by Blake Pierce
When he looked up, his body was flexed. A wild grimace marred his features. Eyes were wide and lips pulled in. He cringed. On the verge of tears, he sucked it back.
“I matter,” he cried.
A cocky swagger took over. He stood up and extended his arms wide. Tears came and surprised him, and he then he gave in to the tears.
“I matter,” he sobbed and squatted down.
Avery stood up and moved away, hand close to her gun.
“What’s this all about?” Ramirez asked.
“Leave him alone,” Avery said.
Oblivious to the desperation that reeked out of their broken suspect, Ramirez squatted down beside George and said: “Hey, man, it’s OK. If you did it, just admit it. Maybe you’re crazy or something. We can get you help. That’s why we’re here.”
George stiffened and went still.
A whisper came from his lips.
“I’m not crazy,” he said, “I’m just sick of you people.”
As deftly as a trained soldier, a hand went behind his back and pulled a hidden blade. In the next instant, he spun around Ramirez and clinched his neck. He quickly stabbed his right side, just below his chest, and as Ramirez screamed out, George sank back into a sitting position, using Ramirez as a shield.
Avery drew her weapon.
“Don’t move!” she called.
George held the blade to Ramirez’s temple.
“Who’s the loser now?” he said. “Who!?” he screamed.
“Drop it!”
Ramirez groaned from the wound between his ribs. The arm around his neck clearly made it difficult for him to breathe. He reached for his gun but the point of the blade pressed deeper into his temple. George hugged him tight and whispered in his ear.
“Be still.”
A groan from Ramirez and then he screamed out.
“Shoot this fucker!”
Avery watched as George pressed the knife tight against Ramirez’s head, and a trickle of blood began to flow—and in that moment, she knew she had no choice. It was her partner’s life or this creep’s—and any second could make the difference.
She fired.
Suddenly, George screamed out in pain and went stumbling backwards, releasing his grip on Ramirez.
Avery looked over and saw him covered in blood, grabbing his shoulder. She was relieved to see it was a clean shoulder shot, just as she had hoped.
Ramirez scrambled to get his gun, but before he could react, suddenly George was back up on his feet. Avery couldn’t believe it. Nothing could stop this kid.
Surprising her even more was that George did not charge Ramirez, or her.
He was charging for the open balcony.
“WAIT!” Avery screamed.
But there was no time. He had a good ten feet on her, and she could see from his sprint that he was going to jump.
Again, she made a hard choice.
Again, she fired.
This time, she aimed for his leg.
He went down, face first, grabbing his knee, and this time he didn’t get back up. He lay there, groaning, feet from the balcony.
Ramirez stood and whirled around. With a hand on his wound, he grabbed his gun and pointed the muzzle at George’s face.
“You fuckin’ cut me!”
“I’ve got him,” Avery said.
Ramirez threw a kick to George’s side and Ramirez cringed from the pain as he did so, holding his wound tighter.
“Fuck!” he screamed.
On his side on the ground, George smiled, blood pouring from his lips.
“Did that feel good, cop? I hope it did, because I’m going to get out of this.”
Avery stepped forward, pulled out her cuffs, yanked his arms behind his back, and clamped them tight.
“You,” she said, “are going to jail.”
CHAPTER TEN
Avery called 911 with her gun trained on George. She used her walkie-talkie to dial backup. Ramirez couldn’t get over how stupid he’d been, or how much the wound actually hurt. Every so often, he’d shake his head and mumble to himself.
“Can’t believe this punk got the jump on me.”
“He’s fast,” Avery said. “You have training, George? Army? Navy? Is that how you were able to abduct Cindy?”
George sat cross-legged and silent with his head low.
“How’s the wound?” Avery asked Ramirez.
“I don’t know. I can breathe, so maybe he missed the lung. But the fucker hurts.”
He then stopped and looked at her with awe.
“Thanks, Black. You had my back. I owe you one.”
When the ambulance arrived, the EMT applied pressure to the wound and asked Ramirez a few questions. The initial diagnosis was that the knife might have missed the lung. The entire time, Ramirez kept shaking his head. “Stupid,” he said. “Stupid.”
A gurney was brought in to take him away.
“I’ll be back,” he said to Avery. “Don’t worry. This is nothing. Just a scratch. Hey, George,” he called out. “You assaulted a cop. That’s six years maximum. And if you killed a little girl, you get life.”
Harvard security stayed with Avery until the police came for George. Nobody spoke the entire time. Avery had been around killers before, lots of killers, in her three years on the force, but it was kids with guns and knives that always gave her pause: kids like George. College student. Harvard University. Someone that seemingly had it all, and yet on the inside he was fractured, broken.
Once the cops came and took George away, Avery stood alone in the apartment. The word “why” kept going through her head.
Why did he do this?
Why? Why? Why?
The face of Howard Randall kept appearing. What’s wrong with this world? she wondered. Look at this place. Sky view. Luxury all the way. Young, good-looking, physically fit, and yet he just attacked and stabbed a police officer. Other faces came to mind: gang faces and angry husbands and drunken psychos that killed innocent people and other kids, some six years old with Uzis strapped around their chests.
