by Peyton Bogue
Kai turns to Richards, smiling mockingly again. “Somebody has spilled ink all over my Tehrani crime report—I mean, look at all that information that’s blacked out on this thing!” Kai says dramatically, sarcastically flipping through the file he’s still got in his hands so Richards can see it. “I’m guessing your copy is probably a lot more legible than mine is, right Richards?”
Richards crosses his arms, looking vindictive, and barely suppresses an eye roll.
Sage turns to Grayson as Kai grumbles, offering him a tentative grin. “I’ll drive us out to the cabin.”
Grayson grins at him, nodding his head, and then turns to Richards, who looks stone-faced and irritated, and says, “Hey, I get my own driver.” He chuckles. “Score.”
FIVE
The drive back over to the cabin is full of awkward silence. It takes Sage and Grayson longer to get back across town towards Prospect Park because of the morning traffic rush, and Sage idly grows more and more irritable as the cars begin to move slower in front of him.
Sage can tell that Grayson wants to strike up a conversation with him, but he still sits back, quiet, and watches the New York scenery pass by as they drive, even though they’re moving no faster than a walking nearby tourist when they turn from Washington onto Ocean Avenue. He seems to be able to sense Sage’s reluctance to talk about anything they might have in common, or anything related to Afghanistan, and continues to sit quietly in the passenger seat, silent but content.
Finally, after another ten minutes, Sage is rounding the bend again and pulling up towards the cabin.
They both step out of the car, and Sage snaps on a pair of his sunglasses as he closes the car door behind himself.
“So, Detective,” Grayson says, turning towards Sage and holding his hand up to shield his eyes from the bright sun. “Why are we back here? Did your team miss something the first time you were here?”
For a moment, Sage is taken aback. He glances at Grayson quickly, but Grayson just looks back at him with a polite yet expectant look as he waits for Sage to answer him. Sage nods a tad stiffly, replying, “Yes. Context. As the FBI was obscuring it.”
Sage grabs a pair of latex gloves from his pocket, pulling out a second pair and offering them to the agent in slight retribution.
Grayson accepts them, easily snapping them on.
“There were some things we didn’t know before. We now know that someone brought a super-gun to an expert,” Sage continues, moving from the car and walking to the side of the cabin, where the dark red blood pool is still roped off with yellow crime scene tape. “That expert was then shot by that same weapon in his kitchen and then was wrapped in a shower curtain and brought out here.”
“Where he was shot again,” Grayson fills in for him, gesturing to the blood pool in the dirt.
“But why the overkill?” Sage asks, bending down to look at the dirt again. There are multiple indentations in the dirt from where the casings were dug out amongst bits of dried flesh and blood.
“Maybe it wasn’t overkill,” Grayson says, lifting a bit of his dress pants so that he can bend down without wrinkling them. “I mean, based on the grouping of the bullets and the volume, my guess is that the suspect bisected him.”
“Bisected him?" Sage repeats, leaning back. “As in cut him in half?”
Grayson nods. “If a weapon’s cyclic rate is fast enough, and the ammunition is strong enough, it’s possible for the bullets to rip right through a person's bones and tissue. It’s a sure way to kill a man.” He stands, placing his hands in his pockets and looks down at the blood pool curiously. “But why halve a man when he’s already dead?”
Sage looks around, thinking, and spots a shed just a few feet away from them. He walks towards it, moving a strand of yellow crime scene tape out of his way, and looks at the items on the workbench.
Like the inside of the gun room, almost all of Aldridge’s tools and items are meticulously placed in order of varying size. He has wrenches, cleaning agents, more hardware tools, and scrub brushes on the workbench, all spaced accordingly and straightened, but one of the items is overturned and the box of it is ripped and damaged. Sage picks it up, turning it around, and sees a label on the slim packaging for heavy duty extra-large black trash bags.
Steven Aldridge is an incredibly meticulous organizer and seems to like to keep his work desk and bench neat and organized. He definitely wouldn’t have left this box on the table without putting it back in its normal place.
