Dying in Detroit (A Bright & Fletcher Mystery)

by Jonathan Watkins

  Over the months since, Schultz had found himself thinking about Issabella Bright. In those moments when his mind wandered away from his work, it invariably found its way to her. But since then, since the young witness, Johnny Niihz, had been granted immunity in exchange for testifying in federal court, he had not crossed paths with Issabella or the man she’d partnered with, Darren Fletcher. They were county level public defenders. It was conceivable that they would never have cause to see one another again. The thought was distressing.

  He wanted to see her again. He wanted her to be whole and unharmed and as beautiful as she had been during that first lunch they’d shared together. Schultz stared at the steps leading up to the second floor and felt himself tremble, suddenly grown weak over the prospect of what he might find up there.

  “Agent Schultz?”

  “Yes?”

  “You want us to clear out?”

  “No. I just need to...” He was looking at the smear of blood again, and he trailed away. Was she there? Was she a broken ruin in the corner of her office? Was all of her sunshine and optimism poured out on the floor in a pool around her?

  Something in the uniformed officer’s face shifted with recognition. He put a hand on Schultz’s shoulder and offered a reassuring grin.

  “Cat,” he said, shooting a thumb up the stairs. “Somebody killed it and made a big show out of getting its blood all over. They left it on the desk in the office up there. Nobody’s here.”

  Schultz looked at the uniform, suddenly fonder of the young man than he was of anyone else in the world.

  “Thank you, officer.”

  “You know the owner, I’m guessing? Why you got here so fast.”

  “Yeah.”

  The cop shrugged and his smile grew into a genuine grin.

  “Hey, I’m not exactly racing out to let some lawyer know they got a dead cat and a broken front door, you know?”

  Schultz reached out and shook the man’s hand.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll go find her and let her know. You guys need anything else from me?”

  “Tell her we’ll tape the doors, but she’ll have to do what she can to secure the place. We’re working with a seven hour backlog as it is. If you want to fill her in and have her contact the detective bureau, that’d maybe let us get a few jumps on things.”

  Schultz understood. He’d worked out of Detroit for several years and in that time he’d become all too familiar with the permanent emergency the local cops were constantly facing. When a road cop logged into his patrol unit’s computer at the start of a shift, there was already a host of calls waiting. Human death and injury got priority. Burglaries would wait.

  “Will do,” he said.

  “Maybe give her a number for a bio cleanup company. I was her, I wouldn’t want to come and scrape dead cat up. Especially if it’s her cat, you know?”

  “I guess maybe I should get a look up there. She’ll want to know.”

  The cop grimaced and shook his head.

  “It’s freaky shit, sir. Straight out psycho.”

  The two of them ascended the stairs. As they passed the smear of blood on the wall, Schultz saw that there were strands of black hair suspended in the sanguine stain. A cold disquiet rustled into him and he paused in front of the doorway to Issabella’s office. The uniform had called it “freaky shit,” and Schultz knew with a real certainty that it was as apt a description of what lay beyond that door as any clinician could offer. There were some simple truths about the various strata of human insanity. People who killed small animals were sociopathic. A person who killed a domestic cat and then put it on display for its owner was something without a clean label—an Other, a thing in human skin.

  “Sir?”

  Schultz pushed the foreboding away, settled back into himself.

  “Lead the way, officer.”

  Issabella’s office was clean and well-appointed. The furniture looked comfortable and tasteful. Rows of legal tomes were stacked in orderly fashion behind her desk. The large window offered a view of the Renaissance Center, its winking glass surface lending Issabella’s office an air of success simply by being visible to anyone who might sit across the desk from her.

  At the moment, in the center of that desk, sat the head of a cat.

  “What’s that underneath it?”

  “Freak left a note.”

  Schultz rounded the desk until he was standing in the spot where Issabella would normally sit and do her work. The black cat head lay there like an obscene paper weight, its hazel eyes wide open and looking at him. Its narrow mouth was agape, tiny fangs frozen in a silent death howl. Underneath it, a single sheet of computer paper.

  “Where’s the rest of it?”

  “We’re still looking for that, sir. So far, nothing but the head.”

  Schultz leaned down and peered at the sheet of bloody paper. The freak’s handwriting was clean and organized, all the letters uniform in height and width.

  Schultz read the words, and was reaching for his phone and running for the door in an instant.

  Ye shall not make yourselves abominable with any creeping thing that creepeth, neither shall ye make yourselves unclean with them, that ye should be defiled thereby.

  He collided with another uniform as he rushed down the stairs. His foreboding suspicion had been right. One of the things, the predators in human skin, had focused itself on Issabella Bright.

  * * *

  When the phone in Solomon’s hotel room sounded, he got it on the third ring. The business in the office of Howard Bright’s daughter had been filthy, wet and foul. Doing it had been a thrill, no doubt. But after the rush of exhilaration he felt, imagining the horror in the eyes of the young lawyer as she saw his handiwork, Solomon had quickly begun to crawl with revulsion. He was not clean. He was awash in fluid and hair and the stink of the rotting downtown air.

