When the Tiger Kills: A Cimarron/Melbourne Thriller: Book One

by Vanessa Prelatte

  Dawn finished it for him: “There's a chance that Lee is still alive.”

  Chapter 7

  Michael had hardly been able to contain himself when the girl had asked him to tell her more about Vanadis. None of the others had understood the way this one did. They had cried and argued and pleaded, refusing to acknowledge the truth. But this incarnation of his goddess – she had some glimmer of understanding. He'd been working on a sketch right then, but he'd laid it aside for the time being and responded to her question eagerly.

  “Vanadis is the Norse goddess of snow and ice. I'm descended from the Norse, the Vikings, on my father's side, you see. But I wasn't really interested in my Viking heritage until Vanadis started appearing to me. Since then, however, I've spent a lot of time researching the ancient Norse religion. Do you know anything about it?”

  Lee considered her words carefully before replying, “Not really. What I know about the Vikings comes from what I've seen in the movies or on television. Most of the time, what they show are Vikings on their ships, spending their time sailing around, invading foreign lands, raiding and pillaging.”

  She was afraid that she might have offended him by mentioning raiding and pillaging, but Michael just nodded at her. “I know - most people think that Vikings were just marauders, but that's a complete stereotype. Only a small percentage of them went raiding. Most of them were farmers or traders in their native Scandinavia. And they were a sophisticated, deeply spiritual people.”

  He frowned, then continued, “The books about the ancient Norse religion – they've got it all wrong. Most of them claim that Vanadis was just another name for Freyja. But Vanadis was actually an entirely different goddess. There was never any connection between her and Freyja."

  “Why did they get it wrong, Michael? The ones who wrote the books?”

  “There just aren't that many references to Vanadis. The so-called experts – they assumed she was another manifestation of Freyja. But they're wrong. You see, she told me so, herself.”

  A sharp finger of dread jabbed Lee in the stomach. He was even crazier, more out of touch with reality than she had originally thought. But she kept her expression bland and her tone neutral as she encouraged him to continue talking.

  “She told you so? When?”

  Michael picked up the sketch again and continued working on it as he answered, “When I was ten. I was on a hunting trip with my father and my brother. Somehow I got separated from them. I got lost, and I nearly died. But then she appeared to me – Vanadis. She was just a shadow, that first time. A glimmer, barely an outline. But her voice was strong and clear. She gave me the strength to get up and keep going. With her help, I found my way back to the campsite, the tent. Vanadis saved my life. Since then, I've devoted my life to her. And in return, she explained everything to me.”

  Lee took a deep breath so that she could keep her voice steady as she replied, “What did she explain, Michael?”

  “About my forefathers. How they were priests, dedicated to her worship. And she explained to me why her image was so faint when she first appeared to me. You see, Loki was responsible. He was her antithesis, an evil god of maleficence and fire. And he was jealous of her, jealous of her goodness, her beauty, and her great power. So he set his wolf Fenrir upon her, and the beast tore her into pieces. She couldn't, die though – she's immortal. Her spirit endured. But it's been fragmented, scattered about inside mortals all over the face of the earth.”

  Michael's face lit up with a beatific smile. “After she was sure that I understood fully, Vanadis gave me a mission. She told me how to find the scattered pieces of her spirit and reunite them. I've managed to identify several over the last few years. Since then, every time she appears to me, her image is less shadowy. It's growing stronger, more substantial. And when our work here together is done, she'll be even stronger still.”

  *****

  As Dawn and Rafe left the office of Trevor Stoss, Rafe's cell phone rang. He picked up the call, listened intently, and then replied, “Okay. We're on our way.” Turning to Dawn, he said, “Jago Bolt is back in town and already has himself a lawyer. They're waiting for us at headquarters.”

  Surprised, Dawn responded, “He had a public defender assigned to him already?”

  Rafe shook his head. “Private attorney. Which means that Mr. Bolt has a nice stash of cash set aside somewhere. Now where do you suppose someone like J.B. acquired the kind of money to do that?”

