by J. L. Drake
“No scuff marks on the floor, Jason.” Cheyenne gently pushed the words toward him. “No sign of forced entry. She most likely went quickly. Probably no fear.”
“Her arm was raised in defense.” He shook his head without looking at her. “Fists clenched, jaw clasped. She had fear. Lots of it.”
She didn’t say anything else.
He stood and paced around the station’s bullpen. There were quite a few people in there now, working at desks, bustling around, making phone calls, or all three at once. The gigantic window overlooking Los Angeles was shrouded by the clouds that had rolled into town. They were heavy with pent-up rain but mocking everyone below by not releasing the floods just yet.
Garth, Cheyenne, and the Captain sat at the far end of the room, surrounded by all the info they had about Abel, Jack Magnum, Adam Fischer, Max Black, Aarti Rao, all their friends, families, hobbies, whereabouts, ideas. Everything they could gather about this case sat all around them. A bulletin board had been set up, displaying several photographs of the dead, including commonplace and fun candid pictures from life and initial shots of their corpses. It was strange sight, Aarti’s smile directly next to her dead body.
On the whiteboard, “2. No idols,” had been marked off. One more commandment off the table.
The victims’ eyes stared at him from the board. Adam, Max, Aarti, Jack…Not to mention the crime accountant Harold Lawson and the Hearse, both blown to dust as “collateral.” According to Abel’s big talk, he planned on adding six more people to the list.
“All right,” Garth spat, flexing his fingers vigorously. A common tendency of his. “Sins, Ten Commandments, Bibles. Abel. He says he’s on some sort of holy journey, but this brutal killing doesn’t fit into that. What’s holy, righteous, moral or whatever about murdering people?”
Jason shrugged. “David decapitated Goliath after drilling holes in his head. Gideon and his crew scared the Midianites so much that they started killing each other. All those deaths were necessary, so to speak. Advanced the greater good. Honestly can’t say I disagree.”
Captain Jones spoke over his shoulder as he walked away from the group. “The Lord works in mysterious ways, right?”
The words made Jason think. He’d never considered Slate Jones as a man of faith, despite his wife being a devout Christian. The Mrs. Captain, named Betty, visited the station every now and then, her merry eyes and warm touches making her a favorite guest.
Once, she had brought her hubbie lunch in a brown paper bag. A peanut butter sandwich. With the crust cut off. The Captain was teased brutally for weeks. All behind his back, of course. Most of the cops were convinced he ate nails and gravel for breakfast.
It was apparent how much Betty loved Slate, but she loved the Lord and his Word even more. She always quoted scriptures and aphorisms from the Bible. The most prized possession in the Jones household was the gigantic, leather-bound Good Book from the fifteenth century, sitting on a podium in the living room. Its pages were thick and wrinkled, each covered with hand-written passages and richly colored paintings straight out of a medieval castle. The Captain always went on and on about how old it was and how much it was worth. Betty always went on and on about God’s “love letter to His children.”
“He sends it every day,” she often said, holding a pocket-sized Bible close to her heart.
Abel’s whisper brought Jason back to the situation at hand.
“God is nigh. Can you sense His might?”
Jason looked back at the photos on the bulletin board. A portrait of Adam Fischer smirked, likely taken at the Ace of Spades. He wore a suit costing five figures, his hair slicked back, necktie creased. White teeth, pink gums, brown eyes, artificially tan skin, pale lips…
Wait.
Brown eyes.
Jason’s eyes jumped across the board. He looked at a snapshot of Adam’s body, still halfway buried in the cement block. This was taken a few minutes after the after the corpse had been excavated. Some gray chunks were still stuck to his skin, but his face was recognizable. Both eyes had been opened by forensic investigators for examination.
Green…
What is here that belongs somewhere else? Abel had taunted.
“Cheyenne.” He whipped around to look at her. She sat in a chair with an open file in her hand. “Read me the coroner’s summary of Adam.”
She sighed quietly. They had been over this a thousand times, never gaining new information.
