He was motionless.
“No!” she cried and tried the door again. There was a flicker of movement in the corner of Henry’s mouth, and her heart skipped a beat. “No!” she shouted, convinced that at any moment the head of a caterpillar would poke out from between his pale lips.
Chase rapped her knuckles hard off the glass and Henry suddenly started.
He peeled his head away from the glass and rolled down the window.
Chase put a hand on her chest, and gaped, still trying to catch her breath.
“Chase?” Henry asked, wiping the drool from the corner of his mouth. “You okay? What’s wrong?”
Chase’s eyes narrowed behind her sunglasses.
I thought you were dead, she wanted to say. I thought that you were the Butterfly Killer’s fourth victim.
“I’m here to relieve you,” Chase said flatly. She was pissed that he had fallen asleep, but her relief at him being still alive forced her anger away for the time being.
Detective Yasiv nodded nervously.
“It’s ughh—it’s a little early, isn’t it?”
Chase flipped up her sunglasses and glared at him.
“I think it’s plenty late for you, don’t you?”
If his face had been red with embarrassment before, it was bordering on crimson now.
“Yeah, I just, ugh, I have a newborn and, uh, the—”
“Go home, Hank. Go home and get some sleep,” Chase ordered.
“Yeah, I just—”
“Go home,” Chase repeated more sternly as she made her way back to her car.
No sooner had she slipped into the cream leather seats of her BMW, the tail lights of Hank’s Toyota flicked on. A second later, he was gone and Chase was alone.
CHAPTER 67
Drake hung up his phone and tossed it onto the passenger seat.
No answer.
He had called Dr. Kruk three times, and all three times it had gone to voicemail.
He sped toward the strip mall that housed his psychiatry office with purpose. If anyone knew who or where Marcus Slasinsky was, it would be him. Drake was sure of it.
After all, he had a notepad with the boy’s name on it on his desk when he had arrived.
Drake pulled into the parking lot and his heart sunk when he saw that the lights to the office at the end were off. In fact, the entire lot was empty. He took the empty parking spot directly in front of the office and jumped out a split second after jamming his car into park.
He tried the door first, but found it locked. Without much hope, he made a fist and banged on the door.
“Dr. Kruk? Dr. Kruk, I need to speak to you,” he said loudly.
Come on, come on. Please be here, please be here…
He knocked again and again.
The way Drake saw it was that he had two options: to call in for a warrant or to wait until Dr. Kruk arrived to work next.
Getting a warrant was a laughable prospect; even if he hadn’t been booted of the case, and if for some reason Rhodes hadn’t sent out a patrol to arrest him for obstruction, there was no way a judge would facilitate a warrant.
As for waiting for the doctor to arrive? It was Friday evening—the doctor wouldn’t be in until Monday at the earliest.
No, Drake couldn’t wait, either.
There was of, course, a third option, Drake thought as his eyes drifted to the trunk of his car where he kept a crowbar. Just as he made a move toward his Crown Vic, he heard a lock disengaging, and the door opened a crack.
It was the secretary he had met a few days ago.
“Is Dr. Kruk here?” Drake asked, trying to keep his voice neutral.
The woman, who was in her mid-sixties with a shock of pitch black hair, eyed him suspiciously.
“Who are you?” she asked.
Drake flipped out his detective shield.
“Detective Damien Drake, I was here yesterday, remember?”
Drake was growing impatient. If Dr. Kruk was in his office, then he had to speak to him immediately. The man could use as many abstract analogies as he could muster, but Drake would get him to reveal who and where Marcus was.
He had to; he had to before someone else was murdered.
The woman’s eyes suddenly widened.
“Ah, yes, I remember now. I’m sorry, Detective, but Dr. Kruk hasn’t been in today.”
Drake swore under his breath.
“I—I need to come in,” he said.
The woman’s brow furrowed.
“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” she said hesitantly. “Dr. Kruk is—”
Drake shook his head.
“It’s important. I left something here,” Drake said, thinking quickly. He knew that in this instance, his red eyes and disheveled appearance might come in handy.
And he also knew that what he was about to do would not only put the nail in his proverbial coffin, but would also toss the first few shovelfuls of dirt on his career.
Fuck, they might even forgo the coffin altogether and bury him alive.
But that didn’t matter.
“I left something about a very important case… forgot it in his office. I’m sure you know which one I’m talking about?”
The woman looked confused and then suddenly extended a finger at him. As she did, the door opened a little more and Drake leaned in to make sure she couldn’t close it again.
“The Butter—”
“Shh, don’t say it. I mean, I’m in so much trouble, I just need to get the file back.”
She shrugged.
“Tell me what it looks like and I’ll see if I can find it for you.”
Drake shook his head emphatically.
“I can’t… it’s about the case and if…” he let his sentence trail off, grimacing the whole time.
The woman offered him a wan smile in return.
“Okay, come on in. But please, be quick. Dr. Kruk is fairly particular about people being in his office without him being present.”
