by H. P. Bayne
To Dez, the falsely classical structures befitted a neighbourhood full of people yearning to be something they were not. Streets were filled with expensive brownstone row houses that cost far more than they were worth and San Francisco-esque Victorian mini-mansions that had their owners trapped in a debt they’d never escape. All so they could pretend for a few brief years—until the bank came calling with foreclosure notices—they, too, could have the comforts and luxuries so common on the South Bank.
Not everyone was so heedless about economics, though. Some of the Victorian homes had been subdivided into apartments, while others—such as the one Lucienne had him pulling up to—had been converted into office space.
“Nice digs for a P.I.,” Dez said, trying to make out the signage on a brass plate next to the door. “What’s his name?”
“Lachlan Fields.”
Dez turned his gaze to his passenger. “Lachlan Fields?”
“Yes. Do you know him?”
“Yeah, I know him. Or I did. He retired from the KRPD last year. Amazing career, brilliant investigator. They say he almost singlehandedly solved the Co-ed Killer case while he was with Homicide.”
“Co-ed Killer? I think I read about that. Some lunatic was running around strangling university students, wasn’t he?”
“He killed two, was actively targeting a third when Fields caught up with him using a combination of psychological and geographic profiling and some good, old-fashioned police work. He’s a legend to anyone with a badge.”
“That makes sense,” Lucienne said. “I went looking for the best, and everyone recommended him, said he could find the unfindable.”
“I’m curious,” Dez said. “If you’ve got him, why do you need me? I mean, I’m no dunce, but next to Fields I look like some half-witted wannabe. Why not just ask Fields to look for Sully?”
“Because Sullivan clearly went to a lot of trouble to have the world believe he’s dead. The way I see it, the fewer people who know he isn’t, the better—at least until we know more about it. You care about Sullivan, want the best for him. So you’ll keep anything you find to yourself. As much as I like Mr. Fields, he’s an outsider, an unknown. Right now, I just want people around I can trust.”
Dez nodded. That seemed to make sense, at least as much as anything did at the moment.
Dez cracked the window for Pax and was following Lucienne toward the building when the dog barked behind them.
“Bloody hell,” Dez said, turning to find Pax’s eyes fixed on the front of the Victorian as he continued to voice whatever was troubling him. “I’d better bring him with us. I’m getting the impression he hates being left out of the loop.”
“I’m not sure it’s a pet-friendly building.”
“It is today.” Dez reached the vehicle and opened the door, allowing Pax to spill out onto the sidewalk. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the matter; the dog took off toward the building’s front door. Lucienne stepped aside to avoid being run down. Once at the double doors, Pax stood on his back legs, placing his front paws against the oval glass panes as he continued to bark.
“Pax!” Dez said as he rushed up and pulled the dog off the door. “Down. Down! Holy hell, what’s up with you?”
Pax looked up at him, a protracted whine breaking off into a bark.
“Okay, okay, relax. Jeez.” While Pax wasn’t leashed, he had a collar at least, enabling Dez to hold the animal back as he opened the door and stepped into the entrance hall.
A man popped his head out of one of the offices, eyebrows lowered, a practiced set of frown lines suggesting he didn’t spend a whole lot of time smiling. “This is a no-pets building.”
“Then you’re in luck,” Dez said. “He’s not a pet. He’s my service dog.”
“What kind of service?”
“Mainly domestic,” Dez said. “He’s good at bringing me stuff, but he sucks at housecleaning.”
The man glared and slammed his door shut. Dez grinned, but Lucienne was all business.
“He’s on the second floor,” she said, stepping around Dez and the dog as she led the way up a carpeted wooden staircase. Pax tugged at his leash, wanting to venture past the stairs toward what looked to be a rear entrance, but Dez kept him in check, and the two of them brought up the rear as they stepped onto the second-floor landing. Three separate offices were up here, all of which Dez guessed were once bedrooms. One of them, according to the brass plate on the solid-looking oak door, belonged to Lachlan Fields.
Lucienne rapped quietly with delicate knuckles, then waited a moment. There was no answer. She knocked again, louder this time. Still nothing.
“Must be out,” Dez said. “Might be on a job. That would explain why he wasn’t picking up your calls earlier.”
“Maybe.”
Dez looked around at the other doors. “Maybe someone in these other offices can tell us when he went out.”
“No good,” Lucienne said. “There’s no one in those offices. They’re still for rent.”
Dez looked closer, noticed the plates had yet to be engraved.
“Could you just try the door?” Lucienne said.
“Why don’t you try the door?”
“I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
Lucienne shook her head, her eyes closing tight and her lips clamping together so hard they virtually disappeared.
Dez felt the blood drain from his face as it hit him. Pax’s barking. Lucienne’s anxiety. The inability to reach the detective.
Dez put a hand out on the wall to steady himself as his head spun with his heart, now pounding inside his chest. “You see him, don’t you?”
She neither opened her eyes nor parted her lips. Her simple nod was answer enough.
“Ah, shit,” Dez said. “Okay, just—Bloody hell …. So if you’re seeing him, he’s dead already, right?”
