Drug Lord- Part I

by Patrick Logan

"Is she… okay?"

  Another pause.

  "Chase is working through some stuff right now — some personal stuff. But I think… I think that she could use a friendly face to help her get through it."

  Drake was surprised by the man’s candidness; in all their previous interactions, Stitts had been the silent type, a man who preferred to sit back and observe. He possessed the effortless ability to coerce others into speaking without revealing much, or anything, about himself.

  Drake knew that a fundamental change in one’s personality usually only happened when things were going badly… when things had become serious.

  "Is she around?" he asked.

  "That’s the thing, Drake… no one’s seen her in months.”

  “What? Really? What about her husband and son?”

  “They moved away a while back. To Sweden.”

  Drake’s eyes bulged.

  “Sweden? What the—”

  “I could really use your help looking for her, Drake.”

  Drake pushed his tongue into the spot in his gum where his tooth had once been.

  “You don’t watch the news much, do you, Stitts?”

  “I’ve been… well, I’ve been working through some stuff, too. Why?”

  “Yeah, you can count me as part of that group, as well. I want to help, and I will help find her, Stitts, but there’s something I need to take care of first. Something I think you might be able to assist me with.”

  There was an awkward impasse; both of them were asking for help and both of them were suffering greatly.

  It was Stitts who broke first.

  "What's this about, Drake?"

  Drake mulled his options. The truth was, friendly or not, Stitts was a member of the FBI.

  "I need… I need something of Chase's," he said quietly.

  Stitts was incredulous.

  "You what?"

  Drake sighed. It felt dirty lying to the man, but the truth was too outlandish and the time too short to explain everything.

  “Remember the Butterfly Killer case? When Chase was taken hostage by a deranged psychiatrist?”

  “Yeah… she told me about that. What about it?”

  “Long story, but there’s been a recent development in the case. Some additional DNA was found in the man’s office — blood. It doesn’t match any of the victims. We just need to confirm that it’s not Chase’s.”

  “Yeah, alright — I can send you her DNA profile from the FBI database.”

  Drake grimaced.

  “Yeah, that’s not gonna cut it this time. There’s been a recent case of cross-contamination of samples from a sister lab in Chicago. The sergeant here is being a dick and is calling for all samples to be tested in-house. We need something… something fresh. Something of hers that we can extract and develop our own DNA profile from.”

  It was far-fetched, but Drake hoped that Stitts was just too stressed about recent events to call him on it. But when the man didn’t answer right away, Drake started to get nervous.

  "Stitts? You still there?"

  "Yeah, I'm still here. I think… I think I have something in my car that you can use. As luck would have it, I’m in upstate New York visiting family. I can be downtown in an hour or so.”

  A tiny, infinitesimal smile formed on Drake’s lips. For once, it appeared that his luck might be changing.

  “Thanks, Stitts. I owe you one. See you in an hour.”

  He hung up and handed the phone back to Hanna who was staring at him with a smirk of her own.

  “I don't know if Dr. Kruk knows anything, or if he can help at all,” Drake said, “but it looks like we’re going to find out.”

  Chapter 52

  "Screech, what the fuck is going on? Talk to me!”

  But Screech couldn’t talk; all he could do was watch as Officer Pontiac waved his pistol in Leroy’s terrified face.

  It was a mistake getting the kid involved, he’d told Drake that from the beginning. Now not only would they have the death of some junkie on their hands, but that of a seventeen-year-old kid, as well.

  Maybe Drake had been right about the junkie; maybe it wasn’t their fault, maybe she would have gotten a hot shot from someone and somewhere else. But the kid… fuck, he was just a kid. He didn’t—

  “I’m sending someone over, Screech. I don’t care if Drake—”

  The mention of Drake’s name finally broke Screech from his stupor.

  “No, not here — don’t send someone here. But you need to help him. And you need to be quick.”

  “Help who, Screech? Help Drake? Because I just saw him. He's beaten up, but—”

  Screech shook his head.

  “No, not Drake,” he said forcefully. “Someone else. A kid. Leroy Walker. We took him in and now he’s in trouble.”

  “What? Who? What are you talking about, Screech?”

  In the video, Pontiac suddenly leaned back and punched Leroy in the stomach with his free hand.

  “It’s your officers… Pontiac and Dalton. They’re… I think they’re going to kill him, Yasiv. You have to help him. You have to save him.”

  Chapter 53

  “I can get you what you need,” Drake said as he stepped back into the cell. The entire time he’d been on the phone, Dr. Mark Kruk had been waiting patiently with his fingers interlaced, his palms laid over top the chains that kept him bound to the table.

  “I knew you could,” the man said warmly.

  Behind him, he heard Hanna enter the room and close the door.

