city of dragons 07 - fire and flood

by Val St. Crowe

  “He’s a drug dealer,” I said. “He doesn’t look good regardless.”

  Lachlan shrugged. “They say there’s no honor amongst criminals, but there is. Just a different kind of honor.”

  I chewed on my lip. “So, does this mean that he’s not connected to Tim?”

  “Probably not,” said Lachlan. “Unless Tim really was a customer he wanted to snuff out.”

  “And we’ve got no evidence of that,” I said.

  “Let’s deprioritize Wells for now,” said Lachlan. “You were right when you said we hadn’t spent enough time looking into Bradley. I think that’s our next move.”

  * * *

  “What have you got?” said Lachlan from the other side of the living room. He was over on the couch in front of the mirror, surrounded by open file folders.

  I was on the other couch, similarly surrounded. We’d spent the entire afternoon combing through Levi Bradley’s files, the ones that Zach had given us. “Well, it’s kind of tragic, actually. There’s a bunch of stuff in here from juvenile records that were unsealed when he was arrested as an adult.”

  “He was a bad kid?”

  “He was troubled,” I said. “Apparently, it all started when he saw his father kill his little brother.”

  “What?” Lachlan got up off the couch and came over to the other side of the room to peer over my shoulder. “Why would his father do that?”

  “He was trying to discipline the boy, from what they can gather. He went too far,” I said. “He beat him to death.”

  “That’s awful,” said Lachlan.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Little Levi saw it all, and he was also present at the execution of his father, because his dad got the death penalty.”

  “Good riddance,” muttered Lachlan.

  “Maybe,” I said, “but it meant that Bradley was all alone in the world. He was shuffled from foster home to foster home, and he was often in trouble.”

  “He was a bully,” said Lachlan.

  “Actually, it seems like he would attack bullies. He would always claim that he was doing it to protect someone or to get back at someone who’d hurt someone weaker than him. That was Bradley’s excuse, anyway. By the time he was fourteen, he’d sent three other teenagers to the hospital and one grown man.”

  “Well, that’s a solid beginning,” said Lachlan. “Any information about magic use?”

  I shook my head. “Nothing like that at all.”

  Lachlan shrugged. “Well, you can’t have everything.”

  “That’s what I got from his younger years,” I said. “What do you have?”

  “Well, he got locked up for beating a man to death in the parking lot of a grocery store.”

  “Just a random guy?”

  “Bradley claimed he’d seen the guy slap his toddler son, who was sitting in the cart screaming during the entire incident.”

  I gasped. “That’s… that’s…” All I could think about was Wyatt.

  Lachlan met my gaze, and I could see that it took him to the same place. “Terrible,” he said. “That poor child.”

  I sucked in a breath, gathering myself. “But it’s all part of his pattern, though, isn’t it? He sees himself as some sort of vigilante, a protector of the weak.”

  “Maybe he sees himself that way, or maybe the damage that was done to his psyche when he saw his father do that makes him behave in ways he can’t explain,” said Lachlan.

  “Oh, come on, Lachlan,” I said. “It’s obvious that he wishes he could have protected his brother. He’s doing this because of the past.”

  Lachlan shrugged again. “That’s the kind of thing that motivates serial killers in 1980s slasher films, not in real life. Real life is messier.”

  I sighed. “Whatever. I think his motivations are clear. And it gives him a motive for Tim. Tim killed a child.”

  “Yeah, maybe that’s true,” said Lachlan. “For what it’s worth, it looks like the two killings at the prison that they think he was involved in are both child killers as well.”

  “See?” I said, sitting up straight. “He’s taking revenge for the kids.”

  Lachlan didn’t say anything, but he got a pained expression on his face.

  “What?” I said.

  He shook his head and walked over to the window.

  I got up. “Lachlan? You all right?”

  He was quiet.

  I crossed the room to him.

  But as I got close, he held up a hand to stop me from touching him. “My kid,” he said to the window, his voice quiet. “You’re saying he took revenge for my kid. And I… I didn’t do anything like that.”

