And then he started to laugh.
It was only a chuckle at first, but it soon degenerated into a belly rumbling guffaw. A few seconds after that, he realized that he was crying.
Not sobbing, exactly, but crying hard enough for tears to stream down his cheeks.
A shadowy figure suddenly loomed over him, and he blinked the tears away. With the fading sun behind him, Drake couldn’t make out his face, but he saw that the man was holding a hand out to him.
“You okay, mister?”
Drake laughed again and somehow managed to articulate that he was fine.
“Let me help you up, then,” the man said in a gentle voice. Drake shrugged and grabbed his hand. The man was thin, but his grip was strong, and when he yanked, Drake was hoisted to his feet.
He then proceeded to dust himself off.
“Thanks,” he said, trying his best not to slur.
“No problem,” the man responded. “You should be careful out here, especially if you’ve been drinking. Not everyone is as nice as I am.”
Drake squinted, trying to make out the man’s face. He saw a narrow nose, deep-set eyes, and the beginnings of a beard. But try as he might, he was just too drunk to get a good overall idea of him.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, but the man was already gone.
***
Drake somehow made it all the way to his couch without falling again. This took every ounce of his strength, and when he saw the worn leather, he collapsed into it, breathing long and deep.
He lay there for a long while, each successive blink lasting longer than the previous.
Sleep threatened to overtake him, and he was prepared to welcome it. But just as he felt his neck droop, the phone in his pocket buzzed. Normally he wouldn’t answer it, but thoughts of Alyssa forced his hand.
And drunk as he was, he wasn’t too drunk to see her again.
Only after he managed to remove the phone from his pocket, dropping it twice in the process, he realized that he hadn’t even given the woman his number.
It wasn’t her; it was another message from Beckett. This time, however, he didn’t even bother to read it.
“Leave me alone,” he grumbled as he deleted the message.
He was about to lean back again and allow sleep to come, when he spied the icon that looked like a miniature video camera on his home screen. Drake pressed it with his thumb.
A window popped open, but instead of the one bisected screen, he saw five extra icons.
Screech must have set up the cameras in the other homes already, he thought with a hint of pride.
Screech was a good man. Strange, odd-looking, and he had a brutally annoying laugh, but he was a good man.
Drake was lucky to have found him.
He wasn’t interested in the other icons, just the first. He clicked it and then stared at the upper right hand corner of the screen.
Mrs. Armatridge was in bed, her husband lying beside her. They had their backs to each other, and as far as he could tell beneath their thick, quilted bedspread, they didn’t appear to be touching.
And yet they had something that Drake wanted very much.
Can I be like that one day? Can I fall in love with someone and live to be old, to be happy?
They weren’t touching, but they appeared peaceful.
The phone slipped from Drake’s hand and his head slumped back against the couch.
He fell asleep.
A sweet, dreamless sleep.
Chapter 28
Chase showed up her badge to the nearest officer.
“Detective Adams,” she said, then gestured to the man behind her. “And this is Dr. Campbell.”
The officer nodded and stepped aside. Chase and Beckett strode forward, and the uniform fell into step beside them.
“The victim is a male in his early twenties. Appears to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the cheek; there’s a massive exit wound on the top of his skull. His given name is Gerald Leblanc, but he occasionally went by Geraldine.”
Chase raised an eyebrow and the police officer, sensing her confusion, continued.
“Street worker. I knew the man, picked him up a few times. Nice kid, confused, sure, but nice kid. I just never thought…” he let his sentence trail off.
Halfway down the alleyway now, Chase stopped and turned to face the officer.
“You going to be alright Officer…”
“Dwight.”
“You going to be alright Officer Dwight?”
The man made a face.
“I’ll be fine.”
With a nod, they continued forward again at a brisk clip, making their way toward a dumpster that was cordoned off by police tape.
Officer Dwight cleared his throat.
“A couple passersby heard the shot and called it in. Nobody came down the alley—and no one saw anyone exit—until the first officer was on scene.”
A sudden series of dull thuds suddenly filled the air, and Chase turned her gaze skyward.
“Was that thunder?”
“No, ma’am,” replied Officer Dwight. “There’s a bar up the street… supper club type of thing. Barney’s, I think. Music pounds from four in the afternoon ‘till four in the morning.”
Chase checked her watch. It was six pm.
“Well it’s annoying as hell,” she replied, moving closer to the dumpster.
Beckett grunted his agreement.
She cleared the edge of the dumpster and despite being prepared for what was to come, the scene still took her by surprise.
It wasn’t the gore, that much she had become accustomed to. It was the uncanny resemblance to the photograph that had lain on Beckett’s desk.
Gerald was on his back, arms laying at his sides. In fact, from the chin down, she might have thought him sleeping. His chest was bare, and his skin was puckered from the cold, and he was wearing a pair of dark jeans.
Even the lower part of his face looked normal, complete with reddish stubble. But when she raised her gaze just a little higher, things went from ordinary to grotesque.
