Particles of Murder (A Shadow of Death Romantic Suspense Series Book 1)

by Charlotte Raine

  My sister’s body was found a week later. She had been dead for about four days. She had been killed—smothered to death—three days after the police officially gave up on finding her.

  That’s why I went into criminal justice and why I pick apart details to find every little fact. I can’t just accept death and move on. I can’t pretend that lives aren’t dangling by a thin string and a second could be the difference between whether a victim lives or dies.

  I set my pen down and close my eyes, relaxing against the recliner. It’s been a long day, but as soon as Andre calls, I’ll need to be ready to go to wherever Alex is. I’ll need to be ready, but right now I need to sleep.

  My cell phone rings so loudly that it wakes me up. I scramble to get it, my vision too blurry to even see the number as I answer.

  “Hello?” I mumble.

  “Is this Mira Solano?” a timid woman’s voice asks.

  “Yes…” I say. “I’m really not interested in buying anything, so—”

  “I’m calling from Tuskmirth Hospital,” she says. “There’s been…there’s been an incident.”

  I sit up, rubbing my eyes. “Is it John Zimmer?”

  “Um, no,” she says. “Look, I’m really sorry, but we don’t know what happened. A neighbor saw the door wide open and they walked right in—”

  “What neighbor?” I ask. “Who’s at the hospital?”

  “He had you as his emergency contact on his phone,” she says. “His name was Andre Fortier.”

  It feels like oxygen is no longer reaching my lungs. “Was?”

  “His heart was barely beating when they put him in the ambulance. There was nothing…we tried everything,” she says. “We’re only supposed to call the next of kin, but Mr. Fortier didn’t seem to have any, so I searched through his phone and you were listed as an emergency contact. I had to inform somebody. You did know him, right?”

  “Y-yes,” I say, finally taking in a breath. “I knew him. You said he was in an apartment, but his apartment is here in the city. Why was he taken to Tuskmirth Hospital?”

  “He was found in an apartment here,” she says. “I’m sorry. I assumed it was his apartment. I don’t know. I’m sorry. I truly am. The police may know more.”

  “Thank you,” I murmur. How am I going to go to the police when Detective Stolz is mad at me for not only getting involved with this Tuskmirth College case, but the Blackman case? Andre was her informant. “Thank you so much for calling me. I know you aren’t supposed to, but I’m really…it was the right thing to do.”

  “Of course,” she says. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you,” I repeat. “Have a good day.”

  “You too,” she murmurs.

  I hang up. A second later, my phone begins to ring again. I glance at it. It’s Detective Stolz. If she’s calling to yell at me because she knows I got Andre involved with this case, I’m going to have to find her and hit her.

  “Hello?” I answer, the word coming out like a wisp.

  “I’m guessing from the tone of your voice that you’ve heard,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

  I pause. “Really? You’re sorry? I thought you would have been angry about me involving other people into cases I’m not supposed to be involved in.”

  “Well, we can’t be sure that’s why he died since—as far as we know—nobody saw him die,” she says. “But it does seem that way. But look, I know you think I’m a cold hard bitch, but I’m just trying to do what’s best for everyone. And I know you had some real, genuine…you loved Andre, in your weird, rule-breaking way. I understand that and I respect that. I just wanted to tell you and to give you my condolences.”

  I sit up, the drive to know what happened taking over. “Where was he killed?”

  “Well, this apartment was rented out by a Mr. Alex Shirokov,” she says. “Who is a student at Tuskmirth College.”

  “Yes,” I say. “I’ve met him and we both suspected him. Andre must have figured out where he went and went after him alone. Wait, Alex lived in the frat house. Why would he have his own apartment?”

  “It looks like Mr. Shirokov had a girlfriend who came here too,” she says. “So, maybe he didn’t want to be around his buddies while he was romancing her. Or maybe this is where he concocted evil plans. I don’t know, but from the way this apartment looks, it was a place for sex. The bed has silk red sheets and the drapes are dark red.”

