Desolate Mantle (Street Games Book 2)

by L. K. Hill

  ***

  Gabe watched from behind the glass as Shaun entered the interrogation room. Ellie sat at the table, looking grim, but not panicked. Gabe forced himself to be calm, his body still. The index and middle fingers of his right hand twitched.

  “My name is Captain Thatcher, Mr. Hammond. You can call me Shaun. Can I call you Ellie?”

  Eltern’s eyes shift to Shaun. Not a muscle in his face so much as twitched. “You may call me whatever you wish, Captain. It’s up to you whether you can or not.

  Ignoring the dig, Shaun nodded as though it was exactly the response he’d expected. He took a seat opposite Eltern. “Thank you. I appreciate you allowing me to use any name, Mr. Collund.”

  Eltern’s eyes came up slowly. They still didn’t look afraid, but something in them was…what? Gabe couldn’t define it. Bemused? Yes, a bit. Nostalgic? Sort of, except that wasn’t really it, either. Mystified, perhaps. His eyes were distant, like he saw something far away that no one else could.

  “Or would you prefer Brad?” Shaun asked.

  “My name is Eltern,” Ellie said softly. Though he still appeared utterly calm, his arms looked rigid. Gabe couldn’t see his hands, but he was willing to bet Eltern’s fists were clenched under the table.

  “It is,” Shaun agreed. “But it didn’t used to be, did it? Twenty-four years ago, before it happened, your name was Brad Collund.” When Shaun said it, Eltern responded. It wasn’t a flinch. More like a twitch, but it was there. “You lived in Modesto, California with your parents, Jonathon and Nancy,” Shaun continued. “You had an older sister who’d already gone away to college.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” Eltern’s said softly, but he visibly trembled, now.

  “Tell me what happened on May nineteenth, Brad.”

  “That’s not my name!” The outburst was so sudden, Gabe jumped. Shaun didn’t appear phased. He continued as though it hadn’t happened.

  “Was there a man in a trench coat, with a van?”

  Gabe glanced down at Brad Collund’s file, lying open in his hands. None of those details came from Brad’s case. Shaun was drawing on things from Dillon’s case, fishing for triggers.

  “Did he make you lie face down in the grass?”

  “Who?” Eltern asked.

  “The man that kidnapped you.”

  “I wasn’t kidnapped.” Eltern set his jaw stubbornly. Shawn nodded. Gabe could feel him switching tactics.

  “Tell me about your parents.”

  “My father was a mechanic. Mom left when I was too young to remember.”

  Gabe frowned in tandem with Shaun, studying the file in front of him. That wasn’t the story of Brad Collund’s parents. His father owned a small business—windshield repair—and his mother was a paralegal. She was very much a part of his life. When he disappeared, she spearheaded the campaign to bring her son home. Eltern was lying.

  “Who are you talking about, Brad?” Shaun asked. “Jonathon owned a glass business. Your mother, Nancy—”

  “I don’t know who those people are.”

  Shaun gazed at Eltern for a moment before closing his file and pushing it to one side. He rested his forearms on the table, clasped his hands, and leaned forward, his gaze boring into Eltern’s. Eltern managed to meet Shaun’s gaze for about twenty seconds before dropping his eyes. It was longer than most criminals could manage.

  “Tell me about your father, Brad. Let’s start with basics. What’s his name?”

  “Sol Dichinlon.”

  Gabe’s head snapped up. Had he really just blurted out a name? The scratch of pen against paper behind him announced Cora was writing down the name.

  “How do you spell that?” Cora’s whisper was rhetorical—just muttering to herself—but a good question nonetheless.

  As if he’d heard her whisper from the other room, Shaun took a pen from the front pocked of his shirt and clicked it. “How do you spell that? S-O-L or S-A-U-L? You know what, can you write that down for me, Brad?” He pushed it toward Eltern along with a legal pad he’d brought in with his manila file.

  Eltern gave a noncommittal grunt. A moment later took the pen and scribbled something on the pad.

  “Tell me about your father. Sol. What did he do?”

  “Whatever he wanted.” Eltern didn’t quite smile, but his expression grew smug. He sounded proud of his “father.”

