“That’s because you’re never around. Besides that, he’s having problems remembering other things too.”
“Like?” I asked.
“A lot of little things.”
“Mmm hmm.”
“Fine, if you don’t care… You know he’s going to be sixty-eight this year.”
“Sixty-eight isn’t that old, Mel.”
“He’s starting to slow down. It’s been a while since you’ve seen him.”
Her last sentence made me lean back and rub my eyes. My sister was about to take the conversation to her normal guilt-trip territory. I didn’t have the energy.
“Hey, I have a work call I’m expecting in a couple minutes. Let me talk to Tommy quick before I have to go.”
She didn’t respond, but I could hear her call him. A rattling on the other end of the phone followed.
“Hello?”
I put on my best talking-with-little-kids voice. It was a touch higher pitched and upbeat. “Hey, buddy. It’s Uncle Carl. How’s it going?”
“Hi, Uncle Carl.”
“How are you doing, pal?”
“I’m good. I got a new car.”
“You got a new car? You’re driving already?”
He giggled into the phone. “A toy car.”
“A toy car? What’s it look like?”
“It’s red and big. It has fire on the sides. When I pull it, it takes off real fast.”
“Sounds cool.”
“Yeah.”
Static and thumping came through the phone. He talked to someone in the room—my brother in law, Jeff, maybe. I had exhausted the attention span of a child on the phone.
“Okay, buddy. Love you. Be good.”
“Okay.”
“All right, Tommy, give the phone back to Mom.”
I heard more thumping through the earpiece. He ran the phone back to my sister. She came back on.
“You need to come up here, Carl.”
“I know. I’ll get something scheduled. I’m getting that call any minute, and I need to get some paperwork arranged first. I’ll call you soon.”
“Fine. I just e-mailed you some pictures of Tommy. Call me tomorrow.”
“Okay. Tell Jeff I said hi.”
“All right, I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Yup. Bye.”
I hung up and blew a giant breath from my mouth. Every conversation with her went that way. A nephew sandwich on guilt trip bread was what I liked to call it. She laid on the guilt, I had a quick talk with my nephew, and she finished with a touch more guilt. When the sandwich was finished, I made up an excuse to get off the phone. The call did make me wonder about my dad’s state of mind. I made a mental note to call him in the morning.
I went through the cabinets and refrigerator for anything resembling food. No luck. The search reminded me that I was still out of coffee. I had zero interest in leaving my condo and going to the grocery store. A magnet on the refrigerator from a pizza joint down the street caught my eye. I called and put in an order. Some pizza, combined with the couple stray beers I had left in the refrigerator, would hold me over until breakfast. Sarah McMillian’s file lay spread out across my table. I dug back into it until the food arrived.
My pizza showed up a half hour later. I tossed the box on the coffee table and flipped open the lid. Butch perked up and came to investigate. He bridged himself between the couch and the table.
“No, Butch! People food. Not for cats.”
He cocked his head, looked at me, and then leaned in closer to the pizza.
“Butch!” I tried to put a tone of authority in my voice.
He dismissed my scolding and stuck his nose into a piece of the pepperoni.
“Get out of there! Bad cat!”
I was just about to shoo him away when he followed up his sniff with an exploratory lick. The piece was his. I’d seen what he licked in his free time.
“Fine, you want some pizza?” I took the slice from the box and stood. He hopped from the couch to follow. His collar bell jingled as he bounded along at my feet. I tossed the slice into his dish. He gave it a sniff, looked at me, and then walked back to the couch.
I shook my head. “Stupid cat.” I would have been surprised if he’d eaten it. The only cat food he would eat was forty dollars a bag. He had a taste for the finer things in life. Greasy pizza wasn’t on the menu.
Two cab companies returned my call as the night progressed. Both had had fares coming from the airport around the time Sarah McMillian went missing, but neither went to the Imperial Suites, and neither was a female. I read over her entire file and all my notes again. My eyes began to strain. I decided they needed a little resting and leaned back into the couch.
