Robin continued to run, not looking back, only concerned with one thing: putting as much space between her and Hanna Whitmore’s blood-curdling screams as quickly as possible.
***
“That’s good, drink… drink slowly.”
Her eyes still closed, Robin sipped the cool liquid that entered her mouth. She reached for the bottle, but someone gently brushed her away.
“No—not too much, not too fast.”
Robin wanted to chug the water, but this asshole wasn’t letting her.
“It says here her name is Hanna Whitmore,” a second voice said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, found her ID in the backpack. Lives in New York City. Jesus, she’s a long way from home.”
The bottle met her lips again and Robin lapped at it. This time when it was pulled back, she opened her eyes.
Two young men, blond and clean-shaven, stood over her. The closest, the one with the water bottle, had pockmarks on his cheeks and nose.
“Is that your name? Is your name Hanna?” he asked.
Robin swallowed and just sat at the base of the tree, confusion washing over her.
“Don’t worry, it’s okay,” the man holding Hanna’s wallet said. “We called an ambulance. They’re on their way. But out here, it might take a while.”
Out here… where am I?
Robin glanced around. She was sitting against the only tree at the edge of some sort of field. There was no sign of Hanna or the John. Just her and these two men.
“I don’t need an ambulance,” she croaked.
“It sure as hell looks like you do,” the man with the water said.
“Hanna, do you know your phone number?” the other man asked, interrupting his friend. He looked over his shoulder. “I don’t live that far from here… I can give them a call.”
Robin shook her head.
“No, please. I can’t go home.”
Both men stared at her as she started to work her way to standing by pressing against the tree.
“Whoa, whoa, you don’t look so good. Just sit down, wait for the ambulance.”
Robin ignored the request even though her knees nearly buckled.
“Please, just give me my backpack,” she said with an outstretched hand.
The man looked down at the picture on the ID card in Hanna’s wallet, then squinted at Robin. He repeated this action several times.
“This is you, right?” he asked, doubt in his voice. “Your name is Hanna Whitmore, yeah?”
Robin swallowed hard, stared the man directly in the eyes and said, “Yes, that’s me. I’m Hanna Whitmore. Now give me my fucking bag.”
PART III
Straw Man
Chapter 50
“Straw man? For real? Who the hell comes up with this shit?” Sergeant Yasiv grumbled. “What do they do? Just throw something at the wall and hope it sticks?”
Drake stared at the mannequin on display in the storefront window. Like at La Nuit des Femmes, this one was also comprised of three separate skins all sewn together using those thick, taxidermy sutures. During his tenure as an NYPD detective, Drake had clashed with the media too many times to count when it came to their glorification of violence and their perpetrators. From the Butterfly Killer to The Chad, Drake couldn’t stand any of the monikers the media came up with. But Yasiv was right, what he described was exactly what the media did, at least according to Drake’s friend Ivan Meitzer at the Times: they just tossed names against the wall and hoped one of them stuck.
“I guess Scarecrow was taken,” Screech said softly.
Drake glanced at his partner, squinting disapprovingly. Whatever was bothering Screech, it went well beyond this case.
“Straw man… a fake argument that is easily debunked or a person with no integrity. I mean, it kinda works? Also, didn’t you guys say that the ME found some straw on the first mannequin?”
“Could be a coincidence,” Drake suggested with a shrug.
“Or not,” Yasiv countered. “Someone could be leaking information to the press.”
“Yeah, like what?” Drake paused and then shrugged again. “Who cares—we don’t have information. What we have are three dead bodies—three more dead bodies, and nothing to go on. Straw man… well, I fucking hate the name but maybe getting this out in the media will help generate some leads.”
Drake was suddenly reminded of Tobin Tomlin and how the man’s deranged psychopathy had been fueled by his desire to become famous. Drake preferred unknown subject, or unsub, over any of the monikers the media came up with. It was generic, unsexy, and banal, which were fitting adjectives for the criminals he hunted.
“The DA is going to hate it, as well,” Yasiv said with a sigh.
“And he won’t be able to sweep it under the rug as he did with the Nuit of Femmes or whatever it’s called,” Screech pointed out.
Drake nodded in agreement. It wasn’t just that the media had taken an interest and dubbed whoever was responsible the Straw Man, which had, indeed, appeared to stick, it was where the current morbid display was placed: in the window of a designer store in a high-end shopping mall.
The location was no accident and hinted toward a motive.
As well as the desire for media involvement.
“When’s the ME getting here?” Yasiv demanded, his tone matching his obvious displeasure. “We need this taken down.”
When nobody answered, the sergeant grabbed the closest police officer and ordered him to put another call into the ME.
Even though they’d all come from the same morgue, Drake and his team had already been at the shopping center for nearly twenty minutes. He suspected that Dr. Nordmeyer was lagging on account of her coming to a complete stop at every stop sign and never exceeding the speed limit by even a fraction of a mile per hour. Or maybe she was devising another plan to fuck Beckett and Suzan.
Who knows?
All Drake knew for certain was that while the ME was taking her sweet ass time, they were standing here with their thumbs up their asses.
