15 Signs Of Murder (Fifteen thrillers)

by Luis Samways

  Sandra shook her head, realizing that it was nearly impossible for a station like hers to get the privilege of “first question.” It was usually given to one of the big network channels. Not basic local syndicates.

  “Who the hell did we sleep with to get such a distinction as first question? And why me?”

  That was when Bob showed another full row of stained teeth. “When you did the live broadcast of you trespassing on the crime scene down at the Avenue, Jimmy Sway got a licking from one of the detectives and the camera was broken, cutting off the feed. That footage has caused a bit of a storm around these parts. Let’s just say that the P.D. knew it was in their best interests to allow us to have the first question. Or face a lawsuit and a smear campaign on the department.”

  Sandra nodded. Her hair was feeling a little greasy, nearly sticking to her scalp. She’d need to have a shower if she was going to attend the press conference. She didn’t want to be looking like a dog on live TV. But it had been a long day, so she thought that was excuse enough for her looking a little unclean.

  “So we basically forced their hands twice? We unearthed the crime scene, and now they have to come clean about whatever it is that they’ve been quiet about — plus they punched Jimmy in the face.”

  Sinclair got up and shook Sandra’s hand. “Either way, you did some mighty fine work. Because of you, the public will now know the truth.”

  Sandra felt confused. Something big must be going on, or things wouldn’t be going their way. The Boston P.D. didn’t just give out golden tickets to the barn dance. Somebody didn’t want bad press. She couldn’t wait to find out why they were buttering News72 up.

  Forty-Two

  “You know that feeling you get?” I said to Santiago as we entered our suspect’s bedroom.

  “What feeling?” San replied, following me into the demon’s lair.

  “That tinge in your balls,” I said, grinning from ear to ear, like a child who’d just uttered his first curse word.

  It didn’t go down all that well with Santiago. I could tell he wasn’t too happy with my sense of humor. “Oh, that’s just fantastic. Keep them coming, Frank. I mean, who knows how many you have left before I die. Maybe eight or nine more months, and before you know it, you’re attending my funeral, wishing you hadn’t wasted half the time we had left ribbing me about my terminal cancer.”

  I shook my head and raised my hands up in the air, acting a little defensive. “Easy, pal — who said I was talking about your balls?”

  Santiago stuck his finger up at me. “Fuck you, Irish prick.”

  “Charming,” I replied. “Anyway,” I said, drawing a large breath. The stairs took it out of me. “You don’t know what the results are going to say. You could have two healthy crown jewels between your legs!”

  San nodded his head and said, “You could be right. Or that feeling you were talking about, the one accompanied by the pea-sized growth on my left testicle, could be cancer, and all this hazing is in bad taste.”

  “I never do anything in bad taste,” I said.

  “Yeah, sure. All those testicle jokes you’ve been spraying off at the mouth since yesterday are just pure coincidence. Nothing to do with the fact that you’re a cunt.”

  “Exactly,” I replied.

  We went silent as we started to look around the room. At first glance, the room looked like it belonged to a normal enough kid. A few posters on the wall. A dresser drawer with certificates in frames. A diploma propped up at an angle. The only thing that struck me as odd was that the room belonged to a fully grown twenty-odd-year-old man who still lived at home with his parents. That and the Wham! poster. Usually taste in music like that signifies some deeply disturbed mind. Trust me, I love Wham!, so I should know.

  “Lots of successful people have one ball,” I continued as I analyzed the boxer drawer. I could feel Santiago’s glare hit the back of my neck. “Hitler had one ball, and he was quite successful at what he did.”

  I heard Santiago cough. I turned around and saw the look of complete anger in his eyes.

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d drop the subject now. Let’s just leave the testicle talk between me and my doctor.”

  I did as he asked and got back to searching the drawers. Irony is a funny thing. Sometimes it strikes at the most opportune moments. It makes for an interesting situation when something ironic pops up. Especially if the conversation prior to it striking had some connection to whatever was about to happen.