  So when the phone blurped at him, he rushed out of the shower, a pink-skinned and steaming mass.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s me,” she said, but he knew that already. Nobody else knew where he was. He didn’t want to talk to her. Didn’t like talking to her. So he just stood there with the receiver against his ear and the steam curling up off his flesh.

  “We have a problem.”

  “I doubt it,” he said.

  “It’s a risk getting to him. He’s in jail.”

  “Hmm. Let me think. Okay. So what?” he chirped in a lilting falsetto. His skin was turning into gooseflesh as he cooled to room temperature. He’d have to start the shower over from the beginning.

  “What do you mean, ‘so what’?”

  “The money, you dear, dumb trollop, is in the lawyer,” he chimed around his little, even teeth. “Howard can get himself drowned in the Detroit River for all I care. He can’t get the money, so let him rot. This Fletcher, the boyfriend—that’s the money. Him and the...the girl.”

  “Jesus,” she said. “You know, when you say that I can hear the sickness in you. This is a job, you fucking creep. I knew you were going to do this. I knew it the minute you came on board. But I guess nobody cares what I think—”

  “Bingo.”

  “Fuck you, Solomon.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Nobody’s paying you to indulge your sick personal issues.”

  “The lawyer will pay me to stop indulging them. Is it that complicated? We get the money. We get out of this walking nightmare of a city and then I never have to hear your whore’s tongue in my ear again. You see how simple this is?”

  “Howard—”

  “Is your problem. Don’t call me again,” he purred. “Not unless you have something worth saying, hmm? I’m on the lawyer. I’ll call you when the money’s in my hands. Fare thee well and la-de-lee.”

  He set
the receiver back in its cradle and stalked into the shower. The scalding jet of water washed over him and he closed his eyes against the searing heat. He grabbed the bar of pumice from where he’d set it on the soap ledge, and began to scour himself from scalp to toe.

  Chapter Six

  When it was clear that both Theresa and Issabella had many questions and concerns to hurl in his general direction, Darren eventually grew so overwhelmed that he leaned forward and grabbed up the ashtray off the little black wrought iron table that sat between the chairs on the terrace of his apartment. He only brought it out when Theresa was visiting. It was a thick, brown glass basin, and Theresa was reaching over to ash in it when he snatched it away and held it high over his head.

  “Enough!” he declared. “I have the conch!”

  Both women stared at him in confusion, their mouths frozen in the act of badgering him about the various concerns and realities they thought he was failing to adequately consider. The mere sight of them suddenly silent and dumbfounded earned him a rush of relief, so he continued to hold the ashtray above his head as if it were some talisman imbued with deep magic capable of rendering anxious women voiceless.

  Around them, the Detroit afternoon breezed along, and the traffic far below was an indecipherable static. Issabella drew a long breath in through her nose and folded her hands in her lap. Theresa tapped her cigarette over the half-wall that ringed the ivy-draped terrace.

  “Whatsa conch?” she said.

  “A big seashell,” Issabella said dryly. “He’s doing Lord of the Flies.”

  “Lord of the what?”

  “The point is,” he said. “We need order.”

  Issabella brushed some invisible speck off her slacks and gave him a level stare.

  “You seem like an unlikely candidate for establishing order, you know.”

  “I admit it’s not a natural inclination, no.”

  “You can put the ashtray back down. Point taken.”

  “Conch.”

  “You can put the conch back down.”

  Darren set the ashtray back on the table and Theresa ashed in it as she sighed out a stream of smoke.

  “Izzy, he’s right about you stayin’ here,” she said. “I seen this guy up close. If you’d been there, you’d be agreeing with me. Let Darren go see your old man and poke around—”

  “While I sit here like a stump,” Isabella finished. “Issabella Bright, Hostage of Circumstance. No thanks. We need to call the cops.”

  Darren sipped his drink and exchanged a glance with Theresa. Issabella saw it and the wrinkle of consternation between her eyebrows deepened.

  “We need to call the cops. We’re two lawyers and a bar owner, for Pete’s sake. We need to call the police and report it and let them do what they do. I don’t understand why we’re even talking about his. Why are we talking about this?”

  “One day,” Darren said. “Stay here one day. You and Theresa. If I can’t get this fixed, then we talk about the cops.”

  She folded her arms across her chest. “Not talk about it. One day. And if you can’t ‘fix’ this—whatever that means—then we call them. We report this. All of it.”

  “You haven’t thought that through,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You haven’t thought it through.”

  “Darren—”

  “Izzy, do you want your father to be convicted? I mean, look, we can just hold stuff back and say some scary bald man freaked out Theresa. But what’re they going to do with that? And if we tell them everything, then a law enforcement agency will be in possession of information that Howard Bright has committed felonies in Arizona. They fax it all out to Maricopa and...Howie’s facing prison time.”

