Straw Man

by Patrick Logan

  Marjorie Wilson was loved.

  And that made it even harder for Drake to utter the next words that came out of his mouth, loud and clear, to ensure there was no misunderstanding.

  “Your daughter is dead. I am very, very sorry.”

  The wailing stopped, but what happened next made Drake wish the sound would return. Stephanie seemed to collapse inward, as if all of her bones had become jelly at the same time. It was a haunting sight, one that would stick with Drake forever.

  “No, no, it can’t be,” Stephanie sobbed. “It can’t be. No, no, no…”

  Tim’s face reddened and he wrapped his arms around his wife. They both cried together, oddly in sync.

  Drake cast a glance at Yasiv, hoping to meet the man’s eyes and signal for him to intervene, but he was staring at his toes and didn’t notice. To his surprise, it was Tim who spoke next, pulling his wife to his chest and then wiping his eyes as he did.

  “It was her, wasn’t it? She was one of the… Marjorie was… she was on the mannequin.” Tim’s voice was barely audible by the end of the sentence.

  Stephanie shrieked and Drake pursed his lips.

  He wanted to lie. He wanted nothing more than to tell these grieving parents that their child died peacefully in her sleep, that she’d felt no pain.

  But Drake couldn’t do it.

  “Yes. I’m so sorry.”

  Tim’s expression transitioned from sorrow to anger. Before he could lash out, Yasiv came alive.

  “I can’t imagine what this must feel like, how much pain you’re in right now. And if I could hold my questions to another time,” the sergeant shook his head, “or not ask them at all, I would. But it’s important—we have to stop this guy before he hurts someone else. When’s the last time you saw Marjorie?”

  Tim’s jaw locked.

  “About a week and a half ago, maybe twelve days. She went camping with some friends.”

  Drake’s eyes went wide.

  “How many friends?”

  Tim glanced over at him.

  “Two. Melissa Tanner and Janice Brookfield.”

  For some reason, the mention of the names of her daughter’s friends reignited Stephanie’s sobs and wails. This time, Drake barely noticed. He was lost in thought, trying to recall the list of art gallery attendees from Screech’s computer. It turned out that he didn’t have to.

  “Their parents were also at the gallery,” Yasiv whispered in his ear.

  “Fuck,” Drake grumbled, then winced. He hadn’t meant to curse or say anything at all. But he had, and loud enough for Tim to overhear. The man glared at him. “I’m very sorry again for your loss,” Drake said quickly. “We’re going to find out what happened to your daughter.”

  I promise, was on the tip of his tongue, but unlike with Ms. Schmidt, Drake refrained. Still, he’d come close to breaking the cardinal rule of private investigation: making promises.

  What the fuck is wrong with you?

  Drake started backing toward the door and Yasiv offered some parting words before following him out.

  “I’ll have a couple of officers swing by. They’ll be able to answer any questions you may have and what to do next.”

  “Do next? What the hell do you mean, do next?” Tim shouted.

  Drake left Yasiv to deal with the man’s anger and hurried outside. He made it to the gate and then called Screech.

  “Screech, I need you to confirm something for me.”

  “Yeah, what is it?”

  “I need you to tell me if any of the guests at the gallery had the surnames Tanner or Brookfield.”

  “Gotcha.” Drake waited a handful of seconds. “Yep, both. Tanner and Brookfield. Why do you ask?”

  “Because,” Drake said as he got into his car and waited for Yasiv to join him, “I think we just found out who the other two girls on display were.”

  Chapter 60

  Even though Hanna left well after Drake, she had no problem catching up with him before he made it to 62nd precinct. She had to make a deliberate effort not to pass him and waited for Yasiv to get in his car and them to drive away before she got out.

  Hanna didn’t feel like explaining to Drake why she was here, why she needed Dunbar to help her access old case files. Part of her felt like she already said too much.

  Sixty-second precinct was bustling. There were cops everywhere, dozens outside and Hanna suspected a magnitude more inside the station.