  I smiled when I saw what I saw in that dresser drawer. My lips couldn’t help but curl. I pulled it out and turned to San. He wasn’t looking in my direction. He was searching through the DVD collection.

  “Speak of the devil,” I said, holding it up for San to see. When he locked eyes on what I was holding, I saw the despair beam out of him.

  “You put that there, you piece of shit!” he said, walking up to me as if he was about to smack me in the face.

  “I swear I didn’t!”

  He didn’t believe me and tried grabbing what was in my hands. I tried to convince him further.

  “Why would I put something like this in here? You were with me when we came up! Did you see me smuggling something like this in? No, you didn’t. So don’t go jumping to conclusions because your testicles are sore!”

  That was when he punched me in the face. It felt like a good and proper punch. Nice and firm. I heard my jaw crack a little. Must have been a partial crack. I could still move it, so no hospital visit for me. I’d been testing his temper all day. Finally I had gotten what I wanted out of him. I hadn’t fallen on my ass, but that wasn’t because the punch was lacking — it was just the dresser drawer that stopped my fall. I put the copy of Adolf Hitler’s biography, Mein Kampf, back in the drawer. As controversial as that book was, I didn’t see it being linked in any way to the murders. None of them seemed like hate crimes.

  San walked out of the room in a huff. I followed him, grabbing his arm.

  “Wait a sec,” I said, pulling him to a stop. “You aren’t going to die!” I said.

  He looked at me and started to cry a little. Oh, boy, I’m an asshole.

  “Look, don’t cry, man. I know for a fact that you are going to be okay.”

  He pushed me away from him. “No, you don’t! So don’t you dare say any different!”

  “I do know, though,” I said, grabbing his arm again. He batted me away, and I lost my footing and nearly fell down the stairs. Just before I did, San grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me over toward him.

  “Watch your step, asswipe.”

  I smiled.

  “See, that’s how I know you’ll be just fine!”

  He looked at me in disgust. I could tell that if I was to say anything else related to the subject, he’d take my head off clean. So I shut my mouth. But I stood by what I said. He’d thank me later for it. I was certain of the fact.

  My cell phone went off. I quickly answered it, partly out of reflex, and partly out of fear of getting another stiff jab to the face.

  “McKenzie,” I said, massaging my jaw with my free hand. Santiago looked on with dead eyes. I could tell he was off in his head, on a trip of self-doubt and hatred. I’d leave him to it and turn around.

  “Yeah, okay. No problem,” I said after a few seconds. I flipped the cell back shut and turned to face San, who was still staring off into the distance.

  “We need to get back to P.D. We have a press conference in a few hours.”

  San nodded.

  “It’s about time they told the public. Someone will hang for not saying anything sooner,” San said, finally snapping out of his funk.

  “Not if the people who covered it up use one of the good guys as a fall guy,” I interjected.

  “Good job neither of us is one of the good guys!” San said.

  “That’s what worries me.”

  Forty-Three

  It had been a very busy couple of days for one Officer Mullins. He was getting out of his patrol car after being s
ummoned to a possible homicide. The P.D. was stretched thin, so he was the only blue on the scene. He noticed as he got out of the car that his police cruiser was the only one in the area. He also noticed the group of people congregating outside the suspected murder scene. A few of the women were crying.

  Officer Mullins decided to make a move for the entrance. He walked up toward the door, and somebody grabbed him by the arm. It was a woman. She had reddened eyes and was weeping uncontrollably.

  “It’s horrible!” she screamed. “There’s so much blood!”

  Mullins gently moved the woman’s hand off his arm. He didn’t want to offend anyone, but he was there for a job, and it wasn’t consoling distraught witnesses. He decided to push past the five or six loiterers. Once he was inside, the distinct smell of death hit him in the face. It was a hot day, so the rate of decomposition was likely to be higher. He saw that a woman was waiting for him behind a desk. He walked up toward her, his freshly polished shoes glinting off the clean floor. He could see his own reflection on the finish. The dead body was obviously not in the lobby, but the smell was, meaning that it mustn’t have been too far away.

