The Mentor

by Monticelli, Rita Carla Francesca

  Dr. Dawson waited for his turn while two agents tried to lift up the shelf without disturbing anything else.

  “Easy, easy!” urged Miriam, raising her hand to wave to Eric.

  “Good morning, Detective,” said the doctor. “We seem to be starting our days off like this a little too often lately.”

  “Morning,” said Shaw, laconic.

  “On three . . .” The agents almost had it. “One, two, and . . . three!”

  The shelf came up, but a picture frame slipped off and came crashing down on the body.

  Dawson released a deep, sonorous sigh. “Eyes on the prize, gentlemen!”

  Jane walked in from the other room. “Ah, you got it.” A big camera was hanging from a strap around her neck. She had to practically climb over the doctor in order to get closer to the body, since Dawson was now crouching down by the victim, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. That’s when Jane finally noticed Eric. “Hey there . . . Sorry, I didn’t see you,” she said, smiling at her boss.

  “You alone?” asked the detective. Usually another member of the team would be present.

  “For the moment, yes. I talked to Adele a little while ago. She was stuck in traffic but on her way. I sent her the exact address via cell.”

  “What do we know?” Eric scrutinized the confusion surrounding them. “Seems like there was a struggle.”

  “Two bullet wounds, one in the chest and another in the head,” said Dawson, who had begun examining the body.

  “I take that back,” Dawson added quickly.

  The doctor was taking a closer look at the victim’s hands. “No signs he defended himself, but . . .” He paused at the wrists. “I see signs he was tied up.” Dawson turned to look at the two criminologists. “I’m betting he was tied up and then killed later. Maybe the assassin was looking for something.” His eyes moved around to take in the entire room.

  “Not just here,” said Jane, stooping to photograph the victim’s wrists. “The same hurricane swept through the other rooms too.”

  “The assassin must have found what he was looking for; after that he no longer needed this guy,” said Eric. Maybe the crime was drug-related. More often than not, that’s what it all came down to.

  “So . . . ,” said Detective Leroux, pausing. She had finished talking with the other agents. “The apartment belongs to a certain . . .” She stopped and reread notes she’d taken on her smartphone. “Daniel Pennington.”

  Eric froze the moment he heard that last name. “Come again?”

  “Did you say Pennington?” asked Jane.

  Shaw went over to the body and knelt down beside it. The face was turned to one side, a lock of hair covering the mouth. He moved it. “Oh fuck.”

  There was a rustle of noise outside the room. Someone was coming in a hurry.

  “Danny!”

  Eric leapt to his feet. “No, no!” He ran to the door.

  He made it just in time to intercept Adele and keep her from coming in.

  “Danny! No!” she cried. “No!”

  The detective held on to her, but Adele was hysterical, and her anguish gave her incredible strength. “Why?” she shouted, waving her arms, struggling to break away from him.

  “Calm down. You have to calm down!” said Eric, his tone emotional but firm. “It’s better if you don’t go in.”

  Adele didn’t even seem to hear him. “No! What have they done . . . Danny?” Her face was livid, all the muscles jumping and contracting.

  Detective Hall went over to them, blocking the corpse from view. “Sweetheart, please . . . Please calm down.” She spoke in a maternal voice, caressing Adele’s head while Eric fought to hold her.

  He was afraid he might hurt her, but he didn’t know what else he could do to help. Seeing her like this broke his heart.

  Eventually Adele stopped struggling and began to weep, sliding down until she was on her knees, dragging Eric along with her. She began hiccupping so forcefully that her entire body shook.

  “They have the same last name,” muttered Miriam, who’d come up behind Hall. “Who was he? Her brother?”

  “Her ex-husband,” said Eric.

  “I’ll handle this,” said Jane, pushing Miriam away. “I’ll call someone else from the lab. Take her outside.”

  Eric picked Adele up, and she stopped crying almost instantly. She looked up at him, an expression of utter stupor on her face. Suddenly she went rigid. Her eyes rolled up into her head, her hands balled into fists, and her body began to shake with powerful spasms.

  “Richard!” shouted Shaw, putting her back down on the floor. “She’s having convulsions!”

  The doctor ran to him. “Turn her head to one side,” he said, already reaching to do so with both hands. “Make sure she can breathe freely. Looks like an epileptic fit.”

  “I didn’t know she suffered from epilepsy,” said Jane, who had knelt by Adele’s side and was caressing her arm. “She’s always so reserved. How did you know she was married?” Then she made a quick expression of disgust, realizing what a dumb question it was.

  All she got by way of answer was a severe glare from her boss. This was hardly the moment for that conversation, even though Eric knew full well that Hall would approve of any kind of relationship between him and Pennington.

  “I called for an ambulance,” said Miriam, sticking her head back in through the doorway. “They’ll be here shortly.”

  Someone shook him, and he opened his eyes. For a moment he was disoriented. He couldn’t remember where he was. Then he felt someone touch his shoulder, and he turned around.

  “Sorry,” whispered Jane. “I didn’t realize you were sleeping.”

  The hospital room was in shadows, and Eric had fallen asleep in the armchair set alongside Adele’s bed.

