The Rookie Club Thriller series Box Set

by Danielle Girard

  “America’s KESWICK?” she asked.

  He looked out the window, blew smoke, and watched it curl up against the glass and roll back at him like a gray wave. Instead of talking, she ran records. How the hell had they gotten so fucked up?

  “It’s a residential addiction recovery center in Whiting, New Jersey,” Tony said.

  “Yeah, I got the little commercial on KESWICK. One hundred and twenty days for men eighteen and older. Also, a Christian conference and retreat center.”

  “I didn’t find Christ, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “No, Tony. I want to know why you’re drinking again.”

  Shit, he wanted to know why too. And not just that. He had so many questions he wanted answered. Why was Mick dead? Why was he alive? Why had he come to Jamie’s? Why had he lost his job in the first place? Why had he failed to quit the bottle? Why did he go into the station when he got the call? They needed extra men, but he was in no condition to enter a burning building. Why, why, why.

  He blew out his breath. “I don’t know.”

  “So you came here? I’m the backup to KESWICK?” She shook her head. “I don’t think that’s a good plan.”

  “I need a place to stay for a while.”

  She reached over and touched his collar.

  He grabbed her hand.

  “I want to see,” she said without letting go.

  He tightened his grip on her hand. “No.”

  “Let me see.”

  He took another drag on his cigarette before looking at her. Their eyes never quite met. There was too much to say if they finally had to confess it all. Tony gave in, unbuttoned his top button. His hands shook. He needed a drink. The spinning and pounding had finally stopped, and now he was shaking.

  Shit, the spinning was so much better.

  He pulled the collar open and let her look.

  She leaned forward, but didn’t touch. They never touched, never had, like it might be contagious. And no one needed to catch what he had.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  He said nothing, feeling the warmth of their bodies and the cigarettes fill the car. He touched the back of his hand to the window, wishing he were out there instead.

  “You can’t do that in my house,” she said. “I’ll take you there if you promise.”

  Promise. How many promises had he made and broken?

  “Okay.”

  “No. Look at me and swear it,” she repeated. “Swear on something that matters. Swear on Lana’s grave.”

  He winced at his mother’s name. Beautiful Lana. Why did the one person who had mattered most leave first?

  Jamie’s mother had died when they were babies. It was his mother who had been a stand-in for hers.

  Until she, too, had died.

  He’d never known his mother. Not as a person. What child really paid attention to his mother? She was there. Her smile, the little shake of her head when he and Mick got up to trouble, and then she was gone. Only tiny pieces of her were left—her laugh and the smell of her hair. He remembered the Irish prayer she used to say before putting him to bed. He could still hear Lana’s whispery voice.

  May the raindrops fall lightly on your brow

  May the soft winds freshen your spirit

  May the sunshine brighten your heart

  May the burdens of the day rest lightly upon you

  And may God enfold you in the mantle of His love.

  Jesus, may the burdens of the day rest lightly. May they rest lightly. They’d stopped resting lightly after Lana. Or maybe they never had. There’d been no mantle of love for Tony. God had taken Lana and forgotten the rest of them.

  He told himself that she was watching. All these years, watching. What did she think of him now? She must have been so disappointed.

  “Swear,” Jamie repeated.

  He pulled his collar from Jamie’s grip. “I swear on Lana’s grave. And on Mick’s. And Dad’s. Your mom’s. Your dad’s.” He looked over at her. “I miss anyone?”

  “Shit.” Jamie stubbed out her cigarette.

  “Can we go now?”

  “Why did you do it?” she asked.

  “Why does anyone do it?”

  She exhaled a long breath. Relief?

  “How did you stop it?” she whispered.

  He ran a finger over the scar on his hand, took the last drag of his cigarette, and then put it out in the overflowing ashtray.

  Jamie gave up on an answer and started the car, revved the engine, and drove out of the police station lot.

