Life is for the Living

by S. C. Stokes

  "But Kasey insisted," Vida continued, "so I dug around a little and found a few interesting tidbits."

  "What did you find?" the chief asked, his rising tone showing his impatience.

  "Well, the cause of death was of course being shot twice in the chest," Vida summarized. "The entry point and trajectory of the bullets was a little strange."

  "How so?" Bishop asked leaning forward over the phone.

  "Well, Bishop, the trajectory of the bullets indicate that Cyrus was shot from an elevated position as the entry point for both rounds is far higher on his chest than where the bullets lodged.”

  Kasey jumped on the opening. "Just to be clear, Vida, you are saying that if the victim was sitting against a table for cover and the killer stood over him and shot him it would produce the wounds that you have just described. Is that correct?"

  "Indeed, and if he was sitting behind the tables, that would have made it difficult for any of the thieves to shoot him in the chest. If they had, the bullets would have entered through his back. Taken together, it means Cyrus was likely shot by someone on his side of the barrier that was formed by the tables."

  "That's exactly what I said,” Kasey shouted.

  The steady tapping of Chief West’s fingers increased in pace. "Tell us about the bullets, Vida. What weapon did they come from?"

  " When I drew them out, I was quite surprised to find that they were a pair of 9mm slugs.”

  9mm bullets. Kasey thought. The same type of rounds fired by the MP5. Kasey looked at the ground in disappointment.

  Chief West seized on the detail. "So, the slugs found in Cyrus are consistent with the guns the thieves were firing? They were with MP5s, if I'm not mistaken, and the MP5 fires a 9mm around last time I checked."

  There was an awkward pause at the other end of the line before Vida continued.

  "Chief. At first, I jumped to that same conclusion too. But Kasey’s comments about the victim forced me to dig a little deeper. Using some preliminary tests on a number of the bullets we have retrieved from the victims and comparing them to those taken out of Cyrus, it seems improbable that they were fired by the same weapon.”

  “Well, there were many present, Doctor Khatri. We would expect some variation surely.”

  “Indeed, chief, but the markings are not consistent with the weapon type either. The markings on the bullets that killed Cyrus Pillar are far more consistent with a 9mm handgun such as the Glock 19, Sig P226, or a Walther P99. Not those of an MP5 submachine gun. The MP5 has a far longer barrel than a pistol and as such, the markings on the bullets form a different pattern."

  "You’re sure, Vida?" the chief asked, dispensing with any formality

  "As sure as I can be, chief. I have run the test twice now."

  "Meaning?" Bishop asked.

  "You have a murder," Vida replied. “This one was not an accident."

  Chapter Fourteen

  Kasey leaped from her seat. "I told you so!"

  Chief West’s eyes narrowed at her.

  "Sorry, chief," Kasey replied as she sat down sheepishly.

  Chief West looked down at the phone. “Vida, thanks for the update. I need you to keep that particular piece of information to yourself. Publicly the case will be closed. Bishop and Chase will run down the lead from Mr. Pillar

  “In the meantime, all the thieves have been apprehended, so I will need you to process the victims’ bodies as promptly as possible. We need to get them back to their families."

  "Understood, chief,” Vida said through the phone. “I'll carry on as swiftly as I can."

  "Thanks, Vida." The chief ended the phone call.

  An awkward silence descended on the office. Kasey felt vindicated at Vida's discovery. It meant her vision was accurate; events had transpired exactly as she had seen them. Her gift was sharpening and becoming more finely tuned each day.

  Chief West cut through the silence. "You two need to move fast. We can’t devote too much more manpower to the gala shooting."

  "Chief, didn't you hear Vida?" Bishop protested on Kasey's behalf.

  Chief West held up his hand for silence. "Of course I did. I'm not deaf. As I said, we are closing the case on the gala heist. The thieves are all dead and there is no point keeping the city in suspense. I will be going ahead and issuing a statement to that effect shortly.