There was a dime-sized hole on his left cheek, rimmed with dried blood. From there, things got progressively worse. The man’s eyes were rolled back, revealing mostly whites. The top of his head was completely obliterated: it was a ragged mess of flesh and blood that spread out across the pavement like a bowl of spilled fettuccine. Brain matter clung to the side of the dumpster like oatmeal.
“That the weapon?” Chase asked, kneeling beside an old-fashioned rifle. It was lying with the barrel pointed away from the body next to his right arm.
“Looks like it,” Officer Dwight replied.
“I was asking Beckett,” Chase said sharply.
Beckett picked up the gun with a gloved hand and inspected the barrel. After several moments, he replaced it in the same position, then went to inspect Gerald’s face. He probed the skin around the bullet hole, then used his pinky to determine the size of the entrance wound.
“It’s consistent. Won’t be able to tell for sure until we get it to the lab.” He removed what looked like a wet-nap from his pocket, opened it, then ran it across the index finger and thumb of Gerald’s pale hand.
Beckett waited for five seconds, then held the paper up for Chase to see.
It was covered in gray smudges.
“GSR on his hands.”
Chase nodded as Beckett stood and started to root through his black medical bag. As he rummaged, she observed the scene in more detail, trying to find something—anything—that would suggest foul play.
Her breath made frosty puffs in the air, and she shivered.
The temperature was dropping.
“Why isn’t he wearing a shirt?” she asked.
“Excuse me?”
Chase turned to look at Officer Dwight.
“Why isn’t he wearing a shirt? It’s getting cold out here.”
Dwight shrugged.
“I don’t, I guess—”
Chase interrupte
d him.
“Look in the dumpster.”
“Ah, pardon?”
Chase sighed.
“Take a look in the dumpster, see if you can find his shirt.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said, then immediately moved to the dumpster and threw the top back. It clanged loudly and Chase cringed.
“Hey Chase?” Beckett said.
“What is it?”
“Check this out,” he replied, holding a manila folder open to him. She only needed to glance at the photograph to realize that the similarities were uncanny: the bullet hole in Gerald’s left cheek, the obliterated top of his head. The bare chest, the dark jeans.
She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers to her temples.
“Found something!”
Chase opened her eyes and looked over at Officer Dwight. He was using some sort of stick that he had found in the dumpster to hold up a sequined muscle shirt.
“This is his. I picked him up wearing this very shirt a couple of months back.”
Chase felt a headache coming on, and she ground her teeth against it.
“Want me to bag it?” Dwight asked. And then, before she could answer, he turned to Beckett, “Can we wrap this up here? Mark it up as a suicide?”
Chase took an aggressive step forward.
“Suicide? Suicide? Who takes off their shirt before committing suicide? Does that make sense to you? What, Gerald didn’t want to get his clothes dirty before he died?”
Dwight looked scared.
“I’m sorry—”
“Maybe he was worried about the dry-cleaning bill. Shit, they might charge extra for cleaning blood and brain matter from sequins.” She leaned into the man, feeling her emotions start to bubble over. “Is that what he was doing, Dwight?”
The officer averted his eyes.
“I just thought—”
“You thought? You thought, what? That he—”
Beckett’s hand came down on her shoulder, and she paused to look over at him. His lips were pressed together tightly.
Chase shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Officer Dwight. “But this is no suicide. I want CSU in here; I want them to comb the whole goddamn alley. As far as the damn bar that keeps playing that obnoxious music, even. This, Officer Dwight, isn’t a suicide; it’s a homicide.”
Chapter 29
When Drake first opened his eyes, he wasn’t completely sure where he was. He blinked rapidly, trying to break the gumminess that held his lids together, and when that failed, he rubbed them with his fingers.
I’m on the couch, he realized. He tried to rise, but his head started to ache and he sat back down.
“Shit,” he grumbled. He clucked his tongue, and his stomach lurched.
Somehow, he made it to the kitchen, where he chased two Advil with a glass of warm water. As he waited for the medicine to take effect, he had a cool shower and got dressed.
“What the hell happened last night?” he asked himself. He remembered going to the bar, to Barney’s, but he didn’t remember coming home.
He had no idea why his ass was sore, either, which was something of a concern for him. Just thinking of how that might have happened made him cringe.
By the time he was finally dressed and ready, it was nearing ten o’clock. He scooped his phone off the table, and saw that the red light was once again blinking. It seemed like every time he picked the damn thing up he had messages waiting. Drake was beginning to think that letting Screech convince him that he needed a smartphone, when he was technologically dumb, wasn’t the best idea.
So long as it’s not Beckett again.
It wasn’t.
It was a message from Screech, and Drake read it out loud.
Drake where you at? It’s nine-thirty and Mrs. Armatridge has been waiting for nearly an hour and I’m running out of prune juice to offer!
He shook his head, chuckled, and then hurried outside to his rusty Crown Vic.
***
Screech’s voice reached him even though the door to Triple D was firmly closed.