  He’d had the rope, the stool, but he’d had to hold that knife just in case. He’d been almost gone. The pressure in his eyes had been so strong, he couldn’t see. But the rope hadn’t been quite strong enough. He’d been weak.

  At the last moment, he’d chickened out and cut it. The rope had split and the knife had sliced right into his hand.

  There it was. He couldn’t even kill himself right.

  Chapter 15

  Jamie had barely pulled into her garage when her cell phone rang. “Vail.”

  “I’ve got something you’ll want to see.”

  It took her a minute to place the caller. She finally recognized the crime tech’s voice. “Roger?”

  “Yeah, it’s me. Can you come into the lab?”

  She glanced at Tony. “Uh—”

  “It’s big.”

  “Can you just tell me?”

  “You’ve got to see it.”

  “Okay. I’ll be there in an hour.” She ended the call. Then, without hesitating, she backed the car out of the driveway.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Station. Something’s come up.”

  “Can’t I stay here? I need some Aspirin.”

  She thought about the mark on his neck, the angry skin. How close he had come to dying.

  What if he did that in her house?

  No. She couldn’t leave him alone. “They’ll have Aspirin there.”

  “You don’t trust me long enough to go to work and back? I’m not a puppy you have to drag along.”

  Jamie measured her breath. “You came to me, Tony. Not the other way around. My turf, my rules.”

  They spoke little on the way to the station. Jamie turned up the music to fill the space, though the silence shouldn’t have bothered her. In the Brooklyn duplex where they’d grown up, long silences were as common as honking horns on the streets below. As young kids, she and Mick and Tony had filled the air with the idle chatter of childhood. Dares and bets and arguments over whether or not Mrs. Brandigi’s cat would survive the two-story fall out her window, and if the saying about how cats always landed on their feet was true from that kind of height.

  Her father and Pat loved to roughhouse, and have pillow fights, and dog piles were a constant source of entertainment.

  In the company of firefighters, the men were jovial and lighthearted. Going to the firehouse with them was a treat the children loved. Tony and Jamie dressed as firefighters for three or four years in a row, forsaking the tradition of trick-or-treating to spend Halloween evening in the firehouse, passing out candy to neighborhood kids.

  Mick was happy to get to leave the younger siblings behind for a change and hang out with kids his own age.

  Jamie couldn’t recall Mick ever dressing as a firefighter, though he loved the firehouse as much as they did.

  It all seemed to change that summer.

  Mick was fourteen, going into high school. Kids had started to make fun of his “two dads” though he never let on to her father or Pat.

  Then, the rape happened.

  There were no more dog piles after that. No pillow fights. All three kids stopped wanting to go to the firehouse—Mick for one reason, Tony and Jamie for another.

  The houses grew quieter. Doors were closed more often than open, until entire dinners were sometimes passed in silence aside from the occasional grunt to request someone pass the carrots and peas, or the salt.

  They were st
ill silent.

  At Hunters Point, she went straight to the lab. Tony shuffled behind. When she walked in, though, Roger wasn’t there.

  “He left you that,” Sydney said, pointing to a microscope.

  She crossed to it and peered in. She had seen enough to identify the sample. It was semen without DNA. “I already saw this.”

  Sydney shook her head. “No. We just finished this one.”

  “It’s not Osbourne?”

  “No. Devlin.”

  Jamie felt her mouth drop. “Natasha? I thought she had sex with Tim.” As soon as the words were out, she felt Tony’s stare. Her cheeks flushed. Would he remember that Tim was her ex-husband?

  Sydney nodded. “She did. We’ve got at least two semen samples. The first is Worley, but then there was another guy.”

  Jamie whistled. “A guy with no swimmers?”

  “Right.”

  “Just like my serial.” Jamie was tracking a serial rapist with no sperm in his semen. Now, Natasha Devlin’s last sexual encounter had been with a man with the same condition.

  She didn’t like the coincidence.

  “Maybe, but we’re just doing an initial workup,” Sydney explained. “We don’t have the technology to do much with it.”

