by Blake Pierce
And without the help of Ramirez.
Still, she placed the call to Connelly before she could get too derailed. She relayed the same information she had just shared with Rose. Rose listened from her place at the kitchen counter, looking both scared and irritated at the same time. When the call was over, Rose looked at her mother in a way that reminded Avery of a look she’d gotten a lot when Rose had been thirteen or fourteen years old—that stage where her growing teenage girl had criticized everything with a permanent scowl on her face.
“So where are you going now?” she asked.
“You have to come with me, down to the A1,” Avery said. “Sawyer and Dennison just now took surveillance duties outside. They’re going to take us down to the station.”
“I thought they weren’t letting you work this case,” Rose said.
“They aren’t. I think they just feel it safer and more convenient if I’m there.”
“So why do I have to go?”
“Because Howard Randall knows where you live. And while I don’t think he’d really kill you, I think he would go to great lengths to get to me. So you can’t be alone right now.”
“This is seriously fucked, Mom.”
“I know,” Avery said. “Now come on. I’m just happy your first time in a police station is as a guest with your mother.”
***
At the precinct, she gave a slightly stretched version of what had happened to her behind Rose’s apartment. She told it in front of several men, all sitting at the conference room table: Connelly, Finley, O’Malley, Sawyer, and Dennison. Rose also sat at the table, but she was nervously plucking at the corners of her cell phone.
Avery fessed up to having snuck out that morning and then was even honest about what she had done—her trip to Harvard and the coroner’s office before her uninvited trip to the A1. Things shifted a bit in the story as she told about getting jumped by Howard. As she told it, she was reaching for her phone as she approached the back door and was assaulted from behind. She claimed that Howard pressed her hard against the wall, which she offered to back up by the bruise on her chest (they didn’t need to know it had really come from his knee while he had her pinned behind the dumpster). She then only told them fragments of what had been said. She told them that Howard had professed his innocence to both the recent killing and the brick through the window. He then told her to stay against the wall with her hands behind her head while he retreated or he’d personally kill Rose himself.
When it was all relayed, the men at the table looked around at one another. Avery could practically hear the questions forming in their heads.
It was O’Malley who asked the first one. “Did he say anything about the dummy and the warehouse?”
“Nothing. Which I found off. Maybe he didn’t know about it.”
“Bullshit,” O’Malley said.
“I don’t get it,” Connelly said. “Why would he take the risk? Why the hell would he assault you?”
“Because that’s what he does,” O’Malley said. “Because he’s violent. Because he’s a killer.”
“Those are both true,” Avery said. “But think about it. He had the chance to kill me. I don’t know if he had a gun or not, but he sure as hell got the drop on me. If he’d wanted to hurt me, he had the perfect chance. And then there’s the clue he gave me.”
“What clue?” Finley said.
“That we might be looking for a ghost—someone I can’t touch. And that it’s a ghost that might want to haunt him, too.”
“And just what in the hell is that supposed to mean?” Connelly asked.
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “When I met with him at the prison those few times, that’s how he always gave me his insights into the cases. It was always with a riddle. Something I had to work for.”
“Maybe it’s just a riddle to distract us?” Dennison offered.
“Or it could be like the warehouse and the dummy,” O’Malley said. “Maybe it’s just another way to screw with us and waste our time.”
“I don’t think so,” Avery said. “It’s not him.”
“You can keep saying that,” Connelly said. “But until you come to us with hard evidence of it, we can’t—”
“How am I supposed to when you won’t let me officially on the case?” she barked, interrupting him.
Connelly was clearly pissed and was looking for an appropriate response when the door to the conference room opened. All eyes in the room turned in that direction and saw Mayor Greenwald enter. He came strolling in as if he owned the place.
I guess he technically does, Avery thought.
Greenwald’s eyes first fell on Connelly but when he saw Avery sitting at the table, his face seemed to go three different shades of red. He slammed the door and wasted no time letting the room know how he felt.
“Did I not make myself perfectly fucking clear?” he yelled. His eyes went from Connelly to Avery and then back again. “Avery Black is not to be anywhere on this case!”
“And she isn’t,” Connelly said. He didn’t look afraid per se, but Avery could tell that he was choosing his words very carefully. It was odd to see him fall into cover-your-ass mode. “As you were informed yesterday, she has been placed under surveillance. We had to bring her into the station today because, as of about an hour ago, she was attacked behind her daughter’s apartment building.”
“By who? Was it Randall?”
“Yes,” Connelly said.
Damn, Avery thought. Things would have been a lot easier if he’d have lied about that.
“And how, exactly, did this miscreant get the best of what I’m told is the best detective in the A1?”
His scowl and rage was turned in Avery’s direction now. And as he leered at her, Avery simply could not contain herself. Every ounce of fear and frustration she had felt in the last two days, tied in with the unresolved grief over Ramirez, came pushing to the surface like an erupting volcano.