And the unsub was on the hunt for more victims.
“Fuck,” Drake muttered as he glanced around. He knew little when it came to high-end fashion but wasn’t so ignorant that he couldn’t recognize that these stores were orders of magnitude outside his budget. These weren’t your typical department stores with dozens of identical jeans stacked to the ceiling. Instead, most of them had a single rack or two of unique items, giving the shopper the impression that they were special, even though they were probably pumped out of the exact the same factory in China as the discount shit.
The advantage for Drake and his team was that these types of stores were big on security; he’d already noticed three cameras just in the small section of the mall that he’d walked through on his way to the display. Drake thought about this for a moment before raising a finger and indicating the closest one.
“Anybody looking into camera footage?” he asked.
Yasiv was about to answer, but he deferred to Dunbar who had just approached from the rear.
“I have one of my techs on it right now,” he informed them. “Shouldn’t take long.”
Drake nodded.
“Good.”
Yasiv wasn’t the only one growing impatient. Everyone seemed to be on edge, including Hanna and Screech, the former of whom had gone quiet ever since her ominous comment back in the morgue.
It’s not a fence… it’s a cage.
Drake massaged his temples. There was nothing else they could do here, he knew, and he had no intention of hanging around for when the district attorney arrived. And Mark Trumbo would show up, eventually. Even though Yasiv hadn’t said as much, there was no way that the man would be able to stay away.
It just wasn’t in his nature.
Even though Drake had been given control of the operation, butting heads with the DA again wouldn’t end well for one of them.
Perhaps even both.
Drake glanced back at the mannequin. While th
e display at the art gallery had been for a specific group of people, a more intimate one, this was more of a public demonstration.
The intended audience was similar, however.
“Yasiv, did you get an address for Robert Tiedeman?” Screech asked, referring to the only real lead they had—a waiter who wasn’t supposed to be working the gallery that night.
After his partner had told him about the match, and they’d wrapped up at the morgue, Drake’s plan had been to go see Robert first, but they’d been sidetracked by the newest mannequin.
“Yeah, I have some uniforms heading over there now, they’re going to—” The walkie-talkie affixed to Yasiv’s hip crackled and interrupted him. It was one of the officers the sergeant was just speaking of, informing him that they were set up outside Robert’s house. And that the man was home. “Speak of the devil.”
Yasiv started to bring his walkie to his lips, but Drake held up a finger, indicating for him to wait. His hangover might have been gone, but things still seemed to be moving far too quickly. He had to slow everything down, take a moment to think.
This was, after all, Drake and his team leading the investigation.
“What’s the play here, Drake?” Screech asked.
All eyes on him, Drake chewed the inside of his cheek. A moment to think would have to come later. Instinct was what he had to rely on now.
He said, “Yasiv, tell your men to fall back, keep an eye on the house, but don’t enter. I’m going to take Leroy with me to ask Robert a few questions. If he puts up a fight, I’ll call in your men and they can drag his ass back to 62nd.”
Yasiv looked as if he was going to protest, so Drake added, “It’s better this way—quieter, which is what everyone wants.”
The sergeant eventually acquiesced and passed the message on.
“Good,” Drake said with an approving nod. “Screech, you and Hanna stay with Dunbar, review the security footage from the mall.”
Screech frowned. They all knew that this course of action was unlikely to bear fruit. If their unsub was smart enough to delete the footage from both the local server at the art gallery as well as in the cloud, the likelihood of him doing something similar here at the mall was high. Still, they had to try.
“If that doesn’t pan out, I want to start looking into different taxidermy places around the city.” Drake recalled Dr. Nordmeyer’s comment about the type of suture that had been used on the mannequin at the gallery. “Especially ones that have been around for a while. We good?”
Screech grunted a reluctant affirmative, but Hanna had other ideas. She stepped forward and shook her head. It wasn’t like her to be quiet for so long, but this, disagreeing and speaking her mind, was true to her character.
Only she didn’t look like Hanna. She was pale and her usually vibrant eyes had dulled a little. There was also a thin layer of sweat on her forehead and cheeks. On the way from the morgue to the mall, Drake had asked her twice about her comment, about how she could be so confident that the marks on the skins had been made by a cage and not a fence, but Hanna had remained mum.
On more than one occasion, Hanna’s strong will and character had gotten Drake out of a jam, and it was the primary reason he’d recruited her to DSLH. But it also complicated things when she had information that she wasn’t sharing. There was nothing Drake could do about it, however. He couldn’t push Hanna. Like with whatever was bothering Screech, he just had to wait for her to reveal the information on her own time.
Time, unfortunately, wasn’t on their side.
“What? What is it?” Drake said a little more sharply than he’d intended.
“I’m coming with you,” Hanna said.
Drake didn’t like this idea. Whatever was wrong with Hanna had the potential to seriously fuck up their investigation. But if he said no, if he tried to shut her down here, it would only make her more determined. There was no doubt in his mind that Hanna would just find her own way to Robert Tiedeman’s house.
Then the shit would really hit the fan.
