city of dragons 07 - fire and flood

by Val St. Crowe

  Lachlan shrugged. “What do you think I’m implying?”

  Zach folded his arms over his chest. “I think I want you to leave.”

  “And I think I want you to answer some questions.”

  “Well, I won’t,” said Zach. “I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

  “Okay,” said Lachlan, “then just listen. There are parts of this I can’t figure out. I’m not going to lie about that. I don’t know what your motive was for killing Poole. I can’t figure it. And I can’t for the life of me figure why you would kill someone with a shower either. But somehow when you were doing it, you got burned too. That’s where the scar came from, not the microwave. And then somehow, Tim saw it all. That I can’t figure either. What was he doing there? But anyway, he knew that you were guilty, and you had to stop him from talking. I don’t think you meant to make it a locked-room mystery and tickle my fancy. I think you meant it to look like a suicide. After all, that had gone over pretty well with Poole. So, you drugged Tim’s food, maybe enough to make it look like an overdose. Except… I don’t know. That went wrong somehow. He didn’t take enough? You didn’t give him enough? Anyway, he wasn’t dead when you got there in the morning.”

  “This is ludicrous,” said Zach. “I don’t have to listen to this. Get out of my office.”

  “So,” said Lachlan, as if Zach hadn’t spoken, “you had to improvise. Smother him with the pillow. Which would have gone fine if the kid hadn’t woken up and started struggling so bad, right? You never wanted it to be that hands on, did you? Was it horrible? Did it seem as if it would take forever before he stopped moving? Do you have nightmares about it?”

  Zach paled.

  Lachlan leaned forward. “Like I said, I can’t figure it all, Zach. You don’t strike me as a murderer.”

  “I’m not,” said Zach in a strangled voice. “I didn’t kill anyone.”

  Lachlan let out a drawling laugh. “Now, that’s just not true, Zach. You killed them both.”

  “You can’t prove anything,” said Zach. “You’ve got nothing but a scar and a few offhand comments.”

  “We might have more than that,” said Lachlan. “They’ve still got the pillow used to smother Tim. I called in to talk to the lab today and they confirmed there was some DNA on the pillow that didn’t match Tim. They think it might match the killer. They don’t have a sample to run it against, of course.”

  Zach went even whiter.

  “I won’t even ask if you’ll provide a sample, because I know you’re not going to do that willingly,” said Lachlan. “But watch your back, because anything you discard that might have your DNA on it? I’ll be following you around to swoop it up. A tissue? A wad of gum? A plastic spoon at a fast food restaurant? It won’t take long until I get a sample of your DNA, and then we won’t need to bother with this conversation.”

  Zach’s nostrils flared. “But it would be easier for you if you didn’t have to chase me around and I simply confessed, right? This how you sweet talked that poor sod down at the station yesterday?”

  Lachlan chuckled. He smiled at Zach. “You ever read The Scarlet Letter, Zach?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne,” said Lachlan.

  Oh, man. I really had been part of this man’s life for too long. He was reusing his literary references. I’d heard this one before.

  “It’s about a man who’s so guilty about what he’s done to another human being that his flesh literally changes shape, because the secret is festering inside him, trying to get out.”

  “I thought that book was about some chick who committed adultery,” said Zach.

  “That too,” said Lachlan. “But that’s got nothing to do with my point.” He leaned forward. “My point is that deep down, you know that it would be a relief to confess. You know that telling me everything you did would lighten you in some way. It’s natural and human to confess wrongdoing and to pay the consequences and seek forgiveness. That’s why I don’t have to work too hard to elicit confessions. Guilty people want to confess.”

  Zach was quiet. He set his hands on top of his desk. They were shaking.

  The room grew silent. I could hear the rush of the air conditioner as cool air whooshed into the room and I could hear noises from outside—tweeting birds and passing cars.

  We sat in that silence for a long time, and Zach’s hands shook harder and harder.

  Finally, he said, “I want you both to leave.”

  “You’ll have to forcibly remove us,” said Lachlan.