  My lips parted. For a moment there, I had forgotten how personal all this was. I didn’t know what to say.

  He swallowed. Outside the dragons came forward. There were maybe thirty of them now, and they all moved as if they had one mind. They gathered close to the window, peering in at us with their empty, black eyes.

  “That’s not who you are,” I said softly. “You don’t take revenge.”

  He glanced at me. “I don’t?”

  I took a deep breath. “It’s not who we are.”

  He laughed bitterly. “Well, a hell of a lot of good it did leaving him alive. He’s dead now anyway.” He backed away from the window. The dragons all backed up too. He stalked across the room toward the doorway to the hall.

  “Lachlan, wait,” I said. “I shouldn’t have… I was thoughtless, saying what I said about Bradley. He’s a twisted person. He’s not doing good. He’s not protecting anyone. The world can’t work that way.”

  Lachlan didn’t stop walking.

  I went after him. “It is good that you didn’t hurt Timmy. He was just a kid when he did it, and if you would have killed him, it would have changed you. That’s why you don’t take revenge—not because the guilty party doesn’t deserve it, but because you choose not to do that to yourself.”

  He stopped. He looked at me. “If you’d had the chance, would you have killed Alastair?”

  I bit my lip.

  He laughed again, and it was caustic. Then he turned and swept out of the room, and I didn’t try to stop him this time.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I didn’t talk to Lachlan for quite some time after that. I went looking for him in the house, and I couldn’t find him. Instead, I found Vivica and the boys, and when Wyatt saw me, he wanted to nurse, so I stopped and spent some time with him. While we were all sitting together, I saw a bright red dragon swooping past the window outside, leading the rogues behind it like the tail of a kite.

  So, Lachlan was flying away from his troubles.

  It was the kind of thing I did sometimes too. I sighed. I’d really messed this up. I couldn’t believe that I’d been so careless with what I’d said to him. The loss of Hallie was the thing that had hurt him more than anything on earth, and I knew that. Did he really feel as though he should have had vengeance for her death, though? And was that why we were here, solving Tim’s murder?

  I wished I knew.

  I wished I knew how to make things right between us. I didn’t.

  Lachlan didn’t come back in until after dinner. He appeared when I was giving Wyatt a bath, and he began making silly faces at our son as if nothing had happened.

  “I’ll take over here,” he said to me. “I don’t mind scrubbing this little guy’s tummy.”

  I left the two of them together.

  By the time Lachlan brought Wyatt to me, he was clean and bundled into his pajamas, and Lachlan had been walking him for a while, so Wyatt was already sleepy. I barely had to nurse him before he drifted off. I lay him down in his pack and play and left the room as quietly as I could.

  Lachlan was in the kitchen, drinking some blood and eating a sandwich.

  I stepped into the doorway, but then I didn’t know what to say to him.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said what I said to you. I wasn’t thinking. It was thoug
htless and cruel.”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong.” He took a deep breath. “I did some thinking while I was out there. Flying is good for thinking.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

  “Well,” he said, “the thing is, I guess when Timmy did what he did, I felt helpless. You know, sometimes, I would think that if I’d been a vampire when it happened, maybe I could have stopped it. I could have used magic to rip the gun out of his hand. I could have floated Hallie out of the way. I could have done something to save her.”

  I twisted my hands together. “Maybe, but that isn’t what happened.”

  “The truth is, I doubt it would have mattered.” He surveyed his glass of blood and then took another drink. “It happened so fast, and I was shocked. He shot me too. I didn’t know what was happening to me. I couldn’t think. Even if I had been a vampire, I wouldn’t have been able to do anything.”

  “Maybe not,” I said.

  “I think I’ve always known that,” he said. “But… I think I haven’t admitted it to myself. I’ve thought, well, I’m still helpless. I need to be so powerful that I’ll never be helpless again. That’s why it’s always bugged me that you were more powerful than me. Because it made me feel helpless. What if something happened to you? What if I couldn’t stop it? It just… I was maddened by it. I’ve been maddened by that fear since the day that Hallie was taken from me.”