“Here: ‘Subject injected with tranquilizing drugs before being encased in cement. Found six hours after the cement hardened, dead from suffocation. Dress pants and blue button-down shirt, alligator shoes, silver Rolex, brass ring, contact lenses—’”
“There. Adam didn’t wear contacts.”
Garth perked up. “Say what?”
“There were no bottles of contact solution in his bathroom, no cases for the lenses in any of his pockets. His physician made no mention of it.”
“So why…?” Cheyenne dropped the file on a desk and stood. “Why was he wearing them as he died?”
“They weren’t his. He was knocked out before being put in the cement. Abel could’ve put them in then.”
“For what purpose?” Garth was standing now too.
Jason strolled over to a nearby stack of papers and began poring through each one.
“Maybe…” Garth scratched his head, his neck, his face. A bolt of raw energy had struck them all. For the first time, they were making moves in the case, not Abel.
They just needed to know which moves to make.
“Maybe…” Garth mumbled again, his energy draining.
Cheyenne felt it too. She had no idea what these contact lenses meant. They could easily be nothing. Completely insignificant.
Then Jason held up two of the papers. “Listen.” He gulped and read the separate reports one more time to make sure his implications were correct. “Here, Adam Fischer did not wear contacts. But Congressman Jack Magnum did. Green ones, too.”
Cheyenne and Garth studied the photos of Adam, pre and post mortem. Brown eyes, and then green.
“Remember how we found Adam?” Jason said. “Max Black. He had Adam’s fingerprints glued over his own.”
A shadow crossed over Garth’s expression. “Max, then Adam, then Jack…”
Jason was thinking the same thing. “Jack’s contacts planted on Adam. Adam’s fingerprints planted on Max.”
“What are you saying?” Cheyenne said. “Planted evidence?”
Garth shot a look at Jason. “It could be a coincidence. We’re pulling patterns out of the air. We could just be desperate.”
Jason shook his head. “You haven’t seen me desperate yet.” He turned to Cheyenne. “Remember that huge flashy ring Jack wore to dinner?” He pointed it out on Jack’s finger in one of the photos. “That one?”
“The one he kept fiddling with, trying to show it off?” She scoffed “Yeah.”
“I’ll bet anything,” he jabbed a finger at the ring, “that it’s Malaysian.”
“It belonged to Aarti, you’re saying?”
Jason nodded. “No one ran any tests on it. It made no sense to. If we search it for prints, DNA, lineage, anything, it’ll belong to Aarti Rao.”
Garth spun around and began to flip through the papers.
Jason, without a hint of hesitation, said, “Abel’s planting evidence from his next victims on his current ones.”
They froze. Cheyenne stared at the pictures, the files, then Jason. It was a huge implication. One she knew was right.
What is here…
“Lookie here.” Garth gestured to a file. “According to Selena Magnum, that ring arrived in the mail two days before they dined with you. It was a gift from a fan, Jack said. Alan Bertram Edward Larkin.”
…that belongs somewhere else?
“Abel,” Jason hissed. “Everything has been set up perfectly.”
He crossed his arms, all feelings of gloom and defeat gone. “It’s a chain. Max leads to A
dam—”
Cheyenne picked up, “Adam to Jack, Jack to Aarti…”
“Incredible.” Garth picked up his jacket from a chair and slung it on. “That means we can know who’s next. We stop the killings.”
Jason began to walk briskly from the bullpen. He needed to find Captain Jones now. “This also means,” he said, Garth and Cheyenne following, “there’s something planted on Aarti.”
Garth nodded once and turned down an adjoining hallway. “I’ll talk to one of the guys in the morgue, get her body ready to examine. I just hope we didn’t contaminate the evidence.”
***
Twelve minutes passed, but Jason felt each of the seconds as if they were in slow motion. Adrenaline had suddenly been pumped through his body, and he felt it through the entire station as well. Finally, finally, they were moving forward. For the first time, he felt like he had taken a peek into Abel’s mind, and, because of that, he could put a stop to his crimes.
He slipped his cell phone into his pocket and swerved into the station’s storage locker room.
