No one did.
Except for him and Clay, and Clay was dead.
And his killer was still out there; no matter what anyone said, Peter Kellington was not the Skeleton King.
Drake knew that if he helped Chase and Beckett, that his nightmares would return, and that chasing their killer wouldn’t be enough.
He would be compelled to find the man responsible for Clay’s death, as well.
If it didn’t kill him first.
Chapter 38
“I think I see the problem,” the tow truck driver said as he leaned under the hood. “It looks like… it looks like your battery has been disconnected from the alternator.”
“Really? How is that possible?”
The tow truck driver, who after considerable prying the man had discovered was named Toby, shrugged.
“You been into the shop lately?”
The man admitted he had.
“They said that my battery was running low, that I might have to replace it soon.”
Toby chuckled.
“Scammers. Without the alternator connected, your battery will die in an hour or so. Quicker if you have the heat on or play the radio.”
“Huh. Well, ain’t that a pickle. Can you help me?”
“I can boost you, but it’ll only last long enough to get you to the shop. Like I said, an hour, tops.”
“What about reconnecting the alternator? Can you do that?”
Toby leaned further into the engine.
“Looks like the bastards took all the cables. I’ll see if I can find something in my truck.”
With that, Toby spun away from the open hood and went back to his truck to rummage in the cab. As he did, the man grabbed the yellow bag containing a brand new set of jumper cables off the front seat of his car. Then he quickly left his vehicle and went back to his post by the open hood, cables in hand.
Toby returned, a sour expression pulling his jowls down low.
“Sorry but I don’t have the right wires to reconnect it. But like I said, I can boost you so that you can start the engine… and I see you have cables. Great.”
The man nodded.
“Ph, alright then. Should I connect them…?”
Toby’s scowl became a patronizing smirk.
“Yeah, don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of it.” Toby strode forward as he spoke and took the cables from his outstretched hand and teased them out of the bag.
“Thank you. This is… well, embarrassing, I guess.”
Toby chuckled.
“Don’t worry about it—it’s not your fault. Some asshole mechanic just took advantage of you. Happens all the time.”
He proceeded to connect the red and black leads to the man’s car battery.
“Alright,” he said, breathing on his hands to warm them. “I’m going to connect them to my battery now. You sit in the car, and when I give you the signal, start it up, okay?”
“Yeah, sure. Thank you,” the man said with a smile. Toby nodded and then went back to his car, while the man did the same.
When he was alone in the driver’s seat, the man put the keys in the ignition and turned them halfway. The lights on the dash lit up.
That’s step one… Toby didn’t even check to see if the battery was still live.
And of course, the battery was fine.
The man took a deep breath, then peered out the windshield. He waited until Toby gave him the thumbs up sign, before poking his tongue into his cheek. He pretended to turn the key a few times and, content that Toby had bought his little charade, he started the car.
The engine roared to life.
The man threw his hands up—success!—and then got out of his car. Moving quickly, he went to his engine even before Toby managed to haul himself out of his oversized truck. But instead of removing both jumper cables, he only teased the red one off.
And this is step two, the man thought, his breathing becoming more rapid.
With a trembling hand, he moved the clamp toward the alternator. After several deep breaths, he ground his teeth and snapped the lead onto the rectifier. There was a brief shower of sparks, but he managed to pull his hand back before he got burned. The headlights of his car dimmed slightly, and an electrical fizz filled the air beneath the hood, but the man paid this little heed. Behind him, he heard the sound of Toby opening his door, and he spun around.
“I got it! I got it!” the man said with a large smile, waving his hand to reinforce his words.
When Toby frowned and continued to lower his large body from his truck, the man broke into a near sprint.
Step three…
He made it to the tow truck before Toby had cleared the front of the car. With another, hitching breath, he reached for the leads still attached to the battery. A caustic foam started to ooze from the positive terminal, working itself into an angry froth.
The man hesitated.
“You should probably leave that to the professionals,” Toby said, suddenly behind him.
“Oh, that’s alright. I’ve got to learn sometime, you know? And you’ve been such a good help,” the man replied as he grabbed the rubber handles of both jumper cable clips. He half expected to feel a jolt, a thrum of electricity course through his fingers and up his arms, but when this didn’t happen, his heart rate seemed to slow a little.
“Did you… hey, did you remove the cables from your car?” Toby asked. “And what’s that smell?”
“Yes, of course, I thought—”
The man spun around as he spoke, leading with the charged jumper cables.
Toby, seeing the expression on the man’s face, tried to pull back, but he was too fat, too slow. The red clip pinched on his neck, the black on his shoulder.
Toby’s eyes went wide and he immediately swatted at the leads, but his arms seemed to freeze in mid-air, his elbows seized at awkward angles.
Something between a croak and a gasp escaped Toby’s now pale lips, and then it was as if his body had been liquefied. He collapsed to the gravel road in a heap. A second later, his back arched so far that only the man’s shoulder blades and hips remained in contact with the ground as electricity coursed through him.
