Shadow Suspect

by Patrick Logan

  Chase shook her head and shrugged.

  “I have no clue. But I think that’s probably something that Tim can help us out with,” Chase said, unclicking her holster lock. She glanced over at him. “You packing?”

  The question took Drake by surprise and he instinctively reached into his sport coat and under his left armpit.

  Only then did he remember that his gun had been stolen outside the cemetery.

  “Fuck,” he grumbled under his breath.

  “What?”

  “I left it in my car,” he lied.

  Chase looked at him suspiciously, and he thought for a moment that she was going to challenge him on it.

  She didn’t.

  “Check the glovebox—I’ve got a spare. Grab it and let’s go. Let’s bring Tim Jenkins in for questioning… see how much he knows about the Monarch life cycle. What do you say?”

  CHAPTER 48

  Beckett closed his eyes, swallowed dryly, then lifted the liver in one hand while sliding the scalpel in his other beneath.

  With one deft slice, he severed the hepatic artery and the liver came free.

  He plopped it roughly into the metal weighing bin where it landed with a sickening plop.

  “That, my Gray’s Anatomy wannabes, is how you remove the liver.”

  It wasn’t the sight of the blood that made his stomach lurch—Lord knows, he had been doing this job for nearly a decade—but it was the smell. And it wasn’t the smell of the body, particularly not this one which was fairly fresh, but the smell of the fixative. It was the formalin; the formalin got into his nose, his hair, his pores.

  And it wasn’t just the formalin either.

  It was the three beers, seven shots of Jameson, and half pint of Crown Royal all before ten o’clock at night. Which said nothing of the drinks on the plane on the way back to NYC.

  Beckett swallowed hard and gestured toward a resident who he would have normally thought was young enough that his acne scars hadn’t healed yet, but this boy—a tall, reedy looking kid with thick glasses—didn’t even look old enough to have had acne, let alone be healing from the scars.

  Shit, this kid looked so young that his teeth were still rounded from sucking on his mother’s teat.

  “Reginald, jot down the weight,” he said, swallowing several times in a row. “Looks like he had a good time before he went.”

  “My, uh, my name’s Aaron, sir.”

  Beckett’s expression turned smug.

  “Yep, sure. Nice name. Now just—”

  His phone, which was on the table by the door buzzed and, thankful for the distraction from the very boring conversation that was about to transpire, he strode over to it. As he did, Beckett snapped off his lab gloves and tossed them to the nearest resident. They struck a woman—girl—in the chest, splattering her pristine gown with blood from the corpse on the table behind him. She gasped and stumbled backward as if they were a set of eight-pound bowling balls instead of two-ounce lab gloves.

  Beckett chuckled to himself as he answered his phone.

  “Dr. Beckett Campbell,” he said, putting on the most pretentious accent he could muster. “At your service.”

  There was a short pause, then a rather mechanical voice replied.

  “Beckett? It’s Seb.”

  Beckett closed his eyes, and squeezed the bridge of his nose with his free hand.

  Seb… Aaron… Reginald… who are these people? Really, who are these people?

  “Look bud, I’ve got a wicked hangover. Can you give me something more to go on? Hair color maybe? Measurements would be better, but if you don’t want to tell, if you’re shy, then I guess that says—”

  “It’s Seb from the lab—CSU. I’ve been running the DNA of the blood found at the Thomas Smith and Neil Pritchard crime scene? The uh—”

  “Shit, yeah, Seb, right. What’s up? What did you find?” Beckett asked, pulling his hand away from his face and opening his eyes.

  “Well, we got a hit. You see, the reason why it took so long is that first we had to—”

  “Just spit it out, Seb. Who’s the match?”

  “It’s from nearly thirty years ago.”

  The stench of formalin suddenly doubled, or at least Beckett thought it did, and his vision began to swim.

  “Thirty years ago? Shit, stay right there—I’m coming down.”

  Beckett hung up the phone and made his way to the door.

  “Dr. Campbell? Sir? What should we do with the body?”

