The Damage Done

by P J Parrish

  PRAISE FOR THE DAMAGE DONE

  "The past and the present come into stunning focus in this brilliantly crafted thriller. You’ll love every fast-paced minute spent with Michigan cold case detective Louis Kincaid, as he lifts the lid off a series of horrific unsolved murders and finds himself forced to confront their present-day legacies. Relentlessly plotted, yet filled with poignant family emotion, THE DAMAGE DONE will grip you from start to finish."

  -- Jeffery Deaver, #1 International bestselling author of THE CUTTING EDGE.

  "Welcome to the Michigan State Police Special Investigations Unit, where cold cases turn red hot and Louis Kincaid finds a disturbing new home for his skills, his compassion, and his relentless obsession with rendering justice. THE DAMAGE DONE is a gritty thriller with a high-octane pace and a beautifully evoked sense of place.”

  — C.J. Box, #1 New York Times bestselling author of THE DISAPPEARED.

  “For the last decade and a half, P.J. Parrish has delivered one fine thriller after another featuring the complex and compelling Louis Kincaid. THE DAMAGE DONE is no exception. With a pace that never flags, dialogue that pops like a string of firecrackers, and a cast of characters so intriguing you can’t look away, this newest Kincaid novel highlights the mastery of a writing team at the top of their game."

  —William Kent Kruger, New York Times bestselling author of DESOLATION MOUNTAIN.

  PRAISE FOR PJ PARRISH

  “Tense, thrilling...you're going to bite your nails.” — Lee Child

  “The kind of book that grabs you and won't let go. I absolutely loved it. nobody is writing better private eye fiction anywhere than PJ Parrish.” — Steve Hamilton

  “Powerful stuff...the quiet sadness that underpins it all really got to me, the way Ross Macdonald does. Among my favorite Florida crime writers are Charles Willeford, John D. MacDonald and Ed McBain. I'll have to add PJ Parrish.” —Ed Gorman, Mystery Scene.

  “A stunner of a book. Amazingly skilled at creating a sense of place, PJ Parrish stays true to her characters. I can't wait to see Louis's growth as he learns more about the world.” —Romantic Times.

  “A gripping atmospheric novel. The author's ability to raise goose bumps puts her in the front rank of thriller writers.” —Publishers Weekly

  “A wonderfully tense and atmospheric novel. Keeps the reader guessing until the end.” —Miami Herald

  “A standout thriller. An atmospheric story set on the grounds of an abandoned insane asylum, a haunting location that contains many dark and barbarous secrets. With fresh characters and plot, a suspense novel of the highest order.” — Chicago Sun-Times

  “Opens like a hurricane and blows you away through the final page. It's a major league thriller that is hard to stop reading.”— Robert B. Parker

  “A complex, sophisticated mystery, a can't-put-down book that absorbed me as much as ‘The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.’” —Triage, robertagateley.com

  "Easily one of the best crime novels of the year. Parrish deftly maintains the pace throughout this highly entertaining mystery. There are many unexpected plot twists and surprises, including a memorable, jaw-dropping conclusion." —Ray Walsh, Lansing State Journal.

  THE DAMAGE DONE

  PJ PARRISH

  Our Noir Publishing

  TRAVERSE CITY, MICHIGAN

  Copyright © 2018 by PJ Parrish

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher, addressed “Attention: Permissions Coordinator,” at the address below.

  www.pjparrish.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Ordering Information:

  This title is available to bookstores, libraries and other outlets at the standard wholesale discounts. If you have any trouble ordering, please contact Our Noir or the author at the website address listed above.

  The Damage Done

  ISBN 978-1-7320867-4-6

  I came to explore the wreck.

  The words are purposes.

  The words are maps.

  I came to see the damage that was done

  and the treasures that prevail.

  -- Adrienne Rich, Diving Into the Wreck

  TO ALL OUR FRIENDS IN THE MITTEN

  Chapter one

  Something was wrong. This wasn’t where he was supposed to be.

  Louis Kincaid leaned forward and peered out the windshield. The gray stone building in front of him went in and out of focus with each sweep of the wipers, appearing and disappearing in the rain like a medieval castle on some lost Scottish moor.

  But it was just an abandoned church, sitting in a weedy lot in a rundown neighborhood in Lansing, Michigan. Louis picked up the piece of paper on which he had scribbled the directions. It was the right address, but this couldn’t be the place where he had come to start his life over again.

  He rested his hands on the steering wheel and stared at the church. A car went by slowly and pulled up to the curb, parking in front of him, maybe fifteen feet away. Louis sat up, alert. It was a black Crown Vic with tinted windows and a small antenna mounted on the trunk. But it was the plate that gave it away—three letters and three numbers, just like all Michigan plates, but this one had an X in the middle.

  An unmarked cop car. The driver didn’t get out. But he didn’t have to. Louis knew who it was.

  It was the devil himself.

  As Louis waited for the man to emerge, all the doubts that had chewed on him for the last three days, piling up during the thirteen-hundred-mile drive up from Florida, were now pushing to the front of his brain, coalescing into one big question: was this a mistake?

