Then Screech turned to leave, but at the last moment, he lowered a hand on Beckett’s shoulder.
“I’d have done the same thing, Beckett. Just stick to the script and we’ll be having a drink together soon, okay?”
The man offered a weak smile, and Beckett did his best to return it.
With that, Screech made his way to the door. He knocked once, and Officer Dunbar’s face suddenly appeared in the rectangular window. A second later, the door opened and Screech vanished.
Chapter 71
The air was chilly, and Drake got the impression that it wouldn’t be long before the first snowfall descended on New York like a frigid plague.
He sat in his Crown Vic, the windows open, enjoying the cool air on his burned skin. His eyes trained on the apartment building, he waited.
After about an hour, the door opened and Steff Morgan stepped out. She had a backpack slung over one shoulder and she walked briskly, with purpose. Pulling her coat up to her ears, she looked both ways before hurrying down the sidewalk.
Only when she was out of sight did Drake get out of his car. Like Steff, his stride was determined, but unlike her, he headed toward the apartment and not away from it.
After briefly glancing around to make sure that the street was quiet, he raised his gauzed hand to knock on the door. At the last second, he decided against it and instead kicked it with his boot.
He heard stirring from inside the building, but when the footsteps didn’t sound as if they were any nearer to the door, he kicked again.
And again.
“I’m coming. Hold your horses,” a muffled male voice replied.
Drake stopped kicking and waited. He heard the deadbolt turn and then locked his eyes on the door handle. When it started to turn, he shoved the door open.
The man standing behind the door cried out and stumbled backward. Drake was on him before he managed to raise his hands defensively.
He grabbed the man by the throat and threw him up against the wall. As he tightened his grip, he felt blisters pop beneath the bandages, but paid this no heed.
“If you hit her again, I will kill you,” he said simply.
Jake was making a strange hissing sound with his mouth, and spit speckled Drake’s face.
He relaxed his grip and when Jake fell away from the wall, his mouth opened in an attempt to speak.
Drake threw Jake against the wall again, the back of his head smacking against the drywall hard enough to leave a dent.
“If you hit her again, I’ll kill you,” he repeated.
This time, Jake didn’t say anything.
Drake let go of the man’s throat and he collapsed to the ground, wheezing. Then he left the apartment and didn’t look back.
***
“Jesus Christ, Drake—what the hell happened to you?” Mickey asked from behind the bar.
Drake didn’t answer as he made his way toward the man. He gestured with a bandaged hand and the bartender quickly poured him a glass of whiskey.
“It’s been a long day, Mickey. A long, long day.”
Mickey didn’t bother trying to hide his discomfort at Drake’s appearance.
“No kidding. It looks like you fought a fireplace and lost—badly.”
Drake sipped his drink.
“Something like that.”
“Well, shit, the drink’s on the house.”
Drake took another gulp of the golden liquid, wincing at how the alcohol stung his raw throat.
“Thanks,” he grumbled.
After drinking in silence for several minutes, Drake realized that he was unable to let his mind roam free, to block out the events of the past week.
For once, even the alcohol didn’t seem to be helping.
There was, however, something that he thought might be able to take his mind off things, if only for a short while.
“Hey, Mickey?”
The bartender turned to face him.
“What’s up? Need a refill?”
Drake looked down at his glass.
“Yes, but I need something else, too. Have you heard from Alyssa, lately?”
Mickey smirked.
“Naw, she rarely comes in here. Not her usual clientele, if you know what I mean.”
Drake frowned.
“Clientele?”
“Yeah, she usually works the more upscale joints in Manhattan. In fact, I haven’t seen her since the night she left with you.”
Drake couldn’t believe his ears.
“Wh—what? What do you mean clientele?”
The smile fell off Mickey’s face and he left the customers at the end of the bar and came over to him.
Leaning in close, he said, “You know, rich kids.”
“No, I don’t know. What the hell are you talking about?”
Mickey stared him directly in the face for several seconds before speaking.
“Shit, I’m sorry, Drake. I thought you knew. Alyssa’s a call girl.”
Drake felt his body deflate.
A call girl? I slept with a prostitute?
Drake looked down and sighed.
“It’s alright,” he said as he finished his whiskey.
It made sense, what with her coming home with him and staying the night, then sneaking out before he was awake, not bothering to leave her number.
He had had his suspicions, of course. But if Alyssa was a call girl, why hadn’t she asked for any payment?
But Drake realized that he knew the answer to that as well.
Alyssa hadn’t asked for money, because she had already been paid. And there was only one person he knew who would throw that kind of money around to get what he wanted.
And in this case, what he wanted was Drake.
“Sorry, Drake,” Mickey said again, before sliding down the bar to deal with a couple who had just taken a seat at the neon bar.
Drake pulled out his cell phone and intended to click on his contacts, but the booze and exhaustion took its toll and he missed his mark.
Instead, he clicked on the app that looked like a video camera.
“Fuck,” he said, meaning to back out to the home screen. But when the video loaded, he saw something that caught his eye.