  Zach scooted back in his chair, and the scrape of the chair legs on the floor was loud after all the quietness. He stood up. He pointed at the door. “Leave.” His voice wasn’t strong. He was shaking all over.

  Lachlan stood up too. He lowered his voice so that it was velvet. “Let it out, Zach. It’ll feel better.”

  Zach scrubbed at his forehead, his eyes wild. “You know… it gets to me sometimes. These bastards who are locked up here can be so hard to work with. I mean, I guess I can’t blame them for not being cooperative. They’re the lowest of the low, and they know they’ve got nowhere further down to go. Why make it easy for the person who keeps you locked up against your will? It wouldn’t make sense if they were easy to work with. So, I get it. Intellectually, I get it. But…” He sucked in an audible breath.

  It was quiet again.

  We waited.

  Zach shook his head. He went back to his desk and sat down heavily. “It was supposed to be an unpleasant punishment, but it wasn’t supposed to be inhumane. I had no idea the water in the showers was so hot. I just… I was so angry. He had been such a jackass that day. Poole hadn’t done a damned thing I asked. He’d tried to stay out in the yard after morning exercise. Gotten tased for his trouble. He’d been telling tales on some other inmate’s marital problems and that guy was out for blood. That turned into an altercation that I had to deal with. And every little bit of bad behavior just sent me over the edge. So, when he started whining in his cell about feeling ill and needing medicine, I just marched him out of there and down to the showers. I threw him in there. I turned the hot water on. He was handcuffed to the wall, so he couldn’t get away.” Zach stopped. He sat back in his chair, and he buried his head in his hands.

  “Go on,” Lachlan soothed. “It’ll get easier if you go on.”

  Zach raised his face from his hands. There was a catch in his voice. “He screamed. And I was glad. I laughed. I said, ‘Hot enough for you?’ And I left him there, handcuffed and screaming and went two feet down the hall to go and get Tim, because it was his night to shower, and I was in charge of getting him there. But when I got him back there, Poole wasn’t screaming anymore. He was just hanging off the cuffs, and his eyes were bulging out of his skull and his tongue was swollen. And his skin was…” He swallowed. “I tried to shake him, and that was when the water touched me, and it burned me.” He gestured to the scar. “Man, who could have guessed the water would get that hot?”

  We waited.

  Zach let out a sobbing noise. “It was all just an accident, I swear it. I threw Tim back in his cell, and I told him that if he breathed a word of it to anyone I’d…”

  “You’d what?” said Lachlan.

  “Well, he was twitchy,” said Zach. “I couldn’t trust him.”

  “So, you killed Tim,” said Lachlan.

  “I had to,” said Zach. “He was a loose end.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Zach put up very little fight after that. He confirmed that Lachlan’s theories about how he’d killed Tim were all correct. He’d tried to drug him, and when that hadn’t worked, he’d had to resort to smothering. He said that Tim was threatening to tell everyone what he did, and though he kept telling Tim that no one would believe him, Zach was worried. He had to neutralize the threat. At the time, it had seemed worth it, but Zach said that Lachlan was right, that keeping secrets like that ate at him, and that he couldn’t handle it anymore. It was
better to have it out in the open, so that he didn’t have to hide anymore.

  We called Steve, who came down to arrest Zach.

  Together, we all went down to the station, where Zach hand wrote a detailed confession and signed it.

  There was little chance he’d be getting out anytime soon. Zach was going to jail for his crimes. He had taken life, and all life was worth something, even the lives of criminals.

  When we got done there, we were met in the lobby of the station by Debra and the twin girls. The girls barely acknowledged us. They were playing some kind of game on a tablet together, giggling whenever it made a chiming noise. I didn’t look too closely at it.

  Debra was crying though. “Thank you,” she said to Lachlan, and she reached out to hug him, but at the last minute seemed to realize that would be awkward and stopped, arms in midair.

  Lachlan took a step back.

  Debra took a step back, dropping her arms.