  “You need to find Alex.”

  “Mira, sweetie, I know you’re really motivated to get this guy now, but I know how to do my job,” she says.

  “Apparently not,” I snap. “Because I started looking into this guy before he killed someone in his apartment and you haven’t found jack shit. By the way, the victims have been poisoned with a version of aconite and Alex happens to know his chemistry.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before?” she asks.

  “Because you wouldn’t have listened to me! You never do!”

  “I would have listened to your information and had it checked out for a murder case,” she says. “Jesus Christ, Mira. If we had known this earlier, we could have tracked him down faster than Andre did. We could have gotten to him and none of this would have happened.”

  “Are you blaming me for Andre’s death?”

  “No,” she says. “No. Absolutely not—it’s only the murderer’s fault. I’m just saying that you need to try to be a team player.”

  “Considering I don’t have a job, I don’t need to do anything.” I hang up. As I’m ready to chuck my phone, I notice there’s a text that I hadn’t seen before since my screen had only ever shown that people were calling me. I don’t recognize the number. I open up the text.

  347-879-7006: We need to talk.

  347-879-7006: I’m not the killer.

  347-879-7006: I might know who is, but I need to know if I can trust you.

  It has to be Alex. Nobody else would be insisting they’re not the killer like this.

  Me: You can trust me.

  347-879-7006: Your case may be compromised. You’re the only one I trust.

  347-879-7006: I could see how much you cared about the victims.

  347-879-7006: Come see me at Freewren Park. It’s a public place, nobody can get hurt.

  Three of the victims have died in public places, but this may be my one chance to catch Alex and bring him in. If he’s telling the truth and he’s not the killer, it will still be good to coax him to the police station.

  Besides, I have some questions about why Andre died in Alex’s apartment, and I won’t be able to get anything out of him if the police are around.

  Who needs to be a team player when everyone around me is always dying?

  I open up my notebook again, because the feel of my pen moving across the page is about the only thing that can keep me grounded. Andre, Andre. His name is spoken with every beat of my heart.

  I begin to write.

  The Blackman case.

  Tom Blackman had his fingers in every profitable street on the Bronx. The Blackman family and their organization mostly sold drugs all over the city, but they were willing to commit any crime as long as they were paid well for it. There were plenty of headlines concerning the “Blackman Black Market” and the little faith people had in the police was quickly dwindling. He had no problem getting his hands dirty, but any time the police could get a witness, they backed down or disappeared. It was nightmare case after nightmare case until one of their more prominent drug dealers was caught on camera beating an undercover cop. That drug dealer was Andre Fortier.

  While Andre was striking a deal with the police to find concrete evidence against Tom Blackman in exchange for forgetting that they had footage of him attacking a policeman, I was showing him how luminol could be used to find blood on any possible weapons, explaining how rifled barrels leave striation marks on bullets, and anything else I could think of to keep him close to me. I knew his history, I knew he was bad news—I’m not even the type to fall
for bad boys—but he always seemed genuinely interested in everything I said and when he looked at me, I felt like someone was truly seeing me for the first time. I thought it was love. I was twenty-three when we first met, and hopelessly naive.

  One night as I was leaving a crime scene, I was attacked by this guy who seemed to be trying to rape me. Andre came by and saved me. I had to stop him from beating that man, too, and the man ran away. I would later find out that this whole scenario was concocted by Andre to get me to trust him, and it worked. Any doubts I had about falling for him quickly began to disappear. I was terribly stupid, but also terribly hungry for love.

  Three months passed by with Andre giving the police minimal information that would never end in a conviction. Detective Stolz, who was working on the case, found out Andre and I were seeing each other when she went searching through his texts to make sure he wasn’t double-crossing us. She told me to break it off. I didn’t. I had romanticized this idea that we could get through anything.