  “Just take out all the organs and weigh them,” he said, without turning back. “Reginald, you’re in charge.”

  CHAPTER 49

  “Tim Jenkins, NYPD!” Chase shouted as she banged her fist against the door.

  Drake suddenly felt a tightness in his chest. He turned his gaze skyward, wondering with a precursor of anxiety, that it might start to rain.

  And then it really would be he and Clay at Peter Kellington’s place again.

  “Tim! We just want to talk!” Chase pounded again. “Tim! Open the door!”

  A thump, followed by what sounded like breaking glass, came from somewhere inside the house. Chase whipped her head around to look at Drake.

  “I’m going in,” she said, reaching for the doorknob.

  Drake went to grab her arm, but he was too slow.

  “You can’t,” he said. “Rhodes—”

  There was another thump, then a chocked cry.

  “Fuck Rhodes,” Chase whispered as she grabbed the doorknob and threw it wide. “Tim! Tim Jenkins!”

  Chase was standing in the doorway when they heard heavy footsteps upstairs, which sounded as if they ended somehow outside.

  “Drake, go around back,” Chase said, her voice high and tight.

  Drake shook his head.

  “No fucking way, I’m coming in.”

  Another thud.

  Chase waved her arm.

  “Go ‘round back! Fuck, I’ll be fine! He’s making a run for it! Go!”

  Drake bolted. He sprang from the porch and first ran east, but then quickly realized that there were at least a half dozen attached houses on that side.

  He swore, then ran the other way. Three houses after Tim Jenkins’s, there was a break between the townhouses, blocked by a short wooden fence.

  Breathing hard, Chase’s gun held out in front of him, Drake reached over, lifted the lock and then burst through.

  There were cheap chain link fence partitions between the narrow yards of the individual units, and Drake catapulted over the first one without incident.

  Two more, he thought as he neared the next fence.

  His heart suddenly skipped a beat, and all those nights—every night for his six months on leave and, truthfully, for a considerable time before that—of drinking caught up to him.

  He gasped, stumbled, but still somehow managed to get over the second fence. When he made it to the third, he was wincing, grabbing his injured ribs with one hand, the gun gripped tightly in the other.

  Drake was forced to stop. Eyes wide, he tried to find Tim’s house in the darkness, but spotted something out of the corner of his eye. The rear fence, also chain link, shook, and his eyes instantly darted in that direction. For a split second, he thought he saw a shadowy figure vault over the rear fence before disappearing into the night.

  “Hey—” Drake started, but then stopped himself and shook his head.

  It’s like the Skeleton King all over again, he thought. Your mind playing tricks on you. There’s no one there—you never saw anything.

  A heavy scratching sound from his left, high up, drew his eyes back. Tim Jenkins’s porch light switched on and reflected off the flagstones, casting the small slanted roof in a grayish yellow glow.

  A man stood halfway out the window, a pale leg and bare foot sliding across the roof shingles.

  “Hey!” Drake shouted. “Don’t even think about it!”

  Despite being in the next yard, Drake was still close enough that he figured even with the poo
r lighting that he could hit the man clean.

  The man on the roof turned in the direction of Drake’s voice, and then he did the strangest thing.

  He pointed.

  A pale white arm extended in the direction that Drake had seen the shadowy figure catapult over the fence. He was tempted to follow the finger, to confirm what he thought he had seen, but he had learned his lesson.

  Fool me once…

  He wouldn’t fall for the misdirection. Not this time.

  “You take one more step and I’ll shoot,” he said calmly. There was a commotion from inside the house, and then Chase’s voice drifted down to him.

  “Step back inside the house, Tim.”

  “Chase,” Drake yelled to his partner, “he’s unarmed.”

  Tim Jenkins slowly lifted his leg and then ducked back into the house. The moment he was out of sight, Drake was off again, this time without a hint of tightness in his chest.