Another nod.
Dez had seen dead bodies before, of course, had seen far more than his share on the job. The likelihood of finding Lachlan Fields dead didn’t trouble him; in all honesty, the guy was kind of an asshole. It was the idea the entire process was being monitored by the man’s ghost. Dez could handle “dead.” “Undead” was what he had the problem with.
But there was no getting around it. He couldn’t just call this in as a death without confirming it first, no way to realistically explain how he knew without having actually entered the room. And he couldn’t, in good conscience, allow Lucienne to go first, uncertain exactly what they were going to find on the other side of that door.
“Okay, just …. just stand over by the stairs. I’ll check it out.”
Blowing out a breath and keeping one hand on Pax’s collar, Dez gripped the brass handle through the cotton fabric of his T-shirt. The knob turned in his grasp, clicking through as the unlocked door opened for him.
He eased it open just a crack at first, keeping his eyes squinted as if that would make what he found inside easier to manage. He’d never seen a ghost himself, but he knew enough about them from Sully. The idea of seeing two versions of Lachlan Fields—one lying on the floor or slumped in a chair and the other standing in front of him—was more than he would know what to do with.
But there was nothing.
He pushed the door, opening the gap until he hit resistance. Then he saw the mess. Papers, files and various desk supplies covered the floor. His gaze landed on a pair of legs sticking out from behind the far side of a large oak desk.
And the blood. The blood was everywhere.
He was unable to see a second version of Lachlan Fields, and he took some comfort in that as he slipped into the room.
“Stay in the hall,” he told Lucienne, then turned to close the door, effectively keeping both her and Pax in the hall and out of what looked like a significant crime scene.
Watching the floor to avoid stepping in potential evidence he might otherwise accidentally step in, Dez circled the desk, intending to check on the man. Sure, Lucienne said she’d seen his ghost
, but Dez knew he had to make sure.
It was Lachlan Fields, all right, a large gash to his head oozing blood, one of the man’s own awards—a golf trophy by the looks of it—lying nearby as the likely murder weapon. To make matters worse, a letter opener protruded from Lachlan’s chest, more blood seeping from that wound.
Dez looked closer. The man was lying on his back, providing a good view of the blood stain spreading across the front of his rumpled button-down. And Dez recalled something he’d heard early on in his career.
The dead don’t bleed.
11
Uttering a quiet curse, Dez closed the rest of the distance between himself and the older man, squatting to check for a pulse.
Lachlan gasped. A bloody hand reached out, caught Dez’s wrist and held on like a vice.
Dez fell back on his ass with a sound similar to the one Lachlan had just made, and worked to twist his wrist out of the older man’s grip. When that didn’t immediately work, and not wanting to injure the man further, Dez settled for talking to him as he pulled out his phone with his free hand and used his thumb to dial 9-1-1.
“It’s Dez Braddock, sir. I’m getting some help for you. Just hold on. Help’s coming.”
The man released him and sank back into unconsciousness as Dez spoke to the operator, speaking over Pax’s sudden barking in the hall to provide an address and the man’s identity—a surefire way to get police here quickly. Lachlan Fields may be retired, but Dez was certain this would nonetheless be treated as something akin to an officer down.
Sure enough, it took just over a minute for the first unit to arrive, patrol officers taking over first aid duties from Dez. By the time he made his way back into the hall to take charge of Pax, an EMS team and four more units—two patrol and two plainclothes—were arriving.
Unfortunately, one of the plainclothes members was Sergeant Forbes Raynor.
Forbes had managed to secure himself a place on the Major Crimes unit, along with the accompanying promotion to sergeant, a couple years before Dez’s departure from the KRPD. But where Lachlan’s healthy sense of self-worth had been well-earned, Forbes’s ego—at least in Dez’s view—had little to back it, his promotion the likely result of connections within the PD brass and the business community at large. Forbes’s father, Charles “Bad Luck Chuck” Raynor, was the city’s longtime mayor and so sat at the head of the Board of Police Commissioners when his son had been angling for the promotion. While conflict of interest legislation meant Bad Luck Chuck was unable to interfere in his son’s affairs, Dez had little doubt the older man’s position nonetheless had some considerable impact on Forbes’s moving up the ladder.
Forbes wasn’t a slightly built man by any means, making his treatment of his wife Greta all the more deplorable in Dez’s mind. Though he came in several inches below Dez’s considerable stature, Forbes carried himself as if he were the largest man in any room, broad shoulders back, head held high and back ramrod straight while holding his heavily muscled arms away from his body to create additional space around himself. While he worked hard to project steely self-confidence, Dez knew better, recognized the man’s innate awareness he would never fully measure up to someone of Lachlan Fields’s status.
But in struggling to build himself up, Forbes had inadvertently torn himself down too, alienating anyone who might have otherwise called him a friend.
Dez remembered a conversation he’d had once with Sully at the Black Fox during one of his brother’s breaks. Dez had barely managed to escape a group of his drunken cop buddies as they cajoled and hung onto his arm, yammering slurred words into his ear. Dez and Sully had temporarily retreated to a quiet back table, Dez waving off another attempt from three friends at drawing him over for a round of shooters, when he noticed Forbes glaring at him from a nearby bar stool.
