Dying in Detroit (A Bright & Fletcher Mystery)

by Jonathan Watkins

  Authorities have not provided any additional information about the suspect, and encourage anyone with information pertaining to the case to contact the FBI’s Detroit field office.

  Malcolm sipped his coffee and mused over the article. He was an exceedingly cautious man by nature. The world was a threatening place, and Detroit more than most other areas. Having been born in the heart of the city’s urban projects, Malcolm had learned very early on that only fools didn’t keep half their attention on the lookout for whatever perils might be lurking just out of sight.

  But sitting there in his booth, he couldn’t imagine any series of events that would attach the news story to him. It was true he had circled close to the missing lawyer and his female partner several months ago. They had been drawn into the same series of events as he, had been under threat from the same rogue police lieutenant. In the end, though, Malcolm had neutralized that threat by seizing Lieutenant Allen Phelps and transforming him from a corrupt human being into a lifeless object of art.

  He puzzled over it for several long minutes, until the eggs were consumed and the coffee drained. By the time the waitress refilled his cup, he was satisfied that whatever misfortune Darren Fletcher had fallen into, it did not involve him. For several months, he’d read the web version of the Freepress, scouring for any mention of his name. He’d put out a few tentative calls to the handful of people in Detroit who knew his name and his nature. All signs had pointed to his safe return. The police were not looking for him. If his name had ever been breathed past Allen Phelps’s lips, it had been dismissed as part of the man’s convoluted scheme of murder and lies.

  Satisfied that he was not being hunted more than anyone else who braved the streets of Detroit, Malcolm pulled out his pencils and his sketchpad. The dinner rush would begin, and he was anxious to get to work.

  * * *

  “And you only saw him that one time?”

  The front desk attendant of the Red Roof Inn was a middle-aged Arabic man with bad teeth, a heavy beard and a heavier accent. He listened to Agent Schultz’s questions with unusual concentration, cocking one ear toward him and nodding along as Isaac stood in the middle of the hotel room and spoke in slow, deliberate sentences.

  “Yes. Yes. One time.”

  “And when exactly did he check in?”

  “When?”

  “When did he get here?”

  Schultz pantomimed holding a steering wheel, moving his hands up and down like he was driving up to the hotel.

  “Oh! When come...here? To Red Roof Inn?”

  “Yes! When. When did he come here?”

  “One week.”

  “One week ago?”

  The man nodded and smiled, seemingly more than willing to be of help. As he nodded, he glanced around at the half dozen other FBI Agents picking over the hotel room. His ready smile had a trembling nervousness to it.

  “One week exactly? Exactly one week?”

  The man’s smile faltered.

  “Ex...extally...” He frowned, working the word around in his mouth like it was a dish he had never tried and didn’t particularly like. “This word. I do not know ‘extally.’”

  Schultz sighed and offered the man a reassuring smile while he waved one of the agents toward him.

  “Get him down to the office and call in an interpreter,” he said. “When we get one, you grill him on everything under the sun, understand? Like you’re writing his life story, right?”

  The desk attendant was ushered away, a nervous smile still pasted on his face.

  Poor fucker, Schultz thought as the man disappeared out the door. Probably thinks we’re hauling his ass down to Guantanamo Bay.

  He cast the man out of his mind and surveyed the scene. Everyone was standing around, glancing in his direction, waiting for orders. Outside the front doorway, Schultz could see the traffic on I-75 zipping past. The Red Roof Inn was just off the expressway, fifteen minutes south of Detroit in a little suburban community called Flat Rock.

  Whomever had grabbed Darren Fletcher was smart enough to have ditched the lawyer’s phone after making the call to Issabella. In the two days since that call, Schultz had kicked himself more than once for having answered it. If he’d let Issabella pick it up, maybe the freak wouldn’t suspect that the authorities were on to him. If she’d answered her own phone like the kidnapper had expected, Schultz could have guided the situation, coached her to draw him out into a meeting. He could have—

  Cut that crap out, he chided himself. Plenty of time for second-guessing after this is done. Move on.

  Luckily, that one phone call had been made. Once his team had assembled that night in Fletcher’s apartment, Schultz had sent a man to make the calls needed to get the records for Fletcher’s phone. In short order, they had a printout of every tower the cell had pinged that night.

  It was a map that led them from downtown Detroit to the area around Flat Rock. The last recorded ping was during the timeframe of the suspect’s call to Issabella. Agents were deployed all over the surrounding area with a computer-generated approximation of the suspect’s likeness as described by Theresa Winkle.

  And now he was in the freak’s former hideout—a low-end hotel room in a nowhere stretch of down-river real estate. He needed to make this discovery count, and he needed to do it fast. He looked around from one man to the next and cleared his throat.

  “Okay, listen up. If you’re not forensics, you’re on foot patrol. Grab your notebooks and knock on every single door in this hotel. We need people who saw him or anyone else with him. We need to know what he drove. What he wore. When they saw him. Where they saw him. Did anyone ever talk to him? Anything. One of you go do the same at those restaurants just off the exit, and the gas stations. I don’t care who. Figure it out among yourselves. Be thorough and be fast. Okay, let’s go.”

