No Remorse No Regret

by Ian Worrall

  * * *

  Standing with her face to the shower, Melissa lets the hot water wash over her body, a little respite from work. Three in one day, a personal record. Melissa squirts some shampoo into her hand and then winces as she raises her right arm to wash her hair. With her left hand, she massages the ten-year-old scar and does shoulder circles, ten forward and ten backward. She sighs in relief. This always seems to work for some reason.

  She builds up a thick lather then rinses her hair and picks up the bottle of body wash. Opening it, she tilts the bottle towards her hand when the shower door opens. Instinctively, she covers herself as she sees Danil standing there holding a bottle of vodka and two glasses. He hands her a glass and pours alcohol to half full.

  “Thanks for the great work today, my love.” He leans in and kisses her on the lips.

  “Anytime.” Second time today I’ve been snuck up on. Am I losing my edge?

  Sitting down on a chair he has brought in, he pours a drink. He raises his glass to her. They clink glasses. He sips while Melissa downs hers before handing the glass back to Danil.

  “Can I finish my shower now?”

  Danil shrugs his shoulders. “I’m not stopping you. I’d just like to enjoy the show.”

  “Fine then.”

  She blows kisses at him then lathers up her arms while arching her back to make her breasts perk up. As the water rinses off her arms, she massages shower gel onto her breasts, squeezing them to make her nipples stand out.

  Danil blows her a kiss, licks his lips, finishes his drink and pours himself another one.

  Melissa raises her left leg, grabs her left foot, and pulls her leg up and to the side before lathering it. As she lets the water rinse the suds off her leg, she uses her right hand to spread the lips of her vagina and starts fingering herself.

  “Baby, you are amazing,” Danil says, rubbing his crotch.

  She takes a shower brush and starts washing her back as she shakes her hips. To rinse the soap off her back she bends completely over so her head is between her knees looking back at Danil, licking her lips. Danil makes squeezing and pulling gestures with his hands.

  With the show finished, she turns off the water and steps out of the shower.

  “Can you hand me a towel?”

  “Sure, my love.”

  Standing up from the chair, he takes a towel off the rack and wraps it around her, rubbing her down as he kisses her on the cheek and neck.

  “Who says the French make the best lovers?” Danil asks.

  “Not me. Russians are the best fighters and lovers,” Melissa answers.

  “You’re my number one at everything.”

  As he dries her legs, he drops the towel to the floor, wraps his arms around the back of her legs and stands up, taking the little woman over his shoulder.

  Always the romantic, she thinks as she is carried out of the bathroom and into the bedroom. She sees the upside-down view of the floor-to-ceiling mirror and the king-sized bed where she and Danil are about to make love, if that’s what you can call this.

  He unzips his pants as he lays her down. She feels him enter her and he pins her arms to the bed.

  “Oh, this is so great, oh yeah.” Another of his rewards for saving her ten years ago, he gets to have her whenever the mood strikes him, which is every day. Some days she’s had to submit three or more times.

  * * *

  Quincey sits down on the toilet and turns on his burner phone. Making circle gestures with his hand, he looks through the cracks between the walls and door of the toilet stall. “Come on, hurry up,” he whispers. Again, he looks out, biting his lip, and sees no one. With the phone booted up after what seemed like an eternity, he sends a text message to the Russians.

  They know of the heroin shipment tomorrow

  He shuts it off as soon as the message is sent. He flushes the toilet just as the door to the washroom opens. Close call as he steps out of the washroom into the office and sees uniformed police officers. Won’t take this risk again.

  * * *

  Finishing a sandwich, Jackie sets a cup of coffee down next to Mitchell as he is typing the name “Mike Cairn” into the police records search. On a second monitor is the report form for his death. Mitchell has witness statements totalling six.

  “That your dead guy from the hotel?” she asks as she plays a drum beat on her legs.

  Mitchell clucks his tongue before replying, “One of them.”

  “One of them?”