A little after one in the morning, I woke up. The case would have to resume later. I was beat. A sleeping, purring ball of cat lay on my lap. I gave Butch a few pets on the head and then slipped him off my lap onto his couch pillow. He was a good cat when he wasn’t awake.
Sarah McMillian’s file was spread across my couch and coffee table. I gathered the papers up, tossed the file onto the kitchen table, and went to my bedroom. My shift wouldn’t start until nine, and I needed to get a good night’s sleep.
Chapter 12
It had been an hour and a half since he’d checked on her—he’d inserted an IV into her arm. Buprenorphine, a synthetic opiate, filled the drip bag. He had picked it up when he acquired the Xylazine to deal with his illness, but it was too strong for his tastes. Watered down, it could work to keep her docile when she awoke.
The lever to engage the deadbolt was on the outside of the door. He flipped it open and entered the bedroom. In his arms were fresh bandages. He closed the door behind him as he walked into the room. Diane Robins lay motionless. Straps across her chest and thighs secured her to the bed. He approached her from the side. She was still out. He grabbed her by the jaw and rocked her head back and forth to wake her. “You alive?”
She blinked her eyelids while she stared at the ceiling. Her face was blank.
He sat at the edge of the bed and shook her by the head again. “Can you hear me in there?”
She didn’t respond. A line of drool rolled from the side of her mouth.
He leaned over her and removed the bandages around her head. He examined his work. A small amount of blood was still seeping from the bottom of the sutures. He dabbed the blood away. She didn’t make any movement. He wrapped fresh dressings around her head and tossed the old ones out. He sat next to her on the bed. Her eyes rolled to the side. They stared at the wall.
“We’re going to do the other side in a bit.”
Her eyes shot to the right and focused on him. Unanticipated rage filled her face.
He glanced at her arm. The IV wasn’t there. He looked further down to see that the straps holding her to the bed were no longer attached to the bed frame. Her left arm flew up from her side, wielding the IV needle. She plunged it into his neck as he tried to spring up from the bed. He stumbled across the room and crashed into the closet doors before falling to the ground. His hands went to the side of his throat. He fumbled at the needle embedded in his neck. Blood was running from the open end.
Diane scrambled from the bed and got herself to her feet. She ran for the door. As she flung it open and attempted to flee, he caught her by the ankle. She kicked him in the face and rushed through the doorway.
He pulled the needle from his neck and tossed it on the bedroom carpet beside him. He was lucky it had missed everything vital. A half inch farther forward, and it would have punctured his jugular—two inches farther forward, and it would have hit his windpipe. He pulled himself to his feet and burst from the room after Diane. He could hear her running through the house. He found her at the glass patio door leading outside. She was fumbling with the door’s lock.
When she saw him, she ran to the kitchen and pulled a knife from the knife block. She had her back to the sink. A wild look filled her face. The knife was at her side, the blade pointed
out, ready to strike. A granite-topped kitchen island separated the two. He rounded the side. She headed two steps in the other direction.
She poked the knife at the air in front of her. “What did you do to me, you son of a bitch?”
He took two quick steps toward her. “Give me the knife.”
She mirrored his movement, taking two steps to the side, still holding the knife out in front of her. She glanced toward the living room. A look of horror crossed her face.
He rounded the side of the kitchen island to flush her out. He thought she would make a run for it. She didn’t. Instead, she held her ground and stabbed at him. He dodged to the right as soon as he saw she wasn’t fleeing. The knife tore a hole through his shirt and sliced against the skin of his side.
“Now you’re just going to die, you stupid bitch.” He grabbed her blade-wielding hand and slammed it into the granite countertop. After only two strikes, the knife flew to the floor and skidded across the kitchen tile. He grabbed her other hand as she tried to claw at his face. With both her hands in his control, he reared back and head butted her in the nose with all the force he could muster. He saw a flash of colors on impact and felt her body go limp. The blow left his vision blurred as he opened his eyes. Blood covered her face, her nose broken. The head butt had knocked her out. He let her go. Her body fell to the floor.
