The Mentor

by Monticelli, Rita Carla Francesca

  At first he hadn’t really understood what he was looking at. He’d thought it was some sort of mannequin. He’d hoped it was someone’s idea of a bad joke. After turning on the light, there was no room for doubt. One look was enough to recognize the tenant, even despite all the blood surrounding the corpse.

  Who could have done such a thing to poor Nick?

  As far as the landlord knew, he was an honest, hardworking man. Nick had retired only a few months earlier, and just a couple of weeks ago he had confided to the landlord that he couldn’t wait for August to arrive, because his son had promised to bring his family to visit. He had seemed truly moved and excited by the idea of that reunion.

  Now it was all over.

  In truth, the landlord didn’t know much about the man. He’d heard stories about Nick’s past, a few arrests for thievery when he was younger, but nothing serious. He seemed to have gotten his head on straight. He’d been living there for over ten years, and every day Nick had left early in the morning to head for work.

  Thinking about all this, the landlord realized that he’d heard a phone ringing on more than one occasion, but he hadn’t been sure it was Nick’s. He lived next door, but the walls in the building were so thin and insubstantial that everyone could hear what was going on.

  He didn’t have any trouble telling the police lady precisely that.

  “Thank you,” said Miriam. “We’ll be in touch if we need additional information.” She handed him a business card. “Call me at this number here if anything else should come up.” Then she turned around and waved at the scientific investigations team, who were just now walking into the room.

  “Hey,” said Jane, her lips tightening. “Let me guess . . . Judging by the stink, I’d say at least a week.”

  “Let’s make that ten days,” said the investigations doctor, Richard Dawson. He was leaning over the corpse, examining it.

  Eric shouldered past his colleague and the other agents so that he could take a close look at the crime scene. After solving the Johnson case, he’d hoped to relax a little, at least for the rest of the day. But life had other plans.

  “Another honest citizen massacred without any clear motivation, I imagine,” said Eric, casting an inquisitive look in Miriam’s direction.

  At that very moment Adele stepped past him, brushing against his arm. She had a look of concentration on her face. She didn’t say hello to anyone in the room but simply started taking photographs.

  “A gunshot to the neck, which lacerated his carotid artery,” said Dr. Dawson, addressing no one in particular. “Another to the groin. No sign of exit wounds. At first glance I’d say he died from loss of blood almost immediately.”

  “Nicholas Thompson, Nick, a sixty-five-year-old repeat offender who appears to have kept himself out of trouble for at least the last fifteen years,” said Miriam, providing a quick summary of the case.

  Even though she was the detective assigned to the investigation, when she worked with Shaw she shared all the data she had with him, and they generally tried to resolve the crime by working together. The team was a well-assorted and often-winning combination of individuals. “No one heard the shots, and given that the walls aren’t exactly soundproof,” Miriam added, pointing to the walls on either side, “I’m guessing the gun had a silencer.”

  The camera flash illuminated the room, forcing Eric to blink and making his head ache. He had slept little the night before and could already sense that he’d be going to bed later than he’d hoped tonight too. “An execution. There’s a lot of that going around lately,” he said drily.

  “Yes, it certainly looks like one,” said Miriam. She was standing alongside him, watching Jane and Adele work.

  “Whoever carried it out, however, wanted to leave a very specific message.” Eric stepped in close to the corpse. “If they’d merely wanted to kill him, a shot to the head would have been enough. But one in the neck and another in the groin . . . hmm . . . Do we know if he was ever involved in any sex crimes?”

  “He was a thief who specialized in apartments,” Miriam said, reading the dossier on her smartphone. “No formal accusations for sex crimes. Seems like he wasn’t the violent type.” She shrugged. “Of course, we don’t know about additional crimes he was never charged with.”

  Eric looked over Thompson’s body, thinking to himself. There was something familiar about the man splayed out on the floor, but he couldn’t quite figure out what. It was a sensation more than anything else. In truth, he felt so completely tired that his sensations could have meant everything or nothing. He smiled, resigned. “Let’s cover every inch of this place,” he said loudly to his entire team. “Was the door forced?” he asked Miriam.

  She shook her head, slipping the cell phone back into her pocket. “It was locked. No signs of forced entry. There’s no key either. The landlord opened it with his key, then called us immediately.”

  Turning to the entrance, which opened directly into the living room of the little apartment, Eric tried to reconstruct the scene. “He knew his assassin, or at least was willing to let him in. He didn’t think he was in danger.” He imagined Thompson opening the door and letting an undefined figure enter. “But whoever he let in aimed a pistol at him, shooting him first in the throat so that he couldn’t cry out for help, then in the groin. The victim falls on the floor and quickly dies from loss of blood. The killer may have stayed here to watch him die.” The unfocused figure Eric had in his mind was now standing right alongside him. “Then he took the keys, closed the door carefully, and took off.”

  “It was personal,” murmured Miriam, putting her hands on her hips. She curled her lips and blew a strand of hair away from one side of her face.

  “We’ll do our best here,” Eric said as his eyes focused on the crime scene again. “But I need you to dig into this guy’s life, because I’m certain we’ll find whoever’s responsible for his death in there somewhere.”