  ~

  “I got it, I got,” Chase said as she led Tim Jenkins out of the house with his hands cuffed behind him. The man was wearing only his boxers and didn’t look that much different than the photograph from the high school yearbook: medium length brown hair, a round face, strong nose and large eyes.

  “Did you see him?” Tim asked as Drake stepped aside to allow them to pass. “Did you see him?”

  Drake shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts of the Skeleton King, of Peter Kellington.

  “Did you see him?” He screamed into the rain. “Did you see the man running?”

  Detective Frank Simmons hurled his body up the porch steps, crouching down to inspect Clay’s unmoving body.

  “See who? See who Drake? There’s no one else here!”

  Drake started to sob.

  “There was someone else…”

  “Drake, you alright?” Chase asked.

  Drake nodded briskly.

  “Fine.”

  “Did you see someone back there? He keeps talking about someone breaking into his house, that someone was in his bedroom trying to choke him.”

  Drake swallowed. It felt like he had a potato lodged in his esophagus.

  “No—didn’t see anybody,” he croaked.

  Chase leaned in close to Tim, and whispered just loud enough for Drake to hear.

  “You hear that, Tim? Nobody in the house except you and your buddy here.”

  Buddy?

  It was only then that Drake realized that Chase was smiling; no, she wasn’t smiling.

  She was beaming.

  And she was also holding something in one hand: a specimen container. Inside, there was a live caterpillar.

  Drake simply gaped.

  “It was in his bedroom. There’s a syringe on the floor as well,” Chase said.

  Jenkins stopped walking, and Chase shoved him forward.

  “It’s not mine,” Tim snapped over his shoulder. “I told you, there was someone in my house, standing over me. When you knocked, I woke up and he ran out the window,” he hooked a chin at Drake. “I was going after him when you saw me.”

  Drake ignored the man and reached out to take the container from Chase’s hand.

  The caterpillar inside reared back, pulling its sticky legs from the inner surface like plucked guitar strings, then seemed to pause as if waiting for something.

  “You heard Detective Drake, there was no one back there. But don’t worry, you can keep up this charade back at the station.”

  CHAPTER 50

  Tim Jenkins was brought into the station the same way that Veronica and Raul had been: in Chase’s BMW with tinted windows driven underground and brought up through the rear elevator. Only with Tim, there was no commotion within the precinct itself. Part of it was the hour—it was nearing midnight—but Drake surmised that there was more to it than that. While Tim was only wearing his boxers and a white t-shirt that they had retrieved from his house, he didn’t have the same allure as a pretty woman in an Elsa gown.

  Yet his presence did raise several eyebrows.

  “I’ll take him to Room 1,” Chase told Drake. “You—”

  “I’ve told you already, you’re making a mistake,” Tim interrupted. “I haven’t done anything… you should be out there looking for the person who broke into my house!”

  “You’ll have plenty of time to talk, Tim. Just wait for the cameras to be rolling before you make your confession,” Chase said. Then to Drake, she added, “Take our furry friend and the syringe to Beckett in the lab. Get him to confirm that it was the same cocktail that was injected into Thomas and Neil—if he’s still around. If not, wake his ass up.”

  Drake held the specimen bag up and grimaced at the sight of the caterpillar, still leaning away from the interior of the container like a miniature cobra readying to strike.

  “He’ll be here.”

  “Wait!” Tim interrupted, his tone changing from annoyed to distressed. “You think I killed Tom and Neil?”

  “Like I said, you’ll—”

  “This is crazy,” Tim gasped, his eyes widened. “I thought… are you guys nuts? I had nothing to do with their deaths! There was someone in my house! He left those things. Shit, I think he was going to use them on me! I didn’t do anything! I didn’t—”

  Chase tried to guide the man forward and into the interrogation room, but he dug his heels in.

  “This can’t be happening! I—”

  Drake shoved Tim from behind and he stumbled forward.

  “Get moving. Don’t give her a hard time, Tim,” Drake said calmly. “You’ll have your chance.”

  Chase started after the suspect, but turned back to Drake before she entered the interrogation room.

  “Get those to Beckett, then hurry back.”