Why?
Was it pain? The pain of such a hard life?
A memory came: her father, unkempt gray hair, missing teeth, a shotgun in his hand. “You want to talk about pain?” he’d snapped. “I’ll shoot you in the fucking head! Then you’ll know pain, won’t you, girl? Won’t you!?”
Avery stood up.
It had been had been hard to focus on the apartment until everyone was gone. Now she made the room, and George Fine, her top priority.
Who are you? she asked.
The walls were practically bare except for one picture of George, proudly displaying a medal he’d won for a race. On his desk, Avery found keys and a wallet. At least ten keys were on the chain. What do you need all these for? she wondered.
No password locked his computer. A check of his recent Internet activity proved useless: a bunch of porn videos, relationship advice, and workout locations around campus. Two social networking sites were open. He had thirty-two friends on one of them. Mr. Popularity, she sarcastically thought.
Hidden in his closet was a box full of pictures: George with a group of men in the woods all wearing Army Reserve T-shirts; George between his parents with Harvard in the background; and Cindy Jenkins, hundreds of photos of Cindy Jenkins: Cindy at the mall, Cindy in Harvard Yard, Cindy at a party. Every photo appeared to have been taken in secret, from afar, or sometimes from right beside her, without her knowledge.
“Jesus.”
Anger welled up inside of her, not at the find or what George might have done if left unchecked, but at Harvard, the dean, and a life of secrecy that had nearly killed her partner.
A few minutes searching on her phone and Avery dialed a number.
“I want to speak to Dean Isley, right now,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” the assistant replied, “the dean is in a meeting.”
“I don’t care if he’s on the fucking moon,” Avery snapped. “This is Avery Black,
Boston PD, Homicide. I’m standing in the room of one of your students: George Fine. Does Isley know about George? He must, because your ‘normal’ Harvard senior just stabbed a cop. Get him on the phone right now!”
“Hold, please.”
Two minutes later, the dean came on.
“Hello, Detective Black,” he said, “sorry about the wait. I’ve just been briefed on your activities this morning.”
“I just want to understand something,” Avery said. “My supervisor, Dylan Connelly, called you last night for a background check on George Fine and Winston Graves. You said, and I quote my partner here, the one that was stabbed, ‘They’re both good boys from good families.’ Do you want to revise that statement?”
The dean cleared his throat.
“I’m not sure what you’re asking,” he said.
“Really? Because I think I’m being crystal clear. Let me say it in another way. We’ve got one downed cop. We’ve got one dead girl. Now we have a prime suspect who you said wasn’t a problem. I’m giving you one last opportunity to revise your statement before I seriously consider pressing charges. I just discovered George Fine was an army reserve. That might have been relevant information, don’t you think? He’s also a trained martial artist. Again, relevant. Good boy from good family just doesn’t cut it. What else do you know about him?”
“Officer Black, our relationship to our students is—”
“Tell me now or I hang up and you’re on your own.”
“Ms. Black, I can’t just—”
“Five…four…at one I hang up…”
“We have—”
“You have a dead girl and a possible murderer on your hands…three…two…”
“All right!” he yelled, flustered.
His voice went low.
“Now mind you,” he said, “no one here actually believes that one of our students could possibly be responsible for—”
“He stabbed a cop. My partner. Tell me what you know.”
“He was on disciplinary probation his first two years at the college,” the dean admitted. “He’d followed a young girl here from Scarsdale: Tammy Smith. There were…problems. No charges were filed. We didn’t want the press. He was under strict orders to stay two hundred yards away from her and have weekly meetings with our school psychologist. I was under the impression his sessions were going well. He’s been a model student ever since.”
“Anything else?”
“That’s all. The files are here if you care to look through them.”
‘What about Winston Graves?”
“Graves?” The dean nearly laughed, “He’s one of our top seniors, a standout in every way. I hold him and his family in the highest regard.”
“No secrets?” Avery pushed.
“Not that I’m aware.”
“That means maybe,” Avery said. “I’ll check on my own. And the next time a cop calls you for information, you might want to be as forthcoming as possible. ‘Cop stabbed in Harvard dorm’ probably isn’t a great headline for school admissions.”
“Wait a minute, I thought we—”
Avery hung up.
The next call was to Jones, a skinny, humorous Jamaican who complained about everything, even when he was having the time of his life.
“Jones here,” he said.
“This is Black. Where are you on the street surveillance?”
Jones was cramped in a dark office space surrounded by two technicians in blue. He leaned forward on his keypad and cocked his eyes like he was about to jump off a roof.
“You crazy, Black,” he complained. “You know that, right? How much longer I gotta do this maddening shit? It’s like a guessing game out here. I have to guess where he might have gone, then I gotta access those cameras and punch in the right times and see what happens. Hours and hours I stare at nothing. Only once I get lucky.”
“You got lucky?”
“Yeah,” he said and watched the screen. “I’m in traffic control right now with Stan and his girlfriend Frank. These guys are great. They helping me out all day. So here’s what I do. I accessed the cameras on the street lights on Auburn, at Hawthorn. You know what I find? I find your minivan. He go straight up Auburn, past Hawthorn. I check on Auburn further west, just past Aberdeen, and I see the minivan again. He’s heading west.”