  Her expression soured. She’d told everyone who would listen that it wasn’t Robert, that the waiter wasn’t the Straw Man, but they refused to listen.

  Mark Trumbo had a hard-on for the guy, which was strange given Hanna and the DA’s previous interaction at the hotel.

  Well, it wouldn’t be the first time a man pretended to like the bun while secretly craving the sausage.

  Slipping large sunglasses over her eyes, Hanna got out of her car and scanned for Dunbar. When she didn’t immediately notice him, she shrugged and started across the street anyway. With every stride, her posture became more adroit.

  Even if Dunbar wasn’t here, Hanna would still find a way inside and gain access to the cold case files. The whole Robert Tiedeman circus would actually benefit her, as every cop here was probably just stroking his cock, moaning about how he’d brought the Straw Man to his knees.

  Hanna was halfway across the street when she finally saw Dunbar. The large man pushed his way through the crowd and met her on the sidewalk. His breath reeked of coffee.

  “Hanna, I know I said to come, but this isn’t—” Hanna pulled her sunglasses down and stared the man in the eyes. “Aw, fuck. Screech asked me to look into cold cases, but I’ve been way too busy with this Robert Tiedeman and Nick Petrazzino mess. Please, just keep your head down and stay close. Let’s hope no one notices you.”

  Hanna grinned.

  “Lead the way.”

  Still shaking his head, Dunbar entered 62nd, with the cops gathered outside parting to allow both of them to pass. Hanna could see several of the officers eying her up, but she just kept her chin high.

  She’d been right, the inside of the station was jammed with officers.

  Sorry to make you go soft, boys, but you got the wrong guy.

  Despite the sheer mass of people, someone still managed to pick Dunbar from out of the crowd.

  “Detective Dunbar, we need you in here,” a man with a military haircut and sporting a Tartan blazer said from the doorway of a conference room. He noticed Hanna next and asked, “Who’s this?”

  Dunbar, as Hanna predicted, just blubbered.

  “Hanna,” she said without hesitation.

  The man’s face twisted.

  “Hanna? Just Hanna?”

  “N-no, no, it’s—it’s okay. She’s been cleared,” Dunbar stuttered. “Working with Yasiv.”

  The man in the jacket looked at Hanna, challenged her, but when she didn’t back down, he shrugged.

  “Sure, okay, whatever. We need you in here, though.”

  “Detective Dunbar is just going to show me some old files. I’ll have him back to you in just a minute.”

  This was Dunbar’s cue to say something and lead her away, but he just stared.

  “Detective Dunbar?” she asked.

  Take me to the fucking files, already.

  “Yeah—yes, yeah. Okay, I-I’ll be right back.”

  Finally, the detective led her away, first down a hallway then to a set of stairs. They descended past a room full of computers and arrived at a door marked ‘Cold Cases’. Both words were written in capitals, except for the ‘C’ in cold which was scrawled in lower case.

  “Hmm, clever,” she remarked.

  Dunbar opened the door, and they entered a small waiting area. In front of them was a wall of floor-to-ceiling fencing, broken only by a small section of weathered countertop.

  Hanna inhaled sharply at the sight.

  “You okay?” Dunbar asked.

  “Fine, just tired,” Hanna lied. She lowered her gaze from
the fence to the counter. It was clear that this area was typically manned, but there was no one here now.

  “Everyone is either upstairs or outside Robert’s house, looking for something to nail him with,” Dunbar informed her, reading her thoughts.

  There was a clipboard on the counter on the other side of the fence that the detective managed to tease through the opening with his chubby fingers. He scrawled his name on it using the pen that was attached by a pink string and then wrote Hanna’s beneath.

  Dunbar used a key on his belt to unlock a small door in the fence next, revealing a much larger space full of metal shelves.

  Shelves that were overflowing with boxes.

  But when Dunbar held the gate open and gestured for her to enter, it wasn’t the boxes that gave Hanna pause.