  “Yeah. Dead junkie in the garage and this guy Mike Cairn was found in the bathtub of his hotel room.”

  He hits the submit search button and five seconds later the name pops up.

  “I knew there was something to it.”

  “What made you think he had a record?” Jackie asks.

  Mitchell points to the file on his left. “The initial crime scene analysis came. Not a single fingerprint. Not even his.”

  Jackie’s eyebrows raise as she taps her leg while whistling to the tapping.

  Mitchell then clicks on the file with Mike Cairn’s name on it. The record shows he was arrested for raping a fourteen-year-old girl, suspected of four others. The case didn’t go to trial due to the girl committing suicide.

  Jackie sits down on Mitchell’s desk as he looks up to face her. “So, a lot of people with a pretty good motive to kill him.”

  Mitchell tilts his head. “As soon as we get the report from the medical examiner, which should be tomorrow, we’ll know if it was natural or not.”

  Jackie nods.

  “And was it Gary Taylor?”

  She takes a sip of her coffee and then continues nodding and drumming on the desk.

  Mitchell grabs her hands to stop the tapping. “The concert’s over, rock star.”

  “From the initial pictures, it looks like it was him. We’ll probably need dental records or DNA testing from his brother to confirm. But the license plate on the car was registered to him.”

  “Any suspects at all?”

  Hopping off the desk, she does a sky hook toss of her coffee cup in the garbage. “Given who and what he was, it’ll likely take until Christmas five years from now.”

  “I sense a ‘but’ coming here,” Mitchell says.

  “Oh, yeah. I talked with one of the people in Organized Crime and they said one of Taylor’s crew put a low-level runner in a coma last month. A kid connected to Danil Burlomov and the Czarists Russian Mafia group. So, narrow it down to them.”

  “Damn, the last thing we need is a gang war.”

  “Well, when we go over to talk to Torres and King, let’s each put in a forty in their office pool as to who’s going to win.”

  Mitchell laughs. “Yeah, might get ten cents profit.”

  Jackie laughs herself as she sits down at her desk.

  “And what about your victim?” she asks.

  “The list of suspects who would want a child rapist dead are probably longer, by a factor of fifty, than who would want a drug dealer dead. This could be a problem though.”

  “How so?”

  “Murder is still murder, kid. People can’t take the law into their own hands.”

  She steeples her fingers. “But do people really sympathize with a child rapist or rapist in general who gets killed? Some might call it poetic justice.”

  Mitchell smiles at her. “I am one of those. But if everyone does this, we’re back to the Wild West days.”

  Jackie hits the space bar to wake up her computer and clicks on an icon that reads report template. When the form opens, she types in the title bar: Fatality, Taylor G.

  “Tell me, though,” she says, “wouldn’t you like to ride shotgun, if even for a day, or an hour, with a lawman like Wyatt Earp or Wild Bill Hickok?”

  Mitchell gives her a look and laughs. “Just so long as I’m not playing pool with Earp or poker with Hickok.”

  Jackie types into her report the location of Taylor’s car and the length of the skid and gouge marks on the asphalt where his car
went over.

  “Say, Mitch?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If we want to get any insight into the rapist killer, the rape crisis and counselling center meets tomorrow night, doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, it does.”

  “After we get the medical examiner’s report and forensics on the car, might be good if I check out the meeting.”

  “Trying to get undercover?”

  Jackie winks at him. “Got to expand my horizons, don’t I?”

  “True.”

  Chapter 3

  T he Tuesday night meeting of the Rape Survivors’ group gets underway. Melissa and her co-facilitator, Arlene Benoit, are sitting in front of the group, with twelve women sitting opposite them. To the right of Melissa and Arlene are three tables. One has three urns for regular and decaf coffee, and hot water for tea. A second table has three trays for healthy snacks of sliced apples, kiwis, and grapes. The third table also has three trays, but this time for carrots, broccoli, and cauliflower.