  “Oh, I don't know. But - just a guess, mind you - Monieque Torrense, perhaps?”

  “Oddly enough, the same idea had occurred to me. Come on, partner. Let's go have a little chat with good old J.B.”

  “Is the D.A.'s office sending someone down to observe?”

  “Yeah. Bob Toravo will be on hand. Just in case someone wants to play Let's Make a Deal.”

  When they entered the interview room at headquarters, J.B. and his attorney were already waiting for them. After Rafe went through the usual routine for the record, the attorney, Moss Calavon, opened by saying, “The charges against my client are ridiculous. Mr. Bolt was a good friend of the victim and had no motive to kill him. In addition, he was on a flight to Florida when the murder occurred. I demand that the charges against my client be dropped immediately.”

  Rafe leaned back in his chair and answered in an amused tone of voice, “You know, Calavon, one thing I've always admired about you is your chutzpah. With the evidence we've got against your client, he's going down for Murder One.”

  Moss Calavon shook his head. “No way. The fingerprint on the murder weapon is meaningless. According to my client, his knife was stolen from him a few weeks prior to the crime. Given those circumstances, it's no wonder that his fingerprint was found on it. You've no proof that puts the blade in his hand on the night that Cullen Torrense was killed.”

  “Your client file a police report when his knife was stolen?” When Calavon made no response, Rafe said, “Thought not. With a witness who saw J.B. enter the park with Cullen shortly before the murder and your client's fingerprint on the knife, you willing to try to sell your bullshit story to a jury? Because all that's going to get your client is a needle in his arm.”

  “There's no way the DA is going for Murder One. You can't prove premeditation.”

  “Oh, I think we can. Especially after the warrant we've filed for Monieque Torrense's bank records comes through. Did you know that she recently inquired about who gets Cullen's trust fund in the event that he died before he reached the age of 21? Or that she paid for your client's little vacation to Florida, which conveniently got him out of town just a few short hours after Cullen Torrense met his unfortunate end? And I'll bet we find that she made a large withdrawal from her account shortly before the murder.”

  Switching his attention from the attorney, Rafe looked J.B. directly in the eyes. “We've already gotten a warrant to look into your finances, J.B. What do you think we're going to find when we look for bank accounts in your name?”

  Before his lawyer could stop him, J.B. sneered and replied smugly, “You won't find anything.”

  “No? What about safety deposit boxes, then?”

  At the expression on J.B.'s face, Attorney Calavon interrupted to say, “Pause the record. I need a few moments to confer with my client in private.”

  “Be my guest.” After complying with the attorney's request to pause the record, Rafe motioned to Dawn, and the two of them strolled out of the interview room nonchalantly, where they found ADA Toravo waiting for them in the corridor.

  “I know Calavon,” Toravo said. “Like you say, he has chutzpah. He'll start off by trying to deal for Criminally Negligent Homicide, with the minimum one-year sentence. After you've stopped laughing, offer Second Degree Murder, and make it clear we'll be expecting J.B. to do the full twenty-four year sentence for a class 2 felony. Then it will be his turn to laugh, because he knows that there's no way we'll get a conviction on Monieque Torrense without J.B.'s testimony. He'll then try for a charge of
Manslaughter, again with the minimum sentence. Tell him we're not going to settle for less than Murder Two, but in exchange for his testimony against Monieque, we'll take it down to a class 3 felony, with J.B. serving the max. Calavon will make one more attempt to deal it down to Manslaughter, but I'm not going there. The most Bolt would have to serve would be six years, and I'm not letting a cold-blooded murderer get away with that.”

  “You sure he'll take the deal?”

  “With the alternative being Murder One and the death penalty? Yeah, with the evidence you've dug up, he'll take the deal.”

  The door swung open behind them, and they saw Attorney Calavon in the doorway. “Gentlemen, we're ready to resume the interview.”

  After they had gone back on the record, the negotiations followed the pattern that ADA Toravo had predicted. Once the deal had been struck, Calavon looked at his client and said, “Go ahead, J.B. Tell them everything.”