Garth and Cheyenne, joined by Captain Jones, turned to look at him.
“Dr. Craig Weston says there was nothing unusual about Aarti’s physicality,” he told them. “Official reports confirm.”
“Then the evidence leading to the next victim,” Garth slid a small box off one of the shelves, “is in here.”
Aarti Rao’s possessions, found on the scene. Very little had been collected, but it was all in that cardboard box. The key to Abel’s chain of bodies had to be in there—otherwise the whole theory was debunked.
“Let’s see,” Garth mumbled. The four cops leaned in and peered at the contents of the box:
Small, flexible shoes, left outside the door to the prayer chamber.
The filthy, tattered dress she had been wearing.
A cracked, rusted watch, missing the hour hand.
A tiny plastic clip that had held her hair into a ponytail.
Two empty containers of Tic-Tacs
And that was it.
Garth whistled lowly. “Wow. Such minimal pieces of property.”
The captain acted like he didn’t even hear. “We need to thoroughly examine each of these. Fingerprints, saliva, hair. The whole nine yards, as soon as possible.” Time for business, not conversation.
The box was swept away by a technician in plastic gloves. Jason dreaded the thought of waiting any longer, but processing the items would take hours, if not days. He felt a light pat on his arm from Cheyenne as she and the others left. His anxiety must be as evident as the nose on his face.
His thoughts went out to Ted. The boy would be home from school by now, along with the Westons, of course. Jason hadn’t seen the little guy in a couple of days aside from brief encounters late at night or in the early morning. He really wanted to go see him, smile at him, hear about his day, but he decided against it. And besides, he wanted to stay close to the station so he could be first in line when the lab results on Aarti’s possessions came back.
Yeah, he’d see Ted later. Tonight.
He left the station, got into his car, and pulled out into the hectic streets. The heavy clouds had encroached on the city a bit more, flashes of lightning winking at the people below.
The clock in the car read 5:25 p.m. Sam would be getting ready for Shane Drake’s transport to County. Ted would be fixing dinner after a long day at school. Garth would be overseeing the examination of Aarti’s things.
And where are you headed, Jason? He wasn’t proud of the answer, but he didn’t know where else to go at the moment.
Feeling a heavy rock in his stomach, he turned into the parking lot of a small joint a few blocks from the police station. Only a handful of cars joined his at this hour in the afternoon. He got out, making sure his car doors were locked.
He sniffed the air. It’d been a long time since he’d been here. A cracked sign dangling from the window had been freshly painted: Sumarian Pub. Jason ignored the gnawing feeling in his chest and entered the bar.
It hadn’t changed a bit in the six years Jason had been gone. Low, droning country music seeped from a radio in one corner, and a large television showing sports highlights dominated the other half of the room. Ten or so guys, either in suits or blue jeans, were in the pub, each focusing on the drinks in their hands.
He loosened his obnoxious necktie and sat at the counter, sinking deep into the plush seat. His mind was on other things—Abel, the Don, Ted, his friends at the station—so the beverage sitting in front of him a few minutes later came as a surprise. He must’ve ordered it. He groaned and rubbed his eyes, trying to snap himself out of that fog.
“Well, Jason,” a friendly voice said from down the bar. “Hey there.”
A weary smile flashed across Jason’s face. He recognized the man from those four words alone. His heart lifted a bit.
“I don’t believe it,” he laughed and turned to look down the counter. “How long’s it been, Chris?”
The man shifted to face Jason, giving off a smile that made the whole room seem nicer. Chris White shook his head slowly and stuck out his hand. “Far too long.”
Jason clasped his old friend’s hand eagerly.
He hadn’t laid eyes on Christopher White since they were both young men at Point Loma University. With burning passions for the Lord, they had parted ways with big ideas and world-changing plans of ministry and love. Keri’s murder, though, had dragged Jason out of those blissful, stupid fantasies.
Chris, on the other hand, had never dropped out of that on-fire-for-God state, and he’d become a preacher at one of the churches that dotted southern L.A. Never faced reality, Jason had thought for a while.