  Along the walls are posters with motivational slogans like “Stand Tall, You are Not a Victim Anymore.”

  Melissa is dressed in baggy pants and a white, flowery shirt. Arlene, a brunette woman of five feet eight inches and chiseled one-hundred-forty pounds, is dressed in jeans and a yellow tank top showing off her well-muscled arms.

  Scanning the room, Melissa sees a newcomer to the group. “This your first time here?”

  The woman lets out a barely audible yes.

  “Do you care to share anything with us?”

  “Not ready yet,” the woman whispers.

  Melissa’s eyes narrow as she taps on her knee. This new one isn’t carrying herself like a victim. No furtive glances around the room. No fidgeting. Melissa catches herself tapping on her knee and stops. No, this one’s a cop. They carry themselves distinctly. What information is she trying to gather?

  “Anyone want to share with the group?”

  One of the women, a five-foot-nine blonde stands up. “This is my third time coming here. I can finally now talk about this. I am Doris and I am a survivor. I was a foster child who was taken advantage of by the one who was supposed to look after me. I was in that home for two years. His reward for saving me from the streets, that’s what he called it, was him taking me whenever the game was on TV. The wife worked over night shifts to help pay for food and stuff. He went to prison for manslaughter when he ‘accidentally’ killed her.”

  Men are all like that. Think they’re entitled to our bodies to do with whatever they want. Melissa asks her, “Do you feel safer now that he’s in prison? He can’t hurt you now.”

  “That was eight years ago. He got paroled.”

  “Really? And you feel scared again?” Melissa asks.

  “A little. I changed my name so he could never find me. Hopefully not, anyway.”

  “Well,” Melissa leans toward Doris. “He won’t be able to hurt you or anyone else again.”

  “How can you promise me that?”

  “I suppose I can’t. But I do have contacts that can keep an eye on him. What was his name?”

  Doris wipes a tear from her face. “Mark Nelson.”

  Melissa licks her lips, “I’ll get my people on it.” As Doris sits back down in her seat, Melissa grinds her teeth. Next target. Melissa continues, “Does anyone else want to speak tonight?”

  * * *

  Inside the police van parked across the street, Mitchell watches the feed from the video camera that Jackie has attached to her lapel. The larger of the two women at the front of the group might be able to physically handle a man. She looks fit. A woman who has been raped would have a motive to kill a rapist, as would the family. Check into that maybe. To overpower a man, it would likely have to be a man.

  Another detective, Darren Hummel, opens the door to the van and enters carrying a digital SLR camera. “Anyone stand out?” he asks.

  “Just that one.” Mitchell points to Arlene on the screen. “We’ll check her out first.”

  * * *

  Driving in his car, Quincey looks in his rear-view mirror and he notices a car that has been behind him for the past five minutes. He makes a sudden U-turn, with cars from both directions slamming on their brakes and horns. Probably being paranoid, but caution never killed anyone. Taking the third right turn, he drives past four more side streets and takes a left before parking the car.

  Waiting for five minutes, he sees that no other cars are coming. If anyone was following, I’ve lost them. He gets out of his car and makes his way toward a playground three blocks up the street.

  He looks into every parked car and every doorway to the houses. No cameras and no one waiting to pounce. At two in the morning, there is little activity. The neighborhood is middle-class, no drug dealers or prostitutes here. Most of the people are sleeping. Some sounds of televisions flow through open windows, the homes of night owls.

  Reaching the playground, he walks along the fence until he arrives at the garbage can behind the swing set. With his mobile phone, he scans around the park using a thermal imaging app. With nothing on the scanner, he pulls the bag out of the can, reaches in and pulls out a fanny pack, and secures it around his waist. Pulling his jacket down over as best he can, he looks like nothing more than a middle-aged man with a protruding beer gut. If a police patrol comes by he can just pat his stomach and say he couldn’t sleep so he thought he’d try and work off some excess pounds.