  He had a sure thing going back in Florida, a new start wearing a deputy’s badge again. But this . . . this was the promise of something so much grander, to be on the ground floor of an elite new homicide task force. And to be back in Michigan near his daughter Lily and his lover Joe.

  But at what price?

  The door of the Crown Vic opened and the man got out. He pulled up the collar of his windbreaker and reached in the back for a small cardboard box. Louis sat forward to get a good look at his face. He hadn’t seen the man since that day back in 1985 when he had vowed that Louis would never work as a cop again in Michigan.

  Six years had gone by since. Six long years spent in exile.

  But now Louis was back. And the same man who had taken his life away was now offering him a chance at a new one.

  Mark Steele hurried up the walk and unlocked the church’s front door. It wasn’t until Steele disappeared inside that Louis sat back in the seat. For a long time he sat there, then he finally pulled the keys from the ignition.

  There was no point in sitting here any longer. The bargain had been made. It was time to face him. Louis got out of the Mustang, jogged through the rain to the wooden doors of the church and slipped quietly inside.

  The church was empty, emptied of almost everything that told of its true function. The pews were stacked like old cordwood in a corner. There was a shadow on the floor where the stone baptismal fountain once stood. The faint outline of a large crucifix was visible above the altar. A cold wind swirled around him. but he couldn’t tell where it
was coming from. Then he looked up and saw a broken pane in the large stained glass window behind the altar.

  But he didn’t see Mark Steele.

  Louis moved slowly through the nave, his eyes wandering up over the dark wood beams, the ornate pendant lamps, and finally down to the dark carved paneling scarred with graffiti.

  What had happened to this place? How had it come to be left to ruin? Why had they given him the address of an old church instead of the task force’s new headquarters? And what was Steele doing here?

  Whooooooo...ahhhh.

  His eyes shot upward. What the hell?

  The sound came again, deep and mournful, floating on the cold air from somewhere on high.

  He saw the source. Up in the choir balcony above the entrance. Just the wind moving through the old pipes of the organ.

  Louis scanned the shadowed corners but there was no sign of Steele. Louis decided to wait and looked around for somewhere to sit, but the only thing he saw was an old low-slung slat-backed chair up on the altar. He mounted the four carpeted steps, unzipped his parka and sat down, rubbing his eyes. He had driven almost straight through from Fort Myers, the backseat of his Mustang packed with his suitcases, boxes and Issy wailing in a cat carrier. A driving April rain had found him in Ohio and had stayed with him all the way here to the state capital.

  Louis leaned his head back and closed his eyes. The soft wail of the wind in the organ came and went, lulling him. He wasn’t sure how long he stayed like that, but suddenly the air around him changed—the cold displaced with something warmer. He opened his eyes.

  Mark Steele was standing at the foot of the altar.

  “You’re supposed to kneel,” Steele said.

  “Excuse me?” Louis said.

  Steele nodded at the wooden chair Louis was sitting in. “That’s not a chair, it’s a prie-dieu. You’re supposed to kneel on it, not sit.”

  Louis rose, his eyes locked on Steele.

  The man hadn’t changed in six years. Except for the clothes. The last time Louis had seen Steele, he had been all starched white shirt, black suit and clean iron jaw. Now he was wearing jeans, a blue state police windbreaker and a day’s growth of whiskers.

  It struck him again how odd it was that Steele had offered him this job without even one in-person interview. The first phone call had come out of the blue on a breezy Florida day a few months ago, from a woman with a velvety voice. She identified herself only as Camille Gaudaire, Mark Steele’s personal aide, and said Steele was offering him the chance to be part of a five-man elite homicide squad working for the state of Michigan.

  He had one day to decide.

  Louis had spent the next few hours walking on the beach, trying to work past his shock, telling himself that this must be some kind of joke, or worse, some kind of weird Karmic trap. His gut still churned with anger at Mark Steele, but his heart ached for a chance to be closer to the woman he loved and the daughter he needed to know—and to wear the badge he so desperately missed. In the end, he knew this was his best chance to get back to Michigan, and by sundown, he had called Camille back to accept.

  Louis came down the steps. There were a dozen things he wanted to ask Steele, hard questions about their volatile past and what appeared to be a chancy future, but instead he found himself extending his hand.

  “Thank you for this opportunity,” Louis said.

  Steele held Louis’s eyes for a second then shook his hand. “Don’t thank me yet,” he said. “This type of unit is new to the state. Things are still in flux. There’s a chance this job may not turn out to be what you hope it is.”

  Louis stared at him.

  “It may not turn out to be what I hope it is,” Steele added. He moved away, his eyes wandering up over the beams and down to the scarred paneling. He turned back to Louis.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “About what, sir?”

  “Our new home.”

  For a second, Louis thought it was a joke, but Steele’s expression was deadpan. This was going to be the task force’s permanent headquarters?

  “It’s . . . unusual,” Louis said.