The friendly handshake felt better than Jason had expected it to.
“It’s nice to see you, Chris.” He glanced around. “Truth be told, this isn’t the type of place I’d expect to find you.”
The preacher smirked. “Yeah, a friend of mine lost his job this morning. His first reaction was to jump for the bottle…” A deeply concerned shadow flickered his face. “I tried to stop him, but he couldn’t be convinced. I just tagged along to make sure he doesn’t do something…” a sigh, a moment to articulate his thoughts, “…something he’ll regret.”
“Good, good,” Jason said quietly, and he meant it. He snuck a peek at the man he assumed was the unemployed in question. The guy had full mug in one hand, his chin in the other. Balding, late thirties, medium build. He sat at a table still like a statue, staring at the wall, eyes droopy and empty. “Poor guy.”
Chris nodded. He eyed Jason. “Now, allow me to be frank, but I never pegged you for the drinking-in-the-late-afternoon type.”
The beer sat on the counter, bubbles fizzing to the top.
“I’m not.” Jason sighed and pushed the mug away a few inches. “I didn’t know where else to go for the moment.”
“Oh?”
“Things are…” Jason stalled.
What was going on? Why did this case, this killer, drive him back to the Sumarian Pub? Abel was ruthless, but he’d seen worse. Bodies mutilated past recognition, crime scenes that made horror movies look like after-school specials, men with minds so genius and twisted…
“Things are complicated.”
“Want to talk about it?”
Jason knew his old friend was only trying to help, but he snapped, “What, and get one of your sermons? Not now.”
Chris shifted in the chair.
Jason’s heart grew heavy. The last thing he wanted to do was push away one of his kindest friends.
“Listen,” he said softly. “I’m sorry about that.”
Chris smiled. “Don’t worry. I’ve heard worse, believe me.”
“There’ve been things in the city that I can’t talk about right now.”
Chris nodded, likely thinking of the deadly explosion by the Hollywood Walk of Fame and the handful of deaths he had heard about on the news.
Jason continued, “And, on top of all of it,
in two days, two short, tiny little days…” Jason balled his fingers, realizing just how much anger was locked away in his heart, “Rick Neves is walking out of his jail cell.”
Chris gasped. They were silent, disrupted only by the country music and the sports commentators.
“Rick Neves.” The name slid from Chris’s tongue. He hadn’t spoken it in eight years, same as Jason. “Poor kid.”
The words made Jason’s blood pressure rise. “Poor kid?” he rustled, grinding his teeth. “He killed Keri, or did you forget?” His pent-up fury nearly boiled over, and, as much as he didn’t want to direct it at Chris, the pastor was right in the middle of his crosshairs.
How dare he?
“No, Jason,” Chris said softly. “I haven’t forgotten. I think about her all the time. Keri was one of my best friends. I loved her like a sister. But if it’s hard for me, I can’t imagine how hard it is for you.”
The anger drained. Jason looked at his friend. All that was left in his heart was sorrow and numbness.
Chris put on a small smile. “But have faith, brother. Man wasn’t designed to be self-sufficient. Why would the greatest artist in history create an awe-inspiring masterpiece and then walk away from it? God yearns for you.”
The words were Keri’s. The last words she had offered him.
Jason said, “She wrote that to me, right before leaving for the bank.” He locked eyes with Chris and chuckled dryly. “Will those words ever leave me alone?”
Chris returned the small laugh. “I pray not.”
“Well, do that. I could use all the power in my corner that I can get. We’re blocked every time we move.”
“Keep fighting the good fight, Jason. The war is bloodiest when the enemy knows he’s losing.”
The bar had gotten noticeably darker. Very little light streamed through the gritty windows, leading Jason to believe the heavy clouds had finally arrived over the city. Good thing he had his overcoat and fedora back at the station.
A few more men in business suits bustled through the Pub’s front door, adjusting their ties and jackets with violent frustration. Tough day at the office, it looked like. Come to drown their troubles with a few pints of beer as if it was some magic potion. Jason sighed to himself and pushed his drink away a few more inches.