Seclusion, freedom, but most of all it was quiet.
It was a place to gain the experiences he so adamantly espoused the importance of to the writing group.
“Right now it isn’t much,” he admitted. “Just a cabin, a cottage.”
He unbuckled his seatbelt and started to get out of the car.
“Looks like a dump,” Juliette replied.
Colin shook his head and sighed as he opened the door for his girls.
They hopped out and immediately started bickering on the front lawn.
Colin ignored them and stared at the cabin, imagining what it might look like with a new coat of paint, fresh window treatments.
The back and sides of the cabin were flanked by heavily wooded areas, adding to the feeling of seclusion. The front lawn, which extended for thirty or so feet until it met the worn path that his car had made, kept it from feeling claustrophobic.
Colin turned his gaze in the direction that he had come, noting that it seemed to disappear when it cut through a section of trees. From the main road, the path was nearly impossible to find, especially with the blanket of snow coating everything.
If you didn’t know the path was there, you would drive right by it without a second thought.
“That’s mine!” Juliette shouted, bringing Colin out of his head.
He looked over to see Colby holding her hat just out of reach. Juliette stood on her tippy-toes, but Colby turned her back to her sister, preventing her from grabbing it.
“Give it back, Colby,” Colin instructed. Either Colby didn’t hear him, or she simply chose to ignore him.
“Na-na-na boo-boo,” she said, sticking out her tongue.
“Guys, just stop fighting, would you? Let’s just enjoy the weather and take a look around. There’s a really cool and creepy basement you have to see.”
Juliette looked at him and blinked several times before speaking.
“It’s freezing out and this place looks like a dump. Can’t we just go back to school?”
Colin felt anger start to build inside of him, and for a split second, he debated throwing them both in the basement.
He shook the thought from his head.
“Fine,” he muttered. “I just need to get something from inside. You guys stop fighting and wait here?”
“Whatever,” they responded in unison.
Colin hurried through the snow to the back door, and then reached on top of the door frame for the key. When his fingers felt nothing, he stared upward.
“I know I put it here—I always put it here.”
Colin ran his fingers across the entire edge of the rotting wooden frame, but still came up empty.
“What the hell?” he said to himself. His frustration was reaching the point of no return, an apex from which no number of controlled breaths would bring him back.
“Where the fuck is the goddamn key?”
Colin tried the door handle, and while it rattled in his hand, it remained locked.
He ground his teeth and pursed his lips.
“Where the fuck did it go?”
Without thinking, his right foot shot out and connected with the bottom of the door. A resounding thud echoed off the trees behind him, and when he pulled his boot away, he saw that he had taken a chunk out of the wood.
“Goddammit,” he swore.
Colin moved away from the door and went to the window, trying to peer inside.
A white curtain blocked his view.
“Shit!”
Blood rose in his cheeks, making them tingle. Just as he concluded that the only way to get inside would be to drive his shoulder into the door, he spotted a small indentation in the snow to his left.
Bending down, he felt relief wash over him. In a tunnel of snow lay a silver key.
It must have fallen off with the snow and wind, he thought as he picked up.
Colin unlocked then opened the door, his nose immediately crinkling at the smell. He debated opening the windows and airing the place out, but a shriek from the front lawn nixed that idea.
Always fighting… always goddamn fighting… will it ever stop?
Colin spotted the worn black notepad on the counter and scooped it up.
With one final, wistful look around, he exited the way he had come, locking the door and making sure that the key was firmly butted up against the wall atop the door trim.
Book in hand, he hurried back to the front just in time to see Juliette whack Colby upside the head.
Colby stumbled, and Juliette continued with the blow, landing on top of her.
“Get off her! Juliette, get off your sister!” Colin shouted, running over to them.
Juliette didn’t listen. Instead, she grew more furious, scooping up snow in both palms before pouring it over Colby’s face.
Both girls were shrieking now.
“I said, get off her!” Colin bellowed. He ran to Juliette and grabbed her jacket, yanking her to her feet.
“Stop fighting!” he yelled in her face, his hand still gripping the hood of her jacket. His fingers twisted in the material, causing it to tighten around her throat. Juliette’s eyes started to water and her breath came out in raspy gasps.
“Next time, you listen to me,” Colin hissed, staring into his daughter’s eyes. “You got it?”
When Juliette didn’t answer immediately, he squeezed the coat even tighter.
“Got it?”
Juliette nodded and Colin finally let go. He turned to Colby, who had since gotten to her feet, her face red and wet from the snow that Juliette had piled on top of her.
“That goes for you, too—both of you. Now get in the car. And don’t you even think about telling your mother about this place.”
Chapter 30
The last thing that Drake wanted to do was to personally head to Dr. Kildare’s campaign office—his first choice had been Screech to do it for him, but he was meeting with Mr. Yachty—let alone go there in the middle of the day. Especially given the warning that Ken had issued about being seen.
