by P J Parrish
When Louis got to the last photograph, he took a step closer.
It was a color picture but faded to orange, as photographs from the seventies often were. It showed two small skulls lying on their right sides inches apart on a wooden surface.
“Louis.”
It took him a moment to realize Steele was talking to him.
“Your pick.”
“Excuse me, sir?”
“Cam has chosen the hookers, Junia the black widow. Your turn.”
Louis glanced at Steele then looked back at the photograph of the skulls. It was the oldest case and he suspected it would be the toughest. He also knew he had to take it.
“The boys in the box,” he said.
CHAPTER THREE
He wanted to start on the case immediately. Not just on the research, the digging through the old files. He wanted to see the place where the bs had disappeared. But it was way up in the Upper Peninsula, almost a nine-hour drive north from Lansing. There was also some more new-hire paperwork, dress uniforms to pick up, and tutorials on the computers and communications. And he still had nowhere to live.
At four, Louis headed out, want ads in hand, determined to find an apartment by nightfall.
He checked out more run-down apartments, most with empty beer kegs on the porch and loud music booming behind closed doors. He was about resign himself to living in one those sprawling modern complexes out near the interstate—places with fake fireplaces, community Jacuzzis and lots of rules—when he took a wrong turn and found himself on Elizabeth Street in front of a large Victorian house with an APT FOR RENT sign in the window.
Louis checked his watch. Almost six. No time to hunt down a pay phone. He dipped out of the Mustang into a misty rain and jogged up to the porch. He knocked hard and, after a minute, the door opened, and a teenage girl peered out. Thin, with straight hair dyed as black as oil and wary, blue eyes outlined in blue, sparkly shading.
“Yeah?”
“My name is Louis Kincaid,” he said. “I’m here about the apartment.”
“My grandpa’s at work. You’ll have to come back.” She started to close the door.
“When?”
“Tomorrow.”
“Could I come back when he gets home this evening?” Louis asked.
“No way,” she said. “He gets off at midnight.”
“Look, I really need to find a place to live tonight.”
When she drew back slightly behind the door, Louis gestured to his car. “I’m desperate. I have a cat and I can’t find a hotel that will take her.”
The girl’s eyes slipped by him to the Mustang, and Louis knew she could see Issy’s cat carrier atop the boxes in the back seat.
“Have you been living in your car with your cat?”
“No, I drove straight up from Florida and just got kicked out of the Super 8. My cat is old and she’s had a rough few days.”
The girl brushed aside a hank of hair. She wore five rings of different designs, one on each finger. “You got a job or are you going to school?” she asked.
“Job. I’m a police officer.”
The girl’s eyes clouded and for a moment she seemed to go somewhere else. “You got something to prove you’re a real cop and not a serial killer or something?”
Louis dug under his jacket for his new wallet and held it open so she could see the gold badge.
“State police,” she said softly. The blue eyes came up to meet his. “Okay, the apartment is three hundred a month and includes lights and stuff. You got to take your trash out every night to the alley, smoke outside, and keep your music down. There’s a phone in the hall for local calls. You okay with all that?”
“Can I see it?” Louis asked.
She waved for Louis to follow her into a narrow, oak-paneled foyer. He got a glimpse of a living room with the TV tuned to MTV. A Michigan State Spartans tapestry hung over the fireplace mantle.
The steep wooden staircase creaked under his weight as they went up to the third floor. Before the girl even opened the door, Louis knew that, barring a colony of roaches or black mold, he was going to take the apartment.
It was roomy inside, taking up the entire third floor, with a bay window that overlooked the street and a kitchenette tucked behind louvered doors. The furnishings were spare—a lumpy burgundy sofa and matching chair, a double bed with a white chenille spread, an old oak dresser, a desk with a goose-neck lamp, a bookcase, and a scarred yellow Formica dinette set positioned in front of the bay window.
Louis turned to the girl. “I’ll take it.”
