by Dan Ames
The electrical vibration sound suddenly stopped. The room was eerily silent until I spoke again.
“Benjamin Collins had fallen in love with your son. And I suspect Lawrence was in love with Benjamin. Is that why you killed him?”
The old man drummed his fingers on the metal table. It made a sound like heavy raindrops hitting the roof.
“Or did it have something to do with your little legal issue?” I said. “Yeah, I found out about that, too. Overcharging the military for your parts? Did Lawrence know something about that and spill the beans to Benjamin during some pillow talk?”
Now I smiled. I really wanted to piss him off. I wanted to hear the words come out of his mouth. That he had ordered the murder. That he had used his military connections to hire a contract killer. It made perfect sense.
“Come on, old man,” I said. “Was Lawrence putting AutoDyne in jeopardy? Or were you just angry that he was putting his you know what you know where?”
Charles Pierce stopped drumming his fingers. For a moment, I thought he was going to blow a gasket and come across the table at me. But just as quickly, the moment seemed to pass. When he spoke, it was with the same tone he’d been using the whole time.
“You were a failure as a police officer,” he said. “And you’re a joke of a private investigator. But when I listen to you talk and hear the stupidity of your thoughts, it makes me happy. Because I know that Elizabeth’s narrow brush with the shallow end of the gene pool didn’t take.”
He got to his feet.
The security guard with the crewcut appeared in the doorway followed by one of the guards from the gate. The one with the machine gun.
It appeared I had worn out my welcome.
35
They led me through the sterile hallway toward the front door. I couldn’t wait to get out of this godforsaken place. I needed to call Ellen, tell her what I knew to be true. Even though Charles Pierce had admitted nothing, our conversation solidified my theory. He had done it. He had ordered Benjamin’s murder.
Waiting for me at the door was the guy with the clipboard.
“I need your badge,” he said. I hesitated for a moment. Remembered when I’d been a cop and had to turn my badge in. It was one of those strange flashback moments.
I dug the badge out of my shirt pocket and handed it to him. He looked at it to make sure it matched the number he’d written on the sheet of paper attached to the clipboard.
He looked down at his notes, pen in hand. He put a check mark in a box and nodded to the guard behind me.
The one behind me put his hand on my shoulder to guide me toward the door but instead of a push, I felt a stabbing pain.
I tried to turn but the guy with the clipboard lowered his shoulder and knocked me backward. My feet flew out from underneath me and I landed on my back.
The guard who’d stabbed me with the needle had unslung his machine gun and put the barrel underneath my chin.
I realized two things.
One, everything was glowing and getting fuzzy.
Two, the security guard with the machine gun wasn’t the same one from the gate. But I’d seen him before.
He had jet black hair and a narrow, pale, pinched face.
It was the man who’d murdered Benjamin Collins.
36
There was a humming in my ears.
I opened my eyes.
The humming was just that. Actual humming.
Huh huh, hmmm hum hummm huh huh huhm hum hum hum hummm.
Satisfaction. By the Rolling Stones.
“I can’t get no,” a voice said. Huh huhhmm hum huh hhmmmm.
“Satisfaction,” he whispered.
It was pitch black. There was a wind, and I heard the sound of water. Waves crashing into hard rock.
I couldn’t move, but it wasn’t from the drugs. My feet were bound with plastic ties. My hands were in front me, also bound with plastic ties. My shoulder ached from where I’d been stabbed with the needle and my head hurt.
I was sitting a few feet back from a concrete ledge. Lake St. Clair was pounding in, carried along by a strong wind from the north.
He stood next to me, a knife in his hand, tapping his feet to the music in his head.
A few hundred feet away, two giant metal tubes protruded from a concrete wall. I’d been here before. It was the boiler runoff from the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club.
I realized where he’d taken me.
The exact spot where Benjamin Collins’ butchered body had been found floating.
“Hello, sleepyhead,” the man said.
He laughed.
“Exile on Main Street,” he said. “Regarded by plenty of people as the Stones’ greatest album. Great title, don’t you think?”
What I was thinking about was screaming. At the top of my lungs. But no one would hear because there was no one around and I could barely hear him talking anyway, between the wind and the waves.
“That’s kind of what you’ve been, haven’t you?” he said. “Exile on Main Street.”
“Fuck you,” I said. “How much did Charles Pierce pay you to kill Benjamin? He was just a kid. Innocent.”
“No one’s truly innocent,” he said. “We’ve all got blood on our hands. Some have just a bit more than others.” He laughed again. “But I always tell my clients. This business we’re in? Half-measures never work. You have to go all the way. Pierce didn’t want to kill you. Just ruin you. Stupid.”
I just couldn’t let him win again. I had to keep him talking. Stall. Maybe I could get one of my hands free.
“Why did they kill Benjamin?” I asked.
