He’s trying to impress her, he realized with a hint of a smile.
“Look, Beckett, you’re going to need to translate,” he indicated himself and Chase, “neither of us graduated cum laude from—”
“Cytokine storm,” Chase interrupted as she moved next to Beckett to inspect the wound herself.
“A what? Jesus do either of you guys speak English? And you,” he said to Chase, “In all of your twelve years of life, did you happen to go to med school during your seven years as a narc in Seattle? Moonlight as a pathologist, did you?”
Chase laughed, but instead of answering, she lowered her head and observed the vic more closely.
“No, no med school, I’m afraid. But there was this case once at a clinical trial facility where seven people died from what was supposed to be some simple test for a generic version of a headache medicine.”
“Ok, great, so Dr. Quinn, care to explain what happened here?”
It was Beckett who answered, his voice again transitioning to a professional air that was foreign to Drake.
Oh, he’s laying it on thick now.
“Basically an uncontrolled allergic reaction—a positive feedback loop of cytokines—err, immune molecules that causes the body to produce massive inflammation. In this case, our vic’s lungs swelled so much that he couldn’t breathe.”
Drake remembered the lack of disruption in the sand around the man’s mouth when he had laid face down in the crack den. At the time, he had thought that he was dead before he hit the ground, but now he couldn’t be so sure.
“So what caused it?”
Beckett pointed at the swelling on the man’s neck which Chase continued to inspect as if she expected words to rise out of the man’s skin, perhaps revealing the killer’s name.
Or even the victim’s.
“Injection—still running tests, but it looks like it was a concentrated insect slurry. And,” now he pointed at the bloody butterfly on his back, “given the killer’s choice of artwork and our furry friend we found in his mouth, if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on a butterfly.”
Drake was still listening, but he had lowered the man’s volume inside his head after he had said the words insect slurry.
A shudder ran through him.
“So, this man was, what? Killed by injecting a butterfly—” he couldn’t bring himself to say the word slurry, “—parts? Then the killer drew a butterfly in blood on his back. Wait, is it blood?”
Drake half expected Beckett to spout another medical term that he didn’t understand, but was pleasantly surprised when he simply nodded.
“Yes, but not the vic’s.”
Drake processed this for a moment.
“So he has a butterfly drawn in someone else’s blood on his back. What about the caterpillar?”
“Put in there post-mortem. So far as I can tell, it didn’t really do anything. Just hung out there until we arrived. Oh, and one more thing, the blood on his back? It’s from a female.”
“Oi,” Drake said without thinking. His face flushed slightly when Chase looked at him with a curious expression. “A woman?”
“A woman,” Beckett confirmed.
New narratives started playing out in his mind. In his experience, this type of crime was rarely committed by a woman.
A scorned lover, perhaps?
But then why the whole charade, why was the man running from her in the alley?
It certainly didn’t feel or even look like some sort of demented crime of passion.
He shared his opinions with Chase and Beckett.
“Definitely not,” Chase agreed when he was finished. She turned to Beckett. “Did you send blood samples to the lab for DNA analysis?”
Beckett confirmed that he had.
“They are backlogged to shit, though. Could be months, and even then we’ll only get something if the person’s blood is in the system. Seems like a longshot. I mean, someone who goes about making a butterfly slurry and carries around Monarch caterpillars doesn’t seem like they would make a dumb enough to leave their DNA at the scene, do they?”
“Great, another detective,” Drake grumbled with a hint of sarcasm.
Beckett held up his hands.
“Just trying to help, Columbo. Just trying to help.”
“Speaking of which,” Drake said, moving forward. “I was hoping that our vic might be able to do just that—well, maybe not lend a hand so much as a finger.”
Beckett squinted at him and looked about to answer when Chase produced the cell phone from her pocket. Beckett turned to her.
“The vic’s?”
She nodded.
“We just need to charge the thing first,” Drake said.
Chase smiled and pressed the button near the bottom of the screen. It lit up, showing the same number pattern that she had shown him on her cell back in his office.
“Already did,” she said.
“What? How?”
“Charged it in the car.”
Drake held up his hands as if to say where the hell was I?
Beckett took the phone in a gloved hand and then pulled one of the victim’s arms off the table. Without saying a word, he extended the man’s index finger, rubbed it briefly, then placed it on the button. A second later, Drake saw the screen change.
Behind a background of icons, he saw an image of their vic, smiling, his arms wrapped around a pretty blond woman and a white-haired boy.
Chase suddenly drew a sharp intake of breath, and Beckett looked like he might be sick.
“What? What is it? Do you know this guy?” Drake asked.
Chase nodded and he saw her jaw clench.
“Yes,” she said in an airy whisper. “And you should, too.”
CHAPTER 11
“Thomas Alexander Smith,” Chase said softly, spinning the newspaper around for him to see. “I didn’t recognize him when he was lying on the ground, and at the morgue I was too busy looking at his swollen neck. But on his phone…” she let her sentence trail off and Drake turned his attention to the article from the finance section of the New York Times.