  Again, he almost said, but stopped himself. He hadn’t told Issabella that her father had a hold on his release from the Arizona Department of Corrections. Her father was on parole for something from his past, from the time when his wife and daughter had suffered through not knowing if he was alive or dead. He wasn’t sure yet why he was holding that information back, but part of him suspected it was because it would push her closer to that point where she decided she just didn’t care what happened to her father, so long as he and his problems went away.

  Why not? he thought. Why not just let Arizona swallow him back into their jurisdiction? The man who threatened Theresa would follow him back there, wouldn’t he? Theresa had been clear in her retelling of what the man had said.

  “Howie owes. Howie owes something terrible. Anyone tries and get in the way of that, then they owe just as sure as he does.”

  Part of him wanted to just heed that warning and not get in the way. Letting Howard Bright get transported back to Arizona might mean an instant end to all of it. The people he’d embezzled money from would call off their attack dog and send him ranging back south to deal with Howie there. Wouldn’t they?

  Darren couldn’t be certain. He chewed his lip and brooded in silence. What if it was too late to just refuse to help Howie? What if his extradition back to Arizona meant that he was the only one safe from the man who had terrorized Theresa and taken that photo of Issabella? He couldn’t bear the uncertainty of it all. The two people most important to him in all the world were under threat and he was flailing about, hoping that a perfect course of action would materialize.

  “Darren’s got a white knight thing,” Theresa said through the smoke, as if she’d been quietly listening to his own internal dialogue. “He’s got some idea in his head where he keeps me and you safe and manages to spring your old man outta the clink. Saves everybody. I seen him do this with clients, too. One of the reasons I put up with him. Probably one of your reasons, too, Izzy.”

  The two women looked at one another across the table. Darren stayed silent, sipped his drink, and watched the subtle shift of expression as Issabella digested what Theresa had said. Her arms unfolded, and the crease in her brow faded. She shrugged, and looked at him.

  “Ugh,” she said.

  “Ugh?” he said.

  “She’s right.”

  “I know.”

  “One day. One.”

  “All I need, kid.”

  He gathered up his suit coat, kissed Issabella on the forehead, and went for the door before either of the two women in his home could think of something else to say.

  * * *

  Darren descended.

  The elevator swooshed him down through the floors of wealthy residents, down past the spa, the concourse of high-end shops, past the five-star restaurant, down and down until it deposited him beneath the street, amid the rows of cars settled safely in their underground parking garage. He stalked ahead.

  And as he did, he picked and plucked around the wardrobe of his interior, searching amongst the affectations and dispositions he could slip on and off as easily as water runs over a stone. Darren Fletcher had a face for every occasion, and a line of patter to accompany it. Of late, he had been most comfortable wearing the guise of Darren Fletcher, Affably Unconcerned.

  But when he reached his black Lexus in its numbered parking slot, the man who climbed behind the wheel was not someone who had seen daylight for quite some time. That man, this new Darren Fletcher, had hard, dark pebbles for eyes.

  He started the engine, stared straight ahead and guided his black machine up into the world.

  * * *

  It took a little less than half an hour alone for Theresa and Issabella to figure out that neither one of them knew how to cook anything they were willing to serve to the other. Darren’s stainless steel oasis of a kitchen was stuffed full of every type of culinary gadget imaginable, all of them intimidatingly foreign.

  “You guys got that restaurant down on the first floor,” Theresa finally said, shutting a cupboard door and fixing her hands on her wide hips. “You wanna o
rder something from there? Do they even have takeout at that sort of place?”

  “For residents of the Tower, yes. Everything’s full service with this place if you can afford the rent.”

  Issabella was holding some metal and plastic contraption in the air for inspection.

  “What do you think this does?” she said.

  “Garlic press?”

  “I thought that other thing was a garlic press.”

  “Swedish can opener, then.”

  Issabella looked at her skeptically. The faintest hint of a grin touched Theresa’s lips, and Issabella set the gizmo back where she’d found it. She sat down on one of the stools lining the breakfast counter. Theresa remained where she was standing on the other side, and Issabella almost laughed—Theresa had positioned herself in familiar territory, on the serving side of a bar.

  “Yeah, okay. There’s a menu over there in that pile of paper somewhere.”

  Eventually the two of them decided on what they wanted, and Issabella made the call. Then they remained in their spots on opposite sides of the counter, neither one looking at the other, awkwardly silent.

  “So, is every—” Issabella began.

  “Do you—”

  “Sorry. You go ahead.”

  “Huh? No, you go.”

  Issabella smiled, but inside she was cringing. She didn’t really know Theresa well. But she had the distinct feeling that Darren’s friend was suspicious of her. She didn’t know for certain, but that feeling alone was enough to make her self-conscious. She felt like she had to justify something about herself, but she had no idea what it was.

  “Is everything okay with your room?” she said. “I mean, is there anything you need?”

  “Like...what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s a nice room. Nicer than my place. I dunno. I don’t need much.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m not fancy.”

  But I am, right? Issabella finished the sentiment in her head. Was that it? Was Theresa calling her a snob or something? A sharp, lawyerly retort formed on her lips.