“Good,” the girl said. “Now maybe you should go get your cat out of the car.”
An hour later, he was sitting at the Formica table, sucking down the last of the Chow Mein he had gotten at Wong-Fu’s down the street. It was lousy stuff, but he had been too hungry to care after unloading the boxes and suitcases from the Mustang.
He looked to the bed. Issy had still not emerged, even after he set out her water and Tender Vittles.
Louis pushed the food container away. He should have asked the girl—Nina was her name, he had discovered—where the nearest grocery or party store was because he really wanted a beer right now, and maybe something sweet.
Fortune cookie . . .
Sure enough, there was one in the takeout bag.
Louis broke open the cookie, and as he chewed it, he unfolded the little piece of paper. Though he had his share of strange experiences and had once met a girl who had convinced experts she was reincarnated from the Civil War, he still couldn’t fully embrace anything he couldn’t see for himself or prove. But tonight, after his first day working for a man who once hated him, he decided it couldn’t hurt to take a look at what might come.
There are some people who must
break before becoming whole.
Some fortune. He tossed the paper into a container and put the food container in the trash. He stood, looking around the room. No TV, no radio. Just the steady drum of rain on the bay window.
He had already called Camille to alert her to his new address and a home phone number. Steele had told them he never wanted them completely out of touch at any time.
Now, he thought about calling Joe. But when he tried to reach her at the station this afternoon from the church, the dispatcher told him she was going to be tied up all evening with a political reception. And Lily was at another ballet recital. Nothing left to do but unpack.
He dispensed with his clothes quickly, except for the newly pressed blue uniforms which he hung carefully, leaving them in the cleaners’ bags until he would be required to wear one—for a ceremony, or God forbid, a funeral.
Then he turned to the boxes. His sparse collection of books—investigative manuals, a couple John D. MacDonald paperbacks, FBI agent Robert Ressler’s Whoever Fights Monsters and a first edition of Eudora Welty’s The Golden Apples —took up only one shelf of the bookcase.
Louis opened the last box, in which he had packed the things that had he kept on his mantel back in his Florida cottage. It struck him that not so long ago he didn’t have anything—except Issy—that he would have considered precious enough to cart from state to state. But now he did.
They weren’t souvenirs or even keepsakes. He had gathered them from the people whose lives had touched his, however briefly. He had come to think of them as markers in both his work and his life.
He first pulled out a red wool hat with braids, then a black silk Brioni bow tie. Next came a baby skull he’d found on Captiva Beach after a hurricane. He took out a postcard from Lily, her first attempt to reach out to him after she learned he was her real father. On the front was a picture of Greenfield Village and on the back one word: HI. They had traded many postcards since, Louis sending her cards from wherever his cases had taken him, hoping to connect with her, Lily always sending some version of a horse picture as her messages became ever less cautious.
Next, he took out a small, framed photograph. It showed him and Lily posed in a carria
ge in front of the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island. It was taken last October, on their first trip together, the only time so far that her mother Kyla had trusted him to be alone with Lily. It was two weeks later that Lily’s newest postcard came. It was the first time she signed it LOVE LILY.
Louis set the frame carefully in the middle of the mantel then reached back in the box. He pulled out a larger frame. It was a picture of him and Joe, standing in front of a frozen Lake Michigan, taken the day four months ago when he had first told her that he loved her.
He set the picture next to Lily’s and reached down for the last item, an old silver frame. It held a photograph of a beautiful black woman. His late mother, when she was just eighteen. Before she met his bastard father. Before she began to drown in booze. Before she gave her seven-year-old son away to the state foster care system. That was the part of her he had not yet forgiven.
He kept her picture not out of sentimentality. He had barely known his mother. He kept it because it was all he had of where he had come from. And maybe to remind himself that no matter what happened to people, no matter how deep into the gutter they crawled, there was always a “before.”
Louis started to set the box aside when he saw a small object under a flap. He dug it out.