  “You don’t like churches?”

  How to answer that one? His experience with churches was limited to snapshot memories of sitting on a hard bench in a hot clapboard building in Blackpool, Mississippi trying to catch the air from the women’s fans. Or those cold Sundays sitting next to his foster mother Frances in the drafty Presbyterian Church in Plymouth, so very aware of being the only black face in a field of white.

  Steele was looking up to the choir balcony. “Lansing has quite a few abandoned churches, so I got a good break on the rent,” he said. He looked back to Louis. “I’d rather spend the money on other things.”

  “I thought we’d be working out of the state police headquarters,” Louis said.

  “When you work in a glass cubicle you get a glass cubicle mind. You get cautious. You get limited. You worry about impressing the wrong people. I don’t want people like that working for me. We need to be independent.”

  Steele went to a bank of doors, opened one of the confessional booths and peered inside. “We’ll set the desks up here in the nave. There’s also a kitchen and bunkrooms in the basement,” he said. “We’ll need them.”

  Louis looked around, envisioning long hours and living on coffee and takeout. Camille Gaudaire hadn’t told him much, only that he would be one of five members of a special squad assembled to work on unsolved homicides, cases that had been long ago abandoned by local police. Lots of travel and long hours. And, given the fact this squad was Steele’s baby, probably a lot of pressure to not screw up.

  Steele’s voice broke into his thoughts. “I imagine you have a few more questions for me but put them on hold for now. I don’t want to have to repeat myself five times, so we’ll clear things up at our first meeting.”

  Louis doubted that his particular questions could be cleared up at a staff meeting. They were too personal, still too raw, the experience in Loon Lake too vivid, even after six years.

  “You find a place to live yet?” Steele asked.

  Louis shook his head. “I just got in.”

  Steele nodded. “Check the State Journal classifieds. There are decent rentals near campus. We start back here Monday morning.”

  Two days? No way would this place be ready in two days. Again the question was there. What the hell had he gotten himself into? He knew what cops were like, how they protected their turfs. What kind of politics and shit went into building an investigative unit that operated separate from the usual lines of authority and webs of bureaucracy?

  And again, stuck inside him like a hard driven nail, the question: How in the hell could he trust this man? If something went wrong, if he screwed up just once, Louis had no doubt he’d be out, with no chance of ever wearing a badge again anywhere. There were no guarantees, no protection.

  Steele headed toward the door. Louis followed slowly, feeling an urge to linger just a bit longer in his new home. When Steele pulled open the door, he paused and looked back at the empty nave, like a man surveying a newly purchased fixer-upper.

  For some reason Louis felt compelled to fill the silence. “There’s nothing here,” he said.

  “I have everything I need,” Steele said. “I have the right people.”

  Steele pushed through the door and Louis followed him out. The rain had stopped but the late afternoon fog was like being wrapped in gray felt. Louis watched as Steele locked the door, then went down the steps, over to the squat stone pillar on the lawn and removed the FOR LEASE sign. He went to the Crown Vic, popped the trunk and tossed in the sign. He turned back to Louis, still standing on the steps.

  “Monday morning,” Steele said. “Nine o’clock.”

  Then he was gone.

  Louis zipped up his parka and looked back at the church. The stone pillar where the FOR LEASE sign had been now was bare except for the Bible verse on it. Some of the letters were missing but Louis coul
d still read it.

  The new creation has come.

  The old has gone, the new is here!

  – 2 Corinthians

  Louis’s eyes went to the name of the church on the top of the sign. It hadn’t registered the first time he saw it but it did now. SAINT MICHAEL’S CATHOLIC CHURCH.

  Michael...the patron saint of cops.

  CHAPTER TWO

  When Louis walked into St. Michaels on Monday morning he didn’t recognize the place. The old stone floor had the gleaming look of a pressure-cleaned patio and the graffiti had been scoured off the confessionals. The stack of pews had been removed and the flaking walls had been re-plastered.

  The sides of the nave had been outfitted with five plain metal desks, each topped with a computer monitor. There was a long table in the middle of the nave, a gleaming mahogany monstrosity that looked like it had come from a corporate boardroom. Four black telephones were clustered in the middle of the table.

  Louis glanced at his watch. Twenty to nine. Apparently, he was the first one to arrive. His decision to get here early wasn’t an attempt to suck up to Steele. It was more because Louis had barely slept since his arrival Friday, his usual insomnia made worse by the rumble-blat of I-96 outside his Super 8 room, and the rattle of the ice machine in the hall. Two days of searching and he hadn’t been able to find an apartment. Stupid to think he would, given that spring semester was just starting up again at Michigan State. He just prayed he could find a place tonight before some maid discovered Issy cowering under the bed.

  He looked at his watch again. Where were the other squad members? He was anxious to meet them to assess who he was working with.

  He moved toward the altar. The beautiful stonework and murals were now hidden by three bulletin boards and a large green chalkboard, the kind that could be wheeled around and flipped. He felt a stream of cold air and looked up. The stained glass window was still missing its pane.