by Lori Ryan
Chapter 5
“Wow.”
Carrie turned and looked into her assistant’s smiling face. She couldn’t help the laugh that came out. Gina was younger than Carrie by a few years. In some ways, she was more mature than a lot of women her age. Other times, not so much. Now was one of those times. Gina seemed to be almost bouncing on her toes.
“Well, tell me!”
Carrie grinned. “Tell you what?” She couldn’t help it. Her mother had just grilled her on Jarrod, wanting to know who he was and why she didn’t know him. Dealing with that interrogation had left Carrie in the mood to mess with Gina instead of just giving in to the girl’s nearly giddy reaction to the detective’s surprise attendance. She still didn’t know how he’d gotten a ticket.
Oh, who was she kidding? Carrie’s own reaction to him in his tux had been a little giddy.
“Cut that out! You know perfectly well what I want to know.” She looked over her shoulder into the ballroom, then turned back to Carrie. “Are you and the detective going to play with his handcuffs later? Are you keeping it kind of cazh? Is that why he left ahead of you? I can take care of things here tonight if you want to sneak out early.”
Carrie was a little surprised at how much she wished that was what Jarrod wanted. But judging by the way he’d grilled her, then run off without another word, his belly hadn’t been doing the flip flops hers had all night. He didn’t seem to be on the same page with her at all. Which sucked.
No, wait. That didn’t suck. It was perfect. Because she didn’t need a date from the man. She needed him to clear her clinic. She needed him to find out who was doing this to the people who depended on Step Up for their medical care.
Ha! The voice in her head that was often too opinionated for its own good raised its ugly little head and laughed. Okay, so it wasn’t just a voice. She often pictured the voice as a cartoon character complete with either wings or devil horns like some throwback to her childhood cartoons. In fact, it was a little cartoon caricature of herself. Carrie mentally took out a hammer and hit the voice over the head. It rubbed its cartoon head.
“Sorry to burst your bubble,” she said, speaking to both Gina and the cartoon. “He was here to see the people involved in funding the clinic. He just wanted to get a feel for all of our major donors for his investigation.”
At the mention of the investigation, Gina’s shoulders seemed to sag and she turned to stand beside Carrie. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder watching the ballroom from a side room. “I’ve been trying not to think about it. Do they really think it’s someone in this room? Isn’t that a horrible thought?”
Carrie nodded. It was. “Someone here, or one of the doctors or nurses at the clinic, maybe. I hate to think of either of those things.”
Gina nibbled on her lower lip. “I wonder if some of the money we’re taking in tonight is blood money, you know? Money paying for access to our patients?”
Carrie swallowed but didn’t answer. She didn’t have an answer.
Chapter 6
“Look at the machine. Going strong.” The tone was snide.
Jarrod ignored the voice behind him and focused on reading his emails. Detective Lars Jepsen was as irritating as he was incompetent. He liked to call Jarrod the Machine whenever Jarrod was working harder than Lars was comfortable with. If Jarrod was working hard, expectations for Lars might go up. Couldn’t have that.
“Beat it, Jepsen,” Cal said as he walked up and placed a cup of coffee down on Jarrod’s desk. Jarrod had been in the station since five in the morning looking through every scrap of material they had on this case, which wasn’t a hell of a lot.
But sleep hadn’t come to him last night for a long-assed time. When it finally had, it was filled with fantasies of a long and leggy blonde gasping his name as he buried himself balls deep.
He’d woken up frustrated, tense, and not the least bit rested. It made sense to come to the station to work off some of that frustration on the case.
“Anything new?” Cal leaned over Jarrod’s shoulder, trying to read the email, but Jarrod growled. His partner backed off with a laugh.
“The ME emailed. She’s gotten consistent results across the board on the blood and tissue samples of five of the eight homeless men.” They had a total of eight men they suspected were killed because of the illegal drug tests. “They all show a substance in the blood she can’t identify, but she says it’s similar to some of the drugs currently on the market. She’s filed the necessary paperwork with the FDA to find out if it’s a match to anything they’ve got on file.”
Both men looked at their phones as nearly simultaneous alerts sounded.
“Speak of the devil,” Cal said.
Jarrod groaned. The ME had another homeless death. She was calling them to the scene. Jarrod grabbed his jacket while Cal pulled out an over-sized Chapstick-looking tube and began smearing it on the back of his neck and his nose as they walked toward the elevator. Cal never left the building without applying sunscreen if he could help it.
Jarrod understood. Cal’s dad and aunt had both had skin cancer. His dad hadn’t survived it. Still, Jarrod grinned at the sight of the large man smearing himself with the stuff, and he regularly gave him shit about it.
Ten minutes later the pair donned protective booties and stepped behind the tape at the scene of what looked to be a brutal death. A pale-faced uniform who looked like he could have come on the job yesterday stood nearby. He gave a small nod when Jarrod and Cal showed IDs, but Jarrod had to wonder how much the kid was processing.
He understood why seconds later. Someone had taken a hammer to the victim’s head while he slept and the result wasn’t pretty. What should have been the man’s head was now a mass of flesh and broken bone with a ring of blood making it difficult for them to get near the body without contaminating the scene. It was tough for anyone to take in, much less a rookie.