“Where did he go after that?”
“Are you fuckin’ serious!” Jones cried. “What I look like? I ain’t no satellite imagery system over here! That took me like, five hours!”
“Keep on it,” Avery said and hung up.
The minivan was headed west, she thought. Out of the city. If George is our guy, he definitely had a house somewhere.
Her next call was to Thompson, longtime partner of Jones, a huge, brutish man who looked almost albino from his coloring, with blond hair, full lips, and the facial features of a woman. Thompson was kicked back in an office with a bunch of state troopers, eating donuts and telling a story about when he caught Jones sleeping and painted a bunny face on him.
“Thompson,” he answered in a deep voice.
“It’s Black. What’s the update?”
“The minivan headed north up Charles Street. That’s all I’ve got. Wasn’t sure if I should check the bridges or not.”
“We’ve got a murderer on the loose,” Avery snapped. “You check everything. Your partner Jones is already way ahead of you. Where did he go after Charles Street?”
“Let me figure that out,” he said.
“No,” she replied. “You’re off surveillance duty for the day. I need you on something more important: George Fine. Harvard student. I’m here now. Ramirez’s been stabbed. He’s at the hospital. I need everything you can find on George Fine. Contact his parents if you have to. He’s in police custody. Does he have a house somewhere, maybe northwest of Harvard? Keys are right here on his desk. Any previous medical history? Talk to his friends, family, anyone you can, you understand? No password on his computer so you can go through that too. You’re on Harvard duty for the rest of the day.”
“I’ll be there in a minute.”
“No—you’ll get here now!” she yelled and hung up.
North, she thought. He went north from Lederman Park. Maybe over the bridge and right into Harvard? Then why would you go west after you picked up Cindy from the alley?
Talk to me, Fine, she thought and gazed around the room. Talk to me.
* * *
An hour later, Avery was at the hospital.
The knife had only slightly perforated Ramirez’s lung. Luckily, it had missed all the other major organs, but doctors needed to go in and stitch up the internal wound.
She headed to the waiting room.
Three plainclothes cops were already there. One of the cops had a frog-like face; he was pudgy but solid, with cropped black hair and narrow eyes.
Great, Avery thought. Finley.
Finley Stalls was one of the worst bullies in the department, a deeply unhappy Irishman who drank every night and walked around the office in a foul mood every day. He had a sardonic sense of humor, and although he was never the first person to pick on Avery, he was always the last one laughing.
All three officers gave her the same emotionless expressions that she was used to in the department. She was about to wave and try to dilute their typical charm when Finley nodded in her direction and spoke in his fast, practically incomprehensible Boston accent.
“Wicked good work,” he said.
She couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not.
The second officer chimed in.
“You trying to get the record for most partners killed, Black?”
Ah, she thought. Kidding.
“Come on,” the third officer scoffed. “Give her a break. It’s not her fault. Ramirez is a fuckin’ fairy around suspects. Always acts like the hand of God won’t get him hurt or something. Fuckin’ idiot. She got him here in one piece, didn’t she?”
“You catch the killer?” the second offic
er asked.
“We’ll see,” Avery said.
She waited for the next joke, the next verbal assault, but none came. The officers simply mulled around, and for the first time in a long time, Avery was able to mentally relax around a bunch of cops and try to focus.
She called forensics.
“Randy, any updates?”
Randy sat in a white lab in the basement of the department. A microscope was on her desk and she peeked through it while she talked.
“I’m glad you called,” she said. “Remember those natural drugs we talked about, the plants he might have had to paralyze and ultimately kill his victim? I received confirmation on that. The toxins in her body pointed to about sixty percent opium. Very pure. Has to be his own plant. Did you get any leads on that?”
“I talked to a drug supplier I know,” Avery said. “Asked who would be stupid enough to sell just the poppy seeds and have their heroin sales go down the drain. Waiting to hear back. I was hoping you had some other leads. I’m nowhere on LED lights and gardening supplies. You can get them anywhere.”
“Looking at fibers right now taken off the girl’s body,” Randy said. “One of them is definitely cat, maybe a tabby? I think our killer likes animals. Hopefully, he doesn’t just stuff them for show. There are dirt specks, too. Typical garden variety. I’d say you’re looking for a green thumb, and someone that has plants, animals, a real garden nut.”
Avery couldn’t fit the pieces together.
George Fine had no plants and no cats.
Maybe it’s at his other location, she thought. But wouldn’t there have been some evidence of that in his dorm? Books on botanicals, drugs?
“All right,” Avery said. “Call me if you find anything else.”
* * *
Later in the afternoon, Avery knocked on Ramirez’s door and entered.
Ramirez waved her in with his arms high and a smile.
“Look who it is,” he called. “My savior.”
“Not really,” Avery replied. “What did I do?”
“You kept your cool,” Ramirez pointed out, “and you acted like a real cop with a suspect in there, not some stupid rookie like me. It’s all good, though,” he scowled, “I’ll be out of here in no time. Doctor said I can leave tomorrow. I’ll be back at the desk by Friday.”