  “Someone reported a dead body?” he asked as he approached the older-looking woman. She attempted a smile, but it faded away rather quickly.

  “Yes, that’s right. He’s just a youngster. I don’t know what happened. Everyone was asleep. They woke up and found him like that,” she said, nearly bursting into tears.

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  She took a deep breath and gulped in some air. She looked as if she was about to gag.

  “The bunkroom,” she said plainly.

  “The bunkroom?” Mullins repeated.

  She just nodded and then told him to follow her. He could tell she was feeling the strain of the whole ordeal. He followed her as she walked out from behind the big counter and made her way around the corner. As Mullins followed, the pit of his stomach started to ache. The smell grew stronger until it was too much. He could hear the AC blowing, but it was no use. It was hardly making a difference. The corridor was burning hot. The walls seemed to be peeling. On the corners of the wallpaper, he could see moisture gathering. It was a dark yellow. Must have been from cigarette smoke. A lot of these types of places were unregulated and could get away with that sort of thing.

  After a few more seconds of walking, the smell grew to its strongest. The woman gestured that the room was right in front of them. She just stood there beside the door, not looking through the open doorway. Mullins could tell that she didn’t even want to entertain the idea of setting foot in that room again. Not until whatever lay behind the door was gone.

  “The guy checked out. The one who killed the boy. He’s gone. He’s probably forgotten about it. But we haven’t. Not one single person in this building will forget this day,” the woman said.

  Mullins thanked her, and she walked off. He took a breath and mentally prepared himself. He closed his eyes, blinked them back open, and walked through the door. What he saw was horrifying. A young man lay on a bed with a hole in his neck. The blood had drained from his wound and took up more than eight feet of space on the floor. The room was full of bunk beds. The boy’s blood covered nearly half the room. Some of it had reached other people’s belongings. A teddy bear was soaked in the stuff.

  Mullins took a few steps forward. The sound of his nicely polished shoes becoming dirty echoed through his head. The room felt like a hot box. There was no air. The body looked moist, as if it had been glazed with honey. That would be the first signs of decomposition. He then noticed the kid’s wheelchair. It was right next to his bed. That had some blood on it, too. The whole place seemed to be covered in the stuff. But that wasn’t the most horrifying thing about the scene. It was the boy’s eyes. They were still open, and they were still screaming for help.

  Mullins couldn’t take it anymore. He rushed out of the room and took out his cellphone, leaning against the yellow-stained wall for support. He dialed and pressed the phone against his ear.

  “Hey, Frank, it’s Mullins. We have another victim. Young male, approximately seventeen years old. Stabbed in the neck. Same M.O. as our guy. We have at least fifteen people who saw the suspect. No one saw the crime take place, though. Someone better get down here and take the body and put it on ice. It fucking stinks.”

  Forty-Four

  “No problem,” I said, gripping my cell phone hard. The thought of another murder by the same guy made the looming press conference even more daunting. “I’ll get the coroner down there as soon as possible. You hang in there, okay?”

  I hung up the phone and gave Santiago a look. He knew that look. Heck, I’d been giving him that look all damn day. It was part and parcel of any murder case. It was a look of disappointment.

  “Another stiff?” Santiago asked. I nodded my head sternly and put a cigarette in my mouth. I was about ready to call it a night, but we had an hour or so left before we had to attend the press conference, and I was pretty skeptical about whether it was a good idea coming clean with the public. Someone would hang for this. And it wasn’t going to be the killer. The good guys always pay first. That was my motto, hence why I always attempted to be between the line. If I were downright good, I wouldn’t be where I was. People can smell a good guy, and they mistake it for weakness. I’m not saying we were anything comparable to the bad guys we chased, but sometimes – most of the time – you need to be that little bit bad to be able to chase evil.