  Nearly a month later, the truth came out. It wasn’t just the man attacking me that Andre had set up. He knew the cameras were on him when he was beating the policeman. He knew he could get a deal with the police if he pretended to be more concerned about himself than the Blackman organization. It was a plan he and Tom Blackman concocted one night—give some information to the police that’s half true, half false in order to make it believable, but still lead them in the wrong direction. Keep tabs on how close the police are getting. Get close to one of the forensic scientists because he or she will be the one who finds the evidence to convict Tom Blackman.

  Andre confessed this all to me one night after I told him about my sister. Betrayal isn’t even a strong enough word. He told me he would go tell the police if it would make me feel better, but nothing would make me feel better.

  After I kicked him out of my apartment, he told Detective Stolz everything. He was arrested. I don’t know much about what happened, but I can only assume they didn’t charge him more harshly because they thought they might need him later, maybe they believed he was truly repentant, or they didn’t have the evidence to convict him of anything worse. I don’t know. I didn’t pay attention to the news for months. I did hear through the police grapevine that he had been stabbed while in prison on the left side of his chest, causing him problems with the muscle in that area, so, in some ways, he paid his dues.

  But now he’s dead. He died trying to make up for his sins against me and I never once told him that I forgave him. And I never told him I loved him back after he got out of prison.

  And, God, I loved him so much.

  The park is ten minutes away from campus. It’s not awe-inspiring and breathtaking nature like I usually imagine parks to be. Even now, when all of the leaves have fallen off except for a few procrastinators, the tree branches cast an eternal sense of dusk over the park. Nobody comes here with good intentions. As I step into the darkness, I know sunlight is just one step back, but the shadows in the woods seem to have their grasp on me and, honestly, I like it.

  I continue to walk through the park, my eyes constantly moving, waiting for the inevitable attack from the Big Bad Wolf. But I’m not Little Red Riding Hood. I’m not on my way to my grandmother’s house with a basket of treats and I certainly won’t wait for a lumberjack to come save me. This will be over very quickly. I have lost too much to dwell on pity, motives, or humanity. The Big Bad Wolf has spent too much time running free and it’s about time that he learned what happens to nuisance animals.

  “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  I spin around. Alex is learning against a tree a few feet ahead of me. He hadn’t been there a second ago. He was hiding in plain sight, just like he always has been.

  “I told you. It wasn’t me,” he continues.

  “How else could he have been murdered in your secret apartment?” I ask, unable to even say Andre’s name. Alex isn’t good enough to hear it. I reach behind me, grabbing the gun in the holster pressed against the small of my back.

  He shrugs. “I have no idea. He was alive, accusing me of murdering those students, and then he was dead. I got the fuck out of there because I knew what everyone was going to think.”

  “Your field of study is chemistry,” I say. “You purposely hurt your arm to hide the scratches from breaking into Iris’s apartment.”

  His eyebrows lift. “Is that what you’ve figured out? All of it?”

  “All of it?” I ask. “What more is there?”

  He smiles, relaxing. “Good. Now, if you’re going to pull that gun out, I’d suggest you do it. Have you ever killed a person? It’s not as easy as you would think. That rage will feed your uncivilized side, that animal side of you to kill me, but you’ve been raised in society to see murder as an unforgivable sin. It won’t be as easy to pull that trigger as you think it will be, no matter how justified you think you are.”

  I pull the gun out. Before I can aim it at him, he grabs the barrel. My fingers twist around the trigger guard as he tries to pull it out of my grasp. I try to pull the trigger to at least scare him, but only the tip of my finger is touching it anymore. As he tries to bend my wrist back, I grab his throat. I squeeze.

  Using my wrist as a way to balance himself, he swings his leg up and kicks me in the ribs. My grip loosens and I stumble back. He takes hold of the gun.