  “But you’re not going to get it,” Drake said suddenly. Dr. Kruk’s smile never faltered. “You’re not going to get it unless you convince me that you’ve got something on the mayor that I can use. Something good. Otherwise, you can rot in here for all I care… and you’ll never see or hear about Chase ever again.”

  Dr. Mark Kruk licked his lips and slowly enfolded his fingers.

  “I knew this was about the mayor,” he said, his smile never faltering. “Trust me, Drake, I think you’re gonna like what I have.”

  Drake shook his head.

  “Not good enough,” he shot back. “You tell me what you have, and I’ll decide if it’s worth it.”

  Dr. Kruk sighed.

  “Drake, last time you came here looking for advice, for my help to catch a killer, I told you what I knew,” the man said calmly. “Did my insight help? Did you catch the man you were looking for?”

  Drake’s cheek twitched as he recalled his conversation with Ray Reynolds at the man’s family farm, the bodies of the members of the Church of Liberation lying all around them.

  “Yes… yes, I suspect that I did help,” Kruk said absently. “And yet now you want to question my integrity, my honesty. Is this because in your past, you—”

  Drake leaned forward and slammed his fist down hard on the table. Hanna gasped, and Dr. Kruk recoiled.

  “Don’t you fucking psychoanalyze me, Kruk. Don’t you do it.”

  Something flashed over the man’s face then, something that turned his eyes dark. Drake had seen this look before, this wild expression. He’d seen it when Marcus Slasinsky had held a syringe to Chase’s throat.

  Then, as quickly as it appeared, it was gone again.

  “Fine, fine,” Dr. Kruk said. “Trust me, or don’t trust me. But I won’t give you what you want before you give me what I need.”

  Drake cursed. Talking to the man was incredibly frustrating.

  “What could you possibly have on him, anyway? On the mayor? I know you treated his son, but I don’t think you got anything from him. I bet you were a shit psychiatrist and didn’t get nothing.”

  Dr. Kruk chuckled.

  “That won’t work with me, Drake; you can’t goad me with insults. I will tell you this about me, however: back when I had my practice, I was very much into improving my craft. And the person I most like to learn from? Why, that would be myself, of course.”

  “You’re a self-righteous—”

  Drake stopped himself.
<
br />   Learn from myself…

  “You… you recorded yourself, didn’t you?” Drake said, finally cluing in to what Kruk was saying. “You recorded your sessions.”

  The man turned his hands over as if to say, you got me.

  Drake considered this for a moment, recalling what had happened after he’d apprehended Dr. Kruk at the butterfly gardens.

  They’d collected everything of interest from the doctor’s office and home in case there ever was a trial. They’d even managed to hack into his computer and clone the hard drive.

  Drake couldn’t remember finding any recordings of patient sessions and said as much.

  “Oh, I’m not surprised,” Kruk replied. “I keep all of my very important things, like video recordings, in a special place.”

  “A storage locker? We called them all, ran your name… nothin’.”

  “Why would I use my name?”

  “What then? Marcus? Is it under Marcus Slasinsky? ‘Cuz we looked for that name, too.”

  As soon as he said Marcus, Hanna approached him from behind and put her hand on the back of his arm.

  “No, not him,” Dr. Kruk said with an air of boredom. “But I’ve had to be many people over the years, given what I went through as a child. I had to be many people with many names. I have three lockers in New York City, Drake. In one of these lockers, I keep the recordings of all my sessions. Now, normally these are privileged, but I can tell that you are desperate. And I have something really special, something Thomas Smith gave. Something that — trust me — will make you very happy.”

  Now it was Drake’s turn to look at Hanna, who shrugged.

  He had never been great at telling when people were lying; that had been Chase’s department. But for what it was worth, he thought that in this case, Dr. Kruk was telling the truth, that he had something that Drake could use. But he wasn’t oblivious to the fact that he could just be projecting, that he was just so desperate that he was seeing something that wasn’t there.

  The problem was that his desperation was real. And Drake had nothing else to go on.

  “Let me guess, I give you something of Chase’s and you tell me where this locker is. That sound about right?”

  Dr. Kruk laughed, a grating sound that sent a shiver up Drake’s spine.

  “No, that’s not right, Drake. Close, but not quite. If you give me something of Chase’s, then I’ll take you to the locker. But I’m not going to tell you where it is. That would be… well, that would be foolish, wouldn’t it?”

  Chapter 54

  “You got a lock on the car?” Sergeant Yasiv asked.

  Detective Dunbar nodded and pointed at a red dot on the screen.

  “Looks like the two officers are hanging out around the projects. A little off-duty extra-curriculars, maybe. You care to tell me what this is about, Sarge?”

  Yasiv looked down at the man’s face.

