by Hadena James
I was saved from doing any more crappy computer work when I was given a list of food items to go pick up. There was a sandwich shop around the corner from the Marshal’s office. I was grateful for the task. I would happily fetch sandwiches over trying to conjure leads any day of the week.
Twenty-four
Rain had cleansed the city. For a few hours, the smell of foods, dirty roads, exhaust, and everything else humans produced was gone. Everything smelled fresh. The sun was setting. I had to admit that watching the sunset over the water was beautiful. While I wasn’t exactly near the water, I had seen it as we wove our way around the city. Gabriel seemed intentionally to take the scenic route to Valerie McGregor’s apartment.
The crime scene technicians had left it the day before and no one had been in there since. Spy cameras had been installed just to be on the safe side. It seemed it was standard operating procedure for SCTU to install these tiny button cameras when they thought a stalker or serial killer might return to the scene of the crime. I had asked how long this had been going on and everyone had just shrugged at me. Considering I had never heard of it, either our crime scene people were keeping secrets or it was actually new and no one was talking about it for fear that the information would leak out to serial killers. Either way, I was dying to get one, and very curious about who monitored the feeds.
The question was answered as I walked up the stairs to the third floor apartment. There was a guy hanging out in the hallway. He was in slacks, a polo, very polished black shoes, and wire-rimmed glasses. I felt my mood sour.
Christian Hunter was a US Marshal and SCTU wannabe who was turning up more and more. He also had borderline personality disorder with psychopathic tendencies and I didn’t trust him any more than I could collapse the Empire State Building by staring at it. There was something incredibly off about him and I could not figure out what it was. I dealt with other borderline personalities and I dealt with a ton of psychopaths, so those things wouldn’t have set the alarm bells ringing. One day, I’d figure it out. Maybe today, since it appeared that he was the one who monitored the video feeds from our spy cameras.
To make matters worse, he was the one who installed and removed them as well, which was why he was here. Gabriel, Caleb Green, and I were going to poke around Valerie McGregor’s life while Christian Hunter removed the spy cameras. The sight of him made me want to punch him in the face. I had never considered myself a bully before, but the desire to punch Hunter had been building since I met him. It got worse with each encounter. If he ever joined the SCTU, I was going to throw the mother of all sociopathic tantrums.
He chatted calmly with Gabriel as Green and I began to poke around. The crime scene techs hadn’t removed anything that wasn’t of evidentiary value. This meant there were dried bloodstains on the floor, the bedframe remained, but the mattress was gone, and many items had been tossed into a jumbled heap in a corner where there was no evidence found. This had happened to me on multiple occasions, but never by the techs that worked for the SCTU and VCU. They were more destructive. Pictures were out of frames, clothes were mixed with silverware in the heap, and there was a residue on almost every surface. In their defense, when they showed up at a victim’s apartment, there was about a ninety-nine percent chance that the victim was dead and they weren’t used to not leaving everything a mess for a living victim.
“Do we teleport these guys?” Green whispered to me.
“Beats me. They sneak in and sneak out. Maybe our crime scene people are all ghosts who can just appear and disappear.”
“More likely to be imps and other fallen minor deities,” Green smirked. “Why else would you work in a crime lab that only processes our crimes?”
“Boredom,” I suggested. “Oh, I bet it’s the fringe benefits.”
“Yeah, like all the time off.” Green’s smirk widened into a smile. I had to smile back. As chasers of serial killers, the SCTU and VCU were notorious for not getting much time off. If we were working, that meant the elves, imps, ghosts, and other fallen demi-gods that served as our crime techs had to be working too. They had a super-secret lab that no one knew the location of and they just appeared and disappeared from crime scenes, often without us even knowing they had visited until they started sending us back test results. They also didn’t handle any other cases. They strictly processed evidence for the SCTU and VCU. Whereas, most police departments were waiting months for a DNA test, we could have one in a day, sometimes less.
My current theory was that there were about a dozen that followed us. When we loaded up and left, they loaded up and left and we all arrived in the city at the same time. They stayed in a different hotel or we would have noticed them by now. The rest stayed in the lab and processed stuff as it was sent to them.
The apartment was somewhat bland. There were no photos or artwork on the walls. There were no rugs on the floor. The furniture all looked like it had come from a secondhand store and had definitely seen better days. A TV on a cart was the old fashioned, big-butt type, not a digital flat screen like most people were used to seeing. The closet was empty.
My eyes darted to the floor and then back at the closet, then back at the floor. I had a sparse closet. There were about fifteen shirts total and five pairs of jeans. I had a drawer of underwear and socks. A drawer with two pairs of shorts and then two drawers of nothing but pajamas. However, I guessed Valerie owned maybe seven shirts, two pairs of jeans, a single set of pajamas, a handful of under garments, and a handful of socks.
“Caleb, count her socks, please,” I said to the FBI agent who was currently standing near the heap, staring out the window.
“I’ve never had anyone request that before,” he said as he bent down and began to comb through the pile. He pulled socks out and put them in a separate pile. There were only four pairs. Each of them had pink toes and heels. “Maybe it’s laundry day.”