  “Oh, Lachlan.” I went to him. I pressed my hand against his cheek.

  He shut his eyes. “I thought about killing him,” he whispered. “Right after it happened, when I had just turned and I knew that I was a vampire and that it would be easy to kill him, I thought about it. Because doing that would make me feel like I was doing something.” He opened his eyes. “But it wouldn’t have brought her back. It wouldn’t have gone back in time and undone what happened. And the logistics of it… he was locked up. I couldn’t get to him. I… I never did it.”

  “Of course you didn’t.”

  “But I think I blamed myself for that too,” he said. “And when I found out about Timmy’s death, I wanted to come here, because I thought this was my chance. This was the way that I would stop being helpless, once and for all.”

  “You’re not helpless.” I ran my thumb over his cheekbone.

  “I am,” he said. “I am, and I always will be. No matter how much magic I have, how powerful I am, I could never stop every bad thing from happening, Penny. I’m not God.”

  I considered that, and then I nodded. “I see what you’re saying. And no, you can’t control everything, and there’s always going to be danger. But you’re a long way from helpless, Lachlan.”

  He smiled a little. “Okay. Maybe that’s true. Still. I think… I want this case over, Penny. I can’t leave before it’s solved. That would eat at me, and it wouldn’t be fair to Debra, since I promised her I’d help. But I don’t want to dally anymore. I know we’ve got to deal with the Green King, but I want to take care of this first. I want to throw everything we have at the case and figure out who the killer is. Put it to bed and close this chapter of my life.”

  I hugged him. “Okay,” I murmured. “Okay.”

  “Good,” he said, wrapping his arms around me. “So, here’s what I’m thinking. Tomorrow, we go to the jail and we lean on Bradley as hard as we possibly can. If he’s guilty, we make him snap under the pressure. We pull out all the stops.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said.

  “Great,” he said. “Here’s what I need from you.”

  * * *

  Lachlan and I sat opposite Levi Bradley in the interrogation room.

  Bradley was chained up, and he glowered at us. “You two haven’t given this up, then? I thought you two had moved on to Simon Wells.”

  “We’ve come into some information about you,” said Lachlan. “It’s shifted the focus of the investigation.”

  Bradley’s nostrils flared.

  “Listen,” I said, “I can see why you do it. It must be awful knowing that there are people still breathing air who don’t deserve to live.”

  Bradley turned to me. “What are you going on about?”

  “I lost children,” I said. “I was in a bad relationship. The man that I was married to, he beat me when I was pregnant. I had three miscarriages.”

  Bradley’s brows drew together. He didn’t say anything.

  “The man who did that to me is dead,” I said. “And I say good riddance. I have nothing but gratitude for the person who killed him. Maybe I shouldn’t feel that way, but I do. He deserved to die, and now he’s dead. When it comes to people who would kill children, well, there’s no reason for them to live. None at all.”

  Bradley was still quiet.

  Lachlan gave me a sideways look. “What are you talking about? Why are you sharing this with the prisoner?”

  I folded my arms over my chest. “I can’t help myself. I know you think that we should just turn him over and tell the district attorney to pursue the death penalty. But I think that anyone who’s known the pain of loss from the violent death of a child would agree that what he’s doing is only taking out the garbage.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Lachlan. “It’s still the law. He’s a murderer.”

  “He’s a hero,” I said, drawing myself up.

  Bradley cleared his throat. “You mean that?”

  I turned to him. “I do. I think you’re doing a valuable service for society, getting rid of those horrible men.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s confusing to me is all,” said Bradley. “Because I don’t see why they aren’t all executed straight away. They don’t deserve to be kept alive. When I was a kid, they weren’t soft on crime, you know. I saw it first hand. You kill a kid, you get killed. That’s how it ought to be handled.”