“Morning, Dr. Kane.”
The medical examiner looked up at Jarrod’s words through thick-framed glasses. She had a distinctive look with strands of gray hair running through the nearly black braid that ran down her back. She nodded at them. “Detectives.” She was removing a meat thermometer from the victim’s body, something that always made Jarrod’s stomach turn, no matter how many times he saw it. “You know the drill, gentlemen. I’ll know more when I get him back to the lab, yada yada, but I’ll place estimated time-of-death between one and four o’clock this morning.”
Cal and Jarrod exchanged a glance before Cal spoke. “What makes you think this is related to the deaths of our homeless guys?” The man was lying on what appeared to be a makeshift pallet of cardboard with a worn gray blanket tangled around his legs. His clothing and general lack of cleanliness seemed to speak of someone who spent more time on the streets than not. But the victims on their current case had all died of heart attack, not the violent death splayed out before them.
“I wouldn’t think it.” She nodded toward the back of the alley where another uniform stood with a woman wearing heavy layers of clothing, holding the extended handle of a rolling suitcase that had seen better days. Darla. Their kidnapping victim and the woman they’d been looking to talk to again. “But she told the first on scene to call you. Says this guy was taking the same pills your other guys were taking.”
Jarrod turned back to the young officer standing guard at the crime scene tape, handing him a ten-dollar bill. “Do me a favor? Can you run across to the coffee shop and grab a coffee with cream and sugar and a sandwich?”
The patrolman nodded, looking a little too eager to get out of there and took off across the street.
While they waited, Jarrod looked at Cal. “You think whoever’s behind this is closing down and cleaning up shop?”
“It’s possible. Either that or this is unrelated and Darla is wrong. This looks like a lot of anger. Why the overkill?”
The ME looked down at the body. “I agree on the overkill, but it was also a fairly quiet way to take the guy out. If the first
blow knocked him unconscious, there wouldn’t have been a whole hell of a lot of noise. Now the mess is another thing altogether. This was one messy kill.”
“So our killer would have walked away with a lot of blood splatter on him.” Cal looked down at the ground. The spot the killer had stood in was plain to see. It was a distinct section with none of the blood that covered the rest of the pavement and wall.
“A lot of it,” Dr. Kane confirmed. “If your killer walked away, he’d have had a hard time hiding this amount of blood.”
They all turned to the mouth of the alley. “Maybe someone was waiting in a car?”
“Could the overkill simply be a hired killer who likes his job too much or an attempt to be sure the vic didn’t survive?” Jarrod mused.
Dr. Kane and Cal each offered some version of a shrug and nod combination to indicate it was a possibility.
The young patrolman approached the tape and shifted on his feet, holding the coffee and bag, as though he didn’t want to come any closer to the body. Jarrod took pity on him and went over to grab the food. With a nod, Cal joined him as they walked around the corpse toward Darla.
“Good morning, Darla,” Cal said. She didn’t answer right away, but eyed the coffee and food in Jarrod’s hands.
He smiled and offered both. “How about we talk while you eat?” He walked further into the alley, away from the crime scene and gestured toward a set of concrete steps at the back of one of the businesses. Darla and he sat as she dug into the bag, while Cal stood nearby, ready to take notes.
“You asked the officer to call us, Darla?” Jarrod wanted to keep the conversation as open as possible for now and let Darla be the one to set the direction.
She answered around a bite of fried egg sandwich. “Max was taking them pills.”
“How do you know that?”
“I saw him with them. I warned him not to take them. Told him my Jimmy and Leo and a whole mess of other guys died taking ‘em, but Max had a mean streak a mile long. He told me to bug off, and I wasn’t going to argue with him.” She glanced at the body, but didn’t flinch, and Jarrod wondered how much she’d witnessed in her life on the streets to develop the kind of stomach to keep eating after what she’d just seen. From what he knew of her, Darla had been living on the streets for many years.
“Did Max say anything about which doctor he was seeing or where he’d gotten the pills?”
“Nope.” Her answer was simple and she didn’t seem to feel the need to expand.
“How about the clinic? Have you seen him go into the clinic in the last three days?” Many of the homeless people in the city spent time during the day in the area surrounding the clinic and shelter, so it wouldn’t have been out of the question for Darla to have seen Max coming or going. And if he’d gone to the clinic to see someone in the few days since Dr. Coleman’s murder, that might indicate there was another doctor or a nurse involved at the clinic.
Darla continued eating, shaking her head no.
“We wanted to ask you a little more about the night you were kidnapped.” Jarrod kept his voice steady and calm, but Darla still froze and looked like she might take off if pressed. She looked his way and grunted a response, and he didn’t need to be a genius to see that something about that night was making her nervous.
“Talk to us, Darla. Help us put a stop to this.”
She looked between the two men a few times, before speaking. “I was in the clinic that night.”
“Okay,” Jarrod said, no judgment in the tone. On the inside, he was having a what the fuck moment. She’d sworn up and down before she was under the bridge outside the shelter when she was taken. He really shouldn’t be surprised. People lied to him all the time. Sometimes, though, he still had it in him to be disappointed.