Satisfied that the clips wouldn’t slip, the man quickly made his way to his car and leaped into the driver’s seat.
Teeth gritted, he jammed his foot on the gas pedal, causing the engine to rev and the dome light above him to blink out.
Toby’s back arched even greater, and smoke began to rise from his cavernous mouth. When the man eased his foot off the gas, the tow truck driver’s body collapsed to the ground again. He gunned the engine a second time, and this time didn’t ease up until he could smell burning flesh in the air.
Electrocution was the most difficult scene to replicate, but it had gone off without a hitch.
The man smiled, then stepped back onto the gravel road. After observing his work for several seconds, he set about manufacturing the scene.
Chapter 39
“You’re paying me extra for this,” Screech said. “Mad extra. In fact, I want double.”
Drake chuckled.
“What? You think that this is without risks?” Screech asked, his eyes wide.
Beckett had since gone back to the morgue, and Chase to 62nd precinct, leaving Drake and Screech alone in the office to discuss what they were going to do next. Screech had been gung-ho about getting involved when Beckett and Chase were present, but now that they had gone he seemed to be getting cold feet.
Drake himself was still having a hard time coming to grips with the fact that the young doctor that had been in his office not more than a week ago had been murdered.
Detective or not, Drake was still a good man and he felt the familiar pressure of responsibility for what had happened to Eddie.
And this was going to drive him to find the killer.
I need a fucking drink, he thought with a grimace.
“Double?” he said, all of a sudden feeling tired.
Screech folde
d his arms over his narrow chest, his lips pressing together tightly.
“Shit, yeah.” His eyes darted to the checks that still lay on Drake’s desk. After all that had happened, Mrs. Armatridge and her cronies’s problems seemed inconsequential. And every moment that the killer remained on the loose, they grew even more insignificant.
The money, however, was what kept Triple D’s doors open.
“Double,” Screech repeated. He was trying to look obstinate, like a man negotiating the sale of a used car. Except he only looked like a little boy, one who was mad because Mommy wouldn’t give him a second scoop of ice cream.
The expression almost made Drake laugh, and he would have, if copies of five photographs of the victims weren’t laid out on his desk like tarot cards.
“How about half?” he countered.
Screech made a face.
“Half?”
Drake nodded and shrugged at the same time.
“Half.”
“What the hell are you talking about, half? Half of what?”
Drake paused.
“Half of Triple D.”
Screech was trying his best to remain calm, but Drake could literally see his body rock as his heart pounded away in his chest.
“One… one and a half D’s?” Screech asked with a hint of a smile.
“Half the company, you dork.”
Screech tilted his head and closed one eye.
“Three-quarters,” he said, then followed this quickly with, “Just fucking with you.”
Screech held out his hand and Drake grabbed it and shook hard.
“We have a deal, Drake,” Screech said. “Now can we just change the name to something slightly less erotic? DDS Investigations, maybe?”
“What are we? A couple of dentists? The name stays, Screech.”
“Alright, alright.”
“Good, now go set up more cameras for the prune juicers, will you? Then, after you’ve done that, see what you can dig up on old forensic pathology students.”
Screech nodded and stood. He was partway to the door when he turned and said, “What about you?”
“I’m going to find a killer,” Drake replied, all the humor gone from his voice.
“Oh, sure, you take the easy job.”
Chapter 40
Beckett left Drake and Triple D with an uneasy feeling in the pit of his stomach. He and Chase had gone there with the intention of recruiting Drake, and while this took some cajoling, not only had they succeed, but they had also obtained the services of his partner, the weird, curly-headed man with the annoying laugh, and yet it still didn’t feel right.
The fact that Eddie had been there, that he had visited Drake before he was murdered, struck a chord with him.
Beckett had stayed with Drake even after what had happened to Clay, despite the fact that Clay was his friend as well, because he knew Drake. He knew Drake was a good man. Sure, he bent the rules every now and again, skirted the knife edge of morality and law, but that was because his pursuits were noble.
But with Eddie… if Drake had only listened to him, then he would probably still be alive today. Hell, all he had to do was give Beckett a call. Was that too much to ask?
Within the hour, Beckett found himself back at the morgue, standing alone in the room with the five bodies that he was now convinced had been murdered. It was cool in the morgue, and although Eddie’s body had yet to decompose as it would if it had been exposed to the elements, his eyes still bulged unnaturally and his skin had acquired the pallor of milk spilled on a marble countertop.
Beckett knew that he was missing something, that there was something here, some clue on the bodies, but he had stared at them for so long now that he was blind to them.
It was time for another set of eyes. Young eyes; young inexperienced eyes.
His first thought was the fellow that he had left in charge when he had gone to Montreal a few months back—what the hell was his name? Reggie? Archibald? Greg?—but he immediately scratched that off the list. After all, the fellow would have known Eddie, known him well.
