“Copy that,” Stewart said.
Bernadette turned away from the security officers and walked out the back of the room, still on the phone with Stewart. “I think we got a killer on our hands, Stewart.”
“Copy that,” Stewart responded.
Bernadette disconnected her phone. “Damn it,” Bernadette said as she went back up the ward. If she’d acted sooner, she would have had the suspect. She hesitated. What the hell was she thinking?
Her cell phone rang; it was Durham. “What’s going on?” Durham asked.
“A suspect tried to get to Dominic with a syringe. She fled and we’re searching for her in the hospital,” Bernadette said.
“I’ll send all possible units and all the detectives in the area.”
“Good, tell them to be careful. I saw a look in that woman’s eyes. She looked deadly.”
11
Corporal Jelenick arrived at the hospital and was instructed by Detective Sawchuck to go with him to check the hospital’s basement. With her gun drawn, she walked through the doors with Sawchuck that led to the morgue.
They stopped in front of the morgue. It was locked.
Jelenick called on her radio, “Dispatch, we’re in front of the door to the morgue. It’s locked. Can you ask hospital security if it’s supposed to be locked?”
Sawchuck stood beside Jellenick. “You think someone locked it from inside?”
Jelenick shrugged. “Damned if I know, but a hell of place to hide out in.”
Sawchuck nodded. “I hope it’s supposed to be locked. I hate going in there.”
“They’re all dead, Sawchuck, what’s your problem?”
“Corpses give me the creeps,” Sawchuck said.
Dispatch came over the radio, “Hospital security says it’s supposed to be locked at all times, the entry code is one niner seven zero.”
Sawchuck holstered his gun. “There you go. It’s supposed to be locked. We can leave.”
“Yeah, but what if the suspect forced someone to let her in?”
“Aw Christ, Constable, you watch too many episodes of that Nine One One show. You know it’s all crap.”
“Humor me, Detective. Or does that mean you’re too scared to enter…the house of the dead?” Jellenick said raising her eyebrows and making her eyes wide.
“Aw, bullshit,” Sawchuck said as he punched the keypad and walked inside.
Jellenick got on the radio and told dispatch they were entering the morgue.
The place was dark, but for one light shining from an office in the back. Rows upon rows of stretchers lined the hallway. Their rubber-soled shoes squeaked on the floor as they walked.
With guns and flashlights drawn, they walked through the long room with Sawchuck leading.
“You see any light switches?” Sawchuck asked.
“Why’d you need light? I thought you didn’t want to see the dead. You’re not afraid they’ll come creeping up on you, Sawchuck?”
“Ha, you should be a comedian. I’d like to clear this room and get the hell out here. The smell is enough to knock a skunk off a gut wagon.”
“That’s just formaldehyde, Sawchuck, the dead are very sanitary.” Jellenick said, sweeping her gun with her flashlight attached left and right.
“All I know is this is going to put me off my lunch—wait, what the hell’s that?” Sawchuck said. He shone his flashlight to a corner. A pair of legs stuck out from underneath a stretcher.
They approached slowly, sweeping their weapons left and right as they did.
As they came closer, they saw the body of a man in coveralls. He lay face down with his hands spread out. Blood flowed from his neck.
“Damn it, I knew it. The suspect is here,” Jellenick said. She reached for her radio, dropping her gun to her side.
She didn’t see the metal object come hurtling at her. She felt it hit her head—she blacked out.
Sawchuck whirled his gun and flashlight to the right. A figure was already in the air coming at him. He fired one shot, screaming as something sharp entered his neck. Falling forward, he pushed the emergency button on his radio.
Bernadette heard the emergency beacon from Stewart’s radio that was beside her. “Where’s that coming from?”
“The morgue,” Stewart yelled as he started down the hallway. “All units, all officers, the morgue, now. Officers in trouble.”
Bernadette ran behind Stewart, as he hit the fire door to the stairs with all his force. The door swung open, banging into the concrete sidewall.