  “Yeah, extra-curriculars, sure. Grab your stuff, let’s go for a ride. You could do with some time away from the computer.”

  Dunbar raised an inquisitive eyebrow but didn’t hesitate. He collected his service pistol and detective badge from his desk and clipped them onto his belt.

  On their way out of the station, a senior detective stopped them.

  “Hey, you see what the mayor said on the news today?”

  Yasiv shook his head. He didn’t have time for the news. Besides, he dealt with enough depressing stories during the day, he didn’t need to be bombarded by it on TV, too.

  But seeing that it was about the mayor…

  “What’d he say?” Yasiv said, as he continued toward the door with Dunbar in tow.

  “Mayor Smith says he’s gonna miraculously cure all heroin addiction in the city. Looks like we’re getting plenty of overtime in the next month or so… until the man realizes that it would be easier to move the Statue of Liberty three feet to the left.”

  Yasiv frowned.

  “Yeah, looks like it,” he said as he left the station and made his way to his car.

  He pulled out of the 62nd precinct parking lot and headed toward Tremont. When they’d been on the road for about five minutes, he turned to Dunbar.

  “Open the glove box,” he instructed.

  Dunbar did as he was asked.

  “Now, take out the binder and look at the names.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Dunbar start to flip through the front pages.

  “ANGUIS Holdings,” he read out loud. “This is the company that the Church of Liberation was funding? The one that Ray Reynolds worked for?”

  Yasiv nodded.

  “Yeah, but it’s more than that. They had ties to the sex trafficking ring and heroin smuggling. See there at the top? See those five names? They’re the ones in charge.”

  “Boris Brackovich, Steffani Loomis, Horatio Dupont, Mendes Corp., and Ken Smith… I’ve seen this list before, Hank. But the thing I don’t get is if Mayor Smith really is involved in smuggling heroin, what’s he doing on the news talking about how he’s gonna get rid of it? Doesn’t make sense.”

  Yasiv didn’t understand that either, but they had more pressing things to deal with.

  “Yeah, I don’t get it. But look at the other names, the long list; these are all people who donated to the Church of Liberation.”

  Dunbar flipped to the next sheet and scanned the page.

  “Yeah, what about it? Am I supposed to see someone in particular?”

  Yasiv turned down 178th street.

  “Yeah, you should, because you work with some of them… a lot of them. Those people who donated, they’re cops, Dunbar. Not all, but most of them. And those highlighted in yellow are the ones who were killed. Including Simmons and Cuthbert.”

  He paused for a moment to let his words sink in.

  “What does that mean? I don’t get it, Hank.”

  Yasiv looked at the cell phone on the dash; they were closing in on the red dot.

  “I’m not sure, Dunbar, at least not one hundred percent. But I think we’re about to find out.”

  In the distance, he saw Officer Pontiac’s dark Taurus with the rear passenger door held together by what looked like duct tape and coat hangers.

  “That’s them,” he said quietly as he pulled over. After shutting off the ignition, Yasiv removed the gun from his holster and indicated for Dunbar to do the same.

  “What are we doing here, Hank?” Dunbar asked, eyes wide.

  “We’re here because a friend asked for a favor,” Yasiv said as he stepped out of the car. “We’re here because Officers Pete Dalton and Michael Pontiac are on that list. We’re here because they are as crooked as the day is long, Dunbar. That’s what we’re doing here.”

  Chapter 55

  “He’s lying,” Hanna said. “If he had dirt on the mayor, real dirt, why would he just sit on it? Why wouldn’t he use it to avoid coming here in the first place?”

  She had a point.

  Marcus Slasinsky might be irrational and unfettered, but Dr. Mark Kruk was different. Drake recalled their conversations back in his office, how methodical, calm, and measured the man was.

  “I’m outta my depth, but I bet that Dr. Mark Kruk isn’t really here… isn’t really a patient at Oak Valley, I mean.”

  Hanna raised an eyebrow and then scratched the side of her head that was shaved.

  “Okay, Carl Jung, you’re going to have to explain that, because I’ve seen him here everyday for the better part of two years.”

  Drake took a moment to collect his thoughts.

  “What if — what if his mind is so compartmentalized that Marcus and Mark are effectively two different people. What if it was only Marcus Slasinsky who was arrested and sent here. What if Dr. Mark Kruk thinks himself a captive… or maybe he has even convinced himself that he works here, as a psychiatrist, I mean. Fuck, I dunno.”

  Hanna rocked her head from side to side.

  “This is some deep shit, Drake.”

  Drake ignored the comment and complet
ed his train of thought, as foreign as it was.

  “Marcus didn’t record the sessions with his patients, that was Dr. Kruk. So, either Marcus doesn’t know about them or he simply doesn’t know how to use them… if there is something useful on them, of course.”