“Where are her dirty clothes?” I asked. We both looked around us. There was no hamper in the main part of the apartment. Caleb checked the bathroom and didn’t find one in there. I moved to the pile and began sifting through it. I pulled out four pairs of underwear, all thongs. One was dirty, the rest were clean. There was a nightstand next to the bed, but no dresser. I stood and moved towards it. Caleb beat me there and pulled open the drawers. They were empty.
“So, she lives like a dirty monk,” Caleb suggested.
“No woman owns just four pairs of underwear, especially not four thongs.” It wasn’t practical to own just four thongs. Unless she no longer menstruated. I checked the bathroom and found a box of panty liners. The day was getting weird. Panty liners didn’t work in thongs. “This is weird as hell.”
“Why?” Caleb asked, looking over my shoulder.
“It’s not practical. I don’t wear thongs, but even I own more than four pairs of panties. Menstruating requires you to wear something other than a thong. Do you think this liner is fitting on that tiny strip of fabric?”
“We need a woman in the VCU. We wouldn’t have caught that,” Caleb informed me.
“What’s the problem?” Gabriel asked.
“She has panty liners but only seems to own thongs,” Caleb told him.
“You can’t wear a panty liner with a thong,” Gabriel responded.
“See, not just a girl thing,” I smirked at Caleb.
“I have younger sisters,” Gabriel blushed, “and I’ve been married. You learn a lot about women when you live with a few for years. Like most women have special panties for when they menstruate. They call them granny panties and will basically hold an ark-sized maxi pad.”
“The married men in the VCU wouldn’t have noticed it either.” Caleb looked at Gabriel sideways.
“Men try to ignore these things,” Gabriel agreed.
“So off topic,” I broke into the conversation. “So, she does not have a dirty clothes hamper. There are dirty clothes mixed with clean in the pile on the floor and she does not have enough underwear for a week. She does not live h
ere.”
“It’s the address on her driver’s license.” Gabriel informed me. “And it’s listed on her police documents for working with them.”
“She still does not live in this apartment full time. She can’t. Even I have photos on my walls and own enough clothing for more than a week’s worth of wear. She is not poverty stricken, so there is no way she has this little clothing. Her furniture isn’t even comfortable to look at, let alone sit upon. I do not know what this place is, but it is not where she lives.”
“Damn.” Gabriel dug out his phone and made a call to Fiona. We all stood around, waiting for Fiona to return Gabriel’s call. Christian Hunter finished removing the cameras, but lingered near the doorway. I knew he was waiting to hear back from Fiona too. He was going to be coming with us, because we were a man down with Lucas gone. I sighed very heavily. Gabriel shot me a look.
“No,” I told him.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do and absolutely not. The VCU does not exist, we’ll keep Green.”
“Green has been assigned to us until the VCU is reassembled, but that might only take a month or so. What do we do after that?”
“We get Lucas back,” I informed him.
“I’m not going to discuss this with you,” Gabriel said.
“Well, we are going to discuss it eventually,” I told him. I didn’t tack on that I was probably going to shoot Hunter if he came to the SCTU, even on temporary assignment. Hunter had proven himself either to be a good shot or a lucky shot while we were in Detroit, but he had also proved himself reckless. I could handle working with a psychopath. I could not handle working with a reckless psychopath. Green looked back and forth between Gabriel and I. Hunter seemed disinterested in the conversation. I didn’t know if it was genuine or not.
The “eureka” moment hit me like a lightning strike. I couldn’t read Christian Hunter. While one could argue that was true of all psychopaths, it was not. I had a knack for it, but Christian Hunter was wrapped in a cocoon of blankness. It was unusual, even for a psychopath. Most of them had some kind of expression, even if it was just the calm. Christian did not. I could not tell when he was in the calm or had turned on his ability to feel. And even in the calm, one had some idea of what was going on with their thoughts. Mine tended to be dark and murderous, which was why everyone thought I was scary. Christian failed to register anything on his face.
“See it?” I asked. Gabriel looked at me as if I had lost my mind. Since I wasn’t looking at him, but at Caleb, he too turned his attention there. Caleb was staring at me. He nodded, twice. It wasn’t just me. I felt like jumping up and down. As someone who had spent their childhood reading the faces of the most unreadable psychopaths, Hunter’s blankness was surreal. The fact that Caleb was having issues with him too made me want to shoot Hunter instead of punch him. There was no way that man was coming in a door behind me.
Gabriel’s phone rang. The conversation was brief. When he hung up, he had a stunned look on his face.
“You’re not going to believe this, but the apartment next door is rented to Valerie McGregor’s mother.”
“So, she lives with her mom.” I nodded.
“No, her mother lives on the other side of town,” Gabriel said. “With her husband and Valerie’s sister, who is mentally challenged.”
“Well, hot damn!” Caleb let out a little exclamation. “She keeps both apartments and uses one for dates or something so that the person can’t return and find her.”
“Sounds like a woman with a stalker,” Christian spoke up from the doorway. Sadly, I agreed.
