Maureen turned and walked out of the bar unsteadily. I watched her leave, still and stiff as a mannequin.
I thought about what Maureen had said. Since I couldn’t move, it wasn’t as though I could do anything except think.
Maureen was right: there was no proof she had killed Sabrina. If there had been, the police or I would have found it by now. And, if I told the cops she was the true killer without something to back it up, all I would accomplish would be to muddy the waters, ruining the alibi Ethan already had—even if it was a lie—and casting doubt on the real one he had with Santiago.
I couldn’t let Ethan go to prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Equally important, I couldn’t let a crazy monster like Maureen get away with a crime she did commit. How many other expectant mothers would lose their lives when Maureen got the itch to peek inside them? I couldn’t let that happen.
I had to do something. Nothing was more obvious. But what? That was a lot less obvious. Maybe I could start by looking into the places Maureen had lived before coming to Astor City. If she had killed pregnant women there, maybe there was some way to link her to the murders now that I knew she had committed them. I could turn Maureen’s life inside out until I found evidence of her crimes.
I was still pondering what to do when suddenly I could move again, like a switch had been flipped that turned my body from off to on. I blinked rapidly, my eyes watering. My entire body was on pins and needles, like when your arm goes to sleep and the circulation is slowly restored to it.
I stood slowly and painfully, intending to go . . . where? I still hadn’t figured out what to do about Maureen’s revelations.
I sat back down to think. I flagged down a waitress and ordered another drink. I drank it and mulled over what to do.
I had more drinks when my thinking yielded no concrete results.
After a while, I stopped thinking altogether.
CHAPTER 11
That night, I had a nightmare about being naked and tied up while a ten-foot tall monster with mismatched eyes and thin legs smashed the heads of bloody baby dolls against a cinder block wall, one after another. A pyramid of head fragments was growing at the wall’s base as the dolls’ owners, all women, wailed in anguish and tore their clothes in grief. Their bellies had all been sliced open.
The shrillness of my cell phone repeatedly ringing jarred me awake. Thank goodness. I didn’t need a psychoanalyst to tell me what the dream was about.
I twisted my way free of the bed linens wrapped around me. My head pounded from all the drinking I had done. At least I had made it into my bed this time instead of passing out on the couch or some random place. It was the biggest accomplishment I had in a while.
I looked at the time as I reached for my phone on the nightstand. It was 2:44 a.m.
“Hello?” My mouth felt like a desert full of rotting fish.
“I’m guilty as Satan himself, Truman. Guilty.”
“Ethan, do you have any idea what time it is?”
“There’s no rest for the wicked. I tell you, I’m guilty. My wife, my baby, I killed them.” Ethan was crying.
“I know you didn’t, Ethan. I was going to call you later and tell you. I know who killed Sabrina.”
“I did it, I tell you. Maybe I’m not the one who held the knife, but I’m as much to blame as the guy who did. If I hadn’t been out tomcatting around, Sabrina and my baby would still be alive today. Santiago told me you spoke to him. He’s gonna go to the cops tomorrow, tell 'em where I was that night. It’s gonna ruin his life, Truman. So many lives I’ve ruined. Santiago’s, Sabrina’s, the baby’s, mine.” He laughed bitterly. “One more, and we’ll start a basketball team. We’ll call ourselves Ruined Lives.” His voice was slurred. It was a sound I was all too familiar with.
“Have you been drinking, Ethan?”
“I sure have, and pretty damned enthusiastically too. In vino veritas. You know what that means?”
“In wine, truth.”
“Good man. We Heroes know a whole lotta random facts, don’t we? Latin, how to take a punch, how to get your family stabbed to death . . . we’re jacks of all trades. That’s right, in wine, truth. But I’m not even drinkin’ wine. What the hell is it I’m drinkin’ anyway? Lemme look, 'cause I forgot.” Pause. “Tequila, straight outta the bottle, just the way Mexico intended it. There’s a whole lotta truth in wine and tequila, Truman. This here tequila’s been telling me that the wages of sin are death, there comes a time when you gotta pay the piper, and that karma’s a bitch. This tequila never met a cliché it didn’t like. But they all mean the same thing. I’m talkin’ about justice, Truman. Aren’t we Heroes supposed to care about justice? It’s not too late to stop Santiago from ruining his life. It’s not too late to take responsibility for my sins. I can dole out some justice and save a man’s life all in one fell swoop. Two birds with one dead stone.”
