“Tiffany? I think you should come down. The police are here and they want to speak to us. It’s about Tanya.”
Chapter 17
“And Mrs. Armatridge, how is she?” Ken asked between puffs of his cigar.
Drake took a swig of his whiskey, marveling again at how smooth the Johnny Walker Blue was. His thoughts turned to the video feed of the elderly woman removing the knife from the butcher block while her husband was being satisfied by the maid in the bedroom above. As she walked slowly to the stairs, slowly, as if sleepwalking, Screech and his curly hair suddenly came into the frame. His partner had grabbed Mrs. Armatridge by the wrist before she did something truly terrible.
Drake shook his head.
“She’s fine,” he replied flatly.
“Good to hear. And business at Triple D? Still steady?”
Drake frowned and sipped his drink.
“Just get to the point, Ken. You want to know what I found out about Dr. Kildare.”
Ken smirked.
“You know what I like about you, Drake?”
“That I do your bidding?”
Drake was hoping that the man’s smile would falter and was disappointed when it didn’t.
“I like your no-nonsense attitude. Directness is a virtue that has been lost in a world of emoji’s and abbreviations,” he took a haul of his cigar, then exhaled the smoke through his nostrils like some sort of dragon. “And you are correct: I’ve brought you here to learn what you’ve uncovered.”
Drake hesitated. For some reason, he was struck by the impulse to lie, to tell Ken that he had found nothing, that Dr. Kildare was as perfect as he seemed.
But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. After all, whatever his feelings for the man, he owed Ken Smith. Besides, he was only reporting facts. He never coerced, entrapped, or even suggested anything to Dr. Kildare.
“Dr. Kildare is having an affair,” he said after a short pause. “He’s sleeping with his campaign director.”
This, at last, got a reaction out of the man.
Ken chuckled and took another puff.
“Raul? Can you please come here?”
Raul appeared beside Drake and slid an envelope onto the table beside his whiskey glass.
Drake looked at it with a sense of loathing. And yet, when he finished his drink, he picked it up. It was heavy; heavier than he expected.
He stood and slid it into his jacket pocket.
“Raul please give our guest a ride to wherever he wants to go.”
Drake frowned at the use of the term ‘guest’. Was he really a guest? Something told him that if he had declined Raul’s offer—however enticing—to come see Ken Smith, then there would be repercussions.
Raul led the way to the elevator, but before it arrived, Ken Smith added, “Get your partner to set up one of those cameras, would you, Drake? Get Dr. Kildare on tape with his manager.”
Drake nodded, but didn’t turn.
“And remember, it doesn’t do either of us any good if you’re seen.”
Drake was scowling when he entered the elevator, and this expression remained etched on his face during the silent drive all the way back to his Crown Vic at Triple D.
“Thanks for the ride,” he snapped as he left Raul’s Range Rover.
Predictably, Raul said nothing before driving off, leaving Drake standing with the snow falling around him.
He felt the weight of the two objects in his pocket; in his right was the e-reader that he felt compelled to continue reading, while the left housed the envelope that Raul had given him.
And he was tired, too. The day had started with the lights being out at Triple D, and only went downhill from there.
Drake’s hand slipped into the pocket with the envelope, and he wrapped his calloused fingers around the material, feeling the thick stack of bills within.
The dead women and Red Smile would have to wait. He had his priorities, and there was something he had to do first.
Chapter 18
Colin couldn’t believe what he was seeing. His wife of eight years was in bed with another man—an older, fat man, whom he had never laid eyes on before.
But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was that she didn’t seem to give a shit that he had caught her.
In fact, Ryanne’s entire being seemed to be dripping with contempt as she sat at the edge of their bed in her t-shirt and underwear.
“Juliette, go take off your boots,” she instructed.
Juliette didn’t move. Colin wasn’t sure that, at seven, she understood what was going on, but she knew given his reaction that something wasn’t right here.
Colin reached down and patted his daughter gently on the shoulder. Juliette looked up at him with wide eyes.
“It’s alright, sweetie, head downstairs with your sister.”
Juliette nodded and then fled the hallway without a word, leaving Colin with his wife and the stranger.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Ryanne spat. She reached for her pants and put them on, then grabbed her pack of cigarettes off the bedside table. As she did, the man turned around, and Colin felt his jaw drop.
He did know the man, after all. It was their landlord, a man who Ryanne had repeatedly referred to as a scumbag.
“You,” was all Colin could manage.
The man glared at him. In his mid-sixties, he wasn’t an imposing figure despite his burgeoning belly; short in stature, with thinning grey hair and a gap-toothed smile, and yet Colin was none-the-less intimidated.
Ryanne lit another cigarette and inhaled deeply.
“I said don’t look at me like that,” she repeated.
Colin shook his head.
“Like what? How the hell do you want me to look at you? Is this a joke? What the hell is going on?”
Ryanne took a long drag of her cigarette.
“What was I supposed to do? You can’t pay the rent, and we need somewhere to live.”
Colin gawked.
“So, you’re what… whoring yourself?”