Drake suppressed a smile. When the secretary opened the door, he quickly pushed by her and went straight to Dr. Kruk’s office door. He tried the knob.
It was locked. He jiggled the knob, confirming that it was a flimsy, brass-coated piece of plastic.
Worst case scenario he could break it off.
“Do you have the key?”
The woman looked a little apprehensive now.
“Yes,” she answered.
“Then please, do you mind? I mean, you can watch me in there if you would feel more comfortable. I’m just looking for my file, that’s all.”
This seemed to calm her nerves, as she nodded and then fetched a single key from the top drawer of her desk.
Some security system, Drake thought.
When she came over to him, he quickly took it from her hand.
“Allow me,” he said with a smile. As Drake fiddled with the lock, he added, “I can’t thank you enough for this. Seriously, without—” the door unlocked, and he opened it.
He turned back and looked at the secretary for a moment.
“You’ve really helped with the investigation,” he said. And then, before she could get a word in edgewise, Drake entered the room, slamming the door and locking it behind him.
“Hey! Hey Detective!” the woman shouted from the other side of the door. Drake ignored her and took a deep breath.
Then he looked down at the single key still clutched in his hand.
What’s done is done, he thought as a strange sense of calm fell over him. Now it’s time to find a killer.
CHAPTER 68
Chase pressed her forehead against the driver’s side window, her breath fogging the glass with every breath.
She had been staring at Tim Jenkins’s house for an hour now, but it felt as if it was twice or three times as long.
Mostly because nothing happened. Not so much as a light had flicked on within his residence. In fact, it was so quiet that Chase was beginning to doubt what Detective Yasiv had told he
r; that Tim had been dropped off by Wes Smith and had remained inside ever since.
Had he snuck out the window, as Drake had caught him doing yesterday?
Chase supposed it was possible, but why would he leave? He must know, Butterfly Killer or not, that the police would be watching him.
Did Weston Smith give him instructions to lay low? To stay out of sight?
It made sense. Anything that linked back to them, to the Smith reputation and family name, had been silenced to this point. Despite the deep-seated anger toward the Smith clan, Tim had secrets in his past that he wanted to keep buried as well.
Like being part of a group of bullies that put a young, troubled man in a coma.
Tim had been so distressed by what he had done, so affected by it, that he had foregone a prosperous career like the ones held by Thomas and Neil to work at the very place that they had nearly killed Marcus.
A sort of penance for his crime.
It was in his face when Chase had spoken to him back at the station, further corroborated by him clamming up as soon as he mentioned Neil.
Chase had been getting close, and Tim couldn’t deal with it. No matter how much Tim loathed Wesley Smith et al, his guilt over what he had done to Marcus far outweighed his anger.
So, yeah, if Wes told him to stay low, maybe threatened to reveal Tim’s involvement back then, he might just listen.
But was he a killer?
She was beginning to severely doubt it.
Chase sighed and closed her eyes. But any concept of peace and quiet from her thrumming mind was shattered when she saw Clarissa staring at her from behind her lids, her mouth twisted into a snarl.
He froze everything! Every last dime I have, he froze. I have nothing now! Absolutely nothing!
“Fuck,” she whispered.
After all she had put the woman through, she was no closer to finding her husband’s killer.
Chase took another deep breath, and tried to force the images from her mind.
To force everything from her thoughts.
CHAPTER 69
Drake ignored the woman’s pleas from the other side of the door and set to work immediately, scanning the man’s desk where he had first seen the notepad with Marcus Slasinsky’s name on it.
Only it wasn’t there.
There were other folders emblazoned with names he didn’t recognize, but not one with Marcus written on it.
“It was here,” he mumbled to himself, as he continued to scan the desk.
There was a folder with Tim Jenkins’s name on it, which he thought odd. But when he opened it, it was empty and he tossed it aside.
“C’mon,” he nearly moaned.
He pulled open the top drawer of the desk and a dozen pens rolled to the front. There was a pad of yellow lined paper in the drawer as well, but after flipping through it quickly, Drake realized that it was completely blank. He checked the second drawer next, but there weren’t any patient notes in there either.
And definitely no notepad.
Where would he keep patient notes? He wondered, hoping that Dr. Kruk didn’t keep them on an off-site location.
His eyes drifted to the bookshelf next, but there were only books on the dark wooden shelves. There was no sign of the dark green notepad he had seen.
Dr. Kruk’s secretary knocked on the door again.
“Detective? Did you find the file? I really think that you should go. I think—”
“Still looking!” he shouted. “I’ll only be a minute. I’m so sorry for this, but it’s confidential, as you can probably understand.”
And he figured that he only had a few minutes before the woman got fed up and called the police. Desperate now, Drake dropped to his knees, looking first under the desk, then under the two chairs facing each other on the other side of the room.
Still nothing.
Shaking his head in frustration, he looked around again, trying to quiet the swirling thoughts in his head, the ones that suggested that maybe the doctor took the notebook home with him for the weekend.
“Nowhere! There’s nowhere—”
But then he fell silent.