  “I didn’t get enough sleep last night,” he said, massaging his neck with one hand. He’d unbuttoned the top of his oxford and loosened his tie. As soon as he moved, the jacket lying over the arm of the chair slipped onto the floor.

  Jane collected it and sat down in a chair across from him. “How is she doing?”

  “They gave her a sedative. She’s been asleep for hours. The doctor said she had a violent attack.” He yawned and grimaced. “What time is it?”

  “Around three in the afternoon. Have you had anything to eat?”

  Who could be hungry at a time like this? “How did things go at the crime scene?”

  “That’s why I’m here,” said Jane. She hung the jacket over the back of her chair and leaned toward him. She looked worried. “As soon as we brought the body to the morgue, Richard extracted the bullet from the man’s chest. It will take him longer to recover the other one.”

  Eric could tell from her tone of voice that bad news was on the way.

  “As soon as I saw it was a nine-millimeter, I decided to compare it to the others.”

  No. Again?

  Jane nodded in response to her colleague’s worried eyes. “The same weapon,” she said.

  “The same weapon?” Adele’s voice made them both turn around.

  “Hey . . . ,” murmured Eric, extending his hand to hers. “How are you feeling?” His mind was a storm of contrasting emotions.

  Adele’s face was dark, devoid of light. She looked absolutely exhausted. “Danny is dead.”

  “I’m sorry . . .”

  “He killed him too . . .” It wasn’t a question; it was an observation.

  Shaw didn’t know what to say. He turned and looked at Jane for help, but for once not even she could come up with anything comforting to say. Discovering a connection between this homicide and the other murders seemed to knock them back to ground zero, dismantling all the theories they’d come up with over the past few days. Why would Garnish kill Daniel Pennington? It’s true they didn’t know much about the victim, but the way he was mu
rdered was completely different from the meticulous modus operandi the killer had employed in the other killings. The only connection was the pistol.

  He wiped his hand across his forehead. His head was pounding and fit to explode with the effort he was making to try to ferret some sense out of all this. It didn’t make any sense at all. The key had to be Garnish—he was sure of it. Maybe Garnish had realized he was being followed by Mills and had seen them when Eric went to pick up the officer near Arsenal stadium. Maybe that drove him to change his plans.

  He looked at Adele. She seemed lost in her own thoughts. He wanted to ask her a million questions about her ex-husband, to try and figure out what kind of connection there might be, but this was anything but the right moment . . .

  “I’ll leave you two alone,” said Jane, getting up.

  Eric had completely forgotten she was there. “Oh, that’s not necessary . . . ,” he said, but it was a timid protest.

  “I have to get back to the department.” She put her hand on his arm. “You go ahead and stay here. I’ll take care of everything. We’ll see each other tomorrow.” She turned to Adele but didn’t say anything. Adele had closed her eyes again.

  As soon as the door closed, Adele stirred and squeezed Eric’s hand.

  “You really scared us,” said Eric, smiling at her.

  The corners of her mouth turned up for a moment. “I haven’t had an attack in a long time,” she said. When she mentioned her epilepsy, her eyes stared out at nothing, focusing on a point somewhere in the distance.

  “It’s been a really bad day,” Eric added limply.

  “Yeah.” Adele seemed to come back and focus on him again. “We grew up together. Did I ever tell you that? Danny and I.” She took a long, deep breath, turning her head to the window. A faint light came in through the drawn blinds. They could hear rain outside, pattering on the windowpane. “He was my first best friend. The first boy I ever kissed. The first boy I . . . was ever with.” She laughed a little to herself. “It was a disaster.”

  Eric couldn’t help but chuckle along with her.

  “I should have seen back then that I really wasn’t his type.”

  It was nice to see her smile again, even if only to remember someone who had passed.

  “But I still agreed to marry him, because he loved me, in his own way. And I loved him. What’s the term for that, the one Americans use to call a woman like me?”

  Eric looked at her, perplexed. How was he supposed to know?

  “A fag hag!” she said, laughing. “God I loved his friends. We were a great group.”

  “You were married while he spent time with other gay men?” he asked. She never stopped surprising him. Or maybe he was just too old for this kind of thing.

  “Oh sure. They thought I was his sister because of the last name. They never imagined that I was his wife!”

  She’d married her gay best friend and taken his last name so that she could pretend to be his sister. It was amazing how little he really knew about this woman. But once again, he felt like all these new and surprising tidbits did nothing but increase how attractive she was to him.

  “You guys lived together, but dated other people?”

  “Of course! Then we shared all the details.”

  “But why did you even get married in the first place?”

  Adele shrugged. “Something to do.” Then, suddenly, she turned serious. “I considered him my family. Marrying him, I thought he really would be.” She sighed. “I know. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  “There is a certain logic to it,” admitted Eric. “Though it’s not something you see every day.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “Why did you two get divorced?”

  “We realized that being married didn’t make sense anymore. Back then he’d started a serious relationship, at least that’s what he said, but I kept living with him for a few years while we waited for the divorce to become final—just like the sister everybody thought I was. Then I started to feel a need for a space all my own.”