  J.B. shrugged his shoulders, and in an attempt at bravado, said, “It's no big deal. Cullen's mom invited me over to her house one day last week. She offered me a few drinks and asked me if I'd heard from Cullen lately. I told her the truth – that since Cullen got out of his last stint in rehab, he'd been avoiding me. Made me mad, too, because Cullen and I go way back. I thought we were friends, and now he's treating me as if I was a pile of garbage. Like he's too good for me or something, now that he's gotten clean. I thought Mrs. Torrense would get mad when I said that, but instead she sympathized with me. Told me Cullen had changed, and he hadn't been treating her with the respect she deserved either. In fact, maybe she'd be better off without him. Then she looked at me and said that she'd heard that I was a pretty dangerous character. Well, I had to agree with her on that. And then she got all skeptical on me. 'Oh, come on,' she said. 'How dangerous could you be? I'll bet you haven't done anything all that bad. Like you haven't killed anyone or anything like that.' I told her not to be too sure about that. When I told her that, she kind of nodded and asked me if I'd like to make some money. Well, of course I did. Then she told me that she'd pay me $20,000 to get rid of Cullen for her.”

  “Do you remember the exact date that this conversation took place, J.B.?”

  “I think it was the Thursday before I... before it all went down. Yeah, it was that Thursday, the week before. I remember because I'd just gotten back that day from a trip to Black Hawk. Thought I'd try my hand at the casinos. Didn't have much luck, though.”

  “Okay. So what happened after Mrs. Torrense offered you the $20,000?”

  “Well, I told her that it was a lot of money, but I wasn't sure I wanted to do it, what with Cullen being a friend and all. But then she reminded me about how he was treating me lately, and by the time she was done, I was mad enough to agree to off Cullen for her.”

  “How did you manage the money arrangements?”

  “Well, I told her I wanted some up front. So she gave me a thousand that night, and promised me the rest when it was done.”

  “She paid you in cash?”

  “Yeah. I wouldn't have accepted anything else. After she gave me the thousand, she told me it would be a good idea for me to get out of town for a while after it was done, and she offered to send me to Florida for a little vacation. I jumped on that offer, of course. I'd never been to Florida before. Anyway, we agreed on the date, and I told her I'd come right over to her house after Cullen was taken care of for the rest of the money.”

  “If Cullen was avoiding you, how did you get him to agree to meet with you?”

  “I texted him that I wanted to make a change, get clean like he'd done. I wanted to find out more about that rehab place he'd been in, see if it would work for me. Cullen texted me back and agreed to meet with me to talk it over.”

  Dawn spoke up then. “Why did you stab Cullen, J.B.? Why didn't you just make it look like a drug overdose?”

  “Yeah – me and Cullen's mom talked about that. It was supposed to be the way it went down. I had some stuff with me that was real high grade. Hadn't been cut at all, so it wouldn't have taken much to be lethal. I thought that there was no way that Cullen could resist it when I offered him some of the really good shit. But he did. Said if I wanted to go on being a loser, that was my choice, but he had different plans for his life. Well, when he called me a loser, I sort of snapped. I pulled out my knife and stuck him so quick that he didn't even have a chance to react. He just fell down, gasped and choked a few times, and that was that. He was dead. So I left him there and went over to his mom's house to get paid.”

  “She just handed the rest of the money over? She didn't ask for any proof?”

  “She asked me to take a picture of the body as proof.”

  “I see. Did you use your cell phone to take the picture?”

  “Yeah, but I deleted it right after I showed it to her. Then she gave me the rest of the money, and I left. I went right home, packed up, and headed for the airport.”

  “Was Mrs. Torrense upset when she found out that Cullen refused to take the drugs and you had to use another means to dispose of him?”

  A look of sly cunning crossed J.B.'s face. “I was thinking she might get upset if she found that out. She was pretty set on the fact that it had to look like a drug overdose. So I took a picture that just showed his face and his shoulders, you know? She never saw the blood or the knife.”