“Okay,” he said begrudgingly. “Leroy and Hanna, you come with me. Screech with Dunbar. Now that everyone has a fucking partner, let’s do-si-do and stop this asshole before he makes another outfit.” Drake looked directly at Sergeant Yasiv. “Oh, and could you please tell Dr. Nordmeyer when she gets here to hurry her ass up with this one, would you? Fucking high priority?”
Chapter 51
“I’ll knock—Leroy, you stay behind me in case I need backup. You two,” Drake indicated the two police officers who had been stationed outside Robert Tiedeman’s house, “go around back in case he tries to sneak out. Hanna, you’re with Leroy.”
Hanna didn’t like being relegated to the backseat, but Drake had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. If Robert was behind the sick mannequins, the man’s capacity for savagery held no bounds. Drake worked his jaw as he stared at Hanna.
Neither did she, he knew.
“Got it?”
Hanna grunted something that could be construed as agreement, which was good enough for Drake. As the two officers headed around back, he approached the door with Leroy and Hanna seamlessly falling into step behind him. The windows flanking the door were heavily frosted, allowing no glimpse of the interior. As much as Drake hated the idea of going in blind, they needed to talk to Robert, and given that the only thing they had to go on was a discrepancy with the catering logs, they also required his cooperation.
Drake knocked twice.
“Who is it?” A male voice asked from inside. The response was so quick that Drake suspected Robert had either seen them approach or had made the two officers stationed outside his residence.
“My name’s Damien Drake, and I’m a private investigator.”
Drake glanced over his shoulder at Leroy, but the man didn’t look back. He was ready for action. Leroy’s dark fists were balled, and his stance was typical of a boxer’s, with one foot in front of the other and his body slightly turned.
“Oh, okay. Just gimme a second, I need to get dressed,” the man, presumably Robert, said from behind the door.
Drake’s eyes narrowed. Even the most inexperienced of beat cops knew that ‘need to get dressed’ was perp code for ‘I’m making a run for it’.
“Go,” he instructed Leroy. Now the man did look at him, his hardened expression becoming one of confusion.
“What?”
“Go around back, help the cops… he’s going to run,” Drake whispered. Finally catching on, Leroy slunk away, leaving Hanna in his place. Her posture was not all that different from Leroy’s.
She too was primed.
“I just need to ask you a few questions,” Drake said.
“Yeah, sure, no problem,” Robert replied. His voice sounded more distant. “Just need to throw on some shorts.”
Fuck, Drake thought, so much for getting the man’s cooperation.
“Robert? Robert?”
There was no answer, and Drake instinctively tried the door.
It was locked.
“Robert, I just want to talk, ask you a couple of—”
Shouts came from somewhere in the distance.
“NYPD, hands in the air!”
Drake swore and took off, sprinting down the side of the house while reaching for his gun. There were more shouts and curses, followed by the sound of something falling to the ground—hard. The second Drake turned the corner of Robert’s bungalow, he let his hand fall to his side.
Then he grinned. Unsurprisingly, Leroy had gotten his man. Robert was lying facedown, his hands pinned behind his back with Leroy kneeling on top of him.
“Hey, would you look at that,” Drake said. “You managed to get dressed after all. Leroy, turn him over.”
Leroy flipped Robert onto his back. It was indeed the man from the art gallery, the one who had been messing around with Lisa Fairchild in the broom closet.
“I didn’t do it,” Robert whined. He tried to sit up, but Leroy forced him back down. “Dude, I didn�
�t do it… I swear to fucking god, man. I didn’t do it.”
Drake moved forward until he was hovering over the man.
“Didn’t do what, Robert? What is it that you didn’t do?”
Chapter 52
“Fucking hell,” Detective Dunbar cursed. He slapped the desk and shoved himself away from his laptop.
Screech was also annoyed and disappointed, but unlike Dunbar, the result was the one he’d expected.
“Did you check them all?” he asked, mostly as filler. Screech’s attention was divided between catching the man the media had dubbed the Straw Man and wrapping his mind around what had happened to Nick Petrazzino.
And what the mobster’s arrest meant for him and Leroy.
“Yeah, all of them,” Dunbar replied. “All the cameras went down last night right around closing, then came back online as soon as the first employees got to the mall.”
Screech had seen the footage of the woman who had opened the high-end department store. She hadn’t even noticed the mannequin. If it hadn’t been for a customer who had asked about it, who knows how long the skinsuit would have been left up. Unfortunately for them, the customer had decided to snap a few pictures before alerting the salesclerk. These quickly made their rounds and were plastered all over the news. The hoopla might have died down shortly thereafter if it weren’t for someone leaking information about the art gallery exhibit. This brought about mentions of a possible serial killer, which was pretty much the holy grail for the media.
Screech shook his head, trying to clear himself of the morbid thoughts.
“What about janitors, a night watchman, that sort of thing?”
“Janitor left about two hours after the mall closed. He was there again this morning and my men already questioned him. Says he didn’t see or hear anything suspicious last night.”
Screech grunted.
“Any idea how the man got into the mall after hours?”
Dunbar shrugged.
“No broken windows or locks.”
Straw Man Page 21