  “On the murder of Mr. Pillar, run down your lead, quickly. You saw a waiter shoot Cyrus. Well, that’s a homicide and solving those is what we do. See what you can find, but under no circumstances is word of the ongoing investigation to make it out of this station."

  "Thanks, chief," Kasey said

  " If there's something to find, we'll find it," Bishop added.

  "I wouldn't expect anything less. You're dismissed."

  Kasey and Bishop rose from their chairs and excused themselves. Kasey opened the door and Bishop stepped out into the hall.

  As Kasey went to leave, Chief West called out, "Kasey?"

  Kasey turned. "Yes, chief?"

  "Two things.” West answered, holding up two fingers. “First, don't take my comments today personally. I think you've done remarkably well here, even under trying circumstances."

  “And the second, chief?" Kasey asked.

  "Second, remember this is my house. What I say goes. Don't ever forget it. If you speak to me like that again, I’ll terminate your placement here. Am I understood?"

  "Yes, chief," Kasey replied nodding before she ducked out of the room.

  Bishop was waiting in the elevator, one hand holding the door.

  "Thanks," Kasey said, stepping into the elevator. "Where to from here?"

  Bishop punched the button for the bullpen, and the elevator whirred to life.

  "We start with the waiter. He is the only concrete lead we have. You saw him shoot Cyrus at the gala. Ballistics has confirmed it. I'll run him down in our database. In the meantime, head down to lab and give Vida a hand. See if you can get anything off of Samson. We need a lead that will tell us what his endgame was."

  "End game?" Kasey asked.

  "Yeah. This whole thing is a mess. We have more questions than answers, but the thing that bothers me about Samson is that we have a tier one operator that was gunned down like he was nothing. No one has even come close to catching him before—he and his team were ghosts—and yet we find him bleeding out next to half a million in cash. He had the skills and the resources, so why was he still in the warehouse? What were they waiting for? It doesn't make sense. They should have already been gone."

  Kasey nodded. "I see your point. We'll start with Samson. He is at the heart of this case. Maybe his body will tell us what we've missed so far."

  The elevator dinged, and the doors parted.

  "Sounds good. I'll come grab you as soon as we have a lead on the waiter," Bishop said as she stepped off the elevator.

  The doors closed, and Kasey rode the elevator down to the morgue. When the doors parted, she made her way down the hall. Vida was standing in between two of the morgue’s examination tables.

  "We are in serious danger of running out of space!” Vida stated as he turned to face her. "I mean, we are used to being busy, but ever since you arrived, this place has turned into Central Station. I can't keep up with the sheer level of mayhem that seems to follow you wherever you go."

  Kasey moved gingerly toward him. "Easy, boss. Last week it may have been me the killer was after, but the attack on the gala had nothing to do with me. You can’t keep blaming me for every misfortune in the city."

  Scanning the morgue, she spotted two bodies lying on the steel examination table: Samson and his last team member.

  "These ones aren't mine, either. Just so we are clear. It seems the cash caused a little trouble in paradise. When we found Samson, he was still breathing. He seemed to think his buddy turned on him for the payday. It was a shame he expired before we could get anything else out of him.”

  “You say they turned on each other, but that’s where it all gets interesti
ng,” Vida said. “Neither of their guns had been fired. I have checked both the primary and secondary weapons. All of them were signed into evidence freshly cleaned, oiled, and with full magazines. Whatever happened in the warehouse, they didn’t do this to each other.”

  “So, you believe another shooter got them both?”

  “It certainly looks that way. Someone beat you to the punch.” He bent over Samson’s body.

  “Not by much,” she countered. “We were about to breach when we heard the shots. Whoever he was, he was bold as brass. Willing to go after Samson while the police were closing in. He was dressed like a cop too. We thought it was Stevens, walked straight past us and killed Kovacs on the way out. Bishop thinks it might have been pay back for the hit on the gala. The one percent taking justice into their own hands.”

  Vida rested his hands on the table. “That seems like a massive risk to take. Samson and his team were facing life in prison, consecutive life sentences. Why go to that sort of trouble to kill them? Seems more likely that someone didn’t want them in custody. Perhaps someone didn’t want them talking.”