He shrugged his shoulders. “They signed the check. That’s all I care about. Although, this time, I have to say I’m getting a little bit of personal enjoyment out of this one. You did some serious damage to me on that boat.”
The killer stretched his arm out. “Still hurts a little, you bastard.”
“Serves you right,” I said. I pulled my hands apart as hard as I could, but the plastic ties just bit more deeply into my wrists, drawing blood. There was no way I could pull them over bone.
“I was in your office today,” he said. “I loved that picture of your family. Did you take that shot?”
“Fuck you,” I said.
“Maybe I’ll pay them a visit after we’re done here,” he said. “I could find a way to comfort them.”
I shot my legs out at him but he easily sidestepped me. He reached down and grabbed me under the arm, wrenched me to my feet. For such a slim man he was very strong.
“Have you ever been out and about, running errands and suddenly you get the feeling there was something else you were supposed to do?” he asked.
I didn’t answer. All I was thinking about was Anna and the girls.
“That vaguely unpleasant feeling that you’d forgotten something?” he continued. “I hate that feeling. And it’s something I’ve felt for the past six years. And whenever it would come over me I would remember. John Rockne. I should have killed him.”
He laughed.
“You’re not going to get away with this,” I said.
He laughed.
“Time to do your Brian Jones impression,” he said. The knife flashed and I heard a shot. Something hot and wet splashed my face. I felt a stabbing pain in my chest and the killer fell backward, his hand still holding onto my arm, half of his head gone.
And then we were both falling.
The ice cold water hit my face, and something hard smacked me in the temple. I was lost in blackness. Water poured into my mouth and up my nose. I was gagging but couldn’t open my mouth and I struggled against my restraints.
I was drowning.
Something tight went around my throat and I thought the killer was still alive, trying to choke me while I was drowning. He was determined to kill me even with half of his head missing. But then my face was suddenly out of the water. The blackness was gone. I coughed, shot a stream of lake water out of my mouth.
; Ellen’s face appeared before mine.
She was pissed.
It looked like she wanted to kill me.
37
“You put a GPS on my car?”
Ellen nodded.
“That’s an infringement of my civil rights,” I said. “Who do you think you are, the NSA?”
“Shut up, John,” Anna said. “Thank God she did or you’d be dead.”
“Yeah, shut up, John,” Ellen said. “Drink your coffee and let’s go.”
We were sitting in my living room. After the crime scene guys had showed up at the lake and fished the killer’s body out of the water, I had been allowed to come home.
Ellen had spent a fair amount of time giving her statement. When you shoot someone, even when it’s clearly the right call like this one, you have to answer a lot of questions.
She looked fine, though. Ellen was a lot tougher than me.
Now, I was in dry clothes, warm, and maybe just a little drunk. I wasn’t much of a drinker.
It wasn’t just coffee. Anna had dumped in some brandy to help me warm up.
I had filled Anna in on the night’s festivities. The doctors had given me a clean bill of health. The killer had managed to poke me with his knife, but it had barely broken the skin.
Other than being a little shaken up by the sight of someone getting their head blown off right next to me, I was fine.
But had I heard right? Ellen was taking me somewhere?
“Where are we going?” I said.
“You’re not quite done with the Pierce family just yet, John.”
I kissed Anna goodbye, but that’s not accurate. I tried to kiss her and she turned away. She didn’t like it when I did stupid things. Which was pretty much constantly.
So I followed Ellen out to her cruiser and we hit Kercheval, followed it up past the Nun’s Walk and across Moross to a neighborhood next to the Country Club of Grosse Pointe. I could see the police lights in front of a house.
“Lawrence Pierce killed himself tonight,” she said. “A detective wanted to show me something. I thought you’d want to see it, too.”
We parked and ducked under the crime scene tape. The house was a red brick colonial with a huge winding staircase just past the foyer. Ellen turned right and we went into a library.
“They already took him down,” she said, pointing to a beam at the center of the ceiling.
We walked over to where a detective from the Michigan State Police stood. He wore crime scene gloves and was flipping through a notebook. A computer sat on the desk, its screen open.
“This has got to be one of the most thorough confessions I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Notes. Email exchanges. Recordings. The whole shebang.”
“Why?” I asked.
“He was a mess,” the detective said. “Coroner said he was strung out on all kinds of prescription drugs. Dude weighed like eighty pounds.”
“No, not why did he kill himself,” I said. I gestured at the pile of material that constituted Lawrence’s confession. “Why was Benjamin Collins killed?”
“From what I can tell, Lawrence told him about how his father’s company was ripping off the government. Daddy must have found out. I guess Old Man Pierce wanted to punish him.”
I nodded.
“What about Elizabeth?”
