Death by Pride: A Kyle Callahan Mystery

by Mark McNease

  Death by Pride

  A Kyle Callahan Mystery

  Mark McNease

  Copyright 2014 Mark McNease

  MadeMark Publishing

  New York City

  www.mademarkpublishing.com

  ISBN-10: 0-9916279-3-8

  ISBN-13: 978-0-9916279-3-6

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, situations and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  For Frank Murray

  May you always answer my knock

  at the top of the stairs.

  CHAPTERS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Epilogue

  Up Next: Kill Switch

  About the Author

  CHAPTER One

  Killing wasn’t as much fun as it used to be. He expected to be a bit rusty after three years, but he had never anticipated this … dullness, this sense that, in the words of bluesman B.B. King, the thrill was gone. Maybe he had just been away from it too long; maybe he needed to get up to speed. The man whose body he deposited into the East River just before midnight was, after all, only the first in his current series. There would be two more before the week was out, and maybe the old rush would return with the next one. He had to trust it would, to believe as a child believes that Santa Claus is real and will come shimmying down the chimney every Christmas Eve. Or how Dorothy believed, clicking her slippers in that dreadful movie. That might be a more appropriate comparison, given the occasion. Click, click, click … and he was home.

  He did not come all the way back to New York to resume his annual ritual for something as lackluster as this first kill. Had it been the young man himself whose death stirred so little response in him? What was his name? Victor? Victor Someone. Dense and inattentive; he had been too easy, and far too handsome. Cute, really. The kind of cute that becomes very sexual in manhood. Innocent smile, calculated shyness. Victor Someone knew exactly what he was doing flirting in the store that afternoon, and he had succeeded, much to his regret.

  Unfortunately, Victor wasn’t nearly as enjoyable to kill as he was to look at. Too easy, too unchallenging. Like a cat who had no trouble capturing a wingless bird, he had not had fun with this one. He would have to analyze the experience, figure out why it had not been as satisfying as it was before, and what he might need to do to reignite his excitement. Did he need to be more brutal? Did he need to introduce tools into the game, a scalpel, perhaps, or a drill of some kind? He would think hard on it. A decision had to be made quickly; he’d already placed an online ad looking for the next one and the emails were flooding into his special account, the one no one would ever trace no matter how hard they tried. A phantom as elusive as he was deserved a phantom email routed through Chicago, then London and Tokyo, server after server erasing any clue to its origin.

  Diedrich Kristof Keller III—D to everyone who knew him well (a thought that made him chuckle, since the only ones who truly knew him died with the knowledge) had only been back in his townhouse since March. His tenants, the ones he rented to when he left for Berlin to take care of his mother, had a lease through February and D had waited patiently for them to leave. A lovely young couple with two small children. He’d never met Susan and Oliver Storch—the rental had been arranged through an agent—but they had taken very good care of the place, he would give them that. And you would never know they had children; no stray toys were left behind, no evidence, really, that anyone had been there at all for the past three years. His kind of people.

  He was so glad to be back. He’d hated Berlin, all of Germany for that matter, though he saw very little of it and had no desire to see more. For D being German was as meaningless as someone being Scottish who had never been to Scotland, spoke with no brogue, and was only tied to the land by name and ancestry. His parents were from Germany, but they had moved to Anaheim, California, before D was born. His mother, Marta, returned to Berlin a broken, bitter woman, but that was not his fault. She was a coward. Cowardess? he wondered, making a cup of tea at his kitchen counter. It was an island counter, surrounded by a stove and refrigerator large enough to impress and too large to be practical—there was almost nothing in the refrigerator, and he rarely cooked. The entire townhouse was furnished for show—the furniture, the artwork, the paintings and photographs of nonexistent family members and forebears. It had been carefully put together to deceive. Anyone who came into his home would think he was just another wealthy man in New York City with a long lineage, should one wonder where he came from. Men with paintings of their grandfathers above a fireplace surely belonged in Manhattan’s upper reaches and had unquestionable pedigree. That was the point, to be unquestioned. By the time anyone got around to questioning him, to wondering about his authenticity, it was too late. He answered their questions with a belt around their necks. The belt he kept especially for them. You’re right, good man, I’m not who I appear to be. Please keep that to yourself. And they did.

  He was tired now. He’d worked out how to get the bodies out of his house unnoticed some years ago, but he was getting older, forty-two this coming September. It wasn’t as easy as it used to be. And this one had been heavier than he’d guessed when he chose him.

  Note to self: never, ever, pick a customer from the store again. No matter how cute or handsome, no matter how liquid and shining the eyes or seductive the smile. Stay online, stay hidden behind a dozen re-routers, change names each time, do not take this risk ever again.