“I didn’t break in,” she rushed to add. “Not exactly.”
“We’re not worried about that, Darla. We just need to know what happened.” Now, that was the truth. He had zero interest in jacking her up over a breaking and entering charge right now.
“I hid when they were closing.”
Jarrod wanted to ask where she’d hid, but didn’t want to stop her from talking just yet. He made a mental note to get that detail later.
“I wanted to look through the doctor’s office. See if I could find something to prove he’d had something to do with killing my Jimmy.”
“Which doctor?”
“The short bald guy. I saw Jimmy going into his office with him a few times when we went to the clinic.”
Jarrod pulled out his phone and pulled up the clinic’s website. He showed Darla the page with images of the doctors. “Do you see him anywhere here?”
Darla nodded and pointed a chubby finger. She chose Dr. Coleman.
“Can you tell me what happened next?”
“Nothing. I went in his office and then someone hit me.” She raised a hand to the back of her head. “That’s it. I was out until I woke up at the factory.” Her voice shook. Jarrod knew from their previous interview that she’d been taken to the Smythe Arms factory – a defunct old building scheduled to be torn down in the next month or so to make room for apartment buildings.
“Do you remember seeing anything before you were hit?”
She shook her head, no.
“How about hearing something? Maybe even a smell? Anything?”
Darla was quiet for a minute, before answering, her face scrunching up with the memory. “Smoke.”
“Like cigarette smoke or smoke from a fire?”
“Cigarette. But not like someone smoking a cigarette. It was more the way someone smells when they be a smoker. That old smoke smell.”
“Okay. I know you’ve told us this before, but can you tell us again what happened when you woke up at the factory?”
Darla had gone back to eating now, and she reached over and took a sip from the coffee cup before answering. “That man that grabbed Mia was there. I was tied up by the time I woke up. He was bent over me finishing up tying them knots when I woke up.”
“Can you think back to that? Did he have the same smell? The stale smoker smell?”
She looked a little surprised and stopped eating. “No.”
Jarrod nodded. “Okay, that’s a good thing to know. Can you tell me what happened after that?” The smell of a smoker was distinctive. If Darla’s memory was accurate, she might not have been grabbed at the clinic by the gunman that had held her and Mia captive at the factory and shot Dr. Coleman. Jarrod hadn’t thought Coleman was a smoker—he didn’t remember any cigarettes or a lighter among the man’s possessions, but they could check Dr. Kane’s notes. There would be telltale signs. In fact, she’d even be able to tell if he’d been a recent smoker and how heavily he’d smoked.
The gunman—Trace Jones—was still lying in a hospital bed in a coma.
“The guy got a phone call and left. I was there most of the night. Then I told you the rest. Guy come in screaming and hollering in the morning. Something about his daughter, and then there was fighting. Then Mia came and got me. You know the rest.”
She’d finished eating and seemed to be getting annoyed talking to them. Jarrod didn’t think it was worth pressing her more now. Everything she and Mia had told him from that point forward matched. It was better to be able to come back to her and ask her questions another time if he had a reason to.
“Just one last thing, Darla. What time did you find Max over here?” He motioned to where the medical examiner was now working with one of her technicians to bag the body and remove it.
“Hour or so ago.”
“Did you see or hear anything when you found him?” If she found him an hour before, he’d been long dead meaning her answer would probably be no.
As expected, she shook her head no and stood up.
Jarrod stood with her. “Thanks, Darla. You’ve been a big help.” She was walking away before he got the words out.
“What do you think?” Cal asked.
“I think we need to find o
ut if the clinic has video or an alarm system in place. We have entirely too many unknown players mucking up this case.”
Chapter 7
“The nurse says she was positive,” Cal said, hanging up the phone as Jarrod stopped the car in front of a small home. The yard was well-kept and the neighborhood seemed to match, for the most part. “She said he first started visiting Dr. Coleman at the clinic seven months ago. She’s sure he showed an ID badge with Simms Pharmaceutical on it and said he was dropping off a delivery Coleman had to sign for in person.”
“I have a hard time believing a company whose business relies on confidential research lets a guy walk out of there with a badge when he’s fired.” Jarrod didn’t make a move to get out of the car yet. They were parked in front of the last known address for Alan Sykes. There was no car in the driveway.
“That’s assuming the ID wasn’t a fake and she’s right in her estimate of seven months. Could be he came in before he was fired eight months ago and then didn’t have to show his badge again. Maybe people just assumed he still worked at Simms and let him back to see the doctor without checking?”
“Do they have any kind of a sign-in process we can go back and check?” Jarrod had heard Cal’s side of the conversation and knew he’d asked her.
“No. There’s a record of the patients, but they wouldn’t have recorded Sykes’ visits.”
“Damn.” Jarrod shook his head as they exited the car, then turned his attention to the house. No lights on, mail sticking out of the mailbox next to the door.
Cal rang the bell and the pair waited for a long minute, before he rang again.
Jarrod tipped his head toward the mail. “Looks like that’s been piling up for a few days, at least.”