Was it all about him?
He had slept with Jasmine, that much was for him. But the rest… he was doing Ken’s bidding because he didn’t have a choice. Ken had given him Craig Sloan, which in turn had saved Suzan’s life. He owed the man. And after taking the ‘loan’ to pay Ivan to see what he could come up with, he was further indebted to him.
The second half… that’s for something else.
So why didn’t he just tell Chase about Ivan? Why didn’t he tell Chase why he was really at Patty’s, why he couldn’t call her back, why he was late?
Drake shook his head, something that he hoped the both Chase and Dunbar didn’t pick up on.
He didn’t tell Chase because he knew what she would do if he did: she would go to Ken, confront the man. That’s just the way she worked; she would try and protect him, as ironic as that was. And the more time he spent around Ken and his pint-sized henchman, the more dangerous he thought they were.
And to think, there’s a good chance that Ken is going to be the Mayor of New York City soon.
“Drake? You listening?”
He cleared his throat.
“Yeah, IP addresses. Got it. But I thought you couldn’t trace L. Wiley?”
Dunbar turned back to the computer screen.
“We can’t. But after compiling and comparing the books that the victims bought, I can confirm that they also have these three books in common.”
He pulled up covers that looked to Drake like covers from softcore animal porn.
“I dug even deeper. Not only did our victims buy these books, but all three of the victims posted a review on at least one of them.”
Chase suddenly leaned forward, her shoulder brushing up against Drake’s.
He was suddenly reminded of his night with Jasmine, and how he had pictured Chase’s face instead of hers.
Maybe she was right, maybe he was falling apart.
Again.
It’s like Clay, like the debacle leading to his death. Like that night in the rain.
And that night had ended badly for everyone.
I can’t let that happen to her, to Chase.
“What do you mean?” Chase asked.
“They all wrote reviews on a Manbeast book. Favorable ones, too.”
“This can’t be a coincidence,” Chase mumbled.
“And who’s this guy? This Germaine guy?”
Chase turned to face Drake, a frown on her face.
“Another fucking pen name. Agent Stitts is still trying to track down who these authors really are, but he doubts he will be able to find out.”
Drake felt like he had tripped and fallen into some technological rabbit hole.
“Yeah, but,” Dunbar continued, “while I couldn’t track the IP address of the author of Red Smile, I tracked down R.S. Germaine.”
Chase’s grip on the back of Dunbar’s chair tightened.
“What? You found him?”
Dunbar sighed.
“Not exactly.”
Drake could feel Chase tense beside her. This was turning out to be more of a black hole than a rabbit hole.
“What do you mean, not exactly?”
Dunbar brought up a map of New York City on his screen. A series of red dots, maybe twenty in total, appeared over an area of approximately fifteen square miles.
“It keeps jumping around. Not like L. Wiley in Asia, though; concentrated in this area here,” he pointed to the screen. “It’s a low-income housing area. Sometimes what people do is set up one router, and then crack it so that everyone in the neighborhood can use it. That way one Internet connection can be used by many people. The IP address keeps resetting, which is why you see so many dots as the old ones are recycled. I mean, usually there aren’t as many users as this, and the connection is probably slow as hell, but people will do anything to save a buck. They probably have a couple of routers in parallel.”
“So we’re sure that someone in this area—what is that, forty houses? Fifty?” Chase asked.
“About that. The resolution is poor.”
“Okay, let’s say fifty then. So someone in one of these fifty houses is the author of the wereporn books. Is that right?”
Dunbar nodded enthusiastically.
“Yeah, but remember these aren’t houses. They’re apartment buildings. Gotta be ten, twenty units in each.”
Drake exhaled loudly. It was a lot of domiciles to search, but at least it was something.
“We need to start going apartment to apartment,” Chase said.
“To look for what? A guy with a computer? Low income or not, if they have IP addresses, they’re going to have computers,” Drake replied.
Chase thought about this.
“The profile,” she said at last. “We use the profile.”
Despite the comment, however, Drake detected apprehension in her voice. He knew about her desire to enroll in the FBI, and how her opinion on profiling had become more favorable since he had first met her, but it was obvious she thought that in this case, it wouldn’t be all that helpful.
“I’ll get Yasiv to organize a team of uniforms, get them to start canvassing. Dunbar, send the list of addresses to his cell, and mine, too.”
Dunbar nodded and went back to the computer. A few computer clicks, he said, “Done.”
Chase stood up straight and headed toward the door.
“Good work, Dunbar. Keep plugging away. See if you can narrow it down somehow. Drake, you come with me. I have a job for you.”
Drake followed Chase back into the stairwell.
“What about the press conference?” he asked when they were alone again. “Any leads from that?”
He was doubtful, especially given the rash of bullshit calls they had gotten about the Butterfly Killer, but it was worth a shot.
Chase paused mid-step.
“You still didn’t see it?”
Drake shook his head.
“Well, we’ve been getting calls alright, just not about the killer.”
Drake’s brow furrowed.