  He’d been away too long, losing his edge in his mother’s dreary Berlin apartment, saving himself for his return to the killing ground. He’d have to sharpen quickly; mistakes were something other people made. He’d made one this time—the only time in all his successes—and he would not make another one.

  He would look at Victor Someone’s driver’s license in the morning. Sense memory was a beautiful thing, and nothing brought it back quite like his keepsakes. The license was his souvenir—his thirteenth. Lucky thirteen. The rest of the wallet stayed with the body. He wasn’t interested in making identification difficult. It didn�
�t matter if the police knew who had been killed, only that they would never find the man who did the killing.

  It had been dark when he parked by the river. The new moon had worked to his favor, a first. No one had been around; he made sure no one saw a man with a heavy, strangely shaped object wrapped in black plastic trudging his way to the river’s edge. Then a simple heave and splash, and he was on his way home.

  Bedtime at last. But before then, for a few minutes anyway, he wanted to go through those emails. He’d requested photos, knowing many of them would be old and meant to trick him, and that was okay. He was less interested in finding a man who looked exactly like his picture than he was in finding a man who made him want to kill. It was like falling in love with an image: he never knew which one it would be, but he knew it when it happened. This one. Oh yes. This one will be here soon.

  He turned off the kitchen light, took his tea cup with the little chain from the tea ball hanging over the side, and headed to his large master bedroom on the second floor. His laptop was open and waiting for him. He would sift through a dozen or so email responses and see if any of them struck his fancy. But first, the pictures of Victor. Victor Someone. He would enjoy those before sleeping. He always took pictures.

  CHAPTER Two

  Kyle Callahan loved being married, it was the getting married that had been such an ordeal. He’d been with his partner, Danny Durban, for just over seven years when they finally made it official—and legal, in the state of New York, at least. That had been one of the reasons they’d waited: neither of them would marry until they could do it in their home state. And now, with the Federal Government recognizing their marriage, there had been no reason to put it off any longer. So on May 12th, just six weeks ago, he and Danny had gone to City Hall in downtown Manhattan and gotten their license. The following Saturday they stood before seventy-five of their closest friends at Metropolitan Community Church and publicly declared their intention to spend the rest of their lives together. Danny had wanted the 12th as their wedding date, to honor the anniversary of their first meeting at the Katherine Pride Gallery, but it fell on a Tuesday. Nobody gets married on a Tuesday, at least not anyone with a mother-in-law flying in with her boyfriend from Chicago, another set of parents from Queens, siblings, nieces, bosses, and Kyle’s best friend Detective Linda Sikorsky from New Jersey, along with her own newly minted wife Kirsten McClellan.

  The sheer logistics of a wedding were more than Kyle or Danny had ever anticipated. It starts out simply enough as a vision in which all these friends, relatives and loved ones magically appear to celebrate the happy couple’s bliss. In that first fantasy phase there are no hotels to recommend, no invitation list to cull, no feelings to hurt by being excluded from the guest list. And certainly no large pile of cash to drop for an affair that seemed to have $10,000 as its starting price. By the time they headed downtown for their license both men were frayed at the edges, ready to elope and send all these people a nice photograph instead. It was too late by then and the worst was over, so they went through with it and now would not have had it any other way. The cost only set them back three years’ worth of prime vacation travel, but that was okay. It had been a huge success and they were finally married.

  The inevitable let-down after so much stress, planning and execution had lasted about a week for Kyle, less for Danny who was busy dealing with the imminent departure of his beloved Margaret Bowman. Margaret had started Margaret’s Passion, the restaurant Danny now owned with Kyle and Kyle’s mother Sally. She’d hired Danny almost twelve years ago, then sold the restaurant to him last year as she crept into her 80s. Now, as he had dreaded, she was preparing to move to Florida to spend her remaining days with her sister Rebecca, leaving Margaret’s Passion to Danny to fully make his own. As long as there was a Margaret’s Passion there would be a Margaret, if only in photographs on the walls with the many celebrities and politicians she’d served so well and lovingly over the decades. But the thought of her being so far away and likely never to return had left Danny in a funk for months. His wedding, despite the rigors of it, the anxiety and the stress, was a high point and a needed distraction from the loss he faced. There would only be one wedding for both men; there would only be one Margaret Bowman, too, and having her there in the front row with their parents was a memory they would cherish as much as the wedding itself.

  Kyle was thinking about it all as he scanned the previous day’s mail at their kitchen table. It was his habit to get the mail when he got home in the early evening, but he’d been distracted and had forgotten, instead taking the elevator down to pick it up this morning, along with the New York Times that lay outside their door. In the age of online everything, Kyle still preferred reading the paper the old fashioned way—with pages that turned and ink that came off on his fingers.