  After they'd concluded the interview and the attorneys were putting the final touches on the plea agreement, Dawn and Rafe headed back up to the bullpen to update the case file and work on their reports. They also called the lab and asked them to bump the analysis of J.B.'s cell phone up to top priority.

  “Dumb-ass didn't even realize that the picture could be retrieved, even if he deleted it,” Rafe commented. “I'll bet when he heard about the picture, that's when Calavon decided to fold his cards and go for a deal. Knew that we'd already gotten a warrant and would go over the cell phone with a fine tooth comb. We'd have found the photograph eventually, and there was no way around that one.”

  After they'd completed the necessary paperwork, they checked on the status of the warrant for Monieque Torrense's bank records and were pleased to find that it had been granted. The forensic accounting squad was already on the job, following the money from that end. Meanwhile, they had also dispatched a team to get the cash from the safety deposit box that J.B. had rented. Once they had it, they could dust the bills for fingerprints. Since Monieque had once worked part time at a day care center, her fingerprints were on file. With any luck, they might find a print or two on the money.

  The next step was to make some inquiries in Monieque Torrense's neighborhood, see if anyone had seen J.B. at her house on either of the dates in question. Dawn suggested that they start with Mrs. Lillipinner, the neighbor who had witnessed Cullen's last meeting with his mother.

  On the way over to the section of town where Monieque Torrense lived, Rafe commented, “You know, I've seen a lot, but it made my blood run cold when J.B. told us that Monieque asked for a picture of her son's body as proof that he was dead.”

  “Yeah, I had the same reaction,” Dawn agreed. “Like Ellanor Torrense said, you'd think that Cullen of all people would have been safe from her. But she's a narcissist, Rafe. They go through cycles of idealization and devaluation when it comes to relationships. Once Cullen grew up, stopped providing her with the kind of uncritical adoration that she craved, and became a source of disappointment to her, he lost most of his value in her eyes. In addition to that, like most narcissists, it's all about power for her. Cullen had slipped out from under her control, and she couldn't stand that. From there, it was just a step further for her to figure that she deserved better than that and scheme to find a way to turn the whole situation around to her benefit. It's not very common, mothers killing their own children, but it's happened before. Remember that woman in South Carolina who drowned her two kids because her boyfriend told her that the kids were an obstacle to their future relationship?”

  “I remember. There was
also a case in Colorado Springs not too long ago where a mother set the house on fire with her three kids inside for the insurance money. Turns out that the dad was in on it, too. I guess Monieque Torrense was cut from the same cloth.”

  Abruptly changing the subject, he said, “What's going on with Ty's friend? Any news about that?”

  Dawn nodded. “Ty sent me a text this morning to let me know that Maeve persuaded Brody to see a specialist about his leg. Knowing Maeve, I'll bet she's already scheduled an appointment and has him on his way to the doctor's office. I'd better take a moment to check for an update and let Ty know that I'll probably be working late tonight. If everything breaks just right, we might be able to haul Monieque Torrense in for a session in the box before the end of the day. Now that's something I'm looking forward to.”

  *****

  As soon as Ty pulled the car back into the garage and opened his door, Traitor jumped into his lap, barking excitedly and licking his face enthusiastically.

  “That dog's useless as a watchdog,” Brody commented from the back seat. “She's never seen me before, but she treated me like a long-lost friend when she came downstairs this morning.”

  “That's because she was hoping you'd give her a treat. I keep some down there in a cupboard over the bar. She doesn't look upon strangers as threats – only as brand new potential sources of treats. Besides, she doesn't need to be a watchdog. I've already got two of them.”

  Brody grunted as he got out of the back, and Ty, giving Traitor a final pat and setting her down on her own four feet, walked around and helped his mother out of the front passenger side. Brody had spotted the security detail following them at once. He hadn't commented, but Ty had known the moment Brody had made them. He'd talked to Brody right after the kidnapping, just before Brody had left the country, so it was no surprise to his friend that he had a security detail following him. Knowing Brody, he was probably critiquing their performance on the way to and from the doctor's office.