  After putting his item in for the Russians, he secures the garbage bag back in the can and heads back to his car. As a city employee, he also has access to the city cleaning crew’s garbage collection schedule, giving him an easy way to make and collect dead drops from all over the city. Almost no one goes through garbage cans, other than homeless people looking for food, but around here there are no homeless people.

  Chapter 4

  U nloading their cargo at the fishing docks, the crew of the Atlantic Princess continue to go about their business as the Captain winks at his crew when eight police cruisers rush onto the scene. Two officers step out from each car shielding themselves behind the car doors with their guns drawn. The boat crew put their hands up and get down on their knees.

  Behind the uniformed officers, a paddy wagon stops and two more officers along with Jared Torres and Jessica King step out of the vehicle. Strutting up to the captain of the boat, Jessica hands him the search warrant.

  “We’ve got a warrant to search the boat and cargo,” she says knowing that after six months of work on this, they can put a dent in the heroin trade, even if only for a month or two. And whoever was responsible for the loss of this shipment? Well, homicide will have another unsolved case.

  “Going to arrest us for fishing? Check our license. Ain’t got nothing that’s not legal,” the captain smiles back at her.

  The crew of the boat are handcuffed and loaded into the paddy wagon. Four officers stand outside the police vehicle to guard the prisoners as the twelve other officers and the detectives start opening the crates of fish.

  One by one, the crates reveal nothing but fish.

  “This was the boat, wasn’t it?” Torres asks.

  “Yeah. Wire taps confirmed it,” Jessica says as she slams one of the crates down. “What is going on here?”

  Torres shrugs his shoulders and turns to one of the uniformed officers, “We do have the radar, don’t we?”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Get it and we’ll check the boat for any hidden compartments.”

  The officer retrieves the handheld radar from the passenger seat of the paddy wagon. Jessica snatches it from his hands. “I’ll do the search.”

  She storms up the gangway onto the boat. Entering the control station first, she turns on the radar as Torres follows behind her. Scanning around, the radar reveals nothing in the walls. She next searches the crew’s sleeping quarters where she again finds nothing.

  “Damn,” she says. All the work that’s gone into this bust, and the cars dying last week, her career
flashes before her eyes, everything I’ve worked for and sacrificed to get here, all for nothing.

  “One last place.” Torres shakes his head and throws his arms up.

  She looks up at him, “You think I don’t know that?”

  They walk down the stairs from the crew quarters into the cargo hold of the boat. They both cover their mouths and their eyes are watering from the stench of the fish. Jessica and Jared almost feel their supper come back up, but they recover within ten seconds.

  Jessica’s scanning reveals no anomalies. She sits down on the step with her head in one hand, the other pounding on the step.

  “What happened?” she asks of herself more so than anyone else.

  Torres pats her on the shoulder. “It’s three thirty in the morning. Go home and get some sleep and we’ll talk later.”

  He walks up the stairs leaving Jessica there. She hears him call out to release the prisoners. She slams her fist into the bulkhead of the boat and grabs the hand, shaking it in pain as she makes her own way up the stairs.

  Reaching the deck of the boat, she sees a van driving away from another boat six berths down from them.

  “Torres,” she yells out as she runs down the gangway.

  Torres turns back to her, “Yes, detective?”

  With her jaw clenched she points to the van driving away. “Go after them.”

  He grabs her around the waist as she jumps out onto the dock. “To what end?”

  “They might have the heroin.”

  “Your evidence?”

  She looks up at him momentarily speechless. “They might have got tipped off and switched boats. This is our chance.”

  “Or your information was wrong. You haven’t got a warrant for that van.”

  “Damn you, what if I’m right?”

  Torres turns to one of the uniformed police officers. “You and your partner follow that car. See if you can nail them on a traffic violation then we can search them.”

  The two officers get in their car and drive off in pursuit of the van.

  As the police start packing themselves into their vehicles, the captain of the fishing crew winks at Jessica and blows her a kiss. She spits on the ground. “I’ve had better than you could ever do.”