The Sullivan Gray Series Box Set

by H. P. Bayne

  As Dez drove the police cruiser toward the freeway leading to his end of town, Sully was his usual brand of quiet in the passenger seat, staring out the window.

  Dez knew that a lot went on in Sully’s brain in these quiet moments, and it didn’t always occur to him to share. Nor did it always dawn on him that sharing might be the key to staying sane.

  “What are you thinking, Sull?”

  An answer came after a few seconds’ pause.

  “Nothing.”

  “So you’re just enjoying the scenery?”

  Sully turned to him, expression suggesting he’d just realized he wasn’t alone. “What?”

  Dez chewed on the inside of his lower lip, studying Sully in between necessary glances at the road. His brother tended to do a good chunk of daily living inside his own head, but he wasn’t often far from the surface. This was different, and Dez didn’t like it.

  “You doing okay?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  The answer didn’t do much to ease Dez’s worries. Nor did the fact his brother quickly broke eye contact to return his gaze to the streets. “Listen, Sully, what you went through today, it’s—”

  “Dez, stop.”

  “What?”

  “Stop!”

  Dez pulled to the curb and made an unsuccessful grab for his brother as he bailed out of the cruiser. Pulling the keys, Dez rushed after Sully as he disappeared down an alley on the opposite side of the business they had pulled in next to.

  As inexplicable as had been Sully’s sudden flight from the car, it had nothing on the fact Dez could see his brother flattened against a brick wall, staring wide-eyed into the air in front of him.

  And yet, there was no question what that meant. If he had no concern for Sully, Dez would have stayed where he was and waited until his brother showed signs the ghost had gone. As it stood, he couldn’t do nothing, not when Sully looked like that—like he had when, as a seven-year-old kid, he’d spent hours shaking next to Dez in bed as he sought refuge from the things only he could see.

  Dez was terrified of ghosts, but he was a big brother first, so he gained Sully’s side in several strides and placed himself directly in front of him.

  Dez felt the chill immediately, as if he’d stepped into a freezer, and it took every ounce of courage, self-control and love for his brother not to move. The cold seized him, biting into muscle and bone hard enough to cramp, and he felt a terror so strong it effectively rooted him to the spot. He sought strength, as he often did, in Sully, in watching the fear dwindle from in his younger brother’s eyes, matching the lessening cold.

  Sully reached out, grasping handfuls of Dez’s uniform shirt as he dropped his forehead against his older brother’s chest. “I’m sorry.”

  “What the hell was that, Sully?”

  Sully’s voice was slightly muffled against Dez’s front. “The sort of thing you’d rather not know about.”

  Under normal circumstances, Dez would be happy to agree. They had left normal behind in that blood-soaked bar. “Tell me anyway.”

  Sully lifted his head and tugged back handfuls of hair as he leaned against the wall. “I saw him for the first time last night, just before the break-in. I hadn’t seen him since. Not until now.”

  “I thought maybe you were going to tell me it was Betty.”

  “I saw her, too, after the shooting. She doesn’t do this to me.”

  “Do what to you, exactly?”

  Sully blew out a slow breath before answering. “This guy scares the hell out of me, and I don’t know why. I haven’t felt this way since I was a kid, and I hate it.”

  Dez dropped a hand solidly on his brother’s shoulder. “Hey, we’ll figure this out, okay? We always do, right?”

  Sully managed a weak nod, albeit an unconvincing one. Dez pulled gently on his shoulder.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here.”

  “Not yet. There must be something he wanted me to see.”

  “I know what I want to see,” Dez said. “The back of this alley.” With Sully returning to his normal levels of calm, Dez felt his own anxieties bubbling back up. Dez sometimes joked the two of them were like a seesaw, only one allowed to hit the dirt at any given time. “Dude, tell me something. Did I just step into a ghost?”

  Sully patted Dez on the chest as he pushed past him. “Yeah, you did.”

  Dez shuddered so violently it came out as a verbal sound.