  “And your mother. What did she do?”

  “I told you I didn’t know her,” Eltern said sharply. The change of subject from his father to his mother had darkened his expression.

  “What was her name?” Shaun asked.

  “She didn’t have a name,” Eltern snapped. “She wasn’t worthy of one.”

  Gabe raised an eyebrow as Cora came to stand beside him.

  “Can we all say mama issues?” Cora said.

  “Yeah, he definitely has problems with women.”

  “With his mother,” Cora corrected. “We don’t know about other women yet. Even though you’re probably right, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”

  Gabe nodded.

  “So,” Shaun went on. “You father, Sol, did he—”

  “Who?”

  “Your father.”

  Eltern’s affected a blank stare.

  “You said his name was Sol,” Shaun said patiently.

  “No I didn’t. His name wasn’t Sol.”

  “Then what was it?”

  “Don. Don Lillinchos.”

  Cora glanced up at Gabe uncertainly.

  “Write it down,” Gabe said, keeping his eyes on Eltern.

  “How do you spell that one? Have you ever heard these surnames before? They don’t even sound foreign in a way that’s recognizable.”

  Gabe shook his head. “He’s probably making them up, but everything he says is significant. Do the best you can. This is a game for him. We need to figure out the rules.”

  Shaun, of course, acted as though a new name was completely normal. “Can you write that down for me as well, Brad? Thank you. So your father, uh, Don? He’s the one who told you about your mother? About how she left when you were young, and wasn’t worthy of a name?”

  “He told me everything. Taught me everything.”

  “What did he teach you, Brad? You said he was a mechanic. Did he teach you about cars?”

  “He taught me everything I know.”

  Shaun studied Eltern’s face, probably debating how to proceed. Eltern neatly sidestepped Shaun’s questions, giving little away. Shaun needed to draw him out.

  “Where did your father work, Brad?”

  Eltern didn’t answer.

  “In a garage, perhaps? Or did he own his business?”

  “He…” a long pause. “He ran his own ship.”

  “What was the pause about?” Cora asked quietly. “Is he lying?”

  “I think he was deciding whether to lie or not,” Gabe said. “The question is, what did he decide?”

  Cora made a note on her pad.

  “His own ship,” Shaun nodded. “What was his business called?”

  Silence from Eltern again.

  “Don’s…Garage, perhaps?”

  “Why would it be called that?” Eltern looked smug again.

  “Many people who start a businesses name it after themselves.”

  “My father’s name wasn’t Don.”

  Shaun sat back, straightening his spine and taking a deep, slow breath, a knowing look in his eyes. “What was it, then?”

  “Sidni L. Chollin.”

  Shaun smiled. “Will you spell that for me on your pad, there, Brad? Just to make sure I remember this time?”

  Eltern hunched over the legal pad. Before dropping his gaze to write the name, his eyes flashed at Shaun. A fleeting moment of anger, there and gone, but Gabe caught it.

  “Did you see that?” he asked.

  “Yup, saw it,” Cora said. “He didn’t like Shaun treating him like a child.”

  “He doesn’t like being condescended to,” Gabe ag
reed.

  Cora barked a laugh. “Welcome to the club, Buddy.”

  “He’s got an ego.” Gabe was musing to himself more than talking to Cora. She answered him anyway.

  “Yeah. We need to find a way to use that.”

  “So,” Shaun was moving on, never missing a beat or giving Eltern too much time to think. “Perhaps your father’s business was called Sidni’s Garage then? Or something like that?”

  “He didn’t own a garage.”

  The questions continued without any surprises for another five minutes. The door behind Gabe opened. Cora turned, but Gabe ignored it. He was too focused on the interrogation to care what else happened in the precinct.

  “Gabe?”

  Reluctantly, he turned. Tyke stood in the doorway. He held a large, manila envelope in his hands. It took Gabe another second to realize Tyke wore gloves. Cora frowned worriedly.

  “What is it?” Gabe asked.

  “You’re going to want to see this,” Cora said.