  From Mina’s Blog

  It’s funny how, when you’re little, people seem bigger than they really are. To my eyes, as I was looking at his shoes from underneath the bed, that man seemed like a giant. But when I found myself facing him twenty years later, I realized just how short he really was.

  As soon as he opened the door, the first thing that caught his attention was my neckline. Maybe because it was the closest thing to his eye level. I had unbuttoned my shirt precisely because I knew it would make things easier. Only after that did he raise his eyes to look me in the face.

  I knew at once, from the way his face relaxed, how happy my presence made him. A young, beautiful girl at his door. I was undoubtedly a pleasant surprise.

  I introduced myself, and just as I’d imagined, he didn’t recognize my name. In fact, he let me in immediately so that we wouldn’t have to talk standing there in the doorway. It was even easier than I’d thought it would be. I’d made up a credible story in order to justify my visit, but I didn’t get a chance to use it. Maybe I’ll get a chance later.

  He told me to make myself at home and asked if I wanted some tea. He went to make a pot right away. I got the sense he didn’t get a lot of visitors, because he seemed to want to do everything he could to keep me there as long as possible, just to have someone to talk to.

  He started talking about the weather—one of those pointless conversations about how this summer was looking rainier than usual, and how melancholy that made him feel.

  “Being British and hating the rain sounds like a singular punishment, don’t you think?” he asked, laughing at his own joke. I laughed too. What a loveable little man.

  Then he started going on about the different varieties of tea he was preparing, and how when he was younger he paid less attention to those details, how he’d been too absorbed by his frenetic life. He really liked it when I told him I’d heard of the various teas.

  When we finally sat down at the table, facing o
ne another, he looked at me closely for the first time. “Excuse me for asking, miss, but have we met before? I feel like I’ve seen you somewhere.”

  He’d never seen me before, but I know that I look a lot like my mother. When he killed her, she’d only been a few years older than I am right now.

  “Not exactly,” I said. “But you’ve had the pleasure of meeting my parents and my brother, even if only for a few hours.”

  The man squinted a little, as if he were trying to remember. I could see he was struggling with his memory. “I’m sorry, miss,” he said, his mouth curling into a little frown, almost as if he was embarrassed. “I’m getting old now, and my memory isn’t quite what it used to be. I had a few problems with drugs and alcohol when I was younger, and I have to admit that a lot of my memories from those years have turned hazy. Give me a little hint. When did I meet your family?”

  I had set the package I brought with me in my lap. He couldn’t see me slip my hand inside it and take its contents out beneath the table. “Twenty years ago,” I said. “I was just seven. You didn’t see me, but I saw you very well, and I never forget a face.”

  He seemed curious to hear what I was saying, but at the same time his expression darkened, as if somewhere in the back of his head unpleasant thoughts were starting to push their way up through his memories.

  I smiled. “My father was thirty-four, my mother was thirty-one, and my brother was just nine years old.”

  Thompson’s brow furrowed.

  I stopped smiling, and the tone of my voice grew hard. “And the safe was upstairs.”

  The man’s eyes turned enormous, and it seemed like some faint thread of recognition appeared there. His mouth dropped open. “Oh, fuck me,” he whispered, standing up in a rush, knocking over the chair behind him.

  I stood up as well, pointing the pistol with the long silencer straight at him. “Behave, Nick. Lie down on the floor.” I started laughing. “You’ll like it; you’ll see.”

  CHAPTER 3

  He yawned in front of the papers spread out across his desk, then checked the time on his computer screen. It was after nine already. Saturday night, and he had been working nonstop since eight that morning. After having pored over the Thompson murder scene, he began dusting off old cases together with Miriam, searching for leads. They hadn’t found anything noteworthy. Nowadays all the information and proof collected in each case was archived in the Metropolitan Police’s main server and was available for review with a click of the mouse, but the farther back you looked, the more fragmented and incomplete the data became. The process by which material evidence was transferred to digital storage continued nonstop, but it privileged the crimes people believed to be more important than others. Minor theft or charges that were brought and then later dropped, as often happened with sexual abuse charges, wound up at the bottom of the list. You had to go back to the old paper files, which were full of irrelevant information, yellowed photographs, and barely legible handwritten notes.

  Eric took off his reading glasses and pressed two fingers into his forehead, as if to drive away the ache that had been twisting its way through his head for hours.

  Maybe he should give up for tonight and get a good night’s sleep. He knew that he would have to make a superhuman effort tomorrow to prevent himself from coming back to the department. His body needed rest, but his mind couldn’t stop turning over the details. He feared that if he loosened his grip, he’d be forced to come to terms with the way he was living and wind up spending another day off wallowing in memories and melancholy, full of self-pity—like he usually did on the weekends he spent without his kids. He would have loved to just go to bed, sleep all day Sunday, and wake up ready to go on Monday morning. Unfortunately, he could rarely stay asleep for more than seven hours, and so in any case he’d wind up watching the sun rise on yet another day in his useless existence.

  And then he’d wind up back here, in Scotland Yard.