  “Thanks for that, by the way,” Sully said as he scanned the ground around them.

  “Jesus Christ, Sully … Jesus Christ.”

  Coming up with nothing but a few discarded cigarette butts and a handful of candy wrappers and crumpled papers next to the business’s rear exit, Sully moved further down the alley toward a dumpster. Dez’s mind turned to the possibility of what that garbage bin might contain, given the recent presence of the ghost, driving Dez to overtake his brother and hold him back before he could pull up the lid. Sully had seen enough death for one day. As much as Dez hated being around dead bodies—mostly because he knew their former owners were sometimes nearby—he figured he was still psychologically sturdy enough to handle finding a corpse in a dumpster.

  Holding his breath against the anticipated smell of dead flesh, Dez lifted the lid.

  “What is it?” Sully asked.

  Dez stared at what appeared, at first, to be a small body. Doing a double take, he realized it was just a bundle of clothes. “Just clothing, man. Nothing much.”

  “Can I see?”

  Dez held onto the lid but stepped slightly to the side to allow space for Sully to peer in. “Mind if I move things around a bit?”

  Dez used his free hand to pull his pen from his front pocket. “Go ahead, but use this. It beats handling garbage.”

  Sully leaned over far enough he could pick at the clothes with the end of the pen, shifting the dumpster’s contents until they had a good view of a balled-up black overcoat, a pair of jeans and a rubber ghoul mask.

  “Dez, how far are we from the Black Fox?”

  “About three blocks, I think. Why?”

  Sully straightened up and handed Dez back his pen. “Because this is the stuff the guy was wearing when he shot Betty.”

  6

  Dez supposed he should have expected Raynor to be unimpressed with their find.

  What he hadn’t anticipated was an outright accusation of evidence-planting.

  “It just seems very convenient, that’s all,” Raynor told Dez once the latter had pulled the Major Crimes investigator aside.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That means what it sounds like. Think about it. There must be close to two dozen dumpsters just like this one in a three- to four-block radius of the Black Fox. You’re telling me you and Sullivan pulled over minutes after leaving the police station and just happened to head to this exact dumpster where, lo and behold, you find the suspect’s clothing and mask?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m telling you.”

  “And I’m saying that sounds very convenient.”

  “I know it might seem that way,” Dez said. “But it’s what happened.”

  “And how do I know the two of you weren’t just waiting for the opportune moment to plant this?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Come on, Braddock. You know your brother is being eyed as a potential suspect here. So the two of you figure out a way to pad his story about this masked shooter by planting items that happen to match those he described to us.”

  “You’re out of your mind.”

  “Am I? Hey, I get it. I really do. He’s your kid brother. You take care of him. And, well, look at him. A pretty-boy like that, he wouldn’t fare too well in prison, would he? He’d be bent over so often he’d start walking crooked.”

  Dez knew Raynor was baiting him, half-hoping to take a fist or two in the face just so he’d have cause to get Dez canned or, better yet, charged with assault. Dez knew it and yet, for a few seconds, he didn’t care. He
took a step toward Raynor, taking some satisfaction in the flash of fear he saw in the smaller man’s eyes. Dez didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to.

  “You’re not thinking about assaulting me, now, are you?” Raynor asked, trying for cocky but getting to only half-mast with the smirk he appeared to be attempting.

  “I’m thinking about it. And I’m enjoying every second of it.”

  He was interrupted by a hand on his arm and his brother’s voice. “Dez? Everything all right?”

  “Everything’s good.”

  “I finished giving my statement to one of the constables. They said we can go.”

  “Uh-uh,” Raynor said. “I say when you can go.”

  “Is there something else you need from me right now?”

  “No,” Raynor said. “You can go. Just don’t leave town, as they say. This isn’t finished.”

  Sully wasn’t quite done yet. “Did you find that thumb drive yet?”

  “The one the deputy chief mentioned to me? No, actually, we haven’t. Which got me thinking maybe it doesn’t exist at all. You’re the only one who saw it, after all.”