  Jamie tried to work it out in her head. “Because there were two samples, you mean?”

  “Right. We’re not sure if the samples can be individually identified. This is something Roger tried.”

  Jamie felt her pulse run a little quicker. “Has anyone talked to Hailey Wyatt?” She glanced around. “And where’s Roger?”

  “We’ve got a call out to Hailey and Roger went back to the evidence storage locker to grab something.”

  Just then, the door opened and Roger entered carrying a cardboard file box. He set it down on the table and began rummaging through it.

  Jamie waited, trusting he’d tell her what was going on when he found what he needed. In her opinion, Roger Sampers should have been the head of CSU. His reports were as meticulous as any she’d ever seen. He was the one people turned to for help in solving particularly complex evidence dilemmas. He was highly intelligent and great at thinking outside the box. Her suspicion was that the reason Roger wasn’t in charge of the lab had to do with his appearance.

  Roger had alopecia universalis, which left him completely hairless. Not just bald, but without hair on his arms or legs or face. No eyebrows, no eyelashes. She had always wondered if that was why he’d decided on CSU.

  He would be a model employee—one who never left a hair behind at a scene. But, because he had no eyelashes, he blinked three or four times as often as someone with them. Plus, his appearance was odd. You didn’t realize the impact of eyebrows on someone’s appearance until you met someone without them. Jamie knew some people found it distracting to talk to him.

  Just then, he pulled a manila folder out of the box. “Got it.”

  Jamie stepped forward. “What have you got?”

  Roger pulled on gloves and emptied a series of clear plastic cards onto the table. They were fingerprint cards. Each one had a black smudged print in the center of the plastic, one that had been lifted from the scene. “These are the prints from Natasha’s office that we haven’t run yet.” He glanced up, blinked twice. “We had nearly a hundred and it’s a time-consuming process.” He paused, looked over at the microscope. “You heard about the semen sample?”

  “Just like Osbourne.”

  “Well, not exactly. Since there were two samples, it’s going to take us longer to be sure we’ve got them separate. In the end, we may not be able to. But I ran some initial tests and it looks like one of the samples may not have any DNA. I’m not anywhere near certain, but when I saw that, I went back and looked at the scene a little more closely.”

  He flipped through a few cards until he found what he wanted. “I was in charge of processing the evidence from the department and Natasha’s office. We focused on running the prints inside her office, but there was one we found on the outside of her office that struck me.” He shook the plastic card in his hand. “Let’s check it out.”

  He crossed the room to a table with a gray computer and sat down in front of it. He slid the clear card into a reader slot. He typed a few commands and the computer began running the print for a match. Roger drummed his fingers on the table as he waited. “Could take a few minutes.”

  “Where did this print come from, Roger?”

  “I’ll show you.” Roger lifted an iPad off the table and entered a four-digit passcode. Then, he flipped through ten or twelve images before stopping. “Here,” he said, turning the device so she could see the image.

  Jamie stared at a photo of the sign outside the Crimes Against Persons Department where Natasha was an inspector. The Crimes Against Persons Unit, or CAP, used to be called General Works. CAP acted as a catchall for crimes that couldn’t be divided into the other personal crimes units like Homicide, Robbery, and Sexual Assault. It also helped with other departments’ overflow, of which there was always plenty.

  The department’s sign was a generic, black, plastic plate base with individual nameplates glued on top of it. The plate was worn and scratched, and dried glue was evident where names had been removed or replaced.

  The first plate read the captain’s name, Morris Travis. Below his, each inspector had his or her own plate. They were listed alphabetically. Natasha’s name came first.

  “What am I looking at?” Jamie asked.

  Roger flipped to another photo. This one showed a close-up of Natasha’s plate. It was taken at an angle and the flash had caught a smudge between “Natasha” and “Devlin.”

  “See that?”

  “It’s a print.”

  “A perfect right index,” Roger announced. The machine beeped. “A match. Let’s see whose it is.”

  Jamie followed, Roger’s enthusiasm rubbing off on her. Even Tony came along.