It was a snowflake Obsidian stone, a gift from a fellow cop named Ollie. It was meant to bring its owner balance, serenity and protection, Ollie had told him when he gave it to him. A few days later, Ollie was shot in the neck by a sniper and had died in Louis’s arms.
Loon Lake. It was only a ninety-minute drive due north of where he now was. But what had happened there six years ago still felt so very close. Tonight, even closer still.
It was all still there, frozen in his memory.
A bronze, flag-draped casket below a cold, cobalt-blue sky surrounded by hundreds of officers standing at attention. One man standing apart, a tall man in black overcoat—Mark Steele.
Steele wasn’t there to mourn. He was there to watch. Steele was from the state’s internal affairs division and that’s what those assholes did: watched and waited for cops to screw up. And the cops in Loon Lake had screwed up big time. So had Louis.
Things had gone mad. A chief had gone mad. And, by the time it was over, three cops were dead, and Louis had taken his first life—that of his own commanding officer.
The actions of Louis Kincaid, while technically legal, were unethical. I intend to make sure Kincaid will never work as a police officer in the State of Michigan again.
Four days after Mark Steele went on TV and said those words, Louis’s name was red-flagged by the state police as a trouble-maker, a man not to be considered for any law enforcement position. Two months later, Louis moved to Florida and began to scrape out work as a private investigator.
Louis’s hand went to the back pocket of his jeans, but it wasn’t there. His eyes scanned the room. Where was it?
Then he spotted the black wallet on the dresser and went to it. He opened the wallet and stared at the gold badge and the two words STATE DETECTIVE.
There was a soft knock on the door.
He put the wallet on the dresser and opened the door. Nina stood there, headphones around her neck.
“You got a woman downstairs.”
“Who?”
Nina shrugged.
“Did she say what she wanted?”
“She said she works with you.”
“Tell her I’ll be right down. Thanks, Nina.”
He shut the bedroom door. What was Junia Cruz doing here? One day into a new job and already there was intrigue in the ranks. He threw off the old sweatshirt and pulled on a sweater and a pair of worn Topsiders.
Downstairs, he stopped short at the entrance of the living room. A small woman in a bright yellow rain slicker and matching hat was standing in front of the fireplace, her back to Louis. She seemed to be staring up at the Spartans tapestry hanging over the mantel.
She turned and smiled. “Hey, Kincaid.”
“Hey,” he said.
He had no idea who she was.
His brain did a quick scan of the faces of all the women he had ever known but nothing came up. Her smile spread. She was enjoying this.
She took off the yellow hat and shook her head, letting loose a curtain of curly hair the color of a new penny.
“Emily Farentino,” he said.
“You dog,” she said. “You didn’t know who I was at first. Some impression I must’ve made.”
He hadn’t seen her in five years, hadn’t talked to her or contacted her once, even though they had worked Florida’s most notorious serial killer case together. When the Paint It Black case had ended, he had gone back to trying to survive as a PI in Fort Myers and she had gone back to the FBI field office in Miami.
Then it clicked. Emily Farentino was the missing link in their team.
“Your hair used to be short,” he said. “And you wore black horn-rimmed glasses.” He smiled. “You look good.”
“You always were slick with a compliment,” she said.
He started to hold out a hand then drew her into a hug. When he pulled back to look at her again, he realized it wasn’t just the hair and lack of glasses. Something else had changed. She had changed. Her eyes were a shade more knowing. She had seen things, experienced things, and it had turned her darker, like one of those old master paintings that took on a patina after being exposed to the years and the elements.
“You just get in?” he asked.
“Yeah, delayed by a storm,” she said.
“How did you get on Steele’s team?” Louis asked.
She arched a brow. “For that, you have to buy me a drink.”
CHAPTER FOUR
Louis didn’t want to end up in some frat-filled bar on campus, so he asked Nina where they could go for a beer. She recommended Dagwood’s on Kalamazoo Street. “Get the fried pickles,” she said.