I sat up in bed. My heart began to race, increasing the pounding in my head. “What do you mean?”
“I mean Santiago’s coming forward to save me from going to prison. I love him too much to let him do that. If I don’t go to prison, there’ll be no need for him to out himself, will there?”
I scrambled in the dark to put some clothes on.
“Now don’t do anything hasty, Ethan. You’re drunk. I’ll tell you what I’ve learned about Maureen and we can talk things out.”
“I just wanted to call to thank you for your efforts. You’re a brick. A brick means an awful nice fella. I don’t know why nobody uses that expression anymore. It’s like everything else in this old world: all good things must come to an end. For that reason, your services are no longer required.”
“But—” The line went dead before I could get another word out. I tried to call him back. The line rang and rang and rang.
Cursing, I finished throwing on my clothes. I raced downstairs to my car, trying to ignore the jackhammering in my skull.
I must have broken some sort of record speeding to Ethan’s neighborhood. Thankfully the roads were relatively clear that time of the morning. I wished, not for the first time, that flight or super speed was one of my powers.
I skidded to a stop in front of Ethan’s brownstone. I could have picked his lock with my pocketknife, but I feared there was no time for that. Two well-placed kicks with the flat of my foot popped the door open. I hustled inside.
I smelled and felt it before I saw it. The smell of gunfire in an enclosed area was unmistakable. I had smelled the bitter, faintly chemical smell many times before.
The feel of death was similarly unmistakable, a sour tightening in the back of the throat. People who thought death didn’t have a feel to it had never been near a fresh corpse. I had felt this feeling many times before. Too many times.
Ethan was in the same room I had last seen him in. He sat on the sofa there. A knocked over bottle of tequila was at his feet. His blue eyes were open, staring at nothing. There was a look of shock in them, as if Ethan was surprised by what he saw. A small revolver hung listlessly from two fingers of his right hand. A bloody hole was in his right temple.
I checked Ethan’s pulse. His lack of one confirmed what my powers had already told me. Ethan had been right when I had first met him: without his powers and his costume, he was as vulnerable to a bullet as the next man.
“Goddamn it,” I said.
A handwritten note was on the sofa next to him. A suicide note, written in big, sloppy letters. In it, Ethan confessed to stabbing his wife.
“Goddamn it,” I said again. The words echoed in the lifeless room.
I pulled out my phone. My hands shook a little. I wasn’t sure if it was from adrenaline or my earlier drinking. I started to dial 911.
I hesitated, my finger hovering over the final digit. I forced my sluggish brain to think.
I put my phone back in my pocket. Pulling my sleeve over my hand, I lifted Ethan’s arm a little, so I could check the gun without touching it. All the chambers but one were full.
; I thought some more. Ethan had been right. We Heroes were supposed to care about justice.
I picked up Ethan’s suicide note and put it in my pocket. Then I took the gun out of Ethan’s hand. I backed away from him a bit. I crouched down a little to get the angle right. I shot Ethan several times in different parts of his body. An expert marksman, I could have grouped the shots close together, especially at this range. Instead, I was careful to spread the shots all over his body, like an amateur firing in the heat of the moment.
My ears rang when I finished. I put the gun into my pocket. I looked around, seeing if I had missed anything. I mentally retraced my steps, thinking about if I had touched anything with my hands other than the gun and the note.
I had not. I went back to the front door. I had damaged it a little by kicking it in, but not much. I scanned outside with my powers. I did not sense the water signature of anyone nearby. I walked out, and closed the door behind myself, using my sleeve over my hand again so I wouldn’t leave prints.
I went back to my car and drove off.