He rested against the kitchen island. He shook his head and squinted his eyes in an attempt to clear out the cobwebs. A violent cough from the physical excursion sent blood from his lungs spattering across the granite of the island. He was dizzy, more than likely concussed from the impact. He wiped his mouth and took in deep breaths from his nose—he exhaled. The sound of metal scraping against tile filled his ears. Before he could see where the sound was coming from, he felt an explosion of pain jolt up his leg. He screamed and looked toward his feet.
Diane was lying on the kitchen floor, holding the handle of a knife. The two-inch-wide blade was lodged into his calf. She pulled the blade out, causing him to scream in pain again. She yanked her hand back and went for another stab. He pulled his leg away. The blade missed and stuck into the cabinet door of the island.
He balanced on his injured leg and pulled his right foot up. He stomped her head. It bounced off the tile and back up into the sole of his shoe. He stomped down again and again. Her head became soft. Blood splashed with each blow. She was dead. She lay at his feet. He stomped her again.
“You could have been famous.”
He stumbled out to the garage. Fresh plastic was covering the table and floor. Gone was the blood spatter from Diane’s first operation. He dropped his pants and slid off his bloody shoes. In his blue boxer shorts, he turned his back at the edge of the table and slid himself up onto it. He crossed his injured leg over the other knee to get a better view of the wound. She had plunged the knife into the middle of his calf. With the saline bottle, he flushed away the blood so he could see the extent of the damage. The stab wound was a couple inches across and hung open a quarter inch. His blood flowed from the cut. It needed to be stitched. He took his materials for suturing and a bottle of alcohol from the cart.
His teeth ground together as he splashed alcohol across the wound. He splashed more alcohol across his stitching needle. He looped the thread through the needle and tied it. Though he had drugs to ease the pain, he would take nothing. He wanted to be clear headed. He inserted the curved suture needle into his flesh. His skin bulged and turned white before the tip broke the surface. He pulled the thread through, sank the needle into the other side, and then pulled the thread tight. The stitching went slowly and, for the first few minutes, rivaled the pain from the wound itself. Numbness took over after that. The needle became slick with blood. It wasn’t a professional job, but it worked to close the knife wound and stop the bleeding. He wrapped his leg with a gauze roll. With the major injury addressed, he needed to see how bad the slash across his side was. He unbuttoned his shirt and removed it one arm at a time. Loose skin hung from his sides. Her wild swipe with the blade had caught the top of what used to be his left love handle. Now it was just skin. A small trickle of blood came from the cut. It was four inches long and an eighth of an inch deep, a minor flesh wound. He was lucky. He squinted his eyes hard, splashed alcohol over it, and searched for a gauze pad and tape. Patching the wound was a quick fix. With his knife wounds addressed, he scooted himself down from the table.
In his underwear, he grabbed the roll of painter’s plastic, a scrub brush, and a set of his latex gloves. He limped back inside to the kitchen. A fly buzzed his head. He smashed it with the roll of plastic sheeting. The fly spun on its back on the kitchen floor. He hit it until it stopped moving. The fly lay dead. He tossed the roll of plastic next to its corpse. Another fly buzzed past his ear. He shooed it away.
He moved Diane’s corpse to the master bath and laid her in the garden tub. The strain on his leg from moving her caused bursts of pain with each step. He hobbled back to the kitchen for the scrub brush and latex gloves. From the laundry room, he grabbed a bottle of bleach.