It was the familiar view of Mrs. Armatridge’s house divided into four quadrants.
In the upper right-hand corner was the Armatridge’s bed, the covers were pulled up high. Only it wasn’t freshly made. There was movement from beneath the sheets. A lot of movement.
A tanned arm slipped out of the sheets and then proceeded to pull them up higher.
“What the hell?” he whispered.
A flurry of activity drew his attention to the lower left-hand corner: the kitchen. Mrs. Armatridge was at the knife block again, and as he watched, she pulled a large blade from the wood.
She looked at it for a second, nodded, then started toward the stairs.
“What the hell?” he repeated, more loudly this time.
When Mrs. Armatridge made it to the stairs, Drake realized what was happening, what the woman was intending to do.
“What the hell!”
He flicked to the home screen, then went scrolled to his contacts. Only instead of calling Ken Smith as he had first intended, he dialed Screech instead.
“Screech! You need to—”
“Drake, that you? Are you okay? I meant to—”
“Screech, just listen. You need to head to Mrs. Armatridge’s place right now!”
“What? What the hell are you talking—”
“Just shut the fuck up for once, and just go, Screech! Get off your ass and go!”
Drake hung up the phone, still in shock at what he had seen.
For some reason, his mind turned to what Mrs. Armatridge had said the first time they had met, which had oddly mimicked what Dr. Mark Kruk had said long ago.
People see what they want to see. They don’t really see what’s there. An imago.
Epilogue
“In here,” Chase said to the two men in the freshly pressed s
uits. The men didn’t bother knocking on the office door. They simply turned the knob and entered.
Chase smiled.
“Hey! What do you think you’re doing?” Rhodes shouted, jumping to his feet.
Chase stepped into the office behind the two men.
“Check his desk; the photographs are in the top drawer.”
The taller of the two men nodded at her and then walked around to Rhodes’s side of the desk.
“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Rhodes repeated, his face turning a deep shade of crimson.
“Officers Lincoln and Herd, Internal Affairs,” the shorter man said, his face stern.
Rhodes blinked once, his Adam’s apple bobbed, and he started toward the door.
The man who had executed the perfunctory introduction pointed a short finger at Rhodes’s chest.
“Stay where you are, Sergeant Rhodes.”
Rhodes looked like he was going to explode. He stared daggers at Chase.
“Did you bring these guys in? You brought IA in?” he demanded, his voice nearing a hysterical pitch.
Chase shrugged and said nothing.
Officer Lincoln pulled a manila folder from the top drawer of his desk and placed it on top. He opened it, and then held up the first photograph for Chase to see.
“This it?”
She nodded.
“Yeah, that’s it.”
Lincoln tucked the folder into his briefcase.
“What’s the meaning of this?”
“Oh, I think you know, Rhodes. I brought this to your attention twice and you ignored it. Now we have a prestigious professor burned alive, and the daughter of a murdered policeman in the hospital. So maybe, just maybe, you should have listened to me,” Chase said, not bothering to hide the smugness that crept into her voice.
“What? What? Who?”
“Dr. Moorfield had some important friends, Rhodes. And when they heard what happened to her, they were curious as to why nothing was being done about the serial killer that took her life.”
Rhodes gawked.
“Serial killer?”
Chase was done with this conversation. She turned to Lincoln.
“That should be enough.”
The man nodded.
“Sergeant Rhodes, you are officially suspended pending an investigation into your lack of action in this case.”
Now Rhodes really looked like he was about to erupt. But his eyes glanced nervously at Lincoln and then Herd, and in the end, he decided better than shouting.
Instead, he bowed his head, and slowly, methodically, walked by Chase and left the office without another word.
“Hey Rhodes,” Chase hollered after him. “You said you wouldn’t be Sergeant for long, but I bet this wasn’t what you had in mind, was it?”
END
Download Murder
Detective Damien Drake Book 3
Patrick Logan
There is nothing to writing.
All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Ernest Hemingway
Download Murder
Detective Damien Drake Book 3
Patrick Logan
Prologue
The whistling was generic, not representative of anything that either of the girls could recognize. It was just a string of pitchless notes that didn’t seem to follow a particular pattern or tune.
Which somehow made it even more terrifying.
Melissa shivered and opened her eyes. Her neck and shoulders were sore from falling asleep with her back against the cold concrete, and her hands, bound tightly behind her, had long ago gone numb.
Her heart rate quickened with the sound of a door opening, and Melissa shut her eyes tightly, trying to will their captor away.
The whistling abruptly stopped, and she somehow mustered the courage to open her eyes again.
A shadowy figure was crouched but a foot from her, head tilted to one side. When a gloved hand moved toward her face, Melissa recoiled so quickly that the back of her skull bounced off the wall hard enough to send stars shooting across her vision.
But the hand didn’t grab her as she thought it might; instead, the fingers brushed a lock of a brittle brown hair away from her face.
“Why are you doing this?” Melissa whimpered.