  It was the fence itself.

  Suck it up. You can do this. You have to do this.

  Hanna took a deep breath, nodded at Dunbar for some reason, then stepped into the cold case room. The odor of wet newspapers struck her immediately, and Hanna scrunched her nose.

  “Yeah, I know,” Dunbar said, making a face of his own. “We’ve got interns digitizing everything, but they’re slow. They’ve only done the last seven or eight years. If you want something from a crime that took place ten years ago or more in New York City, then this is the place.”

  Dunbar sounded daunted, but these words actually gave Hanna hope that she might find what she was looking for. Her previous annual investigations into the Straw Man had been done through a computer.

  This was different.

  This was old school.

  Hanna let Dunbar continued to speak while she looked around. Multiple cameras lined the walls of the room and she noticed at least three fire extinguishers. Whoever was in charge should have invested in some dehumidifiers as dampness was the real hazard.

  Hanna doubted that a flame thrower could ignite the boxes or files within, damp as they were.

  “I hope you know what you’re looking for, otherwise you can expect to be here all day.” Dunbar scratched his chin. “But you can’t be here all day—sorry. You’ve got an hour or two, tops. Oh, and you absolutely can’t take anything out of this room, Hanna. Nothing. I mean it. If anyone comes asking, just tell them you’re working the Straw Man case, under Yasiv and Drake. On second thought, don’t mention Drake. Not here, anyway.”

  Dunbar was rambling as he tried to shake the uncomfortable feeling that was settling over both of them.

  “Where’s the dope? The good shit?” Hanna joked as she started down the row in front of her, examining the labels on the boxes as she went. There was a date and a name on each as well as other digits that meant nothing to her.

  “Hanna…”

  She ignored Dunbar and read the information on the first stack of boxes that went nearly to the ceiling. The name listed on about half of them was ‘Jane Doe’.

  All these missing women who nobody cared enough about to even come looking for.

  While working at the psych facility Hanna had heard cops talk about the ‘lesser dead’ on many occasions. They were referring to prostitutes and other women whom society deemed as less worthy.

  Drug addicts, orphans, mentally ill.

  And that’s what Hanna was looking at now: boxes that contained the only traces of the lesser dead.

  The Jane Does.

  “You said you wanted files from the early two-thousands?” Dunbar asked from somewhere behind her. He sounded a mile away but couldn’t have been more than ten feet.

  “Yeah,” Hanna said dryly. She realized then, looking at those boxes, just how easily she could have become one of them.

  “Over here.”

  Hanna migrated to the row that Dunbar was standing in front of.

  “Rough few years,” he remarked, indicating the overflowing shelves. “Good luck—I have to get upstairs to that meeting. And, please, do not take anything out of this room.”

  Hanna looked at him until he nodded and walked away.

  “Dunbar?” she hollered when the detective neared the counter.

  “Yeah?”

  “Please don’t close the gate. Just leave it open, okay?”

  Chapter 61

  Drake was wrong. Telling a parent that their child was dead wasn’t the hardest thing that you had to do as a cop or PI. Informing them that their child was almost certainly dead, but to confirm you needed a DNA sample, was even more difficult.

  It was the twisted perception of hope that made it so. Drake couldn’t rightly tell the Brookfields or the Tanners that their little girls were unequivocally deceased, which led to uncertainty. And with that, came the nightmares.

  At least the Wilsons could start their grieving process, as painful as that would be.

  “I need a fucking drink,” Yasiv said after they’d finished getting hair samples from both families. He slumped against the worn passenger seat of Drake’s Crown Vic. “A drink and a cigarette.”

  Drake didn’t smoke, but he could definitely use a drink.

  “I don’t mind if you smoke in here,” he said.

  “You sure?” Yasiv asked, but he was already rolling down the window and pulling a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket.

  “Go ahead.”