  Wishing he didn’t have to miss any of the questioning, he walked to the door. Tyke came the rest of the way into the room and set the envelope on the table while Cora closed the door.

  “What is it?”

  On top of the envelope, on a thin bed of white, cottony quilt batting, lay a shiny black cross, attached to rosary beads of the same material. They were like highly polished obsidian. Beautiful. Ominous. Gabe’s heart beat faster.

  “Where did this come from?”

  “It was sent to my desk,” Tyke said. “Marked urgent, with a return address from the lab. I thought it was the DNA results I’ve been waiting on for one of my cases—faster than I expected to get them, but miracles do happen sometimes, even in the lab—so I tore into it. This was inside.”

  “Nothing else? No note?”

  Tyke shook his head. “I already called the lab. My results won’t be in until at least tomorrow. They don’t know anything about this.”

  Gabe sighed. Mail coming into any police precinct was meticulously checked for threats. It wouldn’t be easy to get the official markings of the lab if the package hadn’t truly come from there.

  While Gabe stared, perplexed, at the cross, Tyke gingerly picked it up by the top branch and flipped it over. On the back, four engraved letters ran in a line running down the stem. E. H. B. C.

  “Any idea what it means?” Tyke asked.

  Gabe stared at the letters. He turned on his toe, looking into the interrogations room.

  “My father’s name isn’t Sidni,” Eltern was saying. “It’s Nichole Dolls.”

  Gabe glanced down at the Brad Collund’s file, and it clicked. He turned back to the cross in Tyke’s gloved hands.

  “Eltern. Hammond. Brad. Collund.”

  Cora gasped. “You think?”

  Gabe crossed the room and rapped his knuckles on the two-way glass. Inside, Shaun glanced up, unconcerned.

  “Excuse me a moment, Brad. I’ll be right back.”

  Shaun rose, gathering up his file and the legal pad Eltern had written the forth name on. A moment later, he stepped through the doorway. His eyes instantly fell on the black cross. Cora quickly explained.

  Shaun’s face grew darker as she spoke. “And this just happened to be delivered while we are interrogating him? How does that happen?”

  “It would be almost impossible to sneak something into our mail, right?” Cora said.

  “Take out the almost.” Tyke said quietly.

  “What about en route?” Gabe asked.

  Shaun shook his head. “If anything happened with a mail truck—unexpected stop, accident, anything—we’d have heard about it.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt to check and make sure nothing out of the ordinary happened,” Tyke said.

  Shaun nodded. “Do that, then. I doubt you’ll find anything. Reports like that come across my desk minutes after the incident happens. If there was any suspicion or even the vaguest chance of tampering, the mail would be reassessed for threats. Assuming you don’t find anything, we’ll have to investigate the people in the mail rooms, both ours and the lab’s.

  He looked at Cora when he said it and she nodded, making more notes on her pad.

  Gabe sighed, his exhaustion beginning to catch up to him. “Can I see those names, Shaun?”

  Shaun handed over the legal pad, on which four names were clearly legible.

  Soll Dichinlon

  Don Lillinchos

  Sidni L. Chollin

  Nichiol N. Dolls

  “Weird spellings,” Cora said, peering at the pad from Gabe’s elbow. “No one puts two Ls at the end of ‘Sol.’ And I’ve never seen Nichole spelled that way. They’ve got to be made up, right?”

  Gabe shook his head. “Even if they’re a load of crap, you can’t rattle names off the top of your head like that. Especially with these spellings. At the very least, he must have thought them up before.”

  Cora nodded, still studying the pad. “Lots of Ls.”

  Tyke raised an eyebrow. “Do you think that’s significant?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe it’s special to him.”

  “Dude has a favorite letter of the alphabet?” Tyke asked drily, looking skeptical.

  Cora glared at him. “Maybe it’s an initial, or symbolic of something.”

  Gabe shook his head. He’d already suspected the truth, hearing the names. Now looking at the spellings, he was certain.

  Dillon. Gabe searched the four names scratched on the legal pad.

  “Anagrams. Cora, they’re all anagrams for Dillon Nichols. That’s why all the l’s.”

