met, the reason why Marcus was only eight in a journal dated less than a month ago, and his cryptic comments—People only see what they want to see. Our minds are wired in this way—an imago. This picture? It’s much like everything else in the image we portray to others: just an empty shell—it all added up to one thing: Dr. Mark Kruk was Marcus Slasinsky.
He swallowed hard and stared up at the glass aquariums with a mixture of awe and horror. Drake counted seven of them in total, each roughly a foot and a half tall, and if he were to assume that they were the same width as the bookcase, about a foot wide.
The bottom three were filled with dirt, upon which lay scattered leaves. There were dozens of caterpillars milling about the soil, either eating or resting atop the leaves. The sight made his stomach lurch.
The other aquariums were filled with the most beautiful array of butterflies he had ever seen. Most were monarchs, their orange and yellow wings making a fiery rainbow as they fluttered. But there were others, too, other types of butterflies with names that Drake didn’t know, including bright blue ones, green ones, ones with shimmering wings like miniature peacock feathers.
It was only then that Drake was aware of the meaty smell of old earth filling his nostrils. And it was this smell that snapped him from the mixture of horror and beauty of what he saw.
Drake scrambled to his feet and reached for his phone. It snagged in his pocket, and for the first time in his life, he wished that it wasn’t a thick brick but something slim and sleek like Chase’s.
Chase!
The name ripped through his brain like a skewer through an overripe avocado.
“Detective!” the woman veritably screamed. “I called the police!”
Drake finally got his phone free.
“Good!” he yelled back. “Tell them to hurry!”
Then with a final, shuddering breath, Drake dialed Chase’s number, hoping that he reached her in time.
Chapter 77
The man in black watched as the detective with the dark hair came into the room, waving her gun about like a road flare. He watched as she slowly crept toward the body in the bed, her steps slowing as she neared Tim Jenkins.
His lips parted in a grin when she pulled the sheet back and gasped when his artwork was revealed.
A car backfired, and the detective bolted to the window. As she did, the man slipped his gloved fingers through the crack between the closet door and the frame and slowly eased it open. Sliding silently into the room, he froze when a phone started ringing. She almost turned then, and he knew he had to act quickly. When the detective lowered her gun to pull a cell phone from her pocket, he moved even closer.
“Yeah?” she said breathlessly, her brow furrowing. “What, slow down! I… what? It’s who? Drake, what are you saying?”
The man was close enough now that he could smell her perfume, a gentle vanilla aroma, mixed with her sweet, adrenaline-laden sweat.
“Tim’s dead,” she whispered. “I—”
He snaked an arm over her mouth, while slapping her gun from her hand with his other.
She screamed and dropped the phone, but he slid the syringe into her neck before she could squirm away from him.
As her body started to go limp, shouting from the phone on the floor drifted up to him.
“Chase! Chase, are you alright? What’s happening! Answer me—”
The man drove his heel onto the phone, cracking the screen. He continued to grind his boot into it until it eventually went silent.
Chapter 78
“—Chase! Stay away from—”
But the line suddenly sounded stifled, and Drake pulled the phone away from his face.
“Chase? You still there?”
There was only dead air.
He turned his head to the sky and shouted. Then he hung up and dialed Chase’s number again.
It went immediately to voicemail.
Drake swore, dialed again, then swore again.
The woman on the other side of the door was screaming at him now, hollering that the cops were on the way, but Drake ignored her.
His mind flicked to the empty folder he had found on the desk.
The one with Tim Jenkins’s name on it.
If she was out at Jenkins’s place…
They were supposed to go there together, to relieve Detective Yasiv around ten. Could it be ten already? He glanced at his wrist, but he had forgotten to put his watch on last night or this morning or whenever the last time was that he had gotten changed.
He supposed it could be. There were no windows in the office, but it had been getting late when he had arrived, and there was no telling how much time he had wasted reading the damn notebook.
I have to get to her. I have to save her.
Even though every fiber of his being was telling him to run, to get in his car and drive across the city to Tim Jenkins’s house, he didn’t.
At least not right away.
Instead, he glanced over at the butterflies. The cases weren’t all the same size, he realized. The one on top, the one just at arm’s reach was smaller and appeared to be a handle on top.
It was portable.
Drake ran over to the bookcase and then stood on his tiptoes, trying to block out the smell as he reached up. His fingertips grazed the bottom of the portable aquarium and teased it out. With a grunt, he lifted it and it fell off the shelf and into his waiting arms.
And then he tucked it beneath his right arm and bolted toward the door, unlocking it and throwing it wide.
Dr. Kruk’s secretary backed away as he leaped through the opening, her face going slack.
“Wh—what is that?” she gasped, pointing at the case under his arm filled with a cornucopia of butterflies.
“When the police come, tell them to head to Tim Jenkins’s house. Do you have that—”
The woman gaped, but that wasn’t why Drake paused. He paused because what he was saying didn’t make sense. If Dr. Kruk—if Marcus Slasinsky—was at Tim’s house, then he either already had Chase or she had him in custody. Either way, it would do him no good to go there.