  Drake put the car into drive and Yasiv lit up. They had work to do: Drake had to get the hair samples to the lab, they had to continue to grill Robert Tiedeman, and they had to find this bastard. But he was exhausted. Although never much of an athlete, when he’d been younger, Drake had managed to somehow run a marathon with minimal training. He’d completed it in under four and a half hours, no Herculean feat by any means, but no crawl, either. The level of fatigue he felt now rivaled that day all those years ago. But back then he’d been younger, could bounce back faster. He’d spent more than a decade punishing his body since.

  Drake cursed under his breath. Despite all of these pressing issues, however, he found his thoughts drifting the way an exhausted mind tended to do.

  Hanna’s face, not with her snarky, pretty expression, but the way she looked when telling her tale, suddenly appeared and grabbed hold. So far, Drake kept the horrifying story from the sergeant. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe her—despite Hanna’s checkered past when it came to serious lies, he didn’t doubt her here—but it was more that Drake remained unconvinced that what had happened to her was related to their current case. And if it wasn’t, then it was none of Yasiv’s fucking business.

  Still, there was always the chance that the man who had taken Hanna was responsible for the mannequins. Drake hoped it wasn’t, for a variety of reasons, not least of all for the sick bastard responsible.

  He had learned long ago that Hanna wasn’t someone whose bad side you wanted to be on. Not if you intended to keep your soft bits attached to your body, that is.

  “I’m going to take an officer and visit the campsite tomorrow,” Yasiv said, exhaling a cloud of smoke out the window. “The one that Marjorie and her friends were staying at.”

  Drake nodded. He debated whether or not he should go with the man but decided to leave it open-ended by not answering.

  “After I drop off the hair samples,” Yasiv continued, smoking feverishly, “I’ll run the fourth DNA sample from the gallery mannequin, the male one, and pump it through every database I can find.”

  “I thought the ME already ran it through CODIS?”

  “She did, but I’m going to broaden the search. We have… uhh… relationships with many of the genealogical websites out there. You know, the ones that people use to draw their family tree?”

  Drake was vaguely familiar with the service.

  “Yep.”

  “Well, maybe someone, a relative, who knows, maybe even the asshole who’s behind this, uploaded their DNA to one of these sites.”

  It was unlikely, but worth a shot.

  As Drake pulled up to 62nd precinct, he noticed two things: one, the sheer number of police officers hanging around, at least triple or four times as many
as he was used to seeing, and two, a dark VW double-parked across the street.

  It looked exactly like Hanna’s car, the one that he’d driven on many occasions after he’d abandoned his Crown Vic.

  The same one that Hanna had repaired after the Dr. Kruk incident. Drake thought he even noticed a slight difference in coloring on the front bumper that had been replaced compared to the paintjob of the rest of the vehicle.

  But that must’ve just been his mind playing tricks on him because it couldn’t be Hanna’s car.

  Hanna was back at the shop, with Leroy and Screech.

  “Probably best if you let me off here,” Yasiv said, lighting another cigarette.

  Drake couldn’t agree more. Heading this investigation or not, he planned to avoid the precinct as much as possible. He pulled over and Yasiv hopped out. The man started to walk away before pausing and turning back.

  “Thanks for your help today, Drake,” the sergeant said, the cigarette jammed into his mouth twitching with every word.

  It was an olive branch if Drake had ever seen one. But no matter how Yasiv acted today, no matter how much they needed each other to solve this case, nothing would make Drake forget what the man had written on that sheet of paper.

  Suzan Cuthbert murdered Dr. Nordmeyer.

  Drake nodded, keeping his lips pressed firmly together.

  They would never be friends again, he realized. Acquaintances, colleagues, friendly, but not friends.

  “I’ll let you know if I get any hits on the DNA. If you need manpower for anything, just let me know. Oh, and I’ll be heading to the campsite early if you want to join.”

  “Sure.”

  Yasiv wanted more from him, but Drake wasn’t prepared to give it.

  Not now. Not ever.

  Nobody fucked with his friends and family.

  ***