They pounded down the stairs. Two other officers joined them. No one talked; they ran taking the stairs two by two, grabbing the side rails to keep from falling.
The only sound was their feet pounding the stairs and their breathing. Stewart hit the bottom floor pounding the exit door open. The others were right behind. They drew their weapons as they reached the morgue.
A female constable named Kendal Jenner was on the ground on top of Sawchuck, she’d placed a towel over his neck to stop the bleeding. His eyes were rolling back into his head.
“Sawchuck, can you hear me?” Bernadette yelled. “Hang in, we got medics everywhere. You’ll be fine. Hang on!”
“Where the fuck is the medic?” Bernadette screamed.
Two men with a stretcher came running in. They pushed the officers aside and took over. One put on an oxygen mask, the other inserted an IV and started wrapping Sawchuck’s neck.
Stewart stood beside Bernadette and pulled her up. “You okay, Detective?”
“No, I’m not okay.” Bernadette said quietly. “If I’d stopped that bitch none of this would have happened. This is all on me, Constable. This is all on me.”
12
Bernadette didn’t get home until midnight. She’d filed reports at the station, gone back to the hospital to sit in the waiting room with some of the other detectives and officers, and somehow had eaten a sandwich and drank a coke. She wasn’t sure what time that was. It seemed to happen in a vacuum of grief as the police waited to see if Sawchuck would be okay.
By eleven thirty that night, the doctors said Sawchuck was stable. He’d lost a lot of blood but the scalpel the assailant had used had missed his major artery.
Corporal Jellinick had a concussion and was being kept overnight for observation. Some of the officers went to a pub for a quick nightcap to relieve their stress with alcohol. As much as Bernadette wanted to join them, she thought of Chris and her new houseguest. Uncle Cahal.
She drove into the garage and parked the Jeep. There was no sound from the dog; he must have given up waiting for her. She entered the house as quietly as possible and headed for the bedroom. The light was on.
Chris was sitting up in bed with his t-shirt on, reading a book.
“Hey, honey, you didn’t have to stay up for me.”
“I heard you had a shit show today. Is everyone okay?”
Bernadette took off her shirt and wiggled out of her pants. “Yeah, Sawchuck is out of the woods. Jellinick’s going to have a hell of a headache and our perp escaped with help from yours truly.”
“You want to take a shower? I’ll get you a scotch and we can talk about it.” Chris said.
“Sounds good,” Bernadette said. She went into their ensuite bathroom, threw her bra and panties onto the floor and stepped into the shower. She made the water as hot as she could stand it and got in. She found a pleasant-smelling soap and lathered herself up until she looked like she’d been through the soap cycle of the carwash, then rinsed off.
When she walked out of the shower in her bathrobe with clouds of steam following her, Chris had a small tray on the bed with a glass of Scotch and some salted almonds.
Bernadette sat on the bed and sipped her scotch. “Thanks, I needed that.” She looked at Chris and stroked his cheek. “Sorry, I should have called you today to give you an update and see how you’re doing with the ersatz uncle I’ve had dumped on us.”
Chris moved beside her on the bed, pulled her bathrobe off her shoulde
rs and began to massage her neck and shoulders.
“No worries, I got a call from Evanston. She gave me an update on what happened. I knew you’d be wrapped up tight for the day. I took your uncle shopping to get some clothes; bought him lunch at our local diner and then got him a six-pack of Guinness. We had a nice chat by the fire while he regaled me with stories of Ireland, and I made him my famous chicken with dumpling stew, and he went to bed early.”
“So, you think he’s the real thing?” Bernadette asked, putting her hand on Chris’s and lifting her head to the side.
“I may not be as good a judge of character as you, but he seems real enough.”
“Why do you think I’m a better judge of character than you?”
“Because you agreed to marry me,” Chris said with a chuckle.
Bernadette pulled his hand across her chest and hugged him, pulling him close to her.
“You’ve had a hell of tough day my girl. You need to get some sleep,” Chris said.
“What, you’re not going to seduce me?” Bernadette asked, kissing his arm.
