“Where’s Hanna?” Drake asked the second he stepped through the front door.
Leroy and Screech both looked at him, startled expressions on their faces.
“She went home,” Screech said. “She was tired.”
Drake glanced at Leroy, who immediately averted his eyes.
There was no doubt that they were lying—Hanna was at the police station, no doubt about it—but Drake decided not to press them on it. Hanna must have told them not to say anything, and they were more scared of her than him.
Drake didn’t blame them.
Besides, they were just kids.
“Find anything else about Lisa or Norm?” he asked.
“Not really. I know what you’re thinking, though; all I can say is that Norm is from old money. Family has roots in New York that go back decades. He’s on the board of several companies, donates a fuck ton to hospitals and that sort of shit. Never been arrested. Can’t even find any dirt on the guy on social media.”
Drake made a face. Screech had been right to assume that he was most interested in the husband. It was unfortunate that the man was clean, but clean didn’t mean not guilty. If you had money, you could hire people to scrub the dirt from your face and your Internet profile.
“What about Lisa?”
“That’s a little different. Lisa Fairchild had another husband before Norm. Two kids with the man, too. He works as a manager at a local hardware store now, but only takes a few shifts a week.”
Drake’s eyes narrowed.
“Yep, looked into that, too,” Screech offered preemptively. “Angry ex-husband goes on a killing spree to shame now rich wife, right? But I don’t think so—not in this case. The guy lives with his two kids in a massive house just outside the city. We’re talking seven figures big. Not only that, but both the boys, Jacob and Lennox—twelve and ten—go to a private school. Only way he affords that is if Lisa is footing the bill.”
“Or Norm,” Drake suggested.
“Or Norm. But if the man was pissed at his ex-wife, he would have to be mighty pissed to wanna cut off his lifeline. All he does is post pictures of him golfing at fancy clubs.”
Drake sighed.
“Okay, probably not either husband, then,” he admitted. The men couldn’t be ruled out entirely, but they had minimal time and had to focus on the most likely suspects. The problem with that is that they were running out of suspects. “Well, the attacks weren’t random, that’s for sure—the Fairchilds are being targeted. And having met the two of them, I’d bet that it’s Lisa who is the primary target.”
“You’re not lying,” Leroy grumbled.
“You find out anything else about Lisa, other than the fact that she has an ex-husband? What are their kids like? Columbine in the making?”
“Nope. The kids are preppy AF. Squeaky.” Screech hesitated.
“What?” Drake asked, knowing that his partner was holding something back.
“I dug into Lisa like you asked, but I couldn’t find anything about her prior to her meeting her ex-husband.”
Drake did some mental math.
“Her oldest kid is twelve, so let’s imagine that she met her husband two years before having kids… that puts us back to what? Two-thousand three? Four?”
“Something like that,” Leroy said.
“Well, not surprising that you couldn’t find much, then.”
“Much?” Screech raised an eyebrow. “Not much, nothing. I don’t know who her parents are, if she had siblings, where she grew up, that sort of thing. No school records. No Myspace, ICQ, Napster. Nothing.”
Drake knew that his own online record would be scant—minus several unsavory news articles written about him while he’d been a detective—but he was sure that someone as talented as Screech would be able to dig something up.
“Best case scenario is that she has a checkered past, one that Norm spent a few bucks covering up,” Screech said, sounding frustrated now. “But I dunno.”
“Thanks. Keep on it.”
Drake went to his desk and sat down on the hard plastic. He spent a moment just collecting his thoughts and his breath before saying, “I think you two should go home.”
“Excuse me?” Leroy asked.
Drake raised his head.
“This has been a trying two days and we can just sit here, bashing our skulls against the computer, or we can get some sleep and get at it again tomorrow when we’re fresh. Go home, guys. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“You sure?” Screech said.
“Yeah.”
The two men didn’t need any more convincing. They quickly packed up their things and headed to the door.
Leroy left first and Screech quickly followed, offering muted goodbyes. They were tired.
And so was Drake.
I should go home, too, he thought when he was alone.
But which home?
Should he go to Patty’s place? His bachelor? Or maybe visit his son?
Drake cursed.
Instead of leaving, he just sat there, motionless. Drake remained still for so long that he must have dozed off because the next thing he knew, he was falling backward, tipping in his chair. His arm shot out blindly and Drake managed to grab the middle drawer of his desk to keep from toppling.
After righting himself, and offering a string of curses, his eyes fell on the drawer that had saved him from a nasty headache.
It took Drake the better part of ten seconds to figure out that he was looking at a thick yellow envelope.
Sweat had already broken out on his forehead after the near fall, but now the drops began to coalesce and drip down onto his eyebrows. He swiped the moisture away, then licked his lips, before picking up the envelope. After confirming that he was indeed alone, Drake tore into it and was unsurprised to find no note, just a USB key inside.
Drake wanted nothing more than to throw it in the garbage, to never look at what was on that USB, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it.
He wasn’t ready to watch it, just yet, either.