  “Thank you,” he says, pointing the gun at me. “I can’t legally own a gun, though, really—a short stint in a mental institution—but I’d rather use poison anyway. The noise, the fact that you have to rely on mechanics you can’t see, the whole having to take the time to aim, and, of course, the weapon can be turned against you. You should have looked more into my past before you brought a gun. I’ve completed multiple martial arts classes. Perhaps you should have tried some.”

  “Perhaps,” I relent. “And perhaps your mother and father should have hugged you a bit more.”

  “That is so classic,” he says. “My parents were saints. Don’t point your finger at them. This has nothing to do with them.”

  He lowers the gun.

  “Is there any way I can convince you to kill yourself?” he asks. “Because if I kill you like this, right now, people are going to look that much harder for me and…well, you don’t need to know the other part. See, with poison, they can still have that little belief that those deaths are natural or accidental, but a bullet is an obvious murder. It really is a terrible weapon of choice.”

  “If you’re going to kill me, just do it,” I say. “I’m not going to do anything for you.”

  “Well, then, it’s a good thing I brought back-up,” he says. He pulls a rubber glove out of his left pocket, his right hand still holding the gun. I could tackle him, but if he’s truly experienced in martial arts, it would be pointless. He puts the gun next to his feet and pulls the rubber glove on. It would be so easy to grab it, but I’d have to be able to get a shot off before he could take it back from me and there’s simply no way I could do it. He takes a pen that had been in his left pocket, barely peeking out.

  He holds it out to me. I stare at it.

  “Take it,” he says.

  “That’s how you did it,” I say, staring at the pen. “Victoria was in John’s office, Everett was in class, Iris was working at her play. They all would have used pens at some point. That’s why you broke into Iris’ apartment. You needed to get your hands on one of her pens.”

  “Actually, I just placed a new pen on her backpack,” he says. “I couldn’t get close enough to her to slip it into any of her things, but no one notices if a random new pen shows up and it looks generic. Victoria and Everett were easy. I put one in Victoria’s purse while she was visiting her lover boy. When Everett was snorting his drugs, I slipped one in his backpack. It’s so easy. And now it’s your turn.”

  “But why?” I ask. “What did any of those people do to you? Why are they all connected to John?”

  He smirks. “I’ll die before I tell you.”

  “W
hy? You already plan to kill me,” I say. “And what about that note you shoved in my mouth? What was that about?”

  Confusion clouds his face for a second before he smiles again. “It’s all part of the game, dear.”

  He holds the pen out to me.

  “You either take the pen or I shoot you,” he says. “I highly endorse the poison. It’s painless—I couldn’t have people screaming or vomiting as they died, so it’s just like falling asleep. It’s just more permanent.”

  I will become just like my sister and Andre: another dead body, another mystery that will be buried under the events of everyday life.

  But if I die, their memories will die with me. Especially Andre, whose only friends were criminals who used him.

  I lunge forward, knocking the pen out of Alex’s hand as I tackle him. As we both land on the ground, I can feel him trying to pull the gun in between us. It begins to dig into my stomach and I can feel my breathing slow down. It can’t end like this.

  The sound of brakes screeching in the parking lot breaks through the silence. Alex jerks at the sound, looking to his right toward the sirens. I grab his arm with the gun, dragging his arm out from between us. I slam his wrist against the ground. He hits it hard enough against the roots of a tree that he drops the gun. I scramble to grab it, but Alex is faster. He bolts in the opposite direction of where the sirens are coming from. I wish I had my gun, but he’s weaving through the trees. I wouldn’t be able to get a good shot, anyway.

  I walk toward the parking lot. I barely take three steps before I see Detective Stolz running toward me. She raises her arms in a confused gesture.

  We stop in front of each other.

  “What’s going on?” she asks. “Why are you here?”

  “I’d ask you the same thing,” I say.

  “Well, you sounded like you were going to do something stupid when I talked to you on the phone, so I had Alex's and your cell phone tracked,” she says. “His phone must be turned off, but we found yours. It said you were heading here, so I came as fast as I could. So, it’s your turn now: what are you doing here?”