“That’s because you’ve insisted that you know better than the police,” she said. “He got the jump on me because rather than being out there on the streets trying to find your interfering ass some answers, you’ve chained me like a dog to a post. So I’m a little off my game. A little distracted.”
“If you don’t watch your tone with me, I’ll use your badge as a fucking paperweight,” Greenwald said. “Do you understand?”
“A paperweight for what?” she asked. “It seems to me that you’re too busy meddling in cases you know jack shit about rather than doing any real work. For starters, why not see what’s going on with your prisons? How did someone like Howard Randall escape, anyway?”
Greenwald looked both shocked and surprised. The rage was swept aside, as he was not used to people talking to him in such a way. As he fumbled for words and the rest of the room went quiet with anticipation of a meltdown, Avery felt her phone buzz in her pocket.
She snuck a glance at it, sure it would infuriate Mayor Greenwald even more.
It was the hospital calling.
Ramirez.
She got to her feet and nearly had to nudge past the mayor to reach the door.
“And where in the hell do you think you’re going?” the mayor asked.
She ignored him completely, looking over his shoulder toward Connelly and O’Malley. “It’s the hospital,” she said, swallowing down the fear in her voice.
Connelly nodded and said, “Go. Dennison and Sawyer, can you escort her?”
“And Rose, too,” Avery said.
She started for the door, Rose also getting up as Dennison and Sawyer followed. Mayor Greenwald could only watch in confusion, taken off guard by things obviously not going the way he had planned.
On the way out, Avery heard him continue to yell but it was nothing she cared about. She was too busy answering the call from the hospital. Behind her, Greenwald’s yelling was no more than distant thunder, groaning and complaining in the distance.
But letting her know, all the same, that there was lik
ely a storm on the way.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Avery hadn’t even had to ask Rose to stay behind for a moment when they reached the fourth floor. Without a word, Rose detoured toward the waiting room with Dennison and Sawyer and Avery made a near-sprint toward Ramirez’s room. As she neared his door, the brief conversation she’d had with the doctor swirled through her head like a breeze.
He’s conscious. He’s responding to basic stimuli and the only thing he’s said is that he wants to see you. I let him know you’d been here for nearly two weeks but got called away. He thought that was funny. I think you should come see him as soon as possible.
That conversation had taken place exactly seventeen minutes ago. Sawyer had driven with the sirens on and ran every red light on the way. And now here she was, angling up to Ramirez’s door. When she stepped inside, she had no idea why her eyes started to well up but they did. And she didn’t bother wiping the tears away.
He saw her right away. He craned his neck lightly in order to see her but it was clear that it was taking quite a bit of effort. She rushed to the side of the bed and was amazed to see how much more alive he was now, simply because his eyes were open.
“Hey,” he said, his voice slightly above a whisper.
“Hey yourself,” she said, taking his hand. “Are you okay?”
“Feel a little funny. Groggy. Doc says things look good. A little slow in the thinking department.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you woke up,” she said. “I was out on—”
“Don’t. Doc told me you’d been here almost all day for about thirteen days straight. That was silly. Why?”
Because a nurse found the ring, she thought. But instead, she tried to be funny, although it came out flat. “Nothing better to do, I guess.”
Now she finally did allow herself to wipe away some of her tears. They were still coming, though stemming off a bit.
“So what…are you working on now?” he asked.
“I’m not going to talk about that right now,” she said, though a part of her badly wanted to. But, of course, not right now. Not after he’d been in something extremely close to a coma for two weeks.
“It’d be more entertaining than what I’ve been doing for the last two weeks.” He chuckled at his own joke and it was clear that it hurt him a bit.
“Can I get you anything?” she asked.
“Some ice, maybe.”
“Yeah, I can do th—”
“And a little kiss,” he said. “I apologize beforehand about my breath, though.”
She gave it to him, gladly. She kissed the corner of his mouth and thought she could feel him trying to return it, but was apparently just too weak.
With the kiss broken, she exited the room and went to the small nurses’ station at the other end of the hall. She retrieved a small cup of ice and took it back to his room. In the minute or so it had taken her to get it, though, Ramirez had fallen asleep.
Her heart dropped, fearing that he had fallen back into his comatose state. But as she neared the bed, she could tell that he was in a natural sleep. She wasn’t sure how she could tell, but the vague difference in the way his face looked—more natural and relaxed—was enough to set her mind at ease.
She pulled up the chair she had used so much over the last two weeks and simply watched him for a moment. She knew there were things that she needed to tend to very soon but she figured those things could wait for ten minutes or so.
For now, she was going to watch Ramirez. He was alive; he had pulled through.
Everything was suddenly different and she wasn’t sure if that was a good or bad thing.
***
After clearing it with Connelly over the phone, Avery had asked that Rose be escorted back to Ramirez’s apartment by Sawyer and Dennison. Connelly had agreed, but only if Avery called for an escort whenever she decided to leave the hospital. Rose left willingly enough, but seemed a little misplaced and still unsettled. Avery honestly didn’t like the idea of being separated from her but didn’t know what else to do. She figured she could talk to Ramirez about it and he’d understand if she left tomorrow morning.