With the USB in hand, Drake went to Screech’s desk. The man had left his computer on, confirming that he must have been exhausted. The first thing Drake did was open the drawer on the man’s desk and pull out the bottle of Johnny Blue he knew was inside.
The familiar sight brought a smile to his lips, which remained until after pouring himself a drink.
The first sip brought back bad memories, but this didn’t stop him from swallowing half of what was in his glass.
Only then did Drake slide the USB into the computer. There was a single file on it—a video file.
“It’s now or never,” he said out loud. Drake took one final gulp of the scotch, then clicked play.
Chapter 62
Hanna sat on the floor of the cold case room with boxes strewn all about her. Dunbar had said she could stay here for an hour or two, but it quickly became obvious that that wasn’t near enough time. A rough estimate put the number of unsolved murders in New York City for the year two-thousand and seven at three hundred and change. The problem wasn’t even the sheer number of murders, it was that other violent crimes—rapes, shootings, home invasions—were also boxed and placed on the same shelves. Some of the boxes were marked with the type of crime, beneath the series of digits that Hanna realized was some sort of classification code, but not all of them. This meant more files, terrible photographs, and unsolved violence to root through.
Most of the victims were Black and Hispanic, which sped things up a little. Hanna knew enough about the psychology of serial killers to know that they didn’t often stray from their own ethnicity.
Still, she felt guilty closing up most of the boxes after just glimpsing a photograph of the victim. That’s what the cops had done, shoved everything in a box, put it on a shelf, and let the file rot in a room the way the dead rotted in the dirt.
But like the NYPD, Hanna had limited resources and time.
And both were running out.
Only a handful of crimes fro
m two-thousand and seven came close to the MO Hanna was looking for, but they didn’t quite match up.
One was a twenty-year-old jogger who had been stabbed in the chest before her breasts had been sliced off. They never found the missing organs or skin. The other was a sex worker who had her throat slit and the flesh on her neck peeled down nearly to her collar bone. She’d also been raped post-mortem.
Hanna set these aside to review again later and then continued her search.
Another hour passed and then another. Just as she was giving up hope, Hanna opened a box labeled Jane Doe, identical to all the rest, and froze.
Her throat narrowed, and it became difficult to swallow and breathe. She wanted to reach out and grab the photo but couldn’t do it. Her hand hovered over the box, her eyes blurry with tears, her entire body shaking on the cold floor.
The photograph showed the body of a woman, although you would never have been able to tell the gender from the woman’s face—or lack thereof. From the neck up, everything was just a bloody, battered mess.
This alone would’ve been haunting enough, but it was the rest of the image that gave Hanna chills.
The feet and hands had been crudely removed, leaving ragged, bloody stumps in their place. But this wasn’t the end of the horror. The bastard had further desecrated the young woman’s corpse by removing a huge swatch of skin from shoulders to sternum, revealing a sticky red mess beneath. There was also a large rectangle of skin taken from her left thigh.
It was him. Hanna knew.
It had to be him.
And it was her.
Hanna double-checked the date just to make sure and confirmed that the body had been found around the same time that she’d escaped from the cage.
This was one of the Straw Man’s first kills, perhaps the first kill—and it was Hanna. The real Hanna Whitmore.
Tears spilled from her cheeks and dripped onto the photograph.
Tell me you love me.
“Stop it,” Hanna scolded herself.
She hated that this animal still held power over her, all these years later.
Hanna cleared her throat and wiped the tears away.
You might have run then, Hanna, but you’re not running now. You’re here—you’re here, and you are going to find him.
Spurred by this unexpected aggression, she finally removed the photo and the coroner’s report. The latter was short and simple, with the ME describing pretty much exactly what could be seen in the photo.
Manner of death was listed as blunt force trauma to the head and face. Cause of death was homicide. The victim’s skin had been removed with a sharp knife, listed as likely being a scalpel—there was no comment as to whether or not the skin had been flayed pre- or post-mortem. Hands and feet were severed by a different knife, much thicker in nature, possibly a machete, and these cuts were less precise.
The responding officer had been as brief in his report as the ME had. A dog walker had discovered the body in a park and immediately reported it. The victim’s hands and feet, as well as the missing sections of skin, were never discovered. Likewise, the body had never been identified and never claimed. There was a single sentence speculating on the possibility of two killers working together, based on the different knives and apparent skill used, but Hanna knew differently.
And it made her sick to her stomach.
I should never have left you. I should never have run.
But even as these thoughts entered her mind, she forced them away. If she’d stayed, Hanna was certain that there would have been two Jane Does in this box and not one.
A photograph of the victim, a coroner’s report, and a police report… that was all her friend had been reduced to. The Straw Man had taken a human being and turned her into nothing more than an afterthought.
Except, there was more—there was something else buried in the bottom of the box that she hadn’t noticed at first. Something that wasn’t listed on any of the sheets of paper.
Once again, Hanna’s breath caught, but she didn’t hesitate this time. She reached inside and pulled an evidence bag out, and then held it up to the light to see through the thick plastic.