There was nothing beneath the two blue chairs, but there was something slightly off about the one on the right. He dropped to the floor again and took another look.
The bottom of this chair sagged lower than the other one. It made sense that this chair was the doctor’s, and the other the patient’s, given the proximity of the former to the desk, but Dr. Kruk had been a slight man.
There’s no way he made this chair sag.
Still on his knees, he scrambled over to the chair, and then turned on his back and slid beneath it like a mechanic checking a leak.
He prodded the material, and found that it was indeed loose. And there was something inside; something rectangular, something that moved when he pushed.
Grasping the corner of the fabric with thumb and forefinger, he was prepared to tear it away from the chair frame. But his efforts weren’t necessary. The material was fastened with Velcro, and pulled away easily.
He grunted as two objects fell out, one of which hit him in the face—a book—and the other on his shoulder—some sort of three or four-inch plastic cube.
Swearing, he grabbed both items and pulled himself out from beneath the chair.
In his right hand was a book, a plain notebook with the name ‘MARCUS Slasinsky’ on the cover in black text—the one he had seen yesterday. In his right was a cube of either plastic or some sort of wax. Inside was a preserved Monarch butterfly.
He swallowed hard.
“Did you find it in there?” the secretary hollered.
“Yeah, I uh, I found it,” Drake said, staring at the butterfly as he turned it over in his hand. “It’s just, ugh, missing some pages is all, I’m going—”
He shook his head and closed his eyes.
“Fuck it,” he said to himself, then to the woman on the other side of the door, he added, “I’m going to be five minutes. That’s it. Five minutes and then I’ll be out of here, okay?”
He didn’t wait for an answer. Instead, he placed the encased butterfly on the table and then sat on one of the chairs, the one that hadn’t housed the notebook, and opened it.
A grainy photograph slid out, and Drake grabbed it before it floated to the floor.
“Jesus.”
It depicted a dead woman slumped on a wooden chair. Her forearms were resting on her distended belly, her palms face up. There were ragged, hunks of torn flesh hanging from her wrists. The woman’s eyes were open, the corneas so opaque that they almost seemed to glow in the black and white image. Her mouth was slack, her teeth bared as the gums and lips already started to recede in death.
It’s Marcus’s mother, Drake thought with a shudder. He placed the photo on the table beside the butterfly, then turned his attention to the book.
He was looking for anything that would help him find Marcus Slasinsky—an address, a phone number, even a social insurance number—anything at all that might help locate the murderer.
To locate the Butterfly Killer.
Drake’s initial elation at finding the book didn’t last. Any hopes of an introductory page, a description of Marcus, perhaps, or maybe even an address, were immediately dashed.
The handwritten notepad jumped right into it in a familiar interview style format: a single line with the name Kruk, followed by a question, and then a line with the name Marcus, followed by an answer.
Figuring that the details he sought might be buried in the doctor’s interview, Drake started to read, skipping over the initial preamble.
CHAPTER 70
When Chase opened her eyes again, the only light in the sky was from yellow incandescent street lights.
She sat bolt upright.
I fell asleep! She realized in horror. After admonishing Detective Yasiv, I fell asleep.
Groaning, she stretched her legs, which immediately started to cramp. Expecting the painful tensing to subside, Chase wa
ited, but when she couldn’t get her muscles to relax she opened the door to her BMW and stepped into the street.
After rolling her neck, she reached down and touched her toes, trying to force the stiffness away. It dawned on her that part of her pain must have been from playing tennis the other day—she couldn’t remember the last time she had done any strenuous exercise.
Just as she was making a mental note to pick up running again, or maybe yoga, her eyes drifted toward Tim Jenkins’s house.
“What the hell?” she whispered.
The door was open. From inside her car, it hadn’t been noticeable, but now that she was outside, she could clearly see that it wasn’t completely closed—the door didn’t quite meet the jam.
Chase continued to stare at the door for a few seconds, debating what course of action to take.
I should call Rhodes, the rational part of her brain suggested. But she knew how that conversation would go; Rhodes would tell her to wait it out.
Conflicted, Chase shut her eyes for a moment, hoping that when she opened them again she would realize that it had all been an optical illusion, and that Tim’s door was really closed.
Only when she opened her eyes again, the door was still ajar.
Making up her mind, Chase unholstered her gun and strode toward the house.
Clarissa was right; fuck her career. There were lives on the line.
Chase moved swiftly across the street, crouching low, keeping her gun even lower. She didn’t think that there would be anyone out at this hour—which she estimated to be around midnight—but it wouldn’t do anyone any good for a nosy neighbor to call the cops.
When she reached the door, she put her hand against it, standing off to one side and away from the opening. Just a gentle push caused it to swing open two feet.
“Tim? Tim Jenkins?” she said into the dark interior of the house.
There was no answer.
Struck by a sudden sense of déjà vu, minus, of course, Drake’s presence, she opened the door even further.
“Tim? It’s Detective Adams,” she said, announcing her presence louder this time. “I’m coming inside.”
When there was still no answer, Detective Chase Adams stepped through the doorway.
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