  The men lived on the edge of Gramercy Park, at Lexington Avenue and 25th Street. Danny could easily walk to Margaret’s Passion just six blocks away, and Kyle could get to the Japan TV3 offices, where he worked as the personal assistant to firebrand and borderline has-been TV reporter Imogene Landis, with an easy bus ride and a cross town stroll. Their dear friend Detective Linda (now retired from the New Hope, Pennsylvania, police force) was asleep in the spare room, turning it once again from their shared office into a guest room. She’d come into town the day before for her first Pride weekend and parade and Kyle made plans for them to see the city in much more detail than Linda had been able to on her last visit. That was in late April a year ago, and she and Kyle had been caught up trying to stop the killer Kieran Stipling as he murdered his way through a list of people connected to the Katherine Pride Gallery. Whatever sightseeing Linda had planned that visit was abandoned in the race to end the killing. Kyle intended to make up for it this time.

  Danny walked in wearing the plush brown robe Kyle gave him the previous Christmas. The smell of morning coffee always brought him out of the bedroom, trailed moments later by their cats, Smelly and Leonard.

  “Linda awake yet?” he asked, heading straight to the coffee pot and taking a cup from the cabinet above it. The cats took up position at his feet, expecting early morning treats.

  “I doubt it,” Kyle said. “I think she was up late, I heard her talking on the phone just before I fell asleep.”

  “It’s terrible about Kirsten’s mother. I wish we could see her again.”

  “I’m sure Linda wishes it, too. We’re at that age, Danny …”

  “I know, I know, let’s not talk about it.”

  Time did not take sides, it only passed in a constant flow, and eventually the people we ride the stream with begin to fall off to the shore. Kyle’s father had been gone over fifteen years. Margaret was heading off soon for a few good years in Florida before she, too, slipped from the stream. It wouldn’t be long before their parents were gone and they took their place at the head of the line, saying goodbye to friends one by one—or perhaps saying goodbye themselves. Life makes no guarantees and takes no reservations.

  Linda’s wife Kirsten was in Phoenix with her dying mother. The women had hastily flown her to New Jersey in March and married in a very small ceremony in Stockton with just Kyle, Danny, and the women’s mothers in attendance. It was the kind of wedding Kyle envied after the ordeal of his own. The next day Kirsten flew back with her mother and had been spending weeks at a time travelling back and forth. Her mother, Dot McClellan, had cancer metastasized throughout her body and was not expected to see the end of July. Linda’s plan was to enjoy this weekend in the city with Kyle and Danny, then head to Phoenix. It had taken a serious toll on both women, and Kyle noticed how much thinner Linda was when she’d arrived yesterday afternoon.

  They’d met Detective Linda Sikorsky a year and a half ago during Halloween weekend at Pride Lodge. The Lodge sat on twenty-five acres near the Delaware River, on the Pennsylvania side. Kyle’s friend and lodge handyman, Teddy Pembroke, had been found dead at the bottom of the lodge’s empty pool, and Linda was the homicide detective
investigating the death, which proved to be deliberate. Murder, it seemed, was their first commonality, but since then they’d found many more. Kyle and Linda spoke every few days, and last fall he and Danny spent a week at her small house in the woods in Hunterdon County, New Jersey. Linda had inherited the house from her aunt Celeste and, with some reluctance, moved from her longtime home in New Hope to take up residence with the deer, rabbits and strange sounds nature makes when it has no competition. The highlights of the visit were supposed to be a week of sightseeing, country living and good food at fine local restaurants; instead, it became a hunt for the killer of Abigail Creek, matriarch of CrossCreek Farm and victim of a vicious hit-and-run. Their time together always seemed to attract murderers—or the other way around—and sometimes Kyle wondered if they should just maintain a long-distance friendship, in the interest of keeping people alive.

  “Did you see Vinnie when you picked up the mail this morning?” Danny asked, stirring creamer into his coffee and taking it to the table. He sat next to Kyle and picked up the mail, flipping through it so see what was his. Leonard stayed in the kitchen, staring up at the coffee pot as if he could not understand there were no treats in it for him. Smelly, the wiser of the two, followed Danny to the table and perched at his feet, knowing he would eventually relent and get the pouch of fish-flavored nuggets for her.

  “Come to think of it, no. The relief guy was on duty, what’s his name?”

  “Dayton.”

  “Dayton? That’s an unusual name.”

  The building had doormen. It was a perk Kyle had never known before moving from Brooklyn into Danny’s apartment. It took a while to get used to, but not too long. Having someone open the door for you and receive packages and visitors was luxurious without being too elitist. Vinnie—Vincent Campagna—had the overnight shift and was among the most reliable doormen the building had ever had. He was in his mid-thirties, and in ten years on the door had not been off more than three or four times. This was the second night he’d called in.