At the top of the half-page article was a photograph of their vic, smiling with perfect teeth, a comically large pair of scissors in his hands poised to cut a ribbon. Flanking him were two well-dressed men that looked important enough for Drake to know them, although he didn’t.
Thomas Smith cuts the ceremonial ribbon at the inauguration of the NYC Library that now bears his family name.
Drake swallowed hard, and as he continued to read, he said.
“Yeah, so you know when I said that the press were going to have a field day? Well, fuck, they’re not going to have a field day, they’re going to go on a goddamn month long field trip.”
“No kidding,” Chase said quietly.
They were two of maybe a half-dozen patrons in the small diner that Chase had led him to after leaving Beckett back at the morgue. She had held her tongue the entire time they had driven here, and then had rooted through the stack of newspapers near the front of Patty’s Diner. As she had predicted, they had several from earlier in the week, including one from four days ago, which she showed to him now.
Drake’s eyes darted around quickly, making sure that no one was within earshot, and then read the first few lines to her.
“Thomas Smith, of the prominent New York Law Firm, Smith, Smith, and Jackson, is well known to the community in which he grew up. A caring and giving philanthropist, Thomas and his family’s firm have given more than five million dollars over the past decade. However, this donation to save a library, the land on which it stands aggressively being sought by developers, is Thomas’s largest single donation to date, topping 1.2 million.”
The waitress suddenly appeared, and Drake stopped speaking and folded the paper over as if he were reading a dirty magazine.
She gave him a look, and then turned to Chase.
“Would you like some coffee, dear?”
For a split-second Drake thought that
she was going to order a strange tea, or a non-fat soy latte, hold the sprinkles, and he was going to have to start hating her again.
But she didn’t.
Instead, she said, “Please. Black.”
The woman nodded and flipped over the porcelain cup and filled it. Then she turned to Drake.
“And you?”
Now it was his turn to hesitate. What he desperately wanted was a coffee with an ounce of whiskey in it, and was about to order it too when he remembered what Chase had said to him when they had first met.
Don’t ever drink before coming to a crime scene again.
Although Patty’s Diner didn’t exactly qualify as a crime scene, he wasn’t in the mood to test her. But he did need something; his buzz from the Johnny miniatures had long since faded, and he could feel his body start to cry out for more.
“Coffee and a water. And do you have any cheesecake? Pie?”
Chase raised an eyebrow at this, but he ignored her.
The waitress sighed as if his request had tipped the scales of boredom.
“Key Lime? Cherry? Strawberry-rhubarb? What about—”
“Whatever’s freshest,” he said quickly, making it clear that he wanted to be left alone again. The woman’s thin lips pressed together and she spun on her heels without another word.
Without filling his coffee either, he noticed.
“You just make friends everywhere you go, don’t you?”
Drake ignored the comment, and instead rolled up the newspaper.
“Mind if I take this?” he asked holding it up.
Chase shrugged.
“It’s not mine.”
Good point, Drake thought.
The waitress returned with his pie and a glass of water. When he inquired about the coffee, she said that they were making a fresh pot. He considered asking why she hadn’t filled his coffee when she had served Chase, but was dissuaded by her stern expression.
Instead, he pointed at the pie.
“Strawberry-rhubarb?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“Key Lime,” she said and then turned back toward the kitchen.
Drake used his fork to lift the yellowish whipped cream and spied the pink interior filling. He furrowed his brow.
“Your freshest, huh.”
Chase took a sip of her coffee.
“I’m beat—gonna get some rest. I’ll Google Smith when I get home, see what I can find out if he wasn’t the perfect citizen he appears to be. You’d be surprised what you can find out just by doing a little Internet digging.”
Drake, his concentration fixed on what looked like an artificial strawberry in his pie, said, “What about the family? Want to notify the family?”
Chase shook her head.
“I’ll put a call in to missing persons, but I asked them to contact me directly after we found the body if anyone puts in a report in the meantime. Nobody has yet, so I guess it can wait till morning. It is odd, though, that his wife didn’t call. I mean, they have a young child.”
Chase pulled out the vic’s cell phone as she said this.
“A lot of good that’ll do,” Drake remarked. “I mean, you can’t exactly keep going back to Beckett every time you want to open it.”
Chase smiled.
“I changed the pass code.”
Drake finally put his fork down and lifted an eyebrow.
“To what?”
Chase didn’t reply right away. Instead, she stood and stretched her back.
“Ten thousand combinations, Drake. Ten thousand.”
And then she smiled and left the diner.
When she was gone, Drake chuckled to himself. Maybe it wasn’t going to be so bad working with Chase after all.
He broke off a piece of the pie with his fork, which took considerable pressure, and then grimaced before putting it into his mouth.
It was strawberry-rhubarb for fuck’s sake.
Drake raised his hand, and craned his neck around. The waitress looked over at him, her face pinched so tightly that the thick grooves around her mouth resembled a relief map of the Grand Canyon.
“Hey Broomhilda, bring me a shot of your best whiskey with that coffee, will you?”
CHAPTER 12
“It’s not him,” Drake said, a hint of frustration creeping into his voice.