The landlord, who Colin in his fury couldn’t remember was named Gerald or Gary or Glenn, moved toward the door.
“I’ma leave now,” he said, fists and jaw clenched. “See you next month, Ryanne.”
Colin was so floored by the man’s audacity that he didn’t even flinch when G-whatever his name slipped by him and down the stairs.
“Grow up, Colin. Bills needed to be paid, so I got it done. If you could just get a real job, then we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place.”
Colin whipped his head around to stare at his wife.
“Are you serious? Are you—” he lowered his voice an octave —” are you fucking serious?”
Ryanne nodded.
“As a heart attack.”
Colin raised a hand, and only then realized that it was so tightly clenched that his knuckles were white.
He relaxed his grip and pointed a finger directly at Ryanne’s chest.
“You’re going to be sorry, Ryanne. You don’t know what I’m capable of. I’ve…” he let his sentence trail off.
Ryanne’s face broke into a grin and then she threw her head back and laughed.
“What? What are you going to do about it?” her face grew serious. “You’re too much of a pussy to do anything. Don’t be fake; I hate fake people. Fucking poser.”
“Oh, you’re going to be sorry. My next book… you’ll see. My next book isn’t just going to sell, but it’s going to be a fucking phenomenon. You’ll see Ryanne. And you’re not going to get a goddamn dime.”
Ryanne looked away, and ashed her cigarette in a can of Coke on the night side table.
“Whatever,” she grumbled. “Your books never sell.”
Colin, on the verge of seeing red, of losing control, spun on his heels. His equilibrium was suddenly off and he stumbled, and was forced to brace himself against the wall to avoid falling.
In a daze, he made his way down the stairs.
“Where are you go
ing?” Ryanne yelled after him.
“Out! Make sure that the girls get dinner!”
With that, Colin threw the door to their apartment open so violently that the doorknob put a dent in the drywall.
She’ll pay—that bitch is going to pay for everything that she’s done to me. She will pay.
Chapter 19
Chase’s hands were visibly shaking when she returned to her car after visiting with Tanya Farthing’s hysterical parents. Ms. Green and Mrs. Farthing’s reactions to the news of their daughter’s deaths were as opposite each other as their abodes.
But it was their eyes that got to her. Their eyes were wide, they were moist, but they had a quality of emptiness that she only knew from dead bodies.
“Fuck,” she swore, momentarily forgetting that Agent Stitts was in the car with her. And when she realized that he was, she repeated the curse even louder this time and hammered the steering wheel with the heel of her hand.
She wasn’t sure why these murders affected her when the victims of the Butterfly Killer and Craig Sloan’s twisted acts hadn’t, but the fact that they did remained.
She took a deep breath and then turned to Agent Stitts. He was looking at her again, but there was no judgment in his face.
“Sorry,” she grumbled.
Stitts shook his head.
“Don’t apologize. You know what the difference between you and I is?”
Chase remained silent as she started the car.
“I’m better at internalizing the pain I see in others, pushing it deep down in my gut where it toils with my own anguish. That’s all. But don’t let it fool you; I feel it. I feel it with every breath I take. One of the worst things that has happened to society is the pervasive notion that showing emotion, of being vulnerable, is a weakness. It’s not. It’s a strength. You’re stronger than me, Chase. That’s the real difference between you and me.”
The candid speech took Chase by surprise. For as long as she could remember, she wanted to be an FBI agent. But in all that time, she had thought of it as a cold, hardened institution set on solving the most difficult, and the most heinous, of crimes.
In her mind, the FBI was uncaring, unforgiving, and above all else, infallible.
And maybe that’s what drew her to it in the first place.
But the front that Agent Stitts was presenting… was, well, unnerving to say the least.
And Chase wasn’t sure how she felt about it.
“Where should I take you?” she asked dryly. “You staying in a hotel?”
Stitts nodded.
“Yeah, but you can just drop me at the precinct. I’ve got my rental there. Do you want to talk about the case? We can wait until morning, if it suits you better.”
Chase chewed her lip. She wanted to wait until tomorrow, but thoughts were already festering in her head. If she went home and tried to sleep now, it would never come, she knew.
She checked the clock on the dash. It was almost ten.
“It’ll take about forty minutes to get back to the precinct. We can talk as I drive.”
Agent Stitts agreed.
“Good,” he said softly. “I’ll start. There’s no way that Tanya new Melissa. No way. Not even in some sort of bizarre tutoring relationship. And although the reactions of Melissa’s and Tanya’s parents were very different, they were both genuine. They had nothing to do with either of their deaths.”
“Hmph,” was all Chase could manage. This was another twist that she hadn’t expected: such conclusiveness, and at such an early stage of their investigation. And yet, Agent Stitts had just verbalized her very thoughts.
“So, if they didn’t know each other, how did the killer pick them?” she asked. “They’re both young women around thirty years of age. But Melissa was plump, out of shape, and Tanya was thin, on the verge of being skinny. Melissa had brown hair, Tanya blond.”
Agent Stitts hesitated before commenting.
“Random?”
Chase mulled this over for a moment.