To make things worse, ever since what had happened with Craig Sloan, and even before that with the Skeleton King, Drake was finding remaining anonymous to be increasingly difficult. The media had done a one-eighty on him when they reported that he had saved Suzan’s life, turning him from a heel to a hero.
All the media wanted was a good story, and there was no better tale than a detective who had cost his partner his life, only to save the man’s daughter who was kidnapped by yet another serial killer.
You know what else makes a good story? Red Smile…
Drake pulled his cap down low and strode across the parking lot. It was quiet, which he found surprising considering that it was a Thursday afternoon. From what he knew about politics, which was admittedly little, he figured they usually ran twenty-four seven this close to the election date.
Maybe they’re all out for lunch.
There were still plenty of cars in the parking lot, but the interior of the building, despite being brightly lit, appeared completely empty.
Drake’s brow furrowed as he approached. His mind was flooded with the idea that this was all a trap, that for some strange reason Ken wanted him to get caught, to be arrested. It didn’t make sense, but he couldn’t be this lucky.
He never was.
But as Drake came right up to the door and he still saw no movement inside, he simply shrugged.
The door will be locked and I’ll have to break in. And that’s when the police will show up.
When he tried the door and found that the knob turned easily in his hand, however, the fantasy grew less likely.
Drake tucked his chin into his coat and lowered his head. He slid his hands into his pockets, feeling the objects in each that were roughly the same size: the finger bone and the button camera.
Regardless of whether it was luck or a setup, Drake knew that he had to work quickly. He glanced around, his eyes skipping over the many desks covered in election posters, all bearing Dr. Kild
are’s smiling face, as he tried to locate the best place to put his camera.
The most likely location to record the good doctor doing the bad thing with his campaign manager.
There were several offices near the back, and Drake quickly made his way toward them. The first clearly belonged to a secretary or statistician of some sort based solely on the presence of the massive stack of files on the desk, but the second one gave him pause. Unlike the rest of the warehouse, this office was clean, immaculate even. There was no other evidence that this was the doctor’s office, but something in his gut told him that it was.
Only a doctor would be this neat, this fastidious. Again thinking that his luck was about to run out, he reached for the door handle, and was surprised when it turned with ease.
His heart rate quickened with the realization that he had probably already broken a half dozen laws, but before his conscience took over, he stepped inside Dr. Kildare’s office.
The best location, he figured, was in the corner behind the desk, up near the ceiling. That would offer a clear view of the computer screen and the desk.
Drake grabbed a leather chair and wheeled it to the corner, and then stood on it. He pulled his right hand from his pocket and reached up high, only to realize that he had grabbed the wrong object.
Cradled between his fingers was the finger bone that Ivan Meitzer had given him in the diner what felt like ages ago.
Drake cursed and went to put it back in his pocket when the chair unexpectedly swiveled, and he was forced to reach out and brace himself with his hand. As he did, the bone slipped from his fingers and clattered to the linoleum floor below.
“Shit,” he said as he watched it slide under the desk.
Drake quickly pulled out the button camera and pressed the sticky back against the wall near the ceiling. He leaned back slightly, observing his handy work. It wasn’t completely unnoticeable on the white wall as it had been beneath Mrs. Armatridge’s stairs, but a passive observer would likely just think it a hole or chip in the paint.
Or at least that was what he hoped.
He was about to hop off the chair when a sound from behind him caused him to freeze.
“Roger? That you? What are you doing up there?”
For several seconds, Drake could do nothing but stand frozen on the chair, his back to the man who had entered the office behind him.
His mind was racing as it cycled through every scenario he could think of from knocking the guy out, to making up some elaborate lie to get him out of this jam, all the while Ken’s voice provided a soundtrack to his thoughts.
Whatever you do, don’t get caught. Don’t be seen.
Drake settled for the latter, giving up the hope of not being seen.
That ship had sailed.
He turned slowly, almost robotically, so as to not alarm the man behind him.
With the most genuine smile he could muster, he said, “No, not Roger. But close.”
The man in the office doorway couldn’t have been older than twenty, and even that must have been a stretch. With shellacked hair and a doughy face, the boy was staring at him with wide eyes. “The name is Robert Watts—building superintendent.”
He lowered himself off the chair and then strode forward, hand outstretched. The man—intern, he had to be an intern—looked at his hand suspiciously and Drake withdrew it before it became awkward.
“We’ve been having some problems with the drop ceiling in the other units—especially in the Subway ‘round back. The heavy snow has been causing some water damage. I was just checking for any sign of moisture. Can’t risk having mold in here.”
The man squinted at him.
“I ran it by Mary,” Drake said quickly, surprised that he had remembered the woman’s name. “Said it wasn’t a problem to come in and check it out.”
“And?” the man asked, his eyebrows rising.
Drake’s smile grew.
“And you—heh, we’re in luck. It’s all dry up there. Should stay that way, too, if there’s no more snow, that is.”
When the man continued to stare, Drake made his way toward the door.
“Sorry if I startled you. Can’t be too careful with these things. Once there’s one spot of mold, there’s a dozen.”