  Drake nodded.

  “Don’t start without me.”

  ~

  Drake was surprised to discover that while he was looking for Beckett, Beckett was also looking for him. They ran into each other just outside the elevator.

  “Jesus, you look like you’ve seen a ghost,” Drake said as the elevator doors opened.

  “Must be the hair,” Beckett replied, then quickly added, “got a hit on the DNA from the vics’ backs.”

  Drake gawked.

  “What? Who?”

  He hadn’t expected that they would ever find a match to the bloody butterfly.

  Beckett shook his head, and grabbed Drake by the arm and led him toward the conference room that they held their daily updates in.

  “More like when,” Beckett said. When the door clicked closed, he held a stack of paper out to Drake. “Trade.”

  Beckett snatched the evidence bag and handed over the DNA report. Caterpillar and syringe in hand, his eyes drifted to the cork board with all of the new photographs with strings attaching.

  “Jeez, you guys ever hear of an interactive board? This looks like it belongs in the seventies,” Beckett gave Drake a quick once over. “Sorry. Forgot you were forty going on fucking ninety-five.”

  Drake shook his head, trying to remain focused.

  “What do you mean when? Who is the blood from?”

  Beckett smiled.

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry, battling a wicked hangover. Anyways, you have the case file in your hand. The blood on Thomas and Neil’s back is from a woman who died nearly thirty years ago,” he put on a British accent when he said the name, “A Martha Slasinsky.”

  Drake raised an eyebrow.

  “Who?”

  “Exactly. Who? A woman who died in her apartment from an apparent suicide. But here’s the kicker, she was dead for nearly a month before anyone found her.”

  Drake stared at Beckett, his mind whirring, trying to fit this new piece of evidence, this big pile of steaming evidence, into the appropriate slot in the pegboard.

  A woman dies thirty years ago, and her blood resurfaces in the murders of three wealthy New York City businessmen? What’s the connection?

  “But here’s the kicker—yeah, yeah, we already had a kicker, I know, but her
e’s the real kicker,” Beckett continued, his pale blue eyes glowing now. “Martha, who was a nurse by the way, had a son.”

  Drake leaned in closer.

  “Yep, a son. And he lived with her.”

  Drake screwed up his face, failing to see the significance.

  “He lived with her? So what? What does—”

  Beckett shook his head.

  “No, big fella, you don’t get it. The boy was only eight when his mother died, but he turned nine before she was found.”

  Drake couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “What?”

  Beckett nodded.

  “Martha’s son lived with her body for nearly an entire month after she died. Eventually the neighbors complained of the horrible smell coming from the apartment, and New York’s finest came ‘aknocking. But it doesn’t end there. The boy managed to convince the two uniforms that there was nothing wrong, that they were just defrosting their freezer—can you believe that? A nine-year-old boy… anyways, two days later, the officers came back and this time they went inside the apartment. The boy was enraged, and struck the officers, telling them that the crying had finally stopped, that they were finally living in silence, in peace. He told them not to take her, that she was all he had.”

  “Jesus,” Drake whispered, picturing the scene in his mind. A shudder ran through him.

  “It gets worse, my good friend.”

  How? How could it get worse?

  “After the cops came the first time,” Beckett continued, “the boy opened the window to try and get rid of the smell. But as smart as he was, he didn’t anticipate the bugs.”

  Drake swallowed hard, an image of the nightmare he had of Clay’s dead face, a giant caterpillar crawling out of his mouth flashing in his mind.

  “Yep, you guessed it. The apartment was full of Monarchs.”

  Drake suddenly had to sit down. He reached for a chair and collapsed into it.

  “Drake, you okay?”

  He winced and held his side.

  “The fuck happened to your face, anyway? You say I look like I’ve seen a ghost, but you look as if you’ve been beat up by one.”

  Drake didn’t answer… he was too lost in his own world to offer anything. He was imagining how horrible it must have been for that boy, to have his mother first commit suicide, then be alone with her rotting body for a month.