“Only if you want me to. I’d thought you’d be too tired.”
Bernadette chuckled, putting her scotch down. “You know me, always ready. But maybe I’ll just grab a few moments of shuteye. Then I’ll ravage you.”
“Whatever you say, sweetie,” Chris said, massaging her shoulders.
She snuggled down and in seconds she was fast asleep. She slept soundly for three hours, and then woke with a start at three in the morning.
She’d seen the nurse in her dreams. Seen the blood on Sawchuck, the blood on the dead hospital worker in the morgue
The thought that nagged at her, that kept coming at her was what if she’d stopped that nurse? What the hell had happened to her intuition? She’d made the connection—the nurse wasn’t real. She should have stood her ground, protected Father Dominic, but she hadn’t acted fast enough. The nurse had escaped.
She’d written it all down in her report and given it Chief Durham. To her, she should be fired or reprimanded.
Durham had said, “We can’t second guess everything we do, Callahan. You did a hell of job of stopping her from killing the priest. We found the syringe in a bin; it was full of enough barbiturates to kill him in a second. You alerted everyone to her presence. The rest is just shit that happens in our line of work. You’ve got a tough skin. Use it.”
Bernadette went over Durham’s words in her mind. A beam of moonlight came through the window. Her arm was outside the covers. She ran her hand over her arm, wondering just how tough her skin would have to be to survive her line of work. Sometime, just before her alarm went off, she fell asleep.
13
Belfast, 10 a.m
The bank had just opened at half past nine, an old man joked with a teller at the counter as she stamped a piece of paper for him. Three other tellers were at the counters, only one looked up to see the man who entered.
He was dressed in a gray raincoat with a large brim fedora on his head. His glasses were black rimmed with a tint. Though he looked like a man in his sixties he moved quickly as he made his way to the automatic cash machines and pulled out a sheaf of papers.
The tellers lost interest in the man and went about their business. It was Friday, the rush of customers would be in soon, and they needed to be ready.
The man shuffled his papers, dropped some refuse in the bin by the auto tellers, and walked away. He raised his umbrella as he left the building, although it was only sprinkling a few drops of rain.
He walked two blocks down the street, found a deserted lane and took out a cellphone. He dialed 999, the emergency number.
“What’s your emergency?” the operator asked.
“This is the Real IRA, there’s a bomb in the Bank of Ireland on College Green. You’ve got twelve minutes. Don’t be tardy now,” the man said into the phone.
The operator patched through to the police who notified the bomb disposal.
Bank security staff had the bank emptied in six minutes and the police arrived in eight.
As the bomb disposal unit arrived, they knew they had no chance. A twelve-minute warning was enough time to vacate the building. Two of the bomb techs stood side by side. They’d jumped from the truck and thrown their gear on but waited behind the safety of their armored vehicle.
“What do you reckon, Seamus,” the bomb tech named Steven asked.
Seamus peered around the corner of the vehicle and looked at this watch. “If it’s a timer, it’s about to go off in five seconds from now, but if this is a remote, he could be waiting for us to go inside before he lights it up.”
“But the caller said the real IRA,” Steven said. “I thought all those bastards were dead or in jail.”
“Aye, I thought the same thing. My father told me stories of diffusing bombs they’d left, sometimes they were on the money as to timing and other times, they left false information to cause more destruction,” Seamus said. He looked at his watch again, “Counting, five, four, three, two…” The silence was torn with an explosion.
A Belfast Constable walked over to the bomb techs. “Well, there you go, you found your bomb. Now if you’d have gone in there you could have diffused it.”
Seamus looked at the constable, he was a young man in his twenties, his name badge said O’Rourke. “We got here only three minutes ago. That may be enough time for you to give your wife a proper shagging but not enough time to locate a bomb that you’ve no idea where it is in a building this size and diffuse it.”
Constable O’Rourke’s face went red and he backed away. “Right then, I’ll leave you lads to it.”