As he passed the intern, he observed him closely, trying to get a read on him.
It wasn’t too late to use the Armstrong method, as much as he knew that would only end badly for both of them. Thankfully, the man’s wide cheeks suddenly tightened in a smile.
“Well that’s good news, I guess. Just make sure that you vote Kildare.”
Drake chuckled and walked into the main portion of the campaign office.
“Of course. Here’s to hoping the good doctor comes out on top.”
“Thanks.”
“No problem,” he said over his shoulder.
Less than a minute later, Drake was back in his car, breathing heavily in the front seat, his heart still racing.
“Jesus Christ, what the hell are you doing, Drake? Whose side are you on?”
But before he could answer his own question, a strange chime from somewhere in his thick coat interrupted him. At first, he thought it was the smartphone that Screech had given him, but then remembered that had set it on silent. Drake patted his chest, and then pulled out the e-reader.
His heart sunk when he turned it on and saw that there wasn’t just one book cover on the home screen, but two. The second also showed the pale face of a woman, her lips painted in blood.
Red Smile PART II, the title read.
Drake swallowed hard and opened the book.
It was only later that he realized that he had forgotten to grab the bone that he had dropped in the doctor’s office.
Chapter 31
The man pushed the camera lens through the open window. He waited for the image to focus, then snapped several shots of the building, making sure that most of them included the campaign posters with the smiling doctor’s face in the background.
Satisfied that he wasn’t too far away to capture the details he needed, he waited.
He didn’t have to wait long.
A man in a navy coat, his chin tucked low, made his way toward the door. When his bare hand reached for the handle, he paused, turning to look around.
The camera shutter fired rapidly, capturing more than a dozen pictures of the man’s face in just a few seconds.
Zooming in, he captured several more pictures of the man inside the campaign office, and then of him exiting no more than five minutes later.
When Drake made it to his car and slumped in the front seat, the man captured a final image, then pulled the camera inside the vehicle and closed the window.
Chapter 32
“What did you think of the profile?” Agent Stitts asked as Chase drove toward Charlotte’s last known address.
Chase shrugged.
“To be honest? It’s pretty vague. In a city as large as New York, you pretty much described a third of the male population. Shit, even in Larchmont, you only narrowed it down to a couple hundred people.”
There was something else that bothered her about the profile, something that she kept to herself for the time being. Agent Stitts had said that the suspect was likely emasculated, probably at the hands of a female superior of some sort. And yet none of the bodies they had recovered showed any signs of sexual assault. She was no expert, of course, but something felt fundamentally wrong about their assumptions.
Agent Stitts turned his eyes to the road.
“That’s fair. There’s something in my gut that’s telling me it’s not quite right, that I’m missing something.”
Chase nodded, and Agent Stitts faced her again.
“Thinking the same thing?”
“Yes—there’s something that we’re just not seeing.”
“Agreed. Let me ask you something: do you trust your gut?”
The question caught Chase by surprise.
“My gut? Like a gut feeling?�
�
“Sure.”
Again, Chase wasn’t sure if this was some sort of test, if Agent Stitts was trying to work his way into her mind. But, as before, all the second-guessing was exhausting. She had a murderer to catch, and couldn’t be concerned with whether her hair was straight or if she used proper grammar.
The FBI could wait until this was over.
“Do I trust my gut? Sometimes… the fact is, sometimes my intuition’s right, and sometimes it’s just dead wrong.”
Her thoughts turned to the scars on the inside of her elbows. Intuition had told her that she should gain the trust of the mid-level dealer they were pursuing by taking a hit of heroin. The same intuition had left her with a deadly habit and a whole division of Seattle Narcotics officers looking for her.
And long before that, her intuition had cost her something even more important.
“Nowadays I try to rely on facts and not feelings.”
Agent Stitts continued to stare out the window, and Chase worried that she might have said something that offended him.
“I can see how—”
“Millions of years of evolution,” he said absently.
“Excuse me?”
“Don’t ignore your intuition, Chase. Millions of years of evolution served to develop an inherent defense mechanism in all of us. Call it gut feeling, intuition, a hunch, whatever you call it, it’s a valuable asset in the field. Trust me on this one. Sometimes your eyes see things, but your conscious mind is too busy or too tired to take notice. Your gut, however, is pre-historic. Listen, you ever waited for an elevator and when the door opened, you just had a bad feeling about the guy inside waiting for you to enter?”
Chase tilted her head to one side.
“Maybe.”
“Maybe’s good enough. Everyone has had these experiences in their lives, but there’s a selection bias at play. People who listen to these urges? They don’t think twice about them later because nothing happened. In fact, they might even convince themselves that they were being foolish, childish, even. But it’s the time when you feel something’s wrong, that something’s just not right, and you don’t listen to it and something bad happens? That’s what we remember. Over time, if this job has taught me one thing, it’s to trust my instincts.”
Detective Damien Drake series Box Set 1 Page 62