CHAPTER 12
I sat at my desk in my office in the late afternoon drinking beer and thinking long thoughts. Once I polished this bottle off, I planned to move on to my old friend Scotch. I was going about things the wrong way according to the old rhyme. That rhyme counseled, “Beer then liquor, never sicker. Liquor then beer, have no fear.” I never have been much for following the rules when they got in the way of what felt right. Truman the Iconoclast. I should’ve added that to my business cards. It sounded better than Truman the Inadequate.
My office door opened. Detective Glenn Pearson walked in, looking as rumpled as ever. Despite that, he was a sight for sore eyes. More specifically, the box of donuts under his arm were.
“Jelly-filled?” I said hopefully. Glenn nodded. He put the box on my desk and took a seat in one of my client chairs.
“What’s the special occasion?” I asked. “Did you shoot an unarmed man for jaywalking and you’re looking to celebrate?” I knew Glenn saw the collection of empty beer bottles on my desk. They would have been impossible to miss. I felt a stab of shame and embarrassment. It was nothing a jelly donut couldn’t fix. I opened the box, pulled out a likely looking candidate, and took a bite. I was right. It was hard to feel too badly about anything when there was a jelly donut in your mouth. I wondered if psychiatrists used them to treat depression.
“Ethan Lamb was shot and killed early yesterday morning,” Glenn said without preamble. His bulging eyes looked at me without blinking.
“Yeah, I heard on the news.”
“You haven’t heard this part on the news because we just did it: We arrested Maureen Jansen for his murder.”
I chewed carefully. “Is that so?”
Glenn nodded. “We found the gun that shot him hidden in her hallway closet. Ballistics match the slugs inside of Mr. Lamb with the gun. We also have a 911 recording where a man said he was walking past Ethan’s brownstone in the wee hours of the morning when he saw a woman matching Miss Jansen’s description run out of Ethan’s place with a gun in her hand. The call came in just a little while after the time the medical examiner says Mr. Lamb was shot.”
“Huh. Sounds like an open and shut case.”
“It does,” Glenn agreed. “Miss Jansen denies she had anything to do with Mr. Lamb’s death, of course. Don’t they always? Prisons are overflowing with the innocent according to the inmates. The gun in Miss Jansen’s closet had been wiped clean of all prints, but it obviously did not walk in there all by itself. She says someone must have broken in and planted it there. There’s no evidence of a break-in, though—no broken windows, no busted doors, no scratches around the locks, no nothing. If someone planted the gun like Miss Jansen says, it was someone handier with a lock than Houdini. She says she was at home alone and asleep when Mr. Lamb was shot, so she doesn’t have an alibi.
“On top of all that, when we went to arrest Miss Jansen, she managed to immobilize several officers before we subdued her. Turns out she’s an unregistered Metahuman. Considering her powers and her killing Mr. Lamb, now we’re wondering if we accused the wrong person of Mrs. Lamb’s death. Miss Jansen’s immobilizing powers would explain why there were no defensive wounds on Mrs. Lamb’s arms and legs.”
“Wow. The things people will do. Not to look a gift donut in the mouth, but you came all the way here to tell me this? You could have called.”
“There are a few things about this case that bother me. That 911 call, for instance. It was made from a burner cell phone. There’s no way to know who made the call. On top of that, the caller’s description of who he saw coming from Ethan’s place fit Miss Jansen to a T. There’s something not quite right about that. You and I both know how bad most people are at picking up details about what someone looks like. Especially when that someone is in the dark and running. And, just like I had thought Miss Jansen was lying to us when she had told us where Mr. Lamb was the night his wife was killed, I kinda get the feeling she’s telling us the truth now.”
Glenn stretched his stubby legs out in front of himself and leaned back in his chair. His bulging eyes that missed little had never left mine.
“Plus, though the 911 caller’s voice was muffled, it kinda sounded familiar after I listened to it a few times. Then it hit me. It sounded a little like you. So I thought I’d swing by, bring some donuts, tell you what happened while I was looking at you, and ask you if you know anything about it all.”