Deals
Nikita had been fretting for days. He knew his father had a huge shipment of Krokodil coming in tomorrow and the SCTU were still in town. They couldn’t hunt down drug dealers, but they could tell other people about it if they discovered the shipment. If their work in Detroit was any indication, it was possible that they could find out about it. He was torn between trying to warn his father off having the shipment arrive and letting business work itself out. It was an impossible choice.
His office was secluded from the rest of the building, which was an import/export business specializing in goods from Eastern Europe. It was a front for his father’s real operations, but like any good front, a real business needed to exist. So, the place was full of nesting dolls, rugs, and other crap from Russia, Ukraine, and other former Soviet countries. Some of it was exotic. The Matryoshka or Russian nesting dolls were huge sellers all over the country. This was just the first place they stopped on their way to other cities. Some of it was just cheap crap that was really made in China. He took a moment to marvel over it. Drugs were, of course, their best seller. Guns were the second biggest moneymaker. Matryoshka dolls, real ones, that were handcrafted and hand painted in giant factories near the less hospitable parts of Russia, were the third. A very nice set could sell upwards of a thousand dollars. It cost them only a handful of rubles to get them.
His mind was still on the Matryoshkas when there was a commotion outside his office. The door shook in its frame and a rather large man who did not look Russian burst into his office. Both men exchanged glances. The one who wasn’t supposed to be there looked very confused.
Nikita did bookkeeping. There was bookkeeping software open on his computer screen. A stack of invoices was sitting in a chaotic pile on the corner of his desk. A calculator sat to the right of the keyboard. An inbox, overflowing with stuff to be sent out, looked as if rodents would find it a good nesting spot.
Whatever the non-Russian wanted, he didn’t seem to want it from Nikita, which was fine with Nikita because he was fairly sure he wanted nothing from the non-Russian.
“You are Gregory?” He asked, with a heavy Caribbean accent.
“No, I’m Nikita. Grigori is my brother.” He emphasized the correct pronunciation of his brother’s name.
“Nikia is a girl’s name,” the man scoffed.
“Nikita,” he corrected, saying it slowly so that every syllable could be heard. “Grigori, my brother, has an office in another building. Is there something I might be able to help you with?” He asked. Grigori was the proverbial lazy son. He liked to party. He liked to sleep at his desk. He had no real responsibilities. His father only employed him because he was too lazy to ask questions or learn anything. He preferred the beach and the gym to spending time in his office. Needless to say, the two had a strained relationship. Nikita knew that should their father die, Grigori expected to inherit everything. Nikita also knew this wasn’t going to happen. Instead, his father had tapped a nephew for rising to the top after he was gone. Since Nikita had no aspirations to run illegitimate business dealings that might always end in a gun fight, he preferred to stay where he was, doing the books for both sides of the business.
“He sleep with my sister, now she pregnant,” the man told him.
“That’s unfortunate.” Nikita pursed his lips together. This was above his pay grade, way above.
“What she supposed to do with no support?”
“Um, well…” Nikita paused and looked at the angry man. If it were his sister, he’d be angry too.
“Gregory talk to her, tell her about father. We expect him to help,” the man told Nikita. Nikita wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that.
“Let me make a call to my father.” He held up a finger indicating it would just be a minute. His father answered on the second ring and they had a conversation in Russian. During this conversation, his father threatened to staple Grigori’s penis to his forehead as well as a few other choices, body part rearrangements. Nikita did his best to soothe the situation. He didn’t want the girl or her brother to die just because his brother couldn’t keep it in his pants. His father agreed, which was surprising. Nikita was given instructions and the phone went dead.
“Okay, sir,” Nikita broke out a checkbook. “For now, we will pay your sister five hundred dollars a month. Upon birth, we want a paternity test. If the baby is
indeed my brother’s, we will increase support payments to two thousand a month.”
“Is that best offer?” He asked.
“No, that is the only offer,” Nikita lowered his voice. “Since you know what my father does, I suggest you agree to the terms and go on with your lives.”
“What if I go to police?” The man raised his voice.
“That would be tragic for you and your sister. This is a generous offer, please take it.”
The man seemed to recognize something in Nikita’s voice. He agreed. Nikita wrote him a check for cash. He left the office. The warehouse foreman, who was also a bodyguard, came in after he had gone.
“Since he was looking for Grigori, I thought sending him to you was a better solution.” He looked a little flushed, possibly from embarrassment.
“It was.” Nikita leaned back in his chair. “Come in, Dmitri, let me ask you something.” Dmitri came in, shutting the door behind him. He sat down in the only other chair in the room and waited. He looked like a giant in comparison to the chair and Nikita waited for it to break under Dmitri’s weight. “So, the SCTU is in town and we have a shipment coming in. Do we delay the shipment or ignore the SCTU?”
“Do the serial killer hunters have a reason to look at us?”
“Well, aside from Grigori, no. But I can’t always account for his whereabouts and sometimes, he gets out of control. Do you think these attacks could be him?”
“No, they are all on men. Grigori likes to be rough with women.”
“Are there any bodies to be found?” Nikita normally didn’t pry into his brother’s life. He didn’t have the stomach for it.