“What do you mean?”
“I—”
Chase’s phone echoed through the stairwell. She picked up.
“Adams,” she said briskly. Drake watched her face as the person on the other end spoke.
It sagged and all of a sudden she looked older than her thirty or so years.
Much older.
“Okay, I’m heading there now. Keep the press away.”
When Chase hung up the phone, it looked like she had aged a decade.
“They’ve found the body, Drake. And this time it’s in a public place.”
Chapter 41
The girl was naked, strung up by her wrists and hanging from a soccer goalpost at Hockley Elementary School. Her head was hung low, her face covered with strings of frozen brown hair.
Even from across the field, Chase didn’t need to see the girl’s mouth to know that it would be smeared with blood, or to see the gash across her throat to know that it had been slit.
She parked her BMW and got out, her heart pounding. Detective Simmons had beat her to the scene, and he met her as she started to cross the field.
“Who discovered the body?” she asked.
Simmons pointed to one of the brown brick houses that lined the road across from the field.
“Someone from one of those houses. Says they didn’t see anyone, just the body.”
Drake swore, and Chase looked over at him.
“This the way it was described?”
Drake nodded, ignoring the curious look that Simmons gave him.
“Pretty close.”
A horn blared from their right, and Chase turned in that direction. A pickup truck pulled to a stop by the edge of the field, and as she watched several women piled out.
“What the hell?” she muttered.
They appeared to be unraveling some sort of poster. As she watched, several other cars pulled up behind the pickup, and more people exited their vehicles. It took only a moment
for Chase to realize what was happening.
“Cover the scene!” she yelled, breaking into a sprint. “Get a sheet up and cover the damn scene!”
The first poster unrolled at the same time the shouts started.
“They are victims! The women are not to blame!” the chorus rang out, piercing through the frosty air. “Women are not to blame!”
“Get a fucking screen up!” Chase yelled. Several of the uniformed officers looked at her, then the protesters, then the woman hanging from the goalpost. But none of them moved.
Chase grabbed the first officer she reached and spun him around.
“Put a damn screen up!”
The man glared at her.
“CSU isn’t here yet. They’re stuck in traffic. Going to be at least another twenty before they arrive.”
Chase turned her gaze upward.
“Shit!”
She knew that the press conference had been a mistake, and the dozens of calls that the call center had received had proven as much.
But she still hadn’t expected such a visceral outcry.
And now, with the body hanging in plain view, it was going to be on every social media site within the hour.
“Go to the body,” Drake said from her left. “Gather all of the officers on scene and go to the body. Stand around it. Her hair is in front of her face, but I want you to block all direct views of the body. And then get someone over to the protesters, push them to the other side of the road. This is a goddamn crime scene, not a circus.”
Chase breathed more deeply, realizing what Drake was trying to do. He wanted to make a human shield around the body until CSU got here.
She hurried after Drake, moving close to the body as he instructed. At least a half-dozen police officers did the same, with Drake barking orders to complete the circle. When they were done, it wasn’t a perfect cover, but it was better than having the woman’s naked body exposed for anyone with a cell phone to snap a photo.
They stood in silence as the shouts continued to bombard them.
“Women are not to blame! The victims are not to blame! Women are not to blame!”
Chase hung her head low, her cheeks flushed despite the temperature.
This was her doing.
And it was all wrong.
There was something wrong with the profile, something that didn’t feel right. Agent Stitts had told her to use her instincts, her gut, and this was as strong a reaction that she had experienced in years.
“Find this guy, Drake,” she said suddenly, aware that all the officers were looking at her, but not caring. Chase looked up, staring her ex-partner directly in the face. “Let’s catch this bastard.”
Chapter 42
Colin hurried into his home, slamming the door behind him. He closed his eyes and tried to catch his breath. His hands were shaking. His heart was pounding. He felt his entire body awash with guilt.
“Dad? You okay?”
Colin opened his eyes to see Colby standing there, her eyes wide.
He offered her a fake smile.
“Fine, honey. Where’s your sister?”
“In here!” Juliette hollered from the other room. Colin leaned to one side, peering beyond Colby.
The TV was on, which meant that Ryanne wasn’t home. Part of him was glad, while the other half started to become furious.
“You guys okay? Where’d your mother go?”
Juliette shrugged and then turned back to the TV room, eventually plopping herself down on the floor beside her sister.
“Dunno. She just left.”
Colin shook his head. Something had to be done about her. Leaving two seven-year old’s alone to fend for themselves?
He looked down at his hands, the fingers tensed in the gloves. They were still shaking.
“I’m going to take a shower, okay guys? Then I’ll make you some dinner.”
He removed his gloves and patted his girls on the head, one after the other.
They didn’t look up.
On the way to the shower, he tossed the gloves in the garbage.
His mind was racing and it wasn’t until he was fully undressed that he realized he had cut himself. Holding his hand up to the light, he stared at the two-inch-long gash that ran from between his first and second knuckles to the middle of his palm.