The only sound in my office for a few moments was that of me chewing and swallowing.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said once my mouth was free.
Glenn regarded me silently for a bit. Finally, he blinked.
“Of course you don’t,” he said. He heaved himself to his feet. “The State’s Attorney says we’ve almost certainly got enough evidence on Miss Jansen to convict her of Mr. Lamb’s murder. As for Mrs. Lamb’s murder, the evidence still points in Mr. Lamb’s direction despite what we now know about Miss Jansen’s powers. But, we can’t convict a dead man.”
Glenn went to the door. He turned back around before opening it.
“You need to stop drinking,” he said. I wondered how long he had known about my drinking issues.
“It does more for me than it does to me.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yes,” I said. No, I thought. “If it makes you feel better, I’ll stop drinking one day. But today is not that day.” I drained my beer, thinking of Ethan and Clara Barton. “Tomorrow is not looking so good either.”
Glenn shook his head at me. He looked concerned, but a little disgusted too. There was a lot of that going around these days. Glenn walked out, closing the door after himself.
“Judge not, lest ye be judged,” I said to the empty room.
Glenn had left the donuts behind. Christmas had come early this year. Not that I deserved any presents. I picked out another donut and leaned back in my chair. I wondered, if my mind hadn’t been pickled with drinking, if I could have seen Maureen for who and what she was far sooner than I did. If I had, Ethan would probably still be alive. I had failed him as thoroughly as I had failed Clara.
On my own dime, I’d make a point to go to the areas Maureen lived in before she came to Astor City, and see if I could find pregnant women who had been the victims of stabbings that matched Maureen’s modus operandi. I’d poke around and see if I could somehow tie their deaths to her. I suspected the victims’ families would appreciate some measure of closure.
I made a mental note to call Stan Langley at the Times and a few other newspeople I trusted who knew I’d give them the straight scoop. On the condition they kept my name out of it, I’d tell them about Maureen’s involvement in Sabrina’s murder. If I couldn’t clear Ethan’s name in a court of law, at least I could try to clear it in the court of public opinion.
It seemed the least I could do for a fellow Hero.
The End
Turn the page for a brief n
ote from the author about this novella.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Thanks so much for reading this novella. It is a little darker than my usual stories, but sometimes you just must go where the muse takes you.
In this case, the muse took the form of a painting. I was flipping through an art book in the library I do much of my writing in, and my eyes fell on something that made me pause. It was a painting of boy soldiers who held a pregnant woman face up and spread-eagled on the ground. One of the boys held a weapon and was going to use it to cut the woman open to find out the sex of her unborn child.
Unfortunately, I don’t remember the name of the artist or of the painting. But I do remember how the painting was based on stories the artist heard in a war-torn country. I also remember the artist saying boy soldiers in that war routinely cut pregnant women open to find out the sex of their children, and that they had turned it into a game.
Chilling, right? It’s so disturbing, it may be why I can’t remember the name of the painting. Maybe I blocked it out. It did give me an idea for a story, though. Accused Hero is the result.
Accused Hero is the fifth story I’ve written about Truman Lord, though the events in it take place between The Missing Exploding Girl and Killshot, the second and third books in the Superhero Detective Series. If this novella is your first exposure to Truman and you like him, congratulations! You’ve got four full-length novels starring Truman to catch up on. Those novels are heavier on the superheroics than this novella is. With this novella, I was shooting for more of a traditional hardboiled detective/character study feel. One of the great things about superheroes is the fact that they’re just people, and as such, stories about them can be almost any genre.
This novella was originally given to readers a while ago in exchange for them joining my mailing list. Though I had always intended to formally publish it, I hadn’t looked at or thought about the novella for almost a year. When I recently was looking through my computer for another file, I stumbled upon this novella again and thought, “Oh goody! Here’s my excuse to revisit Truman.” (And yes, I often say things like “Oh goody!” in my head. I try to not say it aloud, though. People look at me funny.) I revised and re-edited the original novella, and you just read the result.
Superhero Detective Series (Book 5): Accused Hero Page 9