  “Oh, come on, you’ve been watching too many movies. It was a robbery gone wrong, not a conspiracy.”

  “You say that, but as Sherlock Holmes always said, ‘once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.’ Who else would have known where they were going to be? You only pried that out of Kovacs minutes before you got there. Whoever killed these men had better intel than you did. I’m betting on a benefactor. Perhaps they paid Samson to hit the Gala and were upset when he failed.”

  She nodded. “I can see your point. As far-fetched as it may seem, Bishop mentioned Samson’s crew has been working the West Coast since they first emerged. A single job in New York City, it doesn’t fit their profile. Why would they come out here for such a high-profile job? This heist would be considered shoddy at best. Nothing like their jobs on the West Coast. I’m told those hits ran like clockwork, left law enforcement agencies chasing ghosts. Now they are in New York dropping bodies, a lot of them, or at least they were.”

  Vida raised an eyebrow. “There is that glimmer of sunshine. Not a lot of damage they can do when they are on ice.”

  “All of them? What about the one that died in the hospital? Is his body here yet?”

  “He sure is,” Vida replied, pointing to the wall of refrigeration units that housed the victims. “Bottom right hand drawer. I asked the chief to request the body from New York General, just in case he could give us anything useful. I’ve done the autopsy, it turns out he didn’t succumb to his wounds. He was poisoned. The toxicology reports haven’t come back yet, but he suffered severe myocardial rupture. His heart practically exploded. You should have seen it.”

  “Oh, yeah?” she asked.

  “Ten years on the job, I thought I’d seen everything, but I’ve never examined anything like that. Whatever they gave him, it sent his heart into overdrive. It simply tore itself apart.”

  “That much trauma? Doesn’t sound like it could have been a medicinal mix-up or a clerical error.”

  He nodded and made his way around the table. “Not a chance. You won’t find a compound that could do that in a hospital. It would have been specially formulated and synthetically created in a laboratory. It was certainly murder, and not a cheap one, either. It is likely the poison was administered intravenously through his drip while he was resting. He would have been dead before the doctors could respond to the code. From the outside, it would have looked like he succumbed to his gunshot wounds, but it was what was pumping through his veins that killed him.”

  She looked down at Samson. “At least now we know what we are looking for. I’ll see if Bishop can get the hospital surveillance footage. I am betting whoever made that early morning hospital visit is connected with our warehouse shooter. Someone is going to great lengths to clean up any evidence of Samson and his crew. Perhaps your conspiracy theory is closer to the truth than I was willing to believe.”

  Vida’s mouth turned to a grin. “Say that again. I didn’t quite catch it.”

  “What part?” she replied.

  “The part about me being right,” he replied.

  “Oh, don’t get cocky. If you make outlandish claims for long enough, you are bound to get a few right eventually,” she replied.

  He shook his head. “Kasey, Kasey, Kasey. Sooner or later, you will learn. You may fire the opening shot, but I get the last word in my morgue.” Vida peeled off his gloves and threw them in the trash can. “I’m going to grab some lunch. I’m leaving Samson and his buddy for you. Get started on their autopsies. I’ll see you in an hour.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” she answered, picking up the scalpel.

  Vida departed, leaving her to her thoughts.

  She studied Samson. She already knew what had killed him. She’d been there as he’d bled out. What she really needed to know was who had killed him and why. For that, she needed a different sort of examination.

  After placing the scalpel back on the table, she leaned over Samson. Seeking to channel her prescience, she focused on the mass murderer lying before her.

  Show me what I need to know.

  She reached out and clasped his hand.

  Nothing.

  Frustrated, Kasey lifted her hand and placed it on his chest.

  Again, there was nothing. No mist, no vision, nothing.

  “You have to be kidding me.” She ripped her hand away from him. “I can’t get rid of you when I don’t want you, but now that I need your help, you have nothing for me?” She pounded her fist into the table, causing her surgical instruments to scatter.