Sage holds the box up so Grayson can see, shaking it so the tubing holding the trash bags inside the package shakes, and says, “I’m thinking ease of transport. Aldridge wouldn’t have left these out like this. Maybe our killer used these to dispose of his body. A whole body wouldn’t fit inside just one of these trash bags. They’re too small. Our guy probably would have needed to bisect him so that Aldridge would fit.”
“Okay,” Grayson agrees, turning back around and walking the few paces to the blood pool before nodding back to Sage. “So, the killer pulls the shower curtain from the bathroom, wraps the body in it, and hauls the body out here, but he’s still got to move it.”
“Right,” Sage agrees, walking towards Grayson and pointing at the dirt a couple yards away. “Our techies casted forensic molds of tire tracks we found in the dirt over there, and Kai and I were able to determine that they matched the tread on a Dodge pickup truck. Maybe the killer dismembered the body with the gun, stuffed Aldridge into these trash bags, and put the bags into the bed of his truck.”
“And then got away without a trace,” Grayson finishes, nodding his head in affirmation.
Sage takes his sunglasses off, glancing at the agent and shrugging. “I’ve seen idiots like this one use garbage bags for body disposals all the time, and they almost always leak somewhere.” He moves towards the tire tracks, scanning the dirt. After a moment, he spots what he was looking for.
There, on the side of a rock, is a single large gravitational blood drop.
He grins, swinging his sunglasses in his hands and looks at Grayson. “I've got a directional blood drop over here.” The agent walks over to where Sage is standing, and Sage takes his phone out to take a picture of the evidence of the blood drop. “Looks like our suspect pulled out of here pretty quickly and started heading up the road here.” He looks back at Grayson, raising an eyebrow. “Are you up for a walk?”
Grayson just smiles politely and nods, trailing after Sage a moment later.
They lapse into silence as they walk, trailing their eyes over dirt, gravel, and greenery as they analyze the area for any more blood drops or bodily fluids.
Sage turns his head to Grayson after another pregnant pause, hesitating half a second before he asks, “Your partner’s a little young to be in the FBI, isn't he?”
Grayson laughs, kicking over a rock with one of his shiny dress shoes. “The kid’s barely twenty, but he’s as smart as a whip. He keeps me on my toes.”
“I bet,” Sage chuckles back, eyeing the underside of what looks to be a piece of scrap metal.
“Truthfully, Logan is my replacement,” Grayson continues, shrugging when Sage looks at him with a puzzled expression. “I’m training him until I can leave the New York office."
“Are you on to some bigger and better things?” Sage asks, turning his gaze back to the ground.
Grayson shrugs again. “I don’t know about better. Maybe more important, I suppose. I might be moving back to Quantico so I can help train young and hopeful recruits. My superiors haven’t been too forward with that information yet.”
Sage nods respectfully at that, looking out into the greenery of the park. It's a nice day out, and the slight breeze that drifts over the back of his neck has him inhaling deeply in appreciation.
Grayson turns to him after a few seconds, grinning behind his own pair of sunglasses he’d fished out of his suit pocket a mile back. “What about you, Detective? Do you enjoy chasing after the scum of New York City?”
Sage hums. “
It’s better than taking enemy fire around the clock, sir.” He sticks his hands in his jacket pockets a tad uncomfortably. “Civilian life hasn’t treated me too badly.”
“Are you biding your time, then, until you can move up through the ranks, Captain?” Grayson asks innocently, but Sage feels his blood run cold at hearing his former title. He has no use for that anymore.
“I’m not sure I’d want that, honestly,” Sage replies, taking a deep breath to calm his suddenly erratic heart. “The Lieutenant is perfectly capable of keeping all of us in line. Besides, I’m pretty good at what I do. Wouldn’t want to break something that doesn’t need to be fixed.”
“Yeah,” Grayson agrees. “Mikalina Sinclair isn’t someone I’d want to cross.” His gaze sweeps out over the dirt road. “So, then what do you want then, Detective?”
Sage exhales through his nose, looking over at the agent, but Grayson just gives him a friendly smile, seemingly innocuous in his growing arsenal of personal questions. Sage is quiet for a moment, before he sighs. “Right now, I want more blood drops. I haven’t seen any in the last hundred or so yards.”