“How the hell did this happen?” he muttered. “I was careful… so careful.”
His heart skipped a beat, and he rinsed the blood away. He breathed more deeply when he realized that although the cut was long, it wasn’t very deep.
Colin stepped into the hot shower, allowing the water to cascade over him. His thoughts went to Ryanne, of seeing her in the bed, her breasts sagging beneath the t-shirt, the landlord behind her, pulling up his underwear.
In our bed—She slept with him in our bed.
Out of spite, he tried to conjure images of the girl with the piercings, of her pale ass as he bent her over the desk, but every time he did, it continued to transform into Ryanne. Ryanne looking back at him, smiling, laughing, a cigarette dangling from her lips, but never falling.
“Come on, big boy, come on Glenn, pump me harder!”
Colin started to cry.
What have I done? What in god’s name have I done?
Everything he had done was designed to make him feel better, to give him some semblance of control. But it hadn’t worked.
And he hated himself for it.
Colin got out of the shower and quickly toweled himself off. He did so with his eyes closed, too ashamed to even glance in the mirror.
The clothes that he had been wearing were damp from the snow, and the knees of his track pants were dirty with mud. He found a plastic bag beneath the sink and shoved them inside, then he tied it up.
Throwing on a fresh tracksuit, he made his way back downstairs, trying, and once again failing, to put on a happy face.
He settled for a neutral expression.
“Colby, Juliette, what would you like for dinner?”
No answer.
Colin sighed heavily.
“Girls? Dinner? What would you like?”
Still nothing.
“I’m going to make green peppers and Brussel sprouts if you don’t answer me!”
This finally got a response.
“Pizza!” Juliette shouted.
“Burgers!” Colby followed.
“How about pasta?” Colin replied.
He took their silence as acceptance and started to fill a pot of water with water. After adding a pinch of salt and setting the burner on high, he bent down and searched the cupboard for a box of pasta.
Not immediately noticing one, he pushed several half-open cereal boxes to one side before eventually found a bag of spaghetti. It was already open, and when he went to pull it out, the noodles slid onto the floor.
“Shit,” he grumbled and started to pick them up, trying not to break the individual strands.
A loud bang from behind him caused him to jump to his feet, and he spun around.
Ryanne was standing in the middle of the kitchen, his computer bag sitting in the center of the counter. Her face was red, her hair wet, and her boots were covered in a layer of snow.
“Ryanne? What’s wrong?” he said quietly.
Does she know? Is that why she—
“I fixed your fucking computer,” she spat.
Colin felt relief wash over him, but a bleep from the cartoons in the other room reminded him that the girls were within earshot.
“Ryanne, keep it down—”
Ryanne’s eyes bulged.
“Keep it down? Fucking keep it down?” she snapped, stepping forward. “I had to walk for three miles in the snow because some asshole slashed Glenn’s tires, and all you can tell me to do is keep it down?”
She was within two feet of him now, and Colin couldn’t help but glance over at a steak knife in the drying rack.
How easy would it be? To grab a knife and…
“It’s just that the gir
ls are in the other room, they might—”
Ryanne’s eyes narrowed to slits.
“They might be what? They might figure out that their father is a no-good hack? Can’t even provide for their family because he thinks he can write fucking books?”
Colin felt his cheeks redden and he slid closer to the rack.
“I don’t want to fight, anymore, Ryanne.”
She ignored him and strode forward.
“That you make your goddamn wife walk in the snow because you can’t get a real job and get me a fucking car?”
Ryanne was right up in his face now, and he could see that her lipstick was smudged, that her hair was a mess.
“That you whored me out so that I could fix your piece of shit computer?”
Red flashed across Colin’s vision. Without thinking, he lashed out.
His fist cracked against the side of Ryanne’s jaw, sending her staggering backward.
“I didn’t make you do it!” he screamed. His voice was so shrill that he didn’t even recognize it as his own. “I didn’t make you do anything! You did this! You did this!”
Colin moved toward her and as he did, Ryanne fell to the ground, her hand reaching up to rub her jaw where he had hit her.
“You’ll be sorry,” she said, her eyes blazing. “You’re going to be so fucking sorry you did that.”
“Fuck you!” he screamed, his hands balling into fists. Any rational thought had fled him. He raised his right hand high above his head, intending to bring it crashing down, not on her jaw this time, but on the smeared lips that had so obviously been wrapped around the landlord’s cock less than an hour ago.
But a split-second before he struck her again, a small voice from his left drew his attention.
“Daddy? What are you doing daddy?”
It was Juliette. She was standing with her hands at her sides, her eyes wide. Colby was beside her, a matching expression on her face. They looked so young then, half of their seven years, if that, like baby chicks looking to their mother for sustenance.
And they were terrified.
Colin gasped and lowered his hand.
“What have I done?” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”
He grabbed his computer bag from the counter and ran toward the entrance. Even when Ryanne shouted after him, he didn’t look back.
Detective Damien Drake series Box Set 1 Page 66