No, it had to be someone else.
It had to be Suzan.
As much as it pained him to get her involved again, especially considering that Drake was now on board, it just had to be her. Sure, there were many others that were more qualified, including Dr. Tracey Moorfield, but he also needed to exercise discretion. He had yet to release the bodies, and although he hadn’t been explicitly told to get things moving in this regard, he could feel the pressure coming down the chain of command.
Senior Medical Examiner of NYC still had to report to the Chief Medical Examiner, and that relationship was one that he valued very much.
Beckett took off a glove and pulled out his phone.
He scrolled quickly through the contacts until he found Suzan’s number.
“Suzan? It’s Beckett. Think you can come down to the morgue? There’s something I need your opinion on…”
***
“These are the bodies?” Suzan asked quietly.
Beckett nodded. He had pulled the sheets over the corpses before she had arrived, and now he stood back, allowing Suzan to take her time while she observed their outlines on the metal gurneys.
“Those are them,” he replied. “All five, in the same order as the test—in the order that they died.”
Suzan nodded and walked over to the first gurney, running her finger along the silver edge, tilting her head pensively.
It occurred to him then that these were probably the first, or one of the first, dead bodies that she had ever seen. She was so mature, so far ahead of even he had been at her age, that Beckett had a hard time accepting that she was only a first-year medical student.
Well, he thought, remembering the day when he had been exposed to his first corpse, better now with me than in front of classmates.
He took a deep breath.
“Suze, if it’s too much…” he let his sentence trail off.
She shook her head.
“No, it’s fine. I want to help.”
“Did you find anything on the Internet about the images? Anything at all?”
Suzan turned then, and Beckett was surprised by the fire in her eyes. When he had seen his first body he had been anxious, nervous, and a little queasy. Suzan, on the other hand, seemed… determined.
“I found something… there’s a bulletin board on a medical resource site, and a couple of months back someone started asking questions about Moorfield’s forensic pathology course. At first, I didn’t think much of it, but then…” she shrugged and let her sentence trail off.
“Then what?”
She looked away.
“Nothing. It’s just the timing seemed too coincidental, is all.”
Beckett instantly knew that she was lying; the steel had gone out of her eyes.
The question was, why?
Beckett stared at her for a moment, unsure of how to proceed. He felt the knot in his gut again, but this time the message was clear: you shouldn’t get her involved. She’s too young, too naive.
“You okay?”
Beckett shook the thoughts from his head and smiled.
Just a new set of eyes, a new perspective. That’s all. Then she can go back to her normal life.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Now look, I don’t want you to be embarrassed if you get sick around the bodies. And if you at all feel uncomfortable, we can just shut this down, alright?”
Suzan stared at him strangely, and he quickly realized that the reason for the look was his out of character response.
“Of course, you can always be an engineer, instead of a doctor. I mean, you’d probably look good in a tall striped hat.”
Suzan smirked, then turned and without hesitation, pulled the sheet off of Trevor Gobbets’s body.
Chapter 41
It amazed Drake how easily he slipped back into detective mode and how comfortable he felt in doing so.
Do you miss it?
Maybe…
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His first stop was the location of Dr. Edison Larringer’s death. He was the key—unlike the others who had been selected based on the fact that no one would question their suicides, Eddie had been murdered because of the photographs he had stolen from Beckett’s desk. That much was obvious, but the real question was, why were the photographs placed on Beckett’s desk in the first place?
To answer that question, Drake needed to learn a little more about the black sheep of the five victims.
Although Drake was no longer a police officer, and could no longer flash the detective shield—like that did him much good in the past, anyway—Screech had made up some fancy Private Investigator business cards that he hoped were sufficient to get him in the door.
529 3rd Ave was a run-down apartment building not far from NYU Medical Center. Drake took a deep breath and walked up to the cracked concrete steps to the door, and then rapped his knuckles briskly off the painted surface.
As he waited for someone to answer, he leaned away from the house, looking upward, noting that there was a window roughly twelve feet up. He was imagining what it would take for someone to scale the brick wall and pry that window open, when the door swung wide.
A young girl in her early twenties sporting a gray tracksuit stood in the doorway. Her eyes were red and her cheeks chaffed from tears.
“Hello?” she asked with a sniff.
Drake cleared his throat and then reached into his pocket and withdrew a business card.
“My name is Damien Drake,” he said, holding the card out to her. Her eyes narrowed in suspicion, but she took the card without hesitation. “I have a few questions I wanted to ask you about someone who lived here.”
“Eddie,” she said softly, her eyes still locked on the card. “You’re here about Eddie.”
Drake nodded.
“Yes. Did you know him?”
Her eyes shot up.
“Of course I knew him,” she snapped. “I lived with him.”
“I’m very sorry for—”
Detective Damien Drake series Box Set 1 Page 42