  He swept his hands wide, ushering them off, and most of the men filed out of the room. He was left with two agents, one of them a young woman with her hair tied back in a tight bun. She was snapping latex gloves on her hands and had a blue plastic forensics kit resting on the carpet at her feet.

  “You look like you want to tell me something,” he said to her.

  “DNA smorgasbord,” she agreed. “Blood in the tub. Also, hair and skin on a length of duct tape, also in the tub. Looks like he was keeping the victim in there. Eugene pulled the j-bend on the sink.”

  She inclined her head toward the other tech who was kneeling down on the floor, picking and poking through his own identical field kit. The tech looked up at Schultz.

  “It’s weird,” he warned.

  “Okay. So?”

  “Crazy amount of skin,” the tech said, straightening up to his feet. He was slight and stoop shouldered, with big eyes made bigger by the thick-lensed glasses perched on his nose. “A lot of it attached to the interior of the pipe, which means there was a lot more that didn’t and was washed away when the tap was turned on. I swabbed the lip of the drain and along the first few inches, and it’s the same story: skin, mixed with blood.”

  “So he cut himself shaving,” Schultz shrugged. “So what?”

  “Uh, I don’t know. It’s just, I’m not seeing hair. Just a lot of skin, like...”

  “Like?”

  “Like someone peeling off the first few strata of the epidermis,” the tech answered, then stopped. “Well, not peeling. Shaving is the right word. Like if you shaved off the upper layer of your skin. Repeatedly. And, I don’t know, like if you did it to your whole body. Repeatedly. That’s why there’s some blood mixed in. Like someone shaving frequently enough that they’re raw from it. Everywhere.”

  “Yeah, you win,” Schultz admitted. “That’s fucking weird. Okay, I’ll let you get back to it. Ma’am?”

  “Mominey, sir. Jennifer.”

  He motioned Agent Mominey o
ver and they huddled together at the front door of the hotel room. He could hear agents knocking on doors around and above them, people talking.

  “The blood in the tub,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “How much?”

  “Oh. More than enough for several viable samples.”

  “No, no. I mean...look, I know you’re here to gather evidence. But, first impression: did he gut the lawyer in the tub and bleed him out in there?”

  Understanding lit her eyes and she was quick to shake her head.

  “There’s a smear on the rim of the tub, but it’s nothing like what we’d see if a human adult had all his blood drained. The tub hasn’t been scoured, and it would have taken a monumental amount of work to clean it up after using it to bleed a man. My best guess now is that the victim was being stored there and has an injury of some sort. To the head. I think the lawyer’s head was resting on the lip of the tub and the blood transfer happened from that.”

  “Scalp bleeds a lot, right? Even a superficial tear, I mean.”

  “Sure. But so does a serious wound. And if it’s serious enough, the victim could be dying without our suspect even being aware of it. Once you get into cranial bleeds or trauma to the brain...you know. It gets very, ah, dicey.”

  “Thank you, Jennifer.”

  Schultz looked around the hotel room one final time, and then wandered out into the parking lot. The men he’d sent out to pound the pavement were doing just that, huddled in doorways with hotel clients, scribbling into notebooks and nodding along with what was told to them.

  Schultz put his palms against the small of his back and arched himself backward, stretching the tension out of his legs and spine. He hadn’t slept since the night before he’d first heard the Detroit dispatcher call out the suspected burglary at Issabella’s office. He reminded himself to stop at a gas station once he left the hotel and grab something with heavy amounts of caffeine in it.

  He’ll keep Fletcher alive. He’ll keep him alive to try and lure Issabella in.

  He wasn’t convinced. Men panicked when they were hunted. If the suspect became frightened enough, there was no reason in the world to assume he wouldn’t dump Darren’s body and race for the state line. Even highly disorganized sociopaths, the ones who were compelled to dance on the strings of their overwhelming obsessions, had a survival instinct. If that instinct prevailed over his need to get ahold of Issabella, Darren Fletcher was going to be found in a Dumpster or a field somewhere.

  “Agent Schultz?”

  He turned and was staring at one of his men. Schultz was opening his mouth to ask what he wanted, but then he saw that the man was holding a clear plastic evidence bag out for Schultz’s inspection. He took it in his hands and held it up.

  “Found it in the Dumpster on the back side of the hotel,” the other agent said. “It was on the top. We’re asking the clerk about his cleaning crew now, figure maybe whoever cleaned the room might have something to say.”

  Schultz used his thumbs to smooth out the thing inside the bag. He let out a tired sigh as he recognized what it was. He felt his stomach take a sick turn and his legs went weak as the dread he’d been feeling for days gripped him with a renewed urgency.

  He was looking at a crumpled photograph of Issabella walking in the rain.

  * * *

  “The one on the left is for the light,” the special agent whose name Issabella had forgotten said, pointing at the wall switch near the kitchen sink. “The other is the disposal. The fridge is stocked. You don’t have to cook for yourself or anything, though. If you want to get takeout or have something picked up for you, just make sure you clear it with the agent on duty first.”