  “Right,” I said. “And it’s like you said about Tim Abbott. He was a waste of air. That’s why it was appropriate to smother him.”

  Bradley lifted his chin. “Now, wait a second, lady. I already told you I had nothing to do with that.”

  “No?” I said.

  “No,” he said. “I couldn’t get to him. The other two, they were easy. They were in the yard. And it wasn’t just about what they did in the past either, I gotta tell you. It was about what they were doing right then. They were bad men. They were hurting other prisoners—younger, smaller men. They like to do things to people like that, and I don’t like to watch it. My father wasn’t a good man, but he taught me that there are consequences to your actions, and I believe he had that right. Too bad he didn’t quite understand it himself. Still, if I saw them going after other men in the yard, I went after them. Tit for tat. That’s all. If no other witnesses spoke up, it was because they all knew I did the right thing. But this Tim guy? I never saw him do anything to anyone. I think he regretted it, if you ask me. I didn’t kill him.”

  * * *

  Zach gave us a smile as he opened the door to his office. “So, you guys got Bradley to crack. He’s been recorded confessing to the murders in the prison. That’s great. We’ve been working on that guy for ages, and you two just sit down with him for fifteen minutes? Wow, you guys are something.”

  “Thanks,” said Lachlan as we came inside. “But it’s ultimately a little disappointing.”

  “Oh,” said Zach, sitting down behind his desk. “Because you were hoping he’d admit to killing Tim.”

  I sat down opposite him. “Yeah. It would have been nice to put this thing to bed.”

  Lachlan nodded, sitting down too.

  “Well,” said Zach, “you never know. Maybe if you lean on him a little more, he’ll open right up.”

  “Nah, waste of time,” said Lachlan. “If he’d done it, he would have confessed. He was singing like a canary about everything else. There’s no way he wouldn’t have come clean about it at the same time. There’s no difference between confessing to two murders and confessing to three murders. It’s not as if leaving someone out makes a difference.”

  “
Good point,” said Zach. “So, you have it in for Wells, then?”

  “No,” said Lachlan. “We’re not sure it’s him anymore. The connection we thought he had to the case fell apart.”

  “Then, you’re out of suspects?” said Zach.

  Lachlan rubbed his chin. “Not quite.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “Man, I don’t talk to Adam Day anymore,” said Carlos Smith, a guy in his early twenties who worked at a restaurant in town as a waiter. He had been friends with Tim and Adam in high school. Lachlan had convinced him to take a break and talk to us, but it was pretty obvious Carlos didn’t want to. “After what happened with, uh, your daughter, I was pretty freaked out.”

  “Were you,” said Lachlan, but it didn’t sound like a question. “Because, you know, one of the things that Tim said was that he had stupid friends back then who didn’t understand death.”

  “Of course I didn’t understand death!” Carlos fumbled in his pocket and got out a pack of cigarettes. With shaking hands, he tapped one out. “How could I understand? I was sixteen.”

  “Did he talk about doing it before he did it?” said Lachlan.

  “Kind of,” said Carlos, who was now feeling around for a lighter.

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I mean, it wasn’t serious,” said Carlos. “I didn’t take it seriously. Hell, we all hated our parents. I have a stepfather too. I hated him.”

  “So, he did talk about it. Talked about killing me,” said Lachlan.

  Carlos found his lighter in the breast pocket of his shirt. “He said it, but it was like, ‘I wanna kill that asshole,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, me too.’ Like, I just thought he was shooting off his mouth. I didn’t think he was serious.”

  “Really.” And again, it didn’t sound like a question.

  Carlos’s hands were shaking so much that he couldn’t get the lighter to stay lit.

  Lachlan snatched the lighter from him and flicked it. Holding the flame aloft, he lit Carlos’s cigarette for him.

  “Th-thank you,” said Carlos. He looked at Lachlan and cringed. “Okay, okay, look. Maybe I knew he was serious. But I was terrified, okay? I swear, it was all just mouthing off until Adam’s girlfriend broke up with him.”