  Cora stared at him blankly for five seconds, Tyke at her shoulder. Then she snatched the pad from his hands and stared furiously down at it. He could see her mentally crossing out letters to confirm the anagrams for herself.

  Tyke did the same, leaning over her shoulder. He whistled softly. “He’s really screwing with you, man.”

  Gabe nodded absently, still watching Eltern through the glass. Pushing the dread and stillness out of his middle, he replaced them with grim determination. “Let him try. I’ve been studying the details of this case for twenty-five years. If he wants to play, I’ll play.”

  Shaun heaved a deep sigh, looking at Eltern through the glass. “Except he’s done nothing but talk me in circles in there,” he murmured.

  Gabe watched his boss’s face. “You gonna tell him about the cross?”

  Shaun met Gabe’s eyes. “Yes. To see if he reacts.”

  Gabe nodded. After Shaun left the room, Gabe, Cora, and Tyke peered through the glass. Shaun appeared on the other side and took his seat across from Eltern again.

  “Something’s happened, Brad. A black cross was just delivered to one of my detectives. Do you know anything about that?”

  Respond, Eltern did. While his face hardly changed at all, something about his eyes turned positively jubilant. “It was delivered?” His voice was an elated whisper.

  Cora and Gabe exchanged glances.

  “What is it, Brad?” Shaun asked, his voice firm, eyes serious.

  “It’s the sign.”

  “The sign of what?”

  “That I can talk to you.”

  Shaun’s brows drew closer together by the second. “Talk to me about what?”

  “My father.”

  “We’ve already been talking of your father, Brad.”

  “My name is Eltern.” He said. A simple statement of fact. No anger behind it this time.

  Shaun slapped his palm onto the table. “Enough games, Mr. Hammond. Twenty-four years ago someone, a man, took you from your home in Modesto. We know of at least one other boy he kidnapped, four years later. What do you know about this man?”

  Still looking pleased, Eltern spread his hands. “I’m his son.”

  In the other room, Gabe couldn’t lean any closer without touching his forehead to the glass. He laid his fingertips gently against it, as though the information would come more swiftly that way.

  “What are y
ou doing here, Eltern?” Shaun asked, voice calm, but face still angry.

  “My father’s bidding.”

  “Which was what? To move into Gabe’s neighborhood and torment him?”

  “Torment? Of course not. I only had to watch.”

  “For how long?”

  “Until my father contacted me to give me further instructions.”

  “And what did you learn?” Shaun asked.

  Eltern shrugged. “Not much. I’d only been there a few days when the detective,” his voice dripped scorn, “wandered into my garage and noticed the box.”

  “Surely you and your father must have made a contingency plan for if Gabe stumbled onto your game.”

  “Surely.” Eltern smiled.

  Chills ran up Gabe’s spine.

  “What was it?” Shaun was all patience, now.

  “To say the line. The one from the last cross, and see how he reacted.”

  It’s so unnatural. The bond between brothers.

  “And how did he react?” Shaun asked. Gabe told him all that had happened back at the house, but he knew Shaun needed to hear it in Eltern’s own words. The more they could get him to talk, the more they would learn about him.

  “He recognized the phrase.”

  “What were you to do in that case?” Shaun asked.

  Eltern spread his hands again. “As you’ve seen. Allow the detective to do his thing. I figured he’d bring me in. Then wait for the sign to tell you the truth.”

  “And what happens now?” Shaun asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing. You can do with me as you please, Captain. My part is done.” With that, El sat back in his seat, looking satisfied with himself.

  Shaun glanced at the glass Gabe, Cora, and Tyke stood behind. Gabe wondered if Shaun wanted some input from them, but Gabe was mystified.

  “That’s it?” Cora asked. Neither Gabe nor Tyke had an answer.

  “Eltern,” Shaun said, leaning forward again, “you said Gabe recognized the phrase. What if he hadn’t?”

  “He wouldn’t have been worthy,” Eltern sneered. “And I would have killed him.”

  The finality and confidence with which he said it made something in Gabe’s stomach go unpleasantly still. He could feel Cora and Tyke’s amazed stares on him, but he didn’t turn to face them.