“No…” Hanna moaned, realizing exactly what was in the bag.
A thick, brown suture—a taxidermy suture.
Chapter 63
Drake only needed to see a total of three seconds of the video before he knew exactly what it was all about.
Still, he forced himself to watch to the end, his frown deepening with every passing moment.
The video was shot from one end of an alleyway and it featured two individuals: Damien Drake and Tobin Tomlin. The camera moved every so often, but for the majority of the filming, the two men were surprisingly centered in the frame.
They tussled, and Drake eventually ended up on top of the much smaller and weaker Tobin. It should have ended there—that’s when he should have called for backup.
But Drake didn’t.
Instead, Drake drove his thumbs into Tobin’s forehead and pressed until the man’s face practically collapsed inward. Then he shouted, but not for the cops.
Drake managed to slink away just before the crowd descended on the fallen psychopath.
He remembered these moments vividly, of course, but not the camera—he hadn’t noticed anybody videotaping him. And even though there was no shot of the person behind the lens, he knew who it was.
Mackenzie Hart.
The PI had it out for him, had threatened him, had demanded that Drake turn over Nick Petrazzino’s business.
There was no menacing note accompanying the video, no ransom demand, no additional information at all.
But there didn’t need to be.
Mackenzie Hart had already told Drake what he wanted: his business. Now that Nick was out of the picture, Drake assumed that the man wanted all of his business. His eyes drifted back to the computer screen, to the last frame of the video. It showed the profile of his face, his chin tucked to his chest, his hands deep in his pockets.
What worried Drake was the sheer flatness in his eyes, the lack of expression on his face.
Disgusted with himself, and at what he’d just seen, Drake pulled the USB key and removed it from the computer. He held the small device between two fingers, twirling it, as he thought about Mackenzie Hart.
What the fuck is this guy’s problem?
There was something deeper to Mackenzie’s obsession with Drake than simple jealousy, but he had no idea where this came from. He had never met the man during his time in the NYPD, or at least he couldn’t remember meeting him. Mackenzie seemed to have just come out of nowhere and started gunning for him.
Eventually, Drake’s thoughts turned to their most recent altercation, to Jimmy, Leroy, and Brock Page. If that hadn’t been indication enough of how serious Mackenzie was, then this video sealed the deal. But the man had overlooked one very important fact.
Sighing loudly, Drake rose to his feet, USB still in hand, and walked over to his desk. But instead of sitting, he raised his plastic chair and placed the USB beneath one of the feet. Then he sat down hard, lowering all his weight at once.
There was an audible crunch as the USB was crushed beneath him. Drake didn’t even bother picking up the pieces. There was no question that Mackenzie had other copies, but that didn’t matter because the fact that the PI had overlooked was that Drake just didn’t give a fuck.
He didn’t care if the man aired his dirty laundry, so long as he stayed away from Screech, Leroy, Hanna, and everyone else he cared about. If Mackenzie Hart wanted to hand this video over to the NYPD or even upload it to the Internet, then so be it.
Drake wasn’t ashamed of what he’d done and if he could go back in time, he’d do it again. Tobin Tomlin’s fate was only part of what the sick bastard deserved. This video didn’t change that, nor was it going to force Drake to give up any business or do anything at all that would negatively affect his partners.
“You fucked up, Mackenzie,” he said as
he went back to Screech’s desk to retrieve his drink. “You fucked up again.”
Drake slumped into his chair and sipped his scotch.
Sometime later, he fell asleep.
Chapter 64
Hanna wasn’t sure how long she stared at that suture, but it was long enough that her vision kept going in and out of focus.
Eventually, when her ass had become numb from sitting on the hard concrete, she knew that she had to move.
The first thing Hanna did was reread the reports and confirmed that there was no mention of the suture in any of them This meant that whoever had found it wasn’t sure if it was related to her friend’s body.
Hanna knew it was.
It was also the key that definitively connected everything.
Hanna replaced all of the pages exactly as they’d been, and then set the photo on top. The only thing she didn’t put back was the plastic evidence bag. It was sealed and signed, and while she knew she could just take the whole thing with her—it wasn’t much larger than a sandwich bag—that wasn’t enough.
She needed to touch it.
Hanna used one of her nails to slice through the tape then opened the bag. She sucked in a sharp breath before reaching inside.
This taxidermy suture was rougher than she’d expected. It was similar to the one that she’d found at Lisa Fairchild’s place, but having been exposed to the elements, this one was coarser, drier.
Hanna twisted it around her fingers, wrapping it over one, then under the next, until it covered all of them. Then she made a fist, squeezing the suture so tightly that her hand turned white.
“Fuck you,” she whispered. With the suture still wrapped around her fingers, she put the lid back on the box and then slid it onto the shelf. Hanna did this with all the boxes, replacing the Jane Does in the same relative position they’d been when she’d entered the room.
She wondered briefly how many times other people had done this, put these woman back on the shelf.
Ten times? Twenty? A hundred?
The more important question was when would someone take them back down again?
Straw Man Page 26