  “But you kept his last name.”

  “I told you, he’s like a brother to me. More than a brother.” Suddenly her face darkened. “Was like a brother.”

  “Then what happened?” Eric asked immediately, trying to draw her attention away from darker thoughts and lead her to happier ones.

  “Well, he and his boyfriend broke up, just as I’d imagined they would.” She laughed.

  “What about you?”

  “Me? Nothing. I didn’t want to get involved in a serious relationship.” She drew a finger across her lips. “Of course I didn’t exactly lock myself up in a convent, if that’s what you mean.”

  Eric felt himself flare up and immediately tried to calm himself down again.

  “I had my adventures, but nothing important. Nobody was good enough.”

  “Because nobody was like him,” added Shaw.

  Adele nodded, then squeezed his hand again. “Or like you,” she said, shooting him a mischievous glance.

  Eric preferred not to try to explain Adele’s behavior. That simple glance was enough to make him feel good inside. During the hours she’d been asleep he had racked his brain with questions, wondering whether or not she would be happy to see him there once she woke up. The fact that she was playing with him again didn’t seem all that important right now. After everything that had happened to her, he felt willing to forgive her just about anything, even something incomprehensible. Part of him, however, still held out hope that she was being sincere.

  “When can I get up and get out of here?” said Adele, interrupting his thoughts.

  “Right away, I think. As long as you feel up to it. They were waiting for you to wake up again before discharging you.”

  “I want to go home.”

  “I don’t think you should be alone right now.”

  Adele let go of his hand. “I’m used to it,” she said, drawing her arm tight across her chest.

  “I’m serious.”

  She scrutinized him.

  “You’ve had a rough time,” he continued. “You have to let someone help take care of you, at least for a few days.”

  She groaned a little. “I don’t have anyone to ask.”

  “You have me.” He’d finally summoned his courage and said it. He could feel the adrenaline coursing through his body.

  Adele seemed surprised. “Nice move, Detective!” Then she laughed a little. “Thank God I asked you to take it slow for a while.”

  Okay, he expected that. He knew she’d probably insist on misinterpreting his gesture. Eric himself wondered if he didn’t have ulterior motives, but it was true that she needed to be taken care of. He laughed too. “I’m not trying to seduce you,” he said, raising both hands. “I swear! I’m just worried about you.”

  She smiled. Maybe she was considering his offer.

  Outside, he opened the door to the black SUV like a true gentleman, which seemed to make an impression on her. Or at least that was the reaction Adele chose to reveal.

  The rain had stopped. A wash of blue crossed the sky, ending in a glimmer of freshly revealed sunlight that brightened the entire Monday.

  The doctor had discharged her in the late afternoon, and in the end she gave in to Eric, but insisted it would not be for more than a couple of days. “So you do have a car!” she exclaimed, climbing into the passenger seat.

  Eric closed the door behind her, then walked around the car and got into the driver’s seat. Glancing at her, he could see that she was staring at him, waiting for an answer. “Well, yeah,” he said. “I have a car. And as I’m sure you can see, it’s not exactly the best vehicle in the world for moving around a crowded city.” Not to mention the fact that it took him far less time to get to Scotland Yard in the tube, even though he had his own reserved parking space in the depa
rtment lot. Whenever he drove anywhere else, however, he couldn’t count on such a privilege.

  “I hope you take it out and use it every once in a while. It would be a shame to leave a beauty like this rotting away in the garage.”

  Eric turned the key, making the engine roar and getting Adele to laugh. “Oh, I use it all right.”

  “When? You’re always working!”

  They slowly pulled out of the hospital parking lot, then got on a minor highway.

  “Whenever I can, I get away and go to my country cottage. It’s one of the few things my ex left me.”

  “A country cottage . . .” Adele lingered over those words. “Sounds romantic,” she added, giving him a sensual wink.

  “Remarkably romantic,” said Eric. He was struggling to keep his eyes on the road.

  That morning she had discovered that her ex-husband was dead, and now here she was flirting with Eric. It was hard to say just how reliable Adele was. She seemed to change moods and ideas from one moment to the next, forcing Shaw to keep on his toes.

  They crossed through the city without saying much else, making it all the way to Dorset Street in silence. Eric pulled over near the entrance to Adele’s apartment building.

  “I’m going to go up and grab a few things,” she said, about to open the door. But then she stopped. “Just a minute. My car is still parked at the crime scene. My kit is inside too.” Then she looked around, alarmed. “Where’s my gun? I had it with me!”

  “Don’t worry. Your kit and pistol are in the trunk.” He jerked his thumb toward the back. “I had someone bring that beater you’re driving here.” He took her keys out of his pocket and used them to point ahead. A red Ford sat parked at the end of the road. Just then he remembered that she’d said it belonged to her sister-in-law. “Hold on, the sister-in-law you talked about, the owner of that car . . . is she Daniel’s sister?”

  Adele shook her head. “She’s the sister of Daniel’s ex-boyfriend. Seeing as how everybody thought I was his sister . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence because her meaning was clear. “I should call her, tell her what’s happened.”

  “You can take care of that later.”