  Steve was next to her in seconds, draping his arm over her shoulders. “Well, you do have a way of getting them to confess,” he said. “I will admit that. So, yeah, thank you very much.”

  Debra put her fingers to her lips. “Why’d you come, Lachlan? Really? It doesn’t make any sense.”

  He let out a sigh. “I needed closure, I guess.”

  “Did you find it?” she asked.

  “I realized I already had it,” said Lachlan.

  “Oh, that’s good,” she said. “Because I don’t. I still don’t have it. I can’t think about that whole chapter of my life without feeling… gutted.”

  I knew what she meant. There were parts of my life that I could barely stand to think about. I had put them behind me and moved forward, though. It seemed as if she had to. In the end, that was the only thing you could do, anyway.

  “Did Steve tell you about Adam Day? How he was the mastermind behind Tim shooting us?” said Lachlan.

  “Mastermind?” said Debra, looking up at Steve. “You didn’t say he was the mastermind.”

  “I don’t know if I’d put it that way,” said Steve. “Three kids make some kind of murder pact and two of them actually go through with it. That’s what I’d say.”

  “Adam put it all together so that he could get away with killing Faith,” said Lachlan.

  “Adam always creeped me out,” said Debra.

  “Because he’s a psychopath,” said Lachlan.

  “Oh, come on,” said Steve. “He killed two people. That’s bad, but it doesn’t mean he’s Hannibal Lecter.”

  Lachlan rolled his eyes. “You know what a psychopath is, don’t you, Steve?”

  “Of course,” said Steve, but he had a vaguely terrified blank look on his face.

  “He was a manipulator,” said Lachlan. “In our line of work, we see that kind of person far too often. Adam was the kind of guy who did nothing but use other people. He got them all into position, like dominoes, and then he knocked them over. Just for the fun of watching them fall. He needed to control Faith. He needed to control Tim and Carlos. Carlos even said Adam was too ‘cool’ to hang out with them. Adam picked those two because they were easy to manipulate. That’s the kind of guy he is. No one else is as important as him and he thought nothing of taking life. Nothing at all. Everything was a game to him.”

  “Look,” said Steve, “I know what you’re trying to do here, but I don’t think it’s a good thing. Adam didn’t kill Hallie. Tim did. You can blame Adam all you want—”

  “No,” said Lachlan. “I’m not blaming Adam. Between Carlos and Tim, I think we can see that the boys were capable of choosing their own paths. Tim knew it was wrong to kill. He did it anyway. He’s to blame.”

  Debra pressed her lips together.

  Steve glared at Lachlan. “Well, you don’t have to put it like that. Jesus Christ, I was only saying not to try to spoon feed her false comfort, not to hold her down and rip off her fingernails.”

  Debra looked up at Steve. “I’m fine.”

  “You want comfort?” said Lachlan. “Take it in the fact that there was a plan to cover up the murder and that Tim couldn’t go through with it. That he turned himself in right away because he regretted what he’d done. He wasn’t a monster, Debra. He was a kid with dark tendencies who went too far.”

  Debra nodded, more tears slipping out of her eyes. “Thank you.”

  “I don’t know if there’s anything to thank me for.”

  “Well, no matter what, he was my son,” she said, “and I needed to know who took his life. You found that answer for me. Maybe it didn’t give me closure, but I think it brought me a step closer. I really appreciate it.”

  “I guess you’re welcome, then.” Lachlan offered her his hand.

  They shook.

  She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “You know, I would have the two of you over for dinner. You, me, Steve, and Penny? It’d almost be like a double date. What do you say?”

  Lachlan was smiling, and for a horrible second, I thought he was going to agree to that. But he shook his head. “That’s awfully nice of you, but I don’t know if that would be… that might be too weird.”

  “Yes,” said Steve.

  “Yes,” I said in a tiny voice.

  Debra laughed. “Okay, you’re right. But I don’t know how else to say thank you.”

  Lachlan reached out and patted her on the shoulder. “You just take care of those girls of yours, okay? Keep them safe. That’d be what I’d want for a thank you.”

  She nodded. “Of course. And you look out for your little one as well.”