Back in those days, Dez had been a different person, liking being liked and dwelling far too deeply on those rare instances when he wasn’t. Sully had read Dez’s silence without needing to ask, and had answered the unasked question by falling back on that unsettling ability he had to see far beyond what a person chose to reveal.
“He’s jealous,” he’d said. “You’re constantly surrounded by people who want to hang out with you. He just sits at the bar by himself, watching everyone else.”
“Yeah,” Dez said. “It’s downright creepy. It’s like he’s hoping to catch someone at something he can use against them later.”
Sully had smiled at that and sat forward. “Did you think that about me when I was a kid?”
“That was different. You were never like him.”
“Are you sure about that? You don’t really know him.”
“I know you. You’re a good guy. He’s ….”
Sully finished Dez’s statement in his own way. “What I could have become if I hadn’t ended up with Mom and Dad and you. Bitter, isolated and lonely.”
Dez guessed that conversation went back two or three years, before he’d lost his dad and Sully was involuntarily committed to Lockwood. Plenty had changed since then, none of it for the better, so it seemed fitting Forbes Raynor remained the sole constant.
“I should have known you’d be in the middle of this,” Forbes said now, looking Dez up and down. His gaze was both appraising and condescending. Dez knew Forbes was examining him for evidence of involvement in the attack, but he had the distinct impression he was also putting him on notice he disapproved of his very existence.
Then again, after last night, Dez had what he figured was good reason for a counter-appraisal. For now, he kept his suspicions to himself. Throwing out accusations without proof, particularly when the likely perpetrator was a police officer, would be a dumb move.
“I’m not,” Dez said. “I just got here and found him like this.”
“Right.”
“Hey, go ahead and ask the guy downstairs. He saw me come in not five minutes ago. I think it’s pretty obvious Lachlan has been on the floor a fair bit longer than that.”
“I’ll leave that to Ident to confirm, thanks.”
Forbes’s partner Sgt. Clark Davies entered the conversation, having taken a moment to check on the victim, now in the hands of an advanced care paramedic. “Leave him alone, Forbes. You know damn well Dez didn’t do this.”
Clark turned his attention to Dez. “Did you notice anyone leaving the building as you were coming in?”
Dez shook his head in the negative. “Nothing, man. Sorry. And like I said, I’m guessing Lachlan was attacked some time prior to me getting here. Some of the blood around him was already looking tacky when I got to him.”
Clark nodded. Forbes harrumphed.
“What were you here about?” Clark asked, the question giving Dez pause.
“It’s kind of weird, but I ran into this woman at the cemetery today while I was visiting my family there. She was upset and said something about having hired Lachlan to look into a matter for her but was having trouble reaching him by phone. I agreed to come down here with her to check it out. This is what I found.”
“And this woman,” Forbes said, making a show of looking around. “Where is she exactly?”
That was a good question. “I don’t know. She was here a minute ago. She’s got to be around somewhere.”
Clark flipped to a new page in his notebook. “We’re going to need a name and a description.”
Dez thought fast, uncertain how much he wanted to reveal. It wasn’t that he owed Lucienne anything, but there was more to this than her well-being. He didn’t want this woman in the hands of police, given her belief Sully was alive. If someone inside the department managed to gain her trust, and she responded by turning to police in her search for her son, that would easily blow whatever cover Sully had created for himself and throw him into harm’s way.
Then again, it was likely Lachlan kept records of his clients, meaning any attempt by Dez to deceive would do nothing but cast himself in a bad light. Should his own investigations reveal Sully had been taken by some
one other than those at Lockwood, Dez expected he’d need the police with, not against, him.
Even so ….
“She used the first name Lucienne. I didn’t ask her last name.”
Forbes sneered. “Really?”
Dez returned his attention to Clark. “She was concerned about Lachlan, so that became my priority pretty quick. We didn’t exactly have time to chat on the ride over as she was directing me here. I’ve never been to Lachlan’s office before, and I had no idea how to find it.”
“Fair enough,” Clark said. “You have a description for me?”
“About five-four or five-five, between one-ten and one-twenty pounds, I’d say. She was blonde, about forty years old, but she has features that make her look younger. She was wearing a knee-length gray skirt and a white button-down shirt. I didn’t notice much for jewellery but I think she had on some sort of silver necklace.”
Clark snagged a passing patrol officer and had Dez repeat the description. Having sent the constable to conduct a quick search of the immediate area for the woman, Clark returned to Dez.
“I’m going to need you to provide a detailed statement.”
“Yeah, sure. You need me to come in?”
“Nah,” Clark said. “I’ll go grab the forms out of the car. Just find yourself a spot somewhere and write something out for me. If we need more later, I’ll give you a call.”
By the time Dez finished with his statement, Lucienne still hadn’t reappeared. Patrol officers turned up nothing more about her save the word of the man downstairs who recalled her coming in with “the big jerk and his dog.”