“I hope the trail hasn't run dry,” Grayson says, continuing to walk forward, his eyes trained down into the dirt.
Sage looks up, squinting in the sunlight despite his eyes already being shielded from the sun, and gazes into the sky. He hears it then, and his head snaps in the direction of the squawking.
“I think you may have spoken too soon, sir,” he says, and Grayson looks at him before following Sage’s gaze into the sky, bringing his head up to mimic Sage’s position. “We’ve got crows.”
Another mile of walking later, Sage and Grayson hike up a small hill, only to be met with two bloated heavy duty trash bags.
“Steven Aldridge, I presume?” Grayson asks, kneeling down to take in the scene.
Steven Aldridge’s bloodied and bruised hand is sticking out of the top of one of the bags, and Sage pulls out his phone again to photograph it, crouching down.
There are bits of flesh stuck in the red plastic ties of the trash bags, and the bags themselves are ripped in increments, revealing bloodied and bullet hole ridden skin, and the smell of a rotting decomposing body hits Sage full on when he moves to photograph the other side of the bags. In this heat and scorching sun, Aldridge’s body isn’t going to be fun to autopsy.
Sage really does not envy Hazel right now.
“It looks like these crows found him a few hours before we did,” Sage says, pointing at the mangled arm. “Those scratches on his arm probably came from their talons.” He looks around, noticing how close they are to one of the numerous trails and bike paths that separate different areas of the park. “I’m surprised a jogger didn’t find him before we did.”
“I don’t know,” Grayson says, scanning their surroundings. “This is a pretty secluded spot.”
Sage continues, undeterred, “Good call on the bisecting.”
Grayson grins, leaning down and untying the bag that Aldridge’s bruised hand is sticking out of it. When he opens it, he moves a gloved hand inside, pulling out a broken beer bottle.
Sage photographs it. “That’s probably the beer bottle that made a water ring on the counter that our techies found in the victim’s cabin. Kai did say that our techies found evidence that Aldridge invited his killer inside, even sharing a beer with him.”
“Check this out,” Grayson says, moving the bag out of the way slightly to reveal what Sage thinks is Aldridge’s bicep, where the head of a severely scratched and altered tattoo can be seen inked onto his flesh.
“It looks like a tattoo,” Sage says, taking a picture of it as well.
“I can’t make it out, though,” the agent says. “It’s too scratched out.”
Sage leans back, glancing at Grayson. “We better call Hazel. She’ll be able to examine his body and maybe tell us what that tattoo is.” He dials her number, looking at Grayson again and offering him a tentative grin. "We may have just gotten ourselves some answers."
“For Aldridge’s sake,” Grayson replies, glancing down at the trash bags somberly, “I hope you’re right."
Hazel is ecstatic as usual when she answers his call, and she’s driving up to them and loading Aldridge’s body into the back of her coroner’s van half an hour after Sage hangs up with her. She tells Sage that she’ll call him again when she’s got some answers for him after the autopsy, but it’s going to be at least a few hours before she’ll know anything.
Sage decides that he and Grayson should head back to the precinct after they part ways with Hazel, and when they both walk through the door and make their way over to Sage’s desk, Kai is throwing pieces of popcorn up into the air and catching them in his mouth as he sits at his own desk, looking completely at ease and relaxed.
Sage snorts when he sees him, raising an eyebrow even as a teasing grin spreads over his lips. “You really are a paramount of professionality, Kai. What are you, twelve?”
Kai gives him a big grin in response, throwing his next piece of popcorn at Sage’s head.
Grayson sits in Sage’s spare chair, placing his sunglasses on top of Sage’s desk as he chuckles lightly.
“Where’s your Agent at?” Sage asks Kai, moving to sit down in his own desk chair as he shoves Kai’s bag of popcorn lightly off of his desk.
Kai chucks another piece into his mouth, nodding towards the other side of the precinct. “Getting my un-redacted file for me. We went over the ballistics report again when you two left, but no dice. You find anything useful out there?”
Sage nods, a little smug. “We found Aldridge’s body.”