The man in the raincoat and fedora heard the blast from two blocks away. There was no need to go and see it; they’d already have an all-points bulletin out for him. He threw his disposable phone down a gutter and changed his clothes. He no longer looked the same. Gone was the old man, a now hip-looking university student walked down the street in search of a coffee shop. He had fired off the first salvo, there would be many more to come by the end of the day.
14
Bernadette thought of a quick run that morning, even though she’d slept little, but her running gear was in the spare bedroom, the one they’d given to Cahal. She poured herself a coffee and briefly glanced over the news on her cellphone. Something was happening in Ireland. Some kind of bombing; she couldn’t get into the full context of the story as she had too much to think about here.
Her dog Sprocket had spent the night outside Cahal’s door, as if he was guarding it. He looked at her with those big searching eyes wondering why they weren’t off on their usual run together.
“Sorry, buddy,” Bernadette said, scratching his ears and running her hand over his big head. “Chris will take you for a run later, then I’ll have Harvey take you out for a walk. You’ll like that.”
At the mention of Harvey, their next-door neighbor, Sprocket let out an agreeable woof. Harvey Mawer was in his mid-seventies, retired several times from working in the oil industry and the best neighbor Bernadette had ever had.
When she’d moved in several years ago, Harvey had taken to shoveling her snow in the winter and mowing her lawn in the summer. He told her he needed something to do and didn’t mind the exercise. Before Chris came on the scene, Harvey would have both Bernadette and Sprocket over for dinner, claiming he had made too much food and wouldn’t mind the company.
Harvey took to Chris easily. When Chris couldn’t find work when he first moved in with Bernadette, he took him out to his local fishing spot where they spent hours shooting the breeze, as they called it, and catching fish.
Now, they had Harvey over for dinner, as Chris was one hell of a cook. Harvey was like the uncle she never had. She’d send him a text later and Harvey would pick up Sprocket take him to the park and go for a walk. What they all knew about Harvey’s walks with Sprocket is he used the good-looking German Shepherd to meet women. Harvey now had a collection of gray-haired ladies with poodles
and dachshunds who called him regularly.
One day Chris put the relationship of Harvey and Sprocket into words:, “I think Sprocket has become Harvey’s pimp.”
They both agreed but decided not to say anything to Harvey, lest he be offended or know they were on to him.
The guest bedroom door opened and Cahal Callahan stepped out. Sprocket turned; he made a low growl as his ears went back.
“Easy boy,” Bernadette said. She rubbed the side of his head and placed her hand on his collar in case he made an unexpected lunge at Cahal. The dog was a drop out from police dog school. Too much attitude, they’d said. He was showing it now.
“Ah, good to see you Bernadette,” Cahal said as he walked towards the kitchen table. He made sure not to make eye contact with dog. He knew that would only aggravate him further.
“Would you like some coffee?” Bernadette asked. She motioned to the kitchen counter while holding Sprocket.
“Splendid, I’ll get it,” Cahal said as he walked past the dog.
Cahal poured himself a coffee and seated himself on the far side of the table, away from the growling dog.
Bernadette bent down and looked Sprocket in the eyes. “That’s enough now. You’ve registered your opinion of our guest. He gets it. Now, keep your comments to yourself. You hear me?”
The dog’s ears went down. He realized he’d crossed Bernadette’s line of tolerance with his behavior. He lay down on the floor at her feet.
“That’s quite the animal you have there. He hasn’t quite taken to me yet,” Cahal said.
Bernadette took a sip of her coffee. “The feeling is mutual. He tends to monitor my mood.”
“Aw, I see,” Cahal said. “We’ll just have to change that won’t we?”
Bernadette looked at her watch. “It’s eight a.m. I have a double homicide and killer on the loose. I’d love to catch up with all the family news of the relatives who dropped my family like a stone once my Irish dad married my native Cree mom. I’m sure you have some rousing anecdotes to share, but right now, I think I need to make tracks.”
Deadly Ancestors: A Bernadette Callahan Mystery (Bernadette Callahan Detective Series Book 5) Page 7