  “Shaw’s going to hit the roof!” Santiago said, joining me for a cigarette. For some reason, we were able to get away with smoking in the precinct. Our boss wasn’t really into the whole new age “passive smoking” malarkey that the media had been jumping on since 2006.

  “Mullins said that he’ll call the boss, which is fine by me. I don’t want to speak to the prick,” I said, taking a drag and pondering my next move.

  We were standing in the center atrium of the precinct. Within it there were about thirty-two desks, all occupied by police officers and detectives sifting through cases. Budget cuts meant that we all had to share the same interior space. There was no “homicide” floor in this precinct. Just a good old-fashioned office block full of all sorts. It was interesting, really. On certain days, you’d see hookers being pulled in and sharing the same waiting area as the pimps, crackheads, and gangsters. We didn’t discriminate down here. Everyone was a piece of shit once they walked through our doors. Including the people who worked there!

  “So you haven’t spoken to Shaw since you clocked him in the face?” Santiago asked, taking his time with the question as he savored his cigarette.

  “Nope, and I don’t want to talk to him until I feel like it,” I replied, also taking my time while I dragged on the sweet smoke that coated my nerves and rested them for a moment or two. This case had been taking its toll on me. It was nice to have some downtime for a change. Not that it would last, though.

  “You’re going to have to talk to him at some point. Remember the bet? You’ll be getting the lieutenant job for sure now.”

  I smiled. I had forgotten about mine and Shaw’s bet.

  “Fuck the lieutenant job. If he gives it to me, I walk.”

  Santiago butted in. “And do what?”

  I smiled at him again and took another drag. “Whatever I want!”

  “So basically, you’ll just bum around and not do anything?”

  I squashed the cigarette butt into the ashtray and clicked my fingers a little. I did that to get rid of the ash that had built up on my skin. I usually didn’t have time to wash my hands. Not when I was working. I never got sick, though, which was a miracle. Should have gotten some sort of food poisoning by now.

  “As I said, Santiago, I’ll do what I want. Maybe a little P.I. work. A few dating shows. The Price Is Right and a little Deal or No Deal, and I’ll be set for cash until I finally kick the bucket and get some damn peace and quiet until the end of time.”

  “So you have it all planned out?” S
an asked.

  “Yeah, as well as you can plan these things.”

  There was a slight pause in the conversation. I grabbed a few of my pills and chucked them in my mouth. My voices were beginning to stir, but I wasn’t in the mood to decipher exactly what they were saying. I rolled my eyes at the sight of Shaw approaching us. He had his standard “nothing can knock me” look on, apart from my fist in his face again.

  “Looks like you two are going to have a nice and productive chat,” San suggested as he saw Shaw approaching us.

  San was about to leave when Shaw held his hand out, stopping him from leaving.

  “Now, wait a second,” he said before reaching us. “I need to talk to the both of you.”

  I shook my head and said, “If this is about me giving you a smack, then I’d rather not.”

  Shaw shook his head. I could see he had a little red patch next to his chin. Must have been from my fist. I was immediately disappointed at the lack of plastic surgery that he’d need to fix that.

  “It’s not about that,” Shaw said in his most condescending voice, which made me think that it was all he wanted to talk about, but somebody had told him to get on with his job. Even our boss had a boss, and I was pretty sure they were both bastards.

  “I want you two to work the parents in the interview room. Work them at the same time, in the same room. I want them to sit and sweat next to each other. I want both of them to stumble and stutter at the same time,” Shaw said.

  I shrugged and said, “Wouldn’t that destroy the idea of an interrogation? Having both parties in the same room might make for a biased account of the truth.”

  Shaw nodded his head and scratched his chin. I could see that every time he looked at me, he was reminded of the various times I had punched him in the face.