Kai’s eyes bug out of his head. “You found his body? Where?”
“A few miles from the cabin. He was in trash bags,” Grayson supplies, leaning his head against his hand tiredly.
“And he was bisected,” Sage adds, leaning back and crossing his arms against his chest, chuckling when Kai’s eyes grow even bigger.
“His body was cut in half? Please tell me you took pictures,” Kai groans. “You always get to do the fun stuff on cases like these.”
“Fun?” He hears Grayson mutter confusedly, and Sage doesn’t blame him. To an outsider, Kai must come across as over enthusiastic and a little dramatic about these kinds of cases, but Sage is used to it. Kai has been like this for as long as Sage has known him.
“It’s because I’m Mikalina’s favorite,” Sage replies, reaching across his desk and pulling the Aldridge file out of his stack so he can record the new evidence that will eventually make it onto their homicide board, along with the photos he had taken at the crime scene.
“Yeah,” Kai scoffs. “You wish, man.” He shakes his popcorn bag and looks sullenly down at, what Sage guesses, the rattling un-popped kernels inside.
“Did you do anything actually productive besides looking at the ballistics report while we were gone?” Sage asks him, flicking a stray kernel onto Kai’s desk.
Kai gives him an exaggerated eye roll, crumpling up the empty bag and tossing it dramatically onto his own desk, heaving a heavy sigh. “Of course, I did, sweet cheeks. I organized your pencil cup.”
He motions to Sage’s desk, where Sage's pencil cup looks about ready to topple over at the amount of stuff bursting out of it. There’s a few pens and pencils, sure, but the cup is packed with paper clips, sticky notes, what looks like Hazel’s metal straw, and Sage thinks he can see his Army issued pick knife hidden behind Kai’s pair of bamboo chopsticks.
Sage just rolls his eyes. Grayson takes out the chopsticks, analyzing them, and then nods accepting, as if his curiosity has been satisfied, and then has to forcefully push the chopsticks back down into the pencil cup when they don’t slide back in as easily as they had when he’d pulled them out.
Kai gives Grayson an odd look, blinking at him, then shakes his head and turns to Sage. He smirks. “Rhys called earlier.”
That gets Sage’s attention, and he looks up from the Aldridge file and snaps his eyes to Kai’s. Trying to ke
ep any real panic from his voice, he asks, “He called here? To the precinct?”
Rhys always calls Sage directly, even though he doesn’t really call Sage that often when Sage is working. If Rhys has something to tell him, he normally just texts Sage or waits to talk to him in person when they meet again. He never calls to the precinct.
“Well, actually, he called me. And let me tell you—that man is such a gossip, Sage. We spent ten minutes just talking about your eyes,” Kai says, and smirks wider when Sage rolls his eyes instinctively, even as he slumps slightly in relief and feels an embarrassed flush darken his cheeks. It isn’t very professional to be discussing his personal life at work, and even less so in front of an FBI agent.
“What did he actually say?” Sage asks, glancing at Grayson. If something is wrong with Rhys, Sage is probably going to have to leave him here to rush over to Rhys's garage, and although Grayson doesn’t look like the kind of guy to hold a grudge, Sage doesn’t think he would appreciate being left alone with Kai, who he’s still eyeing warily. “Is he okay?”
“Yeah, he’s fine,” Kai replies, dropping his teasing tone and shrugging. Sage knows that Kai would never joke about something being wrong with Rhys. He knows how serious Sage gets when he thinks something is wrong with the people he cares about. “He just asked if you were alright since you weren’t answering your phone and asked where you were. He asked for you to call him whenever you have a chance.”
Sage nods, then looks at Grayson with an apologetic smile. “Will you be alright if I step out to make that call? I’ll be right back, and then we can add those photos we took to the evidence board.”
“You’re fine, Sage. Take your time,” Grayson responds, giving him another polite smile.
Sage nods his thanks, stands up and takes Kai’s crumpled popcorn bag and chucks it into the wastebasket underneath his desk with a mock look of scolding while Kai chuckles, and then proceeds to walk the hundred or so yards to the entrance of the precinct so he can step outside into the warm air.