  Her gaze settled on the body lying on the second table. Samson's last crew member. She moved alongside the body.

  "Give me something!" she said as she grabbed the man's wrist.

  Still nothing. She released the man's arm and it flopped lifelessly back onto the table.

  "If you're looking for a pulse, I think you'll find he lost his hours ago."

  Kasey spun to find Bishop standing in the doorway, she was holding a piece of paper.

  "Very funny,” Kasey responded quickly. “I was, uh, checking for any tattoos or other markings. All of Samson's core crew were ex-military. Most of them have been inked at one time or another. Often the tattoos can tell you a lot about the body in front of you. Tattoos will tell you where they have been and who served with."

  Bishop strolled over to the table, smile in place. "Did you find anything interesting?"

  "Not yet, I was just getting started. I am glad to see you found your sense of humor, though. You seem to be in a good mood. Not quite what I was expecting after how the raid went."

  Bishop’s grin widened, as she shook a sheet of paper in front of Kasey. "That's because we have a lead."

  Kasey's eyes went wide. "Is Stevens awake? Did he see something?"

  Bishop shook her head. "No, Stevens is still unconscious, took a pretty solid blow to the head. I did, however, run down your lead with the waiter. It seems, the catering company was only too happy to give up his details. Your shooter is far from employee of the month."

  "You found him?" Kasey asked.

  "Sure did.” Bishop placed the paper on the table. “Our waiter is one Benjamin Glassen. According to their records, he lives in Queens. Got the address and I'm ready if you are."

  Kasey looked at the bodies lying before her. Vida was going to be upset, but she wasn't willing to let Ben slip through her fingers. After all, he’d killed the head of the ADI and then he had tried to kill her. She wasn't about to let that particular deed go unpunished.

  "Let’s go get him. Vida won’t be thrilled. We've been bursting at the seams down here and I'm spending more time on the street than I am in the lab," she answered.

  Bishop pat her on the back. "Oh, don't worry about that. We’ll be back before you know it. I will interrogate our waiter friend and you can catch up on your lab work. It will be win-w
in."

  "Sounds like a plan to me." Kasey grabbed her leather jacket off the coat rack. Then, she pulled out her wallet and phone from her purse and slipped them into her pocket.

  Squaring her shoulders, she said, "Let's hit the road."

  Bishop made her way to the door, Kasey one step behind her.

  "Our new friend Ben isn't going to know what hit him" Bishop said over her shoulder.

  Kasey balled her hands into a fist. Oh, he'll know all right. Here's to hoping he resists arrest.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The squad car rolled to a halt. Kasey piled out of the car, followed by Bishop, both of them already wearing their bulletproof vests.

  The street was lined with old apartment buildings, the one in front of them had a bar built into its first floor. The neon sign was unlit but still readable.

  "The Cracked Keg. That’s certainly going to be an upper-class establishment." Kasey snickered.

  Bishop glanced at the bar. "Yeah, I'm sure you'll find New York City's finest nightlife in there. Speaking of finest nightlife, this is it. Our records show Ben’s apartment is on the second floor, room 204.

  "Are you kidding me?" Kasey asked. "Living directly over a bar. That must suck."

  "Yep, certainly wouldn't be my first choice," Bishop replied as she led the way into the building.

  The apartment building had a small atrium that ran alongside the bar. A hall led off to the right with apartments lining the hallway. The building looked like it had been built in the 70’s and hadn't had much work done on it since. Chipped tiles pockmarked the lobby floor. The carpets in the hallways were an old faded green shag that had seen better days.

  The elevators lay at the end of the hall.

  Kasey stopped as a chill ran down her spine.

  "What's up?” Bishop asked.

  Kasey shook her head. "I dunno. I just had a weird feeling, that’s all. Just a bit of déjà vu, I guess.”

  Bishop raised an eyebrow. “You’ve been here before?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Odd. Are you ready to kick this door in? The sooner we have him in custody, the better." Bishop looked from the elevators at the end of the hall to the stairs near the lobby. "He's only on the second floor. Why don’t we take the stairs?"