  * * *

  We went back to the house, and everything felt oddly anti-climactic. We’d found the murderer, he was behind bars, and we were done. I felt as if we should have been celebrating, but Lachlan seemed somber, and I couldn’t quite muster any cheer either. Maybe it was due to the personal nature of the murder. Maybe it was the specter of the Green King. I couldn’t be sure.

  Vivica wanted to know when we were heading home, now that there was no reason to stay here.

  Lachlan said we’d figure that out tomorrow. We’d just need to get this house cleaned up and to find a flight back to Sea City.

  We had dinner together. Wyatt wouldn’t eat anything. Instead, he just kept using his sippy cup as a shaker to douse his food liberally with water. Eventually, I took the food away and let him play in the water, which he did happily, laughing the entire time.

  After dinner, it was soon time to start putting him to bed.

  The evening ritual soothed me. Bathing my little boy, drying him off, nursing him until he fell asleep, and then placing him in his bed. Everything seemed okay now.

  I called Felicity to fill her in on how things were going. She was congratulatory about solving the case, but she said that the hotel wasn’t quite ready yet. It would need a few more days before the repairs would be complete.

  That put a wrench in our plans of finding a flight tomorrow. Maybe there was no point in going back if we were just going to have to rent a condo or a hotel room until the Purple Dolphin was ready. I resolved that I’d tell Lachlan about that as soon as I saw him again.

  He’d gone outside with the rogue dragons. I wasn’t sure if he’d shifted, or if he was just practicing making them fly in formation and breathe fire. He was preparing for a battle, I knew, and that was good. I only hoped the battle didn’t turn into a full-fledged war.

  I tried to relax, but I couldn’t. I felt as though I should be preparing as well, only I didn’t know how. I didn’t know anything about the Green King and the children of the deep, and I didn’t know how to find any information either. It wasn’t as if we had access to some dusty library somewhere with books that had descriptions of every single water monster out there, along with tips and tricks for killing them. That would be handy, of course, if we had it.

  I didn’t know anyone to ask for information either. Lachlan had once gotten information from an ancient vampire, one so old that he remembered when the nightmares like the Green King
had been unleashed on our earth. But the vampire hadn’t exactly been friendly. He’d drained Lachlan of blood and left him out in the freezing cold to fend for himself. I didn’t think that guy was going to be able to help us anymore.

  All we knew was that the Green King had been locked away thousands of years ago by mages and dragons. They’d somehow beaten him back and sent him to the bottom of the ocean.

  The somehow was the problem. How had they done that? Could we do it? Or was there some way to kill the Green King once and for all, to completely wipe him off the face of the planet?

  A knock on the front door.

  Huh. The last time someone knocked it was Lachlan’s father. I went to the door to open it up.

  Yup, sure enough, there was Nathaniel Flint. “Well, hello there again,” he said. “Lachlan around?”

  “Actually, he’s out back somewhere.” I gestured behind the house.

  “No, I didn’t see anyone out there when I drove up. Only that flock of dragons.”

  “Well, Lachlan might have shifted, I guess,” I said.

  “Shifted?” said Nathaniel, confused. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Oh, um… nothing,” I said. Judging from the way Nathaniel had reacted to everything last time, I thought maybe it was better if he didn’t have to wrap his brain around the idea of his son transforming into a dragon. That might be too much for him. “I can maybe go and get him. If he’s close enough to see me, I’ll wave him down.”

  “Not a problem,” said Nathaniel. “I can wait. I came to apologize. Again. I really bungled it last time. Wasn’t the kind of thing that would make a son want to give his old dad another chance at all.”

  “Well, if you’d like to come in…” I stepped away from the door.

  Nathaniel came inside.

  I offered him something to drink, but he declined. After that, we stood there in awkward silence for a few moments. I knew that I could take him to the living room, and that we could sit there on the couches, trying to make small talk, and it sounded stifling.

  So, I gestured with my head towards the back porch. “Let’s sit outside. It’s really lovely tonight, don’t you think?”