The evening wound into night as doctors and nurses came in and out of the room. With each visit, there seemed to be more good news. The doctors were quick to say that Ramirez would have a relatively lengthy road of recovery ahead of him, but that all signs indicated that he was out of the woods. Early predictions had him leaving the hospital in as soon as a week.
He drifted off twice more, but each time was brief. It wasn’t until around ten o’clock or so, when Avery was wired on crappy hospital coffee and the fact that Ramirez was with her again, that he asked her about work again.
“Two weeks stranded in a hospital room with me,” he said. “Connelly allowed that?”
Already, his voice was a little stronger, his eyes brighter. “Yeah.”
“But like right now, are you on a case?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Isn’t it always?”
“Yes, that’s true. But…well, something happened after your injury.”
She took a deep breath, realizing that Ramirez had no idea that Howard Randall had escaped. She spent the next fifteen minutes catching him up, telling him about Howard’s escape, Kirsten Grierson’s murder, the cat through the window, the dummy in the warehouse, and Howard jumping her. She even threw in the part where she had told off Mayor Greenwald in front of Connelly and O’Malley, if for no other reason than to get a smile out of him.
“You sure Randall won’t come for you?” Ramirez asked.
“He had his chance,” she said. “If he wanted me dead, I’d be dead.”
“That’s a grim thought,” he said, taking her hand and giving it a squeeze.
They sat in silence for a moment and Avery thought he might be on the verge of slipping into sleep again. Instead, he spoke up, saying something that made her think his thought process might not be as sluggish as he had claimed earlier in the day.
“You know,” he said. “The whole nail gun thing on this poor girl. It reminds me of something. Some case from way back when.”
“Yeah? What case is that?”
“I barely remember it. I was a young annoying street cop at the time. Maybe a year under my belt. Long before you came on and graced us with your presence.”
“What do you remember?” she asked. She then thought better of it and added: “But don’t think too hard. We still don’t know how it’ll affect you.”
“No, I think it’s okay. From what I can remember, there was….some weirdo. Killing women in these really grotesque ways. Choked one with barbed wire. Drove a railroad spike through one’s head. Supposedly nailed some mob guy to a barn. He was…”
Avery’s blood went cold. “Oh my God,” she said, barely in a whisper.
“What?” Ramirez asked.
“I know who you’re talking about. Ronald Biel. I represented him when I was an attorney.”
“You what?”
The words froze in her throat as the details of the case came back.
Ronald Biel, a man who became one of the mob’s most feared enforcers—so feared that they eventually cut him loose, and he had not taken it well, going on a killing spree of epic proportions. She’d represented him in court and he had ended up in prison. It had been her fault, working sloppily…on purpose.
“I represented him,” she said, starting to feel sick. “It was the only case I ever took on as an attorney that I purposefully lost. I represented him terribly. On purpose. He was guilty. A mob guy that just sort of went off the deep end. He all but told me he’d done it, but the evidence against him was flimsy. But he was guilty. I knew it. But the lack of evidence and a contaminated crime scene fucked it all up. He would have gotten off with just a minor sentence. But I wanted him to go to jail…”
“Well, then I guess that’s that. If he’s in prison, he’s not our killer.”
“I guess not,” she said. “But…in the
end, he wasn’t charged for the murders. Just collusion and knowledge of the murders.”
“How long did he get?” Ramirez asked.
“I don’t remember. I’d have to look back through my case files.”
“You still have case files from when you were an attorney?”
She nodded, but her mind was elsewhere. She was thinking of Howard Randall’s riddle. A ghost…someone you can’t touch.
“Might be worth looking into,” Ramirez said. His voice was soft again, almost dreamlike. A quick look at his face told her that he was falling asleep again—something the doctor told her he might do quite a bit over the next day or so.
Avery positioned her chair, propping a pillow in the right corner of it, and did her best to get comfortable. It was just after eleven when she closed her eyes and attempted to go to sleep.
But there was a ghost haunting her. A ghost from her past.
A ghost…someone you can’t touch.
A ghost that might like to haunt me as well…
Howard’s voice kept echoing in her head as images of Ronald Biel came to the forefront of her mind.
She recalled Biel well enough. She rarely thought of him, though. After a while all of the demented people she met in her line of work—in both lines of work to this point in her life, in fact—started to blur together. She’s lumped Biel in with so many other maniacs she had helped put away as an attorney and detective. The man had one of those faces that seemed like it was made for documentaries about the criminally insane. A former mob enforcer with a penchant for gruesome crimes and breaking people’s will at any cost. When he had been told that his spree of murders had been all connected, starting at a dingy dock along the Boston Port, Biel had taken to whistling the refrain from “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.”
He’d done it over and over again as a way to taunt Avery as day after day went by and the prosecution failed to come up with any evidence of his crimes. He’d whistle it and give her this creepy smile that seemed to say: You and I, we’re going to win this fucking thing…