It was a classic neighborhood bar, crowded for a rainy Monday night. A quartet of guys in Spartan sweatshirts. Two sketchy old men who looked like they had drifted in from the nearby freeway underpass. A gaunt man in a tweed jacket reading Stendahl’s The Red and the Black. Two tired waitresses still in their Big Boy uniforms snarfing down Reubens.
They took the only empty booth and Emily ordered a bowl of chili and a Bud Light. Louis asked for a Heineken and added an order of fried pickles.
As they waited for the food, they caught up on where they had both been in the last five years. Emily seemed surprised Louis had still been working as a PI. Louis wasn’t surprised she was still with the FBI. He was surprised, though, when she told him she had been teaching at the FBI academy’s behavioral science unit.
Back in Fort Myers, when they had worked together, she had been adamant about wanting to be out in the field, wanting to prove herself as a special agent. This despite the fact she was a rookie, despite the fact she was maybe five-three and ninety pounds soaking wet.
“How’d you end up teaching?” he asked.
“It wasn’t my first choice,” she said. “But I was one of the first special agents with profiling experience and had the master’s in psychology. When they were looking around to expand the forensics teaching unit they asked me to come up to Quantico.”
“Did you like it?”
“I liked working with the students. But I ended up traveling a lot because they sent me out to field offices to train agents.”
“I remember you telling me once you wanted to travel,” Louis said.
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Omaha, Jackson, Newark, all the world glamour spots. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Buffalo in January or El Paso in August.”
Louis laughed.
“I don’t think I unpacked for three straight years,” she said. “It got old.”
The waitresses brought their beers and a basket of fried pickles. They both stared at it.
“Your funeral,” Emily said.
Louis took one of the greasy breaded spears and bit into it. “This could be on
e of the best bad things I’ve ever tasted,” he said.
He slid the basket over to Emily, but she shook her head and took a drink of beer.
“So, how’d you end up on Steele’s team?” Louis asked.
“It was perfect timing,” Emily said. “I wanted back in the field but it wasn’t going to happen. I’d gotten too good at what I did. But when Steele called my boss and asked for me, I jumped.”
“You’ve left the FBI?”
She shook her head. “I’m on loan.”
The waitress brought the chili. Emily ate like a starved kid, half emptying the bowl before she came up for air. She sat back in the booth and gave Louis a sheepish smile. “Sorry, I’ve been living on plane pretzels and 7-Eleven burritos.”
“Did you get to meet the others yet?” Louis asked.
She smiled. “In a sense.”
When Louis gave her a quizzical look she reached into her purse and pulled out a yellow legal pad.
“Cameron Bragin,” she read. “Vietnam vet, Marines. Five years Chicago PD. Brief detour as stunt stand-in for Stallone on First Blood. Fluent in Russian and Vietnamese. Goes by the nickname Chameleon.”
She looked up at Louis. “What, he has scales?”
“Bald as a baby,” Louis said. “The nickname must refer to his undercover work.”
Emily looked back at her paper. “Junia Cruz. First job was as a dispatcher with Inglewood PD, despite the fact her immigrant father made a fortune building a chain of laundromats. She worked as a crime scene cleaner and eventually became a crime scene expert with LAPD. Has been there ten years total. Fluent in Spanish. Nickname Cruz Control.”
“How do you know this stuff?” Louis asked.
“The Feebies have files on everyone. I just went in and had a look.”
He shook his head, smiling.
Emily took a drink before going on. “Sanjay Thukkiandi. Graduated University of Delhi at age fifteen. Busted at sixteen for hacking into Air India to score tickets, but not before he traveled the world free for six months. After two months in jail, he emigrated to London and ended up doing free-lance computer investigation for Scotland Yard. Landed a job at Microsoft in California at twenty-five and eventually worked his way to the Seattle PD. Fluent in Mandarin and proficient in Bashai and seven other dialects. Nickname Tooki.”