  Dez was reaching the end of his rope and knew if he let go, Raynor would be the form he’d crush in his descent. “You’re a real asshole, you know that?”

  Raynor shrugged and lifted an eyebrow. “Unlike some, I’m not here to win popularity contests, Braddock. Look, don’t worry; we’ll get your supposed evidence in for forensic analysis. But I swear to you, if it turns up with any of Sullivan’s or your DNA on it, I’m dragging both your asses over the grill.”

  Only Sully’s persistent tugging on his arm got Dez to follow him away from the standoff with Raynor and back in the direction of the car.

  “Let it go. He’s not worth it.”

  “He might be if it turns out he starts bending what he finds into an excuse to charge you.”

  “There’s nothing to find, right? Like Dad said.”

  His shrugged and grumbled reply didn’t make sense even to himself. He’d been around long enough to know the wrong people sometimes ended up charged. It didn’t happen often, but it happened. And it sometimes also happened that investigators got tunnel vision, became so fixated on their working theory and preferred suspect that they lost sight of other possibilities—and even the truth.

  No one liked to be proven wrong less than Forbes Raynor.

  He wasn’t about to share that with Sully, although he strongly suspected his brother already knew. He had, after all, come into their lives after being unfairly grilled as an un-chargeable child suspect over the arson-related murders of his then-foster family.

  “What did you tell them about how we found the stuff?” Dez asked, instead. “I just said you seemed to have seen something and took off, so I followed. Figured I’d leave it to you to provide the explanation.”

  “I said I thought I saw someone I recognized in the alley. It’s sort of true, I guess. I said I couldn’t see him, so I started looking, and that’s when I checked the dumpster.”

  “And did the constable seem to buy it?”

  “As far as I could tell. I doubt Raynor’s going to.”

  “Probably not.”

  “I couldn’t tell them the truth, though, could I? I mean, Raynor would think that was more improbable than the explanation I gave.”

  “Yeah,” Dez said. “You got that right. What I’m wondering is where that thumb drive got to. It doesn’t sound like Raynor’s about to go all-in looking for it.”

  “I was thinking the same thing. And maybe the reason it hasn’t turned up is because the killer already found it.”

  “You think?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it, man, and maybe he found it and decided he needed to get rid of Betty,” Sully said. “I mean, she obviously knew what was on it and, if that’s the case, she would have posed a danger, too, right? If there was some sort of evidence against someone on there, she would have lost her proof with the drive, but that wouldn’t prevent her going forward with whatever she knew.”

  “Okay, yeah, but I’m thinking it’s also possible the drive’s still out there; that this guy hasn’t found it, and he figured he’d better take Betty out to prevent her doing anything with it.”

  “You know, all this is dependent on my being right that there was more on that drive than Betty’s family stuff,” Sully said. “Maybe she was telling the truth.”

  “You’re good at reading people, Sully. If you think she was lying to you, then she was lying to you.”

  Sully stuffed his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans as he walked. “I wish she’d let me help her. Maybe—I don’t know ….”

  “Maybe what? Maybe you could have saved her? Or maybe, little brother, you would have joined her.”

  Sully shrugged but didn’t say anything else, so Dez fell into silence too—although not for long.

  “Where are your shoes?”

  “Ident seized them earlier today, and I guess you forgot to bring some for me.”

  “Great,” Dez said. “I guess we’d better stop off and buy you some. I don’t think you’re going to fit my skis.”

  Sully had never been the kind of guy to go in for brand names or, for that matter, brand new, so Dez hit the army surplus store a few blocks away.

  As his brother scanned the boots, Dez took in the posters littering a notice board just inside the front doors.

  His eyes locked onto one featuring a warning reading “PEDOPHILE” across the top in big, bold letters. Beneath it was a pair of photos, both of Thackeray Schuster—one a mug shot and the other showing him in Riverview Park. The latter appeared to have been surreptitiously taken and revealed a couple children playing nearby. Beneath the warning were listed a number of personal details, such as birthdate, height, weight, physical description and even his home address.