The detective shook his head. “He never mentioned her. Doesn’t look like she’s involved. But I gotta tell you, that Charles Pierce? A psycho. If he didn’t like you…”
I wondered about that. If ruining my life and getting Elizabeth to dump me had just been a little gravy on the side of Charles’s master plan.
That also meant that maybe Elizabeth hadn’t been lying to me.
Ellen and I walked back to her cruiser.
I thought about Elizabeth. The confrontation we’d had in her house.
There had been no doubt in my mind she wasn’t telling the truth. But it looked like I’d been wrong.
Maybe if you waited long enough, someone can change so much they stop being the person you once knew.
38
We met at a park in Birmingham.
It was now the heart of fall in Michigan. One of those picture postcard days where the sky was beautifully blue, the leaves on the trees were tinged with color, and the threat of a long, cold winter was pushed aside in the spirit of soaking up the sun and savoring a change of season.
Amanda Collins and I sat at a table near a fountain. We each had a coffee from the Starbucks just up the street, along with a copy of the Detroit Free Press. The front page story was about the arrest of Charles Pierce for conspiracy to commit murder.
I had filled her in on the long, sordid story. She cried softly when I told her about Lawrence’s suicide. But the tears had stopped when I’d filled her in on Ellen’s shooting of the killer. They were still trying to figure out his actual identity, but no prints or dental records had matched. It didn’t really matter to me anymore. He was dead. That was the important thing.
“There will be a lot more charges to follow,” I said, gesturing at the newspaper story. “And considering the fact that he’s in his eighties means he’ll never be a free man again.”
“All this time,” she said, shaking her head. “All these years he had gotten away with it. Benjamin dead. That old man still pulling the strings. And the rest of us trying to move on with our lives. Surrounded by the broken pieces.”
I nodded.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry it took me so long to–”
“John, don’t,” she said. “You were a victim. We all were. It’s time to forgive yourself. I’ll never forgive him,” she said, gesturing toward the newspaper. “But I’m moving on. You should, too.”
We sat awhile longer. An unnaturally warm breeze stirred the leaves in the trees. Somewhere a child’s laughter rang out. Behind us, a sculpture stood in the middle of the park. A man and a woman, linked, each with a hand raised toward the pale blue sky.
THE END
Volume Three
Part I
COLD JADE
John Rockne Mystery #3
COLD JADE
(A John Rockne Mystery)
by
Dan Ames
Copyright © 2015 by Dan Ames
COLD JADE is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author or publisher.
COLD JADE
John Rockne Mystery #3
by
Dan Ames
“It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver.”
-Niccolo Machiavelli
1
She weighed a hundred pounds soaking wet but could put away tequila like a Colombian foot soldier just back from three months in the jungle. How many had she thrown back? Five? Six?
Either way, the tingling in her hands, the numbness along her jaw was kind of new.
That part of it could be the drugs.
Around her, people swirled in a cloud of perfume and bright clothes, bounced to and from by a pulsating bass beat that seemed to hit her from every direction, like she was running an invisible gauntlet.
An even more intense wave of disorientation hit her, she knew it wasn’t from the booze. And probably not from the drugs she took, even though she couldn’t remember what the pills had been or who had given them to her.
Maybe I’ve been roofied, she thought. And then she started laughing.
The problem was the friend she’d been with was now gone. But damn, she couldn’t remember his name. Or was it a her? Everything seemed confusing, especially when her breath caught and somewhere there was a crashing bang followed by the unmistakable sound of breaking glass.
She looked down and saw a champag
ne glass at her feet, or at least what was left of it.
Several sets of eyes loomed before her, one person’s mouth formed into a perfect “O” as she struggled to walk past. Ahead, the front door to the huge house looked like a gateway to a different world. And that’s where she wanted to go. A world. That was different.
The front door tilted as she approached it, wobbling on her stiletto heels, and she leaned to the side, because the door was crooked and she had to try to make it through. Instead, her head hit the door frame and it made a solid thunking sound but she felt no pain. The blow to her head pushed her upright and she made it all the way through the door, pushing the dark, heavy wood forcing it to surrender to her shoulder.
It swung all the way open, then bounced off its backstop before swinging back and slamming shut.
The silence and darkness hit her like a splash of cold water.
Her eyes finally opened all the way and she moved forward, not realizing there was a step from the wide front porch down to the walk.
Her leg buckled and her momentum carried her forward. She took a faltering step but she was already leaning too far forward and her legs couldn’t catch up.
She landed face first in the wet grass.
Her nose must have hit first because there was a tiny shadow of pain that crossed her eyes and then she tasted something in her mouth. Something that wasn’t water from the grass, but a thick liquid with a metallic flavor.
“Mmm, this blood is delicious,” she slurred.
With a monumental effort she turned herself onto her back. The sky was now a blanket of black with holes poked in it by distant stars.