“I’m sure Drake will be here any minute, Mrs. Armatridge. He’s probably… he’s probably doing some police work. You know he used to be a police officer—a detective, don’t you?”
Drake put his hand on the doorknob but didn’t immediately open the door. Instead, he listened.
“Yes, I know he was a detective. But not anymore. He works for me now. And you’ve been telling me the same thing for the past hour.”
“Can I get you anything while you wait? A pastille maybe?”
He heard the elderly woman scoff.
“Pastille? That would do wonders for my IBS. How about a glass of water? Filtered, of course. Perrier would be even better.”
Drake took a deep breath and put on his best smile. Then he opened the door.
Mrs. Armatridge was sitting in one of the burgundy chairs, Screech’s crane-like body hovering over her. The other chairs were occupied by more geriatrics.
“Mrs. Armatridge,” Drake exclaimed loudly. “I’m so sorry I’m late. Had to help out with the NYPD.”
The woman pursed her lips.
“No need to shout. I’m not deaf.”
The woman sitting beside Mrs. Armatridge looked over at her and said, “Pardon me?”
Her question went ignored.
“Yes, of course. Please, come into my office,” Drake said, trying his best to keep the smile on his face.
The woman pulled herself to her feet, and Drake followed her into his office.
He frowned when he saw the still open bottle of Johnny on the desk and the two glasses. Hurrying around the woman, Drake quickly replaced the cap and put the bottle and glasses in the top drawer of his desk.
“I hope you’re still capable of functioning, Damien.”
“Yes, of course. I’m sorry for the wait. Now, how can I help you?”
Mrs. Armatridge eyed him from across the desk.
“I see that your office is full, and I suspect that you had more than a few visitors yesterday as well.”
Drake admitted as much.
“I think you’re smart enough to know that that was my doing, Damien.”
“Yes, of course. I want to thank you for your support, Mrs. Armatridge.”
Another hmph.
“And I just wanted to remind you that I was here first, and I expect that my… how can I say this… my case takes precedence.”
“Of course.”
Drake had no problem swallowing his pride. Four ten thousand dollar checks would do that to a man. And yet something told him that this wasn’t the only reason for the woman’s visit.
“Is there anything else I can do for you today, Mrs. Armatridge?”
The woman’s thin fingers went to the pearls around her neck, and Drake realized that she was nervous.
“I’ve been reviewing the video from your home.”
Her eyes shot up.
“And?”
“And, unfortunately, I have nothing to report at this time.”
Mrs. Armatridge’s face drooped, and Drake immediately raised a hand to calm her.
“But, I assure you, I’ve been following the movements of your maid… of Miss Ortiz… very carefully. So far, she appears to be doing nothing but keep the place clean, and look after your husband, of course.”
The mention of her husband made her expression harden.
Mrs. Armatridge stood and started toward the door.
That’s what this visit was about… a fishing expedition. She wants something to be wrong. She wants me to find something, and won’t be satisfied until I do.
“Remember, Damien, how important I have been to your business. And think about how quickly it can all be taken away.”
“Yes, of course. I will let you know as soon as I notice something out of the ordinary.”
Mrs. Armatridge left his office, and when he heard the outer door open and close, Drake took a deep breath.
“Screech! Send the
next one in,” he shouted, trying to put the fake smile back on his face.
Chapter 30
Beckett leaned over the man with the black spectacles and lab coat.
“Anything?” he asked, trying not to get his hopes up.
The lab technician shook his head.
“Nothing. The man had some alcohol in his system, and traces of marijuana. But nothing at levels that would incapacitate him. Gerald was, however, HIV positive.”
Beckett swore and took his hands off the back of the man’s chair.
So Gerald was relatively sober when he died.
Tests from the gun lab hadn’t come back yet, but Beckett would be shocked if the gun at the scene wasn’t the same one that had fired the bullet that had exploded the top of his skull. His wallet was still in his pants, and inside Beckett had found eighty dollars—four twenties.
It didn’t look like a robbery was the motive. What it looked like, quite frankly, was a man who was down on his luck. A man who was HIV positive, who was turning tricks for cash and who had just lost the will to live.
And who had ended it all with one bullet.
Beckett rubbed his forehead.
Only that wasn’t what happened. What happened was that someone had murdered Gerald Leblanc and made it look like a suicide. Just like what happened to Eddie and the man in the bathtub with the slit wrists, the drunk who asphyxiated, and the woman who OD’d and then drowned in Central Park.
He just had to find something that could link the cases, anything that might indicate that their wounds weren’t self-inflicted.
“What about the girl in the pond?”
The man in the glasses turned back to his computer and typed away.
“High levels of diamorphine—heroin—in her system. If she hadn’t drowned, she most likely would have OD’d.”
Beckett swore again.
“And the drunk? The one—ah, fuck it. Never mind,” he patted the man on the shoulder, and he jumped. “Thanks for your help.”
He turned and started toward the door, intent on leaving the lab.
“Dr. Campbell? Can I ask why you are so interested in these suicides? I mean—”
Detective Damien Drake series Box Set 1 Page 39