  Dez could see a store employee sitting behind the till, watching Sully like a hawk as if anticipating a theft. Dez didn’t think his brother looked like a shoplifter, but then, this was the Riverview area. Shoplifters were a dime a dozen around here these days, and many didn’t match the stereotype. Hell, he’d had to arrest an eighty-two-year-old granny last week for trying to make off with a stack of scratch-n-wins.

  Dez plucked the poster from the tacks holding it in place and approached the employee with it. The man gave up the surveillance on Sully and stood to attention upon seeing the uniform—albeit with more anxiety in his expression than full respect. Dez sized him up during his approach: mid-to-late thirties, head shaved bald, well-tended facial hair, and a muscular build and lack of evident body fat that suggested he treated his body like a temple. He had a firearms magazine open in front of him, giving him something he could use to disguise his surveillance should he be spotted. His hands were out of sight, leaving Dez to question whether he had access to a weapon below the counter. And he had the cool, collected appearance of a man who had been there, done that and survived to tell the tale. He wore a long-sleeved T-shirt that couldn’t help but fit tightly over his arms and pecs, and Dez suspected a range of tattoos sat beneath the material—one of them likely signifying the Armed Forces section in which he’d once served. The guy was shorter than Dez—most were—but he looked like he’d be a formidable opponent in a sparring match, nonetheless.

  Dez plunked the poster atop the glass counter, beneath which sat a collection of knives, compasses and sunglasses. Always one to try the friendly approach first, Dez flashed a smile. “Are you the manager?”

  “I am.” The man’s voice was deep with a slight scratch to it, suggesting he was either a smoker or had suffered some form of injury.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Nice to know who I’m talking to, is all.”

  The man didn’t look fully satisfied by that response but answered anyway. “Terrence Waters.”

  “Retired Armed Forces?”

  “Medical discharge.” Terrence pulled up his left sleeve to reveal no
t just a tattoo marking him as army but, directly below it, the start of a prosthesis.

  Dez had never been overly troubled about the idea of asking personal questions, even less so while in uniform. “How’d you lose the arm?”

  “IED. Most of me’s covered in one sort of scar or another but, quite frankly, I lucked out. They had to piece the guy next to me back together so they could send all of him home in a box.”

  “I’m sorry.” Dez meant the words, and he supposed it showed as the guy granted him a nod and the hint of a smile. It disappeared as Dez pointed at the paper he’d placed on the counter. “I’ve got some concerns about this poster.”

  “So do I. Last thing we need is another pervert running the streets.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Yeah. Figured. What’s the problem, Constable?”

  “Most glaringly, it contains a home address.”

  Terrence shrugged. “I don't really care. Wouldn’t think you would either. You must get sick of dealing with assholes like him, guys who prey on little kids.”

  “I hate guys who prey on kids but, just to be clear, the man’s been charged, convicted and sentenced. While I agree guys who get off on kiddie porn are repugnant, the law is the law. I’m required to uphold it. Like it or not, the guy’s done his time. Listing his address like this and some of the details you have here, it invites vigilante justice.”

  “And that’s supposed to bother me?”

  “Whether it bothers you or not isn’t an issue,” Dez said. “I’m telling you, this is a problem. And I’m not sure if you heard, but there was a shooting this morning at the Black Fox. A woman was killed. This guy’s mother as it happens.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “You don’t sound sorry.”

  “Apples fall pretty close to trees most of the time, don’t they? Maybe she wasn’t much of a human being, either.”

  Dez battled back the flash of rage that comment elicited, grateful Sully was too far across the store to have overheard. “You didn’t know her. She was a good woman. A lot of the time, what you say about apples and trees is true, but sometimes there’s nothing a parent can do when their kid starts going downhill. Thing is, this poster’s got me wondering now if someone went after Betty Schuster because of her son. It would be pretty easy to track her since they’ve got her home address.”