When the figure’s only response was to change the angle of the head tilt, rage suddenly filled her.
“Fuck you,” she growled. When the shadow didn’t respond at all this time, didn’t even seem to acknowledge her, she leaned forward and spat.
The spray struck her captor directly in the face, and the figure stumbled backward. The crawlspace couldn’t have been more than four feet tall, and for a second Melissa thought that the captor might crack their head on one of the low crossbeams.
The figure ducked just in time.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk; that isn’t polite,” her captor said. When the fingers extended toward her face again, Melissa didn’t cower away. This time, she stared forward, hatred in her eyes.
“That simply isn’t tolerated here, sweetie.”
There was no anger in the voice—just simple, perfunctory castigation.
The gloved hand slipped out of sight. When it reappeared, the leather fingers were wrapped around the handle of an eight-inch butcher’s knife.
Melissa didn’t want to show fear, didn’t want to feed her captor’s sick desires. But when her eyes fell on the blade, she couldn’t help it; her eyes widened.
Her captor must have noticed this, as a dry chuckle suddenly filled the crawlspace.
“Oh, it’s not for you, hon,” the figure said. With that, the shadow spun around to face the other woman.
She had been here when Melissa had first arrived, and even though it was difficult to tell how much time had passed in the crawlspace, Melissa thought it to be around three days.
And in all that time, the other woman hadn’t said a single word, hadn’t so much as muttered her name. In fact, the only sign that she was alive was her near-constant shivering. Like Melissa, her hair was grimy, covering her pale face in thin spaghetti-like strands. As the figure moved toward her, however, the woman started to animate.
Hope suddenly bloomed inside Melissa.
She’s been saving her energy; all this time, she’s been waiting for just the right moment. Together… together maybe we can take the knife, maybe—
But when the woman simply held her arms out, palms up, all optimism fled her.
There were scars on her wrists, a network of crisscrossing pink lines that stood out on her alabaster forearms.
This woman wouldn’t fight, Melissa knew.
“See?” the captor instructed. “This is how you’re supposed to behave.”
Without hesitation, the blade flashed out and a scarlet streak appeared between the pink scars. Blood immediately spilled forth, coating the lower half of her arm before pooling in her palm. The woman’s eyelids sagged, and her neck drooped.
“That’s alright, sweetie. You’ve done your part—I’ve seen you die.”
The figure cleaned the blade on the woman’s dirt-smeared shirt before putting it back into the holster. Then a gloved thumb reached out and pressed into the wound, soaking the pad in her blood.
Melissa wanted to be angry, to scream at her captor, to demand, for the hundredth time, the reason why she had been taken, why they both had been kidnapped.
But the only thing she could muster was a muted curse.
“Leave her the fuck alone.”
The dark figure turned and moved quickly, half-squatting, half-crawling, over to her.
Melissa tried to turn away, to hide her face, but a hand shot out and grabbed her cheeks tightly, forcing her lips into a pout.
“We don’t curse down here,” the captor hissed. Melissa struggled, but the grip was too tight to pull away. Her cheeks ached, and even if she wanted to speak then, she wouldn’t have been able to.
The blade is going to cut me now, cut me deep just like the other wom
an. Then I’m going to die here in this shitty, freezing basement.
The man squeezed even tighter. Then, with his thumb still dripping with the other woman’s blood, he smeared it across her lips, crudely painting them with the tacky substance.
Melissa gagged, and her captor finally released her face. She tried to spit without touching the blood with her tongue, without letting any of it into her mouth.
Bile rose in her throat when she tasted the coppery liquid, but she somehow managed to fight the urge to vomit.
Apparently satisfied, the captor backed away, moving closer to the dim bulb that provided the only illumination in the crawlspace.
The gloved hand moved again, but instead of withdrawing a knife, it came back holding a black notepad.
As Melissa watched in horror, the figure flipped to a blank page, and then pressed the gloved thumb against the upper right-hand corner, leaving behind a bloody thumbprint.
“Write what you know,” Melissa’s captor whispered. And then the whistling started again as the pen started to move across the page.
First Act
Chapter 1
Damien Drake hunched low, hiding his six-foot frame behind a parked Lincoln Navigator. He was breathing heavily, and sweat was dripping down his forehead despite the snow that flitted down around him.
I’m getting sloppy.
If it hadn’t been for his recent health kick—not skipping the booze, but cutting back—he almost certainly would have been seen.
And what had Ken Smith instructed him?
Don’t be noticed. If you’re noticed, I will deny ever speaking to you, Drake. And you know what that means.
Drake grimaced as he recalled their conversation by the fire in Ken’s lavish penthouse condo.
Yeah, I know. I know what that means.
He instinctively held his breath when he heard the voices, louder now, and he remained completely still, hoping that the two people he had been following hadn’t noticed the puffs of warm air filtering up from behind the Lincoln.
“You know what the worst thing is?” the male voice asked.
Detective Damien Drake series Box Set 1 Page 51