And if they weren’t there, then they would be somewhere else. He thought back to when he had been sitting in the car with Chase, before they had brought Tim in the first time.
He had been reading the report that Detective Yasiv had put together, the line about—
And then it clicked.
“No!” he shouted at the secretary, who recoiled as if she had been struck. “Not Jenkins’s house! Tell them to get to the Butterfly Gardens! Can you remember that?”
Drake was running toward the front door as he spoke.
“Can you remember that? Can you remember!” he cried as he jammed his palm into the door and thrust it open.
He thought he saw the woman nod, but couldn’t be sure. It didn’t matter, anyway.
By the time the cops got there, it would be too late.
It was up to him now. It was up to him to save his partner.
Drake sprinted through the night, threw the container of butterflies on the passenger seat, and then sped out of the parking lot.
Chapter 79
With the police cherry on his dash illuminating the night in blue and red hues, Drake’s rusty Crown Vic sped across the city. He didn’t know exactly where the Butterfly Gardens were, but he had a vague idea based on Detective Yasiv’s notes. And less than half an hour later, he located the first road sign directing him to the Gardens. Scheduled for destruction or not, the wheels of Road Bureaucracy turned slowly in NYC, and the signs gave no impression that the Gardens were closed.
When he got close, Drake switched the cherry off and slowed to a crawl. The front gate leading to the parking lot was bent backward just far enough for him to weave his car through all the while staring at the looming geodesic dome in front of him. The moon was full and bright, and
its blue rays reflected off the gray surface of the Butterfly Gardens with such intensity that it almost seemed to glow.
Drake shut off his headlights next and then cut the engine entirely. One of the perks of such an old car was that he could coast in neutral even with the engine off.
And that’s what he did now. The large parking lot was mostly empty, save a series of bulldozers haphazardly parked and a small corrugated storage container off to one side. But as he neared the front doors to the Gardens, he spotted a car tucked within the shadow of the dome.
It was a black, or maybe navy blue, BMW.
Drake’s heart sunk.
She was here. And the only reason she would be here was because he had brought her here.
An image of Chase Adams on her stomach, hands and feet bound behind her, her throat swollen closed, that awful butterfly scrawl on her back flashed in his mind.
No, he thought with such veracity that his teeth snapped closed with an audible snap. I won’t lose another partner.
He grabbed the gun that Chase had given him from the glove box, then hooked his other hand through the handle of the butterfly box.
As quietly as possible, Drake left his car and made his way toward the entrance to the Butterfly Gardens.
Like the gate at the front of the parking lot, this door was partly open; someone had pried the flimsy lock off and it lay broken on the sidewalk.
Drake silently slipped inside, moving quickly away from the entrance, pressing his back against a wall bathed in shadows.
And then he waited; waited and listened.
The layout to the Butterfly Gardens appeared simple enough, the nature of which Drake had even guessed from the images on the signs leading up to it: a narrow hallway flanked on either side by washrooms, a cafeteria, and gift shops extending away from the entrance before it blossomed into a giant geodesic dome.
And that’s where they’ll be, he thought. Marcus would take Chase to the location that he had been brought by those damn kids all those years ago.
The spot where he had collapsed into a coma.
Drake waited until he caught his breath, then started to strafe along the wall toward the dome.
He had only taken half a dozen steps when something brushed against his foot and he kicked at it instinctively. A rat hissed and then skittered away, and Drake cursed himself for being so careless. The only thing he had going for him now was surprise. And if Dr. Kruk’s secretary did as bid, then the night would soon be alive with sirens.
Moonlight couldn’t penetrate the dark hallway, but ahead, where it opened to the dome, Drake could see shards of light illuminating the area in swashes of gray and blue.
He took ten steps, then twenty.
Thirty.
And then he stopped, trying to calm his breathing.
He heard a voice.
It was a man’s voice, or maybe a child’s; it was difficult to tell as the sound funneled down the hallway to him.
“You are going to give me a kiss, just like Mommy did.”
A chill shot up Drake’s spine as the image of Martha Slasinsky, propped on her chair, wrists ragged flashed in his mind.
“You are going to give me a kiss, pretty lady.”
Drake picked up the pace, moving quickly now, sacrificing silence for speed. He paused only when he got to the mouth of the hallway.
The dome opened before him as he expected, but what Drake wasn’t prepared for was the vegetation. It appeared gray in the moonlight, but he thought that it might very well be the same color by the noonday sun. Leaves of massive plants in various states of decay nearly blocked his passage.
Drake slunk low, using the decomposing foliage to hide his form as he moved toward the voice.
It didn’t take long before he saw them. For a moment, he simply stood there, ramrod straight, not believing his eyes.
Chase was in the center of the dome, standing on some sort of platform, her arms pulled behind her and tied around a pole that ascended all the way to the metal triangles that made up the dome high above.
There was a rag in her mouth, and her eyes were wide.
A man stood beside her, his back to Drake. It was Dr. Kruk as he remembered him from the day in his office: tall, lean, with a thin neck and spindly arms.
Only it wasn’t.