  Eric turned off the computer and put on his jacket. Outside it was pouring rain against the window, and he had no idea where he’d put his umbrella. The St. James’s Park station was just a short walk away, but he’d already be soaked by walking from the New Scotland Yard exit to the gate surrounding the building.

  As Eric walked down the hallway, out of the corner of his eye he noticed a light on in one of the laboratories. He wasn’t the only person putting in a late night. He peeked through the doorway and found someone wearing a white lab coat at a large table in the center of the room. She arranged sealed envelopes with one hand while checking a tablet, which she held in the other. Her back was turned, but he recognized her immediately all the same. Her graceful bearing and chestnut-brown hair with auburn highlights that glimmered in the bright ceiling lights were dead giveaways.

  Eric stood still and watched her for a moment. Adele seemed unaware she had company. She worked in silence. Since he was headed home, he should at least say good-bye, maybe ask what she was still doing in the office. Anybody else would have, but Eric wasn’t sure how to behave with her. For the moment he settled for watching her undisturbed, unknown to anyone, even her. That didn’t happen often, and he didn’t want to deprive himself of this dubious pleasure, even though he could feel there was something inherently wrong in doing so. Maybe he should just slip away silently, hoping she didn’t realize he’d ever been there.

  “Good evening, boss,” she said. Her busy, matter-of-fact tone made him wince just a little. How long had she known he was standing there? “What are you doing here? Working late again today?” The way she said this made it sound like nothing more than the usual courteous workplace convo. But hearing Adele speak directly to him gave Eric a vague sense of excitation, mixed with a subtle feeling of panic.

  It was as if he’d gone back to being a teenager, getting all excited when the most beautiful girl in school happened to wave to him by chance. He was her boss, for crying out loud!

  “Yeah,” was all he managed to say. “What are you up to?” That was right, he was the boss. “You should be at home. Your shift ended hours ago.” He almost bit his own tongue. He never meant to let her know that he kept track of which shifts she was covering. Who knows what she might think?

  “Jane had important plans tonight, so I offered to finish cataloguing this stuff for her. It wasn’t like I had anything more important to do.”

  The indifference in her voice seemed to confirm his observation, but Eric still wasn’t convinced. One thing was for sure: a girl like her would have a million things to do during the weekend, but giving your superior a helping hand never hurt. It might even wind up being useful.

  When it came to work ethic, Jane had an excellent opinion of Adele, but she didn’t feel the same way about her on a personal level. Jane considered the younger woman to be something of a robot, someone who was disinterested in being friends with her colleagues and even considered herself superior to them. A nice gesture from Adele like this might improve Jane’s opinion of her. Even in a worst-case scenario, it would make Jane feel a little beholden to Adele. This favor might even convince Jane to give the younger woman a little benefit of the doubt and suspend her judgment awhile longer.

  In the meantime, Adele had taken off her lab coat and put on a purple leather jacket. Now she was searching for something in her purse, which seemed large enough to pass for luggage rather than a handbag. Clearly she was about to leave the building. Maybe he should wait for her, given that they were the last two left, but he couldn’t be sure the gesture would be welcomed.

  “Well . . . Have a good weekend,” said Eric. Adele seemed to ignore him, busy pulling a small foldable umbrella out of her purse. Against his will, Eric turned and started walking away.

  “Hold on, boss; wait for me!” she said. “I’m headed out too.”

  Eric was paralyzed as Adele emerged from the laboratory.

  She closed the door behind her and walked right past him, ove
rtaking him. Then she turned back to her boss and gave him an inquisitive look.

  Realizing only then that she was waiting for him, Eric walked after her.

  Adele reached the atrium and pressed the button for the elevator. Eric waited beside her, scrupulously careful not to stand too close.

  She glanced at her cell phone for a moment, snorted, and then stuck it back in her jacket pocket. “Still no car,” she said, staring distractedly at the elevator doors opening in front of them. “That damned mechanic promised it would be ready this morning. Now it looks like they’re missing another piece, and it won’t be ready until next week.” She walked into the elevator, and Eric followed her. He had no idea what to say. “Tomorrow I’m going to have to borrow my sister-in-law’s beater, and then I have to drive halfway across London. What a drag.” It wasn’t clear whether she was talking to Eric or to herself. She seemed intent on listening to the sound of her own voice.

  Eric pushed the button for the ground floor, and the doors closed. Neither one said anything during the short trip down. Adele buttoned up her jacket, adjusted the purse over her shoulder, and got ready to open her umbrella.

  When they reached the ground floor, she left the elevator without saying a word, walking quickly toward the exit. Eric did the same, but with less conviction, watching her walk ahead of him and feeling more depressed than ever. He’d just been given an opportunity to talk to the only woman who lit a spark in his heart, and he’d wasted it. He’d been unable to say anything more engaging than “Yeah” and “Have a nice weekend.”

  “I’m going to head out to Leicester Square and grab a bite to eat,” she said.

  Eric looked up and met her eyes. He was stunned. He thought she’d hurried off without a good-bye, but she was standing by the door, waiting for him.