  He was young and nondescript, like most of the other FBI Agents she’d met since Schultz had called the Detroit field office and triggered a full blown manhunt. That first day she’d remained at Darren’s with Schultz, Theresa and an assortment of other agents who came and went in hurried fashion.

  But once the situation had been properly defined, and a cadre of local FBI arranged to identify, seek out and capture the man who had kidnapped Darren, Schultz had turned his attention to Issabella’s safety.

  First thing this morning, she was whisked away from the Fort Shelton, stuffed between two agents in the back of a big, black SUV. After a half-hour drive west, the SUV deposited her and three agents in a little working-class suburb of Westland. She was rushed into a small two-bedroom ranch house on a street full of identical homes.

  I’m like ten minutes from my own house, was the first thought that played absurdly through her head as the young agent began his tour of the interior. How many places like this do they have, anyway?

  Next, she was shown the two bedrooms. They were both modestly furnished with twin beds and dressers. There were no pictures on the walls, or personal effects of any sort.

  “You can pick either one. Your assigned agent won’t be sleeping. We work on rotating shifts, so you can have both if you want, really. I’m also supposed to let you know that we have two men gathering up your clothing and toiletries. They shouldn’t be long.”

  She peered into the second, identical bedroom.

  “Agent?”

  “Tom, Ma’am.”

  “Tom. Okay. Tom, where’s Theresa? My friend from—”

  “She refused protective custody. Okay, here’s the bathroom...”

  Half an hour later, she was sitting on the couch in the living room, feeling abandoned. From the moment Schultz had explained the terrifying call he’d intercepted, Theresa had been a rock for her. There were several hours of that night Issabella could not recall—hours of wrenching, wracking sobbing and wild panic. What she could recall was Theresa.

  She had remained fixed at her side while Issabella fell apart. She’d held her. She’d followed her as Issabella roamed aimlessly about the apartment. She’d made her food and offered no rebuke when Issabella refused it. She’d been Issabella’s constant shadow, ready to reach out and hold her up if she collapsed under the weight of what might be happening to Darren, out there in the darkness and the unknown.

  And now, Theresa was gone. Izzy was alone in a bleak little safe house with a group of strange men tasked with keeping her in one place.

  Issabella the Hostage, she thought. Issabella the Useless.

  Another bout of panic seized her. Waves of fear would come without warning, crashing down and over her when she least expected them. There on the couch, she began to tremble uncontrollably. She saw Darren. They were in his kitchen, and he was fresh from his shower. He chewed grapes idly and talked about keeping her safe. He talked about protecting her.

  Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.

  But it was no use. He was gone. He was gone, and she couldn’t stop from shattering into a million little pieces. She put her palms over her face and let the wretched terror have its way. She cried and shook and screwed her eyes shut against the world.

  “Ma’am?”

  She scrubbed at her face, wiping away the tears.

  “Ms. Bright?”

  “Yes? I’m sorry. What is it?”

  Tom was standing over her. His expression was stoic, and Issabella couldn’t tell if that was because he was straining to be professional or if he was just one of those people who didn’t know how to respond to other people when they were in the throes of high emotion.

  “Agent Schultz just sent word,” he said. “He’s on his way here to pick you up. There’s someone who wants to see you both.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t know any more than that, ma’am.”

  “Has anyone spoken to my father yet? Has he woken up?”

  “Ma’am, I don’t know any operational details,” Tom said, an undercurrent of annoyance creeping into his voice. “I’m on protection. Do you have any ques
tions about that?”

  She did not. On the drive over, barreling through southeast Michigan in the black SUV, Tom had rattled off a litany of rules about protective custody. She was not to leave the safe house for any reason unless approved by Agent Schultz, and only then when accompanied by at least one agent. She was not to answer the door for any reason. If someone knocked on the door, she was to immediately stop whatever she was doing and rush into the back bedroom and remain there until an agent gave the all clear. She was not to use her phone. That last commandment was, in truth, a compromise. Schultz had initially explained that they would need to confiscate her cell. The FBI would keep it in their operations center with a man assigned to monitoring it at all times, in case the kidnapper or anyone else involved in the situation attempted contact.

  Issabella refused. When Schultz pressed the issue, she threatened not to get in the SUV and to throw all of the agents out of Darren’s apartment. Even as she made the threat, she knew it was irrational and desperate. But the idea of parting with the phone was simply too much to suffer. She had a terrible vision of Darren, alone and hunted, managing to find a phone, calling her. And not getting through to anyone. Just ringing, a voicemail message, and the kidnapper grabbing back hold of him before he could tell her where he was. No, the phone would remain with her.

  Finally, Schultz relented. She was in the constant presence of the FBI, anyway. If the kidnapper called her, they could still try and guide the situation. But as Issabella said goodbye to Schultz and got into the SUV, she could tell that he was less than pleased. He did not seem like a man who easily tolerated interference in his work.

  “Is there anything I can get you?” Tom said, still standing like a wooden sentinel over her.