The man’s posture was different. No longer was he adroit, giving off a sense of professionalism, of authority. Now, his arms hung low at his sides, dangling almost.
He looked as he had in the yearbook photograph, which had captured him half in and half out of the frame.
The single photograph that Ken Smith had missed.
Chase blinked once, twice, and then her eyes seemed to focus on him. When recognition washed over her features, Drake realized that he was still standing in the open. Without thinking, he dove to his left, landing softly on several broad leaves that turned to dust as he fell.
It was almost a perfect landing—a perfectly silent landing. And it would have been, too, if not for the butterfly case.
One of the corners clinked off an area of exposed ground and instantly filled the air with the unmistakable sound of cracking glass.
Drake ducked his head beneath some half-dead shrubs just as Dr. Kruk whipped around.
“Who’s there?” the man cried.
Drake cursed silently, trying to figure out the best course of action.
In the end, it was Dr. Kruk who pressed his hand.
“I’ve got a gun, and I will kill this woman,” he said flatly.
And there it was, the cool air of professionalism that had been missing in his stature.
Drake swallowed hard before tucking Chase’s spare gun into his rear waistband and slowly pushing himself to his feet.
Chapter 80
“Marcus, it’s me,” Drake said holding his hands out to his sides to show that he was unarmed. “It’s Detective Drake.”
Marcus Slasinsky had slipped behind Chase and peered over her shoulder at him, a gun aimed at her temple. He didn’t think that his partner’s eyes could possibly grow any wider, but it seemed that they did, until the whites on either side of her hazel irises glistened in the moonlight.
“Ah, Detective Drake. I thought I might be seeing you again,” he shrugged. “Actually, I thought that I might meet up with you sooner. Did you come for your gun or the girl?”
Drake squinted hard, trying to focus on the gun. It was hard to tell from his distance, but it could very well have been his.
“You stole it from my car?”
“It seemed I overestimated you. At the time, I thought you were getting close, and I couldn’t risk being caught. I still had work to do. I had to make them pay.”
Drake shook his head.
“You made them pay. All of them—they’re all dead now. You killed them all: Chris, Thomas, Neil, and Tim. It was… it was terrible what they did to you. But Chase—Detective Adams—she hasn’t done anything. She doesn’t deserve this.”
The man shook his head, and he seemed to get younger as he did. He moved away from Chase and grabbed the sides of his head with both hands, including the one clutching what Drake now recognized as his service pistol.
“You don’t understand… they brought me here and the… and the butterflies… they were everywhere—all around. And then they started crying—mocking me. I can’t stand the crying.”
And then Drake saw that the man—a boy now, eight years old again living with his rotting mother’s corpse—was the one with tears on his cheeks.
“It’s over, Marcus. It’s all over.”
Marcus sniffed and then laughed.
“I forgot all about it… years in psychiatric care made me forget. First about Mommy, then about what those bastards did to me. But… but when Thomas and his wife…” his sentence trailed off and he stared upward, gazing at the moon.
“It was a ploy, Marcus. Don’t you see that? You were set up—it was no accident that Thomas came to you. New York City is a fucked up place, with
a lot of fucked up people. There must be a thousand psychiatrists… what are the odds that they came to you?”
Drake let his words sink in for a moment, watching as Marcus’s face contorted, flicking from the rational mind of the psychiatrist to that of an abused and confused young boy.
“It was no accident,” he continued, more softly this time. “It was Ken Smith, the man who gave you the money to go away after his son put you in a coma, the man who gave you the means to change your name, to get psychiatric help not only to change who you are, but who you were. And when it suited him, he brought Marcus back, didn’t he? Ken Smith is responsible for the death of his son, for the deaths of the other boys, not you.”
The man growled and he leveled the gun at Chase again.
“Woah, easy Marcus. Chase hasn’t done anything to you.”
The man shook his head, and his face twisted into a grimace.
“No, no, she didn’t. But she kind of looks like mommy, doesn’t she?” He smiled at her when he said this, and Chase moved as far away from him as she could given the way she was tied. “Yes, I kind of think she does. And I want mommy to give me a kiss again, to give me—”
“Butterfly kisses?” Drake finished for him.
Marcus pulled away from Chase, his brow furrowing in confusion.
“You—how—” then his face relaxed. “You found my notes, didn’t you?”
Drake nodded. A flash of color danced in his periphery, reminding him of the butterfly container that he had dropped and nearly smashed. He inched his foot closer to it.
“It doesn’t matter,” Marcus said, shaking his head again. He slid a container from his pocket, something clear that the moonlight shot through—save a thick, wriggling black shape. “There is only one thing left to do.”
Marcus reached over and pulled the rag from Chase’s mouth. She gasped, sucking in a huge lungful of air. And then he started unscrewing the cap with one hand.
Drake suddenly realized what the man was going to do, and it made him sick to his stomach. It wasn’t just the caterpillar—it was the fact that Martha Slasinksy had been dead when she had given her son the Butterfly Kiss, the one that had made what he had done all okay.
Detective Damien Drake series Box Set 1 Page 29