He stripped her naked. The smell of bleach filled the bathroom as he doused her body. The bristles of the scrub brush ripped back and forth across her skin. No evidence would be left behind. While he cleaned under her nails, he noticed a cut on her palm. It was from the knife she’d used to stab him. The cut was minor, but someone from forensics would spot it. He took a knife from the kitchen and made a few cuts across and next to it. The police would dismiss it as a form of torture. Cleaned and dried, he re-dressed her in fresh green lingerie. He wrapped her body in the painter’s plastic from the kitchen.
Using just the power of his right leg for support, he pulled her plastic-wrapped body from the tub. He was weak and injured. It took him five minutes to get her out to the garage. Past his work area, parked next to the taxi, was his Range Rover. The rear quarter panel of the SUV held her body up as he opened the rear gate. He pushed her in and slammed it closed. Pain shot up his leg. He stood still until it subsided. He would dispose of her body overnight.
Chapter 13
I had a productive morning. I rolled out of bed early without the snooze button and spent a much-needed hour at the gym. I even had enough time to stop at a local coffee shop on the way to work. In addition to two large cups of coffee, I picked up a bag for the house. I sat down at my desk fifteen minutes early. A message waited on my voicemail from Terry Murphy, in our tech department. They couldn’t get anything off the airport video to identify the taxi.
I put it out of my mind and plugged away at the phones for two hours. I again called every cab company on my list, that served the airport. I hoped the day shifters would remember something the night shifters hadn’t. While I was still waiting to hear back from a couple places, I was starting to think she may have gotten into an unregistered cab.
Then the morning went to hell.
The captain buzzed my desk phone and told me to get to the law offices of Stanley and Wallace. We had a body. It was a female, blond, and dressed in lingerie. Apparently, our guy had struck again. The clock read a few minutes after eleven when Hank and I left.
We drove down West Kennedy. The crime scene was under a ten-minute drive from the station. A couple of turns later, we pulled into the small parking lot for the law office. Set on a corner lot, the place wasn’t much bigger than an average house. The building was a single story, beige with a terracotta roof. White pillars supported the roof overhangs over the doorways. All the windows had arched tops. The landscaping was sparse around the building aside from a row of bushes and a couple palm trees running along the back. I pulled into the first empty parking spot and killed the motor.
Two squad cars, an unmarked cruiser, and an ambulance parked near the side of the building—that was where we headed first. I spotted Detective Jones towering over the other officers and the people they were speaking with. We walked up.
“Jones, what have we got?” I asked.
“Hey, Lieutenant. It looks lik
e we’ve got a case of deja vu. Woman, thirties, blond and wearing green lingerie. It’s the same as the other day.”
“Branded?”
Jones nodded.
“Shit. Has anyone from forensics been here yet?”
“Nah, I’ve only been on the scene for a few minutes. I just happened to be grabbing a quick lunch in the area when the call came in.”
“Where’s the body?” Hank asked.
“This way.” He turned his back and headed for the side of the building. We followed a few feet behind him.
“She’s right back here,” he said.
I caught women’s feet sticking out from the bushes as we rounded the building’s corner.
“The guy that first spotted her is giving a statement to Officer Johnson out front. From what I heard, he said he parked in the last spot there and noticed her as he got out of the car.” Jones pointed to a dark-silver four door.
I stopped and took in the location of the car and building. Unless you were on the complete end, in that specific parking spot, you wouldn’t see the body. I pointed back to the body and resumed walking.
“Continue, Jones.”
“He went to her aid and recognized the woman was deceased. He ran inside and had them call 9-1-1. That’s basically it.”
I nodded. We stood in front of the body. She lay sitting up with her back half into the row of shrubs. Her head rested against her chest, her arms hanging in the branches. She wore green lingerie identical to the woman we had found in the dumpster. She smelled of bleach. Noticeable ligature marks were present around her wrists and ankles. Unlike the last woman we found, this one had been beaten.
I knelt down closer to the body. My stomach turned. Her nose was crushed to one side. She had deep lacerations to both sides of her head.
Malevolent (Lieutenant Kane series Book 1) Page 6