“It is, Drake. I don’t know why you are being so stubborn about this—it’s him; we finally got him,” Clay replied, his eyes still trained on the road.
Drake shook his head.
“Seven bodies reduced to bones, a crown made of finger bones from all other victims cemented to the top of their skulls like some sort of demented crown, and you think that this case has been solved by a simple wire tap? You think that the Skeleton King would give himself away that easily?”
Clay scratched at his beard and gave Drake a disapproving look.
“Skeleton King? Really? For someone who detests the media as much as you do, you seem to have really taken to the moniker, haven’t you?”
Now it was Drake’s turn to look away.
Seven bodies in seven days. People that were never reported missing. Drifters, carefully selected victims that wouldn’t raise alarm. And on the last, a single piece of hair with just enough of a follicle to get a DNA profile. Next comes the wire tap, then the all incriminating telephone call placed to… who? His mother of all people?
No, Drake was positive that this man, that Peter Kellington, was not the Skeleton King.
“This is a waste of fucking time,” he grumbled.
Clay sighed heavily and the car lurched as they started toward Peter Kellington’s home address. They had managed to get a drop on the beat cops, but they couldn’t be more than five minutes behind. If it were up to Drake, he would just allow them to bust down the door while he was back at the station following up with some real leads.
Like that hooker, Charlemagne or whatever her name was now that woman knew something. The King had grabbed her, but for some reason had let her go.
If only he could get more time with her…
“What would you rather do then?” Clay shot back.
Drake didn’t answer and instead relinquished himself to watching the identical brown townhouses that drifted by and quickly became a blur.
They drove in silence for the next little while, before coming to a stop just as the rain started to fall.
Clay immediately opened the door, flooding the car with the smell of wet smog. Halfway out, he leaned into the cab and said, “Drake, you coming?”
~
Drake awoke with a sour taste in his mouth and the hint of a headache behind his eyes. With a groan, he leaned over, and then caught himself at the last moment before he rolled off the coach.
“Fuck,” he swore and then looked down at himself.
He was still wearing the same clothes he had been sporting at Suze’s school that morning, including the now incredibly wrinkled sport coat. He shook his head at not having remembered passing out on the couch, and then instantly regretted that choice, too.
His hint of a headache immediately somersaulted to full-fledged.
Swallowing audibly, he looked over at the table next. There was a half-empty bottle of Johnny Red on its side, the cap looking as if it had been placed on instead of screwed.
Drake shut his eyes and took several deep breaths.
His headache receded to a dull throb, persistent but no longer debilitating, and he opened his eyes again before slowly pulling himself into a sitting position. His neck was sore, and he rubbed it absently with one hand, while the other went directly to the bottle. As he righted it, in his mind he imagined flicking the top off and taking a big gulp. A huge gulp. A goddamn river bass-type swallow.
But instead he withdrew his hand quickly as if the bottle had scalded him.
In some ways, he supposed it had.
With another groan, this time accompanied by a grunt, he stood, immediately wincing at the pain in his neck and shoulders. He went
straight to the kitchen of his bachelor pad, and his gaze flicked to the glowing green numbers on the stove.
4:14.
He grabbed the bottle of Advil off the counter, withdrew two tabs and put them on his tongue. The sweetness of the coating threatened to curdle his stomach, so he swallowed them quickly, dryly, and then chased them with a glass of lukewarm water.
4:14… I’m not going to sleep again tonight.
And then he thought, If what I was doing before could even be considered sleep.
But he couldn’t stay here; staying here with the liquor bottle would be like putting a child in a room made of marshmallows and instructing them not to have a taste, a lick, a smell.
He had to get out.
And Damien Drake knew exactly where he would go, even at this hour.
CHAPTER 13
Drake rolled into the conference room five minutes late, a hot coffee in each hand. He felt like shit, and looked even worse.
His fear of not being able to fall asleep again had proved false: he must have drifted off sometime in his parked car, because before he knew it, the sun was blazing down on him, turning his Crown Vic into a cracked leather greenhouse.
If there was one positive thing to glean out of this was that the heat and sweat had managed to smooth out some, but not all, of the wrinkles in his sport coat.
All eyes were on him as he entered, but he kept his focus straight ahead, his eyes locked on Chase, who continued to speak.
For a second, he thought he saw her eyebrows knit when their eyes met, but he might have imagined it. If the detective had an opinion about him, he was certain that he would hear about it soon.
“We have positively identified the victim as Thomas Alexander Smith—a father of an eight-year-old boy named Thomas Jr., husband to a one Clarissa Smith.”
Upon mention of the names, the other detectives in the room broke into hushed murmurs.
“Quiet, please,” Chase said politely. Drake made it next to her, and handed her one of the coffees, which she took without acknowledging him. “And yes, that Thomas Smith. He was in the paper this past Tuesday, inaugurating the library in Brooklyn that now bears his name. And to the unenlightened, he is a junior partner at Smith, Smith and Jackson—SSJ. The two Smiths, however, are not Thomas; they are his father, Kenneth, and his older brother, Weston.”
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