Unlike the man’s previous comment, his voice had wavered slightly while uttering the word ‘random’.
Is this a test? Did he see something and wants to know if I saw it, too?
Chase shook her head and decided then and there that she would just be herself, do whatever she did that got her to this position in the first place.
She wasn’t about to change who she was or become preoccupied with what others thought about her. Not now. Not after all she had been through.
“Honestly? I’ve never heard of a truly random killer. There’s a connection between them, between Tanya and Melissa. Two women, around the same age, murdered in tandem? Can’t be a coincidence.”
Agent Stitts nodded.
“So, what’s the connection then? It’s not their socio-economic status, that’s for sure. Their looks, then? Maybe. A general hatred toward women of child-bearing age? It wouldn’t be the first—”
“Shh,” Chase said without thinking. Her cheeks started to flush, but she forced this feeling away.
Don’t blush—you’re a fucking police sergeant for Christ’s sake. Act like one.
“There’s something… something…” she let her sentence trail off.
There was something, something in common between the two women. It wasn’t something that she saw, necessarily, at least, not at Melissa’s, but something her mother—
“Books,” she said. The word came out more as an apology than an exclamation as she had intended.
“Excuse me?”
“Books—that’s the connection. Ms. Green said that Melissa was too busy reading or going to the library to look after her children,” her words sped up as she gained confidence, “And Tanya’s mother—remember when she took us up to Tanya’s room? There were books everywhere, but not just law books. Novels. There were dozens on the shelves. Did you see them?”
“Yeah, I saw them.”
And with that unenthused response, Chase’s confidence was suddenly shot.
Books? How many people have books in their homes? And the library? How many thousands of people go to the library?
“It’s somewhere to start, I guess. Might be nothing, but…”
“No, it sounds… I think there might be something there.”
Chase shrugged and took the off-ramp.
“Let me ask you something,” Stitts continued in a softer tone. “Why didn’t you ask about the lipstick?”
The question took Chase by surprise.
“The lipstick?”
“Yeah, the bloody lips… the lipstick spread over the dead girls’ mouths. You didn’t ask either of the mothers about makeup at all.”
Chase vividly recalled the dark maroon smudges coating the corpses’s otherwise pale lips.
“I… I don’t know.”
“Don’t sell yourself short, Chase. You do know. You know it in the same way that you know the books are important.”
The first thing that popped into Chase’s head was so embarrassing that, despite her previous promise to stay true to herself, she couldn’t bring herself to say it out loud. It was trite, it was clichéd, and it was borderline demeaning: a woman’s intuition.
In the end, it didn’t matter; Agent Stitts said it for her.
“Intuition, that’s why.”
Chase suddenly felt tired and decided then and there to put an end to the discussion.
“It doesn’t matter anyway, books or no books. Gaining access to library records is almost as difficult as breaking into the Pentagon. Homeland security and Mein Kampf and all that.”
Stitts chuckled.
“Yeah, well. That’s where I come in, I guess. This badge carries some perks, after all.”
Chapter 20
Drake opened the black mailbox and then pulled the envelope from his pocket. He weighed it in his hand for a moment, and then put it inside. He closed the lid and then was about to flip the small red flag up when he a door opening and froze.
“Drake? Is that you?�
�
Drake debated not saying anything and getting back into his car, but realized that this would hardly keep him anonymous.
After all, he drove a conspicuous Crown Vic. Besides, Jasmine had to know who was putting the money in her mailbox all these months… didn’t she?
Drake turned around and put on his best fake smile.
“I was just leaving, Jasmine. Don’t mind me.”
Jasmine Cuthbert tugged the robe of her belt tight and stepped onto the porch. She was only wearing slippers, he noted.
“What… what are you doing here?”
Drake took a step toward the house.
“It’s cold out, Jasmine. Why don’t you head inside and get warm?”
Instead of listening, Jasmine did the opposite and took another step onto the porch. After a glance back at his car, Drake finally made up his mind and walked toward the house. When he reached Jasmine, he put an arm around her shoulder and spun her around, guiding her toward her open door.
She didn’t resist.
Once inside, he shut the door behind them and immediately started to warm up.
“Is… is Suzan home?” Drake asked hesitatingly.
Jasmine shook her head.
“She’s at a friend’s house, studying for an exam.”
Her response surprised him.
Suzan’s back at school? Already?
Drake knew that the girl was strong, but this was unprecedented. After what happened to her…
“You want some tea, Drake?”
What Drake wanted was to go home and sip from the bottle of Johnny Red that he had waiting for him until he passed out.
“Sure,” he replied.
Drake followed Jasmine to the kitchen, watching her as she went. She set the kettle on the stove and then reached up to grab a mug from one of the upper cupboards. As she did, her robe lifted slightly, and Drake looked away when a bare ass cheek came into view.
He blushed.
“What were you doing out there, Drake?” Jasmine asked as she grabbed two mugs and turned back to him.
Drake stared at her for a moment, trying to figure out if she was being facetious or not. He decided not—in her sleepy state, he doubted that she could be anything but honest.
Detective Damien Drake series Box Set 1 Page 58