  Roger dropped into the chair and typed quickly. When he hit enter, a new screen appeared. “Holy shit, yeah?” Roger said.

  “Yeah,” Jamie agreed. Holy fucking shit.

  At the very top of the screen, in bold yellow letters on a black background was the name whose print had been left perfectly centered between Natasha Devlin’s first and last names.

  It read Michael A. Marchek.

  Chapter 16

  Jamie arrived at Michael Marchek’s apartment with Roger and his team.

  Tony had opted to wait in the car.

  The idea of searching a rapist’s house wasn’t appealing. Jamie didn’t blame him. It made her think of that summer too.

  Hailey arrived a few minutes behind them. She’d stopped off at the courthouse for the signed warrant. Marchek lived in a worn down apartment building in the area of San Francisco where the Mission and Potrero districts met. The only window in the apartment was a rectangle seven feet off the ground. Twelve square feet of sunlight that faced Highway 101 a half block over. At least the freeway managed to drown out some of the drunken neighbors.

  Despite the unfortunate apartment, Marchek maintained the epitome of a pristine home. Jamie had been here once before, but Hailey led the pack this time. According to surveillance, Marchek was at work. A patrol officer rang the bell, and only when there was no answer on the third try did he use a crowbar to break the lock. The wood buckled against the steel and the door tumbled open. Two officers went in first and declared it clear before anyone else entered.

  Roger walked through first. Leaving his bag at the door, he surveyed each room, ceiling to floor. He made notes on a clipboard and then stepped outside to address the two techs who had come with him.

  “We’ll run the light first.” He pulled out a small black satchel with the words “Mini Crime Scope” printed in bright green along the side. The tech shut off the overhead lights while Roger donned a pair of red, plastic glasses and lifted the small, black box from the bag. The other tech handed Jamie and Hailey each booties to cover their shoes and a pair of red sunglasses. Jamie
stepped in, the smell of bleach burning her nostrils.

  Roger flipped on the machine which purred softly as he directed the beam across the floor and up the walls. Fingerprints glowed blue against white paint that now looked pink through Jamie’s glasses. Each time evidence was located, the tech marked it with a numbered yellow sticker. The process took forty minutes. Fingerprints were all they found.

  When he was done, they split up. Roger directed his first tech to run the vacuum. “Pick up anything he’s left. Judging from the light source, there’s not much. Alex, you take the bathroom and closets.” He paused. “Take your time with those. If we’re going to find something, it’ll be there. Martin.” He pointed to a shallow rubber tray at the door. “Drain the bleach solution in that bin and let’s take it with us. We might get some hair or something out of there. I’ll collect the prints.

  “Once we’re done, we’ll tackle the clothes. Specifically, we’re looking for a shirt that might match the button we found in Natasha’s office. Watch where you’re walking until the floors are clear.” Roger turned to Hailey and Jamie. “Have at it, ladies.”

  Jamie pulled a pair of rubber gloves from her coat pocket. Snapping them on, she started through Marchek’s house, praying they’d nail this slippery son of a bitch.

  The apartment was a studio. A thin, off-white cotton curtain hung from a wire fed through loop brackets in the ceiling to separate the sleeping area from a small living space. Hailey passed through to Marchek’s bed, so Jamie tackled the living room. One wall was covered with built-in bookshelves. They looked recently painted, but there wasn’t a single book. Instead, model airplanes lined each shelf.

  Each depicted a different model of plane, though they were all circa World War II. Each plane was painted with precision and Jamie thought Marchek must have a steady hand. She moved slowly along the wall as she studied the models. She lifted up several and turned them in her hands. There were a few new ones, but she thought most were the same as they’d been before. She did notice, though, that Marchek dusted them. There were no cobwebs between their wings, no dust on their noses.

  She lifted one and looked at the careful paint job, turned it over. On the underbelly, in neat print handwriting, were the words “B-29 Superfortress.” Beside them, two script letters—M.M.